Nancy Blanco, "Flip It and Reverse It: Burlesque as a Liberatory Praxis of Pleasure and Sexual Education"
In an era where sexual expression is frequently censored and comprehensive sexual education remains contentious, burlesque emerges as a bold, liberatory praxis—reclaiming pleasure and redefining the boundaries of erotic art. Combining nursing expertise with the art of burlesque, this performance challenges restrictive narratives around sexuality and body autonomy, framing the body as a site of both knowledge and resistance. Through humor, storytelling, and dance, the performance confronts the crisis of repression that seeks to silence discussions of pleasure, particularly those historically marginalized.
Traditional sexual education often centers on purity culture and reproduction, limiting discussions of sexuality to a narrow, reproductive framework that upholds control over bodies and restricts expressions of desire. This performance directly counters these norms, emphasizing pleasure as a critical aspect of human autonomy and self-knowledge. By reimagining burlesque as a form of embodied sexual education, it challenges purity culture's lingering impact and opens up new pathways for understanding the body as a dynamic source of empowerment.
Liberatory practices, as expressed through this performance, extend beyond resistance, they transform sexual education into an inclusive, participatory experience that celebrates the body’s capacity for joy and agency. This reimagined approach to sexual education not only subverts repressive norms but also invites a broader dialogue about how pleasure and autonomy intersect as central elements of the human experience.
Sam Collier, "“So Many Good Stories Yet to Tell”: Ecodramaturgies of Entanglement for the Climate Crisis"
What role can theater play in the climate crisis? How can we put stories about climate change on stage? This paper will consider how theater artists, playwrights, and performers are creating a new kind of eco-theater. By working with the long timescales and global implications of climate change, bringing nonhuman characters and perspectives into the stories they tell, and upending dramaturgical conventions, playwrights are reimagining the narratives we tell about the climate crisis.
The scale of climate change is almost impossible to fathom. The threat we face is the culmination of centuries of carbon emissions, but also of millions of individual moments happening all over the world, right now. It will shape all of our lives in immediate, personal ways, but it will also unfold over thousands of years. In order to wrestle with climate change on our stages, the theater faces a challenge: how to speak to these multiple layers, while also telling a good story?
“There are so many good stories yet to tell […] and not just by human beings.”[i] So writes Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. As theater artists and practitioners craft stories about the climate crisis, many of them are moving beyond the Aristotelian narrative structures that have long defined the standard dramatic form in the Western world. Instead, playwrights and performers are developing works that align more with Haraway’s call for relationality and entanglement. These stories employ new narrative forms, blur the edges of the individual protagonist, incorporate nonhuman perspectives, and draw connections across time and space. In this essay I will consider three recent plays— You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World, by Keiko Green, The Breathing Hole, by Colleen Murphy, and Hurricane Diane by Madeleine George—and the ways they deviate from conventional dramaturgical practices in order to engage with climate change.
[i] Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, p. 49.
Khadija Islow, "Rituals of Resistance: Queer Black Performance in The Netherlands"
In late November 2023, over a thousand protesters gathered in Dam Square, Amsterdam, just two days after the far-right, anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) secured a majority in the Dutch parliament. This electoral success highlights a troubling trend across Europe, where far-right parties have gained prominence in electoral politics and shifted their focus to combating the perceived "crisis" of the so-called Islamization of Europe, all while positioning themselves as defenders of values such as gender equality and LGBT rights (El-Tayeb, 2011). In response to this rising racism and xenophobia, a vibrant countermovement has emerged, particularly from the queer Black community in the Netherlands, aiming to disrupt these prevailing narratives. Drawing on four weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in Amsterdam, this paper employs Black performance theory (DeFrantz & Gonzalez, 2014) to analyze how these artists utilize ritual performances, writing, and dance as acts of resistance against exclusion and as means of fostering community. Grounded in themes of ancestry, belonging, colonial histories, and healing, their performances serve as powerful critiques of the racial oppression embedded in Dutch society and its migration management regime. This study explores how these embodied expressions and staged critiques challenge dominant narratives, revealing deeper insights into the intersections of race, migration, and identity in contemporary Europe. Ultimately, this paper highlights the resilience and creativity of marginalized communities while fostering critical dialogue around the urgent need for solidarity and intersectionality in the face of rising far-right ideologies.
Mohammad Karambeigi, "Performing Multitudinous: Underground Performance in the Downtown of Tehran"
On September 16th, 2022, an Iranian woman named Mahsa (Jina) Amini, after days of being in a hospital, died. Iranian citizens considered Iran’s government responsible for her death and started a nationwide horizontal protest against the Islamic Republic for about 4 months. During and after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” civic movement, theater/performance makers, performers, dramaturgs, and even scholars refused to stage their theater performances and theater/performance-driven lectures in state-centered venues and theater halls. Consequently, the so-called “Underground Theater Movement” started to emerge. It is worth mentioning that Iranian underground theater, music, and even visual arts are not limited to the period after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, and there were a few theater/performance and music collectives that held their performances privately in unofficial venues. However, underground theater as a leading artistic and sociopolitical movement is uniquely limited to the period after 2022. Therefore, this presentation mainly focuses on this particular artistic and sociopolitical movement and aims to investigate it through the lens of political philosophy by opposing the concept of “post-hegemony practice” to post-Marxist theories on hegemonic politics. The former concept is tied to the idea of withdrawal, while the latter emphasizes the importance of articulation and seizing power. I would like to apply the concept of “post-hegemony practice” to Iranian underground theater to understand how Iranian theater/performance practitioners, instead of seizing power, de-territorialize and re-territorialize theater/performance and cultural context under an authoritarian regime. Furthermore, after the emergence of the underground theater movement, I believe theater/performance practitioners have foregrounded the ideas of “radical civil disobedience” and “exit” by practicing and offering alternative politics of space and time to Iranian citizens.
