23-26 September 2026

De Kunstwerf, Groningen

The Netherlands

IX EASTAP Conference

The 9th EASTAP conference of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance is hosted by the University of Groningen in collaboration with NITE / Club Guy & Roni and many more cultural partners from the region.

The conference is organized in parallel with Guy Weizman’s staging of Philip Glass’s opera Waiting for the Barbarians (Nederlandse Reisopera) to premiere at SPOT Groningen, and includes a theatre programme of Dutch talent at the Grand Theatre. It will showcase the infrastructure and ways of working in the theatres of Groningen and the North.

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 includes talks and performances 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.