Search Results (8)

Many youth experience distress around the climate crisis. However, mainstream environmental messages ignore youth concerns, blame individuals, and suggest techno-fixes rather than addressing root causes. Young people need a way to productively process and collectively engage with their complex feelings about the climate crisis. During the spring of 2023, a group of university students facilitated a Research-based Theatre project to explore their relationship to climate and environmental justice as part of a biannual performance festival of student new work. Specifically, we used Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to slow down and embody participants’ struggles with environmental action. We argue that this process allowed participants to explore how and why they made sense of mainstream environmental messaging about the climate crisis. This paper offers a case study exploring how the interwoven themes of power, positionality, and agency emerged through embodied investigations during the early development of our Research-based Theatre performance. The paper concludes by discussing how Research-based Theatre can embrace a post-activist lens that supports the complexity of sense-making and troubles the over-emphasis on solution as the only response to environmental/climate crisis. Further, we argue for the kin-making possibilities that crisis can teach us when engaged through embodied exploration. Full article

This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre’s potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of ‘active citizenship’ for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research. Full article

This reflective essay describes a research course which provided undergraduate students with an opportunity to conduct archival research on six decades of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activism and care that have challenged heteronormativity, cis-normativity, and racism in Canada. While there are many ways to share the findings of archival research, we chose to teach our students how to create dramatic verbatim monologues as the arts-based research method of verbatim theatre required students to use the words of activists themselves to explain why a particular moment of activism and care was needed. Students attended three different workshops during the full-year course from September 2022 to March 2023: a workshop in conducting archival research, a workshop about centring themselves and their communities in their research, and a workshop in verbatim monologue writing. Here, we reflect upon what these workshops taught us about archival research, working with Indigenous archival material, and rupturing systems of oppression in our own bodies. At the end of the course, students reported their take-aways from the course. This included a new understanding that it was possible to conduct research on topics they felt passionate about and that theatre-based research provided them with a way to express the findings of their research in forms other than writing essays. This new-found freedom was life-changing. Full article

This article describes the development and public performances of La Liga de la Decencia, a new play presented as part of the 2023 New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin. Inspired by the cabaret scene and teatro de revista of the 1940s in Mexico City, La Liga de la Decencia combines live performance and video art to explore how hegemonic gender and social norms shaped by the emergent nationalism of postrevolutionary Mexico continue to oppress femme and queer bodies today across the US–Mexico border. Through satire, parody, and dance, La Liga de la Decencia problematizes the social, class, and gender norms as established by the cultural elite and the state. Following research-based theatre as an inquiry process, this article describes how writing and directing this play allowed for a deeper understanding of the dynamics of a historical period. By mixing facts, fiction, and critical commentary, La Liga de la Decencia investigates history through embodiment. Full article

To the Academy is a multi-media performance work that makes poignant and humorous commentary about education, common paradigms of diversity, and the oppressive nature of institutional labor. Created through a dialogue between myself, an Indian American with training in various forms of physical theatre and Indian dance, and Guyanese-Canadian actor Marc Gomes, it has been performed at several universities and arts centers since 2015. In this essay, I will interrogate the ways in which we place select elements of “Indian tradition” at the service of the piece’s overarching theme of histories of European domination, asking whether making these cultural materials subservient to our political agenda constitutes a form of appropriation. I examine three components of the work: the character of the classical Indian dancer who appears in the first section of the show, the explicit references to the ancient Sanskrit treatise on performance, the Natyashastra, and the framing of both these elements within our adaptation of Franz Kafka’s story, “Report to an Academy,” about an ape who learns to impersonate humans. In so doing, I explore the ethical responsibilities artists of color have in working with intercultural aesthetics. Furthermore, I assert the inevitably ambivalent nature of activist performance, even if artists aim to resist hegemonic structures. Full article

This paper will explore ways in which dynamics of visibility/invisibility of American Muslim women activists are transformed in secular places like USA, while these women struggle surviving on the borderlands. Borderland and boundary are perceived as lived spaces that are culturally hybrid and are seen as a theatre for radical action. In this paper I contend that Muslim women activists in the USA operate from geographies of borderland and while inhabiting this hybrid third space they generate discourses of dissent that challenge stereotypes about them. Hailing from diverse backgrounds and countries, with different cultural roots yet same belief system and faith, American Muslim women activists adapt varied resistance strategies to challenge the Muslim patriarchy and the western hegemony that has persisted to portray Muslim women as an oppressed group of people in need of saving. Tracing Muslim women activists’ emotional and experiential geographies I will look at ways in which dynamics of solidarity between them have moved beyond dichotomous divisions of global-local, global North-global South, and empire-colony. With the discussion of lives and activism of Amina Wadud, Linda Sarsour and Asra Nomani, this paper will contextualize these activists within the spaces of resistance which they inhabit, while navigating their challenges in the context of geopolitical tensions and conflicts which are their lived realities in the USA. Full article

Australia’s brutal carceral-border regime is a colonial system of intertwining systems of oppression that combine the prison-industrial complex and the border-industrial complex. It is a violent and multidimensional regime that includes an expanding prison industry and onshore and offshore immigration detention centres; locations of cruelty, and violent sites for staging contemporary politics and coloniality. This article shares insights into the making of a radical intersectional dance theatre work titled Jurrungu Ngan-ga by Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous and intercultural dance theatre company. The production, created between 2019–2021, brings together collaborations through and across Indigenous Australian, Kurdish, Iranian, Palestinian, Filipino, Filipinx, and Anglo settler performance, activism and knowledge production. The artistic, political and intellectual dimensions of the show reinforce each other to interrogate Australia’s brutal carceral regime and the concept of the border itself. The article is presented in a polyphonic structure of expanded interviews with the cast and descriptions of the resulting live performance. It identifies radical ways that intersectional and trans-disciplinary performances can, as an ‘act of liberation’, be applied to make visible, embody, address, and help dismantle systems of oppression, control and subjugation. Full article

Obstetric violence refers to the mistreatment of women in pregnancy and childbirth care by their health providers. It is linked to poor quality of care, lack of trust in health systems, and adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes. Evidence of interventions to reduce and prevent obstetric violence is limited. We developed a training intervention using a participatory theatre technique called Forum Play inspired by the Theatre of the Oppressed for health providers in Sri Lanka. This paper assesses the potential of the training method to increase staff awareness of obstetric violence and promote taking action to reduce or prevent it. We conducted four workshops with 20 physicians and 30 nurses working in three hospitals in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Participants completed a questionnaire before and three-to-four months after the intervention. At follow-up, participants more often reported that they had been involved in situations of obstetric violence, indicating new knowledge of the phenomenon and/or an increase in their ability to conceptualise it. The intervention appears promising for improving the abilities of health care providers to recognise obstetric violence, the first step in counteracting it. The study demonstrates the value of developing further studies to assess the longitudinal impacts of theatre-based training interventions to reduce obstetric violence and, ultimately, improve patient care. Full article