This event will offer a public conversation and performance exploring the development of Songs of Solidarity, a new theatre work examining contemporary forced migration through the lens of epic storytelling. Hosted at Senate House as part of Josephine Burton’s tenure as Practitioner in Residence, the event will bring together Josephine Burton (Dash Arts, co-director), Professor Fiona Macintosh (University of Oxford, APGRD), and one of the five commissioned writers on the project.  

The discussion will be interwoven with short readings from new material generated during the development process, offering audiences insight into how research translates into performance language. These readings will illuminate how fragments of lived experience, scholarly inquiry, and poetic imagination are being shaped into a contemporary “polyphonic epic". Songs of Solidarityis a bold, interdisciplinary project, by Dash Arts and PROJEKT UTOPIA that asks what an epic for our time might look like, one written and performed by migrants, drawing on ancient epic traditions to tell the stories of displacement, belonging and survival that define our world today.

Josephine Burton is a theatre director, dramaturg and playwright whose work frequently brings classical traditions into dialogue with contemporary and intercultural performance. She is founding Artistic Director of Dash Arts, and her productions includeDido's Bar, theatrical reimagining of the Aeneid. She co-wrote and directedThe Great Middlemarch Mystery(Coventry City of Culture 2022) and most recently Offie and Fringe-First nominatedThe Reckoning (2025), shaped by research at the University of Cambridge into Ukrainian history and identity, which she co-wrote and directed. In 2026, she created and directedOur Public House, written by Barney Norris, developed with Professors Alan Finlayson at UEA and Henriette van der Blom at Birmingham, an exploration of England, post-Brexit. A Classics graduate of Oxford, she hosts the OffScript podcast, exploring the ideas behind Dash Arts' work with artists, academics and thinkers.
   
Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London. His second collection,Southernmost: Sonnets(Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes and named book of the year by The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Week. His debut English collection,Ballad of a Happy Immigrant(2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix is editor and lead translator of Hemisferio Cuir, introducing English readers to major Latin American voices. He has been awarded the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize, and a PEN Award. Boix was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in July 2026. 

Fiona Macintoshis Emeritus Professor of Classical Reception in the Classics Faculty and Senior Research Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She joined the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) as Senior Research Fellow in January 2000 after holding a permanent lectureship in the English Department at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (1995-1999). She was Reader in Greek and Roman Drama (2008-2014) and promoted to Professor of Classical Reception in 2014. In 2010 she was appointed Director of the APGRD and made a Fellow of St Hilda’s, where she remained in post until her retirement in 2024. She has an Honorary Degree from Université Grenoble Alpes and was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2025. She has published widely on the afterlives of Greek and Roman drama and epic in the modern world.