Dialogue, Performance and the Body Politic in the Twenty-First Century

Description

A feature of the cascading crises of the twenty-first century is the fragmenting impulse of polarisation. In what ways does theatre act or react to the radical oppositions and incommensurable differences of this socio-political arena? Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s writings on aesthetics and dissensus, Judith Butler’s reflections on precarity and the ethics of unchosen co-habitation, and Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki’s work on dissensual speech and performing resilience (Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy, 2017), this conference aims to generate discussions of (theatrical) performance as a site of dialogue. We are particularly interested in explorations of the following questions/topics: • In what ways does performance interpellate or create a demos? • How do the conditions of contingency and co-presence in theatre speak to or of co-habitation in other social spaces? • Forms of cultural dialogue prominent in contemporary (European) theatre practice: case studies, projects of inclusion, organisations. • Agon and anger. • Embodiment, demonstration – crisis points? Sites of contestation? • Preaching to the choir – theatre and confirmation bias. • Theatre and listening. • Negotiation, mediation and mimesis. • Performance and polarisation – what forms of dialogic discourse might work to propagate contact zones of better understanding or (re)distribution the sensible (cf. Rancière, 2000)?

Period	5 Feb 2021 → 6 Feb 2021
Event type	Conference
Location	Prague, Czech Republic
Degree of Recognition	International