This issue is concerned with the idea of knowledge in relation to performing arts practices, specifically in the context of creation, training, production, performance, and spectatorship. Previous performance-related scholarship has recognized the knowledge-creating nature of practices in the field of dance and theatre, while critically calling into question the use of the term for its political motivations within the current ‘knowledge economy’ and attending to the lack of attention paid by academics to performing artists’ expertise. This issue aims to build on the foundations laid by this previous work, first by acknowledging that performing arts generate something akin to knowledge and, second, by inviting further critical interrogation of what such recognition achieves in the frame of evolving cultural and political contexts. The focus on practices also tilts this issue towards forms of knowledge that come from experience and the senses. Here we encourage contributors to be reflexive about how, in the context of an academic journal, such knowledge can be accounted for on the page. We are also looking for interdisciplinary approaches outside the arts and humanities that might contribute to the understanding of ways of knowing in the performing arts, and in alternative and diverse conceptualizations of the (un)known in the context of practice-generating knowledge or knowledge-generating practices.
Submissions addressing such topics are invited through long-form and short articles, essays, and provocations as well the journal’s unique artist’s pages.