My new essay on theatre curation is published here, in which I discuss the role that theatre festivals can play in our crisis ridden times -

‘A theatre festival is in public space, but it is also as public space. Theatre festivals are good at creating specific densities of narratorial complexities. They accelerate, interrupt, exhaust, and enthuse communities. They alter social temporalities. In a world in which space for disagreement and dissent has begun to erode from society, festival-making could become a restorative act. It could return the public to the realm of imagination, to freedoms, to processes and to experiences that are being expelled from society. Festival-making could be a process of offering protection, attention, and amplification to voices, identities, and silences under threat outside. In this sense, festival-making is public-making; it reserves the power to conjure publics pushed out of sight, it can take up the tumult that seethes under state or social censor and give itself the mandate to create trouble‘.