Bunker Talk #171: Restoke

This event is part of Bunker Talks. Bunker Talks invite artists and researchers to talk about who they are and what they do.
About this Event

Co-Creation: Making Performance with Communities and Young People

Restoke put the people of Stoke-on-Trent at the heart of creative adventures. They make performances, plan events and run workshops alongside people who may not usually meet, forming new bonds of friendship, understanding and solidarity in the city.

Clare Reynolds is the co-founder and co-director of Restoke and has over 17 years' experience creating performance with professional and non-profesional performers, including with children and young people. Working across artforms she is interested in how co-creation can produce work that is both artistically ambitious and socially meaningful, strengthening relationships and solidarity in a city. In this talk, Clare will share insights from almost two decades of practice and explore the opportunities and challenges of making work with communities.

This talk is presented in association with the Performance Research Group.

Daphna Baram

Daphna Baram is a London-based stand-up comedian, researcher and journalist whose work explores stand-up comedy across borders. Her PhD at Lancaster University (2025) focused on how immigrant comedians in the UK negotiate their identities to live audiences in the UK.

She has performed twelve solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and regularly appears at festivals and venues across the UK and in Europe. Her comedy engages with politics, body politics, immigration and otherness. She is the author of Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel and has written extensively about the Middle East conflict. Her current book project, Something to Declare, examines stand-up comedy as a space where cultural authority is contested and redefined in real time. Working between stage and academia, she uses both performance and analysis to explore how humour shapes – and unsettles – ideas of who gets to belong.

This talk is presented in association with the Migration and Postcolonial Studies Group.

Bunker Talks

This event is part of Bunker Talks. Bunker Talks invite artists and researchers to talk about who they are and what they do. Curated by the Performance Research Group at Manchester School of Art and the School of English, Bunker Talks explore geopolitical, ecological or economic concerns. The talks create space for critical encounters, presentations, provocation and dialogue as part of a civic conversation.

Originally conceived in the pandemic to explore how artists, writers, curators and researchers continued to make and share their work, live Bunker Talks now take place at The Salutation every month. Since 2020, over 170 talks have been hosted by Performance Researchers and colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. All talks are recorded, edited, captioned and then archived to create an online catalogue, capturing how artists, makers and curators think about the world today. Find previous talks here: https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/bunkertalks/