TaPRA 2025 Exec Sponsored Panel: Queer and Trans Performance
TaPRA published our Trans Solidarity Statement in May 2023 and as part of this effort we ring-fenced our minoritised scholars/artists bursary scheme for trans scholars and artists in 2024. At the University of Warwick, this August, we shall be celebrating our 20th year as an organisation and we wish to mark this moment with a TaPRA first: an TaPRA Executive Sponsored Panel that foregrounds queer and trans scholarship and artistries as fundamental to our field/s.
CHAIR
Clare Croft is a writer, dance historian and theorist, and dramaturg and curator. She is the author of Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life and the editor of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, both published in 2024 by Duke University Press. She is the editor of Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings; the founder and curator of the EXPLODE queer dance festival. Clare holds a PhD in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin, and is Associate Professor of American Culture and Faculty Director of Creative Practice/Arts Research at the University of Michigan in the US.
SPEAKERS
Dr. Nemo Madeleine Sugimoto Martin is a writer and academic. They are currently a JSPS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Kanazawa University researching queer masculinity and domesticity in Japanese visual culture. As an academic they are the author of The Construction of Race in Les Misérables Fanworks (Bloomsbury Academic) and have two chapters on Aromantic-Asexuality in Japan and racialised gender in Les Misérables upcoming. As a writer for stage and audio they are the creator of Trice Forgotten (Rusty Quill), co-creator of ASIAN PIRATE MUSICAL, writer of BLADE: New Blood (Marvel; Six to Start) and [The Cobbled Streets of Geneva] (Ellandar).
Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson specialises in the social contexts of contemporary performance, focusing on queer and trans practices in festivals, nightlife and Live Art. Their work considers how countercultural practices by marginalised artists generate community, resist assimilationist narratives and embrace radical methodologies. As a lecturer and Programme Director of MA Queer Performance at Rose Bruford College, they are dedicated to developing queer pedagogical approaches to studying and creating performance. Phoebe co-edited a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on Live Art (2024), co-convenes the Queer Futures Working Group of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR), is the co-research lead for The Night Club: an international queer performance research network and is co-chair of the board for Duckie.
Engaged with research through theatre, dance and performance studies, Supraja R (M.A, I.M.Sc, PGD) traverses boundaries of interdisciplinarity. As a pedagogue and critic, they strategize scholarship and artistic practices to spark engagements, beyond foreclosing disciplinary integrities. Tussling with questions of embodiment and social positionality, within and beyond the boundaries of the studio floor, they have published in theatre journals such as the Contemporary Theatre Review and Critical Stages/ Scènes critiques. Their visual essay and performance review, extending their theoretical work, ‘Cleaving’, into artistic domains, can be found in the Alternative South Asia Photography (ASAP) Art and Qurbatein: A Gender and Sexuality Bi-annual. You can find them on Instagram @rajaranikallapolis.
Ray Young is an award winning trans-disciplinary performance artist, theatre maker and writer; preoccupied with notions of rest, care and recovery in art. Their work exists at the boundaries of activism, queerness, race and neuro-diversity. Exploring what it is like to be a neurodivergent artist; and what it means to both create and receive art at a slow pace, outside of the capitalist ideologies of production. Holding space for those at the intersection of multiple realities, through collaboration and resistance to traditional form.