Performing European Publics

What does it mean to perform Europe—and to perform in Europe—today? What are the political stakes of such performances? Performing European Publics (4-5 June 2026) invites researchers from Theatre & Performance Studies, Politics, and allied fields to critically reflect on how performance, publicness, and the idea of Europe itself intersect, collide, and transform across diverse cultural and political terrains. European nations today face, in varying guises, democratic ‘backsliding’ or the rise of ‘illiberal’ democracy, encroaching authoritarianism and erosion of civil liberties, the gathering strength of ethno-nationalist and identitarian populist movements, and a polarised, fragmented, even ‘post-truth’ public sphere. This conference asks how performances—embodied or digital actions, in physical or virtual public space, that establish a performer-spectator relation—and performatives—utterances that do what they state—shape this political terrain, and how the concepts and practices of performance, broadly construed, might help us to navigate it. The conference invites delegates working on and in a range of European contexts to consider performances in public space as street-level acts of political theorising, at once locally intelligible and potentially mobile.

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