Announcements

Conferences & Festivals

Send your conference or festival to this address: [email protected]
Please note the publication dates for Coreopsis Journal, limit your announcement to one or two paragraphs with URLs and contact information included. Do not send PDFs, RTFs, or posters.

The Society For Ritual Arts
Bi-Annual Gathering and Awards Ceremony

Part conference, part festival, a celebration of the Ritual, Sacred and Folk arts

Due to the CoVID – 19 Pandemic, the Society’s gathering has been Postponed until further notice. We hope to gather in 2022 and will keep you informed.

Until then, voting continues for the Awards here: http://societyforritualarts.com/lost-chord-award-voting-for-2020/

Hexenfest Postponed Until Further Notice

We are sorry to announce, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hexenfest and related Sirensong events are postponed until further notice. Please sign our mailing list to be kept up to date. We are monitoring the situation closely and look forward to reveling with you again soon!

Dear Family and Friends of
the Yachats Celtic Music Festival

Despite changing COVID-19 restrictions, we are optimistically moving ahead and continue planning for the 2021 Yachats Celtic Music Festival.

In any conditions, this festival is a major production. Dozens of volunteers donate countless hours to its success. We are encouraged by our growing troupe of supporters and attendees. In the past few years, most shows have sold out. Thanks to everyone!

However, we are realistic to the facts of this pandemic. We need to share with you that many of our decisions are complicated. We are still a few months out from “green lighting” the festival. We are currently in a “yellow light”cautious mode of planning, hoping that State and local restrictions will be lifted by November and that we can proceed. Please know that we are doing our best to ensure the health and safety of everyone, plus have another great festival. We appreciate your understanding and patience. We would hope that by May, we might know more, and we will share updates as they are understood or decisions as they are made.

Please tentatively plan to join us in Yachats for the 2021 YCMF on the weekend of November 12, 13, 14, 2021.

We are happy to answer any questions and address any concerns.

Slainte,

Robert Rubin [email protected]

https://yachatscelticmusicfestival.org/

2021 IFTR July 12 – 16, 2021 National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Call from the Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Working Group.

For the 2021 IFTR Conference in Galway, the Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Working Group invites proposals for conference papers, participatory activities, performances, and other things that might contribute, within a conference setting, to the investigation of what constitutes a religious, spiritual, mystical, ecstatic experience in performance.

Renewed proposals from people whose proposals were accepted for the canceled conference in 2020 will be re-accepted and new proposals will be reviewed for acceptance according to the places available.

We are particularly interested in exploring what renders a performance religious or spiritual and what happens to perception, identity, and ecological relationships during these particular kinds of experiences.

If we assume that experience rests in the body and in its interrelations with other bodies, performance is the context where the boundaries between those bodies can be explored, multiplied, erased, liquified, solidified, and exploited. Accordingly, we welcome proposals that engage with embodiment as a condition of performance and as the prerequisite of spiritual and religious kinds of experiences, as well as with the question of where the boundaries between aesthetic and spiritual experiences lie.

We also acknowledge that human embodiment is an ecological field of experience which involves both micro and macro environments and inner and outer landscapes, the perimeters of which are constantly in question depending on the practices in play. We therefore encourage proposals that recognize the natural world as a site for a variety of embodiments and that seek to identify, perhaps, ‘ecologies of experience’ that may be entwined with the non-human. This will hopefully touch on the politics and forms of resistance that these kinds of experiential events invite and activate.

We encourage a multiplicity of ontological and epistemological perspectives inspired by, but not limited to, the following, suggested themes:

Embodied spiritualities

Religious or spiritual practices and ecology

Animistic practices
Ritual and resistance
Catharsis and/in religion
Rasa
Spirituality and identity
Identity construction in and through religious practice
Indigenous ontologies and practices
Religious, spiritual experiences and perceptions
Spiritual experiences, performance and healing
The commodification of spiritual experiences
Posthuman spiritualities
Sexuality, ecology and Religion
It is worth mentioning that the Performance, Religion, and Spirituality Working Group is working towards publishing an anthology of essays having to do with performance, spirituality and experience. Our invitation for contributions for the 2021 IFTR conference has the development of this book in mind.

Submission Instructions:

Each proposal should be no more than 300 words plus a 200-word biography.

Proposals must be submitted through the IFTR registration process at iftr.org/conference by 31 January 2021
We do not yet have information from IFTR regarding when and how to apply for bursaries. We would advise those interested in applying for a bursary to keep their attention on the conference’s official web site for updated bursary news. We will update our call for submissions as we receive more information.
The Performance, Religion and Spirituality Group (PRS) is an open network of scholars and artists interested in exploring interconnections between forms and impulses of religions, spiritualities, and theatrical performances, and in attending to the ways performance and spiritual life have come into conversation, cooperation, and conflict, both historically and in the present. The working group is affiliated with two peer-reviewed journals. Performance, Religion and Spirituality, which is an open-access journal, can be found at prs-journal.org. Information about Ecumenica, a publication of Penn State University Press, can be found at www.ecumenicajournal.org

The 2021 Full Conference is Going Virtual

In order to ensure the safety of our attendees and to avoid the risk of having to cancel our conference once again due to ongoing pandemic conditions, IASD has decided to hold the full 5-day conference virtually via. Zoom. It will be live and interactive with the same symposia, panels, workshops, morning dream groups, and special events offered as had been planned for the onsite program. This not only ensures the safety of participants but increases global access to the full event.

Please join us, along with 5 world renowned keynote speakers and more than 130 presentations from over 100 presenters around the globe. It is more than just a conference; even in its virtual format, it will be an extravaganza of fascinating presentations and special events. Everyone is welcome – whether you are a professional, a dreamworker, or just a curious or interested dreamer. The program features peer reviewed presentations and workshops, in a multidisciplinary program including the scientific, psychological, spiritual, artistic, healing, lucid and extraordinary, ethnic and cultural aspects of dreaming; and a lot of fun events including opening receptions, a virtual Dream Art Exhibition and a meet the artists reception, the annual PSI Dreaming Contest, and even a virtual gathering for the ever-popular costume parade and Dream Ball. This year’s featured tracks include Dreams and Ethnicity and Dreams and The Arts. For the latter, we plan some special events featuring the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Check out IASD Conference 2021 for more information.

Mythcon 51

http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm

The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien

Albuquerque, New Mexico

July 30 – August 2, 2021

Announcement: Due to quarantines and health concerns, the Council of Stewards has decided to postpone Mythcon 51 until summer of 2021; the date will be July 30-August 2, 2021. Our venue and Guests of Honor have all agreed to this change and the conference theme will remain the same. Your membership will automatically “roll over” to next year but if you cannot attend next year, please contact [email protected] and request a refund of your Mythcon 51 membership. For those who paid the non-member prices, your membership in the Mythopoeic Society associated with joining the conference will be extended by a year. Thank you for understanding!

This year’s Mythcon theme provides multiple opportunities to explore the Other in fantasy and mythopoeic literature. Tolkien spoke in “On Fairy-stories” of “the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea; or the longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird.” We invite discussion about the types of fantasy that are more likely to put us into contact with the alien, such as time portal fantasy and space travel fantasy. In addition to Inklings, some writers who deal particularly well with the truly alien who might be explored include Lovecraft, Gaiman, Le Guin, Tepper, and others. Other topics that might be fruitfully explored are: depictions of the alien Other in film and television (Contact, Arrival, HBO’s Watchmen, etc.); developing constructed languages that are truly different from those of Earth-based humans; fantastical Others in indigenous myths (such as Coyote and Spider Woman from Native American mythology); and American folklore about the alien (flying saucers, alien abduction, Area 51, Roswell).