Theatre and Performance Studies News
TOP STORY: TaPRA 2025 Conference to be hosted at Warwick
We're delighted to announce that the annual Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) conference will be hosted by Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick between 27 and 29 August 2025. The conference will mark both the 20th birthday of TaPRA and the 50th anniversary of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick. Our conference keynotes, plenary panels, artistic activity, conference dinner and programmed events will speak to the themes of milestones and markers, focussing on celebrations, festivities, spectacle and joy. We'll look forward to welcoming you to Warwick next year!
To keep up to date with the conference plans, please visit our dedicated TaPRA pages here.
Professor Nicolas Whybrow is Retiring
Professor Nicolas Whybrow is retiring early at the end of October 2020 owing to recent ill health. He is a long-time member of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick, joining in February 2004. A former Head of School (2014-2017), Nicolas taught across a range of modules, most notably Performance and the Contemporary City and Live Art and Performance. In 2010 he won the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence.
Nicolas played a leading role in the University’s research culture, being appointed as thematic lead for two of its GRPs, Sustainable Cities and Connecting Cultures. In 2017-2020 he was the PI on a 3-year AHRC-funded practice-as-research project entitled Sensing the City, which culminated in a multi-medial exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry and an edited book, Urban Sensographies (2021). Meanwhile, his book Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe: the Work of Art in the Complex City appeared in 2020.
Further details about Nicolas are available on his staff webpage. Happily, he retains his connection to the University as Professor Emeritus.
Sensing the City: An Urban Room Opens in The Herbert Today!
Sensing the City: An Urban Room is a collaborative exhibition curated by Sarah Shalgosky & Fiona Venables with contributions from artists Michael Lightborne, The Tank, Carolyn Deby/sirenscrossing. The exhibition also hosts a grid map of Coventry designed for Sensing the City by Dave Allen and contributions from Coventrians.
Herbert Gallery
Monday, January 13 to Saturday, January 18.
We are bringing together the findings, stories, questions, images, inspirations and much more from our three years long journey in and around Coventry city centre in this exhibition taking place on 13-18th January 2020 at The Herbert Gallery. We are hoping this exhibition will serve as an Urban Room, to revisit together some of the key questions the research team and commissioned artists have been working with...
- How can the human body be in measure of the city?
- How can a focus on human sensing enhance the habitability of urban life?
- What do the sensed contours, textures and atmospheres of the city tell us about it?
- Who and what is Coventry city centre for?
- What kind of city do we wish to live in?
Prof. Nicolas Whybrow is invited to speak at PLAY, an Interdisciplinary symposium hosted by The Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London
Prof. Nicolas Whybrow is making a contribution to an interdisciplinary symposium on Play and its Potential Publics at the Institute of Advanced Study, UCL on 14th September. The paper is called "Sensing the City: a Road Map".
This symposium will bring together scholars in the social sciences and humanities to ask how the potentials of play can operate in public life. We will consider what the consequences are of extending play beyond any defined or intended limits: how it can become integrated with the everyday, the trivial with the serious, the imaginary with the real, the sacred with the profane.
Michael Pigott shows film installation about Coventry Ring Road as part of the AHRC Sensing the City project
Michael Pigott shows film installation about Coventry Ring Road as part of the AHRC Sensing the City project.