TaPRA 2019: Full Schedule

Welcome to TaPRA 2019 at the University of Exeter!

2:15pm BST

Working Group Session 1: Performance, Identity and Community

Session Title: Utopian and dystopian imaginaries

Presenters

Trish Reid

‘Everything Bad is Real': The Dystopian Near Future in Contemporary Drama. This paper builds on work I have published recently in the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English and engages with the WG’s call to ‘consider the social, ethical and political logics that organise... Read More →

Paola Botham

Unsettling Revivals and Feminist Dystopias on the British StagePremiered in April 2019 amid a controversy over all-male programming at London’s National Theatre, the revival of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) at the Lyttleton stage was greeted with the following statement... Read More →

Ian Farnell

Performance, Memory, and Post-Apocalypse in Anne Washburn's Mr Burns In the post-apocalyptic future of Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns (2014), nuclear disaster has instigated the collapse of American society, killing millions and leaving survivors to eke out a precarious existence in... Read More →

Katheryn Owens and Chris Green

Provocation for Performance, Identity and Community WG: I’m dead! Russian Doll, trauma and friendshipIn this provocation we will discuss how the notion of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’, as articulated through Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life (2014) is explored through... Read More →

Wednesday September 4, 2019 2:15pm - 4:15pm BST
Thornlea: White House 1

Working Group Sessions, WG: Performance Identity and Community

9:30am BST

Working Group Session 2: Performance, Identity and Community

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.

Presenters

Tom Cornford

TaPRA Executive Curated Panel:Dr Tom Cornford (The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London): ‘Undoing Language’ This provocation will address some ways in which whiteness shapes research, not only in terms of its content, but the theoretical standpoints... Read More →

Marilena Zaroulia

University of Winchester

Marilena Zaroulia is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Winchester. Her research focuses on theatre and the cultural politics of post-1989 Europe. She co-edited Performances of Capitalism, Crises and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe in 2015 and her piece about the NT's... Read More →

Tony Fisher

The Political Work of Art as “Speech Act” – the Efficacy Debate ReframedWriting in response to Sartre’s essay on engaged literature, Adorno proclaimed: ‘This is not the time for political works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it... Read More →

Philip Hager

Remembering Europe’s future in ‘a time of our own creation’ Mauyra Wickstrom opens her recent book Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History, with the proposition that by ‘invent[ing] or inaugurat[ing] particular types of time’, theatre can... Read More →

Thursday September 5, 2019 9:30am - 11:00am BST
Thornlea: White House 1

Working Group Sessions, WG: Performance Identity and Community

2:00pm BST

Working Group Session 3: Performance, Identity and Community

Session Title: Labour, precarity and value

Presenters

Nadine Holdsworth

No Optimism, Just Getting By: Inviting empathy through representations of precarious Labour in Contemporary British Theatre Whilst Jill Dolan’s seminal Utopia in Performance (2005) offers an invitation to regard the potentiality of theatre to rehearse a ‘better world’, it might... Read More →

Louise Owen

Money’s futurityWhat role does contemporary theatre play in shaping cultural understandings of money as a trans-historical given? This paper seeks to respond to this question through an analysis of two contemporary productions of Shakespearean dramas that each grapple with money... Read More →

David Calder

Disorderly Spaces for Uncertain Times: Street Theatre after BataclanThe state of exception sometimes referred to as the War on Terror is self-perpetuating: as an abstract concept, terror is unable to surrender, and as an emotion, terror is generated or intensified by the very war... Read More →

Thursday September 5, 2019 2:00pm - 3:30pm BST
Thornlea: White House 1

Working Group Sessions, WG: Performance Identity and Community

2:00pm BST

Working Group Session 4: Performance, Identity and Community

Session Title: Identity, futurity and progress

Presenters

Aylwyn Walsh

Afro-fabulation: Black Privilege & centring the less good ideaIn South Africa, artists and scholars attempt to move beyond replicating colonial oppressive visions of the notion that ‘another world is possible’. The politics of idealised futures under capitalism and the notion... Read More →

Lisa Woynarski

Decentring Futurity in Indigenous EcodramaturgiesAs I write this the Extinction Rebellion is underway, with thousands of protesters closing down busy streets in central London. The international network, started in the UK but with groups in many places around the world, state that... Read More →

Louisa Hann

“If we can’t have a conversation with our past, then what will be our future?”: HIV/AIDS, queer generationalism and utopian performatives in Matthew Lopez’s The InheritanceAs the HIV/AIDS epidemic approaches its fifth decade, and emerging generations of queer-identified youth... Read More →

Hassan Hussain

A Whole New World: Performing Gay UtopiasIn this paper I explore how several contemporary gay plays (Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001), Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride (2008) and Jonathan Harvey’s Canary (2010)) propose and construct gay utopias through... Read More →

Gerry Harris

RespondentGeraldine (Gerry) Harris is Professor of Theatre Studies at Lancaster University. She has been publishing work on feminism, theatre and performance since the late 1980s. Her books include Staging Femininities, Performance and Performativity (1999), Beyond Representation... Read More →

Friday September 6, 2019 2:00pm - 4:00pm BST
Thornlea: White House 1

Working Group Sessions, WG: Performance Identity and Community