This project examines how community-based performance brings previously unseen bodies onto public stages and intervenes in struggles over historical memory, national belonging, and political agency. A comparative study, it draws together research conducted with Asian people’s theatres that emerged in contexts marked by political violence and historical revisionism. As non-professional actors appear, speak, and act together in public, they rehearse alternative forms of democratic life and attempt, in specific contexts, to repair a scarred body politic. These embodied practices operate today as cultural vehicles of reparation and range from the Jana Natya Manch’s inclusionary performances in India to Chung Siu-hei’s protest dramaturgies in Hong Kong and PETA’s counter-narrative works in the Philippines. Combining archival research, performance analysis, and ethnography, the project engages scholarship on dissensus, embodiment, and reparation to illuminate how participatory theatre enables communities to renegotiate visibility, memory, and agency. By situating these Asian initiatives alongside the Théâtre du Peuple in the Greater Region (SaarLorLux), as well as other European sites, “Citizen Bodies” develops a transnational framework for understanding how participatory theatres shape historical narratives and civic imaginaries and how embodied practices help communities envision and enact inclusive and just political futures.
DR. AURÉLIEN BELLUCCI
CURRICULUM VITAE
Aurélien Bellucci is a scholar of comparative literature and theatre whose research explores democracy, gentrification, and reparation through performance across Europe and Asia. He is an associate at the Harvard University Asia Center and a research affiliate in the ERC-funded project “Theatre and Gentrification in the European City” (THEAGENT). He received his PhD in comparative literature from Harvard University, where his dissertation, “Democratic Performances: How Theater Creates the People”, received an Honorable Mention for the ACLA Charles Bernheimer Prize. Working at the intersection of comparative literature, theatre studies, and political theory, he draws on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork to examine how participatory theatre enables spectators to constitute a citizen body, reshaping historical memory, democratic agency, and urban life. He is completing his first book, People’s Theatres, which traces democratic experiments in participatory performance across Europe and Asia.