91福利

Mai Al-Battat

Spatial Geographies that Defy Erasure: Infrastructures of Violence, Memory, and the Politics of Imagination

At a time of ongoing genocides and a growing interest in imagination and in people鈥檚 right to directly shape their urban realities, this paper examines how militarization operates across both material and imaginative geographies. Drawing on my master鈥檚 thesis, 鈥淢ilitarization of the Everyday: Infrastructures of Violence vs. Collective Imagination,鈥� and ongoing doctoral research, the study explores how radical imagination can serve as a counterpractice—opening spaces for resistance, collective healing, and the envisioning of alternative spatial futures.

Bringing together critical geography, ethnographic fieldwork, and participatory research-by-design approaches, the paper interrogates the entanglement between militarization and everyday life. It situates the Palestinian condition within broader debates on militarized urbanism while foregrounding the constraints imposed on imagination by people under domination. Empirically, it draws on the Takhayali Ein Qiniya project, which mobilized storytelling, photography, and countermapping.

Building on traditions of collective imagination—such as the 鈥淢ystique鈥� of Brazil鈥檚 Landless Workers鈥� Movement (MST) and the Takhayali Ein Qiniya project —the paper argues that radical imagination is not merely an aesthetic act but a political and spatial one—a means to challenge the dominance of mental militarization, reweave disrupted geographies, and cultivate spaces for collective liberation.

Mai Al-Battat is an architect and researcher focusing on radical imagination as a tool for investigating urban spatial politics and practices of resistance. She is currently a PhD fellow at the Universit茅 libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Research Assistant at the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine. She is co-applicant and co-organizer of the Seminar Series "Geographies of Carcerality and the City: From Palestine to Latin America," funded by the Urban Studies Foundation. She worked with UR掳bana studio on 鈥淭akhayali Ein Qiniya鈥� (2018-2025) within the international research project 鈥淯rbanization, Gender and the Global South鈥�. Her research and writing engage questions of imagination and infrastructural violence.

Michele Aaron

Cinema and solidarity: harnessing the 鈥榣iberated spaces鈥� of the student encampments for Gaza through film

In 2024鈥檚 student encampments for Gaza, activists demanded their universities 鈥榙isclose and divest鈥� from supporting Israel鈥檚 genocide. They declared these encampments 鈥榣iberated spaces鈥�, free from Islamophobia, anti-Arab, Anti-Palestinian and wider racism, anti-Semitism and its weaponisation. Standing and living together, Palestinians and Jews undermined the dominant narrative of their polarisation and alongside numerous multi-national students, co-existed and co-resisted. This is not to elide their differences. The activists were religious, non-practising, atheist, anti-religion, anti- or non-Zionist, black, white, queer, straight or homophobic. The Palestinians were Gazan, Syrian or American, the Jews British, European, Arab and/or Israeli, and more. Despite their various biographies, backgrounds, and perspectives, they modelled a co-existence and co-resistance in the service of shared values but one alive to the complexity of diversity. Such genuine models, which navigate rather than ignore the difficulty of power structures, difference and inequities, are vital for the viability of peace and a better future.

This paper considers these models鈥� complexity as the possibility of freedom and asks how the ethical potential of 鈥榝ilm鈥� can be harnessed to capture, conjure and generate it. I draw on 鈥楥inema and Solidarity: Shifting the narrative of Palestinian versus Jew鈥� which, in 2025, produced, and later shared, 4 short films by student activists from Cambridge University鈥檚 encampment and several interviews with student activists there and elsewhere. Film鈥檚 capacity to stir emotions, create empathy and provoke action – film鈥檚 ethical potential – underwrote the study. In this paper, I will discuss its ethical praxis as method and film theoretical framework. I do so to better understand the potential of film to connect all parties involved in its production and especially its reception. Indeed, how might we reimagine film, and the relationships it depends upon, as solidarity?

Michele Aaron is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the 91福利. Publications include the award-winning Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (EUP, 2014) and 鈥楲ove鈥檚 Revival: Film Practice and the Art of Dying鈥� (Film Philosophy, 24.2 2020). Her current research uses film to activate human connection and change attitudes/actions towards the marginalised and misunderstood: the End-of-Life community and pro-Palestinian activists.

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Babatunde Allen BAKARE & Gbenga Emmanuel ADEBOYE

Whose Freedom, Whose Road? Performing Collective Liberation and the Aesthetic of Solidarity in Femi Osofisan鈥檚 Red is the Freedom Road

This study examines Femi Osofisan鈥檚 Red is the Freedom Road as a drama of collective liberation in which freedom is tested not by slogans or heroic display, but by the capacity of ordinary people to build durable solidarity. The problem addressed is that scholarship on the play has largely stressed protest, class struggle, revolutionary ethics, and non-violence, while giving less sustained attention to how the text stages solidarity as an aesthetic principle that organises action, speech, sacrifice, and political purpose. Osofisan鈥檚 play, first published in 1983, has been read as a socially committed drama concerned with inequality, oppression, and change. This study therefore fills that gap by asking whose freedom is being pursued, by whom, and through what communal means. The study is anchored in Hannah Arendt鈥檚 theory of political action in The Human Condition (1958), which conceives freedom as something realised through human interaction within a common space. This framework is appropriate because it shifts emphasis from possession to enactment. Adopting a qualitative method that combines textual analysis with performance study, the research draws on the January 2020 Pit Theatre production at Obafemi Awolowo University and the 3–5 May 2024 University of Ibadan staging by F脿d谩k脿. The study investigates character relations, dialogue, conflict, and stage action to show how the play rejects isolated heroism and presents liberation as a social task. It finds that solidarity in the play is not decorative; it is the means through which political awakening, resistance, and social reconstruction become possible. The study concludes that Osofisan advances a people-centred vision of freedom founded on collective responsibility, making the play valuable to theatre studies, political thought, and public reflection on justice, citizenship, and shared social duty.

Babatunde Allen BAKARE is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Dramatic Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He hails from Ifaki in Ekiti State, Nigeria. He earned a BA (Hons), Certificate in Dramatic Arts and Certificate in Music at Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife between 1996 and 2003. In 2005, he obtained a certificate in British and Irish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He completed his Master of Philosophy in Ibsen Studies at the Centre of Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Norway in 2008. He worked as Producer/Scriptwriter for African Independent Television (AIT) Abuja for over 5 years. He completed a PhD in Drama and Theatre Studies at Stellenbosch University, South Africa in 2018.

Gbenga Emmanuel ADEBOYE is a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His teaching and research focus on Stage Management and Performance Studies, and intercultural performance practices. Adeboye鈥檚 scholarship bridges theory and practice, exploring how traditional African performance forms inform contemporary stage management and production methodologies. He has presented papers at international conferences and published in reputable journals on African theatre, ritual performance, and creative pedagogy. A passionate teacher and theatre practitioner, he continues to promote culturally grounded approaches to performance education and production. Adeboye鈥檚 work contributes significantly to the advancement of African performance scholarship and the global understanding of theatre as a tool for cultural expression and transformation.

Jigisha Bhattacharya

Political Incarceration, Decolonization and Internationalism in 20th Century Indian agit-prop genres

Political incarceration was hailed as the marker of dissidence and revolutionary impetus in a long history of nationalist freedom struggle in the British Indian subcontinent in the 20th century. The British punitive practices, of course, termed all such prisoners as security prisoners, seditious threats, and terrorists to the Empire. However, within the anti-colonial struggle, these prisoners were valorised and hailed for their revolutionary commitment; and they became the nation鈥檚 heroes after Independence under the new nationalist regime. In post-independent India, though, the 鈥減olitical prisoner鈥� figure continued to exist—where communists, secessionists, and other 鈥渆xtremists鈥� were persecuted for being threats to the nation-state. Without a legal-juridical definition, the figure of the political prisoner continued to be a contested category in a tussle between the small voices and large brushstrokes of history, depending on their ideological differences on the questions of nationalism, internationalism, and the real meanings of decolonization as—freedom.

In my paper, I propose to centrally focus on a set of agit-prop genres from before and after 1947 in India to critically engage with the question of decolonization as it was imagined within networks of anti-colonial and progressive/communist activism. Focusing literally on the 鈥榮mall鈥� (minor) performative genres of political slogans around questions of political incarceration, this paper will argue that nationalist and internationalist ideological positions were intricately intertwined and foreshadowed in mid 20th century within Indian communist movements despite the formal decolonization, and thus, giving us new and contested meanings of 鈥渇reedom.鈥� Closely reading an alternative, 鈥榰nofficial鈥� field of prison-writing as a body that resists the dominant epochal historicization of the colonised and the free, I will ask, how do slogans theoretically address the complexities of nationalism, decolonization, and liberation? Do conditions of captivity change imaginations of freedom and liberation before and after the 鈥淚ndependence鈥� – which was largely critiqued within dissident traditions as a 鈥渇alse freedom鈥� (jhootha azaadi)? How do we locate potential histories from excavating the legacies of such small, marginal genres and voices?

Jigisha Bhattacharya is a doctoral student supported by Gates Cambridge Doctoral Scholarship at the Faculty of English, in Cambridge University. Her dissertation focusses on the cultural registers of political imprisonment in colonial and postcolonial India. Her academic work has been published in journals such as Religion, Wasafiri, South Asian Studies, and in edited volumes published by Routledge, Buchner Verlag and others. As a committed public facing academic, she writes fiction, creative non-fiction, and longform criticisms, hosts podcasts, and curates.

Hind Sabah Bilal

Impossible Freedoms: Performing Survival, Testimony and the Limits of Agency in Heather Raffo鈥檚 Noura

This paper argues that Noura stages freedom not as autonomy or self-determination, but as a contingent and embodied condition produced under coercion, violence and displacement. Through a close analysis of the play鈥檚 dramaturgical use of testimony, I show how freedom is performed as an 鈥榠mpossible鈥� form of survival that exceeds moral and liberal frameworks of choice.

The analysis centres on a pivotal scene in which Mariam recounts the story of a mother fleeing ISIS violence who, in a moment of terror, forgets her infant in its cradle while escaping with her other children. Rather than presenting this as a rational or ethical decision, the performance situates the act within the immediacy of panic, thereby displacing freedom from intentional agency to embodied response. This moment is staged alongside parallel narratives mainly Noura and Tareq鈥檚 escape with their child and Mariam鈥檚 own flight after witnessing violence, within the shared space of a Christmas dinner. The juxtaposition of these testimonies produces a dramaturgical structure in which freedom appears as radically uneven, shaped by circumstance and resistant to equivalence.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt鈥檚 notion of freedom as a practice that emerges in a space of appearance, I argue that the dinner table functions as a fractured performative site where voices, bodies and absences collide. Rather than generating solidarity, this space exposes its limits, revealing how experiences of violence and survival remain irreducibly singular.

The paper contributes to theatre and performance studies by reconceptualising freedom as a dramaturgical problem of embodiment, voice and relationality. It advances an original reading of Raffo鈥檚 Noura that situates freedom within conditions of war, migration and colonial violence, and demonstrates how performance can both stage and unsettle the fantasy of freedom as a universal human condition.

Hind Sabah Bilal is a doctoral candidate in Drama at the University of Exeter, supported by the HCED Iraqi Scholarship. Her research examines women鈥檚 agency in contemporary Iraqi theatre following the 2003 US-led war. Since 2015, she has been a permanent lecturer in English drama and literature at the University of Kufa, Iraq. Hind has published several academic papers and currently has a journal article under review with Global Performance Studies. She is an active participant in local and international conferences and symposiums. Beyond academia, Hind balances her scholarly pursuits with family life as a wife and mother of two.

Anuj Deshpande & Jigisha Bhattacharya

Songs, Incarceration, and Freedom: A Performance Lecture on Prison Songs from Postcolonial India

The notional, popular, and jurisprudential logic of imprisonment—however it gets legitimised under differing regimes and actors, remains that of unfreedom; a suspension of bodily autonomy, a surveillance on the mind, a denial of mobility of thought and habits. It is an unfreedom that is sanctioned by the state, and is held up through coercive and disciplining methods of its many actors such as the police, the prison staff, the guards, the court of law, and often by prisoners themselves. However, the prison space has emerged as a key site that is generative not only of new forms of political action, but also of political thought, and cultural practices.

In this lecture-demonstration, we propose to unpack how freedom is imagined under conditions of captivity by focusing on performative cultural registers which the prison space makes possible precisely because of its architectural, legal, and penal limitations. Focusing on a set of imprisoned political cultural activists in postcolonial India across time, we will argue that it is precisely the conditions of unfreedom which elicit new genres of performative cultural tropes. These tropes, as we will trace in prison songs in Maharashtra, Bengal and northern India in the languages of Marathi, Bengali, and Hindi—not only reflect on the carceral conditions inside the prison, but reflect on what it means for one to really be free beyond these bars. Focusing on imprisoned activist singers, we will perform and critically reflect on the 鈥減rison song鈥� as an embodied aesthetic genre in itself—that, through its melodic, pedagogic and dramaturgical aspects, can resonate across the boundaries of embodied prisoners in solitary cells and enable a feeling of solidarity.

As writer directors of the sold out docu-fiction play, Dear Azadi, we will be performing archival songs from different Indian languages, while critically reflecting on whether prison songs are an inherently, although contingent, political act—intrinsically subversive of the state and its carceral mechanisms. We propose a 30 minute lecture performance, with another 15 minutes in the end for questions and answers.

Anuj Deshpande is a theatre maker, performer and documentarian with an MFA in Scriptwriting from Central School of Speech and Drama, London, supported by Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship. Over the past decade, his theatre and film works have been showcased in several festivals in India and internationally. Currently, he鈥檚 based in London where he recently directed a docu-fiction performance Dear Azaadi, based on the writings of prisoners of conscience.

Dominika Fleszar

Performing Freedom in Transit: Polish Military Theatre and the Embodied Politics of Exile, 1940–1946

This paper examines Polish military theatre in Mandate Palestine during the Second World War as a transitory 鈥渨orksite鈥� of freedom, negotiated between colonial hierarchies, displacement, and an exilic state urgently rebranding its politics. Drawing on archival scripts, photographs, and memoirs, I argue that these performances rehearsed freedom not as sovereignty but as relational praxis: an embodied negotiation of dignity, belonging, and solidarity within militarised structures of power.

The theatre troupe operated under the Polish government鈥慽n鈥慹xile, which sought to 鈥渃orrect鈥� its pre鈥憌ar antisemitic reputation through public recognition of the Holocaust and the selective inclusion of Jewish voices in its exile diplomacy (Rozek 1959). Concurrently, persistent antisemitism and the promise of a different grammar of freedom in a future Jewish homeland prompted a mass exodus of Jewish soldiers from the Polish Army, many of whom joined British鈥憀ed or Zionist鈥憀inked units.

Within this fraught context, the theatre staged both classical and contemporary Polish drama for Arab, British, and Polish audiences. This dramaturgical mode turned the stage into a site where competing visions of freedom - national, imperial, and emancipatory - were scrambled and restaged. The complex Arab鈥慞alestinian鈥慗ewish鈥態ritish constellation of the late Mandate period further underscores how these performances were embedded in an uneven field of sovereignties.

Reading Hannah Arendt鈥檚 conception of freedom-as-action alongside postcolonial and performance theory, I contend that this theatre performed a precarious solidarity. It crossed, yet never fully dissolved, the fault lines between coloniser and colonised, refugee and citizen, and an antisemitic state and its self鈥憆ehabilitated exile. In doing so, it staged freedom as a collective, contested, and unfinished aesthetic practice, perpetually in transit between the pasts of pogrom and exile, and the futures of statehood and genocide.

Dominika Fleszar is a doctoral researcher in Drama at the University of Kent, where she examines Polish 茅migr茅 theatre in London between 1939 and 1989, with a focus on cultural memory, migration, and postwar performance networks. Her research is supported by CHASE funding and engages with postcolonial and diaspora studies frameworks. Alongside her academic work, she is a freelance journalist and theatre critic, contributing to publications such as Unstash Magazine. Dominika has presented her research at international conferences and is currently developing several articles and chapters on Polish exile theatre and performance history. In her free time, Dominika speaks Mandarin, spends too much time watching figure skating, and attempts to write a novel.

Manuel Henriques

If I could sink my teeth into the whole earth: A Performance lecture based on a theatrical experience in Carregueira Detention Centre in Lisbon, Portugal, and 鈥淭he Pedagogy of the Oppressed", by Paulo Freire

In 2025, I had the opportunity to lead a three-month theater workshop with a group of incarcerated people at the Carregueira Detention Centre in the municipality of Sintra, Lisbon, Portugal. The focus of this theater workshop was a practical work, in which the group of participants explored physical and vocal expression, imagination exercises (which took on new and significant meanings within the prison setting), and their emotional expression, sometimes with autobiographical aspects. We worked with poems by two Portuguese authors: Fernanda Botelho and Alberto Caeiro (one of the heteronyms of the renowned poet Fernando Pessoa). 鈥淚f I could sink my teeth into the whole earth鈥� is the title of one of Alberto Caeiro鈥檚 poems. Throughout the workshop, we sought to establish a relationship and connection between the lives of these group of people and the emotional possibilities that each of the poems could evoke. The words and thoughts of Paulo Freire in 鈥淭he Pedagogy of the Oppressed鈥� helped to construct a path: we had to find a connection between these personal stories and these set of poems, by starting with simple words, and the movement of the body inspired by feelings brought by each poem. And also sharing personal ideas without fear of judgment. In this process, we could find some resonance with the literacy processes in the rural areas of Brazil, mentioned by Freire, during the second half of XX century - the need of creating an identification between words and action, that could lead to a process of emancipation, responsibility and freedom. This Performance Lecture intends to look at some of the ideas brought by Freire, and at the same time to share some of the questions brought from this artistic process developed in Carregueira Detention Centre. As part of the lecture, the audience will be invited to participate in a brief performative exercise.

Manuel Henriques is a Portuguese actor, theatre maker and teacher of performing arts, with a bachelor鈥檚 degree from Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (2008) and a Master鈥檚 degree in International Performance Research (2011) from the 91福利 and the University of Amsterdam (Erasmus Mundus Scholarship). He has worked professionally as an actor and performer since 2008, collaborating with different artists in theatre, dance, performance and cinema. As an author and theatre maker, he has developed a work with different starting points: non-dramatic texts; an idea or concept related to the present moment/contemporaneity; a community based approach; a site specific creation; a movement piece; among others.

Website portfolio: manuelhenriques.com

Jovana Karauli膰 & Jelena Kne啪evi膰

Reassembling the Festival as a Temporary Cultural Commons — The Case of Ne:Bitef

This paper examines the emergence of Ne:Bitef, an alternative theatre festival established in response to the censorship and institutional disruption of the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF), in order to explore how organizational practices within the cultural field can generate and sustain spaces of freedom through temporary commons-based practices.

In contemporary cultural systems increasingly structured by institutional hierarchies and project-based governance, censorship lays bare the fragility of artistic autonomy, and may push cultural actors toward new forms of collective action. The emergence of Ne:Bitef illustrates precisely this: a festival platform severed from its institutional home and rebuilt from the ground up through a network of artists, producers, and cultural workers operating through informal and horizontal forms of organization.

The paper conceptualizes this process as a form of temporary cultural commons, in which the festival becomes a collectively assembled platform enabling shared responsibility, horizontal organization, and the creation of a public space. In this configuration, freedom does not appear only through artistic expression but also through the organizational practices that allow cultural actors to collectively co-create and sustain spaces of appearance.

Drawing on a qualitative case-study approach, the research reads Ne:Bitef through organizational analysis, discourse analysis of public statements and media representations, and a mapping of the collaborative networks through which the festival took shape examining it simultaneously as a guerrilla artistic intervention and an organizationally collaborative platform.

The case of Ne:Bitef suggests that theatre festivals can function not only as sites of representation but also as sites of freedom, spaces in which freedom is actively organized and collectively enacted through temporary cultural commons emerging within cultural practice.

Jovana Karauli膰, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Jovana produced numerus independent theatre, film and event projects and she is co-founder of the platform Green Art Incubator. Published in relevant journals and conference proceedings and co-edited international thematic publication "Performing arts between politics and policies: implications and challenges", published by FDA Belgrade and ADA from Zagreb. She is co-author of the publication 鈥淗ow to build network and why?鈥�, published by Kooperativa Zagreb and author of the book 鈥淐ultural performances of Yugoslavism鈥� published by Clio and FDA.

Kishan Katira

Pan-Asianist Anatta: Nishida, S艒seki, Gandhi, and the pursuit of freedom from the mortal binds of British unilinear historicity

In this paper I will do a comparative reading of 鈥楾ower of London鈥� (1905) by the Japanese Meiji era novelist Natsume S艒seki, with the contemporaneous political philosophical manifesto by Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (1909), to demonstrate how the Buddhist-Hindu concept of anatta (non-self), the 鈥榥ondifferentiation鈥� between subject, object, self and other, provides an alternative to Cartesian dualism – the guiding philosophy of British liberal imperialism over Asia.

This is an expansion upon Okakura Kakuzo鈥檚 Meiji era idea of Buddhist Pan-Asianism against British imperialist modernity, from his Ideals of the East (1904), wherein he argues that Buddhist philosophy unites Japan, China and India against European imperialist modernity.

In the early twentieth century, the founder of the Kyoto School, Nishida Kitar艒, in his An Inquiry into the Good (1911), wrote a Zen Buddhist refutation of Cartesian dualism. Nishida argues that the experience of 鈥榝reedom鈥� is really an alignment of one鈥檚 desire with the actuality of their condition – alignment with one鈥檚 Geworfenheit (鈥榯hrownness鈥�). This 鈥榝reedom as alignment鈥� is testament to 鈥榥ondifferentiation鈥�, what Nishida calls the 鈥榰nderlying unity of all things鈥�: he writes that within every act of perception there is differentiation, and this differentiation requires an underlying similarity in order for their particular points of contrast to hold significance. Nishida thus argues that every instance of differentiation implies an a priori unity. Nishida uses this 鈥榰nderlying unity鈥� to refute spatial and temporal differentiation between subject, object, self and other.

This leads me towards applying 鈥榥ondifferentiation鈥� to readings of S艒seki鈥檚 evaluation of British history in his 鈥楾ower of London鈥� story, and Gandhi鈥檚 idea of an alternate pacifist historicity, Ithihas, in opposition to the British concept of a unilinear history of 鈥榩rogress鈥�, that is the foremost a record of human violence (a 鈥榟istory from the top鈥�). S艒seki and Gandhi provide comparable Buddhistic evaluations of British historicity that criticise the uni-linearity of the 鈥榮elf鈥�, towards an anticolonial release from British samsara (material existence).

Kishan Katira is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the 91福利, in England, whose thesis is a comparative study of Mohandas K. Gandhi鈥檚 writings on ahimsa with Natsume S艒seki鈥檚 use of Buddhist philosophy in his novels and literary theory, towards a Pan-Asianist critique of British modernity in Asia in the context of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), heavily utilising the early writings of Nishida Kitar艒 of the Kyoto School of Philosophy. Research interests include: Mohandas K. Gandhi, Natsume S艒seki, the Kyoto School of Philosophy, Eastern (specifically Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian) philosophy and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Adrian Kear & Theresa Nelson

Missing Actors: Aesthetics of absence and the politics of disappearance

This workshop examines the ways in which the de-centring of the figure of the actor in a scenographically-focused 鈥榓esthetics of absence鈥� (Goebbels 2015) is related to the political violence and environmental catastrophes of the contemporary historical period. It aims to contextualize, historicize, and relate the aesthetic displacement and redistribution of theatrical 鈥榩resence鈥� in contemporary performance to the performative tracing, memorialisation, and contestation of scenes of disappearance (Kear 2025).

Methodologically, the workshop aims to bring together performance analysis and political critique in a way that grounds both in the materiality of lived historical experience (Kear 2013). Rather than simply valorising the aesthetic displacement of the actor in contemporary theatre practice, the workshop aims to investigate the aesthetic emergence of the absent actor in the context of the political emergency of missing people (Edkins 2011). Through asking participants to draw upon their contextually situated knowledges and experiences, and engagement with activist organisations and aesthetic practices, the workshop contributes to the de-hierarchization of the production of knowledge and invites reflection on how performance practices can contribute to reparative social justice.

It asks: Whose freedom speaks to and from histories of disappearance, extra-judicial killings, femicides, climate catastrophe, and racialized political violence? Whose freedom speaks for – and through – the disappeared? How are their voices heard and remembered? What performance forms and practices have emerged to challenge and contest the slow, recursive violence of disappearance?

The workshop enables the sharing of materials and examples from artists and activist collectives working across cultural-political contexts. Its processes will ensure prominence is given to their situated knowledges, voices, histories and embodied understanding of the politics of disappearance, as well as those of the conference participants.

Adrian Kear is Professor of Theatre and Performance at University of the Arts London. His research investigates the relationships between performance and politics, and agency and apparatus in creative practice. Adrian鈥檚 books include Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century (Palgrave); Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (with Maaike Bleeker, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms, Bloomsbury); International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (with Jenny Edkins, Routledge); Psychoanalysis and Performance (with Patrick Campbell, Routledge); and Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (with Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Routledge). He is the co-editor of a double special issue of the Journal of Theatre and Performance Design, 鈥楽cenographies of Absence, Scenes of Disappearance鈥� (with Jane Collins and Jazmin Llana, Routledge), and the book series Thinking Through Theatre (with Maaike Bleeker, Joe Kelleher and Heike Roms, Methuen Bloomsbury).

Theresa Nelson is a Ghanaian-born performing artist, writer, and practice-based researcher currently undertaking her PhD at the University of the Arts London. She holds a MA in Performance, Politics and Social Justice, and her 鈥楩reedom Walks鈥� explore performance as a tool for cultural memory, decolonial engagement, and the reanimation of African artefacts. With a background in theatre, community arts, and museum collaboration, she integrates embodied storytelling and ritual to investigate the intersections of heritage, diaspora, and historical restitution.

Olivia Lamont Bishop

Freedom, Distance and the Politics of Place in The Land鈥檚 Heart Is Greater Than Its Map

This paper explores how the performance The Land鈥檚 Heart Is Greater Than Its Map by Ramzi Maqdisi and Olivia Furber mobilises site-based dramaturgy to interrogate the politics of freedom - freedom of land, of movement and of artistic expression - through the affective charge of distance. Drawing on affect theory, I examine how the performance overlays Jerusalem onto the Isle of Portland, transforming each site into a charged terrain where freedom is both imagined and constrained. Portland鈥檚 sweeping horizons and 360-degree views evoke openness, yet the island is also home to a prison: an irony that intensifies the work鈥檚 meditation on enclosure, occupation and the limits placed on bodies and narratives.

The performance鈥檚 portability across cities and landscapes raises questions about the freedom to present politically urgent work in places far removed from the conflict it describes. Following scholars such as Fiona Wilkie on site-specificity, Jen Harvie on performance and neoliberal space and Una Chaudhuri on ecologies of displacement, I argue that the work鈥檚 shifting locations expose how freedom is always contingent on geography, power and access. As the narrator reflects, 鈥淚鈥檝e tried to escape memories of my past but it seems that here, in Portland, I see traces of my history at every turn鈥�, revealing how one site can become a palimpsest for another and how distance can paradoxically intensify proximity to conflict.

Ultimately, I propose that the dramaturgy of distance in this work creates a space of ethical encounter, where audiences must negotiate their own positionality. Freedom, in this context, becomes not a stable condition but a relational practice, emerging in the gaps between here and elsewhere, between what is seen and what is sensed and between the land beneath our feet and the land that remains out of reach.

Olivia Lamont Bishop is a performance maker and researcher whose work explores questions of migration, cultural identity and socially engaged practice. She is currently a Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College and recently completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she also taught as a Visiting Lecturer. Her doctoral research examined contemporary performance processes with a focus on dramaturgies of displacement.

She also serves as Project Coordinator for the Migrant Dramaturgies Network, an international forum that brings together artists, scholars and cultural organisations to explore performance practices emerging from migration and border contexts. Beyond academia, Olivia works Project Manager at Borderlands, a charity supporting refugees and asylum seekers in Bristol, where she facilitated creative engagement programmes and community-based initiatives. Through this work she continues to advocate for participatory practices that empower displaced communities and foster cross-cultural exchange.

Xueting Luo

Freedom in Relation: The Circulation of Energy in Chinese Embodied Aesthetics

In dominant modern discourse, freedom is often understood as autonomy, individual choice, or liberation from external constraint. This paper proposes an alternative perspective drawn from Chinese embodied aesthetics, where freedom emerges not through detachment from form, but through the capacity to move within relations, modulate force, and sustain dynamic transformation.

Focusing on the embodied principles shared by Chinese calligraphy and Chinese classical dance, particularly the movement aesthetics cultivated in Kunqu, the paper examines how freedom may be understood as a relational practice cultivated through breath, rhythm, and the circulation of energy. In both art forms, movement does not arise as spontaneous expression detached from structure; rather, it develops through disciplined responsiveness, where each gesture carries the trace of previous movement and prepares the conditions for what follows. A brushstroke, like a bodily action, unfolds through initiation, transition, reversal, and release.

Drawing on historical writings, Chinese aesthetic philosophy, and practice-led research, the paper analyses how concepts such as Qi, Yin–Yang, and the dynamic relation between emptiness and form shape an embodied logic in which apparent oppositions continuously transform into one another. The written character may be understood as a microcosm: a field in which tensions, intervals, and directional shifts are held together by invisible continuity. In a similar way, the body becomes a living site where movement, breath, and attention circulate and reorganise energy.

Rather than approaching calligraphy and dance as static cultural forms, this paper argues that they offer a distinct understanding of freedom as relational circulation: freedom not as unrestricted action, but as the cultivated capacity to respond, adapt, and remain dynamically connected within a shared field of movement. Seen in this light, freedom becomes inseparable from attentiveness to others and to the conditions of coexistence. Chinese embodied aesthetics thus suggests an aesthetic model of solidarity, in which freedom is sustained through dynamic adjustment, mutual responsiveness, and embodied relation rather than isolated autonomy.

Xueting Luo is an early-career independent researcher in performance studies. She recently completed her PhD at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, where her research explored Chinese classical dance as an embodied expression of aesthetic philosophy, with particular attention to somatic awareness, ecological thought, theatrical traditions, and intercultural practice. She also holds an MA in Chinese dance history and aesthetics from Beijing Dance Academy and publishes in both Chinese and English.

Alessandra De Martino

On The Wings Of Freedom

This paper is a combined presentation, where reflections on the concept of freedom are intertwined with dramatic reading. It is based on the monologue, by the contemporary Italian playwright and theatre director Patrizia Monaco, entitled ICARO 2001, which recounts the tragic events that took place in Genoa on 20 July 2001 when the twenty-three years old demonstrator Carlo Giulian, was killed by a policeman during the manifestations by the Anti- Globalization Movement against the G8 Summit on global economy. The mythological figure of Icarus is associated with Carlo Giuliani, with whom he shares both a yearning for freedom, and a self-destructive end.

The paper starts from the concept of the concept of Myth, which is 鈥榓 socially powerful traditional story鈥�. Icarus, the archetype of the daring narcissist, who disobeys his father鈥檚 order and plunges into the sea, is compared to Carlo, who also disobeys his father鈥檚 advice and dies, only to show that what may be considered arrogance is in fact desire of freedom. It moves on to discuss the concept of freedom of expression in the play by Dario Fo and Franca Rame Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a denunciation of political corruption and cover ups during the investigations for the massacre caused by the terrorist attack at the Bank of Agriculture in Milan, in 1969, that became known as 鈥榯he Piazza Fontana鈥檚 massacre, one of a series of attacks known as 鈥渢he strategy of tension鈥�.

The second part of the paper is a textual analysis of ICARO2001. The dramatic reading is intertwined with reflections on the role of the intellectuals as defined by Antonio Gramsci, whilst highlighting the lyrical aspects of the monologue that make it an ode to freedom.

Alessandra De Martino is Associate Research Fellow in the School of Theatre and Performance Studies (SCAPVC) at the 91福利, UK. She is a translator and has taught Italian language and culture and translation skills in the School of Modern Languages at the 91福利, where she obtained a Ph.D. in Theatre Translation with a thesis on Cultural Transfer in translations from Neapolitan to English of some of Eduardo De Filippo鈥檚 plays. She also is an academic member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI). As a lecturer, she led various projects of translation and adaptation, among whom a collaborative English translation of Dacia Maraini鈥檚 Per proteggerti meglio, figlia mia (All the Better to Protect You, My Dear), and the double theatre adaptation in Italian and English, for which she also was script editor, of Giuseppe Catozzella鈥檚 book Non dirmi che hai paura (Don鈥檛 Tell Me You鈥檙e Afraid).

She co-authored the play Class Action, based on her translations of monologues from Ferite a morte (Wounded to Death) by Serena Dandini. As a theatre director, she staged her own adaptation of Non ti pago, by Eduardo De Filippo, that was performed in Italian in London. She has been invited by national and international universities, including Shanghai International Studies University, the University of Toulouse Jean Jaur猫s, and the University of Milan. She has written numerous articles and chapters published in journals and academic texts and co-edited the volume on theatre of the margins, Differences on Stage.

Jisha Menon

Feminist Performance and the Solidaristic Subject

By examining the work of Indian performer Maya Rao and Chilean performance art group, LASTESIS, this paper asks whose freedom becomes imaginable when feminist performance protests confront sexual violence in public space. Across liberal legal discourse, freedom is often framed as an individual right secured through juridical recognition or punishment. Feminist performance activism, however, reveals freedom as neither abstract principle nor legal possession but as an embodied, collective practice forged in conditions of vulnerability, fear, and unequal mobility.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt鈥檚 understanding of freedom as the raison d鈥櫭猼re of politics — emerging through appearance and action among others, this paper examines feminist performance protest as a worksite of freedom. Through choreographed assembly, collective walking, voice, and gesture, participants reclaim streets, nightlife, and urban spaces historically structured by gendered threat. These performances transform sexual violence from a private injury into a shared political condition, making visible how freedom of movement, safety, and presence are unevenly distributed.

Rather than supplementing legal process, feminist performances enact alternative models of personhood, responsibility, and justice grounded in relational embodiment. They cultivate solidaristic forms of political friendship that counter the isolation produced by sexual violence and challenge law鈥檚 disembodied conception of the violated subject. Yet these worksites of freedom are also marked by tension. Public appearance can generate new solidarities while simultaneously risking juridical capture, carceral expansion, and differential recognition shaped by caste, race, class, and postcolonial power.

By attending to the dramaturgies through which freedom takes shape, in bodies moving together, voices synchronizing, and publics forming in real time, this paper argues that feminist protest reframes freedom as a fragile collective achievement rather than an individual entitlement. Performance becomes a site where freedom is continuously rehearsed, contested, and reimagined, revealing both the promise and the contradictions of solidarity in contemporary struggles against sexual violence.

Jisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. She serves as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature.She is the author of Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) and The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), and coeditor of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Law, Affect, and the Performance of Personhood.

Reka Polonyi

Towards an aesthetic of everyday solidarity: rethinking what constitutes political performance in times of crisis

In a time shaped by overlapping global crises, care has emerged as a vital site of resistance, relational freedom, and solidarity. For artists and scholars alike, care has become not just a response, but a political method, a shared vocabulary, and a repertoire of 鈥榮urvival strategies for uncertain times鈥� (Hobart and Kneese 2020, 1). Over the past few years, scholars and practitioners have taken up care with renewed critical attention, recognising it as central to how we imagine collective life amid the crises, and within movements of solidarity. Yet our attention continues to gravitate toward the most visible and grand expressions of solidarity, the overtly 鈥榩olitical鈥� and spectacular gestures of what might be seen as a struggle for political freedom: the mass assemblies of bodies gathered in defiance, the collective chants that fill public squares, the raised fists that make rupture 鈥榲isible鈥� through scale. Yet beneath these heightened revolutionary moments lies another register of collective life—the 鈥榤inor鈥� gestures of everyday care that materialise, sustain, and render such events possible. For every spectacular display of solidarity, there exists an ecology of maintenance: the tending to grief and injury, the urgent work of allaying fear, the exhausting labour of relationship-building, and the minute, nuanced practices of attentiveness and repair that sustain bodies, hold relations, and that remain unacknowledged and peripheral. These quieter labours are rendered apolitical, even as they constitute the very ground upon which collective and political life is built. This presentation examines these unrecognised practices of care, and how we draw them into our urgent conversations on what constitutes political life and everyday performances. Drawing from the beginnings of a 3-year project called 鈥楾he Aesthetics of Solidarity鈥�, I explore how the aesthetic qualities of care – ie, its embodied, deeply relational and sensorial dimensions - might be used as a lens to notice, describe, and archive the textures of everyday solidarity. I ask how attending to the everyday sensory and affective dimensions of care might reconfigure how we theorise, sense and narrate the political.

Dr R茅ka Polonyi is a social theatre practitioner and a Bicentenary Research Fellow (2025-2028) at the University of Manchester (UK) leading a cross-disciplinary project on everyday performances of solidarity in response to the rise of the far right in Europe. Her PhD (2018-2022) explored the role of playfulness in creative activism (book under contract, publication estimated 2027), and she was awarded the IFTR New Scholars Prize (2021). She was Postdoctoral Researcher on the (AHRC) Care Aesthetics project (2022-2025) led by James Thompson (University of Manchester). R茅ka is also a trained clown and likes to let her out whenever she can, to wreak some havoc in academia.

Rami Salameh

Embodied Resistance: Palestinian Violence and the Dialectics of Becoming Free in the Global South

This paper offers a critical reflection on Palestinian violence within the context of settler colonialism, situating it as part of a broader Global South experience of subjugation, resistance, and decolonial struggle. Dominant discourses—whether Orientalist condemnations, 鈥渂alanced鈥� narratives of symmetry, or critical accounts that privilege Israeli power while erasing Palestinian subjectivity—fail to apprehend the lived realities of colonized existence. Drawing on ethnographic self-reflection and philosophical insights from Fanon, Sartre, and Deleuze, the paper argues that Palestinian violence must be understood through the embodied dialectic between being colonized and becoming free. Colonial power inscribes Palestinian bodies with fragility, dispossession, and non-existence, naturalizing their vulnerability as part of a spatial regime of control. Yet within this negated condition arises a desire for freedom, enacted not as abstract idealism but as practical becoming. Acts of violence, in this light, emerge as transient, immediate, and productive gestures that subvert colonial order, reclaim agency, and articulate justice beyond the frameworks of colonial law. By reframing Palestinian violence as a radical interruption of colonial inscription, this paper underscores its resonance with wider decolonial struggles across the Global South, where resistance often manifests as embodied acts of refusal against systems that deny existence itself.

Rami Salameh is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, and currently the director of the Women's Studies Institute at Birzeit University, Palestine. His work examines the intersections of coloniality, violence, and subjectivity in settler-colonial contexts, with a particular focus on the Palestinian experience as part of broader Global South struggles. Drawing on critical theory, phenomenology, and decolonial thought, his research explores how colonial power is inscribed on bodies and spaces, and how acts of resistance, imagination, and violence function as forms of becoming and decolonial praxis.

Konrad Szczebiot

Freedom at Sea and in Revolt: Staropolska Republicanism and Contemporary Polish Stagings of Classical Drama

鈥婽his paper examines contemporary Polish stagings of classical drama as highly charged performative sites where early modern (staropolska) conceptions of freedom are reactivated, fiercely contested, and aesthetically reconfigured. In the political thought of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, wolno艣膰 (freedom) did not denote liberal individual autonomy, but a rigorously republican condition grounded in civic virtue, shared responsibility, and absolute moral accountability toward the Rzeczpospolita as a common, collective body. I argue that selected recent productions rehearse precisely this urgent tension between collective freedom and its potential, catastrophic disintegration.

鈥婽he first case study is Statek b艂azn贸w, directed by Piotr Tomaszuk at Teatr Wierszalin. Drawing on the early modern allegory of Sebastian Brant, Tomaszuk constructs a grotesque, ritualized community adrift. The ship becomes a visceral theatrical metaphor of a polity entirely deprived of ethical anchoring: freedom severed from civic virtue rapidly collapses into physical chaos and sonic self-parody. Here, theatre functions as a moral warning mechanism, staging the violent erosion of republican solidarity.

鈥婤y contrast, productions by Teatr Klasyki Polskiej foreground dialogue, rhetorical conflict, and reconciliation as necessary civic exercises. Their interpretative strategies emphasize continuous negotiation within a shared normative framework, directly evoking early modern parliamentary culture and the profound performative dimensions of republican deliberation.

鈥婩inally, I examine the widely discussed, controversial staging of Dziady by Maja Kleczewska at the Teatr im. Juliusza S艂owackiego in Krak贸w. Kleczewska radically reframes Mickiewicz鈥檚 Romantic ritual as a contemporary arena of harsh political confrontation, exposing deep fractures within the national community through the subversion of patriarchal casting. The production鈥檚 massive public resonance demonstrates how theatre becomes a vital civic forum in which freedom is not inherited, but fiercely negotiated under conditions of division.

鈥婽ogether, these performances articulate what I term an 鈥渁esthetics of endangered solidarity.鈥� They reveal freedom as a fragile, embodied, and collectively enacted process rather than an abstract entitlement. By situating contemporary Polish theatre within the genealogy of staropolska republican thought, this paper contributes directly to the symposium鈥檚 inquiry into whose freedom is staged, claimed, or destabilized in contemporary theatrical practice.

Ioana Szeman

Music, Performance and Resisting Unfreedom: Roma Musicians at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition

This paper explores the entanglements and contradictions of freedom, as reflected in the performances of Roma musicians at the Romanian Pavilion of the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition. The Romanian Pavilion at the Exhibition represented the independent Romanian nation, whose struggle for freedom from surrounding empires ended in 1877; some of the Roma musicians who performed there had experienced the official process of emancipation from enslavement in the Romanian Principalities, which ended in 1856. This paperexplores their aural performances as spaces of resistance to Gadge (non-Roma) representations of Roma and to the forgetting of the recent history of Roma enslavement in the Romanian Principalities. While Roma were not present on theatre stages in the nineteenth century in Romania, Roma musicians were ubiquitous on public stages, enticing audiences through improvisation and creativity; they were often hailed for their free and improvised style of music, and often treated as people without history, living in a perpetual present, including by visitors at the Universal Exhibition.

Inspired by the work of Black feminist critics Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick, and Roma feminist scholars and artists Mihaela Dragan, Ioanida Costache and Angela Kocze, this paper reframes the official chronology of enslavement leading to emancipation and freedom. Despite the official emancipation of Roma, the Romanian state did not grant them actual status as free citizens and continued to exclude them from the nation. I focus on Roma musicians鈥� performances as acts of resistance to 鈥渦nfreedom鈥� (McKittrick, 2021), the ongoing marginalisation and exclusion of the Roma from the Romanian nation. I show how the paradigm of 鈥減eople without history鈥� reflected the collective forgetting of Roma enslavement in Romania in late nineteenth century and the collusion of nationalism and white supremacy at the Universal Exhibition.

Ioana Szeman is Associate Professor in Drama at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her first book, 鈥淪taging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania鈥� (2018) is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. Her current project focuses on nineteenth-century Roma performances and representations of Roma in East European theatre.

Dragan Todorovic

Auto-censorship: The Happiness Pill

This paper emerges from a personal encounter with censorship in 1983 Yugoslavia and expands into a sustained philosophical inquiry into one of the most pervasive — and least visible — mechanisms of intellectual control: auto-censorship.

Drawing on Czes艂aw Mi艂osz's The Captive Mind — particularly his concepts of the Murti-Bing pill and ketman — the talk argues that auto-censorship is not merely a political symptom of totalitarian regimes but a universal psychological condition. Once internalised, the censor speaks in our own voice: we begin by adjusting our tone and end by adjusting our beliefs.

The paper maps auto-censorship across three registers: the political (communist Yugoslavia, Stalinist Eastern Europe), the philosophical (Foucault's regimes of truth, Havel's living within the lie, Arendt's thoughtlessness), and the contemporary (the soft tyrannies of social media, the craving for approval, the algorithm as a modern Murti-Bing). A central section proposes a Foucauldian–Chomskyan synthesis: auto-censorship arises precisely where Chomsky's innate generative freedom of language meets Foucault's historically contingent boundaries of discourse — the trembling border where the unspeakable meets the possible.

The paper distinguishes between the Greek prefix autos (the inside looking out) and the Germanic self- (the outside attacking the inside), arguing that this terminological precision carries a diagnostic weight: auto-censorship is not imposed but cultivated — a spiritual surrender as much as a social adaptation.

The talk concludes with an ethical provocation: to resist auto-censorship is not to speak recklessly, but to remain faithful to one's perception of truth — however quietly, however stubbornly. In an era when speech circulates instantly and judgement follows close behind, the task may be to find a language that dares, still, to mean something.

Dragan Todorovic is the author of twelve books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and has contributed to several collections. His novel Diary of Interrupted Days was shortlisted for Commonwealth Writers鈥� Prize, Amazon First Novel Award, and other awards. His memoir The Book of Revenge won The Nereus Writers鈥� Trust Non-Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. His collection of interactive poetry Five Walks on Isabella Street was the winner of the Astound International Competition. Several of his stories have been anthologised.

Dragan wrote and directed twenty-four radio plays, two TV documentaries and hosted over a hundred and fifty live TV interviews (on Culture Channel and 3K, Serbia). He is the author of the biographies of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen. He has translated Charles Bukowski, Tom Waits, Rod McKuen, Erica Jong, Billy Collins, Louise Gl眉ck, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and others. His articles in the Canadian magazines have been shortlisted for National Magazine Award, and he had been part of the prestigious Creative Non-Fiction programme at Banff Centre for the Arts. His aural essay In My Language I am Smart was performed in Deep Wireless Festival, on CBC Radio One and published on a CD in 2012. His sound works were recently featured on Earlid, a space dedicated to sound art.

His new collection of poetry, When Is Train Passing Through Here? (Kad prolazi voz?) was published in 2022 in Serbia.

Dragan鈥檚 central themes are exile and the space between languages.