TaPRA 2026: Performance, Identity and Community
Deadline: Monday 9 March 2026
2026 Theme—Possibilities of care: being “beside” in performance and research practices
Last year’s discussions within the Performance, Identity and Community working group emphasized the urgency of solidarity and the potential of drifting as methodology. Building on those conversations, this year we focus on beside and care. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of “beside” offers an alternative to vertical and binary frameworks. Rather than privileging opposition, “beside” emphasizes proximity and coexistence. It resists binaries such as above/below, inside/outside, opens space for non-hierarchical relations and invites us to consider adjacency. Paired with drifting, it suggests reparative, exploratory modes of research and creation that resist teleological or paranoid frameworks (Sedgwick, Freeman, Muñoz).
This year, we also invite contributors to consider how these ideas intersect with ethics of care, as conceptualized in Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift’s Trans Femme Futures. Here, care is not institutional compliance but a radical, abolitionist ethic, a collective practice of survival and transfeminist solidarity. We are interested, therefore, in care as a political modality, and, specifically, in “the multiplicity of care—how it is turned into a mechanism of social oppression and control while simultaneously being a tool with which marginalized communities activate, engage in, and sustain social justice fights” (Nishida 2022, 6). Care and caring structures, as Akemi Nishida points out, are always at risk of dichotomisation into subject and object. In this context, “beside” might instead open towards a non-hierarchical, asymmetrical reciprocity (Young).
In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe writes, “Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future” (2023, 333). Her insistence on care as “shared and distributed risk” resonates with the notion of adjacency implied by “beside”. In this sense, Sharpe’s method—fragmentary, relational, and attuned to the ordinary—offers a way of writing and thinking that enacts care as a collective refusal of isolation and as a practice of survival. What might it mean, then, to imagine care not as a fixed position but as a mode of being beside: beside violence, beside institutions, beside each other?
Within this call, we invite participants to reflect on what it means to think, create, and perform in relation, rather than in opposition. How do performances and/or archival material exist beside each other? How do these relational modes intersect with practices of care? What does it mean to care beside rather than above or below? How might drifting itself become an act of care—cultivating solidarity, mutual responsiveness, and shared responsibility within performance research and practice? How does caring “with” (rather than “for”) resonate with being “beside” rather than “above”? Contributors may also wish to explore care, solidarity, or collective accountability as alternatives to deficient models of inclusion and access, thinking “toward a more relational and sustainable approach” (Price 2024, 169) in theatre-making. Presentations may address modes of performance that enact accountability; or everyday and work-related performances of solidarity—protesting, platforming, or striking. This might involve rethinking ideals like equality (after Eva Feder Kittay) and affects like empathy (after Aruna D’Souza) as straightforwardly constructive of the kinds of caring relations we might want.
Other possible themes and explorations include (but are not limited to):
- Care and performance research
- Interrogating care aesthetics (Thompson)
- Archival adjacency
- Drifting methodologies
- Sideways temporalities (Wark) and being “beside in time” (Freeman)
- Promiscuous forms of care (Crimp, The Care Collective)
- Tentacular practices of multispecies care (Haraway; Puig de la Bellacasa)
- Crip solidarity (Mingus)
- Alternative conceptualisations of “community” (Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective)
- Mutuality and care at work/within institutions
- Decolonial care practices
- Queering care
- Care and ecodramaturgical practices (Woynarski)
- Alternative approaches to access (Price)
- Relational analysis (Nishida)
Preferences for types of proposal:
The PIC working group is interested in hearing from a wide range of researchers and practitioners—established, emerging and postgraduate, whether working in institutions or independently. We aim to embed intergenerational working in planning panels and organising the working group.
We welcome papers in all forms, including short performances, conversations between speakers, and/or pre-recorded presentations. We also want to encourage collaborations between academics and artists, and seek to place value on knowledges that extend beyond the academy (noting that there are always asymmetries in accessing support for conferencing).
Embedding learning from the prior conferences, we will continue to work with the idea of friendship as methodology, rooted in dialogue. Our programming will thus seek to offer moments of this generative cross-pollination and allow time for conversations, rather than a traditional Q&A.
Please note: we are limiting papers to 15-18 minutes rather than 20 minutes; we are often oversubscribed and want to make space for as many contributions as possible.
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.
