Theatre and Performance Research Association


The Theatre and Performance Research Association, or TaPRA for short, is an academic organisation focusing on theatre, drama and performance. It was founded in 2005, largely in response to the 2001 RAE . Academics from drama and theatre departments at Kent, Leeds, Royal Holloway, Warwick, QMUL, Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham Trent, Bristol, Central School of Speech and Drama, Lancaster, Sheffield, Roehampton, Glasgow, Exeter and Trinity College, Dublin formed the initial steering group. In 2019, TaPRA became a company limited by guarantee.
TaPRA describes its aim as "to foster research that:
Membership is largely British and Irish, although international members are welcomed, regularly contributing at conferences and symposia. Individual academics pay an annual fee to become members.
The current Chair of TaPRA is Professor Roberta Mock. Past Chairs are Professor Viv Gardner, Professor Maggie Gale and Professor Gilli Bush-Bailey.

Conferences

TaPRA holds an annual conference in September. The event lasts three days, and is peripatetic, hosted by a different academic institution each year.
Unlike some research organisations, TaPRA does not determine overall themes for its conferences. Instead, separate Working Groups generate their own topics for the annual conference and issue their own Calls for Presentations. These Working Groups are currently Theatre History and Historiography; Performance and New Technologies; Bodies and Performance; Directing and Dramaturgy; Applied and Social Theatre; Documenting Performance; Performance, Identity and Community; Performer Training; Performance and Science; Theatre, Performance and Philosophy; Popular Performance; Scenography; and, the most recent addition, Sound, Voice & Music. Working Groups also arrange interim events around the UK and Ireland, from one-day symposia to theatre visits and walking tours.
Keynote speakers at the annual conference have included Lloyd Newson, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Bruce McConachie, Shannon Jackson, Ric Knowles, Susan Bennett, Philip Auslander, Manon van de Water, Kully Thiarai, and Harvey Young. Conferences also often also feature live performances, such as works by Third Angel, Kieran Hurley, Accidental Collective and Mike Pearson.
The TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium has been running since 2009, focusing on presentation and career development opportunities for postgraduate and early career researchers. Since 2018, this event has been co-organised with the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments.

Awards

TaPRA presents several awards at each conference, such as the David Bradby Award for Research in International Theatre and Performance, the Early Career Researcher Prize and the Postgraduate Essay Prize. David Bradby Prize winners include Heike Roms, Aoife Monks, Jacky Bratton, Kate Dorney and Frances Gray, Duška Radosavljević, Sally Mackey, Jim Davis and Kélina Gotman. David Bradby Award winners present a keynote at the annual conference. Since 2019, the TaPRA Early Career Researcher Prize winner has also been invited to deliver a keynote; the first ECR keynote was presented by Margherita Laera.
The TaPRA Prize for Editing was won in 2018 by Dee Heddon and Dominic Johnson for It’s all Allowed: the Performances of Adrian Howells, and, in 2019, by Richard Gough for the 100th issue of Performance Research journal.