TaPRA 2024 Documenting Performance working group

Deadline: Wednesday 10 April 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 an enthusiasm for performance scenes and performance fictions that have the potential to, as Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows state, ‘call forth a people’ (2019). With this in mind, the call has been staged as though a conversation between the co-ordinators, one we hope you will feel invited to join.

RC: I’m thinking a lot lately about forms and ways of life, or ordinary practices, that can query what we have come to regard as our consensual reality. I’m interested in collective efforts, or performance scenes, to push against the systems and structures that we have come to know and live within.

EB: In the writing of Lauren Berlant, a recourse to the ‘scene’ stages a minor intervention, a scalar shift from the general to the particular. It’s about exemplification, staging an instance that can be folded, perhaps, into a generalization. I’m interested in this as a methodological question, and a political one too.

VM: I think of the word ‘scene’ attached to visibility in and beyond Black performance. In his book Embodying Black Experience (2010), Harvey Young says something about the status of Black people as ‘seen/scene’ that seems to me to usefully complicate how we think about spectacle.

At the crux of soliciting a (soon to be announced) name change for the working group, the co-convenors Rebecca Collins, Vanessa Macaulay and Emma Bennett are keen to issue forth such a call with the aim to bring together a variety of scholars. We invite proposals from artists, writers, curators, activists and other practitioners whose work engages with and expands upon study, collection, exhibition, teaching, practicing and the writing of art and culture. We are interested in proposals that might experiment with alternative modes of writing and sharing knowledge to explore the limits and possibilities of the conference paper format. We wish to explore ‘Performance Scenes of the Ordinary’ as strategy, method, a stretched moment in time – in writing and practice. Papers that are engaging with a range of disciplinary literature that cross various fields of study are especially encouraged. Given our chosen thematic, we welcome submissions that may include the following:

The underwhelming/overwhelming within performance scenes of the ordinary.
Seen/scene as connected to visibility in and beyond Black performance.
The role of ‘performance scenes’ in case-making, exemplification, fictionalization, prefigurative politics, and/or disciplinary regimes in the work of, for example, Christina Sharpe, Lauren Berlant, Saidiya Hartman, and Sara Ahmed.
Performance scenes/seens and performance fictions.
The limits of consensual reality and its potential collective alternatives.
The stretching of a scene to slow it down without restaging harm.
Events / Eventfulness / The Spectacular and The Ordinary.
The Infra-Ordinary (after Georges Perec).
Notes, notation, and other modes of archiving the ordinary, particular, personal, local or embodied.

Proposals must be submitted via https://forms.gle/7zdmdbt9StaxjbEh9 by April 10, 2024. If you require another format please get in touch with the working group convenors documentingperf@tapra.org.

Conference structure
Northumbria University will host the TaPRA 2024 annual conference in central Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) as a hybrid event from 4 to 6 September 2024. We welcome online and in-person delegates.

Process for submitting a proposal
Please email a submission with the following elements by midnight on 10 April 2024 to the Working Group convenors at https://forms.gle/7zdmdbt9StaxjbEh9:

300-word max abstract
100-word max biography
Confirmation on whether you plan to attend online or in person
Any specific requirements relating to space or AV technology

Please note: You may only submit a proposal to one working group (or to the TaPRA Gallery) for this conference, proposals submitted after the deadline will not be considered.

Timescale
TaPRA will inform you whether or not your proposal has been accepted in mid-May 2024. Registration will also be open from mid-May 2024, which will ask for accessibility and dietary requirements. A draft schedule will be ready by the end of June 2023. Registration will close on 1 August 2024. Accommodation options in central Newcastle with special rates will be available to all delegates.

Conference costs
There are two main delegate types (standard and concession, definition below) and all fees include one-year TaPRA membership of £35 (standard) or £17 (concession). Early bird rates only apply to in-person full conference fees.

In-person fees: (early bird/late bird)

Full conference fee: £250/£300 (standard) and £180/£230 (concession)
Day rate: £130 (standard) and £100 (concession)
WG Convenors and Exec: £198 (standard) and £17 (concession)
Life members: £163

Online fees:

Full conference fee: £110 (standard) and £90 (concession)
WG Convenors and Exec: £108 (standard) and £17 (concession)
Life members: £73

A day rate is not available for online delegates.

Concession definition
Concession rates apply to all students, postgraduate researchers (MA or PhD), unwaged, unaffiliated, and retired researchers, and staff on contracts of either less than 0.6FTE or else fixed for less than 12 months. These categories apply to the delegate’s circumstances on the first day of the conference.

Bursaries
Each Working Group manages a bursary to cover the fee and some expenses, offered on a competitive basis. Preference will be given to those without access to any institutional funds. This process is open to accepted presenters only and will be managed by the Working Group convenors post-confirmation of acceptance.

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.