TaPRA 2026: Theatre and Performance Histories

Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026

2026 Theme—RE: Theatre and Performance Histories
The Theatre and Performance Histories Working Group invites proposals for papers, provocations and practice-led contributions on the theme of RE: Theatre and Performance Histories, which explore how the prefix ‘RE’ can productively unsettle and orientate approaches in our discipline. As Rebecca Schneider has written: “The study of theater is the study… of the regeneration of outmodedness.” Works by scholars such as Deleuze, Derrida, Taylor, and Carlson have opened pathways for examining how theatre and performance histories are constituted through acts of returning, revisiting, reperforming and reimagining. In these interventions, the ‘RE’ becomes a crucial lens through which to interrogate both inherited narratives and historical absences. Whether by reenacting, repurposing or resisting, the prefix invites us to consider what it means to (re)engage with the past in ways that are active, ethical and generative.

We encourage contributors to ask how the ‘RE’ can operate as both a methodological and creative principle. How do we revisit archives, repertoires and records with new questions or commitments? What does it mean to reconstruct or recreate past practices, performances or spaces? How might we reframe familiar histories to centre voices, practices or geographies that have previously been overlooked? And what does it look like to retell theatre histories through emerging technologies, community engagement, speculative methods, archival research or artistic experimentation? We invite contributors to think with and against the instability of ‘RE’ in papers that respond to and develop ideas around the theme as methodology, practice, provocation, historiographic tool and/or political stance.

Areas to address might include, but are not limited to, how the ‘RE’ can:

·Reframe canonical historiographies through decolonial, feminist, queer or global perspectives
·Remember/Recover: Whose histories are missing, marginalised or erased—and what does it mean to reencounter them?
·Reactivate archives, repertoires and embodied knowledge to augment understanding of theatre and performance histories
·Reconstruct historical performance practices, scenographies and dramaturgies—and interrogate the politics of doing so
·Re-world the past through speculative, archival or creative critical methods
·Revisit historiographical assumptions around evidence, absence, failure and memory
·Reevaluate the role of technologies (AI, VR, digital reconstruction/mapping) in reshaping historical inquiry
·Re-materialise/Remediate: How do digital tools, mixed-media methods or experimental archival practices reanimate historical materials?
·Reconsider repetition, return and resonance as methodological approaches
·Reenact/Reperform: What ethical questions arise when we revive historical material?
·Remap/Relocate: What new geo-cultural, transnational or localised maps of theatre history emerge when we rethink its centres and peripheries? How might place, space and mobility destabilise canonical trajectories?

We look forward to gathering work that rethinks how theatre and performance histories are told, untold and retold—and to collectively exploring the transformative possibilities of the ‘RE’.

Work Cited
Rebecca Schneider, “Slough Media,” in Remain, by Ioana B. Jucan et al. (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 74

Please note: only one proposal may be submitted for a TaPRA event. It is not permitted to submit multiple proposals or submit the same proposal to several Calls for Participation. All presenters must be TaPRA members, i.e. registered for the event; this includes presentations given by Skype or other media broadcast even where the presenter may not physically attend the event venue.