Tag Archives: laboratory

CfP: TDPT Special Issue, 17.3: Re-envisioning the Theatre Laboratory and Training in the 21st Century

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Call for contributions, ideas, proposals and dialogue with the editors
Special Issue 17.3: Re-envisioning the Theatre Laboratory and Training in the 21st Century
to be published in September 2026

Guest Editors
Dr Patrick Campbell (Manchester Metropolitan University / p.campbell@mmu.ac.uk)
Professor Adam Ledger (Birmingham University / a.j.ledger@bham.ac.uk)
Dr Jane Turner (Independent Researcher) / j.turner.res@gmail.com

Overview 
This special edition of TDPT seeks to explore an expanded notion of theatre laboratory praxis, revisiting traditional notions of training in the light of ongoing sociopolitical, economic changes and practical challenges. In a post-pandemic world, rocked by war, financial crisis and the insidious rise of mediatised neoliberalism, the theatre laboratory community is currently in a state of flux: the time and energy taken to develop a laboratory practice increasingly seems both an anachronism and a financial and logistic impossibility for many. Thus, we wish to interrogate the theatre laboratory as an historical notion, and in terms of its  contemporary valency as both a paradigm within the performing arts and a transnational community of group theatre practitioners united by a shared set of values and an ethics of practice. 

This issue will examine contemporary theatre laboratory practices from a range of diverse, situated perspectives, drawing on the experiences of artists, scholars and practitioner researchers from diverse geopolitical contexts. Contributors will come from a wide range of performance disciplines such as actor training; theatre; critical pedagogy; opera; studio practice; circus; and dance.

A key question is the extent to which organisations that were formally recognised as theatre laboratories are, were or have become what might be described as ‘cultures of practice’ or  ‘communities of practice’? Our concern here is to explore what is meant by an expanded notion of training/practice, especially in contemporary terms. Whereas training has traditionally been considered an introspective praxis, focussing on the individual body and/or the body of the group, an expanded laboratory might be identified as one that faces outwards. Following tenets such as those described as ‘cultural action’ (from Freire, 1970), training may be a space that is able to shift continually according to the needs of communities and groups of spectators. 

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BodyConstitution in Wrocław

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In What a Body Can Do (Routledge 2015), I asked why there aren’t more functioning laboratories dedicated to exploring the intersection between martial arts and performer training. This interdisciplinary connection has been hugely productive in Europe throughout the twentieth century, not to mention the much longer-standing relationships between martial and performing arts found throughout Asia. But it is hard to think of even one institution in Europe or North America that aims explicitly to innovate theatre, dance and performance training practice by placing it in dialogue with martial arts and physical culture more generally. While many individual practitioners and scholars do excellent work in this area, institutions tend to be oriented towards one domain or the other. And we still tend to see martial arts as cultural entities rather than fields of knowledge.

What would a laboratory of martial and performing arts look like? In order to create substantive interdisciplinary interactions, care would have to be taken to create the kind of ‘third space’ described by Pil Hansen and Bruce Barton in their article on ‘Research-Based Practice’ (TDR 53.4, 2009): a space in which specific flows of martial and performing arts would collide without either one being subordinated to the other. BodyConstitution, a project developed by the Grotowski Institute in Poland and funded by major grants from EEA/Norway, is the closest I have seen to such a laboratory. The project is ‘programme of research in practice at the Grotowski Institute,’ which has involved numerous formats of exchange, including four annual seminars (2013-2016), each about a week long, drawing together a wide range of international performers, teachers, and participants. I was recently a guest at the final BodyConstitution seminar and want to use that experience as a starting point to highlight the value of the project as a whole. (For more details and reflections on the 2016 seminar, see Jen Parkin’s post below.)

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