The Tea Collaborative presented their paper titled ‘Brewing the City: Performances & Practices of The Tea Collaborative’, at the 8th International Thaap Conference 2017, The City: An Evolving Organism. 

The paper explores the practise and ideas of the Collaborative, the focus, of course, being the city and the events that build it’s history.

“The tea performances create a visual anomaly in the fabric of everyday public space. It builds a dialogue between the unsuspecting audience and the performers. The mundane activity of drinking tea is elevated to the status of a sacramental ritual and a metaphor for the political and the social… The purpose of the episodes is not the production of a mere visual, but a substantial conversation on the basis of creative experimentation. Working on a referential system that takes information from past events or history to derive the layout for the Tea happening in a specific site, develops a temporal space that make up reality (in that moment). The tea party is an on-going exploration of public spaces, identity conflicts, and exploration of performance art as an investigatory tool”.