Welcome to Transmissions, which is designed as a web based forum for the Transmissions working group of the 2008 ASTR conference. Although casual or interested readers are welcome, submissions to the site are by working group members only. For titles and abstracts, click on the relevant page links to the left of this text, in the 'Site pages' box. To visit our discussion threads, click on 'Discussion Forum', above left.

Here's the abstract for the working group as a whole:

Transmissions: Mobilizing Theatrical Movement
Conveners
Paul Rae, National University of Singapore [paulrae{at}nus.edu.sg]
Martin Welton, Queen Mary, University of London [m.welton{at}qmul.ac.uk]

The aim of this working session is to explore the relationship between globalized mobility and theatrical movement, and to identify how best to research, interpret and articulate that relationship.

In part, we take our cue from Edward Said’s essay ‘Traveling Theory’ (1983). There, he writes that one of the four stages ‘common to the way any idea or theory travels’ is that ‘there is a distance transversed, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence’ (227). The group's discussions will address the phenomenon of theatrical movement in an age of hyper-mobility: that whatever is transmitted across locations is always already in motion within its locale. Some performance styles minimize this ‘traffic of the stage,’ while others heighten it – but rare is the theatrical event as static as orthodox critical frameworks (be it object-oriented semiotics, situational identity politics, or textualizing cultural materialism) tend to imply.

Specifically, the papers circulated amongst group members address either one or both of the following:

• The processes by which gestures, techniques, meanings, performance aesthetics and their attendant ideologies pass from practitioner to practitioner in an age of international touring and collaboration.
• The production and experience of movement within in the theatrical event, including: conventions and representations of movement and travel on the stage; affect and sensation; performance as process, motion, movement, and action, and, conversely, stillness and stasis.

The actual focus of the Working Session will be methodological and conceptual, and address the distinctive analytical challenge of movement and mobility as ‘objects’ of study. The first part of the meeting will be given over to short, prepared responses to the papers by designated group members, paying particular attention to how movement and mobility is figured within the write-up. The second part will build from that, with a view to outlining what might be called a poetics of theatrical movement in an age of globalized cultural flows.