Calls for Participation

Deadline: April 3, 2023
Up close and personal: Exploring the relationship between the researcher and their project TaPRA 2023 PG Symposium Thursday 22 June 2023, in person Guildhall School, Barbican, London It is usual to begin a research presentation by positioning yourself alongside your subject, but often these moments are brief and quickly eclipsed by the topic under discussion. For our first in-person postgraduate symposium since 2019, we would like to invite you to place this moment of context or...

TaPRA 2023, Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group: Catastrophe and reinvention

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working Group Catastrophe and reinvention TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds The TaPRA working group in Theatre, Performance and Philosophy invites proposals for presentations for the annual conference at the University of Leeds. Any researcher, at any stage of their career, who engages with theatre, performance and philosophy is welcome to propose their work to the group. The working group extends a warm invitation to...

TaPRA 2023, Theatre and Performance Histories Working Group: Collaboration and Co-Creation in Theatre and Performance Histories

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Theatre and Performance Histories Working Group Collaboration and Co-Creation in Theatre and Performance Histories TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds In Allure of the Archive (1989), Arlette Farge paints a picture of the historian at work in the archive – the place that is perceived to be their natural environment. Farge’s ‘insider’s account of how historians practice their craft’ (xiii) presents them as exotic and eccentric creatures that ‘could...

TaPRA 2023, TaPRA Gallery: Connections

Deadline: April 11, 2023
TaPRA Gallery Connections TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds 2023 is being celebrated across the city of Leeds as a Year of Culture. Artists and communities are being drawn together to create “experiences which connect people” (2022). Hosted within the iconic Parkinson Building at Parkinson Court, this year’s Practice-as-Research (PaR) gallery will invite Leeds to connect with us, and, as such, this year’s gallery will be fully open and accessible to the...

TaPRA 2023, Sound, Voice and Music Working Group: Encountering (im)materiality and community through sound, voice and music

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Sound, Voice and Music Working Group Encountering (im)materiality and community through sound, voice and music TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds In 2022, our working group wondered together about the models and experiences of subjectivities and intersubjectivities made possible by online and digital performances of sound, voice and music. In 2023, we build on these explorations and turn our attention to how sound, voice and music offer modes of encounter to and...

TaPRA 2023, Scenography Working Group: Scenography, Interrupted

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Scenography Working Group Scenography, Interrupted TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds Many of us have become accustomed to interruption in the last three years. The pandemic has interrupted projects, investigations, and career trajectories. We have all experienced interrupted communication, through isolation or simply tussling with online interfaces. This has been the commonplace reality of scenography – and scenographers – interrupted. The other side to...

TaPRA 2023: Performance, Identity and Community Working Group: Addressing performance

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Performance, Identity and Community Working Group Addressing performance TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds The Performance, Identity, Community working group aims to build on the productive conversations at the last conference by examining our modes, methods and movements in terms of the disciplines associated with performance. In recent years we have explored themes of redress and reparation, queer diasporas, cruel optimism as well as anarchy and desire. In...

TaPRA 2023, Performer Training Working Group: Reimagining intimacy in performance training in a post-pandemic world

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Performer Training Working Group Reimagining intimacy in performance training in a post-pandemic world TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds The concept of intimacy is significant to performance training, be that intimacy in physical, psychological, emotional, ideological, or spiritual forms. Implicit in this concept are questions of trust, physicality, proxemics, presence, and distance, all of which have been ruptured by contemporary global events affecting the...

TaPRA 2023, Performance and Science Working Group: Climate Crisis

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Performance and Science Working Group Climate Crisis TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds The Performance and Science working group has an open invitation for proposals that relate to science engaged performance and research, with a particular focus this year on the climate crisis. This might include the following (though this is not intended as an exclusive list): representations of climate or environmental science in or through performance; complexity and...

TaPRA 2023, Performance and New Technologies Working Group: Narratives of Democratisation, Advanced Capitalism and Precarious Labour within Technologically Enabled Performances

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Performance and New Technologies Working Group Narratives of Democratisation, Advanced Capitalism and Precarious Labour within Technologically Enabled Performances TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds In 2023, the Performance and New Technologies Working Group is exploring narratives about contemporary intermedial practices in the post-pandemic world. Perspectives and dialogue that problematise narratives of democratisation, advanced capitalism and precarious...

TaPRA 2023, Documenting Performance Working Group: Imagining Otherwise

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Documenting Performance Working Group Imagining Otherwise TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds Imagination is not an individual act, rather a collective and necessary endeavour. In Lola Olufemi’s Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021) we, as readers, are interpellated into the reimagining and reorganisation of social relations, not via individual thought experiments but via active and collective practice in favour of a radical interdependency. We are living in...

TaPRA 2023, Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group: BACKSTORY

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Directing and Dramaturgy Working Group BACKSTORY TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds In her lecture on ‘Plays’ in 1935, Gertrude Stein wrote: the thing seen and thing felt about the thing seen not going on at the same tempo is what makes being at the theatre something that makes anybody nervous. The temporal ruptures and asynchronicities of performance, its different speeds, its delays and deferrals, its overlays of time, are what Directing and...

TaPRA 2023, Bodies and Performance Working Group: Critical Hunk and Babe Studies II: Babes and Hunks in Performance

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Bodies and Performance Working Group Critical Hunk and Babe Studies II: Babes and Hunks in Performance TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds Critical Hunk and Babe Studies returns… and we’ve been bulking and buffing! Following our working group event in which we shared our bits (of stuff), we invite you to a beefed-up, manicured and contoured conference experience with curves in all the right (and deliciously wrong) places. We ask you to re-imagine with us...

TaPRA 2023, Audience, Experience and Popular Practices Working Group: Practices of Experience/Experiences of Practice

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Audience, Experience and Popular Practices Working Group Practices of Experience/Experiences of Practice TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds At TaPRA 2022 we held our first meeting as the relaunched Audience, Experience & Popular Practices WG. Following an extraordinary response and a vibrant series of discussions, we are now inviting 15 minute responses of any kind to the theme of practices of experience/experiences of practice. How can we understand the...

TaPRA 2023, Applied and Social Theatre Working Group: Borders and Boundaries: crossing contested spaces in applied and social theatre

Deadline: April 11, 2023
Applied and Social Theatre Working Group Borders and Boundaries: crossing contested spaces in applied and social theatre TaPRA 2023, 30 August – 1 September, The University of Leeds We invite contributions to discuss, debate and dissect the complex issues of borders and boundaries in applied theatre practice and research. In applied and social theatre, border- and boundary-crossing is a site for necessary examination, as we navigate the limits and ethics of our praxis. We cross...

Critical Pedagogy and Performance Training 

Deadline: May 6, 2022
TaPRA Performer Training Working Group Event Critical Pedagogy and Performance Training Deadline date: Friday 6 May Event 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...

Performance and New Technologies: Posthuman Assemblages and Technologically Enabled Performances

Deadline: April 7, 2022
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...

TaPRA 2020, 2 – 4 September, Liverpool Hope University, Theatre History and Historiography Working Group CfP: Working with the past, operating in the present, looking to the future

Deadline: April 17, 2020
‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history.’ (Cicero) In his 2004 article Thomas Postlewait ruminated on a ‘Disciplinary Mandate’ for theatre historians and considered the ways in which the field might develop in years to come, asking ‘How, then, will our discipline define itself tomorrow?’ Since the early years of this...

TaPRA 2020, 2 – 4 September, Liverpool Hope University, Applied and Social Theatre Working Group CfP: Applied and Social Theatre Histories: revisiting origins and creating new narratives

Deadline: April 17, 2020
Applied and Social Theatre working group this year looks at the themes of ‘pasts’, ‘genealogies’ and ‘antecedents’. We are building on last year’s events at Exeter 2019 in which we explored ‘Possibilities, Openings, and Futures’. Our focus is now shifting towards a historicizing of practices that act as possible heuristics for the next stage in applied and social theatre, against current precarious contexts and a lack of fixity in the field and beyond. By revisiting pasts, this...