CALL FOR PROPOSALS: European Journal of Theatre and Performance (EJTP)

Behind the Scenes: Higher Education and Pedagogy in Dance, Theatre, and Performance across Europe

Guest editors: Annelies Van Assche, Hanna Järvinen, and Timmy De Laet

Proposal Deadline: 1 December 2026

Download the full CFP Here

Higher Education occupies a crucial yet often overlooked position in the ecosystem of professionalised contemporary dance, theatre, and performance. Beyond technical and creative skills, it is in art schools, conservatoires, academies, universities, and other types of training institutions that artists learn the histories and philosophies of their art forms, engage with pedagogies of practice and theory, and develop capacities for collaboration and leadership. However, how institutions convey particular understandings of the body, authorship, discipline, or professional conduct to future artists, and which aesthetic values or traditions are prioritised in embodied, theoretical, and practical knowledges in the performing arts, remain insufficiently scrutinised in research.

This special issue invites behind-the-scenes investigations into these dimensions of Higher Education. What is the ‘backstage’ of an educational institution or pedagogical practice? What are the methods, assumptions, values, relationships, infrastructures, and power relations that underpin pedagogical encounters? How are equality and equity norms around gender, class, ability, or racialisation visible in what is regarded as pertinent, novel, or interesting enough to be included in curricula and syllabi? What exactly takes place in an audition process, a technique class, a studio rehearsal, a feedback session, a staff meeting, an assessment process, or at graduation? These aspects may appear peripheral to professional artistic practice, but Higher Education is an important gatekeeper for the field. Therefore, it is crucial to ask what kinds of artistic practices are legitimised, and what kinds of bodies, identities, behaviours, and knowledges are valued or transmitted in education? Decisions about student selection, curriculum design, syllabi, and assessment procedures shape who is able to enter the profession, whose artistic work is recognised, and who may become a role-model for future generations.

While specific pedagogical approaches have received considerable scholarly attention, this issue shifts the emphasis towards the foundations of Higher Education in dance, theatre, and performance: institutional conditions, power relations, organisational cultures, and historical structures through which pedagogies and values are decided upon. Recent scholarship has begun to explore these underlying dimensions from a range of perspectives, including studentcentred learning, care-oriented pedagogies, practices of leadership, implicit norms, and learning beyond the formal curriculum (e.g. Longley and Kensington-Miller 2020; Husby and Reppen 2025; Marinus and Van Assche 2025; Husby 2026; Rothmund 2026). Particular attention has been given to matters of inclusion, representation, and decolonial approaches (e.g. Daly 2022; Stamatiou 2022; McCarthy-Brown and Schupp 2023; Barr and Oliver 2025). Other studies have also examined the relationship between institutions and creative industries as future employers, the development of students as critically reflective and theoretically informed practitioners, as well as the methodological and ethical dimensions of the classroom as a situated cultural site (e.g. Leijen et al. 2008; Dryburgh 2022; McNamara 2022). While these studies offer important conceptual and methodological tools, much of this work emerges from Anglophone contexts, whereas the institutional histories, educational systems, and policy frameworks of Higher Education vary considerably within Europe, especially across diverse languages. We seek to address this epistemic imbalance in international scholarship by bringing into dialogue research on professional dance, theatre, and performance education published in languages other than English (e.g. Schellow 2021; Germain-Thomas and Vellet 2022; Casale 2023; Christe 2023).