Gatherings Manifesto
Gatherings is a forum for theatre and performance scholars to explore creative work that is inspired by their work as scholars, and not aside from that work. We seek to encourage a space where the scholar and the artist in each of us can meet to advantage. This is not to say that no such spaces exist--but not enough, and not of this kind.
Gatherings is a place for those who are steeped in scholarship to employ modes of working not ordinarily circulated in scholarly publishing: performative texts; poems of all kinds; short-form prose; performance traces; figurative marginalia; the visual manipulation of words; scripts; scores; diagrams and other manifestations of the mind; visual interpretations and manipulations of the work of the scholar; and many other modes of expression. We know that the work of the scholar often travels through many of these forms of expression toward the rigours of the scholarly publication. These transitory ways of confronting the scholarship and the archive are worth examining.
Gatherings is a print publication, chosen in the belief that, while the web is a wonderful thing, there is something tactile in the work of the scholar. We emphasize materiality and materials, and the sense of touch, and advocate the use of paper, pen, printing presses, paints, graphite, ink, and wax, of words and figures, of found objects, decay and traces, of documents manipulated and visual experiments as documents. All techniques are welcome. We believe in the materiality of the held literary and artistic object.
Gatherings occurs at a moment when Canadian theatre and performance scholars are often practitioners or practice-based researchers. This publication is a space for materials that reflect these endeavours. It is also a space for the secret, amateur, nocturnal, marginal, desperate scrawlings of the artist-in-us-all.
Gatherings recognizes that by exploring alternative ways of working, the academic employing artful methodologies and sharing their processes/productions might become a happier academic. Likewise, the academic who holds a volume of their community’s creative work is likely to become happy too.
- Jenn Cole and Stephen Johnson
