Current open calls for submissions

Volume 32, Issue 6 - On Invisibility

Deadline: 22 October 2026

Issue Editors: Anne-Lise Brevers, Jasper Delbecke, Kyoko Iwaki, Sarah Lucie and Jonas Schnor

 

This issue of Performance Research invites contributions that investigate how contemporary performance embraces invisibility. Amidst the current sociopolitical economy that prioritizes optics – where images proliferate faster than attention and visibility become a dominant currency – performance reminds us that not everything that matters can, or should, be seen. This issue turns towards performances that suspend the primacy of vision, moving beyond both the imperative of capitalist representation and limits of human eyesight to activate other perceptual registers: aural, haptic, olfactory, atmospheric, thermal, vibrational, as well as the durational and the temporal. Rather than understanding invisibility through absence, negation, suppression or disappearance, we approach it as a generative force that enables alternative ways of sensing, relating and imagining the world. Based on this thought, the issue editors embrace the invisible as a site of more-than-human performance, where toxins, neurons, heat waves, atmospheric pressures, microbes, radioactive particles, algorithms and cosmic forces continuously perform, relate and transform, regardless of whether they enter the field of human spectatorship.

 

The issue aligns with Hito Steyerl’s affirmation: ‘Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal’ (2017: 47). Despite the advancement of visual technologies and the explosion of data, we see less and less. In contrast, we increasingly encounter phenomena that evade direct perception although they profoundly shape the conditions of our lives: the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation that transcends human lifespans (Nixon 2011); algorithmic infrastructures that manoeuvre our lives (Chun 2016; Zuboff 2020); macro-performances of planets, waters and dark matter (Sofer 2013; Cervera 2017; Neimanis 2017); microbial ecologies of bacteria, viruses and protists (Radomska 2016); and other more-than-human agencies, from radioactive particles to atmospheric pollutants, that remain imperceptible yet undeniably present (Decamous 2018). Such phenomena remind us that the invisible is not synonymous with non-existent; it is, rather, part and parcel of entangled reality that performance, qua gesamtkunstwerk, is uniquely positioned to sense, attune to and dramaturgically activate. 

 

Further, the issue calls for contributions that examine how performance embraces invisibility as an anti-capitalist strategy. In an output-driven culture, visibility increasingly functions as the primary condition of social value. Across social media platforms, workplace cultures, surveillance regimes and representational politics, subjects are compelled to render themselves continuously available to view. Against this visibility regime, we are interested in performances that cultivate strategic invisibility, collective anonymity and forms of digital or embodied unavailability as clandestine aesthetic and political resistance (Felton-Dansky and Gallagher-Ross 2024). We welcome contributions that explore practices resisting economies of spectacle, disrupting algorithmic attention or embracing imperceptibility as a mode of anti-capitalist world-making. 

 

Theatre, as Maaike Bleeker argues, has long operated as a ‘vision machine’, producing culturally and historically specific modes of looking that shape what comes to count as ‘reality’ beyond the stage (2011: 151). Far from functioning merely as a mirror held up to the world, theatre actively manipulates our perception, cultivating particular modes of seeing. The visible, in this sense, is not simply a medium of representation but a dispositif through which social realities, cultural norms and epistemic assumptions are produced and naturalized. Likewise, since Hans-Thies Lehmann identified ‘visual dramaturgy’ (2006: 93) as the defining characteristic of post-dramatic theatre, optics have frequently functioned as one of the principal organizing logics of contemporary performance. Over the last two decades, as global cultures have become increasingly saturated by digitally mediated images, theatres too have often embraced spectacular or mundane visuality: photogenic aesthetics, livestreams, projections and quotable performances readily pre-packaged for circulation across digital platforms. Yet this proliferation of images has coincided with a growing uncertainty about the authority of the visual. As algorithmic curation, artificial intelligence, and ecological crises, in their varying ways, expose the instability and unreliability of what ‘appears’ before us, vision no longer retains its epistemological authority. We are entering a moment of societal shift in which seeing no longer guarantees knowing, and visibility no longer secures truths. 

 

In addition to more theoretical performance interventions, this issue also welcomes close analyses of specific theatres and dramaturgical practices that engage invisibility in concrete terms. How do contemporary artists compose with what cannot be readily seen, measured or represented? What aesthetic, dramaturgical and sensory strategies emerge when performance no longer privileges vision as its primary mode of encounter? From post-dramatic days to more recent performance practices, artists have persistently interrogated the limits of visibility, experimenting with dramaturgies that resist positivist modes of knowing. In Stifters Dinge (2007), Heiner Goebbels experimented with the absence of human performers, allowing atmospheric and material elements such as wind, fog and water to emerge as star actors within a dramaturgy organized around an ‘aesthetics of absence’. Kris Verdonck similarly works with graphite, mist, dust and light as dramaturgical agents, while sound artists such as Ryoji Ikeda compose at the edges of the average range of human hearing. In 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–22), Sarah Cameron Sunde stands in a tidal body of water for a full tidal cycle, allowing the imperceptible force and temporality of the ocean to register ever so gradually as the rising water nearly engulfs her body. Elsewhere, ‘Microperformativity’ (Hauser and Strecker 2020) names artistic practices that destabilize human scales and stage processes beyond ordinary human perception, while ‘bioperformativity’ (Woynarski 2020) turns towards cellular realities, mobilizing performance as an ecodramaturgical mode of enquiry.

 

Lastly, as issue editors, we acknowledge the rich body of scholarship that has theorized invisibility in relation to marginalized identities, particularly through concepts such as opacity, fugitivity, ephemerality, disappearance, refusal and illegibility within Black, queer, feminist, Indigenous and decolonial performance traditions. These interventions have fundamentally reshaped how theatre and performance studies understands the laws of optics and the ethical stakes of remaining unseen. However, with this issue, we propose an expanded ecology of invisible agents that goes beyond representational and identity-based frameworks. Our aim is not to displace these scopes, nor to diminish the political urgency of making the historically marginalized visible. Rather, we seek to situate invisibility within a broadened field of more-than-human and non-visual agencies. 

 

The Performance Research issue ‘On Invisibility’ welcomes single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials interrogating the topic of invisibility. 

 

Topics may include but are not limited to:

•Sub-sensory and sub-visual performances

•Durational and scalar performances beyond human perception

•Invisible agents in theatres – air, light, smell and sound

•Non-visual dramaturgies such as aural and haptic

•Performances in darkness or blinding glare

•Poetics and politics of vibrations

•Performances of heat waves, polar vortex, and atmospheric pressures

•Performances of avian vision, amphibian visions and deep-sea vision

•Invisible processes in rehearsal rooms

•Performances created by and for blind audience and artists

•Dark matter and imperceptible planetary performances

•Invisible performances by radioactive nuclides, viruses and toxins

•Undetectable degenerative diseases

•Death becoming invisible through regulated vision 

•Embracing invisibility against capitalist representation

•Strategic invisibility and collective anonymity

•Resisting beauty norms in hyper-visible culture

•Undetectable performances of operational images

•Artificial intelligence (AI) systems as epistemological invisibility

•Beyond-visible performances such as climate change

•The failed spectatorship of multi-scalar extinctions

•Invisible infrastructures manoeuvering human actions

•Invisible yet intensifying environmental grief

•Leaving zero trace of humans in eco-humility

 

Selected References:

Bleeker, Maiike (2011) ‘Limited visibility’, in Mieke Bal and Miguel Hernández-Navarro (eds) Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, resistance, and agency, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 143–59.

Cervera, Felipe (2017) ‘Naming the Cosmos death: On performance, astronomy and Katie Paterson’s The Dying Star Letters’, Performance Research 22(5): 28–34. 

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyon (2016) Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual new media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Decamous, Gabrielle (2018) Invisible Colors: The arts of the atomic age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Felton-Dansky, Miriam and Gallagher-Ross, Jacob (2024) ‘Interface theatre: Watching ourselves disappear’, Modern Drama 67(1): 1–24. 

Hauser, Jens and Strecker, Lucie (2020) ‘On microperformativity’, Performance Research 25(3): 1–7. 

Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, London and New York, NY: Routledge.

Neimanis, Astrida (2019) Bodies of Water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology, London: Bloomsbury. 

Nixon, Rob (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Radomska, Marietta (2016) Uncontainable Life: A biophilosophy of bioart, Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press.

Sofer, Andrew (2013) Dark Matter: Invisibility in drama, theatre, and performance, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Steyerl, Hito (2017) Duty Free Art: Art in the age of planetary civil war, London: Verso.

Woynarski, Lisa (2020) Ecodramaturgies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zuboff, Shoshana (2020) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The flight for a human future at the new frontier power, New York, NY: PublicAffairs.

 

Format:

Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below, including a 100-word author bio, for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies. 

 

Issue Contacts:

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

 

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors: 

Anne-Lise Brevers (anne-lise.brevers@ap.be), Jasper Delbecke (jasper.delbecke@luca-arts.be), Kyoko Iwaki (kyoko.iwaki@uantwerpen.be), Sarah Lucie (slucie@wpi.edu), or Jonas Schnor (jonas.schnor@uantwerpen.be)

 

Schedule:

Proposal deadline: 22 October 2026

Proposal outcomes: November 2026

First drafts: March 2027

Final drafts: December 2027

Publication: summer 2028

 

General 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 re artist pages.

The text for proposals should not exceed one 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.

•Proposals should be sent by email to info@performance-research.org.

•Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send. 

•Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email. 

•Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. 

 

•If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.

 

Volume 32, Issue 8 - On Drag

Deadline: 9 November 2026

Issue Editors: Adele Senior and Em Welton

 

How does making, producing, performing and being an audience of drag performance stage an encounter with ethics? This issue of Performance Research is motivated by questions concerning an ethics of drag as a diverse and multi-faceted performance form that contains tensions: contemporaneously, drag participates in both anti-capitalist activism and majority mainstream cultural production; drag interrogates racist, colonialist, misogynistic, classist, ableist, transphobic and homophobic structures while, at times, upholding them; and drag creates both inclusive and exclusive communities. 

 

The issue asks: How does drag do ethics? How might drag provide unique modes of ethical engagement for performers and audiences, and with the wider world? What role does agency, power and responsibility play in both drag performances and drag (sub)cultures more generally? How do we account for drag’s contradictions: drag’s precarity as a form and the ways that some drag artists have perpetuated homonormativity (Duggan 2010) and homonationalism (Puar 2007)? How have majoritarian cultures had a parasitic relationship with drag, and, simultaneously, how has drag’s radicalism been compromised, over-estimated, romanticized? Conversely, the issue also questions its own focus: is putting drag as a form under the lens of ethics fair on drag? Should drag bear the weight of ‘doing’ ethics? Given the hateful, billionaire-funded far right and anti-LGBTQIA+ attempts to create a moral panic around drag in its entirety (and particularly drag queen performance), is it ethical to demand an ethics of drag, a form that is by its nature marginal, not-dominant, despite its mainstream visibility in some places around the globe? Can drag ‘queer’ ethics – and, if so, how? Can a discussion of drag’s ethics prècis the ways that drag seduces us, brings us into our bodies, into pleasure, joy, fun, relief, kinship, solidarity, a shared language, even for a moment? Maybe ethics is inherent to these things that drag offers us. 

 

‘On Drag’ seeks to centre drag studies, a growing but under-valued discipline. The issue is indebted to existing scholarship that documents how drag performance and drag communities have challenged hegemonic power in the moment of performance and beyond it, and how drag performance and communities have staged more equitable conditions for performance, work and community care (Newton 1972; Khubchandani 2020; Parslow 2024). While we ask what the ethics of drag are in the processes of performance-making, doing and witnessing, we also ask: what are the ethics of conceiving drag as a discipline? How does drag studies do ethics? 

 

We invite contributions that consider global, contemporary and historical drag in relation to power, agency, responsibility and morality. We wish to foreground submissions that complicate and abandon these frameworks from decolonial, indigenous, feminist, queer, posthuman, ecological and interspecies perspectives. How does drag relate to frameworks such as virtue, deontological and consequentialist ethics? What do local or global perspectives on drag do to these frameworks? How does drag interact with an ethics of responsibility to/and with the ‘Other’ (Ahmed 2002, 2010)? What does the movement between drag king, thing, queen, monarch, monster, alien, animal categorizations have to do with ethics? ‘On Drag’ shares its own ethical commitments to intersectional approaches within the field currently, such as Decolonize Drag (Khubchandani 2023) and The Routledge Companion to Drag (Edward, Farrier and Sterk forthcoming), which consider how gender and sexuality play in drag performance is always imbricated with issues of race and ethnicity, class, coloniality, and disability. However, we wish to foreground ethics in conversation with a range of perspectives in order to pose fundamental ethical questions: how does, can and should drag act?

 

Contributions may include themes relating to ethics in/and/of:

  • Drag’s techniques (including lip-synching, improvisation, composition, dramaturgy, choreography, vocals, the reveal, costume-making, make-up)
  • Drag’s ‘reuse’ strategies, including issues of authorship, responsibility, appropriation and exploitation in drag; the relationship between the living and the dead in drag performance (Farrier 2016); the relationship between drag and camp (Dodi 2021)
  • Drag’s relationship to exclusion, marginalization and discrimination (for example, transphobia, racism, classism, casteism, ableism, misogyny)
  • Drag’s reinscription and/or critique of capitalist, patriarchal and colonial structures (Khubchandani 2023); drag and decoloniality (Ramirez 2024)
  • Economies of drag – funding for drag; payment for drag; drag as mutual aid/healthcare fundraiser; drag brunches; Ru Paul’s Drag Race (2009–); drag and neoliberalism/the cult of the individual
  • Drag and the non-human; Sustainable and/or ecological drag
  • Staging, producing and curating drag; drag in/outside of queer venues; drag and digital futures – digital drag, deep fake drag, AI-generated drag (Parslow 2023)
  • Drag and care-work (Graziano 2026)
  • Historiographies, archives and legacies of drag; drag and nostalgia
  • Drag and its documentation: video, memoir (RuPaul 2024; Khubchandani 2025; Harsh 2026), fiction, documentary
  • Drag and the senses – the privileging of the visual/spectacle in drag performance, integrated audio description and drag (Cavallo and Fryer 2021); drag families, friends and foes
  • Drag training and pedagogy – drag competitions, tutorials, the (in)formalities of drag training
  • Drag, labour and work, including amateurism and professionalism (Parslow 2021)
  • Activist drag, corporate drag, subcultural drag
  • Drag, trigger warnings, content warnings, and safe/r space policies
  • Drag, religion, faith and spirituality
  • Drag and age, ageing and ageism 

 

Format 

Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below for academic articles of approximately 6,000–7,000 words or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages, theoretical writing, poetic interventions, fictions and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies.

 

Proposals 

Please submit an abstract (maximum 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 the editors via: A.M.Senior@leedsbeckett.ac.uk and em.welton@ell.ox.ac.uk 

 

Outline Schedule:

Proposal deadline: 9 November 2026

Proposal outcomes: November 2026

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

 

First drafts: April 2027

Final drafts: December 2027

Publication: 2028

 

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 re artist pages.
  • The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words. 
  • A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
  • Alongside traditional written abstracts, we welcome proposals in alternative forms to support your access, such as voice notes or video proposals, up to 2 minutes in length. Please submit these as attachments via emails to info@performance-research.org.
  • 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.
  • Proposals should be sent by email to info@performance-research.org.
  • Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
  • Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email.
  • Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
  • If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work to be published in Performance Research.