PolyVocalCity: What’s On?

Application deadline February 4, 2024

PolyVocalCity:Re-Staging Croydon festival, Quaker Hall, 2023. Courtesy of Theatrum Mundi.

Theatrum Mundi is looking for aspiring urbanists interested in taking part in PolyVocalCity, an intergenerational, educational cohort aimed at individuals who have a strong interest in cities and culture.

Building from the knowledge we have acquired and developed from last year’s conversations around Croydon, we will continue working in the borough and beyond with methodologies of world-building and gaming to find new strategies for achieving environmental and social justice in the urban realm. This year we are interested in employing the metaphor of parasitic life to interrogate symbiotic relationships based on co-dependency and resilience to break down hierarchical structures while exploring their fragility and their potential danger. We are particularly interested in engaging with ideas of:

1. Structural similarities – what similar grounds and resources do we share?
2. Parasitic strategies – using mimicry to avoid detection
3. To be and to become parasites – who is being colonised/ who is being the coloniser?
4. Parasites as noise and disruption – parasitic life as resistance

We are interested in initiating new conversations and generating new thinking to create discourses that offer practical and theoretical responses through four dedicated sessions on choreography, sound, writing, and infrastructure and the production of a community TV programme and a public event.

The program will be delivered in partnership with locally based arts organisation Turf Projects and Croydon’s Placemaking Team.