Audience, Experience and Popular Practices
Fun, Playfulness & Pleasure
This year the Audience, Experience, and Popular Practices WG are inviting 15-minute responses of any kind to the theme of fun, playfulness, and pleasure.
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, about live performance experiences of any kind, about the performance of identity in everyday life, about love or desire or sex or sexuality, or about forms like games, film, television, or mass and social media. In doing so, you might choose to address a number of related questions...
Whether we’re talking about performance-makers or audiences, researchers or practitioners, historians or scholars of contemporary performance: what does it mean to experience sensations of enjoyment, gratification, delight, and joy? In the rehearsal room, in teaching spaces, online, onstage, or as part of an audience: how do we experience fun? How do we know when we’re feeling playfulness? How can different performance modes invite us to feel pleasure? When are these sensations experienced as positive and/or cathartic affects, and when is it more complicated than that? Who is given space to experience these feelings and who is not? At what point does one person’s pleasure become another person’s pain? Whose joy gets overlooked, othered, or seen as dangerous and in need of stamping out? When might these seemingly good feels need to be either resisted or embraced, and when can pleasure and displeasure sit in dialogue with one another as part of the same experience?
For example: your approach to this topic could be around issues of method: perhaps by raising urgent considerations about the ethics or epistemologies of a particular methodological approach. Alternatively, it could be about the feelings provoked by a piece of performance itself: whether that’s contemporary artistic work, or a historical event, or a popular form of practice. It could interrogate issues around intimacy or affect, asking for instance whether pleasurable sensations create particular audience/performer relationships? It could also raise questions about what it means to work both as artists and as academics within our contemporary landscape of precarity and uncertainty. We are also very interested in exploring relations of power, such as whose desires get to be prioritised and whose pleasures are often unacknowledged or even suppressed.
Preferences for Types of Proposal
We invite 15-minute responses and encourage diverse modes of sharing research, including, but not limited to, provocations, practice demonstrations, performative presentations, formal papers, etc. Please indicate your preference of format clearly in your proposal, with a specific breakdown of any technical requirements. We will endeavour to accommodate all requests, but please be aware that we are working within finite resources and we may need to suggest alternative formats.
We understand ‘performance’ and ‘practice’ in their broadest possible terms. In Warwick, what we want to encourage is a holistic analysis of what it means to experience practices – of making performance, of being an audience, of doing research, and of living in the world. We are eager to welcome work in progress at any stage: whether you want to talk through ideas for a brand new project, or to discuss preliminary findings, or to deliver a fully-developed presentation. More than anything else, we are working to carve out a space for supportive, generative, and helpful conversations. In light of the challenges of the past few years especially, our goal is to foster a home for safe sharing.
Proposal Submission Process
Submit your proposals by using the Abstract and Proposal Submission Form on the conference website by 10 March 2025. Your abstract should be max. 300 words and should be accompanied by a bio of max. 150 words.
How the TaPRA Conference Works
Our conference has two types of sessions: whole group sessions for all delegates and parallel panels of papers, performances, and interventions streamed by “working group”. The working groups focus on specific research interests and disciplines and set their own themes for each conference. These themes are detailed in the calls for papers for each group (linked above). There is also an opportunity to exhibit practice research in the TaPRA Gallery, also linked above.
A complete list of our 13 working groups is available on the TaPRA website. Most delegates choose a working group that aligns with their interests and use this group as their base for the conference, attending most or all of their slots, as the working groups meet multiple times. These sessions host presentations from long-standing members and new colleagues. However, you can attend sessions hosted by any other working group throughout the conference. The programme also includes open panels where attendees are encouraged to visit working groups sessions other than their own.
To speak, present, or perform at TaPRA, you will need to identify your preferred working group and submit a proposal that speaks to their theme. You can apply to one working group only. On the Abstract and Proposal Submission Form you can also indicate that you are willing for your paper to be considered by other working groups.
Conference Environment
In addition to whole group sessions, working groups, and open panels, the TaPRA Gallery and publisher stalls are open for most of the conference, and there are social and networking events at various moments. These include the conference dinner, which is not to be missed. It will mark TaPRA’s 20th Birthday and will be held at Fargo Village in Coventry to celebrate the city’s music heritage. There will be Caribbean food, sets from a Two-Tone Band and dancing aplenty.
Access
The 2025 annual TaPRA conference will be a hybrid event, facilitating participation by online delegates alongside those attending in-person. Since our 2021 conference we have been able to experience benefits of online conferencing, such as increased opportunity for international presenters, lower financial costs to participate, and greater accessibility for those with caring responsibilities. The 2025 conference at Warwick aims to retain the wider opportunities for engagement that online platforms offer, whilst also maintaining a space for in-person engagement and social interaction.
Schedule
- Applicants will receive decisions on their proposals on 11 April 2025
- Conference registration and accommodation bookings opens 12 May 2025
- Early bird registration closes on 30 June 2025
- Presenter registration deadline is 18 July 2025
- General registration closes 12 August 2025
Bursaries
Each working group has one bursary available for postgraduate and early career researchers. The bursary includes free conference registration and £300 towards conference travel and accommodation, to be disbursed after the event on showing proof of spend. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please tick the relevant box on the Abstract and Proposal Submission Form, when submitting your abstract.
Other Calls for Papers
You can view the CFPs for all other working groups using the links below:
Audience, Experience and Popular Practices
Performance and New Technologies
Performance, Identity and Community