TaPRA 2026: Theatre, Performance and Philosophy

Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026

2026 Theme—Performance Phenomenology and Experience
For the forthcoming TaPRA conference at QMUL, the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group invites proposals that engage with performance phenomenology as a site for interrogating experience. We welcome proposals that explore not only how performance represents or stages experience but constitutes, disturbs, problematises, reorients, and reconfigures it – through bodies acting in time and space, and in relations to others, materials, histories, contexts, and worlds.

Phenomenology is the study of that which appears. It is a (re)turn to experience itself, to give an account, and make sense, of experience. ‘Performance studies is deeply concerned with the study of bodies acting in places. Phenomenology is the original site of the foregrounding of the study of the body as the centre of experience.’ (Grant 2019: 33) At the intersection of performance and phenomenology lies a rich and plural terrain, which attends to structures and forms of lived experience, the textures of perception and temporality, to intersubjective encounters, and to the entanglement of experience with(in) its material, discursive, and unconscious conditions.

This working group invites contributions that think with, through, and against phenomenological traditions and methodologies, including feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical phenomenologies, as well as practice-based and artist-led inquiries. We are particularly interested in how performance engages moments of orientation, disorientation, rupture, and reorientation – those bodily, sensory, and perceptual experiences that unsettle confidence in the ground, undo habitual orientations, or open up new modes of sensing, acting, and being. As Sara Ahmed writes, ‘Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up, or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable.’ (Ahmed 2006: 157) Such moments may be fleeting or enduring, affirming or crisis-inducing, but they nevertheless foreground experience as neither transparent nor given, but contingent, mediated, and contested.

We also welcome explorations of marginal, borderland, and world-travelling selves, attentive to how experience is shaped by difference, power, and positionality. Mariana Ortega argues that ‘the self in the borderlands, or the self that world-travels, constantly experiences ruptures in her everyday experiences that lead to a more thematic or reflective orientation toward activities.’ (2016: 50) Following on from the working group’s 2025 focus on ‘borders’, we ask how performance might complicate phenomenological accounts of selfhood, intentionality, and presence by centring experiences at the margins. How do rehearsal processes, acting systems, and spectatorship practices cultivate particular experiences and orientations towards the world? What forms of experience are enacted, staged, withheld, estranged, or made newly perceptible through performance?

This call for papers is open to many different forms of work that touch upon or address the intersection of performance and phenomenology, and ways of understanding and interrogating experience. We invite proposals that situate existing work, methods, and foci of study and practice within this methodological and philosophical arena. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

We encourage proposals in a range of formats, including scholarly papers, practice-research presentations, artist talks, workshops, lecture-performances, and other experimental modes of inquiry and presentation that foreground performance as a way of thinking.

By gathering, thinking, speaking, practicing, and sharing around Performance Phenomenology and Experience, this working group seeks to cultivate a space of collaborative investigation into how performance makes experience matter: how it grounds, ungrounds, thickens, fragments, and reorients bodies; how it unsettles sedimented modes of being that carry with them political and ideological legacies; and how such experiential work might open new philosophical, political, and artistic possibilities.

References:
Sara Ahmed (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham and London: Duke University Press
Stuart Grant (2019) ‘The Essential Question: So What’s Phenomenological About Performance Phenomenology?’ in Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, and Matthew Wagner, eds, Performance Phenomenology: To The Thing Itself, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.19-37
Mariana Ortega (2016) In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, Albany, NY: SUNY Press

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.