Trans and Queer Voices in Performance Research: study day #1

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.

Info: We open with a series of provocations on trans and queer performance practice and research as sites of contestation, care, and political transformation. We ask: How might we not only write about trans and queer lives, but write, think, and perform in trans and queer ways? How do trans and queer artists reimagine performance as a space of becoming rather than representation? Performance here is understood here as not simply expressive, but also as speculative—as a means of reimagining history’s absences and distortions to conjure new futures.

Info: Bringing together poetry and theatre, this session reflects on trans and queer poetics as modes of survival, reinvention, and world-building. It asks: What does it mean to write queerly? In what ways can language, form, and narrativity be bent towards queer ends? How might theatre become a threshold through which audiences cross into the visceral textures of trans lived experience? The session examines how writers articulate queer affect, attending to the poetic and performative processing of trauma as a means of producing resonance, resistance, and shared feeling. Moderators: Matt Cook & Em Welton

Info: This session explores how fictional and speculative strategies in trans and queer performance serve as means of reclaiming, distorting, and fabulating histories. Through drag, performance, and art-making, the speakers experiment with storytelling as a way to redirect and re-enchant received narratives—from the invention of trans life histories to the queer reimagination of historical figures and non-human animal subjectivities. Embracing fiction as a methodology, the discussion considers how queer and trans artists use make-believe, mimicry, and exaggeration to generate counter-knowledges that challenge dominant accounts of history and experience. Moderators: Oreet Ashery and Eleri Watson.

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