Theme

The theme proposed for the Conference - Silent Voices / Forbidden Lives: Censorship and Performance is of the utmost political and social significance for countries such as Portugal with a long history of dictatorial rule that left its mark on their national life and culture, as well as on those other lands where power was imposed through colonizing enforcement.
Aware of the importance of research in archives - some of them only recently made available - and of the need to look with a more demanding inquiry into the cultural, aesthetic and artistic consequences of that long history, we cannot, however, ignore our present world where constraints in life and art still exist in many places, excluding many from a free expression of their thoughts and dreams, engendering grievous inequalities that diminish human dignity and exclude others from reaching a minimal prospect of living well.
How theatre and other performing arts have responded and defied restrictions of different sorts can surely be most stimulating and provocative matters for our reflection, arguments and debate, not excluding what they can offer us as a better design for living.

The conference theme will include the following related topics:

• Drama under close scrutiny: where, when and how censorship and other constraints operated on texts and how they affected theatre and performance in general
  

• Theatrical genres: artistic responses to ideological constraints: how certain genres were invented or used to elude political or other forms of inhibition
  

• Dancing: confrontations and commitments: social, political, cultural and artistic contexts can favour, challenge or confine choreography and bodily expression
  

• Composing over silence: how music in performance has responded to difficult situations, inhibitions and unfavourable conditions

• Gendered politics under surveillance: how gender may have proved to be the pretext for blockage, prejudice and concern

• Bodies against boundaries: negotiating the physical presence of the performer, the erotic dimension of their body, the revelation of sickness, deformation, self inflicted pain and other forms that subvert conventional ways of representing the body on stage

• Breaking theatre walls to reach elsewhere: outdoor performances, unconventional environments, the incitement of audiences to action, invisible theatre, internet explorations, global theatre, confounding boundaries between fiction and reality (by filming intimate scenes as if they were live action)
  

• Setting the scene for/against the repressed other: how theatre has represented the other in a recognizable acknowledgement or denial of their existence or how it has illuminated their configuration

• Regional, national and intercontinental dissensions: is it important to recognise geographical, linguistic and cultural predicament as encouraging its theatrical representation?

• Dislocated outcries: immigrants’ Voices: immigrant communities or traces of their presence in multiple forms of performance

• Performing memories: culture against adversity: how retaining cultural memories can help people preserve and invent their identity in difficult situations

• Theatrical disobediences: rejecting conventions and defying expectations to invent other forms of living and expressing human desires and frustrations
  

• Spectres of the invisible or haunting absences: how the dead and the silenced haunt live performance

• Strategies of survival under empires: different configurations of hegemony have been opposed by theatre and performance in general. How should we characterise those human and artistic resources created out of cultural predicament? How should we identify and study different artistic strategies in the present and in the past?

Please note:

Individuals, who feel that the conference theme or the related topics do not appeal to them, can of course submit a proposal to one of the many Working Groups. The Working Groups are not bound by the theme of the conference, and have their own themes and ways of working. For details, contact the Convener of the particular Working Group you are interested in (See Working Groups).

Also, it is important to note that while the New Scholars' Forum is an inherent part of the larger conference, the papers presented here need not be related to the themeof the General Conference. New scholars may submit topics of their own choice for consideration. (See New Scholars’ Forum)