PeARL — Performance Artistic Research Lab 2, 2021 — 2022. Call for submissions

PeARL is an Interdisciplinary Laboratory investigating myriad meanings in the term ‘performance’ within academic contexts today. It probes how research can inform artistic practice and vice-versa. Our praxis is informed by contemporary knowledge accumulated in the field of Performance Studies.

Where ’Performance’ is normally understood as relating to an art practice or artefact, it can also stand for a social interaction, a research process, or a philosophy. Enacting performance, these might creatively collide. There might be inherent tensions between making art and practicing research, as between performing and philosophising; but, we insist, there are no impermeable boundaries. We are keen to seek out the porousness here — the cracks, the mutations, the cross-currents. In our interdisciplinary and international dialogues, we open new ways in which performance as art-making, research, social practice and philosophy inform and enrich each other.

PeARL valorises work on the Body across the project. Our research initiatives and intellectual enquiry are stimulated by contemporary art practices, with Guest Artists and thinkers joining us.

Following our highly successful first Lab 2020 — 2021, next year’s programme will develop the Lab work towards purposeful questions of criticality. Each session will involve performance in practice and theorized critical discussion of this.

We invite artists and academics — at Masters, PhD and Post Doc levels — from different disciplines to contribute on an equal basis to experiment, research, perform and engage in critical vocabularies during the course of the academic year 2021 — 2022 in developing the field of Practice-as-Research (PaR) from a specifically critical perspective.

PeARL is free of charge. It will run from October 15th 2021 — June 15th 2022 in 10 week blocks x 3 hours per week online.

PeARL is Co-directed by Anna Furse, Professor of Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths, University of London, Director: MA in Performance Making, Co-Director Centre of the Body and Departmental Research, and Artistic Director Athletes of the Heart; and Liudmila Alyabieva, Assistant Professor, HSE Art & Design School, Academic Director of the Doctoral School of Arts & Design HSE, Editor-in-chief of the Russian Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. Their Advisory Team is Irina Sirotkina (IHST RAS) and Roger Smith (independent researcher).

APPLICATION: kindly fill in the Form attached. Applicants will be chosen on the basis of their suitability for the project and what they would contribute to an interdisciplinary community of intellectual and artistic enquiry.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15th September 2021.
pearlab2020@gmail.com