IMPROFEST workshop: Playing Politics - Raffi Feghali

In a time when political issues are becoming more and more controversial, we are expected to be more and more politically correct on stage. This workshop helps us navigate how we can say everything we want to say without having to be politically correct and grow our audience instead of losing it.

Bio:
Raffi Feghali is a theater maker, peacebuilding consultant, and trainer working mostly in Europe, USA, and the Middle East while being based between Amsterdam and Beirut.

As a theater maker, he draws on the meeting point of improvisational theater (improv) and storytelling (especially that rooted in the “hakawati” tradition) in order to inspire his performing, writing, directing/devising, radio dramas, sound design, and music making. He is a member of the Lincoln Theater Center Directors Lab 2018.

In peacebuilding, he uses listening exercises, the “Do No Harm” framework, and systems thinking in order to facilitate conflict analyses with communities and eventually strategize interventions accordingly - especially using Reflecting on Peace Practice methodologies. When he’s on the field, Raffi uses arts and especially theater as an approach and tool for peacebuilding. In that context, he’s an avid practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed, Playback Theater, Masar Theater (which he has developed and is still developing), and expressive arts conflict transformation and peacebuilding methods and techniques in dialogues and workshops.

Raffi is a trainer of various improvisational theater topics as well as other theater skills. He coaches multiple stand-up comedians, storytellers, and actors on performance skills and provides guidance in the development of their shows.

He offers trainings in different skills relating to peacebuilding: conflict transformation (especially through the arts), systems conflict analysis, dialogue and negotiation skills, Theater of the Oppressed, Playback Theater, and other.

Feghali has been a guest lecturer at multiple universities on the various topics he practices and trains on (University of Amsterdam, University of California, Irvine, New York University Abu Dhabi, American University of Beirut, LCC International University).

In business contexts, Raffi gives different training and coaching sessions on multiple soft skills, using improvisational theater and storytelling, especially with the company Perform.

The workshop is a part of Improfest 2025, a theatre festival focusing on improvisational theatre. The festival invites improvisers from Sweden and the rest of the world to give performances and offer workshops in various locations in Sweden during the period May to August 2025

(Workshopen kommer att hållas på engelska då Improfest är en internationell improvisationsteater-festival med inbjudna improvisatörer från hela världen.)