Can we imagine performance that does not become performance management?
We live in a time in which the demand to perform has become increasingly pervasive. Performance no longer refers only to what happens on stage: it also names a broader social logic in which people are expected to remain visible, productive, adaptable, self-managing, and continuously available for evaluation.
This double meaning of performance is central to our question. In the performing arts, we produce performances; at the same time, artists, teachers, students, cultural workers, and institutions are themselves required to perform – in funding applications, evaluations, rehearsals, classrooms, digital environments, and professional networks. Artistic practice thus becomes entangled with wider regimes of productivity, self-optimization, competition, and accountability.
Creativity can be translated into productivity, responsibility into self-management, and presence into measurable output. The question of sustainability therefore concerns not only how performance is produced, but also what kinds of subjects, institutions, working relations, and forms of life this demand for performance produces and sustains. Can we imagine alternatives?
Sustainability can hardly mean just a greener production, however necessary it is vis-à-vis the climate crisis. We must also ask who is being sustained, by whom, for what purpose, and at what cost. Whose bodies are expected to remain available despite exhaustion, illness, care responsibilities, or the need for rest? Which materials are discarded because labour is cheaper than repair? Which institutions survive by exhausting the people who keep them alive? Which artistic processes reproduce the very regimes of extraction they claim to critique?
The pressure to perform is also a pressure to produce the new – and to claim it as one’s own. Contemporary artistic production often ties authorship to originality, individual responsibility, and ownership, even though artistic work is always shaped by shared practices, inherited forms, material conditions, and collective labour. What would sustainability mean if we loosened this demand for constant novelty? Could repetition, adaptation, reconstruction, reuse, quotation, and collective ownership become artistic strategies rather than signs of creative failure? And how might copyright, institutional expectations, and established ideas of authorship enable – or obstruct – such practices? Can we imagine authorship not primarily as possession, but as relation, transmission, shared responsibility, and the ability to continue, transform, or let go?
Theatre Conference JAMU 2027 invites artists, researchers, students, and all those who think through performance to explore sustainability of performing arts as a political, ethical, material, human, and spiritual question. We want to ask what can be reused / repaired / upcycled / slowed down / shared / or finally let go.
Together with you, we will try to create a space for the mutual exchange of knowledge, know-how, and doubts.
18–19 February 2027
Divadlo na Orlí
Brno, Czech Republic
We invite proposals in the following formats:
Please send your proposal via the application form for Speakers by 2 December 2026.
You can also join the conference as a Community member: part of a close group of practitioners who will accompany, reflect upon, and creatively respond to the conference programme. Guided by a facilitator, Community members will have the opportunity to develop artistic responses to both the conference themes and to what unfolds during the event itself — its discussions, encounters, tensions, questions, and shared experiences. These responses may take different forms and will be created directly on site, allowing the Community to become an active reflective layer of the conference rather than simply an audience.
Community members will meet online before the conference to get to know one another, discuss possible approaches, and prepare for the shared process. They will then work together in person throughout the event. Please send your letter of motivation by 10 January 2027.
Visitors are welcome to join the conference as audience members and participate in discussions, workshops, and masterclasses.
