Resistant performance: bodies and politics in practice today(in person)

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Performances can be found in many practices: artistic and mundane, at home, at work, in the street, in private or in public. In all these situations, bodies are arranged. Performances reproduce, often reinforce, gendered and racialised bodily formations. Yet it is also in performance that normative body politics can be questioned.

In this panel, we want to think about possibilities of resistance in performance. What can performance teach us about being in and relating to the world? How to imagine otherwise, non-normative, non-hierarchical practices today? In a conservatoire and higher education setting, how do we study, research and teach performance as a form of resistance? How do we practice pedagogies of care and solidarity?

We are excited to welcome Vânia Gala, Freya Jarman and Ella Parry-Davies & Helen Rios to address some of these questions from the perspectives of music, choreography, and theatre, from theory and practice.

Panel: Vânia Gala, Freya Jarman, Ella Parry-Davies & Helen Rios

Freya Jarman:

Freya Jarman is a Reader in Music at the University of Liverpool, having managed a convincing enough impersonation of a basically functional grown-up to remain in employment there since 2005. They have a wide-ranging interest in issues of the voice and vocality in their cultural and historical contexts, examining voice through the critical lenses of identity politics generally and queer theory in particular. Freya is the author of Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities and the Musical Flaw (Palgrave, 2011), and a number of chapters and articles on vocal topics including: lip-syncing in film; vocal impersonation; the London factor in millennial blue-eyed soul; and shifts in the gender work of operatic and Broadway voices. Their ‘difficult second album’ is a wide-ranging historical exploration of the gendered values of high notes in western vocal music (contracted with Oxford University Press), which sets out to use voice to demonstrate how gender is always-already intersectional.

Vânia Gala:

Choreographer, curator and researcher. Gala is part of the collective of artist-curators who represented Portugal at Venice Art Biennale (2024) with the project “Greenhouse”. She received her PhD from Kingston University funded by a university scholarship. She works at the intersection of critical dance studies, performance philosophy and experimental practices in curating, dance and performance.

Her interests lie on notions of refusal, fugitivity, improvisation(s), opacity, black ecology, black (non)performances, negotiation and hospitality. Gala has been Course Leader of MA Expanded Dance Practice at the London Contemporary Dance School, Director of the BA in Contemporary Performance Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and module coordinator of the MA/MFA Choreography at Trinity Laban. She is an Associate Professor at Escola Superior de Dança.

Recent performative interventions include Passa Folhas (Venice Biennale), Table for Upside Down Practices (Gulbenkian Foundation and Tramway (UK)) and Fanon’s Ph*rm*cy- Grammars of the Blues (Culturgest). Latest publications include Greenhouse: Art, Ecology and Resistance and a chapter under Afroeuropeans: Racism, Identities and Resistances. Gala is co-convenor of the Theatre, Performance and Philosophy group of TaPRA and had consulting & evaluation roles in international projects at Arts Directorate Portugal (Ministry of Culture), Manifest (EU) and European League of Institutes of Arts.

Helen Rios:

Helen Rios is a domestic worker, church volunteer, and community leader who currently serves as a member of Migrante UK and Chairperson of Gabriela UK, a women’s alliance advocating for the rights of migrant women. A mother who courageously left her children in the Philippines to work overseas, Helen channels her lived experience into empowering others. She is actively involved in campaigns and direct actions to support and rescue individuals who are victims/survivors of human trafficking.

Ella Parry-Davies:

Ella Parry-Davies is a practitioner-researcher taking up feminist and crip approaches to the collaborative study of labour migration. Her first book Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work came out with Northwestern University Press in September 2025, and reflects on a collection of site-specific soundwalks co-created with migrant domestic workers in the UK and Lebanon. She is a lecturer at King’s College London, teaching practice-research on the MA in Theatre, Performance and Critical Culture.

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