Challenging Structural Violence through Community Theatre: Exploring Theatre as Transformative Praxis (original) (raw)
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Performing Arts and Social Violence: Innovating Research Approaches to Sexual and Gender-based Violence in the Global South, 2022
Executive Summary Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is a global epidemic. It has been estimated that one in three women worldwide is subjected to physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. And yet, there is a paradox between the commonality of SGBV and the ability to speak and address these issues openly. Some of the reasons and rationales for this are culturally specific, but the fact remains universal – it is difficult to talk about and address SGBV. Fighting SGBV is a stated objective for numerous governments and international organisations, as well as researchers. However, methods and approaches can be heavily standardized and bureaucratic, taking no account of the range of emotion involved in tackling SGBV. Relying on these risks neglecting the fundamentally complex and contradictory dynamics of SGBV, and limiting the effectiveness of discussions about it. Driven by a belief in the power of the arts and humanities to provide playful, creative, and counter-intuitive responses to urgent problems, this project used comedy, theatre, song and dance in activities run for women and men in partnership with established NGOs. Emphatically, the project’s findings illustrated how ‘fun’ arts approaches (such as humour and improvisation) may be highly effective in opening up very sensitive conversations about deadly serious topics. Instead of being disrespectful or incongruous responses to the matter, they may provide insights into how concepts such as violence are understood contextually and culturally. Thus these methods have the capacity to open up completely new ways of understanding these notions in order to address them. The methodological headlines of the project have already been published in a peer-reviewed academic article entitled “Embracing Aporia: Exploring Arts-based Methods, Pain, “Playfulness” and Improvisation in Research on Gender and Social Violence.” Some of the conceptual findings around performance and dramaturgy in the midst of workshops can also be found in the forthcoming article “The Theatre of Development: Dramaturgy, Actors and Performances in the ‘Workshop Space’” in Third World Quarterly. The project was evidenced by fieldwork and workshops in Sierra Leone and South Africa. The scoping work highlighted the extent to which SGBV research in the Global South is directly relevant to the Global North. While this project conducted research primarily in the Global South, the findings have broader implications for exploring the nuanced ways in which SGBV is an acute, pernicious global epidemic embedded in the subtleties of individual and collective attitudes and behaviours. In addition to known drivers of SGBV (such as socio-economic privation), there are drivers that are not as well understood. These include socio-cultural narratives supporting individual and institutional responses to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity (e.g. men’s treatment of wives as property and the complicity of police); the affordances of technology (e.g. easy access to pornography); the enabling role of local institutions and social norms that create barriers to justice; discourses of sex and sexual roles; and geographically and culturally inflected gender performances. Without understanding these drivers, it is impossible to find ways to stem the tide of SGBV, safeguard victims and survivors, and change the behaviours that perpetuate the cycles of social violence globally. Developing this work, therefore, requires new funding streams and award schemes that promote the co-construction by academic and community researchers of creative, discovery-led, longitudinal work. Any ambitious new funding programme should facilitate broader comparative case studies, alongside the further development and deployment of arts and humanities-led interdisciplinary approaches, and expand existing innovations to advance the field. Funded projects should include capacity building, e.g. research training for community participants and for NGO members; doctoral training for local researchers at local universities; institutions and infrastructure to support ongoing work beyond the life of a project. These programmes should be international and integrate the practice of international exchange between the Global North and South to enable comparative study of SGBV cultures and explore the universality of the nuances driving social violence and allow scope for extensive knowledge exchange across these contexts. This should include provision for Global South researchers to participate materially in fieldwork and research activities in the Global North. Methodologically, this project strongly endorses the use of arts-based methods, including comedy, song and dance, and theatre, to engage audiences in discussions around SGBV. The scoping project identified a major new research opportunity for the urgent use of arts and humanities-led interdisciplinary approaches to explore the subtle ways in which social violence, specifically sex and gender-based violence, manifests and persists. The exercise confirmed that arts-based methods (when used meaningfully and appropriately) can facilitate discussion about sensitive subject matter, including SGBV, and may in fact be a ‘natural’ or intuitive way of engaging with this discussion. It also highlighted the value of approaching the design and conduct of research in different ways. These include the need for research to be slow or incremental: that is, building relationships and trust with communities and project partners, co-designing projects and performances with the full research teams and returning to locations over time and for research to involve exchanges. Further, instead of focussing on pre-determined outcomes, arts-based methods enable researchers to maintain flexibility and remain open to travelling where the research leads. Following the affective turn in applied theatre, we aimed to engage the sensory, embodied and affective power of performance and produce certain sensory effects in relation to a particular theme (here, SGBV). Our team are sceptical about transformational, interventionist projects, and recommend that emphasis be placed on how to engage with existing practices as methods that open up difficult conversations and move people emotionally and physically. We argue that fun and playfulness should not be dismissed in the face of sensitive subjects such as SGBV, but rather more fully embraced and explored in greater depth. This means moving away from using flat, binary data as evidence and results, and instead having the intellectual conviction to back the potential of this sensory, ludic, proleptic approach to methods, evidence and outcomes.
Participatory theatre for transformative social research
Reflecting on the transformative potential of participatory theatre methods for social research, the article draws on a project with ethnically diverse migrant mothers in London. The research reframes the experiences and practices of socially and ethnically marginalized migrant mothers as active interventions into citizenship. We also challenge recurring public discourses casting migrant mothers as threats to social and cultural cohesion who do not contribute but instead draw on the resources of the welfare state. We highlight how participatory theatre methods create spaces for the participants to enact social and personal conflicts. It also validates migrant mothers' subjugated knowledges of caring and culture work creating new forms of citizenship. By enacting different versions of collective stories, the theatre sessions therefore become rehearsals for socio-political transformations.
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This article describes two participatory theater projects undertaken by Western Edge Youth Arts in Melbourne and aimed at challenging racialization and fostering belonging among culturally diverse young people. Drawing from interview and archival data, we suggest that participatory theater provided the young people the opportunity to share and reflect on their lived experiences and represent themselves, as well as gain resources for responding to the different issues associated with racialization. In the settings created, participants were able to disrupt taken for granted and common sense understandings of self and other and create new stories of identity and belonging. These disruptions into the symbolic context of social identity construction are important for personal and social change, including for decentring whiteness. However, participatory theater is not a panacea, nor is it free of power relations. We discuss some of the challenges and limitations of the different projects.
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This thesis looks at theatre as a possible medium to advocate for social justice and change. The arts have proven to be a method for engaging people, groups and communities in dialogues concerning a vast amount of issues. I participated in a nine-day artistic residency with thirteen student artists from a theatre school in Northern California in order to see their interactions, involvement and engagement with a rural community in northern California. During the residency, I took the role of a participant observer and did ethnography. After the artistic residency, the participants were asked to participate in semi-structured interviews with the purpose of understanding and obtaining richer descriptions of their experiences during their stay in the rural community in northern California. This research is in response to a program evaluation I produced for the school. The results show that arts and theatre are a venue to promote community building. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would never have been able to finish my thesis without the guidance and support of my committee members, help from my cohort, and support from my family and spouse. First and foremost, I would like to thank Renée Byrd and Meredith Williams, my committee chair and graduate coordinator, respectively, for encouraging me to follow my hopes and aspirations. Thank you Dr. Renée for your guidance and for always reminding me that above all, I am still a human being. Dr. Williams, thank you for your weekly check ups and for reminding me that I was not writing the All-American novel. I am eternally grateful for the amazing group of people with whom I began and completed this journey. Nicole Chappelle, Janae Teal, Nicole Menefee and Patric Esh, thank you for your persuasion, motivation and unconditional support, I honestly do not know what I would had done without you. We did it! To my family, my parents and younger sister, each time we spoke they reminded me why I was pursuing the Public Sociology program. To my spouse, Roberto Arce, for being the first to join me in my journey and for his support and love. Finally, I want to thank all the individuals, organizations and communities, who in one way or another contributed to this work. Though I am not allowed to mention you, thank you for allowing me into your lives. You are the protagonists of this story. I am
Reenvisioning theatre, activism, and citizenship in neocolonial contexts
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Political situations in neocolonial Africa in the 1970s instigated several artistic strategies through which people understood their new oppressions and sought cultural and political means of transcending them. Theatre for Development (TFD) emerged as one such cultural practice that helped communities produce forms of resistance by using performance traditions not only to tell stories of their oppression but also to galvanize them into social actions. As practiced in most of Africa, TFD brings together amateur and professional actors, social workers and health functionaries, in a broader movement to help communities coerced into poverty and under-development transform themselves into voluntary social organizations seeking more proactive citizenships. Its distinguishing feature is extending theatre of political consciousness into a programmatic activism whereby communities set agendas for their own social development, as well as devising means of negotiating with government and non-government organizations. Theatre for Development in Nigeria, where this vision of development became a broad-based movement, will be the focus of this chapter.
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The paper is based on the ESRC research project: 'Identity, Performance and Social Action: Community Theatre Among Refugees' which is part of the research programme on 'Identities and Social Action'. After describing the project, the paper examines the methodological specificities and different stages of Playback and Forum Theatre. The latter includes image work, character building, scenes and interventions. It argues that overall participatory theatre, techniques as sociological research methods, provide different kinds of data and information than other methods � embodied, dialogical and illustrative. The paper ends by examining the circumstances in which the use of these techniques as research methodology are be beneficial. It also calls for an overall wider use of these techniques in sociological research, especially to study narratives of identity of marginalised groups, as well as to illustrate perceptions and experiences of social positionings and power relations in and outside community groupings. Using participatory theatre as a research tool, therefore, can be considered as one form of action research.
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In this chapter, I focus on the phenomenon of staged performance as a medium through which experiences of atrocity and violence are being increasingly articulated by those who experienced them directly. Drawing chiefly on the rationales underpinning Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness and the collaborative work of Bravo 22 Company and The Drive Project, the chapter interrogates two broad questions emanating from projects of this nature. Firstly, for scholars exploring relationships between bodies, violence, injury, memory, memorialisation, and reconciliation, what exactly is it about these performances that should constitute ‘the empirical’? Exploring a form of expression more apt, it may be claimed, at capturing the visual and the visceral, as well as the unspoken and the unspeakable, I argue that any analytical attempts to harness the power of staged performance must resist the temptation to reify its meaning. Rather than trying to decipher ‘the real meaning’ of a play, for example, I argue that only approaches which pay close attention to the practices of production and consumption associated with the performance are able to faithfully comment upon its all-important context. Secondly, I consider the potential ethical contradictions of documentary theatre as an artistic site of investigation for the social sciences which have frequently exemplified an overly individualistic and risk-averse logic characteristic of Western epistemology and pedagogy.
The practice of the “ Theatre of the oppressed” from an ethnological perspective. A dialogue
Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica. Journal of Theories and Research in Education, 2015
During a Theatre of the Oppressed Seminar the Kuringa explained: “I look at reality, take a step back and create a reality with understanding. I observe, I analyse, I create an Image of the Reality to go back to discuss about Reality”. (Field notes) Could we put in relation the creation process of theatre with ethnographic research? What could come out? There are many intersections as interesting critique points which can be relevant for both. My understanding of ethnographic research, political and collaborative, brought me to the following methodological questionings. I observed theatre practice participating at the activities of a theatre group for six months. I presented my analysis and interpretation to the participants and I did interviews to deepen specific themes. The inputs collected are not objective ones and the results does not aim to be definitive but to reflect on questions of contemporary social science. We move and observe the space on the not clearly definable borde...
LINK TO ACCESS ARTICLE: https://doi.org/10.1080/02500167.2018.1443484 This article presents insights on a participatory theatre initiative implemented in Kenya, with the aim of understanding the changes that were initiated towards the re-establishment of peace between communities. The project was carried out in the aftermath of the post-election violence that took place in the country between 2007 and 2008. Amani People’s Theatre organised a number of theatre-based activities adopting a participatory approach, which ensured the involvement of community members from different tribes. Participants used the plays to re-enact the events, experienced during the conflict and the issues that still affected their communities as a result of those events, and worked together on finding solutions. The article begins with a literature review on Theatre for Development and its progress towards a more participatory approach. This is followed by an introduction of the project and the context in which it took place. The study design and Theory of Change developed for the analysis are then presented, opening the path to a discussion of the findings generated through that framework. Lastly, final reflections bring to light a number of issues that must be considered when working with participatory theatre in peace interventions.