Call for PSi Theme Park Attractions and Events

Often situated away from regular routes of navigation, theme parks are wholly designed and realized spaces that stretch between the fantastic and the mundane. They are built worlds of amazing sights and thrilling rides that sit alongside the pedestrian infrastructure of ticket queues and bathrooms and are inhabited almost exclusively by paying customers and employees who interact as guests and cast members. The facade of the theme park is thick and resistant, even as we know there must be a backstage, internal machinery, labor, garbage. The theme park is only real in relation to the fantasies it constructs. Multimodal and immersive, theme parks present opportunities to consider the networks and spans of relations among performers, spectators, and designed spaces and objects. We are especially interested in the ways that theme parks perform the elastic boundaries between fantasy and disappointment, wonder and boredom, pleasures and apathy. Theme parks thus enact and perform economies of attention, performance labor, and may open considerations of the university itself, among other institutions, as a theme park.

In all of this, we ask: What does the theme park want? How does the theme park extract? How are participants resourced into sustaining the world of the theme park? How might we view theme parks’ capacity to simultaneously stretch and compress themselves as an activation of new forms of affective economies, social relations, and labor practices?

To take up these questions, we will stage our own theme park at PSi #25 in Calgary. The event will entail a number of attractions related to the performance research of participants, who will enact and perform their work within the conceit of a pop-up theme park. The theme park will take place over the course of one day of the PSi Conference in Calgary from July 4 to 7, 2019 in a flexible performance space. Audience/attendees will come and go throughout the day. Some theme park attractions may be durational and occur and recur throughout the day, while others may only happen once during the day. Participants are encouraged to think of the various modes of performance of theme parks from rides to interactive games to parades to gardens and museums to roaming characters to gift shops and refreshments. We welcome solo performances, ensembles, installations, and other diverse engagements with performance studies and theme parks.

What does your PSi theme park attraction look like? Please complete the following questionnaire and we will be in touch.