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.

Info: Exploring the intersections of trans vocality and posthuman subjectivity, this panel considers how trans and queer artists reimagine the voice as a site of resistance and transformation. The panel examines how voice can exceed the boundaries of the self, framing it not only as sound but as a mode of activism, embodiment, and relation.

At the centre of the panel is an immersive live performance, featuring elements of TRANS VOICES’ recent sound installation work UN/BOUND, first presented as part of the collective exhibition FEEL THE SOUND at the Barbican Centre, London. This vocal work harnesses novel AI and quantum technologies to transform individual voices into virtual chorality, meditating on the figure of the voice as a medium of expression and on deep listening practices as catalysts for social change.

Info: Focusing on corporeality, this session considers the body as archive, medium, and contested site. Through discussions of performance art, film, and writing, the panel explores flesh as a collaborative material, interrogating the limits of what bodies can hold, expose, or expel. From cruising methodologies to acts of extremity and endurance, the panel reflects on how trans and queer performance troubles received accounts of memory and embodiment, negotiating power, presence, and the ethics of taking up space.

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Host or Publisher TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities