Blackfriars Conference -- Planning, Call for Papers, and Early Registration

As the new year starts, the education department is getting ready to gear up our preparations for the 6th Blackfriars Conference, which will be held October 25th-30th, 2011. Our special Google calendar for the event is already filling up with deadlines and scheduled meetings, and we spent hours of our last education department workday coming up with to-do lists and project ideas. This project is both exciting and a little intimidating for me -- I was still a student in the MLitt program during the 2009 Conference, so I only saw a little bit of the work that goes into making the Blackfriars Conference one of the best venues in the world for discussing early modern theatre. I'm in awe of my colleagues Sarah and Christina, knowing now how much they handled for the 2009 conference, and I'm looking forward to stepping up to the challenge myself. I'll be documenting the progress of our preparations on the blog and on Twitter, so those of you following along will hear quite a bit about it between now and the end of October.

One of the primary focuses of the Blackfriars Conference, which sets it apart in many ways, is the relationship between scholarship and practice. How does one inform the other? How can we put research into play on the stage? What can staging, especially in an early modern space like the Blackfriars, teach us? We have a lot of ongoing dialogue at the ASC about this relationship and about how to improve the lines of communication between scholars and actors. A trouble that Sarah tells me has come up in the past, though, has been an under-representation of practitioners at events like the Blackfriars Conference. One of our goals for this year is to figure out why that happens and to determine how to fix it -- What can we do to encourage more practitioners to engage in this conversation? If you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them. The Blackfriars Playhouse is not a museum, and the Blackfriars Conference is not solely a congregation for academics. Our space is a living tool for us, and we learn so much from the production of plays there, and some of the most exciting and thought-provoking sessions that I witnessed from the 2009 conference came from practitioners, examining staging choices or audience response. Because we know there is so much to be learned from the plays as performance, we hold staging sessions during the conference, where interested parties can use our actors, in the Playhouse, to examine a variant direction, a staging choice, or another crux that can only be thoroughly examined by bringing the words to life, rather than by reading them on a page. Last year's staging sessions were so successful that we've added time for a few more this year, and we're looking forward to seeing what challenges our presenters want to explore.

Here is our call for papers and abstract submission form. We're looking for papers on audience contact, meter and rhetoric, rehearsal, playhouse conditions, visual design, history, architecture, Shakespeare's relation to politics, the playing companies of early modern England, or other topics exploring Shakespeare's words and his world in new and exciting ways. We'll also be holding breakout roundtable sessions on shared language in the actor/scholar conversation, producing non-early-modern plays in early modern spaces, pedagogy, the economics of playing, Shakespeare and the web, props, politics, dramaturgy in practice, onstage silences, music, and prologues and epilogues. We accept submissions from college professors, high school teachers, theatre practitioners, graduate students, independent scholars -- anyone with something thoughtful and exciting to say about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, his plays, or his world.

Conference Registration is now open -- register by May 31st to get the special early rate. Please note that early registration has no effect on paper selection -- but, by no means do you have to submit a paper to attend our conference. We hope to see attendees from all over the country, from many different disciplines relating to Shakespeare studies.