Launched in 2013 and hailed as the largest geoeconomics initiative in history, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road, also know as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aims to connect continents, and integrate Eurasia through collaborations spanning trade and infrastructure, culture, and finance. While until now the BRI has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomics project, in this seminar we shall ask: what does it mean to ‘revive’ the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, and how this geopolitical chronotope could be productive for theatre and performance studies? We shall discuss the ways theatre and performance artists, visual artists, and filmmakers from the countries along the Silk road route (Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, India, China, etc.) engage, critique and represent the underbelly of the contemporary silk roads – contemporary linkages between the circulations of peoples and desires, the global spread of the capitalist market and economic globalization, and the human and environmental catastrophes they unleash. Focusing on selected cities along the New Silk Road (Lisbon, Belgrade, Athens, . . .) we shall also examine the contested nature of BRI-driven, infrastructural, material restructuring of urban space and its effects on the contours of lives, places, and socio-natures. Finally, employing a cross-cultural lens and the unique disciplinary methodology of Politics and Performance, we shall explore how to build a new critical framework to understand the New Silk Roads performatively as a relational and intersectional critical concept and practice.

Launched in 2013 and hailed as the largest geoeconomics initiative in history, China’s Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road, also know as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aims to connect continents, and integrate Eurasia through collaborations spanning trade and infrastructure, culture, and finance. While until now the BRI has been discussed as a geopolitical and geoeconomics project, in this seminar we shall ask: what does it mean to ‘revive’ the Silk Roads for the twenty-first century, and how this geopolitical chronotope could be productive for theatre and performance studies? We shall discuss the ways theatre and performance artists, visual artists, and filmmakers from the countries along the Silk road route (Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, India, China, etc.) engage, critique and represent the underbelly of the contemporary silk roads – contemporary linkages between the circulations of peoples and desires, the global spread of the capitalist market and economic globalization, and the human and environmental catastrophes they unleash. Focusing on selected cities along the New Silk Road (Lisbon, Belgrade, Athens, . . .) we shall also examine the contested nature of BRI-driven, infrastructural, material restructuring of urban space and its effects on the contours of lives, places, and socio-natures. Finally, employing a cross-cultural lens and the unique disciplinary methodology of Politics and Performance, we shall explore how to build a new critical framework to understand the New Silk Roads performatively as a relational and intersectional critical concept and practice.