Jacob Kingsbury Downs tells us about the new series of events beginning MT 2025: Trans & Queer Voices In Performance Research.
This year, the University of Oxford’s TORCH Performance Research Hub launches a new series of study days exploring trans and queer voices in performance and performance research. Co-chaired by myself and Jacob Mallinson Bird and supported by TORCH, the Ruskin School of Art and the Faculty of Music, the series brings together artists, scholars, performers, and activists to think about what it means to speak, write, and perform in trans and queer ways—from experimental theatre that reimagines gender narratives to vocal performances that challenge conventional ideas of identity and expression.
The series emerges in a moment of increasing hostility towards queer and trans communities, when spaces for creative and critical gathering feel especially urgent. It responds by turning to performance not only as a form of expression but as a method of world-making—a way to imagine and inhabit other social and political possibilities. Across its events, the series asks how trans and queer practices rework histories, create alternative communities, and make space for new ways of living together.
Each study day approaches these questions through a different lens. Early sessions explore queer poetics and theatrical writing as acts of survival and reinvention, alongside fiction and storytelling as tools for reclaiming and distorting official histories. The series considers how fabulation—the creative act of making new myths and narratives—has been harnessed by trans and queer artists to challenge dominant cultural stories.
Later events turn to the voice as both material and metaphor, examining how trans vocality exceeds the boundaries of the self, and to the body as archive, asking what kinds of memory, presence, and endurance are performed through trans and queer embodiment. The final workshop focuses on publishing, documentation, and reading as collective practices: ways of extending performance into networks of care, visibility, and shared possibility.
At its heart, the series is an invitation to consider performance as a form of thinking—a way of working through the frictions that animate trans and queer work: visibility and opacity, vulnerability and resistance, exhaustion and flourishing.
The first study day takes place on 24 November 2025 at the Ruskin School of Art, followed by events in January and March 2026. The events are free and open to all, though registration is required. Watch this space to find booking details for the 2026 events.
Supported by the Performance Research Hub.
