Sourcetext: Dr Pavlos Kountouriotis & Andrea Pagnes
Bodies in Dissent is a seven-week module at HOME OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICES. Every year in January, students here explore the intersections between performance, politics and philosophy. They focus on acts of dissent that question normative ideas about the body.
The students work intensively with the body as a site of resistance, creative liberation and artistic revolution. The module is put together by Dr Pavlos Kountouriotis and is guided by him and fellow lecturers Andrea Pagnes, Verena Stenke, Dr Anja Foerschner, Anushka Nair and Steef Kersbergen.
Through theory and practice, students delve into questions of embodiment, identity and power. The module connects to earlier modules such as Body in Performance, in which the body was examined within normative structures. In Bodies in Dissent, students go one step further: they are encouraged to question and break through these structures through their practice.
The pedagogy connects theory, artistic practice and reflection, in order to create space for bold engagement. The module concludes with a collective performance, followed by a diffractive essay in which students bring together their research.
Students deepen their understanding of the social, political and philosophical dimensions of performance. Transgression is central here. They analyse how artists, then and now, use their work to challenge hegemonic systems. Think of criticism of exclusion and hierarchical norms.
Transgression is seen as a liberating method, not only as resistance. It is a way to take back power and break open rigid stories about body and identity.
Dissent in this module is not a destructive act, but a lived expression of engagement. Instead of doing even more violence to the body, the search is for forms of artistic and intellectual generosity. In this way, students explore thinking otherwise as a research method. They look for new ways to understand and imagine bodily identities and social structures.
By investigating performance practices that push at boundaries, students gain insight into the systems that regulate the body. They see how performance has historically been used against marginalisation, and how alienation can be transformed into agency and freedom.
Students are encouraged to position their work within broader social and political contexts. They create a collective performance in which failure, vulnerability and experiment are given space as forms of engagement.
Attention is also paid to the ethical side of working with themes around body and subjectivity. Not the imposition of new norms, but careful engagement is central. Each student works from their own practice.
An important part of the module is the shift from reflection to diffraction. Reflective thinking often repeats existing frameworks. Diffractive thinking, by contrast, looks for entanglement, multiplicity and new meaning.
‘Diffraction’ comes from the work of Karen Barad, who argues that knowledge arises through relations: theory and practice do not exist separately from one another. They continually influence each other.
Students work with theory by, among others, Bataille, Kristeva and Agamben. They do not apply these theories literally to their work, but investigate how these theories affect their practice.
Thus reading Kristeva’s ideas on contempt can lead to changes in a performance. That performance then in turn also yields new insights into contempt. This is what Barad calls “cutting together-apart”: theory and practice that at the same time separate and connect.
In their diffractive essays, students do not analyse their work as an end product, but as living research. They ask questions such as: How does my practice change the theory I am working with? What arises out of this entanglement?
The essay becomes a space where contradictions are allowed to exist, and where thinking and making move forward together. This method connects to the module’s focus on dissent, difference and hospitality.
A core of Bodies in Dissent is the idea that engagement is a basic precondition for dissent. The module is inspired by the thinking of Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle on hospitality. Thinking otherwise is here seen as something that both invites and challenges.
In English you can see this nicely in the word ‘host’, which can mean both ‘host’ and ‘enemy’. This doubleness forms a metaphor for the learning environment: critical and caring, disruptive and inviting.
The module offers a ‘courageous space’, in which students can share their vulnerability. Relationships and collaboration are central. Dissent is not a solitary act, but a shared practice.
Making performance here is a response to urgent social issues. Students formulate their personal and political urgencies, and translate these into performance.
The process is co-creative and transdisciplinary. There is room for embodied research, sensory exploration and poetry.
In a world full of crisis and polarisation, this module offers a way to use performance for critical engagement. Students are given tools to combine artistic and intellectual research and are invited to imagine new forms of dissent.
In this way, Bodies in Dissent contributes to broader conversations about the role of art in social change. Performance is used as a space to welcome difference, question norms and explore new ways of being.