TaPRA 2026: Audience, Experience and Popular Practices

Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026

2026 Theme—Structures of Experience
This year the Audience, Experience, and Popular Practices WG are inviting 15-minute papers, performances, or creative presentations about the relationship between structure and experience.

We are eager for this exploration to be as broad as possible. You might want to talk about any aspect of theatre-making or spectatorship. You might also want to talk about live performance experiences of any kind, or about the performance of identity in everyday life, or about forms like games, film, television, or mass and social media. In doing so, you might choose to address a number of related questions…

Whether we’re talking about performance-makers or audiences, researchers or practitioners, historians or scholars of the contemporary moment: what is the relationship between structures in all their forms, and people’s lived and/or cultural experiences?

For example: How do practitioners structure experiences? How do spectators construct experiences in collaboration with the invitations they’re offered, or else produce resistant readings against the grain? How do institutions operate to structure society – whether it’s arts venues, the cultural and heritage sector, universities, corporations, or bureaucracies and other public services like the NHS? In everyday life, in the rehearsal room, in teaching spaces, online, onstage, or as part of an audience: how do structures and systems shape the way we experience the world?

As always, we are particularly interested in thinking about relations of power. When can structures be experienced as liberating, and when are they oppressive and need to be resisted? For whom are social, political, or dramatic systems designed to operate? Whose experiences get to be prioritised? For whom can the prevailing ‘structures of feeling’ (to borrow a term from Raymond Williams) produce euphoria, pleasure, or joy, and for whom do they cause marginalisation, disenfranchisement, and pain? And finally: how can experiential structures be productively queered/cripped/decolonised/etc to bring about a better future?

We invite 15-minute responses and encourage diverse modes of sharing research, including, but not limited to, provocations, practice demonstrations, performative presentations, formal papers, etc. Please indicate your preference of format clearly in your proposal, with a specific breakdown of any technical requirements. We will endeavour to accommodate all requests, but please be aware that we are working within finite resources and we may need to suggest alternative formats.

We understand ‘performance’ and ‘practice’ in their broadest possible terms. In Warwick, what we want to encourage is a holistic analysis of what it means to experience practices – of making performance, of being an audience, of doing research, and of living in the world. We are eager to welcome work in progress at any stage: whether you want to talk through ideas for a brand new project, or to discuss preliminary findings, or to deliver a fully-developed presentation. More than anything else, we are working to carve out a space for supportive, generative, and helpful conversations. In light of the challenges of the past few years especially, our goal is to foster a home for safe sharing.

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.