Call for Papers: Theatralia 2/2025

Theatralia: Journal of Theatre Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, issue topic: ‘Brutal Repertoires. Reception of Sarah Kane and “New Brutalism” in Central Europe (and Beyond)’
Issue Editors: Dorota Sosnowska (Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Poland) and David Drozd (Department of Theatre Studies, Brno, Czech Republic)
Proposal deadline: 30 October 2024

Asking about the foundations of the post-Сold War world, the fragile equilibrium of which now came to an end, we come across the surprising and overwhelming presence of violence in culture and popular imagination. Arjun Appadurai in his Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006) even called the 1990s the epoch of super-violence pointing to the shifting situation of minorities connected to globalisation. As theatre scholars we also find violence on the theatrical stage of Poland and Czechia mainly in the context of British dramas from the so-called in-yer-face current. Interested in the historical momentum of the 1990s being the period of post-communist transition, we would like to ask what the relation is between Sarah Kane’s and other brutalist dramas and political and social change experienced during the transition, and how it played out in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc as well as the former USSR republics undergoing the same process.
The issue of Theatralia 2/2025 invites contributions in the form of research articles for the peer-reviewed sections of the journal (4,000‒7,000 words), as well as reports and reviews (1,000‒1,500 words), that explore the themes in following frame (the list of topics is by no means exhaustive):

• How is ‘new brutalism’, ‘in-yer-face’, ‘coolness’ framed in different post-Soviet countries?
• How do performances of texts by Sarah Kane (or others like Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Nielsen,
  Martin Crimp, Patrick Marber) function in a new context? What is specific about their reception?
• What (aesthetic, political, emancipatory) issues do the performances bring up, and how does it reflect
  the understanding of the play in a changed context
• How do these performances function in the context of a period of political and social transition?
• What is the current state of the relation of East-West? What are the phantasies about western life and its meaning for the creation of new social norms?
• Violence in 1990s – why are images of violence so frequented in art? How does imagery of violence
  differ in the East vs West context? Is there really a difference as it was diagnosed for example by Polish scholars claiming the radically different meaning of violence in both contexts?
• Do ‘long 1990s’ as diagnosed for example with the exhibition British, British, Polish, Polish. Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long Nineties and Today from 2013 and shown in Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw exist in all the post-Communist countries? How is this notion influenced by British drama and art?
• How does the image of ‘in-yer-face’ drama in Central Europe differ from the image created by Alex Sierz in the context of cool Britannia?
• What are the different media of new brutalism/in-yer-face? Does it function in theatre, in art, in film, and how?
• What are the affects and emotions triggered by this art? How can we understand them in the political and social context?
• What is the class context of the theatre of the 1990s? Who goes to see Sarah Kane’s plays? Who accepts this theatre, who rejects it? Does it have anything to do with arising class hierarchy?

We intently avoid original performances in Britain; we want to track the reception in Eastern (or Central) Europe and beyond, which was triggered by mainly German performances of Thomas Ostermeier in Schaubühne and then followed to former communist countries, which were in a state of social and political transition.

Proposal submission deadline (300-500 words): 30 October 2024
Manuscript submission deadline for peer-reviewed sections (Yorick, Spectrum): 21 December 2024
Manuscript submission deadline for non-reviewed sections (Reviews, Events): 28 February 2025
Foreseeable date of publication: Fall 2025

All issue-related enquiries as well as submissions should be sent to the issue editors: theatralia@phil.muni.cz. General guidelines for submission, formal requirements, article template and citation style are available at the section for authors on the Theatralia website.

Theatralia is a peer reviewed journal of theatre and performance history and theory, issued by Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and indexed in SCOPUS, EBSCO and ERIH Plus and listed in the Ulrich’s web Global Serials Directory.