Stages of Violence Research Network

The 'Stages of Violence' Research Network offers a timely exploration of the relationships between performance and violence. It will run over a two-year period and bring together academics and practitioners who are interested in performance that relates to contexts and legacies of violence in Kenya, Rwanda and Northern Ireland. All three countries have shared histories of colonial violence and, more recently, of the political instrumentalization of religious and/or ethnic identities which have led to violence.

More specifically, the network will consider how performance relates to acts of collective violence, defined as the participation in, and/or formation of, groups who engage in violence against others for economic, political or social gain. We will ask how performance and performance makers represent, challenge, and/or sustain violence? This question will be explored through three key events, and a final online symposium. First, we will consider how performance is being used to prevent violence through an event in Kenya, where violence around presidential elections has led to preventative work taking place. We will draw on the expertise of Amani People's Theatre and their use of Theatre of the Oppressed approaches to prevent participation in conflict and violence. Second, an event in Northern Ireland will consider how performance has addressed, and continues to engage with, violence. Here, we will engage with the expertise of Derry Playhouse, which runs innovative arts and peace projects. Third, we will travel to Rwanda to examine how performance is part of commemorating acts of violence, marking (and at times masking) histories and narratives of violence. Participants will attend the Ubumuntu Arts Festival - organized by Hope Azeda (Mashirika Arts). Finally, the online symposium will move beyond preventing, addressing and commemorating violence, asking what happens next? The continual representation of particular contexts as violent, or marked by legacies of violence, may further entrench conflict and prevent the transition towards new, alternative, futures. The event will draw on the findings of the three previous workshops.

The network will comprise six core participants, some of whom are representatives from the organisations mentioned above. Two core participants have been recruited from each country, and they will take responsibility for some of the planning and implementation of network events, including the recruitment of ten further participants in each country, who will attend the events happening in their respective contexts. The findings of the research network will contribute towards academic understandings and discourses of performance and violence but also to the approaches and knowledges of the theatre and performance practitioners who are doing this work, on the ground. The activities will result in a co-edited book and we aspire to create new opportunities for sustained partnerships beyond the network.