TaPRA 2026: Theatre, Performance and Philosophy
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Performance Phenomenology and Experience
For the forthcoming TaPRA conference at QMUL, the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group invites proposals that engage with performance phenomenology as a site for interrogating experience. We welcome proposals that explore not only how performance represents or stages experience but constitutes, disturbs, problematises, reorients, and reconfigures it – through bodies acting in time and space, and in relations to others,...
TaPRA 2026: Theatre and Performance Histories
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—RE: Theatre and Performance Histories
The Theatre and Performance Histories Working Group invites proposals for papers, provocations and practice-led contributions on the theme of RE: Theatre and Performance Histories, which explore how the prefix ‘RE’ can productively unsettle and orientate approaches in our discipline. As Rebecca Schneider has written: “The study of theater is the study… of the regeneration of outmodedness.” Works by scholars such as Deleuze,...
TaPRA 2026: TaPRA Gallery
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme— Acts of Cultural Resistance
For TaPRA 2026, we invite proposals responding to this year’s TaPRA Gallery theme, “Acts of Cultural Resistance.” Your practice work will be exhibited in BLOC, Queen Mary’s new studio, gallery, and cinema space.
How does research in theatre and performance represent, engage with or contribute to cultural acts and struggles of resistance? This can be on multiple fronts, including—but by no means limited to—struggles against genocide,...
TaPRA 2026: Sound, Voice, and Music
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme— Senses, Sensory, Sensation
In 2025, our working group conversations focused on the theme of interfaces, exploring the potential of sound, voice and music in cultural and social interaction, dramaturgies of migration, methodologies of embodiment, autoethnographic and documentary practices. This year we situate our inquiry within the discourse of the sensory, shifting the last year’s emphasis towards reception, perception, and the conditions under which sensorial experience is...
TaPRA 2026: Scenography
Deadline: March 9, 2026
Scenography as a Process of Re-
In our aim to investigate scenography as a process of re- (re-purposing, re-claiming, re-inventing, re-configuring etc.) we invite contributions that explore scenography as critical practice and process for re-engaging. For example: to what extent might scenography be a re-purposing of dramaturgical means? How might scenography re-configure sensory experience? In what ways can scenographic practices contribute to environmental solutions through re-purposing and...
TaPRA 2026: Performer Training
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Repurposing In/Through Performance Training
This year’s call for contributions considers what repurposing can offer performance training, and the role performance training can take in repurposing — conceptually, pedagogically, institutionally, socially, and artistically.
There is a rich history of repurposing within the field of performance training. Practitioners have long reworked materials, spaces, and lineages to respond to shifting cultural, political, and...
TaPRA 2026: Performance, Identity and Community
Deadline: March 9, 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”...
TaPRA 2026: Performance and Science
Deadline: March 9, 2026
The Performance and Science working group has an open invitation for proposals that relate to science engaged performance and research. This might include the following (though this is not intended as an exclusive list): transdisciplinary research that brings together methods from performance and science; intelligent networks from the biological to artificial; gamification of knowledge; climate or environmental science in or through performance; science communication and education using drama...
TaPRA 2026: Performance and New Technologies
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Human and More-Than-Human Co-creation in Performance
The Performance and New Technologies Working Group is inviting proposals that explore, question and challenge how performance-making engages with and relates to the entanglement between human and more-than-human. We invite reflections on what forms of collaboration between human performers, AI systems, and other-than-human environments might enable ethically grounded modes of co-creation.
It has been a quarter of a century...
TaPRA 2026: Documenting Performance
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—After Documentation
To be after something might involve inhabiting the immediate aftermath of an encounter, to register it as prior, yet in some important sense ongoing. To go after something is to pursue it, seek it out. Neither sense connotes straightforward linear temporality or resolution. Here, we might return to the Documenting Performance WG’s 2019 focus on ‘wayward temporalities,’ the generative and political aspects of alternative duration: how performance enables us...
TaPRA 2026: Directing and Dramaturgy
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Dramaturgical Slippage
Throughout theatre history, performance forms have established conventions only to continuously trouble and reinvent them. Such conventions frequently operate alongside and/or in accordance with a system of binaries such as reality/artifice, presence/absence, and performer/spectator. And yet, many of the most exciting, provocative, and affectively charged theatrical moments occur in the unstable zones between such dichotomies.
Looking to the historical,...
TaPRA 2026: Bodies and Performance
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—The Changing Body in Performance: Mourning, Shedding and Modification
At Warwick in 2025, we were struck by the emergence of two major themes: mourning and modification. Phoebe Patey-Ferguson considered the pleasure-dulling qualities of GLP-1s, and how their rapid promotion by the state and celebrity culture makes fatphobia a technique of fascism. Roberta Mock thought with late performance artist Danielle Abrams’ body of work, and how ‘gender, race and religion alchemically...
TaPRA 2026: Audience, Experience and Popular Practices
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Structures of Experience
This year the Audience, Experience, and Popular Practices WG are inviting 15-minute papers, performances, or creative presentations about the relationship between structure and experience.
We are eager for this exploration to be as broad as possible. You might want to talk about any aspect of theatre-making or spectatorship. You might also want to talk about live performance experiences of any kind, or about the performance of identity in...
TaPRA 2026: Applied and Social Theatre
Deadline: March 9, 2026
2026 Theme—Aesthetics resonance: Attuning to the social and the political
Last year’s working group discussed at length how Applied and social theatre practices are frequently framed through their social, ethical, and political impact, often overshadowing the aesthetic, epistemic, and sensory dimensions of this work. This year, the Applied and Social Theatre Working Group invites contributions responding to a central contemporary provocation: What does it mean to approach the aesthetics...
