The Performer Training Working Group has been meeting for twelve years and has produced several collaborative outputs, including a variety of contributions to the thrice-yearly journal, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, dedicated to training...

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In the introduction to Performing Environments: Site-Specificity in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, Susan Bennett and Mary Polito begin by calling for a more expansive history of seventeenth century drama, theatre and performance. They...

The co-convenors are delighted to issue a call for papers for the forthcoming conference at the University of Salford in September on any topic exploring the relation of theatre, dance or performance to philosophy. The working group’s mission is to...

Intervals, gaps, breaks, ellipses, caesuras, pauses, syncopes… Live performance can very literally have an interval. In addition, in our modern world of hyper-acceleration, Jonathan Crary calls for a state of being suspended, or an interval: ‘a...

Questions of migration are among the most contested in contemporary culture. In the current political climate, investigating the performative role of the document in controlling the movement of bodies across borders has particular urgency. The...

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In our first conference as convenors, we would like to focus on the theme of generation(s) and (re)generation in applied and social theatre. Previous conferences and events have addressed: health and wellbeing; heroism; craft; aesthetics; histories...

 Science, art, literature, the drama, the effort for economic betterment, in fact every individual and social opposition to the existing disorder of things, is illumined by the spiritual light of Anarchism. (Emma Goldman, ‘Anarchism: what it...

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TaPRA Performer Training Working Group University of Aberystwyth 5th – 7th September 2018   Performer Training Working Group   The Performer Training Working Group has been meeting for thirteen years and has produced...

Call for Papers and Presentations for TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium 2018 Materials and Materiality: How do they matter? 9 February 2018 Royal Central School of Speech and Drama Postgraduates and early career researchers are invited to contribute to the 2018 Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Postgraduate Symposium titled ‘Materials and Materiality: How do they matter?’. The symposium will take place at Central Bankside, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on Friday, 9 February 2018 and seeks to investigate the roles and significance of the various materials that are around us and that make up or are negotiated in theatre and performance practice and research. Tim Ingold in the Ecology of Materials (2012) goes back to Aristotle, who establishes that any thing is a compound of matter and form, which are brought together in the act of its creation. For Ingold, the process of making begins with two ingredients, a formless lump of raw material and a ‘form in mind’ (Ingold 2012: 432). The process ends when form and material are united into a complete artefact (Ibid.). Whether active and with agency or imposed and designed, as researchers and practitioners we are surrounded by and constantly engage with materials. Ingold notes, ‘the builder, the gardener, the cook, the alchemist, and the painter are not so much imposing form on matter as bringing together diverse materials and combining or redirecting their flow in the anticipation of what might emerge’ (Ingold 2010: 94). So how do we, as makers of performance, practice and research shape and design materials? How do materials come together and form something else? What possibilities they might reveal to us? More importantly, for Jane Bennett (2010) nothing acts alone, every thing’s agency and efficacy depends ‘on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces (21). So how might materials prompt us to reconsider others, the world and ourselves? How are we intertwined with materials and assemblages? Various approaches to materialism have identified the importance of matters, materials and things. While some of the more recent concerns of materialism have been tied to ecology and ecomaterialism, we seek to draw from this viewpoint and use it as a benchmark to explore the broader ethics, cultural and social practices through our engagement with the concept of materials. What implications might these signal for art and performance making, and more broadly for politics, and everyday life? Is the performance space (even when virtual) therefore the medium for the materialisation of performance theory? Building on themes and conversations that emerged from the TaPRA Conference in Salford in September 2017 and last year’s TaPRA PG symposium in Leeds, we ask: how does our interaction with the material, and the immaterial, shape our research? As postgraduate and early career researchers making, working and living in a world where resources – whether financial, natural and cultural – are becoming ever more limited – how do we make our practice and research matter? We invite presentations that engage with the theme of ‘Materials and Materiality’ in all forms of theatre practice, performance, performance studies, formal and informal performer training, stagecraft and theatre/drama in education. Themes might include, but are not limited to:

• Natural and cultural objects.
• Energy, force and matter.
• Origin, originality and novelty; artificial materials; copy and reproduction; fetishism.
• Substance and physicality, ideals and consciousness. Graspability and imagination.
• The material and immaterial; the human and the non-human.
• The materialisation (or de-materialisation) of performance theory in performance space.
• Scenographic materials: light, sound, video, architecture.
• Archival and historic materials; the histories of materials; access to materials.
• Material and media; hybrids; the process of making; formation, deformation, reformation.
• Vitality, ecology, environmentalism, sustainability.
• Cultural materialism, historical materialism, new materialism, post-materialism.
• Materials for/of performance, found materials, devising materials.
• Assemblages, changing materials, agency, objectivity and subjectivity.
• Material tendencies; exchanges between bodies and materials; material relations; material conditions.
• Collaboration, immersion, improvisation, composition.
• The materiality of body, of voice, of text, of play, of story, of performance, of research, of knowledge, of thought.
• Implications and limitations of materials. The invisible, the inaudible, the unexplored, the unimagined, the unclaimed, the uncovered….

Abstracts will also be considered towards publication in JAWS, The Journal of Arts Writing by Students. The award winning, international journal, published by Intellect Books (http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=243/), will aim to publish a number of papers as well as a selection of abstracts in a forthcoming issue. JAWS is the only arts journal entirely written, edited and peer reviewed by current students and first year graduates. Publishing across art and design at a postgraduate level, JAWS acts as writing-studio. A space for early-stage academics to explore and share ideas and flex their peer review muscles over emerging themes and trends in arts research. Papers (15mins), provocations (10mins) and alternative presentations from postgraduates at all levels of study, postdoctoral researchers and early career academics, are welcome. The symposium is free for TaPRA members and £10 for non-members; this includes membership for the academic year 2017/18. All membership must be paid online via the TaPRA website prior to the symposium: http://tapra.org/membership/ Abstracts should be 250 words in length. All abstracts should be sent to pg@tapra.org. When submitting your abstract, please also include a short biography (no more than 50 words) and a brief note on technical requirements (if any) in the same document. Those wishing to engage with alternative approaches to presenting research, such as performance lectures, are asked to include an additional 100 words detailing your intended presentation methods. All correspondence should be directed to Yaron Shyldkrot, Cathy Sloan and Adelina Ong via pg@tapra.org The deadline for submitting your proposal is 12pm (Midday) on Thursday 4 January 2018. We will be unable to accept submissions after this deadline. Notifications will be sent by 12 January 2018. If you would like to be considered for a limited number of travel bursaries, up to the value of £25, then please specify that this is the case in your submission email. Priority will be given to those travelling farthest. Yaron Shyldkrot, Cathy Sloan and Adelina Ong TaPRA PG symposium organisation team

Call for Proposals, TaPRA Scenography Working Group Interim Event 2018

TaPRA Scenography Working Group

Scenography in Exhibition & The Museum

6th April 2018, V&A

The Scenography Working Group invites proposals for our forthcoming interim event taking place at the V&A on Friday 6th April 2018. This meeting will focus on questions around scenography in exhibition and the museum.

Expanded scenography has, with the emergence of the experience economy, become an experiential strategy in exhibition spaces and heritage sites, or an approach to exhibition design. Design studios such as Curious Space or Nissen Richards Studio design across exhibition and performative spaces, utilising their backgrounds in scenography to create narrative spaces in a range of contexts.

Conversely, when scenography enters the museum as acquisition, is it understood as a discipline of design, a subset of theatre, or a performative art-form in its own right?

In this context, we would like to invite presentations and discussions around the theme of  scenography in exhibition, museum display and heritage sites. How do scenographic strategies operate within museums  and other exhibition contexts or beyond? How do we exhibit scenography? How do we preserve, archive and display it within museum spaces?

We invite presentation proposals from a wide variety of practitioners and scholars. This interim event is intended as the starting point for a broader conversation, and the possibility of a future publication. For the interim event, we welcome contributions in the following forms:

• Case studies or practice presentations

• Interviews/’In Conversations’

• 15 min papers/provocations

Your presentation proposal, irrespective of format, should include a 300 word expression of interest along with a short biography. We plan to structure the event around the strengths of the applications we receive.

Proposals may address, but are not limited to:

• Exhibiting scenography

• Expanded scenography in museum spaces and heritage sites

• Preserving and archiving scenography

• Theatricality vs scenography

• Exhibition and theatre technologies

• Scenography and the experience economy

• Virtual exhibitions vs Physical space

• Temporary vs Permanent exhibitions

 

Please email all expressions of interest (no more than 300 words in length) an additional few sentences of biographical information and the format of your presentation to Lucy Thornett,  l.thornett@lcc.arts.ac.uk  Kathrine Sandys,  kathrine.sandys@bruford.ac.uk  and Greer Crawley greer.crawley@rhul.ac.uk

 

Some funding will be available for postgraduate travel costs.

 

The deadline for the submission of proposals is Friday 16th March 2018.

Loughborough University London, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park 9 June 2018    The language of ‘outreach’ shapes conversation on university and artistic life, from ‘strategic visions’ to arts council applications. But what does it mean to reach out? What is the discourse on outreach as a gesture – an act and effect?   In On Being Included, Sara Ahmed argues that institutional commitments to diversity may be considered “non-performatives”: “they do not bring into effect that which they name” (2012: 119). Institutions run diversity workshops and committees, outreach programmes and ‘participatory’ or ‘inclusive’ agendas, but where does the gesture stop, and where does it begin? How may we understand the choreography and the dramaturgy of institutional outreaching? How can we begin to detour this language so as to rethink the role of the university – and of artistic practice – in public life today? Does the university have a role to play in public life, and what might that be? Does this equate with ‘outreach’? What is the relationship between artistic practice and what may be termed ‘creative research’?   In this day-long workshop, situated at the Olympic site of the University of Loughborough – a location like many in the ‘expanded university’ today concerned with reaching out to the ‘local community’ – the TaPRA Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group aims to think together about choreo-geography, gesture, site, institutional politics, affect and the never-ending labour of reaching: we will ask, what does it mean to imagine a cultural and intellectual sphere from which reaching  takes place, but yet which, it seems, is never imagined to be reached towards? What colonial or imperial legacy suggests that intellectual life has for its role to bring knowledge out towards others? What might we learn from being touched in our work by those whose knowledges may not be institutionally recognised? And finally, what might be involved in thinking cultures of proximity, displacement, and spostamento – or centripetal and centrifugal displacement, reciprocal displacement, displacement that comes back to haunt one? How are we implicated in cultivating intellectual and creative spaces and ties that fail again and again to bind, to shift, or perhaps at this stage in the public life of universities – entering full throttle into a wholesale culture of privatization – to query the form of these structures of ‘outreach’ for those whose lives we are meant, in the final analysis, to ‘transform’? If public impact is meant to ‘change’ those our work comes into contact with, how do we analyse and eventually reclaim the dance, the theatre – the dramaturgy – of this contact and this encounter? The event aims to engage participants in roundtables and curated discussions at the intersection of philosophy and practice. We are calling for reflections and provocations centred (or decentred) on the following themes in relation with theatre and performance:

• Practices of reaching, discourses of outreach
• Dissociation, displacement and decentring
• Dramaturgies and choreographies of distance and proximity
• Aporetic and porous spaces of co-habitation
• Institutional choreopolitics
• Decreation and deproduction; alternative models of capitalism, work and theatricality
• Gesture, ‘community’ and constitutive alterity
• Discourses and practices of political and institutional ‘change’
• Cultures and pedagogies of the sited university
• Performative (or ‘non-performative’) languages of business, enterprise, innovation and affiliation

We invite researchers, practitioners and performance curators to submit expressions of interest in the form of proposals for position papers, curated discussions, seminars/reading groups, workshops or performative interventions.   Postgraduate students, unaffiliated/casualised academics and independent practitioners are especially encouraged to apply, and four travel bursaries of £80 each will be made available (please indicate if you are eligible in your application). Lunch and refreshments are included. Please send 250-word proposals and a short bio to Fred Dalmasso (F.T.J.Dalmasso@lboro.ac.uk), Kélina Gotman (kelina.gotman@kcl.ac.uk) and Daniela Perazzo Domm (D.Perazzodomm@kingston.ac.uk) by 20 April 2018. Participants will be notified by 4 May 2018.   The cost of this workshop is £10 (free for postgraduate students, unaffiliated/casualised academics and independent artists). Participants who are not current members of the Theatre and Performance Research Association will also be required to pay a discounted membership fee of £10.  

Venue: Tate Exchange at Tate Modern, London (13th May, 12-6pm)

Call for Participation

If you hear tell of an event, somebody relates it to you. Hear tell involves both a speaker and a listener, a performer and an audience. It represents an account communicated in speech of something that might have happened. Theatre and performance both involves and prompts such acts of hear telling, discussions, like those described by Joe Kelleher, ‘as to what was seen or heard tell of and what it might mean, what it might be worth, what there is to do with it’ (2015).

Taking the form of a study day, Hear Tell circulates around three key actions: describing, reporting and narrating. Each of these terms can be understood as a mode within performance. It also presents an approach to writing and talking about performance, a means by which live events might be articulated, shared and documented. In turning to these terms, we are not rejecting analysis – rather, we are focusing our analytic frameworks on the methods through which we often arrive at analysis. Describing, reporting and narrating might be understood together as forms of address or as mediating steps between event and apprehension, tools for circulation and distribution. On the other hand, each term has its own codes, resonances, and related concepts.

The three key terms of this event carry a range of connotations and associations; one of the tasks of the study day is to test the efficaciousness of these associations in relation to theatre and performance. The act of describing might do the work of summoning to appearance a range of subjects with a variety of consequences (as Christina Sharpe points out, ‘fitting the description’ can carry oppressive weight in the case of, for example, racist stop-and-search policing (2016)). Reporting may highlight complexities of objectivity and subjectivity – to make a report is to engage in some way with registers of truth-telling. Finally, narrating might be understood to accompany action and appearance. As Adriana Cavarero argues, drawing on Hannah Arendt, narration can reveal ‘the finite in its fragile uniqueness’(2000), distinct from the universal categories of philosophy, e.g. ‘the human’. As Sylvia Wynter has shown, the historical development of the category of ‘the human’ has underpinned imperialist and white supremacist projects (2014). Might attention to the more contingent practices of describing, reporting and narrating offer different ways in to the recounting of experience?

In order to probe the nuances of these terms, the organisers invite proposals for reports, descriptions and narratives. Each contribution should identify with one of these forms and likewise report, describe or narrate an event, object or experience also performing that respective term. The day will be made of descriptions of describing, reports on reporting, narratives of narrating.The project of the event is to do the work of reporting, describing and narrating so central to the making and reception of theatre and performance. It is through this hearing and telling that a critical reflection will emerge.

To apply as a contributor, please submit a proposal of no more than 300 words, and a brief biographical statement, to Georgina Guy (georgina.guy@rhul.ac.uk) and Johanna Linsley (johanna.linsley@roehampton.ac.uk), cc-ing documentingperf@tapra.org, by 5 April 2019.

All participants must be TaPRA members. If you are not currently a member, you will be asked to join the organization at the interim rate of £15 before the date of the event (http://tapra.org/join-tapra/).

TaPRA is providing two £50 travel bursaries to facilitate postgraduate and non-affiliated artists/researchers to contribute to this event.  The event organizers will award these bursaries based on:

• the quality of the proposal
• the benefit to the applicant of participating in the event
• the contribution of the participant to the Documenting Performance Working Group

If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please signal this when submitting your proposal, briefly outlining how you would benefit from attending and how you meet the criteria as a postgraduate or non-affiliated artist/researcher.

A physical meeting is not happening this year to ensure that the TaPRA working group in Theatre, Performance, and Philosophy puts the health of its members first. In lieu of thinking together in person, we would be grateful to hear from you. This is voluntary, and we understand that colleagues may not be able to fit extra work into an already overloaded summer. The idea is to put together the thoughts of the working group into a single document that can be shared within the group and, if you consent, publicly. We are asking for a few sentences and no more than a paragraph. Your piece of writing could take a number of approaches. You might share an idea that you would have liked to present to the working group, or explain what your current research focus is. You might also like to take a more conversational tack and share thoughts about the new conditions of life and work we find ourselves in and consider them in relation to theatre, performance, and philosophy, such as: viral life, Black Lives Matter, streaming performance, working from home, etc. Lastly, you might want to share your recent reading or spectating if it is relevant to the group. We welcome short pieces in one or more of these approaches, as well as anything else you might like to share with the group. We will put these pieces of writing together and send back to the group so that we can all have a moment to check in. This might be a way of opening up some conversations between members and considering future themes. If the group is happy to, we would like to publish this on the TaPRA website in the working group space and then share more widely. This could be a good way to invite more colleagues to engage with our working group. Please email your contribution to philosophy@tapra.org by 12:00 noon GMT on 10 July 2020. Please indicate if you would like to share only with the group or if it is ok for your contribution to be public. You are welcome to use your name or share anonymously. All responses will be collected and sent back to the group, and if possible, shared publicly shortly after.