Futures After the Pandemic: Transmedial Stages and Posthuman Dramaturgies
Deadline: April 9, 2025
Date: Friday 9 May 10.00-17.00
Venue: Rose Bruford College
Organisers: Joseph Dunne-Howrie and Bianca Mastrominico (WG co-conveners)
Guest speakers: Maddy Costa, Hannah Silva, Caridad Svich and Roisin Tyrrell
Call for Contributions
The Performance and New Technologies Working Group is inviting proposals for their interim event in 2025 concerning post-pandemic transmedial stages and their intersection with posthuman and post-digital dramaturgies in online/internet/networked...
TaPRA 2025 Scenography CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Making and Doing Scenography
For the TaPRA annual conference at University of Warwick, the Scenography working group invites contributions that concern acts of making and doing scenography. Drawing from Rachel Hann’s understanding of “scenography as an act of place orientation” (2019, p.19), the crafting of which is “a process of material acclimatization that occurs in time” (2019, p.19, emphasis in original), as well as Brejzek’s...
TaPRA 2025 Performer Training CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Training Beyond (Established) Techniques
The UK higher education theatre and performance field is unstable – with drama schools ‘particularly hard hit by the previous government’s decision to cut funding for arts subjects to prioritise STEM subjects’ (Weale and Hattenstone, 2025), several universities closing or condensing drama departments over the last few years in response to these cuts, reduced applications, and reduced intake of...
TaPRA 2025 Directing and Dramaturgy CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: On Joy and Ecstasy
What is the role of joy in theatre and performance? How does the idea of “a good night out” (Aston & Harris, 2012) shape our theatrical landscape? And, how do joy and ecstasy figure beyond the idea of theatre as entertainment? What are the dramaturgical limitations and possibilities of staging joy and/or ecstasy? What is the politics associated with such stagings?
Joy
In the past decade, contemporary liberation...
TaPRA 2025 Audience, Experience & Popular Practices CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Fun, Playfulness & Pleasure
This year the Audience, Experience, and Popular Practices WG are inviting 15-minute responses of any kind to the theme of fun, playfulness, and pleasure.
We are eager for this exploration to be as broad as possible. You might want to talk about any aspect of theatre-making or spectatorship, about live performance experiences of any kind, about the performance of identity in everyday life, about love or desire or...
TaPRA 2025 Theatre, Performance and Philosophy CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: On Performance and Borders
For TaPRA 2025, the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group invites artists, thinkers, activists, researchers and curators to engage in collaborative praxes of creation focused on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders, adding to the intricate tapestry of existing reflections and practices on performance and borders.
We seek to explore spiritual and philosophical approaches to threshold...
TaPRA 2025 Performance and New Technologies CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Postdigital and AI Dramaturgies: Gen Alpha and the Politics of Care in Online Performance
The Performance and New Technologies Working Group is inviting proposals concerning emergent performative paradigms of generative artificial intelligence (AI) that intersect with the politics of care. We are particularly interested in proposals that engage with the online performance cultures of Generation Alpha (children born after 2010) and...
TaPRA 2025 Sound, Voice and Music CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Interfaces
In 2024, discussions in the SVM working group revolved around resistance, reflection and regrouping, opening new pathways of thought about musicality and vocal expression in such contexts as politics, care and activism. This year, we encourage colleagues to think about sound, voice and music as interfaces, dynamic contexts for interaction, which enable new connections, border crossing, and foster collaboration.
In the age of the...
TaPRA 2025 Theatre and Performance Histories CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Celebration
In her afterword to Tanja Beer’s Ecoscenography (Palgrave, 2021), Rachel Hann asks: “How can theatre and performance celebrate the interweaving of humans, things, and places?” We might extend that question to our discipline as a whole: how can theatre and performance scholars find the capacity to celebrate with and within our research? The last few years have been characterised by challenges to our discipline, sector, society,...
TaPRA 2025 Performance, Identity, and Community CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Looking Back to Look Forward: Where Have We Gone Wrong?
In light of the conference theme, ‘Milestones and Markers’, we’ve chosen to reflect on the themes of the Performance, Identity, and Community Working Group over the past few years, taking stock of what we’ve done, what we’ve not done, and what we want to do in the future. Methodological questions have cut through the CfPs over the last five years, with themes ranging from cruel...
TaPRA 2025 Applied and Social Theatre CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Ways Out: Power and Potencia in Applied Theatre Practices
In last year’s Applied and Social Theatre Working Group gathering, our discussions were often focussed on the material realities and the power relations that constitute our applied theatre ecologies. We discussed, time and again, the power wielded by donors, granting agencies and the like, that seek to define these ecologies by necessitating “tangible outcomes … [resulting in] the...
TaPRA 2025 Bodies and Performance CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Fleshy futurities: Embodied yearning, resistance and grief
Given that the destructive futurities of the broligarchy hinge on transcendence, whether bodily or planetary, we suggest that there is an urgent need to ground questions of futurity, yearning and beyondness in a commitment to a fleshy embodiment and placehood. Recognising that New Materialist and post-human thought parallel millennia of often-uncited indigenous epistemology (Zoe Todd,...
TaPRA 2025 Documenting Performance CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Documents Against Form
‘What does seeing the past do to ameliorate or repair loss?’
(Jennifer C. Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, 2024: 78).
The document has long been burdened with the responsibility to witness, record, archive, and contain the fleeting or ephemeral. Yet this expectation often limits its potential, framing the act of documentation as static and individual. Perhaps the most overtly...
TaPRA 2025 Performance & Science CFP
Deadline: March 10, 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Intersections: Science-Engaged Performance
The Performance and Science working group has an open invitation for proposals that relate to science-engaged performance and research. This might include the following (though this is not intended as an exclusive list): AI and performance; complexity and emergent/self-organising systems; gamification of knowledge; representations of climate or environmental science in or through performance;...
TaPRA 2024 Performer Training working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Centering Second Language Users in Performer Training
Among efforts to decolonise and decenter the actor training studio, practitioners and scholars consider the barriers for students who speak English as a Second Language (henceforth, ESL) and undertake performer training in English. Innovative and inclusive pedagogies draw on cultural studies and second language acquisition research to support ESL users in transcending barriers concerning dispositions about performance standards (Espinosa...
TaPRA 2024 Scenography working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Enduring Scenographies
For the TaPRA annual conference at Northumbria, the Scenography working group invites contributions around the theme of endurance and duration. Etymologically linked, both words signal a relationship with the temporal aspects of performance, with the former expressing graft, tenacity or suffering as time passes.
Survival can also be about keeping one’s hopes alive; holding on to the projects that are projects insofar as they have yet to be realized. You might...
TaPRA 2024 Gallery
Deadline: April 10, 2024
As part of the Theatre & Performance Research Association (TaPRA) 2024 conference, we invite proposals to exhibit audiovisual, digital and analogue documentation of research projects across theatre and performance disciplines for the TaPRA Gallery hosted by Northumbria University, Newcastle.
This year is an open call.
The TaPRA Gallery hosts work relating to all modes of research enquiry including practice research. Selected exhibitors from the TaPRA Gallery will also be invited...
TaPRA 2024 Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Uncertain Groundlessness – the dizzy, the ungrounded, the subterranean, and other risky (dis)orientations
Aaaaaaaaargh… So flippantly, we have bottomed up, upside down – a strange situation, discernible perhaps as an experience of groundlessness.
A free-falling or floating condition that slips away from hegemonic conventions of stability, catching on the present moment’s ubiquitous sense of disorientation. According to many contemporary thinkers, such as Hito Steyerl...
TaPRA 2024 Sound, Voice and Music working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Resistance, reflection and regrouping through sound, voice, music
In 2023, the Sound, Voice and Music working group explored encounter as a mode of knowing and engaging with ourselves, each other, and the material/immaterial worlds. In 2024, we extend the encounter and keep looking outwards, acknowledging the enormous upheavals going on across our planet. Humans continue to extract and plunder natural resources, engage in violent conflict, deepen economic inequalities and ideological...
TaPRA 2024 Performance, Identity and Community working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Resistance/refusal in the afterlives of performance
This year, we continue our focus on methods (both contemporary and historical) and the epistemic politics in and of performance. To that end we are turning our focus to the afterlives of performance, and specifically, the politics and ethics of creating and maintaining those afterlives, with an emphasis on queer and anti-colonial approaches that resist or refuse closed/ untroubled legacies.
How does a politicised framing of...
TaPRA 2024 Performance and Science working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
The Performance and Science working group has an open invitation for proposals that relate to science engaged performance and research. Both performance and science are taken as broad, inclusive, and fuzzy terms, and the group welcomes proposals that explore or test those definitions. The working group welcomes contributions of any kind: performance, paper, workshop, or others that we haven’t yet imagined. Suggestions could include: performance and complexity and emergent/self-organising...
TaPRA 2024 Performance and New Technologies working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Staying with Postdigital Troubles: Bodies, Affects, Identities and Social Changes in Technologically Enabled Performances
Drawing on definitions of the postdigital as the convergence of human, machines, and data from performance studies (Causey 2016; Bay-Cheng 2018; Jarvis and Savage 2021) and digital humanities (Bridle 2023; Seymour 2019), this call responds to an urgent need to understand how embodied simulation and the affective status of digital interactions can provoke social...
TaPRA 2024 Theatre and Performance Histories working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Theatre and Performance Histories: So what?
The Context: In August 2023, our working group began a response to Esther Kim Lee’s ‘Invitation to Theatre History’ (2022), which calls for the wider discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies to unite to ‘rebrand’ and ‘reimagine theatre history together’. Papers at last year’s conference explored the collaborative nature of our work, challenging the stereotype of the theatre and performance historian as a tweed-clad solitary...
TaPRA 2024 Documenting Performance working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Performance Scenes of the Ordinary
The ‘Documenting Performance Working Group’ theme ‘Performance Scenes of the Ordinary’ for the annual TaPRA 2024 conference takes its cue from Christina Sharpe’s latest book Ordinary Notes (2023) where the note form itself sutures memory, observation, racism and violence from everyday scenes. Tenderness and intimacy also appear as a means to weave hope into writing at this bleak moment in history. Our interest in the ordinary also stems from...
TaPRA 2024 Directing and Dramaturgy working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Precarity/Precariousness
For two decades, precarity has been used within and outside of the academy as a framework for understanding the increasingly unstable and contingent conditions of human existence under late capitalism.
Anthropologist Clara Han distinguishes that “[on] the one hand, precarity is tightly bound to transformations of labor and the welfare state under conditions of globalization. On the other hand, precarity, and its companion, precariousness, is understood...
TaPRA 2024 Bodies and Performance working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Dynamics of desire: A politicised methodology towards pleasure-fuelled research
In the woozy afterglow of our investigations last year into the ways in which Critical Hunk and Babe Studies might be mobilised to critique oppressive structures and aesthetic regimes of whiteness, ableism and cisgenderism, we have lingered in the possibilities of centring the pleasures and desires of the researcher of performance. Last year’s presentations were pervaded by a spectrum of desires – from...
TaPRA 2024 Audience, Experience and Popular Practices working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Experiencing Comfort & Discomfort
This year the Audience, Experience, and Popular Practices WG are inviting 15 minute responses of any kind to the theme of comfort and discomfort.
What does it mean to experience sensations of comfort or discomfort – whether as researchers, theatre-makers, practitioners, historians, students, performers, or scholars?
We are eager for this exploration of dis/comfort to be as broad as possible. For example: your approach to this topic could be around...
TaPRA 2024 Applied and Social Theatre working group
Deadline: April 10, 2024
Below the Radar: The minor gestures of applied and social theatre
Applied and social theatre often occurs within the interstices of the ‘mainstream’; both in terms of the contexts in which it takes place and the modes of participatory performance it involves. Debates in this field have attended to the inherent power dynamics and neoliberal agendas that practitioners and artists must navigate with critical awareness to attend to the political potential of socially conscious performance...
Teaching Theatre and Performance Histories Mini-Conference 20-21 March 2024, University of Warwick
Deadline: December 15, 2023
Nearly twenty years ago, Anne Fliotsos and Gail Medford remarked on the lack of attention our discipline pays to teaching: “it is one of the great ironies of theatre scholarship that what most of us do, few of us study” (1). Much has changed in the decades since, from the kinds of students that we teach to the ways that they learn. Scholars have begun to take pedagogy more seriously, publishing essays on how to teach musical, queer, and global-majority theatre and performance histories, for...
