Annual Conference
CfPs for each Working Group that plan to meet at our Annual Conference are normally released in February.
Working group events
Working group events normally occur between January and July each year. CfPs will be released throughout the year usually at least a month before the event date.
Posthuman Assemblages and Technologically Enabled Performances
Saturday 28 May 2022 at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh
Call deadline: Thursday 7 April 2022
To register for this hybrid event, please visit the Eventbrite page.
The discussion about collaborative relations between humans and other than humans was initiated during our last annual meeting in September 2021. Driven by a desire to continue such conversations and in order to develop a polyphonic discourse that recognises the heterogeneous mix of human and non-human others that operate within the nature/culture/technology continuum, we are organising an event that will take place at the University of Queen Margaret in Edinburgh on 28 May.
The Performance and New Technologies Working Group invites proposals from researchers and practitioners interested in questions that address the predicament of technologically enabled performance practices seen in the context of posthuman assemblages that operate within the intersectional axes of analysis such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, (dis)ability and class.
Philosopher Rosi Braidotti critiques the anthropocentric hierarchy of species and exposes the dominant structures within both, humanism and anthropocentrism, that for centuries has been missing perspectives from the Global South, women and LGBTQ+ people. Braidotti posits that posthumanism seeks the inclusion of these missing people. She elucidates the current moment of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction, in which humans and other-than-humans find themselves. She talks about posthuman subjects as assemblages that are in ‘the process of becoming’ named also as ‘nomadic becoming’ (Braidotti, 2018, 2–3). This way of thinking asserts that ‘subjectivity is not restricted to bound individuals but is rather a co-operative trans-species effort (Margulus and Sagan, 1995) that takes place transversally, in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past – in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries’ (Braidotti, 2018, 3). In a similar vein, Legacy Russell subverts a binary system, which assumes that ‘ourselves are unchangeable’ (Russell, 2020, 8), she calls for engagement with technoculture that will ‘use “body” to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract’ (2020, 9).
Against this backdrop, we ask: how do technologically enabled performance practices challenge and subvert binary oppositions? How can we read contemporary intermedial practices as posthuman assemblages co-operated by trans-species efforts?
We would like to welcome practice-based responses, provocations, lecture-demonstrations, and papers, exploring and reflecting on various readings, approaches and interpretations of posthuman assemblages in contemporary intermedial practices. Proposals may respond to, but are not limited by, the following prompts:
- posthuman entanglements and assemblages within technologically enabled performance practices
- hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships between humans and non-human others
- the politics of race, gender and class in collaborative practices
- ecology and technologically enabled performance practices
- the nature/culture/techno continuum and performance making
- new materialism and immersive technology practice
- ethical problems posed by intersections of human and technological processes
- precarious positions and identities in postdigital collaborations
Proposals, if accepted, may be directed into a range of presentational formats, including traditional panels (with 20-minute papers), short provocations that can form the basis for wider discussion or performance-based panels. While we welcome statements of preference, final decisions will be made by the working group conveners and will be indicated at the time of acceptance. We also welcome alternative, practice-as-research or performance-based proposals that engage with the theme. The Working Group also warmly welcomes participants who do not wish to present this year.
Submitting a proposal
This is a one-day event, with tea/coffee and lunch included, and all participants must be TaPRA members. If you are not currently a member, you will be asked to join the organization at the rate of £18 before the date of the event.Please send a 300-word (max.) proposal and a short biography in a Word document via email. Please also include precise details of your resourcing needs, for example, any audio-visual technology, or a particular type of space (e.g. drama studio) that you will need to make your presentation.
Email abstracts and information to the Working Group conveners, Dan Barnard, Anka Makrzanowska Peter Woycicki, using the working group email: perfandnewtech@tapra.org
The deadline for the submission of proposals is 7 April 2022 by 23.59 UK time.
IMPORTANT: Please indicate at the point of submission if you intend to attend the event in person or online. This information is vital so that the event organisers can effectively plan the infrastructure for the event and Working Group convenors can schedule panel sessions effectively.
TaPRA Performer Training Working Group Event
Critical Pedagogy and Performance Training
Deadline date: Friday 6 MayEvent date: Friday 20 May
A day of discussion and practice at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts (University of Sussex, Brighton) to reconsider performer training as critical pedagogy. At this time, when we are questioning who we teach, what we teach, and how we teach, we ask: How might training practices be positioned as critical pedagogy? How does the way that we teach enable choice for our students? How can language open up or close down a liberatory teaching practice? How can we build a pedagogic community of practice for performance training?
The morning session will focus on considerations of critical pedagogy with a panel discussion between practitioner, educationalist and linguist followed by discussion. In the afternoon Niamh Dowling (incoming Principal, RADA) will lead a workshop exploring the language of Systemic Constellations and its intersection with Alexander Technique as an example of critical pedagogy. The day will end with a talk and open rehearsal for Quarantine’s show Twelve Last Songs, part of Brighton Festival 2022.
This meeting of TaPRA’s Performer Training Working Group will also be used to launch a new blog strand for the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training that focuses on pedagogy.
Tickets are free but you must have TaPRA membership. Non-members of TaPRA will have to obtain membership to attend (£18 standard rate, £10 concessions for postgraduates and non-affiliated researchers). Bursaries are available for postgraduates and non-affiliated researchers, including PhD students, on request at application.
Please book via Eventbrite at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/critical-pedagogy-and-performance-training-tickets-261942195157
The deadline for applications is Friday 6 May.
*Please note the date of this event has changed in support of the strike action happening on the original date.*
This gathering of the Documenting Performance Working Group approaches questions of archiving and materiality, particularly of marginal and activist cultures and histories. Extending our ongoing conversations (‘Wayward Temporalities’, 2019; ‘Speculation and Fabulation’, 2021), in this event the group will continue to query and challenge: the work of reading, thinking, writing about and making performance; documenting social, cultural, and political action; politics of administration and organising in and through archives; and processes of transformation as they manifest and are carried through the performance document. We are interested in expanding on the interconnections between bodies, actions, bodies of work, collective bodies and borders, and their documentation – and the complexities of the performance document as it relates to visibility, refusal, and legibility.
Access to archival materials is arguably an essential part of the process of discovery and contextualisation of creative, social, and political histories. How, then, might archives as sites of embodied memories and discursive acts enable the expansion of notions of evidence and interconnections across time? How might artists, scholars, students, and activists seek to archive both the politics of personal experience and the personal experience of the political? What are the political or educational possibilities of archives of countercultural, social, and protest movements and actions? How might archives and their questioning offer ways to think about unaddressed politics of administration and organising? How might scholars take care to attend to the nuances and complexities of histories, movements, and their documents – particularly those that appear resistant, wayward, or marginal?
Located in the archive collections of MayDay Rooms in London – ‘an active repository, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories’ – the event will be structured as an exploratory study day, reflecting on and responding to MayDay Rooms’ call for collective gatherings that enable, activate, or facilitate fluid connections between site/location/locatedness, the archive, embodied spaces, and contemporary research. Their collections ‘span the period from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s’, with a focus on do-it-yourself countercultures, alternative education, housing and social justice campaigns and other radical cultural and political movements. The event is imagined as an opportunity to enter into an exploratory space, to consider the politics of the archive in relation to social justice and performance, to encounter new and unknown subjects, and think collectively about processes of transformation which emerge through documents of past events, and how their afterlives are subsequently shaped by engagement with them.
The day will be split into two parts: the morning will be spent exploring the MayDay Rooms collections; after a break, we will reconvene to reflect on what and how we’ve engaged with materials in the archive, and the questions that have been raised in the process. Contributions to the afternoon discussion will be facilitated by and responsive to some key prompts from the Working Group Convenors and an invited respondent, but will purposely remain open-ended in scope and responsive to discoveries and reflections relating to the archive materials.
Capacity for this event is strictly limited to a maximum of 15 participants due to venue capacity and Covid-19 protocols. To apply to attend, please submit:
- a statement of interest in the event of no more than 300 words;
- a brief (e.g. 150 word) biographical statement;
- whether you wish to be considered for a postgraduate student research travel bursary (and if so, where you are travelling from);
- whether you are currently a TaPRA member. Please note that all participants in the event must either be TaPRA members in good standing or will be directed by the organizers to join via this page: Join TaPRA
Please send the above information to the TaPRA Documenting Performance Working Group Convenors, Harriet Curtis, Diana Damian Martin, and Eleanor Roberts, at documentingperf@tapra.org by 2 February 2022.
Postgraduate events
Our postgraduate symposium occurs in the spring every year. Other PG-focused events will appear on the main postgraduate page as well as on the events page. CfPs will be released usually at least a month before the event date.
TaPRA 2023 at Leeds
Our 2023 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Leeds.
TaPRA 2023 at Leeds
Our 2023 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Leeds.
