In cooperation with the House of National Minorities, Moving Center’s three-day festival of ideas will explore the important themes of dissidence and oppression.

“A poet is a blind optimist. The world is against him for many reasons. But the poet persists. He believes that he is on the right track, no matter what any of his fellow men say. In his eternal search for truth, the poet is alone. He tries to be timeless in a society built on time.”―Jack Kerouac

First day: Yesterday

Featuring a slideshow and lecture by Tomki Nemec (personal photographer of Vaclav Havel), the storytelling-musical performance of exiled Iranian singer-songwriter Shahab Tolouie, a concert of The Plastic People of the Universe, and more, we will look at lives confined but not defined by totalitarianism and political/cultural oppression.

Second day:Today

Bringing together Afghani women writers, Iranian women visual artists, potentially important dissident voices like Yulia Navalnaya, and more, we will examine current situations of repression and the strategies of survival that their victims utilize to overcome them.

Third day: Tomorrow 

Inviting visionary poets like David Whyte, psychologists, philosophers, educators, and artists like Alex Grey, we will explore strategies to avoid repeating the conditions that gave birth to previous cycles of abuse. How can we raise our children so that they learn to break chains instead of reforging them?