HOME

This conference seeks to explore the paths that queer theater companies, directors, and playwrights across the world have taken throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries to speak queerness to power against normative orders of gender and sexuality. Darkened theater rooms across the planet have been one site of many, where queerness has come to be negotiated vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes, conservative governments, and religious ideologies. This conference sets out to map such theater spaces across the globe, historicize and contextualize them, while also examining their generative potential for critical theory.

Conference venue: Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg | Room 319

THURSDAY, June 5

10:00 OPENING REMARKS

Ursula Regener
Vice President for Internationalization & Diversity

Tatiana Klepikova & Saltanat Shoshanova
Organizers

PANEL 1 | 10:20 – 11:20

Queer Constellations: Vaslav Nijinsky, Josephine Baker, & Federico García Lorca in Cosmopolitan Buenos Aires

Carlos Halaburda, Chicago

The Art of the Culture War: Lessons from
the Battlefields (Scotland/UK)

Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, London

intermission

PANEL 2 | 11:40 – 12:40

“We… did nothing… twice and slept”
Sri Lankan Queers Navigating the Public Performance Board

Matthew Tyne, Sydney & Jake Oorloff, Colombo/Melbourne

Mission Impossible: Queer Characters on Soviet Estonia’s Stages, 1960s–1970s

Eva-Liisa Linder, Tallinn

Lunch

PANEL 3 | 14:30 – 16:15

Queer Jewish Theater, Censorship, & the State (USA)

Jennifer Glaser, Cincinnati

Politics of Queer Theater since 2000 in Poland

Błażej Warkocki, Poznań

intermission

Ilkhom against the State: Uzbek Theater as a Place of Queer Transgression

Saltanat Shoshanova, Regensburg

16:30 – 18:00 INTERVENTION

Alyson Campbell, Melbourne

FRIDAY, June 6

PANEL 4 | 10:00 – 11:00

Queer Memory on Stage: A Search for History and Lineage in Contemporary Russia

Tatiana Klepikova, Regensburg

Performing Sadomasochism: The Theatre of Cruelty in East Palace, West Palace (China)

Hongwei Bao, Nottingham

intermission

PANEL 5 | 11:15 – 13:00

Yearning for Chuqui Chinchay: Rethinking the Nation through Folklore in Danza Nacixn (Peru)

Enzo Vasquez Toral, Austin

Theatre as Dissensus and Deconstructive Gender Space: SAMUHO Performers in Bengal, India

Swati Guha, Kolkata

intermission

Envisioning a Lubunya Galaxy*: Queer Sci-Fi Aesthetics and Migration Narratives in Theatrical Space (Türkiye/Germany)

İrem Aydın, Berlin

Lunch

PANEL 6 | 14:30 – 15:30

The Stage and Costume Designs of Peter Kothe: Slipping Between Life and Theatre in the GDR

Emily Stokes, Birmingham

Composing Queer Utopian Glimmers of Resistance in HOMO FOMO, a New Piece of Queer Performance (Australia)

Meta Cohen, Melbourne

intermission

PANEL 7 | 15:45 – 17:30

Queer Theater against Institutional Silence: Affective Solidarities and the HIV+ Undetectable Subject (USA/Palestine)

Andrew Sutherland, Melbourne

Institutions for Queer Theater (Research) & Their Futures

Closing reflection with the input from current and past convenors of the IFTR Queer Futures working group (Alyson Campbell, Melbourne; Ella McCarthy, London; Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, London)