Breakfast Dialogues with Arkadi Zaides
Saturday, 20 June, 2026 @ 10h - Les Subs / les Tilleuls
Talks
60 min / Free entrance
Les Subs
Breakfast Dialogues opens a simple space to think together - an informal encounter where artists, citizens, and guests share questions, ideas, and perspectives before the day unfolds.
Over coffee and conversation, we gather to listen closely, challenge assumptions, and let the festival’s themes resonate through voices in dialogue.
Towards Documentary Choreography: Performing Human Rights Between Theatre and the Public Sphere
In this talk, Zaides proposes a series of insights into the challenges that arise when navigating this complex terrain, drawing specifically on recent projects such as Archive (2014) and Necropolis (2018). Special attention will be given to the theatre space, where the spectator’s seemingly privileged position is brought into question and reconfigured, and where the conditions of witnessing, responsibility, and implication are critically examined using performative and choreographic means. At the same time, Zaides will reflect on how the processes surrounding these projects extend beyond the theatre setting, operating within the public sphere and gradually shifting toward activist terrains, where artistic practice functions as a tool for civic engagement, institutional critique, and the emergence of new forms of collectivity.
Arkadi Zaides (b. 1979, Homel, Belarus, former USSR) is a choreographer, performer, researcher, and curator. He holds a master’s degree from the AHK Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam (NL), a PhD in the Arts (Dance) from the University of Antwerp (BE), and a PhD in the Arts (Drama) from Ghent University (BE), where he is also a visiting professor. From 2024 to 2027, he is an associate artist at Agora – Cité Internationale de la Danse in Montpellier (FR). His work has been presented at festivals, museums, and galleries across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and he has received several prizes, including recognition from the Émile Zola Chair for Interdisciplinary Human Rights Dialogue (IL) for his engagement with human rights issues.
In his artistic practice, choreographer Arkadi Zaides investigates the capacity of choreography to engage with contemporary societal urgencies by working with documentary materials. His multidisciplinary projects continuously navigate between spaces in which structural violence produces specific forms of social choreography, and the artistic space in which these choreographies are interrogated, displaced, and reconfigured though embodied interventions, performative translation, and hybrid staging.