Taking Care, Taking Risks

In 2022, Ada Mukhina brought her performance Risk Lab, which is about risk in arts and artists-at-risk, to Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics. That idea of risk and care became the keystone for this spring 2025 Cultivating Cultural Resilience panel. Kiyo Gutiérrez, Teddy Mangawa, Dijana Milošević, and Trà Nguyễn join Ada for an international dialogue on artistic impact. What follows is an edited, abridged transcript of their conversation.

Ada Mukhina: I'm a nomadic artist and theatremaker originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, and for the last five years I have been based in Berlin, Germany. At the moment I'm working on a new theatre piece called School of Survival. It's an empowerment-performance with music for “Anxious Germans” about survival strategies under far-right politicians who are on the rise around the world. The piece will premiere in Stuttgart, Germany on 3 October at Theater Rampe. So when I got the invitation from the Lab to moderate this talk, I asked them, “Do you now also need our international survival expertise for “Anxious US-Americans”,” and they said, “Yes.”

Today, I would like to focus not on the problems, which are many around the world, but on the strategies. Let’s hear from these brilliant international artists on how to resist, build solidarity, and take risks with care. I will ask each of the speakers to share one strategy that you or your colleagues have employed in the part of the world you work in: What are the issues you are tackling? What are the obstacles? What are the results?

The government banned the production, silencing it before it could gather the momentum. Fear ruled the stage before we ever had the chance to fully claim it.

Teddy Mangawa: It is good to see and connect with you all. My name is Teddy Mangawa. I am a fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics based in Zimbabwe. I am a theatre practitioner, mainly focusing on theatre for social development. In Zimbabwe, the stage is fiercely a contested space. Art is rarely neutral. Every community theatre play that speaks truth to power is not viewed simply as a tool of expression, but as provocation to challenge the status quo. So for us to conduct community theatre performances, you must get clearance from the provincial Minister of State. After that, you go to the District Development Coordinators for clearances. I work in the rural areas, and for one to work in the areas like those, you need to be cleared by the Rural District Councils and District Development Coordinators. As for the mainstream theatre for theatre venues and festivals, scripts must go before the censorship board, and it goes to both local and international productions. Apart from the clearance, digital surveillance is also a norm of the day. Police infiltration is also part of it.

I am going to share my story, when we came up with a hybrid kind of approach, which we call “theatre in transit.” So in 2008, the ruling party ZANU-PF [Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front] lost elections but refused to hand over power. The regime called for a runoff, and leading up to that runoff, violence exploded across the country: Opposition leaders and supporters were abducted, disappeared, tortured, and killed.

In the midst of the chaos we produced a play, me and my team—a bold act of resistance to speak out against the violence and injustice. After two performances, the backlash was swift. The doors for the performances were locked. The government banned the production, silencing it before it could gather the momentum. Fear ruled the stage before we ever had the chance to fully claim it.

Ada: What was your reaction? How did you resist this censorship?

Teddy: When the stage was taken from us, we took our stories to the people. We turned to Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre, staging unsanctioned performances in commuter buses. Eighty percent of Zimbabweans use public transport, so our actors blended in as ordinary passengers, sparking conversations about electoral violence and fear.

We started by risk mapping. We did an assessment of the legal, political, and digital threats. We also held briefs with different stakeholders, including Zimbabwean lawyers for human rights. We set up images and contact chains and legal responses, planned secure communication and preparations. With no stage, no lights, no script, just danger and truth, we conducted plays without clearances.

The rule was simple: People should not know that this was a performance. They only knew later, when they begin to see things—issues unfolding, audience involvement. After the performance, the reactions were surprising. People in Zimbabwe know that the democratic space is shrinking, and every time they have an opportunity, they make sure that they engage. Our plays were five to ten minutes, and then engage into post-performance discussions, where people will be spoke, engaging, exchanging ideas, encouraging each other, so that there was a kind of community urgency.

So our care strategy for that—we made sure that the cast members were trained in improvisation for the purposes of de-escalation, and we also made sure that we have legal observers nearby during the performances. There are lawyers on pro bono and those who work in the development and social justice field. We invited one or two lawyers, bring them into the bus so they were also monitoring and assess the impact of our strategy. Like I said, people cried, argued, reflected, even though most of them did not realize that it was theatre until the end, and by then the performance had done its work. It awakened something.

Ada: Thank you so much, Teddy, for sharing the first strategy. Now, I would like to go to a different part of the world—to Serbia. The resistance methods are actually quite linked between these two contexts, when it comes to leaving the institutions and taking over the streets and public spaces. I would like to talk now about the recent student protests in Serbia. Dijana, could you please share some strategies from this inspiring movement?

Dijana Milošević: In Serbia it's really about care and risk at the same time. These are student protests—the students initiated them, and then they became civilian protests. So me and my theatre company are taking part every day, or whenever we can, as citizens of the city. We, for some time, stopped performing at the usual venues as a sign of support to the students that are in blockade. So they're blocking their universities, and they're not having any kind of the classes. Professors support them.

It all started because… I mean, it's very hard to speak in such short time about the roots. But just to say that we live in a highly traumatic, traumatized society that grapples with legacies of dictatorship, corruption, and so on. For the last twelve years, we have had an extremely corrupt, very authoritarian regime and power. This is the context.

So dissatisfaction of the citizens was huge, and lots of protests were happening. This protest started in November because the canopy in front of the rail station of Novi Sad, Serbia fell and instantly killed fifteen people, and then the sixteenth victim died after some months in hospital. It was due to the corruption of the construction business and corruption that is happening in all segments of society supported by the current regime. The students started to react to that, and students are still doing different actions that are energizing citizens. We are speaking about thousands and thousands of students and citizens all around the country, and the tactics that they started to use from the very beginning, as I said, were risk and care.

Fr example, the first action was to stand in silence for fifteen and then sixteen minutes, the number of the victims of that event, at the exact time when the canopy fell. So it looked surreal and quite tragic, of course, and then in some strange way beautiful to see people stopping wherever they were—on the streets, in the middle of work. The response of the government was very fierce. They had people in cars that were going through protesters, running them down. So the risk was high, but the students were organized in such a way that it was really caring for everyone.

Then, they started to develop lots of actions. They were basically blocking the streets, blocking institutions, and blocking the city. They were using different songs, banners, puppets, and lots of humor. Instead of being in fear, people really felt energized. Something that was quite distinctive of those protests was—and this is why the whole country started to take part—they had kind of the self-sacrifice dimension in it. I'm thinking about Grotowski and the “holy actor” that is offering his body and mind to the audience. Like, students started to walk from city to city, hundreds of kilometers, in support of the cities that are going to have protests. In that way, they were spreading information to the ordinary people, peasants, citizens, and so on, who are all under media censorship.

Ada: I remember that for a very long time there was no international coverage of these events. Could you please share the strategies for how people were breaking this media silence?

Dijana: Exactly as I said, by really walking. Also, the students organized in small groups, and they said, “Go to your person in the village you know, and talk to them.” This is what they are still doing. They made it so that all the citizens started to feel that they owned the protest. Then it was a big response from the people coming with food to greet those who were walking.

Then, to break international censorship, a big number of bikers started to bike from Belgrade to Strasbourg where the International Court for Human Rights is. It got huge coverage. Then, the latest that just happened a few days ago was running to Brussels. Can you imagine? It's thousands of kilometers, and they are the runners. I mean, the students were running, and then on the way, again, people were cheering them on. They arrived in Brussels, where we have the European Parliament, and they were greeted, and they were talking with officials. It was quite incredible.

Ada: I personally find particularly inspiring the instructions that students wrote about how to self-organize and make collective decisions through the plenary assembly. Look them up! And now we go a bit closer to the American context. Kiyo, the floor is yours.

Speculative fiction here is a tactic to confront censorship and injustice, because it allows us and the audience to imagine alternative realities and encode critiques.

Kiyo Gutiérrez: I am originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, but I moved to California to study my Master's degree in art. I want to share the project that talks about the border, trying to reframe the border not as a line but as a site of entangled sovereignties and as a place of resistance and memory. So last summer, for one month, me and my collaborator traveled the rivers that delineate the border between Mexico and the United States. We started in Brownsville, Texas, where the mouth of the Rio Grande goes into the sea, and we followed the Rio Grande, then the Rio Colorado, the Gila River, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And throughout, we engaged with this colonial document, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This is an international treaty that back in 1848 that ended the so-called Mexican-American War and turned these rivers into borders.

My proposal is using the archive and using speculative fiction as resistance when dealing with injustice and censorship. Archives, especially state or institutional ones, are often tools of power, and they're created to legitimize authority, to record ownership, and to codify control. But we, as artists, as theatremakers, can repurpose these materials to reveal all those contradictions, all those voices that are absent within these archives and these narratives, and all the injustices embedded in those official narratives. So this is how the archive, in this case, becomes a site of evidence and, more importantly, a place of imagination.

My tactic was to engage tactically with this colonial and imperial document. I was trying to challenge the myth of a lawful expansion, and I wanted to link this historical document to contemporary crises like migration, border militarization, and climate injustice. Censorship often works through erasure. By returning to the archive, we can point out what is missing, like Indigenous land rights, water access, and voices of women, voices of laborers, voices of migrants.

This work is trying to echo and restore those absences through speculative fiction, storytelling, and embodied performance. The creature in this story (which turned into a thirteen-minute film) gave birth to the waters millennia ago and returns to visit them. Then she finds out that these rivers have been partitioned and raped by insatiable men. And this is the document that did this. So throughout the film, this creature is engaging with these archives with different gestures, like ripping, marking, soaking into these rivers and dissolving its ink and pages as a symbol of the erosion of the colonial power and of those impositions. Speculative fiction here is a tactic to confront censorship and injustice, because it allows us and the audience to imagine alternative realities and encode critiques, especially right now, and bypass direct confrontation in politically repressive or unjust environments. By setting stories in alternative realities, like this project does, we can disguise sharp critiques of present systems like colonialism, racism, authoritarianism. The speculative setting becomes kind of a protective view.

Ada: Performing on the border means going to very remote and highly restricted areas. Who was watching you there, and how did you make sure your work reaches a broader audience?

Kiyo: Because those places are highly surveilled, there was no easy access to any of these bodies of water. And there was also a risk, because border patrols were constantly going there, questioning us. But also, if we cross the border to the Mexican side, these are very dangerous places to be. So this performance was not thought for live audiences being there, but as a documentation to project afterwards the film for audiences in other places.

Ada: Thank you, Kiyo. It is good to remember that a risky performance could also reach the audience later in a safer environment through video. Trà, could you please give us one more story?

Who takes care of the very strong minded?

Trà Nguyễn: Okay, one more. I'm from Vietnam. A very short, brief introduction of my country: We have a single-party government. We just celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the reunification of the country from a long war. Some call it the Vietnam War, some call it the Vietnam war against the United States. Fifty years ago, it ended.

By putting together this fiftieth anniversary celebration, the government achieves a level of credit that was unprecedented. It was so successful in the eyes of the citizens that people would camp on the street to see the march on the next day. And currently, as many other countries are, Vietnam is in between the trade war between the United States and China. That's where I live now.

I got to think about the topic for this panel, and a question sort of coagulated from my long-term investigation into the personal. I'm an artist, and around me are artists. They do things for the community, for people. They are very strong. They're strong minded. They're strong spirited. But when they do things for others, I wonder, who takes care of them? Who takes care of the very strong minded? I guess the very strong people find a way to take care of themselves, because it's very hard to find people who are even stronger to rely on. They take care of themselves by doing more stuff for other people.

I would like to share a very specific strategy that I'm inspired by, by one of my artist friends, on how to take care of themselves while participating in a very critical discourse in Vietnam. Her name is Nhung Dinh. What she does is, I kid you not, she gets married. On 26 April, so like three weeks ago, my friend got married to something like ten beautiful beings. She called them beings. Some are people—some identified as men or women, some cisgender, others genderqueer, a furry, some living in this world, and others might not. This is in her world. And this is an artist who, a few years ago, married herself to an island. So, when I got to know this, I'm just basically 100 percent inspired without knowing why. It struck me on such a deep level.

In Vietnamese, we have a saying that the family is the basic block of the society. Vietnam is a normative society. So normally there's a husband, a wife, and one to two kids. The issue here is likely addressing this ideal basic block of the society. When I think about the risk of this, this ceremony, well, there's a risk of being censored by the police, but I feel like the biggest risk is actually a total denial of who she is, of this community that holds themselves together around this, this ceremony, a total denial. And it's too heavy. I feel this strategy of care. This is a performance, by the way. It is a ceremony, but it is also a performance.

Ada: Who was the audience of this performance?

Trà: She sends out invitations to people saying, “Yo, come to my wedding tomorrow.” That's it. And she did say that she is legally tied to no one, but dutifully to herself, and her freedom and autonomy are intact. Every party continues to marry whoever they like, I guess. This just allows the community to just come together and witness and celebrate together with her and with likeminded people—and seeing in front of their eyes the absolute loneliness that she bears with her. I feel like she also can marry her loneliness. That's a sad story to exemplify a strategy that my dear friend, artist Nhung Dinh, manifested into real life.

Ada: Thank you so much for this exchange.

I think it is beautiful that we started it with the strategies of fighting censorship and ended with how we take care of ourselves while we fight. We went through strategies of t how to react to political situations in different contexts: from personal ways, as you Trà, described, to the organized ways, as Dijana explained; from performing for nature and border controls, as Kiyo does, to going directly where people are, as Teddy does. The choice of strategy is yours. But doing nothing is not an option anymore.