IMPAC2025
7th INTERNATIONAL MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS CONFERENCE (IMPAC2025)
|| THEME ||
The Future of Performing Arts: Reimagining Boundaries
25-27 November 2025
8:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. (Malaysia Time)
Mode: Online
Host: Faculty of Music and Performing Arts
Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris
35900 Tanjong Malim, Perak, Malaysia
IMPAC2025
Overview And Experience
We are pleased to announce the 7th International Music and Performing Arts Conference (IMPAC2025), which will be held virtually on 25 - 27 November 2025.
Organised by the Faculty of Music and Performing Arts at Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (Sultan Idris Education University), IMPAC2025 will explore the theme The Future of Performing Arts: Adapting to Changing Landscapes.
We invite established and emerging scholars, artists, and practitioners to submit their work on any topic related to the conference theme. Presenters can choose to deliver a full 20-minute paper or a 10-minute lightning paper.
All accepted papers will be included in IMPAC2025’s e-Proceedings. Additionally, the Editorial Committee will select the best papers for potential publication in either the Scopus-indexed Malaysian Journal of Music or Jurai Sembah, a performing arts journal. Authors also have the option to submit their manuscripts to other journals published by Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris.
Please find below the key details for submitting your abstract and registering for IMPAC2025. For more information, visit our website at impac.upsi.edu.my
CONFERENCE SUBTHEMES
Repositioning Tradition: Innovation and Reinterpretation in Performance
This subtheme invites discussions that explore how traditional performance practices are being reimagined to meet the demands of contemporary artistic contexts. Participants are encouraged to examine choreographic, musical, and dramaturgical strategies that reinterpret inherited forms while navigating cultural authenticity, creative agency, and socio-political relevance. Papers may address issues such as interculturalism, revitalisation, reconstruction, and the ethics of innovation in performance grounded in traditional frameworks.
Digital Ecologies and the Technological Mediation of Performance
This stream focuses on the intersection between technology and the performing arts, highlighting how digital platforms, AI-generated content, XR (extended reality), and virtual performance spaces are reshaping creation, dissemination, and reception. Presentations may analyse digital scenography, algorithmic composition, immersive performance, audience interactivity, or the changing dynamics of performer-audience relationships in technologically mediated environments.
Performing Resistance: Decolonial Praxis and Embodied Counter-Narratives
This subtheme centres on performance as a mode of resistance and a tool for articulating counter-narratives to dominant cultural and academic paradigms. We welcome contributions that interrogate colonial legacies in aesthetics, training, and institutional structures, and that foreground indigenous knowledge systems, minoritarian voices, and embodied decolonial strategies. Topics may include critical race performance, activist performance, queer and feminist interventions, and cultural sovereignty in the arts.
Pedagogies of the Future: Transdisciplinary Approaches in Arts Education
Focusing on innovative pedagogical frameworks, this subtheme explores the future of teaching and learning in the performing arts. It encourages papers that investigate transdisciplinary approaches that integrate theory and practice, digital literacy, community engagement, and interprofessional collaboration. Reflections on curriculum reform, student-centred learning, inclusive methodologies, and cross-cultural pedagogy are particularly welcome.
Performance, Memory, and Cultural Sustainability in Times of Crisis
This stream invites investigations into how performance functions as a repository of collective memory and a tool for sustaining cultural identity, particularly in contexts of disruption such as pandemics, environmental crises, war, or displacement. We seek contributions that examine ritual, oral history, reenactment, intergenerational transmission, and performance-based archives, considering how the arts play a role in healing, resilience, and the negotiation of continuity during uncertain times.