[AHS-Grads] Fwd: Regarding Sharing the Call for Papers for UCLA's Center for Performance Studies Upcoming Grad Conference

Tue Sep 15 08:57:37 PDT 2026

Please see call for papers below

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: JOSE NATERAS <jnateras at g.ucla.edu>
Date: Mon, Sep 14, 2026 at 5:45 PM
Subject: Regarding Sharing the Call for Papers for UCLA's Center for
Performance Studies Upcoming Grad Conference
To:

Hello,

I hope this email finds you well!

I am reaching out because UCLA's Center for Performance Studies is hosting
a graduate conference titled 'NO THING PLAYS ITSELF: Infrastructures of
Support and the Myth of the Solo Act.' We would so appreciate your help in
circulating our CFP to the graduate students in your department. The
conference will take place at UCLA this February and will feature scholars
and local curators. It should be a generative event and it would be great
to have your students in the mix.

I am attaching a PDF of the CFP and also including the text below in case
that is easier to send out. Let me know if there is someone else I should
get in touch with from your department whose job it is to distribute these
sorts of things.

Many thanks in advance!

All the best,

Jose Nateras

***
CALL FOR  PAPERS

*NO THING PLAYS ITSELF: Infrastructures of Support and the Myth of the Solo
Act*
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An interdisciplinary graduate student conference presented by UCLA’s Center
for Performance Studies with keynote speaker, Amelia Jones (USC) & an
evening conversation with Mindy Seu (UCLA)

*Conference Date: February 17, 2027Deadline for Submissions: Friday,
November 6, 2026*

Given performance’s historic place as a cross-disciplinary, witnessed and
often collectively produced art form, it is widely understood as inherently
collaborative. Performance, even in the most general sense, depends upon
dense infrastructures of support, from material conditions and
institutional frameworks to technological systems, historical inheritances,
and networks of care and labor that make appearance and shared meaning
possible. And yet, these conditions usually recede into the background of
experience, especially when they function well. What comes into view when
we foreground the conditions that underwrite performance and sustain
everyday acts of self-figuration?

As Shannon Jackson reminds us through the work of Vivian Sobchack, “it can
be tricky to expose systemic contingency precisely because enabling systems
often go unregistered in the moment that we use them” (Jackson 2011, 5).
Reflecting on the altered capacities she developed after the amputation of
her leg, Sobchack notes how the prostheses and support systems we rely on
“are generally the ground of our intentional movement and acts, not the
figure,” that is “unless there’s a function problem or they become of
interest ‘in themselves’” (Sobchack 2005, 57). During a moment marked by
the erosion and reconfiguration of cultural and academic support systems,
amid funding crises, institutional retrenchment, and intensifying political
pressures, this conference invites participants to treat the precarity of
support as an occasion for critical attention. Can we consider support, not
as ground, but as figure itself, or perhaps as a verb that acts to hold
ground and figure dialectically? How might performance studies, a field
long attuned to collectivity as a medium, help us refine an interdependent
language for confronting the increasing instability of enabling systems?

A reference to Thom Andersen’s documentary,* Los Angeles Plays Itself*
(2003), the title for this conference, “No Thing Plays Itself,” signals an
interest in Southern California’s local histories of support that might
serve as useful models for contemporary circumstances that can feel
unprecedented. At the same time, this title extends our inquiry into
systemic contingency to include the mediated and mediating role
infrastructures occupy. To play oneself is never to originate meaning, but
to cite, inhabit and rework languages that precede and exceed the
individual. Performance, then, emerges less as an expression of singularity
than as an activation of inherited forms: scripts, gestures, aesthetics,
technological apparatuses that are collectively accessed.

This one-day graduate conference welcomes submissions from across
disciplines that engage questions such as:

● What are strategies for rendering supportive infrastructures sensible “in
themselves”?
● How are systems of support localized, distributed or made scalable?
● How is the present supported by the past? How do imagined futures
condition the modes of their own production?
● How might intergenerational and interdisciplinary collaboration sustain
scholarship and artistic practice during precarious times?
● How do relationships between human and nonhuman actors, technological
systems and environments mediate performance?
● How do we contextualize ourselves and our work beyond self-imposed
boundaries?
● How might performance function as a mode of political organization,
mutual aid, or collective survival?

We look forward to receiving submission proposals on topics such as, but
not limited to:

- Histories of infrastructures that support the arts
- Hidden or obscured systems of labor
- Collaboration across artistic, scholarly and activist practices
- Academic work that precipitates across generations
- Complicating notions of automation– digital and corporeal
- Collaborations with non-human actors
- Environmental and ecological support systems, public infrastructures
- Relationships between performance and political organizing/ political
organization
- Defenses of solitude and celebrations of loneness

In addition to traditional conference papers, we are accepting proposals
for performance lectures, performances, workshops, working groups, and
group panels.

*SUBMIT ONLINE:* https://bit.ly/performucla27
Abstract (200-250 words) and bio (100 words max) by Friday, November 6,
2026.
Questions? Contact cps at tft.ucla.edu

Works Cited:
Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics.
Routledge.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2005. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A
Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).”
Topoi (Dordrecht) 24 (1): 55–66.
_____________
*Jose Nateras*
*He/Him/His*

PhD Candidate, Theater and Performance Studies, UCLA
MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BA, Loyola University Chicago

https://www.josenateras.com/about-me

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