Trans and Queer Voices in Performance Research: study day #2

In 2025/26, TORCH Performance Research Hub hosts a series of study days bringing together artists, scholars, performers, and activists to explore the role of trans and queer voices in performance and performance research. Across panels, performances, and provocations, the series investigates how trans and queer practices rework histories, generate alternative publics, and activate new political imaginaries. Discussions between artists and scholars—as well as live performances, readings, and workshops—offer forums for critical engagement with trans and queer work in and beyond performance.

The series invites scholars and practitioners to consider performance not only as a mode of expression but as a method of world-making: a way to expose and reconfigure relations between bodies, institutions, and publics. Across panels and conversations, we will think with the tensions and frictions that animate trans and queer performance—the negotiations between visibility and opacity, vulnerability and resistance, flourishing and exhaustion.

Throughout its sessions, the series explores poetry, theatre, drag, performance art, music, fiction writing, and speculative history to consider how trans and queer performance mobilises language, embodiment, and voice. Panels examine poetic and theatrical forms as strategies of world-building and survival; fictional and fabulatory methods that reclaim and distort official histories; and expanded vocal and bodily practices that challenge fixed notions of identity, presence, and legibility. The final workshop turns towards live readings as practices of community formation through which writing nurtures and amplifies queer and trans collectivities. It also explores how processes of publishing and fundraising can extend these practices—transforming acts of creation into networks of care, visibility, and shared possibility.

The organisers are grateful for the support of TORCH, the Ruskin School of Art & the Faculty of Music.