Call for Proposals

The Theatre Faculty of Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno is pleased to invite you to the Theatre Conference JAMU 2022. This year's topic is Touching Limits / Crossing Borders of Theatre. The conference will be held from 10^th to 11^th of November 2022 in Brno, Czech Republic.

This year’s topic builds on the previous issue with the ambition to develop it further. In 2021, we paid attention to the new horizons towards which theatre expands in both theory and practice. In 2022, we feel the need to focus on turbulent zones of transition within the field of performing arts and at its edges. How do we perceive such zones – are those the limits we need to reach and touch or borders we want to cross?

As an academy of performing arts, we see our task in bringing new impulses and challenges to discussion. Therefore, this year of the conference we open not only to representatives from within the creative field (designers, directors, dramaturgs, managers, art pedagogues, performers, theorists) but also to those who approach the same borders and limits from the other fields – practitioners and thinkers from the field of social and political studies. To prepare a common ground for such a diverse group, we share two possible thematic lines together with questions we ask:

1) art as a profession, professionalism in art

• What makes an artist a professional? How does money relate to this?
• Where are the limits in our control as institutions and individuals? What did the system prove not to be able to guarantee? What remains up to the individual responsibility?
• How do we construct authorities? What authorities do we seek and how do we deal with them? How can I become one? Should I?
• How do we navigate between different kinds of ethics (ethics of working methods and artistic creation, ethics of artistic expression, individual ethics, environmental ethics etc.)?

2) forming and re-forming realities

• Where do the art end and social/political reality intervention begin and vice versa?
• Where does the personal become political? Where does politics become personal?
• When do we approach art as a space for imagery, and when do we approach art as an opportunity to work with facts? When are facts stronger than imagery, when is imagery stronger than facts?

You are welcome to send your proposals in one of these formats:

• Paper presentation (30 min + 10 min discussion)
• Work demonstration (up to 60 min)
• Performative lecture (30 min + 10 in discussion)

Practical Information

Please submit your proposal of no more than 300 words and your brief CV before 5 June 2022. You can register here. Regarding the acceptance, the authors will be notified by 10 July 2022. The refined abstracts and CVs will be posted on the conference website prior to the event. Due to a slight change in our schedule, we decided to keep the applications open for a bit longer. The new deadline is July 31st!

Selected papers/recordings of lectures will be published by JAMU in a collective multimedia monograph reflecting the topics of the conference.