Current open calls for submissions

Volume 31, Issue 7 - On Capturing Practice

Deadline: 16 February 2026

Edited by Laura Hayes and Vida Midgelow

The act of capture – whether by word, camera, drawing, code or archive – both preserves and transforms, inviting reiteration and return to what it seeks to hold. As we try – and fail – to capture events, processes, gestures, feelings and performances in other formats, there is always a slippage, a shimmer, between what occurs and what remains. 

As a methodological tool and a creative act, capturing ephemeral performances during the making and after their realization helps to shape creative choices, while archiving seeks to preserve them for future generations while framing how they are interpreted and studied. Such acts are recognized to be always partial, porous and incomplete, yet definitions of capture might also indicate control and force. To capture practice, then, is a contradictory act. On the one hand, it suggests the violence of control; on the other it is an act of care and preservation. It holds and releases; it fixes and flows. 

Artists and researchers use multiple means to document their work, including social media as a method to both reveal and market their work – perhaps becoming curators of their own discourse. Meanwhile universities have been developing digital repositories to archive practice research – supporting the preservation of materials, searchability and inviting re/use. Such processes of capture and sharing have the potential to enhance the reach of performance and access even as they give rise to questions of labour and authenticity, ownership and control.

Debates about acts of documentation (Auslander 2018, Reason 2006, Sant 2017) alongside the related issues of inclusion and exclusion embedded in archival practices (Breakell and Russell 2023, Borggreen and Rune 2013, Manning 2020, Singh 2018, Taylor 2003) and the ubiquity of (self)-capture and surveillance within performance and daily lives (Lonergan 2024, Whalley and Miller 2018) have been well rehearsed, yet remain unresolved. How have we, or might we then, move beyond the neoliberal obsession with capture in which documentation and archiving become an apparatus of validation? How can we re-imagine archives so that they reach beyond merely storing – or worse monetizing or institutionalizing – to offer inventive alternatives? What approaches might refract and diversify archives, making room for affective and reparative engagements? 

This issue of Performance Research invites provocations and reflections on and creative explorations of the multiple meanings of capture in performance research – capture as preservation, as containment, as commodity, as attention, as collaboration, as care. We further ask:

What is at stake in this desire or need to capture, to preserve, to make visible, to share, hold, name and evidence? How are our practices and creative processes informed or changed by capture? What kinds of knowledge and value are legitimized – or lost or excluded – through acts of capture? How might performance resist the drive to capture and dwell instead in the potential for more attuned, sensate approaches – listening, touching and moving – thereby challenging what documentation and archives might be or become?How might capture reflect Indigenous knowledges, be participatory, co-authored or relational, rather than extractive? How might we activate archiving as a living, embodied, collective and processual act? In the digital age, how do emerging modes of documentation – digital printing, QR codes, hyperlinks, motion capture – reconfigure the possibilities of performance itself? And, as generative AI becomes ever more powerful and entangled in living and creativity, how might its challenges to authorship, ownership and originality unsettle what we mean by performance and archive?

In this spirit, the issue seeks to rethink capture as an ethics of relation: activating and conserving, collective rather than singular, provisional rather than fixed – an opening rather than a containment, a gesture that lives on in its variations, its traces and ghosts, its returns.

 

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

  • Documenting and archiving practices: Exploring methods of capture and the relationship between the live, the material, the digital and the embodied.
  • Text, language and symbolic systems: Considering playwriting, scoring, notation and how creative practice is evoked and captured in word.
  • Journalling, sketching and diagramming: Revealing how reflective writing, mark making and other mapping activities, as used within creative processes, help shape and form performance work.
  • Digital practices and Generative Artificial Intelligence: How digital technologies like mocap both capture and (re)create practice; considering how LLMs and GenAI transform performance and challenge authorship and ownership in artmaking. 
  • Social media: Reflecting social media as capture, on the creative use and impacts of social media in documentation.
  • Institutional practices: Investigating and critiquing the place of the institution in acts of collection, digitization and preservation.
  • Legal systems: Considering how copyright and intellectual property effect how and what we capture.

 

References

Auslander, Philip (2018) Reactivations: Essays on performance and its documentation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Breakell, Sue and Russell, Wendy (2023) The Materiality of the Archive: Creative practice in context, Abingdon: Routledge.

Borggreen, Gunhild, and Rune Gade, eds (2013) Performing Archives/Archives of Performance, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press.

Lonergan, Patrick (2024) Theatre & Social Media, London: Methuen Drama.

Manning, Erin (2020) ‘What things do when they shape each other’ in For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Thought in the Act), Durham, NC:Duke University Press.

Reason, Matthew (2006) Documentation, Disappearance, and the Representation of Live Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sant, Toni, ed. (2017) Documenting Performance: The context and processes of digital curation and archiving, London: Bloomsbury.

Singh, Julietta (2018) No Archive Will Restore You, Quebec: 3Ecologies Books.

Taylor, Diana (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Whalley, Joanne ‘Bob’, and Miller, Lee (2018) ‘The construction of self(IES)’, in Hilevaara, Katja and Orley, Emily (eds) The Creative Critic: Writing as/about practice, Abingdon: Routledge.

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This call emerges from the Arts & Design Practice Research Exchange (ADPRex), Southeast Asia’s first annual conference dedicated to practice research. ADPRex positions the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), University of the Arts Singapore (UAS), as a leading centre for arts and design practice research in the region – where artists and thinkers gather to explore the nexus of artistic process, reflection and innovation.

 

Format

Contributions are invited in the standard article formats. However, given that this issue explores the different formats of practice and the way it is captured, we also invite contributors to consider the possibility of non-traditional, visual essay, multi-registered/voiced and collaborative forms.

 

Indicative lengths:

  • Visual Essays / Documentation / Original Artwork (c.4–10 pages)
  • Thought Pieces and Provocations – 2,000 words
  • Dialogues / Interviews – 3,000–4,000 words
  • Standard Articles – 4,000–5,000 words

 

Please submit an abstract (max one A4 page/500 words) and a short biography to info@performance-research.org  

 

Issue Contacts

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org  

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to Vida Midgelow and Laura Hayes (the issue editors) at: capturingpractice@gmail.com

 

Outline Schedule:

Proposals: Submission by: 16 February 2026.

Outcomes: March 2026. Following selection authors will be asked to develop their full submission for editor review followed by blind-peer review.

First drafts: June 2026

Final drafts: February 2027

 

General Proposal Guidelines for Submissions:

  • Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
  • Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs as for artist pages.
  • The proposals should not exceed one A4 page, circa 500 words.
  •  A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
  • Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
  • Submissions should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.