Building Solidarity Across Cultural Contexts
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
While global and local crises multiply with each year, solidarity seems crucial and yet harder to build with every new challenge that we face. Groups of those who advocate for their specific cause, or come from a specific geography, narrate their story and seek solidarity, but often miss the chance of seeing links and connections with similar struggles of others. This results in fragmentation among activist groups, in more scattered social movements, and in the narrative of competing vulnerabilities where solidarities might have been more apparent.
What prevents different groups from seeing each other’s vulnerability and struggle as reflections of similar violence? What can allow us to see beyond the narratives of each other, and into human stories and experiences? How can we humanise each other through arts, creative storytelling and embodied connection to support our common work towards a more just world?
This workshop will be led collaboratively by leading theatre makers and activists from Ukraine (Oksana Potapova) and the UK (Molly Flynn). It will be grounded in the work of embodied social justice, decolonial praxis and arts-based methods of narration. It is aimed at diverse communities of activists and theatre practitioners, those who are asking themselves similar questions about possibilities and challenges of building solidarity in our times.
Built around a set of somatic, theatre-based and narrative practices, this workshop will invite participants to explore the concepts of solidarity, community engagement, and activism. By working collectively and critically analysing the role of narratives of solidarity in our cultures, communities and institutions, we will explore what possibilities exist creating new pathways towards collective action as we explore the importance of narrative and embodied practice as a methodology of radical imagination and a more inclusive future.
Contact name: Molly Flynn
Speakers-
Molly Flynn
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Molly Flynn is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance and the Subject Lead for Performing Arts and Creative Industries at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research analyzes theatre as venue for social change and space for civic engagement. Her most recent projects focus on Ukrainian theatre sine the Euromaidan Revolution as a form of anticolonial resistance and cultural diplomacy. She is the editor of 'Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution' (2023) and the author of 'Witness onstage: Documentary theatre in twenty-first-century Russia' (2020). Molly is the director of Birkbeck's Creative Practice Lab and the Co-director of Birkbeck's Centre for Contemporary Theatre.
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Oksana Potapova
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Oksana Potapova is a feminist decolonial scholar and practitioner of participatory arts-based methods for communities, with a focus on collective care, feminist pedagogies and decolonial solidarity-building. Oksana holds a masters in Gender, Peace and Security from the London School of Economics. She is trained in theatre of the oppressed, feminist pedagogy and somatic approaches to individual and group work and has over 12 years of experience in organising, curating, and facilitating projects aimed at supporting communities affected by war and displacement. The purpose and passion of her work is creation of spaces and methodologies for individual and collective liberation and the belief that the world worth living in is created by people and communities who are deeply connected to themselves and their creative potential.
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