[sic!] Summer Institute Cologne is becoming Consortium of [six!]

Consortium of [six!] - CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS 

[six!] summer institute
Where: Northwestern University
When: June 16 – 21, 2024
Northwestern’s Application Deadline: Monday March 20, 2024 by 11:59 PM
Click Here to complete the application via Google Form

Participants of [six!] 2024 will be reimbursed for flight and accommodation costs!

What is the [six!]: summer institute?

[six!] is a consortium of six universities from five continents that all offer advanced degrees in theatre and performance: Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), Northwestern University (USA), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Tel Aviv University (Israel), University of Cologne (Germany), and University of Ghana. It continues the tradition of [sic!], the annual summer institute convened by Northwestern University and the University of Cologne that took place from 2013 - 2019.

The consortium will host two online workshops (February 1 9:00-10:30 a.m CDT and April 3 9:00-10:30 a.m CDT 2024) to introduce the topics and orient participants to each others’ perspectives. We will then convene in person in Chicago (16 June- 21 June 2024) to engage in advanced, non-credit study, networking, and research. There is no cost for Northwestern University grad students to participate.

Who can apply?

Any graduate student enrolled at one of the consortium institutions may apply directly to faculty in their University to participate in the summer institute. Interested students should complete the brief Google Form application and be prepared to signal their interest in one of the two seminar themes detailed above. The application asks for, among other things, an explanation of your interest in one of the seminar themes, how the chosen seminar is relevant for your own research project, and what you would gain from attending the workshop. Applications received after March 20th will not be considered.

“Historical Repertoires Then/Now” is the theme for [six!] 2024

Each seminar will take up this theme in distinct ways. Our theme and meeting in Chicago are designed in conjunction with the 2023 - 2024 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar “On Decolonizing Theatre,” a year-long series of discussions on how today’s artists engage historical repertoires to address issues of social justice. These events are currently taking place at Northwestern University, and will culminate with [six!]  in June 2024.

I. Untranslatability

_{Asiedu Mana Awo, Danielle Bainbridge, Bishnupriya Dutt, Ekua Ekumah, Milena Grass, Caroline Gleason-Mercier, Andrés Kalawski, Andrea Pelegrí Kristić}

Does the practice of translation in theatre reproduce or destabilize long-standing hierarchies and hegemonies between languages and national artistic practices? Despite the ubiquity of performance/ theatre translation as well as the (un)translatability issues inherent to every transcultural exchange, scholars in theatre, performance, and translation studies need to engage in transdisciplinary approaches to study this phenomenon beyond mere specific case studies and take into consideration issues of race, gender, (de)colonial powers, and class. Even more so, the distinctions can be complicated (or productively highlighted) by techniques of remixing, adapting, and layering associated with the engagement of historical repertoires in our own times and places.

As an intersemiotic practice, productions stemming from foreign plays, sometimes distant in time and place to their original context in the source culture, resort to various strategies to achieve linguistic and cultural translatability and to broach political perspectives. The transcultural nature of [six!] provides an opportunity to study and test how historicist approaches to performance practice can work. Participants will explore theatre translation and untranslatability by working on translated canonical texts from different cultural backgrounds as well as traditions, both in practical exercises and discussion formats. This year, there will be a focus on post-colonial ‘reworkings’ or adaptations of colonial texts in attempts to decolonise and reinterpret them.

II. Critical Media History and Performance

_{Sharon Aronson-Lehavi, Ruthie Abeliovich, Tracy C. Davis, Peter W. Marx, Joyce Osei Owusu  Ameet Parameswaran, Keary Watts}

Critical Media History is an approach that bridges gaps between Theatre and Performance Studies and cognate fields—including Literary Studies, Cultural History, Art History, Musicology, and Media Studies—to emphasize the entanglements inherent between mediation and the circulation of cultural practices. The “media” of Critical Media History refers to various things: both media that are technologies that construct and communicate performance per se and the interactions between performance and other kinds and formats for knowledge (this includes print, optical devices, built environments, and corporeally transmitted repertoires, complicated in later periods by broadcast, audio and visual recording, including transcription, painting, drawing, photography, and sound/video capture). Considering this “ecology” of performance knowledge, transfer, and transmission is a way to broach how ideas, sensory experiences, technologies, and ultimately aesthetics are trans-regional and trans-continental, as well as tempered for specific localities. This opens up new topics for consideration as well as new ways to regard evidence of performance that exists across zones of convergence, facilitated by the circulation of people and ideas in relation to mediation. This mutuality of media’s development in conjunction with social formations makes the study of historical (and contemporary) performance a promising approach for understanding both how performance is co-constitutive with power and oppression and how—as historians—we can analyze this with various forms of redress in mind. The seminar will utilize discussion and small group formats based on common readings.