8 – 10 October 2025

Drama for Life (DFL), based at the University of the Witwatersrand, is proud to announce that the 17th Drama for Life Conference and Festival will take place under the theme: HUMAN CHANGE! From global ideals to justice(us)?

The conference and festival will run simultaneously in the Wits University Chris Seabrooke Music Hall and surrounding venues, in the Braamfontein main campus, from the 8th to the 10th of October, Johannesburg.

Quoting theatre visionary Augusto Boal: “To dream of a better world is not utopia – it is the first act of resistance.” This conference asks: What does it mean to be human now? How do we inspire change, and how must we change in relation to global ideals and local realities?

At a time of profound political instability, social dislocation, climate emergency, and escalating authoritarianism across the globe, what does it mean to be human now, and how must we change? In response to these upheavals, we turn toward the applied arts and arts therapies not just for solace, but for radical reimagination.

Each selected conference and festival presentation and or performance explores how Applied Drama and Theatre, Expressive Arts Therapies, Movement, Dance, and other embodied and arts-based practices can act as powerful tools for shaping systems, healing trauma, challenging injustice, and envisioning change.

The 17th Drama for Life Conference and Festival is curated to be a space to reflect, resist, remember, and reimagine. To centre Just(Us). To reclaim our collective capacity for human change and justice. Applied Drama practitioners, academics, students, researchers, artists, educators, social scientists, community leaders, policymakers, active citizens and curious minds are at the centre.