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.
This special issue of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training invites contributions that critically examine production and technical training as a sociocultural and sociomaterial practice. It seeks to bring production and technical training into sharper focus as a site of practice-based learning, knowledge production, and ethical negotiation: one in which people, tools, spaces, technologies, policies, and organisational cultures are deeply entangled (Daniels, 2001; Engestrom, 1987, 2010; Gherardi, 2006; Vygotsky, 1987) requiring training which supports practioners to how to recontextualise their practices for changing industry futures (Hockham & Wallis, 2024).
This special issue foregrounds care ethics as a critical framework for understanding production and technical training. Care, understood as the often-unseen work required to sustain shared worlds so that people can live and work within them as well as possible (Tronto, 2015), provides a lens for examining how responsibility, attention, and responsiveness operate within training and production environments. In an industry characterised by freelance labour, blurred boundaries between personal and professional life, and cultures of overwork, care must be understood as structurally produced; shaped by institutional policies, contractual arrangements, line management practices, and informal norms that are frequently normalised through training itself (Hockham 2022; Bondar, 2025; Hockham and Bondar forthcoming). From this perspective, mental health and wellbeing outcomes of how training is organised, scaffolded, and supported across teams and institutions. Care ethics therefore invites critical attention to how needs are recognised, how responsibility is distributed, how support is enacted, and how feedback is received and responded to within training cultures (Tronto, 2015).
Learning Scenographics, a theoretical framework developed by Hockham (2022) and extended in forthcoming work by Hockham and Bondar (forthcoming), offers one way of understanding training as an emergent process within scenographic assemblages of people, purposes, tools, spaces and contexts. From a learning scenographic perspective, production and technical practitioners, tutors, students, apprentices, and freelancers continually orient themselves within complex training landscapes. Practice is enacted through navigation: moving between education and work, between venues and productions, and between disciplinary languages and organisational cultures. This aligns with broader accounts of trans-situated expertise, in which knowledge is carried across contexts and reconfigured through collaboration in response to shifting sociomaterial conditions (Nicolini et al., 2017). For production and technical training, this raises important questions: How are learners and early-career practitioners supported by training providers as they navigate complex and often precarious professional landscapes? How are cultures of care modelled, or undermined, within training environments? How might we empower those being trained to shape ethical, sustainable work futures? How might Production and Technical Training be a change-catalyst to support and reimagine our future industry.
Scope and invitations
We invite contributions from scholars, practitioners, educators, and practitioner-researchers working across theatre, dance, performance, live events, circus, opera and related fields. We particularly welcome submissions that engage critically with the intersections of learning, sociomaterial practice, care, and wellbeing, and that draw on collaborative, practice-based, or co-authored methodologies.
Contributions may address, but are not limited to:
- Production and technical training as sociocultural and sociomaterial practice
- Learning scenographics and practice-based pedagogies
- Recontextualisation and trans-situated expertise across training and/or how training is connected to work
- Training care ethics, management, and leadership
- Mental health, wellbeing, and emotional labour in training cultures
- Apprenticeships, work-based learning, and professional transitions
- Tools, technologies, and infrastructures as agents in Production and Technical Training
- Diversifying the Workforce, access, and exclusion in production and technical training
- Training models which do / or do not support Freelance labour and working precarity
- Curriculum design, institutional policy, and learning environments for training
- Peer learning, mentoring, and collaborative knowledge production in and for training within Higher Education and beyond
Join the peer review team
Alongside interest in submissions, we also welcome expressions of interests (EOI) to become an academic reviewer as part of this special edition. Training will be provided by the journal team on the academic review process. We encourage engagement from those at any stage of their career, in and out of Higher Education.
Submission
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training has three sections:
- “Articles” features contributions in a range of critical and scholarly formats (approx. 5,000-6,500 words)
- “Sources” provides an outlet for the documentation and analysis of primary materials of performer training. We are particularly keen to receive material that documents the histories and contemporary practices associated with the issue’s theme.
- “Training Grounds” hosts shorter pieces, which are not peer reviewed, including essais (more speculative pieces up to 1500 words); postcards (up to 100 words); visual essays and scores; Speaking Images (short texts responding to a photo, drawing, visual score, etc.); and book or event reviews. We welcome a wide range of different proposals for contributions including edited interviews and previously unpublished archive or source material. We also welcome suggestions for recent books on the theme to be reviewed; or for foundational texts to be re-reviewed.
Innovative cross-over print/digital formats are possible, including the submission of audiovisual training materials, which can be housed on the online interactive Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal blog: https://theatredanceperformancetraining.org/.
To signal your intention to make a contribution to this special issue in any one of the ways identified above please email an abstract (max 250 words) to:
David Hockham (dh2463x@gre.ac.uk)
Training Grounds proposals are to be made to both:
Thomas Wilson thomas.wilson@bruford.ac.uk
David Hockham Dh2463x@gre.ac.uk
Issue Schedule
- 11th January 2026: 250 word proposals to be submitted / & Expressions of Interests to become part of the peer review team.
- 12th March 2027: Response from editors and, if successful, invitation to submit contribution
- March to 7th September 2027: writing/preparation period
- 7th September to December 2027: peer review period
- January 2028 – April 2028: author revisions post peer review
- June 2028: publication as Issue 18.2
Bibliograhy
Bondar, M. (2025). Micro-Events: A Potential Tool for Navigating Consent and Accessibility in ImmersiveTheatre. Journal of Consent Based Performance, 3(2). https://journals.calstate.edu/jcbp/article/view/4096/3945
Burgess Walsh, M. (2023). RECRUITMENT & RETENTION SURVEY. https://www.abtt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ABTT-MADC-Recruitment-Retention-Report.pdf
Burgess Walsh, M., & Hanna, P. (2021). UK Backstage Entertainment Industry Wellbeing Evaluation 2021.
Camilleri, F. (2026). Evolving landscapes of performer training in the twenty-first century. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2026.2652839
Daniels, H. (2001). Vygotsky and Pedagogy. Routledge/Falmer.
Engestrom, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding: An Activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Orienta-Konsultit.
Engestrom, Y. (2010). Activity Theory and Learning at Work. In M. Malloch, L. Cairns, K. Evans, & B. N. O’Connr (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Workplace learning (pp. 74–89). https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446200940.n7
French, C., & Ravengai, S. (2026). Accessing, playing and narrating culture(s) in African and European performance training. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2026.2620090
Gherardi, S. (2006). Organizastional Knowledge: The texture of worplace leanrning. Blackwell.
Guile, D. (2010). The Learning Challenge of the Knowledge Economy. Sense Publishers.
Hartley, J. (2024). Towards a trauma informed pedagogy in actor training: knowledge and agency. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2024.2368474
Hemley. (2024, May 15). ‘Precarity and burnout’ – report shows impact of Covid on early career workers. The Stage.
Hemley, M. (2025, August 6). Exclusive: National Theatre Productions team to be cut by 70% to just seven. The Stage.
Hockham, D. (2022). What are the Implications for HEI Pedagogy and Learning when Production and Technical Theatre Practices are Re-orientated as Practices of Scenography? https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152859/1/David%20Hockham%20Clean%20copy%20for%20upload.pdf
Hockham, D. & Bondar, M. (Forthcoming) Production and Technical Management for Theatre and Live Production. Routledge
Hockham, D., & Wallis, J. (2024). Operationalising the concept of recontextualisation: leveraging pedagogy and learning strategies in higher education practical courses. Higher Education, 88(2), 645–660. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01136-3
Masso, G. (2023, June 28). Burnout and depression’: stage managers warn of mental health crisis. The Stage.
Pitches, J., Worth, L., & Kapsali, M. (2024). Editorial. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 15(3), 339–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2024.2404803
Nicolini, D., Mork, B. E., & Hanseth, O. (2017). Expertise as Trans-Situatedness. In J. Sandberg, R. Linda, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), Skillful Performance: Encting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence, and Expertise in Organizations (2). Oxford Scholorship Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806639.001.0001
Theatre Green Book. (n.d.). Https://Theatregreenbook.Com/. Retrieved October 29, 2025, from https://theatregreenbook.com/
Tronto, J. C. (2015). Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics. Cornell University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1987). The collected works of L S Vygotsky: Problems of General Psycology. Vol 1. Plenum Press.