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Performance Philosophy runs a biennial conference and encourages and supports interim events organised by members and working groups. PP conferences seek to break the frame and are interdisciplinary, inclusive, and seek to provide a platform of dialogue and interaction between researchers and practitioners.


Biennial Conferences 

Performance Philosophy biennials are large scale events open to all members, hosted in a different country, every two years.

Hosts are selected by core conveners through an open call. The next call for proposals from prospective hosts of PP2023 will be released in January 2021.

Biennial hosts are invited to edit a special issue of the Performance Philosophy journal following the event. The issue from PP2019 in Amsterdam is open access, online here.

The next Biennial Conference will take place in Austin from May 16-20, 2024. The theme is After Tragedy. It will take place on the campus of the University of Texas, Austin. You can find the CFP for the conference here.

Past Biennials

Amsterdam 2019: Between Institution and Intoxication: How does Performance Philosophy Intervene?

Prague 2017: How does Performance Philosophy Act? Ethos, Ethics, Ethnography

Chicago 2015: What can Performance Philosophy Do?

Surrey 2013: What is Performance Philosophy? Staging a New Field.

Interim Events

Interim Events are smaller scale events hosted by members of Performance Philosophy between the biennials.

Individual members or Working Groups can apply to run an event “in association with Performance Philosophy”, to use the network logo and to receive advice and support with the organisation from core conveners. Performance Philosophy can help to circulate calls for proposals and promote events to the community. Please contact us to help you organise your interim event.

When possible, Performance Philosophy runs seed-funding competitions for interim events. Details are announced on this site.

Selected Past Interim Events

  • Filosofia-Performance: Performando a filosofia ou filosofando a performance?” (Performance Philosophy: performing Philosophy or philosophizing Performance?) in Ouro Preto, Brazil (October 29, 2019). Organised by Luciana da Costa Dias during the Performing Arts Graduate Programme Research Week at Federal University of Ouro Preto. The workshop explores different conceptualisations of the body in the Western philosophical tradition from Greek (pre and post Platonic), and modern (Descartes) to contemporary (phenomenology, Artaud and Deleuze).

  • Playing with Virtual Realities in Berlin, Germany (January 18-19, 2018). Organizers: Einav Katan-Schmid and Christian Stein. Explores VR technology and embodied practices of gaming and dancing enact and design imagination and perceptual experience.
  • Performance Philosophy School of Athens II, a collaboration between the PP Network and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece (September 23-24, 2017). Organizers: Stella Dimitrakopolou and Stefanie Mylona. Focus on new development in dance performance and the intertwining of dance and the visual arts.
  • Pragmatics : Practice : Praxis (July 13 -16, 2017). Organizers: Erin Brannigan, Oliver Feltham, Barbara Formis, and Theron Schmidt. A three-day workshop that brings together artists and researchers from Europe and Australia. Its aim is double: first to explore how different forms of practice are deployed and given value in the fields in which we work; second to create space for cross-fertilization and experimentation by sharing, transferring and then implementing researchers’ established methods and tools, thus producing new hybrid models of practice. 
  • Repetition/s: performance/philosophy in Ljubljana, Slovenia (September 15-17, 2016). Organizers: Ben Hjorth, Gregor Moder, Bara Kolenc, Anna Street. A poly-disciplinary event at the University of Ljubljana bringing together scholars and artists to explore the concept of repetition and its crucial importance across these fields.
  • “Getting Bread” – One Day Workshop for Philosophy as Performance in Hanover, Germany (July 30, 2016). Organizer: Rüdiger H. Rimpler. The idea: The Workshop “Getting Bread” tries to find out if the concept of Philosophy as Performance proves itself in everyday life situations. Thus, the workshop works as a kind of case study in philosophical investigations respectively artistic research. Following the idea that “doing philosophy” is linked with embodied experiences and affective meanings of our thoughts, the workshop is open to non-philosophers and professional philosophers.
  • Kiskadee in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago (March 2016). Organizers: Andree Bagoo, Vahni Capildeo. This event takes off from Nietzsche’s idea of the central place of dance as a prism through which to question freedom and its limits in contemporary Trinidad, a country where anti-homosexuality laws and the Board of Censors are perhaps as much in force as the more visible powers emblematized by the creativity of Carnival.
  • Contemporaneities. The Entangled Now of Performance in Ghent, Belgium (March 5, 2016). Organizers: Frederik Le Roy and Christel Stalpaert. Together with philosophers, performance practitioners and performance theories we want to investigate how what philosophical, temporal and historical notions underpin the ‘contemporaneity’ of contemporary performance and understand how performance negotiates, critiques and transforms these notions? This is event is fundamentally invested in thinking the relation between performance and philosophy, specifically the philosophy of time and history as it pertains to the notion of the contemporary.
  • Thinking Through Tragedy and Comedy. A Symposium on Performance Philosophy and the Future of Genre, Berlin, Germany (December 4-5, 2014). Organizers: Maité Marciano, Ramona Mosse, and Anna Street. Reconceives how genre interacts and shapes performance and philosophy.
  • Beirut: Bodies in Public in Beirut, Lebanon (October 9-11, 2014). Organizers: Ella Parry, Davies Eliesh Sahyoun. Aims to explore the relation between performance, philosophy and public space.
  • Know thyself: NO PAPER Conference in Prague, Czech Republic (September 19 – 21, 2014). Organizer: Alice Koubová. Focusses on participants coming from philosophy, engaging in “public thinking” rather than prepared papers.
  • Theater, Performance, Philosophy Conference at the Sorbonne, Paris, France (June 26-28, 2014). Organizers: Anna Street, Flore Garcin-Marrou, Liza Kharoubi. Explores the relationship between French and Anglophone philosophy and theatre while introducing the new field of performance philosophy to France.
  • Mad Theory: A Performance Philosophy Symposium in Madison, Wisconsin, USA (April 12, 2014). Organizer: Madison Performance Philosophy Collective. From an audio/noise performance theorizing queer stammers and the glitch to a relational, food-based aesthetic gesture; from a trans-digital methodology of the handmade to a performative investigation of race in visual culture; from experimental theory videos to collaborative digital poetics; from philosophy of body modification to exploration of library literacy programs, MAD THEORY features a stunning range of interdisciplinary work!
  • Making Sense of (Performance) Philosophy in Athens, Greece (March 14, 2014). Organizer: Stefania Mylona. Introduces PP to Greece and investigates alternative modes of learning about (and through) performance philosophy such as sensing theories.
  • Performance Philosophy: The Young in Groningen, the Netherlands (February 7-8, 2014). Organizers: Konstantina Georgelou, Efrosini Protopapa, and Danae Theodoridou. An interdisciplinary exchange on performance philosophy between groups of postgraduate students, focussing on the social production of ideas.
  • State of Encounter in Arequipa City, Peru (Februar 4-9, 2014). Organizers: Christian Frias, Monica Vergara, and Nancy Carpi. Workshop exploring practice-based audience participation in “thought” released via performance.