TaPRA 2026: Applied and Social Theatre

Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026

2026 Theme—Aesthetics resonance: Attuning to the social and the political
Last year’s working group discussed at length how Applied and social theatre practices are frequently framed through their social, ethical, and political impact, often overshadowing the aesthetic, epistemic, and sensory dimensions of this work. This year, the Applied and Social Theatre Working Group invites contributions responding to a central contemporary provocation: What does it mean to approach the aesthetics of Applied and Social Theatre with renewed attention today, while acknowledging their deep entanglement with ethical and political concerns?

We are interested in exploring the overlapping presentation of effects; the measurable outcomes of a project, and the emotional, atmospheric, and embodied intensities of a process of becoming, affects. In some contexts this overlapping is generative, producing what has been theorised as Æffect (Duncombe 2024); an articulation of how artistic activism mobilises both affective experience and political/social impact in a single, entangled operation. While our sector attends closely to impact and relational experience, we believe its aesthetic dimensions require exploration and raises a critical contemporary question: what epistemic values lie behind aesthetics in applied theatre? How might we understand aesthetic experience not as an optional embellishment but as a mode of knowledge-production in its own right, one that shapes, complicates, and sometimes resists the social aims of our work.

Although the question feels urgent in the contemporary moment, this debate is almost as old as the academic discipline of Applied Theatre itself. It has been explored in the foundational texts of the discipline like Helen Nicholson’s Applied Drama: A Gift of Theatre (2005) and James Thompson’s Performance Affects (2009). Gareth White’s interrogation of aesthetic judgement and participatory form in Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (2015) is another important intervention in this debate. Clearly, scholars have long grappled with the tension between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the social in applied theatre practices. What is contemporary, however, is the shifting political, cultural, and disciplinary landscape in which these questions now sit.  This theme resonates with ongoing debates in socially engaged art and performance philosophy. British art historian, Claire Bishop, critiques the tendency to evaluate participatory practices primarily on ethical grounds, arguing that aesthetic form and spectatorship are central to how such work produces meaning and political force.  She notes that the long-standing division between art (which is subjected to critical aesthetic scrutiny) and participatory art (which is not). “…it is comparable to sociological critiques of art, in which the aesthetic is found to be the preserve of the elite, while the ‘real people’ are found to prefer the popular, the realist, the hands-on’’ (2012:38), highlighting how the avoidance of aesthetic critique is never neutral, but itself structured by cultural hierarchies. Alongside this, Félix Guattari’s Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995) asserts aesthetics as the model for a new ethical practice that resists capitalist rationality, positioning art as a process of becoming. He suggests a fluid, generative, and partially autonomous zone of activity that disrupts disciplinary boundaries while remaining inseparable from the social field. Together, these thinkers invite us to interrogate how applied and social theatre might be reconsidered through aesthetic, sensory, and epistemic registers, and to rethink the value we ascribe to aesthetic experience in participatory contexts.

We invite abstracts that relate to or are provoked by the above discussion and/or the following prompts:

• Aeffects as the entanglement of outcomes and atmospheres in applied theatre processes
• Epistemic values of aesthetics and what kinds of knowledge aesthetic experience produces, and why these remain undervalued
• Co-creation and aesthetic authorship: whose aesthetics matter in collaborative processes?
• Ethics of attunement and how practitioners tune themselves relationally and aesthetically to participants, contexts, and conditions
• Philosophies of aesthetics in applied practice: reinterpreting applied theatre through contemporary aesthetic thought
• Sensory, affective and atmospheric dramaturgies
• Aesthetic decision-making in workshop processes
• Taste, hierarchy and cultural value in community-based work
• Applied theatre practices that resist, unsettle, or exceed their intended social aims: aesthetics as a vehicle for political discourse.

We accept proposals for 20 minute papers, 10 minute flash papers, and performances.

Works cited
Duncombe, Stephen, Affect: The Affect and Effect of Artistic Activism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2024; online edn, Fordham Scholarship Online, 19 September 2024).
Nicholson, Helen, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Thompson, James, Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).
Guattari, Félix, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

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.