Critical Approaches to Solo Theater and Performance

Edited Anthology of Research articles

Solo Theater and Performance is envisaged as an edited anthology of critical essays encompassing contemporary practices, issues and methods, prominent figures, and historical contexts in the domain of one-person theater and performance. Research scholars and academics interested in the area are welcome to contribute to the proposed volume.

Solo performances existed in various classical theater traditions and were subjected to immense transformations of strategies and techniques. Shamans and Storytellers performed oral histories and ritual narratives, bards brought together narrative, music, entertainment and education, performers entwined dramatic monologues with action and movement; one person acts have become intensely personal narratives and critiques in various facets of history of the form.

In 20th century, a wide variety of socio economic and cultural elements interceded in the regulation and development of solo theater and performance practices as exceptional experimentations in interrogating identity, marginality, politics of difference, institutions and power. These initiated autobiographical, documentary, participatory, educational and therapeutic modalities in performance.

Contemporary Solo theaters and performances have an extensive array of forms, styles, sources, practices, modes of manifestation in one person format which portray documentary, autobiographical, self reflexive and/or self revelatory, adaptative, poetic, auto ethnographic, therapeutic, participatory, radical, political and so on. A wide range of performers have revolutionized this genre as an exceptional performance practice such as Andy Kaufman, Anna Deavere Smith, Maya Rao, Eric Bogosian, Rani Moorthy, Emily Mann, Danny Hoch, Karen Finley and so on. Adaptations such as A Christmas Carol by Patrick Stewart, Julie Harris’s biographical sketches of Emily Dickinson, Autobiographical and confessional performances of Holly Hughes and Spalding Gray, Feminist performances of Eve Ensler and Laurie Anderson, political acts of Maya Rao and Rev. Billy, Queer performances of Karen Finley, Tim Miller and Alok Vaid-Menon have become vehemently spectacular solo performances in the last few decades.

One significant factor in solo theater and performance is that it reflected relentlessly the major movements and technologies in art, politics, and society by exploring new sources, modalities of reproduction, intellectual movements and theater space. Solo theater and performance illustrates self-reflexive play of impersonation together with the dynamics of language and narrative and has undergone tremendous transformations in the wake of modernists projects such as ‘Live Art’ and/or ‘Performance Art’, ‘Happening’ and Conceptual art of the sixties and seventies which manifested ideas in terms of material objects, body and spatial movements. Such radical artistic movements have valorized and privileged the process rather than product, presence rather than text, mobility than fixity, flux and ambiguity than concreteness and facts.

The proposed volume comprises of research and innovations in Solo Theater and Performance under seven rubrics: Documentary, Autobiographical/auto ethnographical, Political (identity, race, gender, ethnicity), Transformational/educational, Queer, Personal/Confessional and Transmedia incorporated. Research articles (6000 words) are invited on topics mentioned above, or on related areas, to the Critical Approaches to Solo Theater and Performance in MLA style in MS Word with figures and diagrams separately in JPEG format. Interested authors need to send an abstract in 200 words with keywords, tentative title and a short biography on or before June 10, 2021. Authors of accepted papers will be intimated soon after the blind review process. Completed papers are to be submitted before August 30, 2021. The publication will be released on November 10, 2021. Send the abstract and article to & .

Please include an abstract of approximately 200-400 words and one-paragraph bio. As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in this book and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action. The Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants the editor of the the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish in the volume; Critical Approaches to Solo Theater and Performance.