Theatre and 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 celebrated its 50^thanniversary. During the year, we hosted 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 celebrations here

Departmental Seminar Series

Every year Theatre and Performance Studies run a twice-termly departmental seminar series. The dates and times for the 2024/25 and 2025/26 Theatre and Performance Studies seminar series are as follows:

In this presentation, Royona Mitra shall share excerpts from her new monographUnmaking Contact: Choreographing South Asian Touch - published by Oxford University Press in April 2025.

Unmaking Contact Link opens in a new windowinterrogates “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.

To register for the seminar, please email aishwarya.walvekar@warwick.ac.uk

Research Seminar, Tuesday 9th December 2025, 4:00pm, Online Teams Meeting

Yana Meerzon and Mikhail Kaluzhsky - Performing Censorship: The Russian Case (Research Clusters: 2SSJASEAC)

The 1993 Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and prohibits censorship, but in practice censorship has long functioned as a tool of state control. Historically, it has been a central mechanism of state power, dating back to the Tsarist era and continuing through the Soviet period. In the post-Soviet years, censorship took new shape under Boris Yeltsin, particularly during his second term (1996–1999), which marked the rise of conservative ideologies. Since Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power in 2000, the Russian government has enacted numerous laws and constitutional amendments regulating cultural production. These laws target language use, blasphemy, depictions of historical events, and representations of sexuality and gender identity. Their impact has been especially pronounced in the performing arts, where they are enforced not only through legislation but also through grassroots actions, such as protests by nationalist and religious groups, public disruptions, and personal denunciations.

Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, censorship in Russia has become even more repressive, with harsh penalties for dissent, including fines, imprisonment, and exile. The book, Performing Censorship: The Russian Case, traces the evolution of state censorship under Putin and illustrates how his regime has fostered a culture of intimidation, conformity, and violence, perpetuating Russia’s long history of control over artistic expression. In this talk, Yana and Mikhail will outline the book’s major arguments and present several case studies that exemplify these practices.

To register for the seminar, please email aishwarya.walvekar@warwick.ac.uk

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