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...
