Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors

Special Issue: 19.2 Production and Technical Training for Theatre and Live Productions

Guest Editors:

Dr David Hockham                 (University of Greenwich / dh2463x@gre.ac.uk )
Dr Melissa Bondar                  (Independent Researcher / melissa.bondar@gmail.com )
Mig Burgess                            (University of Surrey / m.walsh@gsa.surrey.ac.uk )

Context

The landscape of production and technical work in theatre and live performance is undergoing significant change. Long-standing concerns around recruitment, retention, and working conditions have intensified in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Industry-led research, including work undertaken by the Association of British Theatre Technicians, has brought renewed attention to the structural conditions shaping production and technical work and has prompted urgent questions about how care is enacted, withheld, or displaced within backstage cultures (Burgess Walsh, 2023; Burgess Walsh and Hanna, 2021). Extending this focus, recent work has also examined the responsibilities of production and technical staff in caring for audiences, particularly in relation to the growth of immersive, participatory, and non-traditional performance forms, where boundaries between audience, performer, and environment are reconfigured through practice (Bondar, 2025).  Over the past decade, there has also been heightened attention to questions of diversity, access, and inclusion within theatre and live performance. Despite the sector’s self-image as progressive, particularly in relation to LGBTQ+ inclusion and neurodivergence, persistent inequities remain obscured. The production and technical workforce continues to be disproportionately white, shaped by informal recruitment pathways, freelance precarity, and working patterns that exclude many practitioners (Guile, 2010; Nicolini, Mork and Hanseth, 2017).  Mental health and wellbeing concerns, widely reported across the sector (Hemley, 2024, 2025; Masso, 2023), must therefore be understood as outcomes of the sociomaterial conditions of our work, learnt and reproduced in production and technical training. Long hours, touring schedules, technological intensification, and cultures of endurance are frequently normalised through training practices themselves, embedding expectations about resilience, availability, and self-sacrifice from the earliest stages of professional formation.  Attention to sustainability within production and technical training, particularly through sector-led frameworks such as the Theatre Green Book (2024) have recently been explored within an aligned special issue (Pitches et al., 2024).  In parallel, performer and actor training scholarship, has been reshaped by sustained attention to identity: race, disability, gender(Camilleri, 2026; French & Ravengai, 2026; Hartley, 2024).  This special issue asks how these critical developments might also be extended into production and technical training, where the formation of professional practice is equally shaped by questions of embodiment, belonging, exclusion, labour and institutional culture.  Here training is imagined as a change-catalyst.