TaPRA 2019

Session Title: Politicizing pasts and futures

This panel responds to the working group’s call to examine the intersection of performance, progress and futurity, by proposing to explore past legacies and concomitant assumptions surrounding artistic practice which can be identified as ‘political’. What is the promise of the political in the theatre and, more broadly, how does it structure projections of the future and appreciations of the past? How does a misconstrued indebtedness to the past limit our movement to a different form of progress, and how can past and present be re-politicized for the future? The panel consists of four provocations that focus on diverse examples to interrogate how we may draw upon a politicized understanding of the recent past to shape interventions that could define a political theatre for the future.