Theatre & Performance Studies Research Events

Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick has an active research community.

As well as having a departmental Research Seminar Series which meets twice-termly, there are regular events hosted by individual members of our community relating to their current research projects. Above you'll see a link to our 'Past Events'. From here you can find out about individual events hosted recently, but can also link to ongoing research project webpages.

50 Years of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick

In 2025, Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick celebrates its 50^thanniversary. During the year, we’ll host a range of activities to mark this milestone, including a day-long event aimed at our alumni on 28 June 2025. Find out more about our celebrationshere

Departmental Seminar Series

Every year Theatre and Performance Studies run a twice-termly departmental seminar series. The dates and times for the 2024/25 Theatre and Performance Studies seminar series are as follows:

Research Seminar, Wednesday 19 November 2025, 4 pm, FAB 0.20

Rooyna Mitra - Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch

Royona Mitra is Professor of Dance and Performance Cultures and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion at Brunel University of London, UK. She is the author of Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch (2025, OUP) and Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism (2015, Palgrave). Her first monograph was awarded the 2017 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association (DSA); her article "Unmaking Contact: Choreographic Touch at the Intersections of Race, Caste and Gender", was awarded DSA’s Gertrude Lippincott Award in 2022 for the Best English Language Journal Article; and her co-edited journal special issue titled "Outing Archives/Archives Outing" for Contemporary Theatre Review journal, alongside Profs Bryce Lease and Melissa Blanco Borelli, was awarded the Theatre and Performance Research Association's Edited Collection Prize in 2022. Her research examines systems of oppression in dance and performance cultures at the intersections of bodies, social power regimes, and choreography as resistance. She contributes to the fields of diaspora and performance, South Asian dance and performance cultures, critical dance studies and performance studies. Royona was Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded #DanceResearchMatters “South Asian Dance Equity” project (2023-2025) alongside Drs Prarthana Purkayastha (PI, RHUL) and Anusha Kedhar (Co-I, UC Riverside). She was co-Chair of TaPRA alongside Dr Broderick Chow (RCSSD) (2022-2025).

ABSTRACT

In this presentation, I shall share excerpts from my new monograph Unmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch - published by Oxford University Press in April 2025.

Unmaking Contact interrogates “contact”, understood in Global North dance discourse as a shorthand for the movement discipline of contact improvisation (CI) and its characteristic shifting points of weight-sharing between two or more bodies through physical touch, by attending to power asymmetries that are foundational to this practice. By placing South Asian aesthetics, bodies, discourses, and philosophies on touch at the heart of its interrogation through the lenses of caste, ecology, faith, gender, and sexuality, I argue for an intersectional, intercultural, and inter-epistemic understanding of contact, that may or may not involve touch. In doing so, I shift and expand understandings of “contact” in dance-making through intercultural epistemologies that examine notions of touch and contact.

Through foregrounding South Asian transnational dance artists - India based contemporary choreographers Akila and Diya Naidu, UK-Pakistan based kathak exponent Nahid Siddiqui, and US-based drag queen LaWhore Vagistan - in this book, the term contact becomes an apparatus for dismantling power regimes; it is conjured as a catalyst to examine power in social relations; it appears as a fulcrum of ecological relationality; it arises as critical encounters full of generative and transformative potential; and finally, it manifests as community.

Research Seminar, Wednesday 21 May 2025, 11.30-1.00 pm, FAB 0.20

Marcus Tan, ‘This is us, this is our story’: Historicity, Musical(ity) and The Singapore Story

2015 was a portentous year in Singapore’s history in which the country celebrated its golden jubilee (entitled ‘SG50’). It was also the year in which famed statesman Lee Kuan Yew died. With the intention to be part of the SG50 celebrations, two musicals were staged and both of which became a performative means of memorialising and mythologising Singapore’s oft regarded founding father of the city-state. Singapura: The Musical (2015) was a musical theatre performance that attempted to chart ‘The Singapore Story’ – a national, state-fashioned, rags-to-riches story. The LKY Musical (2015), relatedly but dissimilarly, explored The Singapore Story through the personal lens of Lee. It follows his public and private lives and his metamorphosis into the nation’s first, and longest serving, Prime Minister. Both musicals were staged shortly after Lee’s death and, though primarily in conjunction with the SG50 celebrations, were distinct attempts at exploiting historicity for commercial expediency but inadvertently became appropriated for political gain. Regardless of creative intentions, staging a nation’s history (and her founder) is always already an act of political performativity where the mise-en-scene will necessarily be framed and read as a performance of the political. Consequently, in this seminar, I will interrogate the politics of music(als) and examine how both Singapura and LKY can be regarded as political artefacts that uncritically promote the ruling government’s dominant, singular narrative – The Singapore Story. In both musicals, the intent to perform a musical spectacle of the birth of a nation, and the larger-than-life biopic of a man whose status itself far exceeds any fictional representation, nullified the possibility of musicals as a medium for counter-narrativity; the need to cohere to prevailing sentiments and mood in 2015, the self-censorship prevalent in the arts, and the necessity of conforming to state-prescribed narratives meant Singapura and LKY were little more than reverberations of a founding fiction used to support the continued legitimacy of the prevailing single-party dominated government of the People’s Action Party. In relation to, and apart from, considering the surrounding events that led to the politicisation of both musicals, the paper invites considerations of the potential and precarity of staging history as musicals for musicality, the physical properties of sound, pitch, rhythm, timbre, as well as the lyrics, have profound impact on the construction of subjectivity. These advent questions of musical narrativity as representations of political history, considering how Jacques Attali posits that ‘any organisation of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality […] it is an attribute of power in all of its forms.’

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk