Decentre the stage

Three Days to Look Back on Three Years of Common Stories
11 - 13 December 2025, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles

For the past 3 years, the European project Common Stories has been involved in an exploration of the question of ‘the other’, and in promoting the voices of those who all too often remain unseen on our stages.

This has enabled some remarkable artistic practices and theatrical expressions to emerge.

As a space for reflection and dialogue, Decentre the Stage brings together not only the partners and actors in the project, but also researchers, activists, artists for two days of discussions and round table events. This period of taking stock underlines the need to diversify the imaginary, in constructing tomorrow’s stories. There are so many dynamic creativities and new avenues to explore in the future for European theatre.

Two days conceived by Safia Kessas, in dialogue with Isabelle Collard and the teams at the Theatre National.

Detailed programme

Thursday 11 December

2pm: Workshops

Institutional Diversity: findings and lived realities

Meeting with Good Practices Factory representatives and Common Stories partners. A contextualisation of questions around diversity within institutions. Conversations and exchanges of practices with participants. Conclusion by Dr. Sarah Youssef, Artistic Director of Orangerie Theater – Cologne. (In English)

5:30pm : Performance

Anatomie de la Riposte by Laurence Rosier

Laurence Rosier, linguist, professor at ULB, and passionate author, will present an original performance based on her book La Riposte (Payot Publishing). In this sharp and timely work, she explores the many ways of responding—whether to an insult, a sexist, racist or homophobic attack, an injustice, or an abuse of power. Through quick retorts, strategic silence, humour, irony, and subversion, La Riposte is at once a history of forms of counter-speech, a handbook for linguistic self-defence, and a manifesto for dignity and collective intelligence.

1h30 / Salle Jacques Huisman (French, with English surtitles)

Friday 12 December

2pm: Round tables

moderated by Youness Anzane, Peggy Pierrot et Sarah Youssef*

Discussions between Common Stories artists and Brussels-based artists and activists on the themes Family & Utopia, Memory & Mourning, and Gender, Body & Resistance.
Followed by a feedback session at 5:30pm with the project partners to share conclusions and perspectives resulting from the exchanges.

*These times are reserved for CommonLAB artists and are therefore not open to the public.

7:30pm Closing conference

Common Stories: Decentre the Stage

with Mame-Fatou Niang, Hortense Archambault, Pankaj Tiwari, Emmanuel Ndefo and Safia Kessas

While political discourse frames migration and otherness as “problems” to be managed, our stages remain remarkably white, our institutional leadership homogeneous, our programming timid. Common Stories emerged from the recognition that the performing arts must not only reflect and represent our European societies but also actively shape fairer, more plural, more livable futures.

Themes

Institutional ‘disruption’: How can European cultural institutions move beyond tokenism to truly share power with artists and communities historically excluded? What structural changes—in recruitment, programming, resource allocation, decision-making—are non-negotiable?

The violence of universalism: How does the myth of “universal” art and culture perpetuate exclusion? What happens when whiteness, heteronormativity, or masculinity are named, when Eurocentrism is challenged, when knowledge from the margins is centered?

Body, space and visibility: How do urban architecture, institutional aesthetics, and performance spaces themselves encode the stories that matter? What does it mean to give life to dominated bodies, to make the invisible visible—who decides?
How can we support artists who mobilize rituals and forms deemed unreadable by traditional criticism? Who does art belong to?

The European question: What futures can we imagine for a European project increasingly threatened by xenophobia, nationalism, and the instrumentalization of “diversity” as a political scapegoat? How do the performing arts contribute to building solidarities across differences?

Speakers

Mame-Fatou Niang will bring her incisive analysis of Black geographies, universalism, and the institutionalization of antiracist thought in France, Europe, and beyond. Co-director of the documentary Mariannes Noires and founder of the Center for Black European Studies & the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University, her research dismantles the fiction of color-blind republicanism, revealing how the construction of French identity systematically marginalizes Black bodies while appropriating their labor and creativity.

Hortense Archambault has co-directed the Festival d’Avignon with Vincent Baudriller for a transformative decade (2004–2013) before taking the helm of MC93 in 2015, Archambault embodies an institutional commitment to making space for voices historically excluded from European stages. Under her leadership, MC93 launched Common Stories, acknowledging the need for structural—rather than cosmetic—institutional transformation.

Pankaj Tiwari (CommonLAB 2024)

Emmanuel Ndefo (CommonLAB 2025)

Safia Kessas

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