Theatre, Performance and Philosophy
On Performance and Borders
For TaPRA 2025, the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group invites artists, thinkers, activists, researchers and curators to engage in collaborative praxes of creation focused on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders, adding to the intricate tapestry of existing reflections and practices on performance and borders.
We seek to explore spiritual and philosophical approaches to threshold spaces, digital entanglements and technological borders, and artistic interventions that challenge colonial and modern systems of division. Of particular interest are works examining refugia and safe harbours, networks of care and solidarity, resistance to state violence, and practices that defy traditional systems of classification.
As we approach these intersectional borders, we begin with a meditation on thresholds-
“Without warning, thresholds can open directly before our feet… In the ecstasy and loneliness of one’s life, there are certain times when blessing is nearer to us…Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you” (O’Donohue 2008).
While things are shifting externally and internally the space between can be the opening for the blessing to flow and recede, to lean in and then bow back. The threshold, the borderland, the boundary works both ways. What does it mean to inhabit the threshold with fierce tenderness, to move through liminal space with both precision and trembling? Not to mend or bridge or domesticate the divide. But to cultivate a terrain of creative tensions. A sanctuary for boundary-practices, a meeting place that resists resolution. That pulses with possibility.
We invite proposals exploring performance practices that create “refugia” – sheltered spaces of resistance and regeneration in times of global crisis. Following Kathleen Dean Moore's concept, we seek investigations of how performance can cultivate imaginative sanctuaries that nurture alternative ways of being, knowing, and relating across borders. Of particular interest are works that examine how performance generates temporary autonomous zones, creates networks of care and solidarity, or establishes creative "safe harbours" for un-hosted bodies, voices, and traditions.
Drawing on Astrida Neimanis's concept of “ecotone,” we welcome submissions that investigate performance at the threshold of intersecting social, political, and ecological systems. We are interested in how performance practices inhabit and activate these liminal zones of transformation – the fertile meeting points between cultures, species, territories, and ways of knowing. Proposals might explore how performance creates spaces of productive tension, hybridity, and emergence, particularly in contexts of migration, climate change, and contested boundaries.
These liminal zones of transformation take on new urgency in our digital age. As the image of the Donald Trump inauguration circulates, our entanglement with digital technology, as networked beings, directly connects us to the rise of a tech oligarchy and the emerging fascist regime of the Trump administration. The collapse of boundaries between public and private in the digital tech sphere, now simultaneously sustains the order of violent border policies, the policing of bodies and the denial of a climate crisis.
As we sit in this complex zone of entanglement, we ask how can performance foster resistance to the logic and order of state violence, both explicit and invisible? Thinking with Wendy Chung’s notions of “leakiness” and “promiscuity” (2016) and Stacy Alaimo’s “trans corporeal” subjects (2010), we are interested in proposals that rethink how performance engages with the human subject as a boundless/borderless entangled subject entangled with state violence.
The physical manifestation of these borders and their violence finds powerful expression in artistic intervention. A 548-foot-long fracture was opened in the floor of a London art institution in 2007 by artist Doris Salcedo. The artist said: “It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space”.
Despite its filling with concrete (the crack was filled leaving a scar in the floor), never before has this fracture been so exposed. This open wound (Anzaldúa 1987), this dark side of modernity of building walls, fortresses, dividing lines and deportation have been a persisting routine characteristic of coloniality and modernity. They are a manifestation of a particular worldview, even an epistemic fixation that thinks the world through the concepts of hierarchy, classification, epistemic supremacy and a western partition of the world “with irreconcilable differences, binary demarcations, and opposition of species” (Glissant 1997).
The open wound is under – a program of – evident intensification.
What characterises this fracture today is that a certain fluidity of our contemporary age (velocity, acceleration of the algorithms, data flows, abstraction and AI) and even a growing awareness of planetary entanglement with concerns about climate change emerge in contrast to an intensification of security, erection walls, lines of demarcation, and deportations as ways of controlling and safeguard the western partition of the world. Moreover, alongside we witness a blurring of the economic power of tech corporations and political sovereignty of states which asserts exceptional powers which are no longer circumscribed to one country region but the world. This “broken floor” withdrawals basic rights from certain groups and is methodologically executed and establishes itself worldwide.
In Sylvia Wynter’s thoughts on the practice of the plots, plotting emerges as both a place and possibility of escaping to something different (1971). They advance a visionary, aspirational, and subversive orientation as plots (plans) to imagine life otherwise and cultivate life in defiance of inhuman conditions and in resistance to totalizing ideas. In other words, it is under the shared power of displacement that alternative ways of living, positionings may emerge. Inspired by a call to resist dominant systems of classification, administration, or a western partition of the world with irreconcilable differences, binary demarcations, and opposition of species we invite proposals that advance alternative and defying ways of how to live and perform together under these present conditions of global modernity.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to-
- Performance practices creating “refugia” and imaginative sanctuaries
- Explorations of threshold spaces and liminal transformations
- Networks of care and solidarity across borders
- Performance at the intersection of ecological and social borders
- Digital borders and networked resistance practices
- Performance engaging with technological surveillance and control
- Trans-corporeal approaches to border crossings
- Practices that defy systems of classification, bordering, western partition of the world, binary demarcations
- Performance and the practice of living otherwise (ex: kilombos, maronage)
- Performance and safe harbours
- Fugitive performances
- Plotting performances, performance(s) as plotting
- Performances of resistance relying on camouflage or the “hidden in plain site”: e.g., syncretic Brazilian Black spiritual practices, capoeira
- Syncretic performances (that that fuse incorporate irreconcilably at variance with each other, performances of assemblage of dissimilar)
- Performance and unconditional hospitality/hospitality
- Trickster(s) strategies
References
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press.
Alberge, D. (2007). ‘Welcome to Tate Modern’s floor show- it’s 548 foot long and is called Shibboleth’, The Times, 9 October.
Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.
Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press.
Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Moore, K. D. (2020). Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. Counterpoint Press.
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic.
O'Donohue, J. (2008). To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. Doubleday.
Wynter, S. (1971). “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” Savacou, 5, 95-102.
Note: For Doris Salcedo's work (Shibboleth, 2007), the installation was presented at Tate Modern, London.
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
Theatre and Performance Histories
Theatre, Performance and Philosophy