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Politics of the Performing Body: Insurgence, Pleasure, Labour

Politics of the Performing Body: Insurgence, Pleasure and Labour

Aparna Mahiyaria in conversation with Brahma Prakash

Monday, 19 October 2026 | 4–6 pm TS2, Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter

The Centre for Live Performance Matters invites you to a conversation with writer and cultural theorist Brahma Prakash on the performing body as a site of cultural memory, oppression, resistance, labour, and pleasure. The conversation will focus on the performing body as a site of political oppression, resistance, visceral experience and memory. We will explore how the body becomes a repository of memory, how it resists being archived, and how performance gives expression to histories and experiences that might otherwise remain unrecorded.

Drawing primarily on Brahma Prakash's Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the ‘Folk Performance’ in India, the discussion will also connect these questions to his more recent book, Body on the Barricades, and to recent ongoing protest movements in India.Brahma Prakash is a writer, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

He is the author of Cultural Labour: Conceptualising the ‘Folk Performance’ in India (2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (2023). Aparna Mahiyaria is a Lecturer in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter and co-lead of the Research Centre for Live Performance Matters.

Live Performance Matters is a research centre based at the Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter that brings together scholars, artists and practitioners to explore the cultural, social and political significance of live performance, and the ways in which performance shapes and responds to the world around us.

All are welcome.