2026 EASTAP Annual Conference
We are delighted to announce the EASTAP Annual Conference 2026, hosted by University of Groeningen, under the theme Waiting for the Barbarians.
The 2026 EASTAP conference is organized in parallel with Guy Weizman’s staging of Philip Glass’s opera Waiting for the Barbarians (Nederlandse Reisopera), to premiere on 26 September 2026 at SPOT Groningen.
Taking its title from the production of Glass’s opera, EASTAP conference explores the dramaturgical, philosophical, and political configurations of waiting in theatre and performance. The opera itself adapts J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name, itself a reimagining of C.P. Cavafy’s 1904 poem, tracing a genealogy of waiting across literary and theatrical forms. The conference invites contributions that examine how waiting, understood both as a thematic concern and affective condition, operates within theatre and across socio-aesthetic, intermedial, and intertextual engagements with novel, poetry, and opera.
Waiting provides a dramaturgical mechanism that structures theatrical time around the expectations and anticipations of characters and audiences, and the interplay between them. In (high) modernist and postdramatic theatre, the suspense gives way to suspension, rooted in repetition, cyclical patterns, and stagnation. This suspension disrupts the teleology of plot-driven drama and its progression towards a resolution, turning the performance into a metatheatrical self-reflective apparatus. From Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Gao Xingjian’s The Bus Stop, waiting transforms duration into tension around the imminent arrival, perpetually anticipated yet continuously deferred or absent; an acute sense or perhaps even a ‘structure of feeling’ that speaks to the present socio-political condition, both locally and globally.
When the awaited figure is imagined as the barbarian, as in Cavafy, Coetzee, and Glass, waiting acquires a political inflection. The discourse of barbarism and civilization has long structured artistic and cultural imaginaries, shaping perceptions of Self and Other, empire and subject, citizen and invader, oppressor and oppressed. This opposition can be traced to Greek theatre, where tragic narratives constructed the “barbarian” as the negative mirror-image of Greek civic values. But the “barbarian” has long circulated within Western artistic discourses not only as a construct of the Other, but also as a means to define the radical Self. The Futurists famously self-proclaimed as barbarians (‘Ebbene, sì, siamo barbari!’, Marinetti 1914), while the Surrealists declared, ‘There is no doubt that we are barbarians, because a certain kind of civilization disgusts us’ (‘La Révolution surréaliste’, 1925). Such statements, characteristic of the historical avant-garde’s construction of the primitive as an antithesis to dominant cultural and social paradigms, nevertheless reinforce the binary between civilization and barbarism.
Taking account of these discourses and their artistic articulations, the conference seeks to explore how the image of the barbarian mobilizes collective imagination, memory, and action. The anticipated barbarian elicits responses ranging from feelings of powerlessness and inaction to engagement with rhetoric of conflict and war. Waiting for the barbarian, therefore, enacts a dramaturgy of social and political imaginaries that is anything but passive. It compels us to give reckoning to the injurious and transformative power of naming and representing within the institutions that define a civilization, while recognizing the barbarian within the Self.
EASTAP 2026 invites scholarly and artistic debate on ‘waiting for the barbarian’ as a generative temporal and imaginative framework that produces new forms of identification, collective being, and political life.