Call for Paper

Making Waves: Transformations of Theatrical Culture, Memory and Industry  

2022 TATPIS International Conference

As an ancient medium, theatre is marked by its unique characteristics of immediacy and irreproducibility, which make theatre seem outdated and marginalized in our current digital era of virtual reality. Nevertheless, theatre has always boasted of its resilience in the sense that it continues to survive in the historical processes of ongoing technological revolutions, and at the same time retains its medium specificity even after continuous renewals of forms and contents. The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically changed our ways of life; it forces the accelerating process of globalization to come to a screeching halt. Human mobilizations and cultural exchanges all of a sudden migrate to digital platforms on a large scale. Once again, theatre is challenged with a fundamental change of technological condition. Theatre has always upheld the co-presence of performers and audience as its medium specificity. With the new imperatives of quarantine and social-distancing, theatre has to relocate to various digital platforms, figuring out new technological necessities and experimenting with new possibilities of co-presence. This epochal change is demanding theatre to adjust its ways of mediating and redefine itself, and meanwhile the cultural forms and industrial models in the theatrical world are going through radical changes.

　　Also, in the midst of new challenges for human survival, how does theatre prove its artistic value and cultural necessity to continuously exist in the human world? As an ancient medium, theatre has always been an important site where collective memories and imagined communities are built. As “les lieux de memoire,” under historical currents and challenges of new media, how does theatre transform itself and reposition itself to find new ways and methods in response to human beings’ collective desire for memory inscription?  

　　With “making waves” in its title, this conference reassures the agency of theatre. Theatre does not simply passively respond to epochal changes; rather, theatre is one of the driving forces in epochal changes and civilizational transformations. It bears the existential traces of human migrations, interactions, or even collisions. This conference takes an oceanic view as its point of departure from the Global South, weaves contradictions and complexities together through the perspective of oceans and seas, and attempts to revisit theatre’s ongoing transformations in this contemporary moment from marginal, fluid and non-orthodox perspectives. In the shuttling between tradition and innovation, we seek to investigate and explore new possibilities for theatre’s future. The topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Theatre and the Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis 
• Theatre and Digital Media 
• Theatre and the Global South
• Theatre and Historical Memories 
• Theatre and Global Indigeneity 
• Theatre and Environmental Studies 
• Theatre and Marginal Cultures 
• Theatre and (Anti)Neo-Liberalism 
• Theatre as Sites of Cultural Confluence 
• Theatre and (anti)Globalization 
• Theatre and Taiwan Studies 

Hosted by 

Center of the Humanities and Department of Theatre Arts, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan 

 College of Liberal Arts and Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan 

Organizational Committee 

Katherine Hui-ling Chou (Distinguished Professor, Department of English Literature and Language, National Central University, Taiwan)

Jen-Hao Walter Hsu (Associate Professor, Department of Theatre Arts; Director, Center for the Humanities, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan)

Juan Chin (Associate Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Chung-Kung University, Taiwan) 

Review Committee

Ayling Wang (Professor, Department of Theatre Arts, National Sun Yat-Sen University)

Wei-Yu Lin (Associate Professor, Department of Drama Creation and Application, National University of Tainan)

Hsiao-Mei Hsieh (Chair & Associate Professor, Department of Drama and Theatre, National Taiwan University)

Location: Huali Hall, International Academic Research Building, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung 

Dates: July 29-31, 2022. 

We welcome graduate students and scholars to submit individual papers or proposed panels (three papers on one panel) according to the topics. Papers should be written and delivered in English or Mandarin Chinese. The deadline for submission is March 3^rd, 2022. 

In your submission, please include: 

1) paper/panel title

2) abstract (Mandarin within 600 words; English within 350 words)

3) information of presenters (within 100 words)

4) contact information   

Please submit with attachments to the following emails: 

tatpisconference@gmail.com; sysjoh@mail.nsysu.edu.tw  

We will email you the review results no later than the end of April, 2022.