TaPRA 2026: Documenting Performance
Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026
2026 Theme—After Documentation
To be after something might involve inhabiting the immediate aftermath of an encounter, to register it as prior, yet in some important sense ongoing. To go after something is to pursue it, seek it out. Neither sense connotes straightforward linear temporality or resolution. Here, we might return to the Documenting Performance WG’s 2019 focus on ‘wayward temporalities,’ the generative and political aspects of alternative duration: how performance enables us to think non-linear, asynchronous, and non-successive temporalities that destabilise relations between historicity and futurity. To be after documentation might be to bear the imprint or impression of encountering it. ‘We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression’ writes Sara Ahmed, ‘[i]t allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace’ (2004: 6). To be after documentation is not the same as being over it: the thing is not finished, the work not yet done.
An important theme emerging from the 2025 Documenting Performance Working Group presentations on Documents Against Form was a renewed interrogation of the “problem” of documentation. Performance studies has long theorised the instability of the document and the politics of liveness between ephemerality and record. It would seem that this opposition no longer adequately accounts for what documentation now does. Images, recordings, livestreams, and testimonies of state violence, racialised killing, and genocide circulate continuously and globally often live and in real-time. In many cases, bodies are not disappearing from the record; the documentation is abundant and undeniable, yet the accumulation of evidence has not translated into proportional action, accountability, or redress. The question, then, is not whether the materiality of violence can be documented, but what forms of relation, obligation, and response are produced once documentation is made visible and publicly incontrovertible. How must we, as artists and scholars, respond?
In an era of media saturation and evidentiary excess, there may be a renewed sense of urgency around what Gargi Bhattacharyya (2023) describes as the ‘mismatch between the efficient universalization of data capture and the erratic and dangerous and collapsing materiality of a world on fire’ (141). But contemporary regimes of traceability operate according to racist and colonial logics that are not new. As Simone Browne demonstrates in Dark Matters (2015), surveillance is not a problem tied solely to “new” technologies but a longheld condition of Black life: ‘to see [surveillance] as ongoing,’ writes Browne, is to insist that we factor in how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order’ (8-9). At the same time, Saidiya Hartman’s theorisation of the ‘afterlife of slavery’ reminds us that contemporary documentary practices are inseparable from longer histories of extraction, enumeration, and evidentiary violence. How might this ongoingness be registered? What strategies of historicization does performance – in its seeming immediacy and con-temporality (literally, together-time) – require and demand? In uncommon times, how might performance challenge us to rethink what it is to live, know and act communally? How can the idealised co-presence, or liveness, that has been framed as the central claim of performance, be re-thought to register the deep inequalities underwriting the systems of capitalist-colonial extraction?
As the Documenting Performance Working Group enters a period of transition and seeks new co-convenors, we invite contributions that reflect on the complex and shifting relationships between historicity, futurity, and the present in and through performance.
Potential responses may involve, for example:
● Pre-histories of the present epistemic crises and reflections on afterlives
● Practices that offer a different language or set of terms to reflect on performance documentation in an era of media saturation and evidentiary excess
● Thinking through after-effects, affective imprints, impressions, or traces
● Strategies for historicizing documentation, especially in relation to racial and colonial logics (e.g. those inscribed within supposedly “new” technological regimes)
● Related to the above, thinking through contemporaneity as not a straightforward periodising category but, in the words of Sianne Ngai, a “speculative thesis about mutual belonging or collectivity” (2012: 323).
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.
