ATDS at ATHE 2026

AFTER COLLABORATION: IMAGINATION BEYOND CONSENSUS

The call for ATHE 2026 in Baltimore, MD, prompts us to activate imagination in and with community; who are we engaging, how do we safely and effectively collaborate, and what are the limits of our cooperation? How do we create, mentor, teach, build, and dream when “community” itself is a fragile or even impossible site of belonging? Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies often position collaboration as an idealized act of democratic virtue — a promise, or a dream, or possibly an act of faith that shared labor produces a shared sense of purpose. Yet the past several years make clear that any such faith is strained to the breaking point: coarse public discourse, increasingly normalized violence against marginalized communities, and deep ideological divisions born from a hyper-partisan media challenge our ability to teach and create works that address or overcome political repression and institutional instability. What lies after collaboration—after faith in shared ground collapses? 

Proposals might address: 

• Ways of collaborating when care cannot be assumed and/or ethically sharing labor in creative or scholastic practices when that labor demands unequal risk; 

• Distinguishing between collaboration and complicity in higher education institutions, performance spaces, and organizations that demand civility over justice; 

• Negotiating the tensions between control, accountability, and repair amidst an industry insistence to “stay in the room,” even when the room itself (people or institution) enacts harm;

• Historical or contemporary case studies of fractured artistic partnerships, collectives, or institutions that worked together through difference;

• Practicing self-advocacy when distributive authorship covers over extractive or harmful practices, or when rhetorics of cooperation mask radical asymmetries of power; 

• Refusal, silence, or non-cooperation as generative forms of dramaturgical or political agency;

• New ways of collaborating and organizing that emerge as a result of conflict, failed collaborations, and crisis;

• The role of imagination in survival—how to generate and then sustain creative and intellectual work amid conflict.

In the spirit of building better communities and collaboration in our fields, ATDS enthusiastically welcomes creative approaches to submissions for panels, roundtables, performance-based presentations, and interactive workshops. This year, we are particularly eager to collaborate with other Focus Groups, and we encourage you to imagine, dream, and create across organizational divisions in ATHE.

Submission Guidelines: The Pheedloop submission portal for the 2026 Summer Conference will open on November 3, 2025. For consideration, please submit a short abstract of 250-300 words and the personal information requested in the ATHE portal by December 12, 2025 (11:59 p.m. Eastern). As in recent years, ATHE will hold a second round of submissions (due March 9, 2026) for additional participants to accepted sessions. The submission portal will be available through ATHE’s website. For a complete timeline of this year’s conference submission activities, please visit ATHE 2026’s Important Deadlines page and the Conference FAQs page. If you have questions, please contact co-conference planners Samuel Yates and Victoria LaFave at conference1@atds.org.