TaPRA 2025 Documenting Performance CFP
Deadline: Monday 10 March 2025
27-29 August 2025, University of Warwick
Theme: Documents Against Form
‘What does seeing the past do to ameliorate or repair loss?’
(Jennifer C. Nash, How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, 2024: 78).
The document has long been burdened with the responsibility to witness, record, archive, and contain the fleeting or ephemeral. Yet this expectation often limits its potential, framing the act of documentation as static and individual. Perhaps the most overtly authoritarian document is the ‘form’: in its legal sense, that which demands to be filled, signed, its boxes ticked. This document bears deep associations with established orders of governance; in its contractual form, it can operate as an instrument of what Audra Simpson names the colonial ‘trickery of “consent”’ which ‘papers over the very conditions of force and violence that beget “consent” (2017: 20).
Taking its cue from Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes (2023), last year’s Documenting Performance Working Group theme took up the note form as a means of circumventing, that is getting around, the official form of the document. This year, we continue to think about the uncertain relations between documenting, performance, and form via the process of making, doing, or undoing, the document form. What if the document became a space of relation, a practice of holding, listening, and imagining collectively? In a time of profound social, political, and ecological precarity, how might we imagine documentation as a tool for resonance rather than resolution, for presence rather than preservation?
In preparing this call, we have drawn sustenance from Jennifer C Nash’s How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (2024) ), which highlights how Black feminist thought reshapes our understanding of writing, knowledge, and loss. Nash emphasises the importance of ‘measuring the complexity of existence by the distance between the text and the body, between the word and the lived’ (x). Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) similarly guides our thinking, offering us the concept of the album as ‘an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise. (xv) These works invite us to reimagine documentation not as a neutral or fixed practice but as one that attends to the wayward, unruly and intimate textures of life that continue to resist easy capture.
We read these alongside articulations with and against form itself, including Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Rizvana Bradley’s Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (2023), lingering, in profound and uncertain ways, in impasse, digression, suspension, interruption, or abeyance. How do we document in ways that echo, ripple, and resonate across time and space? How can documenting be a shared editorial or performative action, rather than an isolated act? How can we move against dominant logics of representation and aesthetics to document the uncontainable? How can we enact a claiming that refuses capture? What does it mean to document the personal, the violent, the everyday or the beautiful without containing or resolving them?
We invite proposals for 15-20 minute paper/presentations, and also for 5 minute provocations, and for as yet unthought formats for exchange, collaboration, or shared editorial praxis. Proposals to test alternative modes of writing, sharing, presenting, and working on and through “the paper” as an act or process are especially welcome.
Potential responses may involve, for example:
- Experiments with non-linear, fragmented, or improvisational documentation practices.
- Archival interventions that foreground resonance, echo, and absence.
- Collective, participatory approaches to documenting performance and performing documents.
- Practices that center care, listening, and relationality as key to the act of documenting.
- Documents that resist coherence and adopt multiplicity, gaps, or uncontainable histories.
- Ulterior modes of writing, form(att)ing, and mis-usage of technical supports, screens, pages, and papers.
Submit your abstract here by 10 March 2025
How the TaPRA conference works:
Our conference has two types of sessions: whole group sessions for all delegates and parallel panels of papers, performances, and interventions streamed by “working group”. The working groups focus on specific research interests and disciplines and set their own themes for each conference. This is detailed in CFPs like this one. There is also an opportunity to exhibit practice research in a gallery.
A complete list of our 13 working groups is available here on the TaPRA website. Most delegates choose a working group that aligns with their interests and use this group as their base for the conference, attending most or all of their slots as the working groups meet multiple times. These sessions host presentations from long-standing members and new colleagues. However, you can attend sessions hosted by any other working group throughout the conference. The programme also includes open panels where attendees are encouraged to visit working groups sessions other than their own.
To speak, present, or perform TaPRA, you will need to identify your preferred working group and submit a proposal that speaks to their theme. You apply to one working group. You can also indicate that you are willing for your paper to be considered by other working groups.
Conference environment:
In addition to whole group sessions, working groups, and open panels. the Practice Gallery and publisher stalls are open for most of the conference, and there are more social events at various moments including the conference dinner.
Access:
The 2025 annual TaPRA conference at the University of Warwick will be a hybrid event, facilitating participation by online delegates alongside those attending in-person. Since our 2021 conference we have been able to experience benefits of online conferencing, such as increased opportunity for international presenters, lower financial costs to participate, and greater accessibility for those with caring responsibilities. The 2025 conference at Warwick aims to retain the wider opportunities for engagement that online platforms offer, whilst also maintaining a space for in-person engagement and social interaction.
Key dates:
- Applicants will receive decisions on their proposals on 11 April 2025
- Conference registration opens 12 May 2025
- Early bird registration closes on 30 June 2025
- Presenter registration deadline is 18 July 2025
- General registration closes 12 August 2025
Bursaries:
Each working group has one bursary available for postgraduate and early career researchers. The bursary includes free conference registration and £300 towards conference travel and accommodation, to be disbursed after the event on showing proof of spend. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please tick the relevant box on the ‘Abstract Submission Form’, when submitting your abstract.
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.
