0333 - 2026 APDF Symposium

Course Description

*** Register by May 13 to guarantee your meal options ***

This year’s symposium grows from the energy of APDF 2025’s theme of Hulihia — the overturning, the rupture, the moment when things shift. If Hulihiaasked us to look at disruption, this year we look at what comes after. Living Heritage turns our attention toward the practices, choices, and experiences that carry culture forward through change. Heritage is not something preserved behind glass; rather, it is embodied within communities, people, and relationships. It adapts, responds, protects, and continues.

Simultaneously, sustaining heritage often requires resistance — resisting erasure, resisting imposed forms, resisting narratives that narrow the complexity of who we are. Artists across the Asia-Pacific region have long reshaped, reimagined, and rebuilt form as a way of asserting cultural knowledge and opening space for new futures. This is where Resisting Form / Forming Resistance takes shape: in the tension between holding on and breaking open, remembering and remaking, inheriting and innovating.

This year, we invite works that sit in that creative tension. Works that honor lineage. Works that disrupt or rearrange inherited forms. Works that protect what must endure. Works that transforms cultural memory into new expressions. Works that explore what it means to “live heritage” — through movement, dance, film, screen media, storytelling, research, and community exchange. Living Heritage: Resisting Form / Forming Resistance invites us to gather at the point where culture continues, transfigures, and reclaims its futures.