TaPRA 2026: Directing and Dramaturgy

Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026

2026 Theme—Dramaturgical Slippage
Throughout theatre history, performance forms have established conventions only to continuously trouble and reinvent them. Such conventions frequently operate alongside and/or in accordance with a system of binaries such as reality/artifice, presence/absence, and performer/spectator. And yet, many of the most exciting, provocative, and affectively charged theatrical moments occur in the unstable zones between such dichotomies.

Looking to the historical, contemporary and emergent, the Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group hope to interrogate interstices, liminalities and, crucially, the dramaturgical slippage that exists within the unique landscape of theatre and performance.

Peter Brook’s famous claim that only actor and spectator are needed for ‘an act of theatre to be engaged’ (1968: 9) feels, in 2026, incomplete in defining the complex interplay between individuals within performance spaces. Welfare State International’s site-specific and site-based theatre work in the late-1960s integrated the porous boundaries between creators and audiences seen in Happenings and Performance Art. By 1974, Augusto Boal had coined the portmanteau ‘Spect-Actor’, suggesting a more complex possibility for the designation of agency. While in more recent theatrical history, Immersive Theatres have innovated the role of the spectator-participant, with the form migrating from fringe, experimental venues to garner commercial appeal and even celebrity endorsements such as The Moonwalkers: A Journey with Tom Hanks (Aviva Studios, 2025) and Punchdrunk’s upcoming LANDER 23 (Carriageworks, 2026).

Alongside innovations in performance spaces and participation, new theoretical language has emerged in attempt to capture representations of instability. Lianna Mark’s Theatres of Autofiction (2024) identifies, ‘[w]ith its explicit mix of truth and lies’, a form that ‘both complements and contrasts a political discourse in which incompatible claims accumulate with no accountability or reckoning’ (9-10). Mark’s definition encapsulates theatre that moves fluidly between fiction and autobiography, provoking audiences through deliberate manipulations of truth, representation, and memory. Tom Drayton’s Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre (2024) reflects a broader cultural dissatisfaction with so-called certainties of postmodernism and its theoretical legacies. He identifies oscillations between idealism/scepticism, hope/despair, sincerity/irony, and thus provides yet another rumination on the nature of slippage on contemporary and emergent UK stages.

In addition to reflecting these open-ended trends, contemporary performers such as Temi Wilkes (Main Character Energy, 2024), Travis Alabanza (Burgerz, 2019), Kim Noble (You are Not Alone, 2015), and Khalid Abdalla (Nowhere, 2024) utilise monodrama and a slippage between the representation of performative selves to expose certain dramaturgical possibilities and limitations. These monodramas also let slip the indivisible interdependencies between the neoliberal self and the various ‘others’ of our contemporary time, to posit ‘inoperative communities’ (Nancy, 1986) against our increasingly individualised world.

Other recent theatre-makers have explored and manipulated the possibilities of time and space in real, imagined and virtual worlds, reflecting a broader trend visible in other dramaturgical strategies that seek to tease out tensions between reality and fiction. Virtual Reality performance pioneers have engaged with the slippage between these, sometimes with explicitly political objectives as with ETT, Trial and Error and the National Theatre’s collaborative Museum of Austerity (Young Vic, 2025).

There has also been a resurgence in the use of puppetry, seen in Robert Icke’s adaptation of Animal Farm (2022-26), or a combination of puppetry with digital technologies and/or performer physicality as with Complicité and Crystal Pite’s Figures in Extinction trilogy (2022-5). Such performances invite a tacit, imaginative dissolution between objects, animals, and humans. Indeed, the visibility of eco-theatre and eco-dramaturgy increases with social eco-consciousness, and within these forms is often a foregrounding of the more-than-human in attempts to trouble long-standing anthropomorphic hierarchies, seeking to expand distinctions or understandings of environments and ecologies. Here, slippages manifests in blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman, alternate languages of physicality, and heteroglossia; while elsewhere in posthuman performance, cyborgean forms (Parker-Starbuck, 2011) posit similar transfusions between the human and the digital.

For intercultural theatre, Patrice Pavis identified slippage ‘produced when the source culture is received in the target culture’ (1992: 13), alike the ‘gap’ in translation studies between original text and translation, and Derrida’s différance between signifier and signified (1967). Slippage points to the potentiality of theatre at the intersection with translation/adaptation, theatre that defies and tries to transcend cultural ghettoes but also points to the limitations, the slippage of mistranslations, misrepresentation, miscasting and more. Some of it can be traced to Peter Brook’s criticised attempt at intercultural theatre (Mahabharata, 1989), to the cross-cultural theatre of Robert Lepage, and to more recent theatre that directly addresses questions of identity and representations, in particular migrant theatre in Britain (Projekt Europa) and post-migrant theatre in the German and North-European context.

Finally, if slippage is visible in performance spaces, then it reflects rehearsal room practices and production experiences, concerns, interests, and navigations. Traditionalist notions of directing and dramaturgy have long been dissolved or merged by theatre makers with less defined roles; indeed, the very phrase ‘theatre maker’ represents a contemporaneous acceptance of ‘looser’ approaches to creative roles across theatre and performance (Radosavljević, 2013). Alongside analytical and theoretical explorations, we welcome perspectives from practical makers to reflect on aspects of ensemble-led, and other hierarchically ‘slippy’ ways of working.

Proposals might consider, but are by no means limited to, the following areas:

• Dramaturgies that manipulate time and/or space
• Overlaps and intersections between spectators and performers
• Redefining roles in the rehearsal room
• Queer interventions and alternate realities
• Self-reflexive performance
• Slippages in media and medium
• New and evolving dramaturgical processes
• Choreographic slippage and dance dramaturgy
• Alternate realities, queer time, and queer space
• Slippages in identity and identity construction
• Taste, value, and slippages between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art
• Text and performance, and the spaces in between
• Materiality and immateriality
• Theatre in translation; theatre as adaptation
• Theatre in between cultures; multi/cross-cultural theatre
• Migration and theatre; diasporic theatre or post-colonial theatre

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.