Contemporary Theatre Review currently has three calls open for Special Issues.

All queries and abstracts should be sent directly to the guest editors. Please find further information for both special issues at the bottom of this page.

Feminist Legacies & Gendered Theatre-making in the north of Ireland

Guest Editors:
Dr Shonagh Hill (Queen’s University Belfast)
Dr Ciara L. Murphy (TU Dublin)
Dr Trish McTighe (Queen’s University Belfast)

We invite submissions to a proposed special issue of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review looking at gendered theatre-making in Ireland’s north. Women’s voices in Northern Ireland have often been stifled by socially conservative, religiously motivated ideologies, yet theatre has proven to be a vital space of expression. This special issue sets out to investigate the presence and possibility of a tradition of gendered theatre-making in the region and is keen to explore unexamined or under-examined work across a range of theatre and performance practices including women’s theatre-making and writing, queer theatre and performance work, as well as gendered contributions to the theatre industry and culture more broadly since the early 1980s. Women have been, and continue to be, a vital component of the theatre ecology in Northern Ireland and therefore their role warrants closer scholarly engagement. In scholarship on women’s theatre making on the island of Ireland, a great deal of attention has been paid to work in the Republic with notable exceptions including Imelda Foley’s The Girls in the Big Picture: Gender in Contemporary Ulster Theatre (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003) and Fiona Coleman Coffey’s Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012 (New York: Syracuse Press, 2016). Although Coleman Coffey and Foley have expanded knowledge in this area greatly, more research is needed. The work by women emerging from the northern context deserves both documentation and critical analysis to ensure that women’s theatre-making in the region is situated appropriately both within its context as well as within the wider framework of feminist theatre-making across the island of Ireland and UK.

We are at a moment of increased awareness of the neglect of women’s contributions to theatre and thus the need to improve the visibility of women theatre makers. The #WakingTheFeminists campaign was launched in Nov 2015 to highlight the marginalisation of women in Ireland’s theatre history. This was a response to the Abbey Theatre’s (Ireland’s National Theatre) ‘Waking the Nation’ programme: 90% of the plays were male-authored. One element of the grassroots campaign was the publication of a report into the sector’s gender equality: Gender Counts (2017).  WakingTheFeminists NI published their first report in 2021: ‘The Headcount’: A survey on the gender breakdown of eight Arts Council of Northern Ireland core-funded theatre companies, 2014-2019 [https://doi.org/10.17034/bcf2-6828]. However, the stark findings have not led to the sweeping changes that have been implemented in the theatre sector in the Republic of Ireland. The changes implemented in the South are reflected on in a follow-up report, 5 Years On: Gender in Irish Theatre – An Interim View (2020). In contrast, Maggie Cronin notes that ‘our research work in the North has been conducted at a much slower pace’ (5, Headcount). Different historical and current socio-political contexts, as well as very different funding landscapes, are at play in the differing responses to WTF both sides of the border. In the South, the grassroots campaign came in the wake of two progressive referendum results on marriage equality and reproductive justice.

This special issue endeavours to address frameworks for understanding women’s theatrical traditions in a Northern Irish context. We invite submissions that place an emphasis on tracing influences and networks between generations of artists in Northern Ireland as well as examining work within its context thereby contributing to the work of assembling something that might be seen as a tradition. The issue’s engagement with the work of contemporary theatre makers seeks to critically engage with Charabanc as forerunner, and as role model for many theatre-makers who emerged in their wake. The all-women company was founded in 1983 and was the first independent company in the northern theatre landscape. In a recent interview, Brenda Winter-Palmer describes the company’s influence and highlights what has not changed in the intervening decades: ‘Basically, it was do it for yourself or you’ll not do it. And I think, having taught so many young women here and watched them go out and have to do what we had to do is in many ways disconcerting. It’s better, it is better in that we now know that we can do those things, and I suppose Charabanc was inspirational in terms of showing that that could be done.’ (Women Theatremakers in Northern Ireland podcast) We are seeking contributions, therefore, addressing the work of contemporary theatre-makers who have followed in Charabanc’s footsteps and endeavoured to make theatre on their own terms. We welcome proposals that address gendered theatre-making in the north from the 1980s onwards that might consider (though are not limited to) the following, for example:

• Charabanc Theatre Company’s work/legacy
• Gendered theatre making in the north of Ireland
• Feminist performance legacies and lineages of practice
• Representations of women’s experience in post-conflict performance practice
• Women theatre makers’ historiographies
• Queer performance practice in the north of Ireland
• Archive as a method of performance retrieval
• Politics of performance practice in the north of Ireland

While much of the work of this issue will likely focus on women’s theatre-making, we encourage intersectional thinking that is conscious of class and race and the expansive gender landscape that is emerging around us. We use the terms ‘woman’ and ‘women’s theatre-making’ with the intention of inclusion rather than exclusion. We are curious about the past legacies of women’s theatre-making even as we write from within the frameworks of the complexities of the gendered present. In mapping women’s relative exclusion from theatre-making and the theatre industry in the North, we seek to continually engage with ‘woman’ as a category produced within certain cultural and economic contexts, rather than as a biological determinant. We recognise that ‘women’ are not a homogenous group but one marked by and intersecting with multiple different identities and pressures – class, race, disability and so forth. To this end, our endeavours are underpinned by Sara Ahmed’s suggestion to avoid getting too comfortable within feminism: “To avoid such a politics, we may need to stay uncomfortable within feminism, even when we feel it provides us with a home. This discomfort […] means ‘not sinking’ into the spaces in which we live and work, and it means always questioning our own investments.” (178, The Cultural Politics of Emotion). The frameworks of analyses that our special issue engages are ones that are attentive to the troubling of gender categories in the wake of queer theory as well as complexities of gender within the field we address, in addition to its aforementioned intersectional aspects.

In proposing this special issue, we seek to respond to the urgent demand that gendered labours in the theatre (and beyond) not be absented from the historical record but are, rather, given their due under a critical lens, and we look forward to reading proposals that share and respond to these concerns.

The timeline for submissions is as follows:

Abstracts submitted by 1 Feb 2025

Articles submitted by 1 September 2025

To submit an abstract or if you would like further information, please contact the editorial team and copy all members:

Dr Shonagh Hill, [email protected]
Dr Ciara L. Murphy, [email protected]
Dr Trish McTighe, [email protected]

In-yer-Ear: Performing in the Headphone era

Guest Editors:
Maria Ristani (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Sotirios Bampatzimopoulos (Ankara University)

In recent years, private listening devices – headphones, earphones, or earbuds – have become an essential component of contemporary performance, evolving into what critic Matt Trueman (2009) calls a ‘must-have theatre accessory’. Writing in the Guardian over a decade ago, Trueman expresses his astonishment at the increasing prevalence of theatrical experiences that deliver information and instructions to participants via headphones. Headphone-mediated performance has produced new modes of spectatorship – or perhaps listenership – while simultaneously disrupting conventional structures of ‘theatre-proper’. This is, perhaps, no surprise given ‘the postWalkman normalisation of headphone use’ (Roquet 2021) as well as our wider audiophile culture of highly advanced listening technologies, of portable music players and smartphones, of streaming platforms and personalized music curation, or of increased need for friction-free, noise-clean isolation and comfort.

In-yer-ear theatre makes, at least at first glance, an uneasy coupling; this is in light of the privatized, bubble-like logics that we inevitably correlate with headphone modes. Jason Farman refers to headphones as ‘[o]ne of the most ubiquitous mobile media that accomplishes this “distancing through-proxemic”’ effect, enveloping listeners in what he reads as sealed-off, privately controlled ‘cocoons’ (2012). Ross Brown describes headphone listening as an experience of hearing through and within the ‘acoustic blanket’ of the ear/headphone device – one that brackets off the ‘exterior world of the here and now’, closing in on ‘the personal space of individual audience member, even into the “intracranial” sonic space between the ears’ (2016). This is a shift from listening to the wider environment to an experience of listening in: ‘in’ as immune to referents of surroundings, ‘in’ as immersed in a private auditory space.

That said, the connection with live, communal theatre may seem incongruous. Yet this seemingly uneasy pairing has given rise to remarkably creative works in recent years by artists and collectives such as Simon McBurney and Complicite, the British-Swedish artist duo Lundahl & Seitl, Darkfield (David Rosenberg and Glen Neath), Rimini Protokol, Slung Low, Ant Hampton, and Tim Etchells. This special issue seeks to zoom in on such practices – not to impose a rigid genre classification, but to document and critically examine how performative encounters with headphone culture challenge or re-imagine the possibilities of performance experience.

In this context, we are seeking contributions that explore the artistic, technological, and cultural significance of headphone-mediated performance over recent years. This special issue welcomes contributions that engage headphone-mediated performance across diverse cultural spaces that foster broader dialogues orbiting around several key questions: What are the working logics of headphone-mediated performances? How do they negotiate conventional emphases on the liveness, presence, or communal experience of performance? How do they restructure and mobilize performance experience, and how do they work with performance space or with audience engagement and perception? To what extent does ‘in-yer-ear’ theatre draw from and embrace the specificity of its medium? In other words, how does it harness the enclosed nature of its wired listening to envision new futures for expanded stages and “liveness-plus” performance? How do the private stages of headphone listening reflect contemporary emphases on individual experience or reproduce algorithmic echo-chamber logics? In what ways do they engage with neoliberal ethics and the cult of individualism? To what extent do they position headphones as cultural references, fashion statements, or commodities within consumer culture?

Contributions might approach questions including but by no means limited to:

• Historical antecedents of headphone-mediated performance including headphone verbatim
• Intersections with current audio culture (or more specifically with podcasting, ASMR, and other headphone-based media forms)
• Possible future directions of headphone-based theatre
• Space and place in walking-based headphone theatre or audio/video tours
• Role and influence of personal audio technologies in theatre practice (from design to performance)
• Headphone-based theatre and audience experience
• Audience and/as performers in headphone performances
• Digital listening and embodied perception
• Wired spectatorship, digital bubbles, current algorithmic culture
• Inclusion and Accessibility in headphone-based performances
• Aesthetic and narrative elements of headphone-based theatre
• The politics of headphone-based theatre
• Role of headphone theatre in intimate or one-to-one performance
• Digital theatre listening as/and eco-minded practice
• Questions of liveness in headphone-mediated theatre

The issue welcomes research articles (6-10,000 words) as well as a range of other types of submissions, including, but not limited to, artistic reflections/interventions, interviews or manifestos (3-6,000 words) that align with the theme.

If interested, please submit 300-word proposals by Tuesday 15 July 2025 to the guest editors: [email protected] and [email protected].

If successful, full articles will be due in April 2026.

Theatre in Unexpected Places

Editors:
Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco (University of the Philippines Diliman)
Stephen Greer (University of Glasgow)

This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review will examine current practices outside the traditional confines of stages and auditoriums. From digital platforms and augmented reality to community-centred practices and performances in urban, rural, and liminal spaces, theatre is finding new homes and audiences. We invite contributors to reflect on the diverse ways theatre emerges in unexpected places, interrogating what it means for the form, the audience, and the broader cultural landscape. How do these unconventional sites shape theatre’s aesthetics, politics, and accessibility? How might they invite us to revisit or revise our understandings of site-specific or site-sensitive practice? What new stories, communities, and sensibilities are enabled when performance moves beyond the stage?

 Possible areas of focus include (but are not limited to):

• Theatre in streets, parks, or reclaimed urban spaces, and its impact on community engagement, political activism, and public discourse.
• Theatre in political and judicial spaces, including performances staged in courthouses, parliamentary buildings, or protest sites, and their role in shaping legal narratives, civic engagement, and public discourse.
• Performance in forests, on beaches, or in wilderness areas that respond to and interact with ecological concerns.
• Travelling performances, roving ensembles, and site-responsive works that are rooted in mobility or migration.
• Theatre as a participatory act within communities, including immersive, interactive, or therapeutic engagements.
• Theatre in virtual and digital spaces, including livestreams, VR/AR performances, social media experiments, and hybrid practices.
• Theatre in refugee camps, conflict zones, or other areas of humanitarian response.

We welcome contributions in a variety of forms, including:

• Essays
• Practice-based reflections
• Provocations (short, critical challenges to existing ideas or norms)
• Manifestoes (articulations of new visions for theatre in unexpected places)

Submissions can range from concise interventions to more developed explorations, with a word limit of 1,000–3,000 words. This shorter format is intended to enable the inclusion of a wide range of contributions in the issue, including ‘rapid response’ engagement with current developments.

Contributors are asked to provide an Abstract of their proposed contribution (300 words) and a short Author bio (150 words) by 1 May 2025.

First drafts of accepted contributions will be due 1 November 2025.

Submissions and inquiries can be directed to Sir Anril Tiatco [email protected] and Stephen Greer [email protected].