SEARCH
In the coming days, the first issue of the new peer-reviewed periodical ArteActa will come out. The journal, which is published by the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, focuses on artistic research and contemporary performative art, in particular theatre, audio-visual art, music and dance, with crossovers into fine arts. The journal was first presented to the public on 13 October 2018 as part of a scholarly workshop at the 4+4 Days in Motion festival.
The project to publish ArteActa grew out of an initiative by AMU Rector Jan Hančil, who describes the journal as follows: “ArteActa endeavours to fill a certain vacuum. Hitherto, the area of performative art has lacked a scholarly periodical that consistently emphasises interdisciplinary crossovers and, in addition to the perspectives of artistic scholarship, also offers a platform for publishing information about artistic research. I believe that the energy that has been invested into this project will pay off over time by enriching scholarly discourse in the areas of audio-visual, theatre, music and dance arts.”
The journal ArteActa arose out of the need for a specialist periodical in which several scholarly disciplines would immediately interact and inspire one another. On one hand, it covers contemporary performative art with emphasis on audio-visual, theatre, music, dance and their interdisciplinary crossovers, while its other area of interest is artistic research. ArteActa Executive Editor Jan Jiřík explains: “We do not pretend – nor do we wish to pretend – that we know the exact and only correct form of artistic research, its boundaries and methods. We understand ArteActa as a space that we would like to offer for discussion on this discipline. We want to identify its specific forms and to present component studies which have emerged from artistic research, but we would also like to encourage reflection on its possible forms and methodological approaches.”
In addition to the peer-reviewed portion of ArteActa, readers will find essays, translations of significant papers, and reviews of books and exhibitions.
A peer-reviewed study will constitute the core of each issue. In addition to artistic research, the journal is focused mainly on contributions on 20th- and 21st-century performative art which ideally also extend beyond the boundaries of their traditional fields. In contrast to periodicals with a narrow disciplinary focus, ArteActa offers a space for authors who can no longer find a place for their thinking and ideas in traditional artistic scholarship in the areas of audio-visual art, theatre, music and dance. In addition to the peer-reviewed portion, the journal will also include essays addressing current topics in the above-mentioned fields, as well as translations of significant papers by foreign authors. Ample space will be devoted to more extensive reviews and review studies of books, exhibitions and other types of relevant outputs and events. ArteActa will be published twice annually, and will include studies in Czech, Slovak and English.
From the first issue’s editorial
The aims of the journal ArteActa are beginning to come to fruition already in the first issue. In her study “‘Dance-concept’, ‘no-dance’ or ‘new choreography’?”, subtitled “The current German-language theoretical discourse in the area of dance performance”, Jitka Pavlišová traces the phenomenon of conceptual dance, which began to develop in the 1990s and has garnered significant theoretical attention. Jan Motol’s polemical essay titled “From artistic investigation to radical research, from science to diplomacy” opens a series on artistic research, on which the editors intend to focus for some time in the essays and translations section. The reviews section consists of two texts: In the first, František A. Podhajský considers the original web platform on which prominent contemporary performers as well as performance theoreticians concentrate their views about contemporary performative art. In the final text of this issue, Barbora Kašparová reviews Dita Dvořáková’s Czech selection of current tendencies in German-language dance theory.
Individual issues of ArteActa can be purchased in the NAMU e-shop (www.namu.cz) and will also be available from selected Czech and Slovak booksellers. Subscriptions are available on predplatne@arteacta.cz.
