Futures After the Pandemic: Transmedial Stages and Posthuman Dramaturgies

Deadline: Wednesday 9 April 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 performance practice.

We are particularly interested in opening a conversation about the future of the fervid experimentation in online performance making and performer training arising from Covid-19, and we invite you to ponder/reflect on how mediated and online performances continue to push boundaries in what digital training and making can be post-pandemic.

For this interim event, we ask:

  What is the future of audience participation in mediated/online performances in a post-digital society?

  How can we create and sustain networked communities of artists, scholars and activists in alternative spaces of online connectivity to address the contemporary political, social, and ecological permacrisis?

  How can digital performance archives reactivate histories of past crises and technological revolutions as a time capsule for learning and sharing revolutionary creative practice?

The interim event will take place at the XR Stage at Rose Bruford College. This state-of-the-art facility provides students, academics and artists with access to the latest in virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality technologies. The XR Stage is used in theatre productions and as a space to conduct practice research projects into digital scenography, interactive artworks, AI dramaturgies, and non-human theatre.

Contributions will explore and respond to, but not be limited by, the following prompts:

• Posthuman dramaturgies in performance
• Online performances as ecologies of becoming
• Mediated/intermedial performance post-pandemic
• Post-digital interconnectivity and hyperconnectivity
• Human agency in technologically enabled performances
• Performances of survival
• Transmedia performance/stages
• Digital liveness
• Online alternative spaces of imagination and artistic resilience
• Archiving online performance practices

Whilst we welcome ‘traditional’ spoken papers, we strongly encourage speakers to think creatively about sharing their work in dialogical and participatory formats using the resources of the XR Stage. These formats include but are not limited to:

• Hackathons – Small group collaborations to solve a problem in response to a provocation
• Creative or performative writing e.g. critical texts written ‘with and alongside’ not ‘about’ postdigital performances
• Short performances/scenes

Each speaker will be allocated 10 minutes to present. We will consider longer presentations up to a maximum of 15 minutes if the proposed format warrants an extended period.

Please include the following in your proposal:

• Specifics of the format
• Proposed length
• If you will present online or in-person
• Precise details of your technical requirements, including altered room configuration and any specialised equipment

Time constraints mean that conveners can only accept a limited number of submissions. Proposals that don’t explicitly address the themes and questions of the call will not be considered.

Submit a 100- to 150-word proposal to perfandnewtech@tapra.org no later than Wednesday 9th April.

Please note that this event is for TaPRA members only. If you are not currently a member and wish to attend, you can join here: http://tapra.org/join-tapra. Membership costs £18 (£10 concession) and will run until 11 September 2025, regardless of when you join.

To support access to participation in this event, we have allocated funds for a number of bursaries for PGR students and ECR academics to cover travel and TaPRA registration. Should you wish to be considered for such a bursary, please include the following:

• A statement of up to 100 words explaining why you are applying for the bursary
• An outline of any expenses/access needs for which you would like to apply to the discretionary fund: what they are and costs

The Working Group Convenors will award bursaries based on:

• Quality and strength of submitted proposal
• The significance of the applicant’s contribution to the WG event (connection to advertised theme, methodological approach, expected outcomes).
• The extent to which the applicant will benefit from attending,
• The financial need that might otherwise impede participation.

Delegate biographies:

Caridad Svich received a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art.. Her plays and translations have been produced across the US and abroad. Key pieces include 12 Ophelias, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls…, Red Bike, and The House of the Spirits (based on Isabel Allende’s novel). Among her honors: Flora Roberts Award (The Dramatists Guild), Obie for Lifetime Achievement, Ellen Stewart Career Achievement Award (ATHE), American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize, and a Harvard/Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. They have authored/edited several books including Toward a Future Theatre (Methuen Drama), Audience Revolution (TCG), and Federico Garcia Lorca: Impossible Theatre (Smith & Kraus). They are also published by TRW Plays, Broadway Play Publishing, Intellect Books, and more. As a screenwriter, the feature film Fugitive Dreams is streaming on Apple Tv and Amazon Prime. They are an editor at Contemporary Theatre Review (Routledge, UK).

Maddy Costa works as a writer, dramaturg, critical friend, conversation facilitator, zine-maker and more. She is co-author with Andy Field of Performance in an Age of Precarity (Methuen, 2021), and collaborates with writers/artists Mary Paterson and Diana Damian Martin on Something Other, an online/IRL community for awkward writing practices. As a dramaturg she has worked with artists including Paula Varjack (iMelania, #thebabyquestion) and Selina Thompson (salt, Twine), and as a board member for the dramaturgs’ network she organises peer support gatherings. She co-hosts a pop-up theatre club – like a book group, but for performance – at Cambridge Junction, and theatres across London.

Hannah Silva is a writer and performer confronting big ideas through formal innovation and a seriously playful approach to language and technology. Their work spans BBC radio dramas—winning the Tinniswood Award for best script—and two decades of critically acclaimed poetry and performance. Their record ‘Talk in a bit’ was among The Wire’s top 25 albums of 2016. Their latest book, My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press UK/Softskull Press North America), weaves memoir and fiction through conversations with a toddler and an early open source language model, exploring queer single parenting and love. It was named one of Granta’s Books of the Year 2023.

Róisín Tyrrell (she/her) is an actor, writer, digital theatre artist and musician from the West of Ireland, based between Co. Clare and Berlin. Drawing on a background in clown and physical theatre, Tyrrell uses play and humour to explore online performance, adapting the spontaneity of live theatre to digital spaces. Her recent digital theatre piece Crisis Be With You, which will be presented on Instagram, examines themes of gender related trauma, self-optimisation, and the performance of self online. Tyrrell primarily experiments with Instagram as a platform for performance, using it to explore simulations of self and identity. A classically trained pianist and composer, she fronts the Berlin-based post-punk band The No Girls, who are releasing their debut EP ‘We Are All Faced Down’ in March. With an M.A. in Devised Theatre and Performance from Arthaus Berlin (formerly LISPA established by Thomas Prattki of École Jacques LeCoq), Tyrrell also performs in underground spaces with her solo music act Netto Baby and as Rope in the clown-drag act John Giotto, Dis(k)ney Princess.

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.