The Call for Papers has just been made for the Samuel Beckett Working Group which forms part of the annual conference of the International Foundation for Theatre Research to be held in 2025 in Cologne, Germany from 9-13 June.
Aligning with the overall conference theme, the seminar’s chosen title is Greying the Carnival: Samuel Beckett Inverting / Inverting Samuel Beckett.
The call for papers states:
Samuel Beckett’s drama may not be yet mapped as a site of carnival; nevertheless, the
Beckettian dramatic ecosystem is open to a sense of the carnivalesque. In Europe and the
northern Americas, the carnival tends to be understood as a secularised Christian tradition, the
religious roots of which are enshrined in the epistemology of the word. Originating from the
Latin carnem levāre – the removal of the flesh (OED) – the carnival used to be a festive
threshold leading into the frugality and modesty of Lent. Yet, such grassroots street
performances have thrived beyond this limited cultural, historical and geographical frame. We
notably think about the African and Indigenous carnivals, such as Canboulay, which operated
as spiritual, political and cultural performances of resistance and rebellion against domination
and exploitation (Browne, 2018). It is therefore necessary to first decentre the event of “the
carnival” in order to zoom in on “the carnivalesque” as a complex phenomenon.
The carnivalesque has been providing historians, ethnographers and anthropologists
with “a tool for broader historical analysis of non-carnival festivities bearing carnival
characteristics” (Testa, 2021) and literary critics with a lens through which to analyse the
aestheticization of “a carnival sense of the world” (Bakhtin, 1984a). Combining both
approaches, theatre and performance scholars may find in the carnivalesque a concept through
which to identify and examine cultural manifestations of the phenomenon beyond the
performances of carnival, tracing its evolution and hybridisation across various real and
fictional milieux. We propose to begin our investigation into the topic of the conference with a
provisional definition of the carnivalesque that owes a debt to Mikhail Bakhtin’s study, but
attempts to be inclusive of contexts other than the popular culture he scrutinized: a reflective,
subversive and playful politics and aesthetic of illusion, relying on symbols that blur dualisms
to express a desire for freedom, while limning its limits. By dualisms, we think in particular of
the real/the ideal, life/death, doom/hope, continuity/rupture, centre/margin, top/bottom,
male/female, human/animal, order/anarchy and revolution/entertainment, but this list is not
exhaustive and deserves to be expanded, to adapt to the complex and shapeshifting
manifestations of the phenomenon.
The carnivalesque seeps into Beckett’s oeuvre, mostly in an embodied fashion, but not
only in this manner: obvious occurrences can be identified in the onomastics of the Kraps and
the Piouks; Vladimir’s and Estragon’s commedia dell’ arte inspired lazzi (Kern, 1966); the
excess of Lucky’s logorrhea; Hamm’s need to keep playing; Krapp’s boozing as well as his
clownish makeup and costume; Winnie’s ritualistic attention to costume and props; and the
staging of the grotesque body with the laughter and hiccups in Play or the character of Mouth.
However, Beckett’s plays do not “digest” those carnivalesque elements easily, rather putting
them to the test of what we could refer to as the anti-carnival of a (post-)catastrophic everyday.
If the carnival is characterised by the gathering of masses, feasting and abundance, Beckett’s
plays perform the opposite with masses disappearing, food and other vital resources depleting.
Yet, both operate as a suspension: a point of convergence and departure. The carnival may be
understood as a “temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank” (Bakhtin,
1984b, 10) – a pause in the course of the everyday. Beckett’s oeuvre is ruled by the imperative
to “go on” in the anachromism of “grey time,” “where there is neither simply action nor its
opposite, but a call to keep paying attention to the intensity of time that resists the black and
white of a crisis” (Salisbury, 2024). As is so often the case with Beckett, we are left with scales of grey: an ode to the complex and the paradoxical. At a time when contradiction and debate
have become difficult, when freedom of speech keeps oscillating, we propose to revisit
Beckett’s plays as sanctuaries of the uncertain, the contradictory, the paradoxical – a grey
carnival.
In practice, the tension between tradition and innovation is always at the core of
production and often yields questions about the possibility to invert or subvert Beckett’s legacy
and artistic paradigms. This battle has often been fought on the grounds of gender, whereby
queering Beckett appears as a magnifier of gender topics and issues already at play in the work, as well as new epistemological ways of unearthing systems of power, domination and
exploitation. Cross-casting and drag remain a vexed issue in the performance history of
Beckett’s work both in his lifetime and afterwards. On the one hand, the Beckett Estate – in its
mission of “protection” and “preservation” – tends to impose a strict adherence to what is
thereby construed as a gender politics, often applying a binary approach, which is not directly
traceable in the texts. On the other hands, queer performances of Beckett not only bring to the
surface the queerness of the texts, but they can also provide a path to explore the “masquerade” of femininity (Butler, 2015), the identity of characters beyond the binary, and some plays like Happy Days even become vehicles for performing what it is to be “stuck in [one’s] body” (Nando Messias, qtd. in Heron, 2022). Furthermore, as the Beckettian oeuvre is being remediated, further troubling the border between the real and the virtual, and presence and absence, we are compelled to investigate how new creative technologies are themselves
political and aesthetic tools that both (re-)produce an already existing Beckettian carnivalesque,
while also complexifying, hybridizing or inverting it (Johnson and Heron, 2020). In the
geographical Beckettian “centres”, this prolific creative engagement with the work is often
made accessible to the public as part of festivals, drawing masses in a carnivalesque celebration of Beckett and his work (McTighe, 2023), which disrupts not only social time (a break from quotidian life) and phenomenological time (the effect of Beckett’s slowed-down dramaturgies on audience members), but also the temporality of theatre-making (a shift in the somatic approach to rehearsing those slow-paced pieces) and marketing (programming short plays in neo-liberal contexts). In other words, as Trish McTighe eloquently puts it, “Each festival
constructs ‘Beckett-time’ out of the normative fabric of cultural time” (McTighe, 2023). The
carnivalesque durée as / of / in / against Beckettian festivals thus calls for a broader
reassessment of our collective consumption of art, as well as our modes of celebration of bodies of work and artists.
All papers related to Beckett’s drama or Beckett in performance are welcome. We also
encourage proposals in English and in French pertaining, but not limited, to the following
topics:
⁃ Beckett and the carnivalesque
⁃ Beckett as anti-carnival
⁃ Beckett’s clowns, fools and jesters
⁃ Beckett and the grotesque
⁃ Beckett and commedia dell’arte
⁃ Beckett and costumes and props
⁃ Beckett and festivals
⁃ Beckett and technologies of hybridization
⁃ Queering, inverting, subverting Beckett
⁃ The carnival of Beckett’s doodles
The Samuel Beckett Working Group is an evolving international community of researchers,
which seeks to support the development of excellent research on Beckett’s drama and Beckett
in performance. We welcome postgraduate and early-career researchers, as well as faculty,
independent researchers and artists. We value the participation of Beckett and non-Beckett
experts alike, as both categories partake in the maintenance of a healthy interdisciplinary
ecosystem. The submission of work at various levels of development is encouraged from early
ideas on a project to work in progress to nearly finished papers. This community strives to offer
rigorous and constructive feedback through respectful engagement with each other’s work. Our core values are inclusivity, diversity and care.
Abstracts can be submitted via the IFTR Cambridge Core portal. Please note that you must
renew your membership here or become a member in order to submit.
The deadline for abstracts for working group papers is 15 January 2025.
Papers of up to 3,000 words in length are to be distributed by 9 May 2025.
For information about the general conference, please check the IFTR website. Please also
check for updates on the Samuel Beckett Working Group page.
If you have questions about the group or about attending please contact the working group
convenors, Céline Thobois-Gupta and Trish McTighe.
Please note that papers to be presented at the Working Group are distributed and read by all
the participants ahead of the meeting. At the Working Group sessions presenters give short
résumés of their work, followed by a lengthy discussion period (each presenter has 30 to 45
minutes in all, depending on the number of presenters). This is an extremely effective method,
which allows ideas to be discussed, debated and evaluated, with participants suggesting
directions for the presenters’ work-in-progress. There is limited space for presenters; there will
also be a limited space for auditors, who may also be sent the papers to and be encouraged to
engage in the discussions during the sessions.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.
University of Minnesota Press, 1984a.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University
Press, 1984b.
Browne, Kevin Adonis. High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture.
University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2015.
Johnson, Nicholas E., and Jonathan Heron. Experimental Beckett. Cambridge University
Press, 2020.
Heron, Jonathan. “‘Restriction Gives Freedom:’ A Dialogue between Jonathan Heron and
Nando Messias.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 34, no. 1 (2022): 79–91.
Kern, Elizabeth. “Beckett and the Spirit of the Commedia Dell’Arte.” Modern Drama 9, no.3
(1966): 260–7.
McTighe, Trish. Carnivals of Ruin. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Oxford English Dictionary, under “carnival.”
Salisbury, Laura. “Waiting with Beckett in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Beckett Studies 33,
no.1 (2024): 14–40.
Testa, Alessandro. Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The History of Popular Carnival in
Europe. Routledge, 2021.
The Samuel Beckett Society 