Darrel Toulon of the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Austria, will present ‘Performance Art Countering Social Invisibility at the Intersection of Social Justice and Legal Change’ at The Vienna Conference on Arts & Humanities (VCAH2026) and The Vienna Conference on the Social Sciences (VCSS2026), to be held in Vienna, Austria, and online.
Darrel Toulon is an artistic researcher, practitioner, and educator whose work explores how performance can support marginalised and conflict-affected communities. His keynote will introduce docu-dance-theatre as a participatory method for transforming trauma, challenging social invisibility, and creating opportunities for societal change, using projects completed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Uganda, and the Philippines as case studies.
This keynote presentation will be held both onsite in Vienna and online via live-stream. To participate in VCAH/VCSS2026 as an audience member, please register for the conference via the conference website.
The presentation will also be available for IAFOR Members to view online as part of their membership benefits. To find out more about becoming an IAFOR Member, please visit the IAFOR Membership page.
Speaker Biography
Darrel Toulon
Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Austria
Darrel Toulon is an artistic researcher, practitioner, and educator at the Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität, Austria. He is also a cultural manager, an artist supported by Arts and Health Austria, and the Founding Artistic Director of 'the alpha group’, based in Vienna. His projects align with the university's Third Mission, addressing issues such as the consequences of migration and war, intersectionality and identity, and long-term unemployment. His primary area of research is the development of docu-dance-theatre as a transdisciplinary tool using participatory artistic interventions for personal growth, trauma transformation, and societal change, with marginalised, stigmatised, and silenced populations.
Toulon has headed projects in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Uganda, and was a featured artist at Künstlerhaus Wien (SUBSTANZ Exhibition, 2024-25). Other international projects include the intergenerational/interethnic Peace-Building with Performance Arts Residency at Mindanao State University, Philippines. His projects also target young adults with migration backgrounds and NEET status, and individuals living with their Lebensborn family inheritance.
In 2002, he was awarded the First Austrian Dance Production Special Prize. His community dance project “THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR” (2015), created with unaccompanied minor refugees residing in Graz, Austria, was nominated for Place of Respect 2016. He was awarded the Styrian Golden Cross of Honour in 2016.
Abstract
Performance Art Countering Social Invisibility at the Intersection of Social Justice and Legal Change
Social invisibility refers to the phenomenon where certain groups or individuals are marginalised in a haze of stigmatisation, discrimination, and non-acceptance. Docu-dance-theater (Toulon, 2014) is a performance art that uses participatory artistic interventions to effect personal growth, trauma transformation, and societal change in vulnerable populations. By transforming the hard facts of real-life biographical source material into fiction for performative interpretation to breach the void of communication, dominant cultural narratives can be rewritten and witnessed, initiating multi-layered processes of integration, reconciliation, and socio-political transformation.
At the heart of this presentation is more than a decade’s insight from an evidence-based body of work, drawn from internationally implemented projects that intersect with transdisciplinary research in post-conflict zones, contributing to, for example, the recognition and acceptance of children born of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and children born in captivity in Uganda. Simultaneous, coordinated engagement across multiple domains is necessary for this work to successfully foster a sustainable, just society.
How can an invisible population be rendered as empowered creative agents and advocates? How can vulnerable groups challenge their social and legal invisibility, and break the walls of silence surrounding their existence? How can marginalised groups negotiate when and how they want to be seen, and have their needs and experiences recognised by mainstream society, policy makers, and researchers? Docu-dance-theater methodology is situated within the Post-Traumatic Growth model (Calhoun and Tedeschi, 1998), and builds on Trauma-Informed Principles (Alessi and Kahn, 2022) to create ‘safe spaces’ that allow interventions to unfold in a benevolent manner. Hart’s Peacebuilding Wheel (2008) serves as a framework for visualising the multi-layered needs of societies affected by war, with tangible and intangible issues, intergenerational trauma transmission, and deep-rooted conflict.
