Overview

We live in a time when wars, revolutions, political repression, and social or ecological crises can rupture the present without warning. Such ruptures disrupt familiar orientations: communities transform or disperse, identities lose their recognition, and the narratives through which we understood our past and future no longer correspond to the realities we inhabit.

This course explores the question: What does it mean to live through historical rupture?

Approaching this question through performance ethnography, the course uses biographical theatre as both a research method and artistic practice. Playback Theatre creates a temporary research community grounded in trust and ethical witnessing, where personal stories are transformed into improvisational performance. Documentary Theatre works with archives, testimonies, artifacts, and embodied memory to compose performances that connect individual experience with historical contexts.

The course culminates in the development and presentation of collaborative documentary performances and a reflection on performance ethnography as a method of knowledge production.