Permeable Boundaries:

Towards A Critical Collaborative Performance Pedagogy

Nisha Sajnani

A Thesis in the Special Individualized Program

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctorate in Philosophy

Concordia University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

January 2010

©Nisha Sajnani, 2010

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ABSTRACT

Permeable Boundaries: Towards a Critical Collaborative Performance Pedagogy

Nisha Sajnani, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2010 This thesis represents an interdisciplinary inquiry into the boundary between the

listener and the teller in applied theatre performances that purport to effect progressive

change in the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors of those who bear witness: the audience.

Without attending to this boundary, the transformative potential of the performance

project risks impotency and may well result in an unintended affirmation of harmful

divisions of power in society. Current approaches to empowerment that fail to move

beyond hegemonic social relations, that do not entail a redistribution of resources and

decision making authority, result in asymmetrical change and reinforce the boundaries

that sustain poverty. A rationale for audience engagement strategies that can effectively

disrupt this center/margin binary is presented through a retrospective case study of three

applied theatre projects. An argument is made for a critical, collaborative performance

pedagogy as a foundation for a relational praxis of social empowerment in applied

theatre. Essential components of this approach situate applied theatre as a form of

participatory action research involving collaborative processes between audience

members prior to, during, and after the performance event. Such an approach attempts to

disrupt the dynamics that produce poverty by galvanizing the collective analysis and

action of the audience within a larger community organizing strategy.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who have supported me along this journey and I would like to acknowledge a few individuals in particular who have helped me contribute a verse to what is possibly the greatest conundrum of philosophy: how to connect what is with what ought to be. I am grateful to my mentor, Dr. David Read Johnson, for your faith and commitment to my development. Thank you for the readiness of your challenge, your contagious humor, enthusiasm, and your generosity. I would not have completed this task nor lain this foundation if it were not for you. I am thankful to Dr. Alice Forrester. Thank you for restoring my will, unbinding my motivations, and reminding me of the Legacy that has been and continues to unfold. I am thankful to my committee. Dr. Margie Mendell, for your willingness to oversee this journey, for your steadfastness, and commitment to excellence. Thank you for introducing me to such innovative thinkers and for providing me with Opportunity. I also thank Dr. Stephen Snow for your creative spirit and for your guidance and encouragement in this process. Thank you Dr. Edward Little. Our brief conversation after our performance on the politics of water in Bangalore provided the inspiration for this work and I continue to enjoy our work together. I am deeply and happily indebted to Cindy Coady, Geeta Nadkarni, and Kris Tonski for your love and friendship, for your laughter, available ears, rich insights, and unwavering support. Thank you for taking such good care of me. Thank you to Denise Nadeau, Warren Linds, Norman Fedder, Cecilia Dintino, Amy Thomas, Pardis Zarnegar, Mahshad Aryafar, Danusia Lapinski, Paul Gareau, Lucy Lu, Allan Rosales, Alan Wong, Serge Carrier, Navah Steiner, Mira Rozenberg, Elizabeth Hunt, Gerardo Sierra, Dipti Gupta, Rahul Varma, Tana Paddock, Joni Ward, and Rebecca Giagnacova for our many compelling conversations over these years and for such willing playfulness. You continue to inspire me. Thank you to the students and teachers of the Centre for Social Action at Christ Church College and to Dr. George Kutty of the Free Tree University in Bangalore for the ways in which you have modeled a path of artful, social service and holistic scholarship. Finally, I thank my mother, Rakhee Sajnani, and my sisters Sonia and Reena for their love, support, and prayer. We have had many great adventures during the completion of this work and there are many more to come. It is just the beginning.

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PROLOGUE: Two Stories

In December of 2006, in a small village outside Bangalore, a group of young

students from the Centre for Social Action in Christ Church College (Bangalore) and law

and theatre students from Concordia University (Montreal) along with myself and a few

other faculty members participated in a theatre-based human rights project called Rights

Here! (phase 1). Over the course of three weeks, we created and performed a montage of

songs and scenes relating the politics of water to urban and rural audiences. In one village

in particular, residents had not been able to access water from the local pump for three

days. The water table had dropped 233% with the invasive and aggressive drilling tactics

of multi-national corporations resulting in villagers having to walk ten miles to collect

water; water that was only available to be drawn for four hours each day. The reason for

this limited accessibility was due to the fact that the electric pumps needed to gather

water were also privately owned and only made available for brief periods by their

owners. After the performance, a young Bangalorian student from our troupe took on the

role of the mediator (facilitator) between the audience and the action and asked the

audience about their thoughts relating to the lack of this essential common good. A

middle-aged man approached and said, quite simply, ‘Did you bring water’? He

explained that his children had not had water for three days and when he heard the bells

and calls signaling our performance in an open area of the village, he thought we might

have been bringing water. Our ‘emcee’ explained that we had not brought water but that

we were there to draw attention to the lack of water faced by the urban and the rural poor.

I remember feeling that this man already knew that reality all too well. I also remember

the complicity we felt as we returned to our bus where we had stored bottles of water for

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our journey; bottles of water produced by the same multinational corporations

responsible for the thirst these villagers faced. The urgent nature of his question prompted

a dialogue amongst our group about the role of the artist in community development,

about the necessity of working in alliance with those already engaged in practical local

development and with those who create the inequities present, and about the need to

evolve methods of engaging audiences, both those absent and present, in constructive

dialogue. This experience also prompted me to think about the gathering created by our

spectacle in that village. There we were surrounded by mothers, fathers, children, and

elders who, while they all face the same difficult reality, may not have had an opportunity

to gather together to give their collective attention to the issues that affected them most.

The collective attention of the audience appeared to be, in that moment, a political act

that appeared to sever the habitual divide between public and private suffering. Granted,

this analysis provides little comfort when people are thirsty.

***

Another moment in another village outside Mysore on that same trip, our group

witnessed the work of a local, popular street theatre group perform a play about the

exploitation of child labor. Our group sat on the dusty ground amongst the local villagers

and the village elders under the cover of darkness half-lit in the intermittent shadows cast

by a single light bulb swaying precariously on thin wire that ran the length of a single

main meeting hall a few feet away. The scene depicted a family in poverty facing illness

and diminishing choices. The performing group sang in Kannada, the local language,

about children’s hands - young hands that would not know play, but that were calloused

and hard from having been put to work to pay for the family’s debts. After the play ended

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there was silence. In our group, we peered at one another appreciative, anxious, curious,

uncertain and then…someone…clapped. A man who appeared to be visibly in charge

noticed this. He seemed to gesture at the others to start clapping. A slowly escalating and

uneasy applause ensued.

After the gathering dispersed, we were led to the large porch in front of the dimly

lit hall where they had arranged daal (lentils), rotis (bread) and water (life) for us. We sat,

ate, and questioned the moment. One of the leaders of the performing troupe, a

tremendous musician and singer, explained that ordinarily the silence that followed the

play would have remained because the play was depicting the everyday realities these

villagers faced. The clapping broke this silence and, in an instant, created a spectacle

removed and distant from the familiarity of our lives. He explained, in gracious yet

unapologetic tones, that they would have normally continued a dialogue after the

performance but that, in large part due to our presence, they had not pursued this crucial

conversation about the lives of the children in that village. He continued to explain that,

on their last visit to this village, they had performed a play depicting the fact that the land

these villagers worked had been bought by external landowners leaving them to find a

means to travel to an urban center to work. This reality was further compromised by the

fact that there were no roads leading in and out of the village. The troupe had performed a

play about the connection between their isolation and their poverty. After that

performance, the dialogue that took place resulted in plan to barricade the nearest local

road until government officials took notice. Both the actors and the villagers had pursued

direct action together and created a human barricade for days. Their efforts were

rewarded with a wide, new dirt road. Through a form of peer-lending, the villagers were

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also able to purchase a bus that they proudly showed off to us that evening. In fact, our

bus traveled that same road to get to their village and we were the very first visitors they

had received since the road was created. So, in this context, theatre was a serious and

revolutionary endeavor and the actors were allied in the struggles faced by communities

beyond the scope of the performance or perhaps as part of an ongoing ‘play’ with power.

Again, this experience gave me pause. I can still hear the sound of our clapping in the

stillness of that night and wonder at its ability to pull us further away from the scene,

distancing ourselves from implications of such a terrible reality, reducing it instead to a

fictive illusion. I still wonder at what possibilities for action existed within such a

diversely located audience and at what responsibilities may have been pre-empted by our

presence. The image of the dirt road leading able-bodied workers out of the village to

work in the city, while heralded as progress, also revealed larger trends of a growing

divestment from one’s land, labour and capital. These experiences, along with the others I

have presented in this thesis cast into sharp relief the necessity of defining the ways in

which applied theatre can irrigate the boundaries that define centers and margins of

power to create the possibility of solidarity and justice in light of persistent social and

collective trauma.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ..………….…………………………………………...1

Chapter 2 Literature Review…………………………………….9

Chapter 3 Methodology…………………………………...........47

Chapter 4 It’s A Wonderful World…………………………….55

Chapter 5 Rights Here!………………………………................74

Chapter 6 Creating Safer Spaces….…………………................93

Chapter 7 Discussion……………………………………….....110

Chapter 8 Conclusion…………………………………............125

Endnotes ……………………………………………………..129

References …………………………………………..................131

Appendix ……………………………………………………..138

1

INTRODUCTION Her (story) remains irreducibly foreign to Him. The man can't hear it the way she means it. He sees her as victim, as unfortunate object of hazard. `her mind is confused,' he concludes. She views herself as the teller, the un-making subject... the moving force of the story. (Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1989,p.149)

This is an investigation of the space between the listener and the teller in applied

theatre performances that purport to effect progressive change in the attitudes, beliefs or

behaviors of those who bear witness: the audience. Without attending to the boundary

between the listener and the teller, the transformative potential of the performance project

risks impotency and may well result in an unintended affirmation of the status-quo. This

thesis explores the opportunities for dialogue, coalition building, and solidarity amongst

witnesses to difficult stories, stories that emerge from dystopic, unsettled, displaced, and

often violent realities in the context of public performance. In this chapter, I will introduce a

rationale for the evolution of effective audience interaction practices and the necessity of a

critical, collaborative performance pedagogy (CCPP).

Efforts to effect change in society have been based on analyses of divisions of power

(Gramsci, 1971; Gujit & Shah, 1998). Individuals and communities have had differential

access to power depending on their membership in particular social groups at different

points in history creating centres and margins of power with those who have the most access

and opportunity to exercise power at the centre. For the purposes of this study, the issue of

whether an optimal society contains divisions of power or that these divisions are stratified

along the lines of social difference will be placed to the side. Further, the author adopts the

perspective that society is not neatly divided into homogenous nor fixed centres and

margins, but that these stratifications of power are produced, performed, multi-layered, and

context specific. Individual or social differences, and their corresponding social power, are

2

not constant nor immanent but produced through discursive practices and performed in

daily interactions. Rigid boundaries between those who have and those who do not have

power limit the degree to which those who occupy marginalized space in any given context

will be able to enjoy the full arc of their potential.

For example, those who are physically impaired in a society that privileges able-

bodied people will not enjoy access to the same opportunities as their able-bodied counter-

parts. They may be overtly, though variably, restricted from public and private spaces that

are not physically accessible to them and consequently further restricted from possible

economic, educational, and civic opportunities. In this example, the physical planning of

this imagined territory is a construction of a variably coordinated ‘centre’ that creates a

boundary which restricts the advancement of those who are overtly or subtly relegated to

the ‘margins’. This arrangement of power, centres and margins produced over time

coincident with the intersections of one’s socio-economic status, ethnicity, legal status,

ability, gender, age, and sexual orientation among other social locations, restricts the

mobility of members of marginalized groups from attaining the resources and opportunities

required to better their quality of life. Consequently, this structure also shapes and possibly

restricts the degree to which those who enjoy the benefits of the centre are willing to render

these boundaries more permeable by collaborating in efforts to create equity and justice

across lines of difference. Therefore, the permeability of the borders or boundaries within a

given society is of pivotal significance in the assessment, design and evaluation of projects

that seek to address inequity.

Efforts to increase permeability or mobility across boundaries tend to focus on the

actions or potential actions of those located in the margins of society, rather than the actions

or potential actions of those who enjoy the benefits of the centre (Shragge, 1997; Mendell,

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2005). Transformative economic, pedagogical and research protocols such as those

espoused in community economic development or participatory action research place

emphasis on the importance of having those most affected by particular hardship(s) bring

about desired changes by building consensus about the nature of the problems they are

faced with and mobilizing their own resources towards desired outcomes. Within these

models, projects devised to improve the quality of life of individuals and communities

burdened with stigmatization, social and/or economic restrictions resulting from real or

perceived differences in socio-economic status, geographic location, legal status, race,

ability, sexuality, gender, ethnicity or other social categories, are often generated by and/or

for the communities in question. Efforts are centred upon the coordination of the group

affected to move towards their desired goals.

In the example of physically disabled persons who have been restricted from

exercising the full range of their potential, they may choose to address the barriers, such as a

lack of physically accessible spaces, by either organizing themselves to either build desired

spaces or encourage the governing body of their territory to entertain modifications to their

physical landscape. In either approach, change is envisioned as the potential outcome of a

marginalized group’s capacity to assert a unified challenge, a capacity potentially

compromised by an overly facile construction of ‘community’ and by a possible lack of

resources, in confidence, time, money or space for example, resulting from the structural

inequities identified.

Therefore, empowerment efforts have relied on an asymmetrical relationship

between the centre and the margins wherein those occupying marginalized space are tasked

with transforming themselves with minimum, if any, disturbance or risk to the centre. When

efforts to realign this relationship towards an increased permeability between centres and

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margins, to share authority or redistribute resources, fall short of their mark, the blame is

often placed upon the ‘community’ for being uncoordinated in their attempts to achieve

change. In the example above, a group of people similarly affected by a lack of accessible

spaces in the city may be granted sponsorship in the form of seed funding to support their

efforts, a space to meet, and supplies to creatively assert their goals. They may have access

to training in leadership, empowerment, and methods of influencing media. However, this

support, while respective of their efforts, does not require the host or dominant society to

make any changes to their territory as a whole nor risk reducing their political, economic or

social power. In fact, such acts may increase their power when they are seen as benevolent

partners. In this way, the boundary or glass ceiling between margins and centres of power

remains preserved and any failure to thrive experienced by the ‘community’ is firmly

attributed to a deficiency on their part.

Applied theatre that purports to effect social change also follows this formulation.

Performances are produced by, with, and for marginalized, disenfranchised, or otherwise

dispossessed groups in an effort to gain power; to gain internal or external resources.

Attention is given to the realities of those seeking change with minimal attention or

adaptation required, if any, from the always already diverse audience beyond watching or

sponsoring these events. Projects undertaken by community groups who seek to increase

their quality of life are often sponsored by academic and cultural centres of power, federal

and/or private funding agencies. Individual theatre practitioners who are allied with a given

community’s goals may support the development of theatrical productions aimed at drawing

attention to their realities with the hopes of effecting change. Here, the margins are given

centre-stage while potential representatives of the centre, the audience, are seated in the

margins and asked to give their full attention to the realities lived by others. This is not to

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say that all applied theatre projects are, intend to, or should be performed by members of

marginalized groups for members of the ‘centre’. Nor are performers and audiences neatly

divided into representatives of the margins and centres within a given society. However,

when untold stories are given an art form and a platform, audiences, as representatives of

society, remain largely unburdened.

Attempts to engage the audience have ranged from textual to dialogic and embodied

techniques designed to provoke reflection and action. Certainly, the experimental theatre

movement, the work of Brecht and Boal, and current community-engaged theatre practice

are of pivotal significance in considering the ways in which audiences have been forgotten

or engaged in the social project. However, while their strategies have been successful in

arousing a critical consciousness and the desire to act upon injustice, they have stopped

short of laying the groundwork for sustainable change outside the doors of the theatre. The

temporary reversal of centre and margin focuses on the transformation of the marginalized

group and the awareness and appreciation of the audience, but misses the relational nature

of sustained change. As a result, these projects may have limited impact and, ironically,

may risk further entrenching the disparity of power between the margins and the centres

they seek to disrupt by restricting the audience’s role to that of a concerned and appreciative

benefactor at most. Whether the stories of those living at the margins of society are staged

by those affected directly or actors who wish to draw attention to particular realities, the

audience is asked to bear witness; to watch, listen, think and, at times, act. However, their

capacity to respond is compromised by the distance they may feel from the realities staged,

the silence surrounding their complicity in the maintenance of these realities and the

structural dynamics that operate together to sustain oppression. Their will to act, to respond

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differently in the face of injustice, is further compromised by the emphasis placed on

individual action and reflection in current audience engagement techniques which occlude

efforts that can be made in collaboration with one another. Any flexibility or ambiguity that

may have existed within the border between audience members and between the audience

and the stage, is quickly rigidified in the act of securing this silence. In this way, the

audience is left off the hook and the centre remains preserved and further fortified.

Furthermore, performances by those who seek to change their marginalized status risk

having the political thrust of their project neutralized and their differences further eradicated

and successfully co-opted in these intended celebrations of diversity. Therefore, the efficacy

of the social change project is deeply undermined by unintentionally cultivating a culture of

passive reception and isolated action amongst those who could potentially be allied with the

impetus of those seeking progressive change.

A critical collaborative performance pedagogy is needed as a foundation for a

relational praxis of social empowerment within applied theatre. Essential components of

such a pedagogy include dialogic processes between audience members and between

audiences and actors within a larger community organizing strategy. Contributions of such a

pedagogy will be an increased emphasis upon the experience of the audience and on

processes of supporting effective relationships; social networks that are capable of acting

upon the inequities staged. As the opening quote suggests, the stories of the teller(s) risk

becoming lost in translation when the listener(s) is not able to resonate, recognize or

identify with the experience staged. Therefore, such a pedagogical approach in the context

of performance will necessitate a continuous exchange of lived experience amongst

audience members always already diverse in their proximity to the realities staged.

Furthermore, the analysis of inequity and power, and therefore of social change, available to

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the actors and the audience is obfuscated in audience engagement strategies that do not

attempt to name or negotiate the complicity of the collective, the audience members and

actors, in sustaining injustice. A critical, collaborative performance pedagogy will lay the

groundwork to better identify, proclaim, collectively examine, and address the structural

and interpersonal dynamics that silently maintain fixed centres and margins of power. As

these dynamics continue to persist, identifying obstacles to their transformation will also be

an important part of this approach. In this way, both externalized and internalized

boundaries that prevent mutual relationships between those who occupy the centres and

margins of power, in any given context, can be grappled with.

This thesis will, therefore, examine approaches to audience engagement within three

applied theatre projects towards defining the necessary elements of a critical, collaborative

performance pedagogy. I selected these three projects to provide a diversity of approaches

within applied theatre practice that will hopefully yield greater generalizability. The first

project, entitled It’s A Wonderful World: A Musical Ethnodrama (phase II), elicited and

staged the fears and aspirations of a group of adults living with developmental disabilities.

The second project, entitled Rights Here! (phase II), documented and staged the experiences

of racialized citizens and refugees living in Montreal. The third project, entitled Creating

Safer Spaces, invited newly arrived South Asian immigrants and refugee women to

collectively examine their experiences of dis/integration, and assimilation within Quebec,

Canada. These projects were not designed, a priori, to be best practices. However, through

this process of examination, I intend to articulate the basis of such a pedagogy. Hopefully,

the results of this thesis will include specific suggestions for effective audience intervention

strategies within applied theatre projects as well as the identification of major obstacles to

their implementation.

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The significance of this research lies in the reality that the efforts that continue to be

made by ‘communities’ who seek to address disparities of power through theatre remain

compromised by a lack of attention to the processes of change within the audience.

Evolving a method of audience engagement towards effecting sustainable change within the

attitudes and behaviors of audience members is a necessary step towards re/imagining a

model of society that supports the mobility of people, resources, and ideas across centres

and margins of power. A critical collaborative performance pedagogy will support the

creation of sustainable social capital; strong social networks forged across social

differences. Furthermore, laying the groundwork for audience engagement will render

applied theatre practice an increasingly useful ally to alternative methodologies and

practices that also seek to galvanize sustainable relationships between individuals across

communities, with influential institutions, and with the State towards shared risk,

responsibility, and effort in decreasing poverty and realizing progressive change.

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Chapter 2: Literature Review

Centres and Margins Power is stratified within society creating centres and margins of power demarcated

by in/visible and, at times, consensually sustained boundaries that restrict the flow of ideas,

resources and people. I find support for this in my reading of Antonio Gramsci (1971)

whose concept of hegemony describes how dominant groups have maintained binary

divisions of power through persuading those with marginal power to accept, adopt, and

internalize particular norms and values through the proliferation of ideology within varied

tools of cultural production (i.e. radio, television, film, music, theatre, art) authorized by

subalterns of the State including intellectual and moral authorities. The power of this

cultural hegemony is thus enforced primarily through coercion, cooptation, and consent

rather than armed force and re/produces social relations based on domination and

subjugation. Dominant groups also maintain centres and margins of power, (i.e. the status

quo), whether that is the privileging of a particular ‘race’, religion, economic system or

governing body, through multiple means of interpellation. Here, Louis Althusser’s (1971)

concept of interpellation refers to the process through which subjectivities are re/produced

and reinforced through the repetition of ideologically invested communication. Althusser

gives the example of the police officer who calls out ‘hey you’ and the guilty response of all

who, assuming they are being spoken to, turn. He argues that, even in the absence of an

easily located authority, subjects become complicit in the re/production of their identities

and in the preservation and architecture of unequal social relations through internalized

patterns of self-identification. This idea is similar to the proposal offered by Frantz Fanon, a

psychiatrist and scholar of the psychopathology of colonization, who asserted that the

10

internalization of dominant discourse concerning social difference regulates subordinate

groups by convincing them to accept the roles they have been prescribed (1967).

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe define hegemony as a discursive strategy

combining principles from different systems of thought into one coherent ideology for the

purpose of securing consent (1985). Drawing on their ideas, Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996)

defines hegemony as "a process by which a hegemonic class coordinates the interests of

social groups such that those groups actively 'consent' to their subordinated status" (1996,

p.113). Both Althusser and Slack differ from Gramsci by dislocating hegemony as a

function unique to the State and assert that social boundaries in a particular context are

maintained through the proliferation of ideas, values, and norms embedded within the

cultural production of multiple dominant groups that form a hegemonic class, a group that

has the material means or the power, to ensure the survival of its ‘knowledge’ and its way of

life. Michel Foucault adds to this argument with his concept of ‘power-knowledge’ that he

uses to conflate the production of ‘knowledge’ by those who have the power to define it as

such (1981). He argues that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and

knowledge through multiple forms of de/centralized supervision. Foucault suggests that a

‘carceral continuum’ runs through modern society, from the maximum security prison

through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, therapists, police, and teachers,

to our everyday working and domestic lives prescribing and asserting norms of acceptable

social behavior as involving the supervision of some humans by others (1977). This norm is

internalized to the point where visible guards are no longer necessary.

Expressions of hegemony are articulated by critical race theorist, Sherene Razack

(1998, 2008), who provides examples from within communities of racialized immigrant and

refugee women and people with developmental disabilities amongst others. She argues that

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power is held by those who have the authority to assert their way of life and that this

‘centre’ continues to be constructed by white, able-bodied, heterosexual males. As a result,

those who do not fit this category are perceived and interpellated by the apparati of the State

and the media as homogeneous groups that deviate from the ‘norm’. Consequentially, these

groups are relegated to the margins where they experience restricted economic, social, and

political space; where their political agency is limited to their marginalized (and

internalized) status (Bannerji, 2000).

Within a hegemony, power emerges as having both internalized psychological

properties and externalized socio-political expressions and can be understood as the

potential of individuals and groups to transform their way of life and to sustain or stabilize

the changes they seek (Giddens, 1984). Therefore, a critical, collaborative, performance

pedagogy would require the explicit naming of the in/visible boundaries that create centres

and margins of power in order to begin to understand or change its influence over the

current social order in a given context.

The Need for Permeable Boundaries

Several theorists and practitioners across the social sciences challenge the efficacy

of a social model that relies upon a fixed margins and centres and argue the need for a more

permeable politic. In a discussion about economic development, Ash Amin, Doreen

Massey, and Nigel Thrift (2001) have noted how geographical divisions of power,

exemplified by large urban centres with peripheral entities, create rigid boundaries that limit

a reciprocal flow of ideas, resources and people. They advance the need for a relational

politic: social networks that can support innovation and development across and within

centres and margins of power as necessary within each particular context. They argue the

need to conceptualize space as a product of networks and relations in contrast to

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territoriality, and advance the need for permeable borders enabling multiple and mobile

centres of deliberation and decision-making that can bring together different people with

differing ideas together to the exercise local democracy. Martha Nussbaum (2000) also

contributes to the argument for increased permeability in the boundaries between centres

and margins of power in her articulation of the concept of a capabilities approach to human

development. She argues the responsibility that governments have to provide a basic

threshold of material prerequisites to their constituents in order to increase the mobility of

impoverished groups by making it possible for them to exercise their choice to realize the

totality of what they can be and do.

Feminist scholar, Audre Lorde (2007), presents an argument for why social

boundaries persist. She advances that social boundaries such as racism, sexism, and

homophobia persist because of society’s failure to move beyond oppressive, dualistic

relations of power. In her often cited essay, The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the

Master’s House, Lorde deftly articulates the continued oppression of women within the

feminist movement as a result of the movement’s over-reliance on the unequal social (and

economic) relations prescribed through the ideological apparatus of dominant groups. She

argues that, by denying permeability in the category of women, feminists merely pass on

old systems of oppression substituting white slave-masters with white feminists and that, in

so doing, prevent any real, lasting change. Lorde’s argument is useful in understanding how

an over-reliance on a social model that necessitates dominant and subordinated groups, a

reliance on a fixed binary of centre and margin, will ultimately fail in diminishing present

day human suffering or achieving sustained equity and justice.

In the same vein, cultural studies theorist, Homi Bhabha (1994), aptly articulates the

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inherent violence implicit in the persistent re/production of the centre/margin (white/black,

good/evil) binary stressing the limitations it places on a society’s capacity to imagine

equitable social relations that do not rely on violent and harmful subjugation. Through the

use of his concept of the third space, Bhabha argues for increased permeability in this

construct asserting that, once this binary is destabilized, cultures can be understood to

interact, transgress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than

traditional binary oppositions can allow. This thinking requires a shift towards

understanding social relations and the prescription of power as being dis/located from the

colonizer/colonized mentality where power is derived from consistency and homogeneity

towards an acceptance of power as derived from flexibility and multiplicity expressed

through overlapping, ever-shifting subjectivities and mobile, differentiated forms of power.

Therefore, attempts to destabilize and redistribute power cannot occur without attending to

the multiple economic, social, and resulting psychological boundaries that restrict the

mobility of ideas, people, and resources that obstruct substantiated pathways to self-

determination and sustainable change within and between current centres and margins of

power. Relational networks, alliances and coalitions emerge as necessary to the function of

this mobility and, in the final instance, may contribute to the collapse of a singular and fixed

social order. Therefore, a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy would embody and

inspire relational networks that are capable of navigating a ‘third space’ between the rigid

extremes of ‘centre’ and ‘margin’ in order to move towards greater permeability across

current dividing boundaries.

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Asymmetrical Development: Change Without Disrupting the Boundary

Efforts to increase permeability, while they may attempt to depart from hegemonic

strategies, have relied upon an asymmetrical relationship between the centre and the

margins wherein those occupying marginalized space are tasked with transforming

themselves with minimum disturbance or risk to the centre. The ideal of empowering the

marginalized has, in theory, been a driving force of the social justice project. The thinking is

that by enabling the poor to analyze their own realities and thus influence development

priorities, they will have greater ability, confidence and skills to act more effectively in their

own interests (Nelson and Wright, 2000). This has been paradoxically disempowering as,

although “community matters, its efforts are often compromised within a dominant

paradigm that relegates community to the margins”(Mendell, 2005, p.1).

Eric Shragge (1997) describes how community organizing has either subscribed to a

model of social action in which it is incumbent on marginalized communities to pressure

the State to have their needs met, or to a model of community development in which it is the

responsibility of the community to achieve consensus about their challenges and to address

these with local programs and services. An example of social action might be Nussbaum’s

Capabilities Approach in which she argues that pressure be put upon the State to provide a

basic threshold of material welfare (2000). An example of the community development

approach might include the asset-based appreciative approach authored by John P.

Kretzmann and John L. McKnight (1993) that involves the identification and mobilization

of a geographically defined community’s strengths and resources as a means of realizing

desired changes. In both models, the emphasis is largely placed on the marginal group to

transform itself without changing the prescription of power that would relegate some human

beings to the margins.

15

Challenges to Asymmetrical Development from Community Economic Development and

Liberatory Pedagogies

Community Economic Development

Challenges to asymmetrical development have been articulated through a growing

interest in the social economy and in the varied practice of community economic

development (CED). While an exhaustive review of social entrepreneurship and social

enterprise are beyond the scope of this thesis, there are several key insights from this body

of knowledge that contribute to an understanding of rigorous and effective social

intervention. The Canadian Community Economic Development Network defines CED as:

An action by people locally to create economic opportunities and better social conditions, particularly for those who are most disadvantaged. CED is an approach that recognizes that economic, environmental and social challenges are interdependent, complex and ever-changing. To be effective, solutions must be rooted in local knowledge and led by community members. CED promotes holistic approaches, addressing individual, community and regional levels, recognizing that these levels are interconnected (Canadian CED Network, www. www.ccednet-rcdec.ca).

CED is a diverse set of approaches to community development that share an

understanding that poverty is a primary dividing factor in creating social boundaries that

result in centres and margins of power and correlating social conditions. The practice of

CED is primarily concerned with fostering permeability between and within the boundaries

of society towards a continuum of objectives: from local job creation involving varying

degrees of internal and external investment to a redefined relationship to one’s land, labor

and capital in ways that return autonomy and decision-making power to the individual and

16

community. Shragge (1997) asserts that CED involves much more than local job creation,

but is an approach to addressing poverty and, as such, should involve an analysis of the

intersections of race, gender and class. In his analysis, racism, homelessness, environmental

degradation, inadequate child-care, and gaps in social programs create and sustain poverty.

Shragge advocates what he sees as a progressive vision of CED offered by Michael Swack

and Donald Mason who argue that “the starting premise for CED is that communities that

are poor and underdeveloped remain in that condition because they lack control over their

own resources” (Swack and Mason cited in Shragge, 1997, p.12). Therefore, according to

Shragge, a progressive approach to CED would not only focus on the development of local

programs and institutions but would also include analyses and actions directed against the

wider processes that prevent local control over local resources; preventing communities

from addressing poverty.

The wider processes that govern local expressions of democracy and social welfare

have been the primary subject of interest to proponents of the social economy which has

been conceptualized as the non-profit, voluntary, community or third sector, occupying a

space between public and private economics and involving liberal and socialist traditions

(Ninacs, 2002). Proponents of the social economy foreground its social dimensions. As

Marguerite Mendell puts it, the “economy itself is intrinsically and inevitably social…we

know that it cannot function without institutions, without people, without community

support, [and] without an accommodating State” (2003, p. 3). A recent review of the types

of development espoused by proponents of the social economy indicate that they have

departed from a socio-democratic model where social issues are the exclusive domain of the

state and redistribution the only possible regulatory mechanism (e.g. state funded maternity

leave, heritage and culture grants). They have also departed also from a neo-liberal model

17

where social issues relate only to individuals who do not or cannot take part in the market

economy and whose needs are seen as ‘unprofitable’ (e.g. childcare, senior’s homes,

immigrant and refugee settlement services) (Ninacs, 2002). Instead, William Ninacs notes

that recent articulations of the social economy seek a model of economic and social

democracy where social issues would concern both the state (redistribution) and society

(reciprocity, participation in the market) (2002). In this model, the economic players would

be more numerous, not only including trade unions, but also women, racialized community

groups, youth, and other marginalized or subjugated members of society. Examples of this

might include (partially) state supported yet collectively operated artisan, food, or trade

collectives that employ persons with mental or physical disabilities, create goods and/or

services for the market and reintegrate people into the economy while engendering

increased autonomy and providing a meaningful avenue for social, economic, and political

participation. This model faces a number of limitations and requires several difficult socio-

economic transformations such as the reduction of hours worked, greater worker

democracy, and more collective services (Shragge, 1997; Fillion, 1998; Lévesque &

Mendell, 2001; Lowe, 2007).

Conditions that may enable these transformations are proposed by Louis Favreau and

Benoît Lévesque (1996) who emphasize the need for dialogue and deliberation in their

approach to the economic and social revitalization of communities. In the same vein,

Giancarlo Canzanelli emphasizes the necessity of beginning with “social networks of

different people capable of working together for a common objective in an organized and

voluntary manner, sharing rules and values, and able to subordinate individual interests to

collective ones”, as a core requirement in advancing the needs of a given community and

achieving desired change (2001,p.12). Each of these proponents of equitable local

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development argue the need for multi-stakeholder forums, avenues for dialogue and

deliberation with people of differing levels of power. However, as noted earlier by

Nussbaum, dialogue and deliberation is not empowering when it is not substantiated with

enabling material conditions (2000). Social economist, Mendell states:

Empowerment in any sense that really matters must result in a substantive transfer of resources; the presence of new actors on the scene contributing to a cacophony of voices generating noise, while important as a sociological phenomenon, is not in and of itself empowering (2009, p.1).

In the absence of responsibility shared by those who hold decision-making power, the

boundary between the centre and the margin is not only maintained, but potentially

solidified as the margins continue to compete with one another, reinventing themselves to

receive financial and social support from the State, in effect concealing internal tensions

and distracting them from collectively addressing the structural inequities that give rise to

economic, social, and political poverty.

The implications of this analysis of the social economy and practices associated with

CED for a CCPP are multiple. First, a CCPP would need to ground itself in an analysis of

what phenomena contribute to the disenfranchisement of communities from their own local

resources and their own capacities to address poverty. Secondly, these perspectives

reinforce the importance of cultivating strategic alliances with influential agencies and the

State through spaces of dialogue and deliberation as a means of encouraging cross-sectoral

investment in shared social aims that can result in a useful transfer of resources when

indicated. Thirdly, a CCPP would need to grapple with its contribution to increased local

decision-making power towards greater control over local land, labor and capital.

Ultimately, the perspectives offered within this discourse encourage a thinking through of

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how change is pursued; whether it is through empowering local ‘actors’ to pressure the state

or other legislative bodies (social action), whether it seeks to mobilize communities to meet

their own needs through the identification and development of necessary social programs

(community development), and/or whether it seeks to insert itself within the ‘third space’ of

the social economy in some form.

Liberatory Pedagogies

There are also examples of pedagogical and research models that attempt to deviate from

asymmetrical approaches to development and, while they begin with the efforts of

marginalized groups, they also lay the groundwork for engaging marginalized communities

in an exercise of local decision making and change efforts. An excellent example of

transformative participatory pedagogy was developed by Paolo Friere (1970) who evolved

his Pedagogy of the Oppressed in a time of extreme political repression in Brazil where

equitable partnerships between centres and margins of power were not easily realized nor

expected. His liberatory literacy education involved not only reading the written word, but

also reading the world through the development of critical consciousness or

conscientization. A critical consciousness allowed people to question the nature of their

historical and social situation with the goal of acting as subjects in the creation of a

democratic society rather than passive objects to be dominated by an oppressive

government. His popular education methods countered the dominant system of education, a

system inherently oppressive and dehumanizing that he described as a “banking model”

where students were passive recipients of the teacher’s knowledge. Within Friere’s popular

education, people bound by a similar struggle were understood as active co-producers of the

knowledge that was necessary to their ultimate emancipation.

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The Spiral Model of Community Action (Figure 2.1) illustrates the popular education

process.

Figure 2.1: Popular Education: The Spiral Model of Community Action (Arnold et al. 1991, p. 38)

Through raised awareness and collaborative action, popular education practices draw on and

validate participant knowledge, or situated expertise, in the production of new knowledge.

Through iterative cycles, a praxis, of critical dialogue, collective reflection, and problem

posing, participants discuss the possibilities of transforming the oppressive elements of their

experience culminating in collective social action.

Freire’s emancipatory epistemology contributed to the emergence of participatory

action research (PAR) methods that shared his values of equitable participation, direct

experience and action, and that emphasized the inter-subjective nature of knowledge

creation and dissemination (Orlando Fals-Borda, 1981; Park, Brydon-Miller,Hall, &

Jackson, 1993; Greenwood and Levin, 1998; Reason and Bradbury, 2008). Friere (1982)

21

wrote, "The silenced are not just incidental to the curiosity of the researcher but are the

masters of inquiry into the underlying causes of the events in their world. In this context,

research becomes a means of moving them beyond silence into a quest to proclaim the

world” (p. 30). However, these approaches have also garnered critique and speculation

relating to the persistence of asymmetrical power in PAR processes. Robert Chambers

(1983) indicates:

However much the rhetoric changes to participation, participatory research, community involvement and the like, at the end of the day there is still an outsider seeking to change things... who the outsider is may change but the relation is the same. A stronger person wants to change things for a person who is weaker. From this paternal trap there is no complete escape. (p.37)

Chambers notes the ways in which researcher-community relationships will continue to

assert an influence on local power dynamics and asserts that community participation in

such a context should be recognized for what it is, an externally motivated political act with

differing benefits to those involved. Chambers’ point is similar to that of Lorde’s (2007) in

that working within a system in which there are centres and margins, stronger and weaker,

will not eradicate the continuance of these binaries. However, this fact alone should not stop

efforts at emancipation and equity. The pedagogical and research methods which have

emerged from Freire’s work attempt to counter the asymmetry of empowerment efforts by

extending responsibility for reducing harmful marginalization to those who may not see

themselves, initially, as having a part in the same struggle, as part of the same ‘community

of interest’ to use Baz Kershaw’s term (1992). Collaboration across margins and centres of

power is necessary to the realization of permeable boundaries and possible solidarities.

What is also required, therefore, is a means of increasing transparency in the declaration of

22

a project’s intentions, the identification (not eradication) of differing biases and

investments, and multiple avenues to assess and ensure an ethic of equitable participation.

Applied Theatre

Change processes within applied theatre repeat this formulation of seeking social

change or transformation through the empowerment of marginalized groups. The term

Applied Theatre is relatively new and brings together a broad range of dramatic activity

carried out by diverse individuals and groups that vary in the intention they bring to their

practice. The Centre for Applied Theatre Research in Manchester (CATR), founded by

James Thompson in 2001, refers to applied theatre as “the practice of theatre and drama in

non-traditional settings [including] theatre practice that engages with areas of social and

cultural policy such as public health, education, criminal justice, heritage site interpretation

and human development”(CATR, 2008, para 1). Judith Ackroyd (2000), advances that

Community Theatre, Theatre in Education, Drama in Education, Theatre for Health

Promotion, Popular Theatre, Drama Therapy, Sociodrama, and Psychodrama all fall within

the range of the umbrella term Applied Theatre. In each case, Ackroyd identifies the

underlying basis in each of these practices to be a belief in the transformative capacity for

theatre ‘to address something beyond itself’ referring to the efficacy- entertainment

continuum proposed by Richard Schechner (1994) wherein he describes a performance that

is efficacious as one whose purpose is to ‘effect transformations’. However, efforts to

effect these transformations are located primarily in the margins, wherein the lived realities

of those suffering varied forms of internalized, relational, or systemic violence are provided

an art form and a platform from which to render visible the suffering they face (James,

1998, Jennings, 1998, Ackroyd, 2000). Ackroyd draws attention to the lack of analysis

about the ideologies that underpin the desire to transform marginalized communities nor

23

attention to the means through which interpersonal or institutional intervention and

transformation is achieved and sustained:

Looking at much of the applied theatre forms frequently identified, there is an implicit political bias…there is a crying need for evaluation of applied theatre. Research is required to look at the efficacy of applied theatre in its various forms. We need to know what distinctive contribution drama can make to changing attitudes and behaviour, and to be alert to any unintended consequences of using it. (Ackroyd, 2000, p. 2) Efforts to effect change within society through applied theatre, to render permeable the

boundaries that limit the freedom of particular social groups and which give rise to the

multiple forms of violence they face, have also centred on the potential capacity of those

who bear witness: the audience. Ackroyd emphasizes the importance of the audience,

stating that “there are two features which [are] central to our understanding of applied

theatre: an intention to generate change (of awareness, attitude, and behavior), and the

participation of the audience.” (2000, p.3). She is not alone in her call for ‘more’ in our

analyses of the efficacy of applied theatre. In the following sections, I will present and

discuss the articulation of audience participation in drama therapy and in community theatre

practice situated as two sets of approaches to applied theatre that differ in intention and

approach yet compatible in their desire to promote progressive social change.

Drama Therapy

The often stated intention of drama therapy is to facilitate emotional growth,

development, and behavioral change through the systematic and intentional use of theatre

processes with individuals, couples, families, and groups in a variety of contexts and

settings (Emunah, 1994). The practice of drama therapy is varied in its approaches and is

used in the private space of therapy within traditional mental health clinics, within social

service, educational, corrective, and healthcare agencies and institutions and in therapeutic

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public performance (Mitchell, 1994, Johnson and Lewis, 2000; Snow, 2009). In this way,

drama therapy is traditionally thought to operate within the nexus of theatre and

psychological intervention. Within the context of drama therapy, audience interaction is

deeply intertwined with witnessing and understood as one of nine core processes central to

the therapeutic function and fundamental efficacy of this practice (Jones, 1996). Phil Jones

defines witnessing as an action that “ is an important aspect of the act of being an audience

to others or to oneself in Dramatherapy” (p.109). He stresses the multiple opportunities for

the participant in drama therapy to ‘en-role’ as an audience to the process of others, thereby

supporting other group members in their expression of themes of concern. He also stresses

the therapeutic function of witnessing as being related to the process by which participants

in drama therapy develop their own internal capacity to be an audience for themselves

through activities such as role-reversal towards gaining increased perspective on their own

challenging situations. Within his formulation, witnessing emerges as an action and the

audience is seen in a singular, unified role. The audience is either internalized or a fluid,

interactive role undertaken by group members at different points during the therapeutic

process; externalized without necessarily requiring a formal separation of actor and

audience.

Jones (1996) asserts that, where there is a formal demarcation between actor and

audience such as within performance-oriented drama therapy, the act of witnessing is

rendered increasingly visible “[enhancing] the boundaries concerning being in and out of

role or the enactment, [heightening] focus and concentration [and] the theatricality of a

piece of work” (p.111). The potential psychological benefit to the participants involved in

both the processes leading up to performance and the final enactment is discussed elsewhere

(Emunah, 1994; Jennings, Cattanach, & Mitchell, 1994; Johnson and Lewis, 2000; Snow et

25

al., 2003). However, Jones concludes that “much consideration has gone into the dramatic

work that occurs for those involved in the enactment, but much less has gone into the notion

of audience in Dramatherapy” (p.110). This is not surprising as the therapeutic contract

implicit in performance-oriented processes, such as in self-revelatory theatre (Emunah,

1994) or therapeutic theatre (Mitchell, 1994, Snow, 2009), privileges the therapeutic benefit

conferred to participants who shoulder the burden of risk in disclosing their vulnerable

experiences to their friends, family, and wider public. Here, the role of the audience is often

constructed as a necessarily homogeneous entity, uniform in its desire to applaud the efforts

of the performer and validate the aesthetic and creative expression of those who have given

embodied testimony. In this way, the audience is positioned as a supportive network capable

of re-integrating those who have experienced being ‘cut off’ from society as a result of the

suffering they endure(d) (Johnson, 1980; Emunah and Johnson, 1983; Emunah, 1994; Borch

and Rutherford, 2007; Johnson and Lubin, 2008).

The sacredness conferred to performances which arise from therapeutic intentions,

while providing a unique sense of affirmation, may also obfuscate further analysis of the

suffering staged during post-performance audience interaction processes as the audience is

largely directed to value the potential psychological emergence offered by the therapeutic

performance. However, Renee Emunah (1994) also, albeit briefly, gestures at the social

impact of performance-oriented drama therapy as it situates private experience in the public

realm and, in doing so, extends opportunities for public education about marginalized

populations. She writes of communities of people bound by a common struggle, be it to

overcome drug abuse, sexual assault, homelessness, or the experiences of immigration by

staging their own experiences “that have been hidden from pubic domain…stories that

have been kept secret…on stage [they] come out with their private identities and histories”

26

(p. 251). However, the processes by which audiences are increasingly educated about the

private experiences faced by marginalized groups, or the definition and processes implied

by overcoming the challenges participants face are largely underdeveloped in this field.

Indeed, the nature and scope of witnessing and audience interaction within performance-

oriented drama therapy has been limited to analyses of the therapeutic benefit conferred to

participants through uniformly empathic witnessing from a decontextualized, socially

unsituated audience and, in this way, largely disregards the potential within the audience to

contribute to or sustain any kind of change.

Fred Hickling and Hilary Robertson-Hickling (2003, 2005) also agree that the act of

situating private identities within the public realm through performance opens up

possibilities for social and cultural change. They develop this idea in their

psychohistoriographical approach to performance that they situate as a form of cultural

therapy. Hickling and Robertson-Hickling visited Montreal, on invitation by Stephen Snow

of the Creative Arts Therapies department at Concordia University, in 2005 and 2007 to

teach this approach that involves the staging of a group’s collectively created biographical

performance. Jaswant Gudzer, a trans-cultural child psychiatrist who participated in their

workshops, describes the process as follows:

This process encompassed themes of cultural identity, intergenerational transmissions of trauma, timelines of history, and identity hybridization in the context of inter-cultural realities. The psycho-historiography process is a cultural therapy model that builds on concepts of the group’s psychic centrality (the implicit psychological themes pertaining to the group) and reasoning, (in the context of the historical timeline, and elements of individual and collective identities). These elements are then transformed into a script and performance reflecting this group process1.

This approach has resulted in rich and evolved group processes wherein group members, in

addition to embodying the trajectory of traditional group therapy (Yalom, 2005), grapple

with their enmeshment within historically determined and politically inscribed dialectics.

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However, it also lacks an effective audience interaction process that, consequentially, limits

its social goals as evidenced by frustrated audience-stage communication post-performance.

Hickling and Robertson-Hickling’s ideas about cultural therapy are complemented by

contemporary ideas about the conjecture of social justice and therapy. There is a growing

trend in psychotherapy to challenge inequality and commit to social justice. This is

evidenced by efforts to question the presumed neutrality of the therapist and to re/define the

role of the therapist to include outreach, prevention, and advocacy. Related ideas also

include enlarging the therapeutic space to include community specific locations, usefully

blurring the boundaries between the public and private by calling for public accountability,

situating the encounter between therapist and client in sustainable partnerships and

participatory practices, and in reformulating the purpose of therapy as facilitating individual

and/or a group’s capacities to identify, analyze and address the internalized, relational and

systemic dynamics which limit the full arc of their desires (Thompson, 2002; Vera and

Speight, 2003; Holzman and Medez, 2003; Fanon, 2004, Toporek et. al, 2006).

Community Theatre

Turning attention to other approaches within applied theatre, Eugène Van Erven (2001)

uses the umbrella term community theatre to describe practices that operate in the nexus of

performing arts and socio-cultural intervention. This definition echoes the continuum

suggested by David Hornbrook’s (1998) definition of theatre as a ‘dramatic art’ and Betty

Jane Wagner’s (1979) ascription of theatre as a ‘learning medium’. Van Erven further

situates community theatre as a practice of cultural democracy involving the localized

cultural expression and representation of participants’ interests and personal stories

resulting in community dialogue, the diminished exclusion of marginalized groups, and an

opportunity to engage in collectively oriented improvisation. In addition to cultural

28

democracy and cultural expression, Edward Little (2005) advances that a relational

aesthetic, in which the aesthetic merits of community theatre are intertwined with its

relevance to its constituent communities, separates community theatre from mainstream

production. The intention of community theatre is further elaborated by Little who states

that “an overarching intent common to community-based theatre is to create an iconic

representation that celebrates negotiated values, privileges human creativity (as opposed to

expensive and resource-consuming technological solutions), and affords a pragmatic

appreciation of the potential utility of art as a resource-effective means of addressing

community concerns” (p. 4). Jan Selman and Tim Prentki (2000) describe the intention of

popular theatre as a means of fostering a critical consciousness and, in this way, link their

definition to Freire’s (1970) principles of education that embraced notions of exchange,

participant ownership, reflection and action. Although there may certainly be debate in the

field, the popular theatre process is often thought of as following particular stages that bear

resemblance to Freire’s popular education process described earlier (Kidd, 1989, p.21).

Figure 2.2 delineates the process of theatre-making as involving specific communities

forming a group identity and then embarking on an iterative cycle of identifying issues of

concern, analyzing current conditions and causes of a situation and expressing such through

the theatre medium, identifying potential points of change, and analyzing how change could

happen and/or contribute to the actions implied.

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Figure 2.2: Stages of Popular Theatre (Kidd, 1989, p.21)

Within this process, audience participation is understood as necessary to the function of

community organizing wherein the analysis developed by group members is extended to the

public, further analyzed and propelled into community action. Applied theatre requires

audience interaction strategies that can facilitate this praxis and that can respond to the

challenge presented by Jan Selman and Shauna Butterwick (2003) to “create a radical kind

of empathy, one that recognizes the danger of story telling and the inequality of risk in the

story telling process, one that creates spaces and relationships where stories are told and

heard.” (p. 9).

Critical Ideas about Audience Engagement in Applied Theatre

The emphasis placed on audience interaction in theatre to achieve a redressive purpose

or to effect social transformations has a significant history marked by differing opinions

about the purpose and place of catharsis (i.e the place of emotional release) in effecting

social change. Indeed, the history of applied theatre has had a challenging and continuously

evolving understanding of the overlap between theatre as therapy and theatre as social

30

intervention (Spolin, 1963;Brook, 1968; Schechner,1973; Fox, 1994). In the sections that

follow, I will present and discuss specific contributions to this discourse from several

theatre theorists as well as applied theatre practitioners.

Antonin Artaud: The Theatre of Cruelty

Antonin Artaud had significant ideas about how to effect change within the audience. He

wanted theatre to return to a form of pure magic and an event where a revolutionary

catharsis of the audience could take place. Artaud writes:

Everything in the order of the written word which abandons the field of clear, orderly perception, everything which aims at reversing appearances and introduces doubt about the position of mental images and their relationship to one another, everything which provokes confusion without destroying the strength of emergent thought, everything which disrupts the relationship between things by giving this agitated thought an even greater aspect of truth and violence - all these offer death a loophole and put us in touch with certain more acute states of mind in the throes of which death expresses itself. (Artaud, 1971:92)

Artaud was rallying against traditional French theatre which traditionally began with

proposing a problem at the beginning of a play and providing a solution to this problem by

the end of the play. He was overwhelmed by a performance of Balinese theatre that he

witnessed at the Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1931 and it cemented his belief that a

dramatic presentation should be an act of initiation during which the spectator will be awed

and even terrified to such a degree that they may even lose their reason. He proposed that,

during this induced frenzy, the spectator would be able to take onboard a complete new set

of truths, revelations into the true nature of society. So, Artaud sought a theatre that would

disturb the mind in order to open the subconscious, driving people back to their ‘primitive’

nature. His dictum, “Squeeze a man hard and you’ll always find something inhuman”,

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inspired many theatre companies, outraged at the complacencies of modern culture, to

develop a theatre of confrontation that shocked and even outraged their audiences (Dale,

2002). The effect on spectators was absurdly emotional, but far from cathartic as, for

Artaud, all freedom was “dark, and infallibly identified with sexual freedom”. Thus, his

‘theatre of cruelty’ forced upon the audience the violent, the ugly, and sexually ‘perverse’.

Bertholt Brecht:“Verfremdung”(German): Audience Estrangement

Brecht took a different approach to encouraging revelations about society amongst his

audiences. For him, the theatre of catharsis was a means of robbing the spectator of an

essential autonomy as a thinking person. His idea of verfremdung, a stylistic element of

audience estrangement was designed to encourage the viewer to reflect on, rather than

identify with, the events on stage. Audience reception theorist, Susan Bennett (1997),

emphasizes the influence of Brecht in this discourse. She states that Brecht is “important for

any study of audience/play relations…his ideas for a theatre with the power to provoke

social change, along with his attempts to reactivate the stage-audience exchange have had a

profound impact on critical responses to plays and performance” (p.21). Brecht’s objective

was to provoke a critical yet entertained audience. Cultural theorist, Walter Benjamin

describes Brecht’s process:

A double object is provided for the audience’s interest. First the events shown on stage; these must be of such a kind that they may, at certain divisive points, be checked by the audience against its own experience. Second, the production; this must be transparent as to its artistic armature…Epic theatre addresses itself to interested parties ‘who do not think unless they have reason to’. Brecht is constantly aware of the masses, whose conditioned use of the faculty of though is surely covered by this formula. His effort to make the audience interested in the theatre as experts- not at all for cultural reasons-is an expression of his political purpose (1973, p.15-16)

The notion of a theatre engaging an audience for anything other than ‘cultural reasons’,

for entertainment or aesthetic achievement, highlighted the failure of theatre to address

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contemporary concerns and also revealed theatre as an apparatus of the State. In this way,

Brecht’s epic theatre rearticulated and politicized the relationship between the audience and

the stage. The risk of sustaining the status-quo by forgetting or overly simplifying the

function(s) of the audience is best summed by Brecht as he points out how contemporary

practice constrained a direct relationship between audience and the stage: ‘[t]he theatre as

we know it shows the structure of society (represented on stage) as incapable of being

influenced by society (in the auditorium)’ (Willet, 1964, p.189). While the technologies of

participation in society have changed and mobility has increased for some, Brecht’s

observations remain increasingly important today given the persistence of poverty and the

differential access particular individuals and communities have to realizing their full

potential based on their membership in particular social groups.

Phil Jones and Robert Landy: empathy and aesthetic distancing

Within the discourse of drama therapy, Brecht’s concepts have been translated into the

concept of distancing which has been described as a means of engendering thought,

reflection and perspective (Jones, 1996). Jones also offers that empathy wrought through an

emotional resonance or identification with the situation staged and that the experience of

empathy and distance is different for the actor and for the audience, but both processes are

present within each role. Robert Landy adds to this with his articulation of aesthetic

distance which he describes as the “balance of affect and cognition, wherein both feeling

and reflection are available” and necessary to the prospect of catharsis when encountering

painful realities (1993, p.25). These concepts drawn from literature in drama therapy have

not been applied to audience interaction but are useful to the evolution of a CCPP in their

emphasis on the necessity for both visceral and intellectual engagement in the project of

change.

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Augusto Boal: The Spect-actor and the Joker

Beyond Brecht, perhaps the most well articulated and widely used audience interaction

strategies are those of Augusto Boal, originator of a composite system of politically oriented

theatre-based practices known as the Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) (1979) and a

contemporary of Paolo Freire (1970). Boal developed his theatre in the early 1960’s in

South America in response to the military dictatorship in Brazil and later, in Europe, in

response to internalized oppression and its constellation of anxiety, depression, isolation,

shame, guilt that compromised human vitality and the possibility of change. T.O. is

comprised of the Games of the Oppressed, Image Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Forum

Theatre, Legislative Theatre, Direct-Action, and the Rainbow of Desire.

At the core of his practice was the belief that theatre can enable everyday individuals, en-

roled as spect-actors, to effect change in society through a rehearsal of embodied reasoning

(Boal, 1979). Whereas Brecht focused on stimulating the critical faculties of his audiences,

Boal urged audiences to move their thoughts into action upon the stage. In Boal’s words,

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially a poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action! Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution! (1979,p.155).

In his view, catharsis was a manipulation, a means of the ruling elite to undermine the

oppressed populace. Boal’s prescription for transforming the everyday person into a social

actor occurs over four stages beginning with a process of knowing the body, disarticulating

it from its habitual and socially prescribed movements (1979). Secondly, the work is

focused on making the body expressive. The third stage, theatre as a language, involves the

practice of theatre “that is living and present, not as a finished product, displaying images

from the past”(126). This third stage is divided into three parts that facilitate an increasing

34

proximity between the spectator and performance beginning with simultaneous dramaturgy

wherein audience members direct actors to perform desired actions in an effort to change a

troubling scene. The second degree of proximity is achieved through Image theatre in

which audience members/workshop participants are invited to express their view of a

particular issue by sculpting an image of the concerning theme, their vision (image) of the

possible ideal concerning this theme and the transition between using only the bodies of

other participants. The third degree of proximity is achieved through Forum theatre in

which spect-actors are invited to intervene directly in a performed and staged scene

depicting oppressive social circumstances. The final stage in Boal’s theatre pedagogy is

what he terms the theatre as discourse wherein spect-actors, liberated protagonists, create

spectacles reflecting the relationship between historical and present oppressive realities in

order to extend the critical examination of injustice into a wider public sphere. Boal

proposes many methods of inspiring debate through theatre including photo-romance,

newspaper theatre, historical theatre and invisible theatre to name a few. Since the

publication of his seminal volume, Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), there have been myriad

evolutions, adaptations, critiques, and context specific examples of his work in theatre,

education, therapy, and advocacy around the world (Boal, 2002, 2006;Cohen-Cruz &

Schutzman, 1994, 2006; Sajnani & Nadeau, 2006). Boal continued to evolve his philosophy

and practice until his recent death on May 2, 2009.

Two roles are central to audience intervention within the Theatre of the Oppressed: the

Joker, in reference to the drama facilitator and the spect-actor, the active witness. The term

Joker is in reference to its neutral role in a deck of cards but also references the trickster

who disrupts and reveals the complexities present in scenes staged. The Joker is the

intermediary between the audience and the stage. The spect-actor is a term Boal developed

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to counter the passive receptivity associated with the traditional division of the theatre

which had expert actors on the stage invoking and (re)enacting potentially troubling social

dynamics while audience members remained seated with their gaze fixed upon the action.

By interpellating audience members as spect-actors, Boal transgresses this divide and

reminds his participants and audience members to act upon oppression rather than only

observing it. This is most tangible in Boal’s Forum Theatre, wherein audience members are

invited to intervene and propose alternative solutions within scenes that represent the

tensions and struggles of their own community.

While he has a generally negative view of catharsis, Boal also asserts that no effective

audience engagement is possible without a modicum of sympathy and stresses the need for

the joker to check that audiences can identify, recognize or resonate with the material staged

before proceeding with further interventions (1995). Boal asks his audiences to identify

points of contention in the scenes staged, and then to take responsibility for either seeking

alternatives or remaining complacent and complicit in the maintenance of deficient familial,

social, economic and political systems. Through this ‘performance of process’, to borrow

Ingrid Mündel’s term (2003), the audiences participating in a forum theatre performance

engage in re/visions of culture by rendering visible their ideological biases, desires, and

tensions through their embodied suggestions. The collective gaze and action of the

audience, albeit populated with individuals of differing social status, attending to a chosen

concern and debating differing visions of change becomes the performance and is, in itself,

an act of social change.

Legislative theatre builds upon the process of Forum theatre by translating audience

interventions into legal language that can be presented to legislative bodies. It is also worth

noting that in the overtly political Legislative theatre, State and legal representatives are

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necessary bodies within the audience. In recent workshops sponsored by the Pedagogy and

Theatre of the Oppressed organization in the U.S., practitioners have been experimenting

with combining Rainbow of Desire, Boal’s prescription for the use of theatre as a form of

social therapy, and Forum techniques wherein he challenges group members and audiences

to engage with the internal struggles facing the protagonists of the scenes depicting social

injustice (PTO, 2008).

Practices within the Theatre of the Oppressed have been adapted for use in various

settings but have also drawn criticism. Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Shutzman (1994, 2006)

have contested the troublesome binary of the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed’. David

Diamond (2008) has challenged who can be replaced in a forum and Paul Dwyer (2004) has

subverted the pseudo-neutrality of the joker who can never truly be neutral as it is s/he

whose gaze, questions, and comments, determine what can be discussed in the forum.

Denise Nadeau and I have questioned the ideological contradictions inherent in a form that

supports collective action but traditionally affords only individual intervention, albeit many

(2006).

Boal’s writings also reveal the economic and cultural factors that shape and strain the

relationship between cultural production and audience reception (1979). Artists are often

faced with having to choose only the most popular works or those that will receive state

sponsorship or funding and the same can be said for applied theatre projects that seek to

secure funding by conforming to the mandates articulated by state sponsored funding

agencies (Bennett, 1997). Boal indicates how works produced are generally contingent upon

the audience’s prior knowledge or reception and this, therefore, limits what can be heard.

Here, economic decisions made at the level of production inevitably shape the ways in

which audiences will engage and will also shape which audiences are present. This reality

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highlights the challenges in cultivating audiences to bear witness to marginalized

experiences and the necessity for effective strategies that can facilitate reception amongst

audiences to not only unfamiliar genres of work, but to potentially unfamiliar realities.

Julie Salverson: Aesthetics of Injury and Clown

Cultivating audience reception to unfamiliar realities has been described by Julie

Salverson (2001) who calls on witnesses to stagings of injury, scenes which depict violent

realities, to attend to these realities as opposed to too quickly and uncritically identifying

with depictions of suffering. She draws upon Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of mourning

and melancholia to describe the ways in which audience members may withdraw in the face

of loss or over-identify with an experience of victimization, conflating the staged suffering

for their own, thereby limiting their capacities for self-reflection and responsibility (2001).

She advances the need for an aesthetic that does not lapse into an overindulgent fetishizing

of trauma and asserts that this ‘aesthetic of injury’ is what precipitates audience detachment

and over-identification, minimizes the urgency and gravity of the situation one is exposed to

and may, ergo, diminish one’s desire and ability to respond to it. As opposed to a ‘Joker’,

Salverson employs the role of the ‘clown’ to intercede with the audience. In reference to a

play she wrote about land mines called BOOM, she states “It is absurd that they exist.

Hence, the form speaks to this absurdity. We should not be able to accept these things as

normal, as a given… we need to be woken up, startled into seeing their absurdity”(2009,

para 8). She offers the clown as a way of waking up and encountering tragedy stating that:

There is joy, pleasure, and thus energy in the encounter with tragedy when we can also laugh. This is not the laugh at the expense of another, it is not mockery, it is the sweet pleasure to see the humanity that can’t be extinguished, no matter what…[when] the violent event is presented in an iconic way… it is larger than life, the victims are huge, the oppressors are huge, and so an audience member is made somewhat passive by that. There is, I think, very little relationship with the audience. Clown exists to be in relationship with the audience. (para 8)

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Salverson discusses how she uses the role of the clown to interrupt media saturated tellings

of tragedy and to remind the audience of the absurdity of current injustice and, in sharp

contrast with Artaud, to make it tolerable to stay engaged with difficult issues.

Baz Kershaw: Performance Efficacy

As the audience is always already comprised of individuals of differing experiences,

resources and social status, audience reception strategies that remain cognizant of this

difference are also necessary in order to achieve a tolerance for the unfamiliar and what Baz

Kershaw describes as performance efficacy (1992, 2003). Kershaw identifies the need for

mutual and active partnerships between theatre groups and community organizations, as a

necessary precursor to performances that endeavor to shift social perception or incite

progressive action (1992, 2003). He advances the need for processes that can forge a

‘community of interest’ and a ‘reinforcement of achieved commonalities’ (1992, p. 245) as

a basis for solidarity amongst communities within competing or divergent interests

throughout the performance process. Here, ensuring reception amongst audiences is critical

to the social and political thrust of the applied theatre project and central to the process of

building the alliances and partnerships required.

Jonathan Fox: Fostering Social Ecology Through Sharing Lived Experience

Playback Theatre, developed by Jonathan Fox in 1974, responds to Kershaw’s

emphasis on inviting disparate groups to see themselves as sharing a ‘community of

interest’. Playback Theatre attempts to foster social change amongst audiences through a

continuous sharing of lived experiences. The Centre for Playback theatre describes this

practice as follows:

A group of people in a room, a hall, a theatre. They face a row of actors sitting on boxes. On one side sits a musician with an array of instruments. On the

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other, an emcee, who waits next to an empty chair. This is for the "teller," who will come from the audience to tell a personal story. Then, in a ritualized process, using mime, music and spoken scenes, the players will act out the story. After one teller, another will come. In this way, the individuals in the audience will witness a theatre of their own stories. (para 3)

Fox intended playback theatre to be an extension of a forgone oral tradition within which

communities could generate insight regarding their lived experiences through the sharing

and witnessing of each other’s stories (Fox, 1994). Fox writes, “if oppression can be defined

as having no one to tell their story to, our mission has been to provide a space for anyone

and everyone to be heard” (1994, p. 6). He offers playback theatre as a force for preserving

social ecology by “transforming people’s lives and making aggregations of people into

communities of memory”(1994, p.212). He envisioned the form as a means of intervening

in a ‘culture of separation’ through the mutual sharing of lived experience and by

strengthening the capacity for communities to hear and tell complex and multifaceted

stories. With regard to bearing witness to painful realities, Fox writes of striving for a kind

of theatre that could provide a glimpse of redemption alongside representations of human

suffering and offered playback theatre as a form that could “describe the most difficult

truths in a way that we can bear to remember because the rendition is beautiful” (p.216).

Here, he emphasizes Playback’s attempt to interweave its social objectives with a strong

aesthetic sensibility.

The redressive function of Playback Theatre lies in its being both a theatre of trance and

of ideas. Fox resists modernist definitions of Playback as a specialized form of educational

theatre or therapy, noting the traditional mistrust of catharsis in the non-scripted theatre

movement and, as Jones, Landy and Boal have noted, the need for some measure of

emotional engagement in order to effect any form of social transformation. Fox considers

that “one reason why J.L Moreno, despite his early appearance on the scene, always

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remained outside the establishment was his willingness to go all the way in terms of purging

feelings…the result, consistently, was high drama and a jolt to our habits of emotional

distance and rationality”(p.71). Instead, Fox favors an “adult exchange between actors and

audience rather than one which invites a kind of infantilism…a theatre that does not try to

seduce me of my thoughts at the moment of termination, but has the confidence and courage

to respect them”(p.150). However, he also sees the place of emotion in this work, stating

that “experiencing…the positive ‘feeling’ of community may do as much to bring about an

equitable society than a theatre of ideas”(p.151).

Fox also describes the specialized role of the conductor at length. The conductor is

similar to Boal’s joker and Salverson’s clown in that the conductor occupies a liminal space

between the actors and the audience and is a conduit for unspoken feelings, words, and

images. In addition to the conductor being a fellow actor and emcee, Fox states that the

“function of the conductor is also shamanistic, leading actors and audience in the direction

of …the ‘illud tempus’, that locus of meaning and rejuvenation which we often think of as a

paradisiacal Eden but whose actual rediscovery is fraught with uncertainty” (p.134). The

conductor, in Fox’s philosophy, encourages anyone to tell their story, just as Boal’s Joker

invites anyone to make a suggestion in Forum theatre, and notes that failure to do so

“repeats the syndrome of [the isolated individual’s] interaction with society” (p.136).

Susan Bennett: Gathering and Dispersal

Audience interaction is not limited to the end of the play. Susan Bennett proposes that

the gathering and dispersal phases of theatre performances expand the possibility of

audience reception as well as opportunities for inter audience-stage and intra audience

relationships. The gathering phase might include the process of advertising, sharing of a

meal, coming to the theatre venue whereas the dispersal phase post-performance might

41

include questionnaires, discussion immediately or shortly after the performance, readings of

text or reviews, and festivity as part of the audience’s act of dispersing and leaving the

theatre and beyond. Bennett asserts that “all of these acts have the potential to shape the

initial decoding of the production” and, ergo, are useful to the process of ensuring reception

and future production (1997,p.165).

Further, Bennett’s assertion to “view the theatrical event beyond its immediate

conditions and to foreground its social construction” (p.211) is critical in advancing our

understanding of audience interaction as well as the impact of theatre on society. She

proposes that theatre, as a form of cultural production and reception, involves an iterative

process in which audience reception ultimately forms what can be produced and therefore,

what can be received, heard, witnessed by the audience and so on in a continuous cycle. In

this way, theatre is situated as a form of cultural intervention in which the architecture of

ideology can be explored and questioned insofar as it shapes social relations. Bennett

provides the following diagram (2.3) that illustrates the possibilities of cultural intervention

in theatre practice (p.210).

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Figure 2.3 Cultural Intervention in Theatre Practice (Bennett, 1997, p.210)

CULTURE

Interpretive Communities

Horizons of Expectations Theatrical Conventions

INTERACTIVE RELATIONS

Bennett argues the importance of repositioning the study of theatre to reflect the

‘culturally constituted horizon of expectations’ of audience members who are situated in her

analysis as participating in specific, albeit shifting, cultures. Culture in Bennett’s analysis,

is tied to sites of interpretation and, in this way, shares similarities to Turner’s (1967)

understanding of culture as the practices of social actors and the context that gives such

practices meaning. The site of interactive relations suggested in Bennett’s diagram is

reminiscent of Lev Vygotsy’s zone of proximal development, a concept often used in

developmental and educational psychology that describes the space that exists between what

is known and what can be known with the support of others (2007).

Fictional Stage World

Internal Horizon of Expectation

(mise en scène)

Fixed time for reception

Overcoding

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Edward Little: Relational Aesthetics and the Affirmation-Intervention Continuum

Finally, Edward Little (2005) is supportive of Bennett’s analysis in his description of

authors of community-engaged theatre as “integrat[ing] ritualistic elements not only into

performance but into “gathering” (pre-production) and “dispersal” (post-production) phases

of the theatrical event (p.2). He continues to say that these ritualistic elements “break down

amateur/professional and popular/mainstream binaries, blur the lines between beginnings

and endings and create an extended theatrical event in which art and daily life are not

regarded as mutually exclusive”(p.3). Little also proposes that the strength of theatre which

stages the lives and challenges faced by particular communities lies in its relational

qualities, the common, culturally specific ‘sites of interpretation’ to use Bennett’s term, that

they share with their audiences. Little writes:

In a post-modern context, to be either “moved” or “impressed” (or some combination of both) is a subjective experience that is largely contingent on environmental factors, which include an individual’s sense of belonging within a matrix of geographic and relational communities and the degree and nature of an individual’s participation in the theatrical event. A key directorial challenge within an aesthetic of communalism relates to striking a similarly dynamic balance along a continuum extending from affirmation (reification of a community as it is currently constituted and understood) to community intervention (cultural intervention, social change, or community advocacy in the face of a dominant or threatening other) (p. 6)

Little proposes that an artistic balance needs to be struck between the poles of affirmation

and intervention in order to avoid over-indulgent performances void of sufficient analysis

or, on the other side, overly alienating propaganda. He asserts that finding this balance is

what allows for both emotional and rational engagement, affords new perspectives,

engenders dialogue and, in this way, carries the potential for social change.

To conclude, I began with an argument that fixed centres and margins of power lead to

harmful internalized and externalized social boundaries and posit that an increased

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mobility across these boundaries is necessary to the social justice project. Several

perspectives within community economic development offer useful insight into countering

asymmetrical development by calling for a redistribution of resources. They have also

highlighted the need to consider one’s approach to change as either wrought through

autonomous local development, through pressuring the state, or through sustainable

partnerships between marginalized groups, the state and the private sector. Within the

practice of applied theatre, performance efficacy has been tied to efforts that reinforce a

context specific basis for solidarity, a means of engendering analysis and dialogue, and a

platform from which to engage in collective action. However, there has been limited

attention to a coherent process of articulating one’s approach to change, developing

necessary alliances, or engendering analysis and collaborative action in our current audience

participation pedagogy.

The examples of audience participation explored in this review have provided useful

indicators for what might comprise a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy. First of

all, an analysis of the context in which an applied theatre project takes place has been

identified as important in informing audience reception strategies. Each of the theatre

practices developed by the key theorists surveyed developed their methods in response to

the ways in which power was divided in society and with a particular analysis of what

constituted appropriate levers of change (i.e. for Artaud it was shock and for Brecht it was

audience estrangement). Proponents of community economic development have, in

recognition of the long-term inefficacy of asymmetrical efforts, emphasize the importance

of understanding the forces (context) which restrain communities from addressing poverty

and advance the need for a relational politic, social networks, alliances and partnerships

capable of working together to ensure the viability and sustainability of community

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development efforts. Further, authors of the social economy differentiate between change

practices as happening within, against, and/or in spite of current economic and political

agendas. These nuances contribute to an understanding of what role theatre can play in

change processes and which agendas it may support. Current practices in applied theatre

reveal tensions in why, how, when, where and through whom audience participation

strategies take place that are contingent upon the intentions and timeline of each theatre

project. For the most part, audience participation strategies revealed in this survey rely on a

mediating role between the audience and the stage (i.e. joker, conductor, clown). Boal’s

Theatre of the Oppressed and Fox’s Playback Theatre also place attention on who is in the

room, and while not explicitly breaking the anonymity of the audience, place importance on

audience conceptualization.

Each practice attempts to stage the ‘untold stories’ emerging from the dystopic

experiences of the margins in the hopes of changing the attitudes and behaviors of the

audience though audience participation strategies that range from encouraging solitary

reflection, positive affirmation, verbal interaction, to embodied intervention. However,

while each of the examples provided speak to the conditions that may engender change,

there is little evidence of what social conditions have been changed as a result of theatrical

intervention. A post-performance assessment remains important. Further, applied theatre

practitioners such as Boal, Fox, Salverson, and Little have been experimenting with

methods of addressing both the psychological and the political in their performance practice

towards enabling both a visceral and an intellectual engagement amongst their audiences.

Their work can be strengthened through the inclusion of concepts such as aesthetic

distancing offered by Landy and concepts such as the zone of proximal development offered

by Vygotsky.

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Therefore, the temporary reversal of margin and centre, wherein the audience is seated at

the margins gazing, reflecting and acting upon the realities of others placed centre stage, is

limited in its ability to achieve the changes they seek in part because of a lack of a coherent

strategy that sufficiently engages with the elements of context, intention, timeline, alliances,

audience conceptualization, audience participation, and post-performance assessment. The

benefits of a coherent approach as suggested in a critical, collaborative performance

pedagogy will be to scholar-practitioners of applied theatre and the social economy as they

share overlapping objectives insofar as they rely and benefit from the mutual recognition

and collaborative, cross-sectoral investment in agreed upon social aims. I advance that

cultural practitioners including those who engage in performance-oriented drama therapy

must contend with the politics of difference when extending their work into the public

domain to avoid burdening those who take the risk to perform their stories with increased

cultural stigmatization. Furthermore, community theatre practice may benefit from a

therapeutic perspective in facilitating audience participation that does not result in increased

harm to those who have taken the risk of staging their stories of social injury. Attending to

the psychological processes that support new learning and change will also strengthen

audience engagement strategies. A coherent audience participation process must involve

pedagogies that not only recognize these inequalities of risk-taking but also provides

avenues to encounter one another and engage in meaning-making in ways that might bear a

closer resemblance to the relational ethic called for by Carolyn Ellis (2003). Finally, a

critical, collaborative performance pedagogy would provide the architecture of evolved

dialogic, pedagogical, and embodied processes that might adequately reveal the complicity

of the audience and actors in sustaining the interactions which give rise to internalized,

interpersonal and systemic violence while sustaining compassionate response/ability.

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Chapter 3: Methodology

In chapter one, I introduced the need for a critical collaborative performance pedagogy

that can effectively engage diversely located audience members in a relational examination

of social injustice within applied theatre praxis. I advanced that the contributions of such a

pedagogy will be an increased emphasis upon the experience of the audience resulting in

greater performance efficacy, the development of relationships and social networks capable

of critically identifying, examining, and acting upon the inequities staged. The research

question is “what are the central components of a critical, collaborative, performance

pedagogy?” This chapter describes and explains the methodology deployed in this study of

three applied theatre projects.

Design

This study is a presentation and analysis of three case studies and as such conforms to

the standards of multiple, retrospective case study inquiry (Yin, 2009). There are multiple

definitions and understandings of the case study. According to D.B. Bromley, it is a

"systematic inquiry into an event or a set of related events which aims to describe and

explain the phenomenon of interest"(1990, p.302). This method is most often used

prospectively but has also been used retrospectively as in the case of this study. George

Huber and Andrew Ven de Ven (1995) conclude that the most significant limitation of

retrospective research is the difficulty in determining cause and effect from reconstructed

events and therefore, advance that multiple case studies significantly increase the internal

validity of this approach.

The data of this multiple case study comes from personal documentation, archival

records, and direct observations. This study design explores and describes the scope and

practice of audience participation in three applied theatre projects. Each project will be

48

described and analyzed according to the criteria (i.e. units of analysis) that have emerged

from the literature concerning performance pedagogy and audience reception in Chapter 2:

Units of Analysis

Context

The context of each project provides information on how the boundaries between the centre

and margin are expressed and experienced within the social groups most directly concerned

in each project. The context also provides information on the history and prevalence of the

issues that contribute to the experience of harmful marginalization in each community.

Alliances

Alliances refer to the nature and purpose of the relationships, partnerships and social

networks that were involved prior to, during, and after each project. In this section, each

project will be analyzed in terms of which individuals, groups, agencies, and institutions

were involved during the life of the project and to what ends.

Intention

The intention of each project comprises the goals and objectives of each project insofar as

they have been declared. The intentions of applied theatre have been understood to fall

along continuums of psychological/socio-political intervention, affirmation/ intervention

and entertainment/efficacy as well as involving a redistribution of resources and/or greater

community autonomy. The intentions of applied theatre will also reveal the way change is

approached as being either absent from planning, as occurring within communities, against

perceived oppressive forces, and/ or through cross-sectoral partnerships. A project’s

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intentions have particular implications for the aesthetics employed and the purpose and

practice of audience participation.

Timeline

The timeline of each project refers to the life of the project from inception to completion as

defined by the proponents of each project. A relational approach in applied theatre praxis

necessitates a timeline that can facilitate the development of sustainable relationships. An

analysis of the timeline will also include an investigation into the gathering and dispersal

phases of the performance event.

Audience Conceptualization

The conceptualization of the audience refers to the ways in which the audience was thought

about, considered, imagined, planned for, or cast in relation to the performance event. This

unit of analysis investigates the presence or absence of a premeditated audience and, in this

way, refers to the degree to which a rationale exists as to who (i.e. which audiences) would

bear witness to the performance.

Audience Participation

Audience participation refers to the intended purpose of audience participation in each

project as well as a detailed account of what practices, approaches or methods were used to

engage and interact with audiences including, where possible, their impact and contribution

to the development of performance efficacy. Opportunities for audience participation prior

to, during, and after the performance event are also described and considered.

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Post Performance Assessment

A post performance assessment is an analysis of the impact of the performance project in

relation to the project’s intentions.

From this analysis, I hope to advance theory about the role and function of audience

participation and gesture towards the necessary criteria of a relational praxis, referred to

here as a Critical, Collaborative Performance Pedagogy. Each of these projects were

chosen because of their diversity in intention and in approach to audience participation, but

were not designed a priori to be examples of a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy.

This study addresses the lack of substantial research into the purpose, practice, and efficacy

of audience participation in applied theatre.

Case Study Samples

1) The first project was a form of therapeutic theatre entitled It’s A Wonderful World: A

Musical Ethnodrama (phase II), initiated by the co-founder and director of creative arts

therapies at the Centre for the Arts in Human Development, Stephen Snow, to identify and

communicate the fears and aspirations of a group of adults living with developmental

dis/abilities for an audience of their peers and family, health care professionals and the

general public. The intent of this project was to challenge popular assumptions and to

reduce the harmful effects of stigmatization levied against people living with disabilities. In

the first of three phases, this project drew on art, drama, music, dance-movement therapy

and Playback Theatre to facilitate the sharing of personal experience and to create the final

production.

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2) The second project, entitled Rights Here! Theatre and Law for Human Rights (Phase II),

was a collaborative initiative by the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, the

Park Extension Youth Organization (PEYO), Teesri Duniya Theatre, and a legal advisory

committee consisting of members of the Equality Committee of the Quebec Bar

Association. This project involved a street theatre performance about human rights by actors

who were predominantly undergraduate theatre and development students from Concordia

University in addition to several youths from Park Extension, a neighborhood populated by

recent immigrants to Montreal. Audiences varied widely within various public spaces in

Montreal and in the indoor performances staged in an abandoned section of the William

Hingston Community Centre in Park Extension. This project drew on popular theatre

exercises, interviews and games to collect and stage the experiences of racialized citizens

and refugees living in Montreal. The intention of this project was to raise awareness about

human rights amongst people living in Park Extension, a densely packed neighborhood

populated primarily by Italians, South Asians, Vietnamese, and African-Canadians, and to

provide avenues for continued legal support in the form of a School for Human Rights

Advocacy (Phase III).

3) The third project, entitled Creating Safer Spaces, is an applied theatre project initiated by

the coordinator of Montreal’s South Asian Women’s Community Centre, Sadeqa Siddiqi, to

raise awareness within the South Asian community about intimate and structural violence

affecting South Asian women. Project participants were newly arrived South Asian

immigrants and refugee women who used several techniques within the Theatre of the

Oppressed to collectively examine their experiences of dis/integration and assimilation

within Quebec, Canada. They developed a performance to motivate a zero-tolerance

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response to violence against women within the South Asian Diaspora that was performed,

initially, for an audience of other South Asian women’s groups and then for mixed gender

and mixed ethnicity groups.

Data Collection, Analysis and Verification of Interpretation

The data for each of these projects has been drawn from my own record of these

initiatives as a participant-observer and from archival documentation. As this is a

retrospective study, data collection and analysis have not occurred simultaneously as would

be in the case of a prospective study. At the base, a qualitative analysis is based on data

reduction and interpretation aimed at identifying categories and themes. I have elected the

aforementioned units of analysis with which to describe each project and will return to

modify these criteria, as needed, in the discussion section of this thesis (chapter 7). In the

three chapters that follow, each sample study will be presented using the seven units of

analysis described in this chapter. Aside from a brief introduction to each sample, the

description of each project will be limited to an analysis of the social context in which each

project is embedded, and the relationship between audience engagement and social efficacy.

Each section concludes with a summary of the specificities from each project that appear

useful towards the development of a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy.

Role of the Researcher

I understand the role of the researcher in ethical qualitative research as that of a situated

interpreter. Sharan Merriam (1988) posits that the researcher in qualitative inquiry is the

primary instrument for data collection and analysis. Further, Michelle Knight (2000) and

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), in their articulation of ethics in qualitative research,

emphasize the necessity of situating oneself in relation to social stratifications of power in

order to remain cognizant of the positive and negative biases that accompany an inter-

53

subjective inquiry as well as to afford the reader an opportunity to make informed decisions

about the verisimilitude of the research process and the interpretations offered.

To this end, I currently locate myself as an able-bodied Canadian woman born to able-

bodied, middle-class, South Asian parents, both of whom had immigrated from Malaysia

after having survived forced displacement from their homeland of Sindh, Pakistan. I am the

eldest of three daughters who grew up in a single-mother home in a largely White,

Protestant, English speaking community in the crossroads of the prairies and mountains in

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Our family was the only South Asian family on our block

when I was in primary school and I was one of only two non-white children in my class. I

was amongst the first of my generation in my province to attend French immersion primary

and secondary school and speak and write both English and French fluently though I do not

understand my parents’ native tongue. I have been defined as a visible minority, a term of

contested utility, in the eyes of my home State. I enjoy the privilege of having access to

higher education and an acceptable geographic mobility that has afforded many

opportunities to encounter diverse geo-political and cultural realities. I have worked as an

artist, educator, community organizer, entrepreneur, and therapist. All of these and other

varied identities intersect and overlap in ways which advantage and disadvantage me

dependent on context yielding an intimate, albeit always already partial, knowledge of the

politics of difference. Further, and perhaps more relevantly, I was deeply involved in each

of the projects that are presented in this study and, in each case, partially responsible for the

design of the audience participation process.

In the first project, It’s A Wonderful World (phase I), I was hired by the Centre for the

Arts in Human Development as the assistant director and as a paid doctoral research

assistant. I will limit my analysis to Phase I of this three-phase project. I participated in

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research and production team meetings, co-facilitated during afternoon theatre-based

process groups, and contributed to the codification of the research data that emerged from

collective interview processes. I coordinated the training of a Playback Theatre company

comprised of student volunteers from the Drama Therapy graduate program and from the

undergraduate Theatre and Development program and also devised the post-performance

audience interaction process.

In the second project, Rights Here! (Phase II), I was hired as the outreach coordinator,

paid through the Park Extension Youth Organization (PEYO) by funds provided through the

Artist and Community Collaboration Fund (ACCF) of the Canada Council for the Arts and

Heritage Canada. I participated in coordination team meetings, facilitated outreach

workshops on a weekly basis for youth from PEYO and the neighborhood, and contributed

to the development of an audience interaction process in coordination with the director of

the performance, Rachel Van Fossen and the creative team. I will limit my analysis to Phase

II of this project.

In the third project, Creating Safer Spaces, I was hired by the South Asian Women’s

Community Centre along with a dance therapist to develop the community theatre

performance and the vision of a larger community organizing strategy. I co-facilitated the

development of the audience participation process. Because of my intimate connection to

each of these projects, I will also reflect on my role, intentions, and my personal learning in

the summary provided for each of these projects. I also acknowledge the possible

contradiction and irony of criticizing the approaches employed in these projects by

practitioners who are relative ‘outsiders’ to each community and the development of this

thesis which attempts to advise both practitioners and community participants about what

they should be doing and what their intentions, values, and goals should be!

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Chapter 4: It’s A Wonderful World: A Musical Ethnodrama

The Centre for the Arts in Human Development is a research, training, and clinical

centre within the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Since 1996, the

Centre has provided opportunities for growth and development for adults living with

developmental disabilities within a Creative Arts Therapies paradigm. The Centre is

frequented by individuals referred from hospitals, vocational and residential settings, with a

variety of developmental disabilities including Fragile X Syndrome, Autism, Prader-Willi

syndrome, and William’s syndrome. Every alternate year, the Centre produces an art exhibit

and a public musical theatre performance derived from a multi-modal creative arts therapies

process dedicated to improving participants' self-esteem, and quality of life. Since 1996,

every play produced was an adaptation of a well-known fairy tale or classic story adapted to

showcase the talents of the Centre’s participants in front of affirming friends, family and

funders.

In September of 2006, the Centre departed from this approach to performance with a

decision to undertake and stage an ethnographic inquiry into the lives of the Centre’s

participants. As James Mienczakowski states:“...ethnodrama is explicitly concerned with

decoding and rendering accessible the culturally specific signs, symbols, aesthetics,

behaviors, language and experience of health informants using accepted theatre practices”

(2001, p. 368). In this case, the performance resulted from a phenomenological arts-based

inquiry by the research and professional team into the experience of being an adult with

developmental disabilities and drew upon participants narratives shared in individual

interviews, and through group applied arts processes in art, music, dance, and Playback

Theatre. A cohort of twenty individuals with developmental disabilities who were already

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familiar with the Centre participated in this new initiative along with several professional

and volunteer staff. Three preview performances were staged from June 7-9th, 2007 to an

audience of friends and family, health and social service providers, and the general public.

It’s A Wonderful World: A Musical Ethnodrama Photo Credit: Eric Mongerson

Context

The social context of this ethnographic inquiry is aptly surmised in the title of an essay

by feminist scholar, Sherene Razack (1999) entitled From Pity to Respect: The Ableist Gaze

and the Politics of Rescue. The social and economic mobility of adults living with

developmental disabilities is, in part, constrained by the stigma associated with

vulnerability. Razack asserts that adults living with developmental disabilities “have been

constructed almost universally as vulnerable, a social construction most often used to

‘explain’ the tremendous social and sexual violence in their lives”(p.136). Charlene Senn

outlines four salient preconditions of sexual abuse: the adult must be predisposed to abuse;

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internal inhibitions must be reduced; external social restraints must be reduced; and the

person’s own restraints and protection must be overcome (1988). In the last three

preconditions, a gender analysis would most certainly reveal that girls and women with

developmental disabilities are clearly at greater risk. Adults with a desire to abuse a child or

woman with developmental disabilities can rationalize that a child or a woman with such

impairments ‘would not know what was happening’ and, most importantly, would not be

believed if she reported the violence. However, when we label this social situation as one of

the vulnerabilities of ‘special needs groups’, we take the focus away from those who

actively and aggressively set out to sexually or otherwise violate and fail to ask about the

perpetrators or the sources of violence itself. The use of vulnerability as a construct also

carries major risk in the legal context. Pity is the emotional response to vulnerability, a

response that does not necessarily lead to respect - that is, to a willingness to change the

interpersonal and structural conditions that hurt people with disabilities (Razack, 1999).

Martha Minow (1993) confirms the inefficacy of asymmetrical efforts to empower the

disabled in describing how focusing on the special needs of persons with disabilities can be

a helpful impulse, but such responses “fundamentally preserve the patterns of relationships

in which some people enjoy the power and position from which to consider (as an act of

benevolence) the needs of others without having to encounter their own implication in the

social patterns that assign the problems to those others” (217). Thus vulnerability, and the

pity it gives birth to, is unlikely to lead to respect and may further restrict efforts made by

varied individuals and groups within this population for self-determination.

With regard to self-determination, many adults living with developmental

disabilities have not had the opportunity or the support to control choices and decisions

about important aspects of their lives. Instead, they are often overprotected and

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involuntarily segregated. Many have not had opportunities to learn the skills and have the

experiences that would enable them to take more personal control and make choices. The

lack of such learning opportunities and experiences has impeded the right of people with

disabilities to become participating, valued, and respected members of their communities.

Furthermore, the social mobility of people with developmental disabilities, in particular, is

limited by a number of other factors including limited or non-existent after-school or

summer employment, career development and counseling, postsecondary education,

progressive social policy, and funding (Uditsky, 1995). Often adults with developmental

disabilities are relegated to a very narrow range of low-paying, part-time jobs and are under

appreciated in business and labor sectors. In response to these and other concerns, a number

of initiatives have been proposed or are underway in Canada, the United States and

elsewhere (Neufeldt & Albright, 1995). Self-employment, small business development, and

other forms of engagement within a social economy represent responses that enable

individuals with varied disabilities to contribute to the economic development of a

community, so as to increase their own options and choices and their overall social

mobility. However, the stigma accorded to individuals living with varied disabilities

through the construction of vulnerability continues to restrict the roles available to that of

rescuer and rescued.

Intention

The over arching intention of this project was to ‘reshape culturally-ingrained views

about persons with developmental disabilities [by] advancing knowledge of how to best

serve such individuals…towards really changing the way society looks upon persons with

developmental disabilities” (Snow, 2006,p.1). This project also had educational, social, and

therapeutic intentions as evidenced by the five major goals defined for this three-year

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initiative in the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant

application written by the primary investigator and director of the project, Stephen Snow

(2006, p.3):

• The first is to utilize the methodology of ethnodrama to create a theatre production

with a new cohort of participants (20) at The Centre for the Arts in Human Development in order to explore, reveal and communicate their unique vision of the world, and, in this way, to empower them and, subsequently, to enlighten health providers, health educators and the public-at-large to the special needs and special ways of perceiving of reality of our clients.

• Secondly, the project will allow the faculty, staff and student interns at the Centre to

become skilled in a highly effective method of “visually performed research.” This will be useful for future projects and to share with other institutions and agencies with similar mandates.

• Thirdly, the study and implementation of this method as a means of “postmodern critical theory related to health settings” may help to improve services for the developmentally disabled, as it will elucidate their special needs, and may also reveal ineffective or faulty treatment practices.

• Fourthly, the long-term process of developing and bringing this production to

fruition will aid in the advancement of knowledge in regards to the field of Theatre and Disability.

• Finally, as the Centre operates specifically under a Creative Arts Therapies paradigm, with the goal of using the arts as instruments of healing, rehabilitation and development, the theatrical production created through the ethnodramatic approach may help the participants to experience catharsis “...that is not only emotionally experienced but can be logically related to therapeutic strategies leading to individual change” (Mienczakowski, 1996, p. 445).

Timeline

This project was intended to take place in three phases over three years. Phase I

occurred from September 2006 to June 2007 and involved a team of professional creative

arts therapists led by Dr. Snow researching, defining and establishing a methodology of

ethnodrama through multiple arts modalities. Throughout this year, “various arts media

[were] employed to evoke the “inner world” of the participants [in order to] establish the

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fundamental design concept and the dramatic structure of the play to be produced” (6). The

narratives and themes that emerged from the interviews and arts based processes formed the

script of the play in which the participants created music, art-work, choreography as well as

acted. Dr. Snow invited a documentary filmmaker in this phase for archival and educational

purposes.

Though not part of the analysis in this thesis, at the outset of the project and

contingent on continued funding, a Phase II was intended to take place from September

2007 to April 2008 in which the performance could tour to special interest groups and

agencies. Phase II was also to include the development of evaluations to gauge audience

reactions and to evaluate the authenticity and efficacy of the play. Phase III, scheduled for

September 2008 to April 2009, was to focus on the evaluation, documentation and

dissemination of results arising from this initiative, and to create a model of theatrical

production, based on ethnodrama, that could be used by other agencies and institutions who

work with the developmentally disabled2.

Alliances

The relationships and social networks that were readily mobilized at the inception of

this project were those that existed as a result of their affiliation with the Centre and its co-

founder, Dr. Stephen Snow. This primary network concerned with this project was

understood to be the professional/research team that consisted of the two founding members

of the Centre for the Arts in Human Development: Dr. D’Amico and Dr. Snow who had

worked together since 1995; and two faculty members Dr. Lister and Professor Mongerson,

who worked with the Creative Arts Therapies and Theatre departments, respectively. In

addition to this, creative arts therapists who had provided professional services to the Centre

over the years were also considered consultants to the project and members of the

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professional/research team. Among them were Dance Therapist, Joanabbey Sack, Art

Therapist, Elizabeth Anthony, Music Therapist, Shelley Snow, and Professor Denise

Tanguay, a specialist in Sandplay Therapy and a co-founder of the Centre. Mr. Phil

Herbison, a professional documentary filmmaker who had a significant history of

documenting the Centre’s events, was enlisted to create a video documentary on the whole

project. Further, the research team also included student interns of theatre, theatre and

development, and the creative arts therapies as well as two professional drama therapists

(David Jan Jurasek and myself). This team met approximately once a month over the

course of Phase I and decided on the structure of the ethnographic inquiry within each

modality, grappled with the ethics of ‘informed consent’, as well as provided consistent

reports to the project director about the content arising from participants’ engagement in

each modality. As the performance opening date drew nearer, these meetings became more

frequent and issues pertaining to the aesthetics of the production including script

development, set design, and preparedness of the participants as actors, were privileged on

the agenda.

A group of twenty participants comprised a separate but interconnected group of

individuals with developmental disabilities who were clients of the Centre in 2005 and who

had agreed to participate in this project3. Many of them already knew each other in previous

encounters at the Centre. They were referred to as co-researchers, participants and/or actors

over the course of the project and their input into the direction and purpose of the project

was valued. They were divided into four groups and invited to participate in each of four

modalities: art, music, dance, and drama as well as participate in life story interviews.

Conversations about their understanding of the project were initiated by the project director

during weekly large group meetings that also provided a forum in which to ascertain

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participants’ hopes and fears related to staging their lived experiences. Of note, one of these

meetings resulted in a participant naming the production, ‘It’s A Wonderful World’. The

name was agreed upon by the participants present.

An Advisory Team was organized a couple of months into the project. This team

was comprised of the project director, Dr. Stephen Snow, several other

professional/research team members, and two parents of two of the project’s participants as

well as project participants themselves. The purpose of this team was to provide feedback

about the authenticity and relevancy of the themes that emerged over the course of the

process leading up to the performance. This board was created to provide a forum for the

parents and guardians of project participants and project participants themselves to voice

any concerns that arose over the course of the project. This advisory board met twice over

the course of Phase 1. However, from my recollection, major concerns that arose

concerning participant involvement were raised outside of this forum and, rather, addressed

directly to the project director, Dr. Snow and/or to the executive director of the Centre,

Lenore Vosberg.

A Playback Theatre team, comprised of professional drama therapists as well as

student volunteers, was initiated near the beginning of the project to facilitate weekly

afternoon rehearsals with participants. After preliminary group building exercises, playback

theatre was used elicit the stories of participants relating to themes that emerged over the

course of the process including stories relating to love and marriage, friends and family,

vulnerabilities, sources of pride, stigma and name calling, small pleasures, and desires for

independence and dreams. These themes resulted from a systematic coding process

consistent with the methodology of an ethnodramatic inquiry and were used to structure the

script of the performance (Mienczakowski, 1995, 2001). The participants were also taught

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Playback Theatre techniques over the course of this exploratory phase in order to transfer, to

the extent possible, authority to facilitate their own sharing of their lived realities. Four

Playback Theatre teams comprised of participants were created, each supported by a

professional drama therapist and student volunteer. The Playback Theatre team formed into

an ensemble that was able to perform together outside the auspices of the project on one

occasion. The Playback Theatre team also facilitated relationships between professional

drama therapists and students in related disciplines who, together, functioned as supportive

auxiliaries to the participants during the rehearsal and performance process. During the

performance, this auxiliary staff were all dressed in black and attended to the participants

backstage and carried out quick set changes. Here, there was a brief discussion about the

necessity of highlighting the performances of the participants with developmental

disabilities. It was assumed by the initiators and professional/research team that this was a

good idea even as they were confronted by the fact that the participants did need help.

Finally, there were potential and realized alliances formed between the Centre and the

participants’ family members and friends as well as the agencies that attended the

performance. Many agencies were present as a result of a previous relationship to the Centre

and to the Executive Director and social worker, Lenore Vosberg4.

Photo Credit: Eric Mongerson

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Audience Conceptualization

Each of the three evening performances had been designated for a particular

audience. In the grant application submitted by Snow (2006), he indicates that

“performances will be specifically designated for health providers and health educators in

the field of developmental disability; other performances will be made available to the

general public at a large theatre venue in Montreal” (6). In reality, all performances took

place in a large hall on Concordia’s Loyola campus, albeit transformed to suit the purposes

of the production. Friends and family of the participants were invited on June 7th, health

care providers, educators, and social service professionals were invited on the 8th, and the

general public was invited to see the performance on June 9th, 2007. The performance

specifically designated for supportive peers and family was deemed necessary in order to

provide project participants with an encouraging therapeutic experience at the beginning of

the performance run in addition to challenging their caregiver’s assumptions about the lived

experiences of individuals with developmental disabilities5.

Audience Participation

After each performance, the participant-actors adjourned to an adjoining room where

they were met with a member of the professional creative arts therapies team who

congratulated them on their performance and led a group exercise that facilitated their

transition from the performance to encountering the public present each night. In co-

ordination with the professional/research team, I devised several audience engagement

processes in order to provide multiple opportunities for audience members to assess if they

recognized the experiences portrayed and if they had experienced a shift in their

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understanding of the realities lived by adults with developmental disabilities. These

included:

1) Audience Feedback Questionnaire6: The lighting was adjusted to afford the

audience a view of themselves seated in their bleacher style row seating and I let the

audience know that we were interested in hearing their reflections about the

performance in a variety of ways. The first of these was through an audience

feedback questionnaire that had been distributed to them upon entrance into the

performance space. Each audience was given the same questionnaire that included

an optional space where they could identify themselves and provide contact

information. I had included this section in order to facilitate possible follow-up

efforts with those who attended although I did not have, at the time, a clear sense of

what that follow-up might look like. Here is a selection of responses provided for

each night of the performance that represent sentiments that were repeated often

within the same audience.

June 7th: Friends and Family (22 questionnaires returned):

In response to the question “ What in this play was the most meaningful for you?”

“The opportunity it gave the participants to express themselves in their own terms.” In response to the question “ Who do you think should see this play and why?”:

“Everyone so they can realize everybody has feelings and dreams and to step out of their busy lives and realize this” “It’s a window into a separate but shared world.” “Teachers should see this so they can realize that we all have the same dreams.” In response to “What questions/comments do you still have about the play?” “I would have liked to have seen interactive sketches, interactions between people with and without developmental disabilities.”

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June 8th: Health Care Professionals (47 questionnaires returned):

In response to the question “ What in this play was the most meaningful for you?”

“The play was equalizing. The sensitivity and arousal to limitations as well aspirations common to everyone- I’ve been trying to understand what my ‘clients’ may be feeling but this is their reality and it is a window to what actually are their feelings and thoughts and they have emotions common to everyone. I had a very emotional response.” “The part about the participants being teased and the possibility of love and marriage.” “The section on pride and about their desire for independence.” “I was struck by how the themes that came up for the participants were also the themes that my clients have.” In response to the question “ Who do you think should see this play and why?”

“Other therapists” “Family members- to give them hope.” “Everyone! I think some people look down at people with disabilities and don’t realize that they also have dreams, desires, and want what we all want. This performance shows that.”

“It should be on National Television” “Donors should see this play.” June 9th: General Public (73 questionnaires returned):

In response to the question “ What in this play was the most meaningful for you?”

“ The ability of the actors to perform in front of an audience and remember their parts.” “ It made me understand other’s lives and feelings and memories.” “The honest expression of their feelings given a chance to express themselves in their own words and ways.” “Usually, we don’t have the opportunity to think about problems, thoughts, and desires of people with a deficient mind, so this show is a real learning and teaching.”

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In response to the question “ Who do you think should see this play and why?”:

“Those who don’t realize that these guys are people too with all the same feelings and emotions.” “ Elementary and high school students to sensitize them to people with special needs.” “Young adults with disabilities that may not be lucky enough to be in groups like this.” “ The parents, relatives, and friends of those who have handicaps” “ Health care workers and the general public, it lessens prejudices and helps develop empathy.”

2) Direct Questions: After approximately 5 minutes, gauging the preparedness of the

audience to move on from their questionnaires, I asked the audience the question:

What did you remember from the performance?” In the brief seconds of silence that

followed, I often asked a reiteration of the first question, “What scenes stood out for

you during the performance?” Audience comments were directed towards the MC

primarily.

3) Actors Talkback: The participants re-entered the performance space to the applause

of the audience and formed a semi-circle on stage. The audience was invited to pose

any questions they wished to the participants who were introduced as actors and co-

researchers in this performance project. Overall, audience members voiced their

appreciation for the stories shared and applauded participants’ courage and

creativity.

4) Art Corner: Once the talkback concluded, I invited audiences to continue sharing

their reflections about the performance through an art corner or through video

response. The art corner consisted of two tables, art supplies and sheets of paper of

differing color and sizes as well as an open mural space. The rationale behind this

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approach was to invite non-verbal and symbolic expression from audience members

who were more comfortable choosing this medium to express their thoughts. The art

corner went underused each night of the performance as audience members appeared

to be drawn to congratulating the actors and dispersing from the theatre space.

5) Video Response: Phil Herbison made himself available after documenting each

performance to capture any feedback from audience members who wished to

contribute their reflections directly to the camera. Several audience members

accepted this invitation once the audience was dispersed. Overall, the comments

shared on camera had a celebratory and congratulatory tone and spoke to the

importance of the play in challenging common perceptions about disabilities.

6) Playback Theatre: The Playback Theatre Team that developed over the course of

the rehearsal process was, at one time, considered as part of the post-performance

process with the rationale that audience members could continue the process of story

sharing, revealing their ideas, hopes and desires as caregivers, health care

professionals and peers of individuals living with developmental disabilities.

However, the majority of the professional/research team felt that the playback

theatre team might overshadow the accomplishments of the Centre’s participants

and was, therefore, not used as an audience participation process. I agreed with this

choice at the time.

7) Post-performance Reception: The audience was directed to an adjoining room

after each performance for a brief reception. On the final night of the performance,

the set was dismantled and the main hall was turned into a reception hall. Audience

members as well as the friends and family members of participants were invited to

attend the reception where a light dinner was served and entertainment was provided

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by past clients of the Centre. This reception and the smaller versions of it on

previous nights were considered to be a formal part of the audience participation

process.

Post Performance Assessment

The social intention of this project was to simultaneously empower individuals with

developmental disabilities and to orient health providers, health educators and the public-at-

large to the necessity of providing better care. The responses received during the post-

performance engagement with audience members reveals that they were enlightened,

however temporarily, to the perspectives and realities of people with developmental

disabilities. It is not apparent that the performance, at least in Phase I, had an impact on

actual changes and improvements in service delivery. The therapeutic intentions, while they

are not the subject of this thesis, were attended to at various intervals in the process and

performance and influenced the audience engagement strategy in so far as the therapeutic

well-being of the participants was privileged over an engagement with the social,

institutional, cultural and political implications of the realities exposed through the

performance.

Summary

Several aspects of this project emerge as critical to an understanding of audience

engagement processes that can effectively challenge the conditions that preserve the

harmful marginalization of individuals with developmental disabilities. First of all, this

project was localized and involved people who live the reality of having a developmental

disability as well as agency representatives and health care workers living in Montreal as

auxiliary staff or witnesses to this performance. The rigid roles of rescuer and rescued that

sustain harmful stigmatization and which threaten to limit social mobility were temporarily

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disrupted through the staging of their multiple challenges and desires in their own words to

an audience of people they often interact with. However, as one audience member noted,

there was a lack of representation of this interaction or of the relationship, between

caregivers and individuals with developmental disabilities.

Members of the research and professional team assumed that it was necessary to

avoid drawing attention to the existence of the staff who were supporting the participants

during the performance. As a member of the research team, I agreed with this at the time

given the therapeutic tradition of the Centre’s performances that strived to create a platform

for their participants’ stories to be expressed. Though the professional team was fully aware

that the clients could not achieve this performance on their own and needed help, the open

acknowledgement of this reality appeared to undermine the stated purpose of the activity

that was, in part, to empower the clients and improve their self-esteem. Therefore, there was

little dialogue with the clients about the role that the staff should play. Staff from the

Playback Theatre team that had facilitated the emergence of participants’ stories during the

rehearsal process became stage-hands during the play. They were dressed in black and

silently facilitated transitions between scenes, ensuring smooth entrances and exits from

backstage. Together, clients, staff, and audience participated in this illusion of autonomy

for the purpose of the project.

Another example of this process of hiding the presence of the representatives of the

‘centre’ during the performance was in the choice made by the research and professional

team not to use Playback Theatre as a post performance process. I agreed with this decision

at the time. However, in retrospect it became increasingly clear that the silence and absence

of the auxiliary staff permitted a performance uninterrupted by the voices of the caregivers

that these participants interact with daily and yet, on the other hand, it was clear that the

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entire performance was shaped by those with the power to do so, namely the non-

developmentally disabled people involved with the project. Here, the absence of any

representation of the relationship between caregivers, service providers and the participants

causes the audience to only temporarily ‘suspend their disbelief’ about the capacities of

their relatives, peers, and clients on stage. The near invisibility of those who hold the power

to permit and shape the conditions in which participants’ expression could be heard is what

preserves the rigid binary of the rescuer and rescued in the long term and prevents

sustainable alliance between these centres and margins of power. Thus, though the overt

message celebrated through such performances is one of the empowerment of the

marginalized group, the covert message (i.e., that they are not capable) is held in the

shadows, as a conversation that cannot be held simultaneously, and that therefore goes

unexamined or challenged. In the end, the representatives of the centre are silently

congratulated for ‘what they have done for’ the clients.

With regard to audience participation strategies, engaging the audience with an

open-ended question did elicit a variety of affect-laden responses. The questionnaire

revealed important information about who had attended the performance and the

impressions it had left. The talk-back allowed for some interaction between audience

members and the participants. Most of this was congratulatory and supportive and this was

useful, however, the talk back did not engage participants nor the audience in further

analysis about the implications of their experiences and desires on their level of autonomy

or on the services they use. Even with the choice of undertaking an ethnodramatic inquiry,

the culture of therapeutic theatre that had permeated the Centre was always present as

evidenced by the post-performance process facilitated for the actors in the adjoining room

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as well as by the choice not to indulge the audience’s experiences through the use of

Playback Theatre or otherwise.

There was careful thought given to who should see the performance. However, I, as the

MC, employed little variance in how each group was engaged. The other audience

participation strategies, with the exception of the video feedback, were less effective in

collecting information or inspiring alliances. It is also important to note that all of the

audience participation strategies were individualized and unidirectional in nature wherein

audience members provided singular feedback towards the MC or towards the actors and

not to each other. In fact, proximal encounters that may have been conducive to forming

alliances between participants, families, and health or social service providers was perhaps

most realized during the reception that followed the last performance7.

The majority of people who attended were either friends, family or had a prior

relationship with Lenore Vosberg, the Centre’s executive director. The social network she

represents is a formidable asset to the ongoing work of the Centre. However, there was not

much effort given to recruiting an audience that was not previously acquainted with the

participants or the work of the Centre that resulted in audiences who were already

somewhat familiar with the messages this production attempted to convey. This is not, in

itself, a liability. It was important that these family members and care providers had an

opportunity to be reminded of the arc of desires held by their children, siblings, and clients.

However, audience responses indicated the need for this performances to be seen by those

who have the resources to effect institutional and political change; lawyers, members of

parliament, doctors, teachers, and health and social service administrators were often

indicated as important witnesses.

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With regard to the research design of the project as a whole and the determination of

the context and project’s intentions, an attempt at a more participatory research process was

attempted wherein project director, Stephen Snow, identified participants as co-researchers

and involved them in identifying key concerns as well as in determining their interest in

telling their story in a public space. However, there were challenges to involving these

participants in a discussion about the value of creating an ethnodramatic performance that

were endemic to their psychological condition. The clients of the Centre for the Arts in

Human Development were, as mentioned earlier, adults with developmental disabilities

with varied levels of cognitive ability. The question of whether they could provide

‘informed consent’ to participating in the project was considered often during the planning

process. In the final instance, they did not all agree to participate or to participate in the

same way in the performance. The intentions of the project, however, were largely

developed by members of the professional/research team, the majority of whom had a long

history with the Centre and continue to work with participants there. I, too, was a student

intern with the Centre and had some familiarity with the clients who became participants in

this project. From my perspective, this familiarity sensitized me to the need for an increased

awareness and response/ability on the part of the non-disabled community towards this

group. As a result, I firmly agreed with the project’s intentions to bring to light the

aspirations of the Centre’s participants to an audience of their care-givers and service

providers. However, our approach to determining the project’s intentions by members of the

‘centre’ at the outset meant that we needed to get ‘buy-in’ from those directly affected, the

margins. Intentions construed without the full participation of those whose lives are directly

implicated in the project re-enact and re-establish hegemonic relations of power, further

entrenching the margins as the space defined and written upon by those in power.

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Chapter 5: Rights Here! Theatre and Law for Human Rights

Rights Here! Theatre and Law for Human Rights (Phase II) was a collaborative

initiative by the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, the Park Extension Youth

Organization (PEYO), Teesri Duniya Theatre, and a legal advisory consisting of members

of the Equality Committee of the Quebec Bar Association. Their goal was to create a

performance that would raise awareness about human rights in Montreal amongst youth,

their parents, and community groups primarily within the ethnically diverse neighborhood

of Park Extension. This project brought together artists, theatre students and youth from

Park-Extension in a bilingual performance that staged scenes relating to housing rights,

racial profiling by police officers, reasonable accommodation and forced marriage.

Audiences varied widely within three outdoor, public performances and in three indoor

performances staged in an abandoned section of the William Hingston Community Hall in

Park Extension. Outdoor performances took place in the months of May and June and the

indoor performance took place between June 28-30, 20078.

Context

Montreal has a large and ethnically diverse urban population. This is particularly visible

in a neighborhood located in the north of Montreal called Park-Extension which is in the

borough of Villeray-Saint Michel-Park-Extension and has a population of 35,000 in an area

of 1,6 km9. The name derives from the fact that it is situated at the north end of Avenue du

Parc, and is literally an‘extension’ of the artery. The area is known by locals as ‘Park-X’.

40% of the population is made up of racialized communities from South Asian, African and

Middle Eastern descent. This makes Park-X one of the city’s most culturally diverse

neighborhoods, and home to a large number of new Canadians. In a survey of the city’s

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poorest neighborhoods for the Montreal Mirror, Philip Preville refers to Park-Extension as a

‘mission impossible’10. The following excerpt from his article highlights some of the

indicators of poverty faced by new immigrants to the neighborhood:

Park Extension, regardless of how proud its residents may be, seems beyond help. There is no former splendour here. There are no trees, and virtually no space to plant them even if you wanted to. The streets are narrow. There are no charming buildings; most of them were built between 1950 and 1970, hideous boxes with orange or yellow brick façades that look like bathroom tiles. And they're crammed up against one another: over 35,000 people are packed like sardines into a district of only 1.6 square kilometers, more than triple the average population density in Montreal. Recent surveys suggest that 10 per cent of all buildings in Park Ex need major repairs. "And that's definitely an underestimate," claims Gérard Joseph of the Park Extension Action Committee. "Most of the population is made up of recent immigrants who came from places where things were even worse than this. They don't think they have the right to complain, and they don't want to complain." Joseph says landlords know this, and take advantage of it. "So many times, we've had people come to us who live in small basement apartments, wondering why their hydro (utilities) bill is so expensive. We tell them to go home at night and turn everything off--clocks, refrigerators, everything--and then check their hydro meter to see if it's still running. Usually it is still running, because their landlord is hooked up to their meter. The landlords are hoodwinking tenants into paying their electrical costs. That's just part of everyday life in Park Extension.

Bridge to Nowhere Location: In front of the William Hingston Community Hall and the edge of Park-Extension Source: Christopher DeWolf, Spacing Montreal11

Location: Durocher Street just below Jean Talon, Park Extension Source: Christopher DeWolf, Spacing Montreal

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However, this poverty cannot be understood without also understanding the interlocking

effects of racism, classism, and sexism that create multiple barriers to the upward mobility

of racialized immigrants, thereby producing and sustaining poverty (Razack, 2008). In

Quebec’s intercultural context, the particular struggles of diverse ethnic groups had been

further obscured by the politics of language wherein those who do not speak French, the

primary language in Quebec, have been historically excluded from full participation in civic

life. Further, recent debates about what can be considered ‘reasonable accommodation’, a

term borrowed from American labor law to refer to the extent to which arrangements should

be made with religious minorities so they can keep their traditions in public life, has drawn

attention to the asymmetrical power held by the dominant Francophone society in relation to

other ethnic groups. Within these debates, groups of people sharing similar characteristics

were categorically racialized as Muslims, Arabs, or Minorities, their own historical, social,

economic, religious, and gendered differences erroneously collapsed within the media.

What emerges is a homogeneous Other; an Other to be feared and managed12.

Within this context, struggles for equality have taken place in myriad ways. The

following excerpt is from the response from a local branch of a nationwide human rights

organization, No One is Illegal, to the oppressive discourse regarding difference that

appeared in much of the English and French speaking media at the height of the

controversies that sparked a larger debate on reasonable accommodation in 2007,

As racialized and migrant women, we are outraged by the slanderous, xenophobic and racist propaganda that is being expressed in the debate about “reasonable accommodation”. We assert our ability, as subjects not objects, to exercise our own capacity to self-determine our lives; we reject the repeatedly paternalistic, and fundamentally misogynist, discourse about the State that will supposedly save us from our own cultures.

We assert that such a discourse is both racist and sexist. It is racist, because it perpetuates the idea that our cultures are fundamentally

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backwards and cruel, in contrast with white Western culture, which is seen as the ultimate achievement of civilization. It is sexist because it derives from ideas that render women childlike, or viewed as simple victims incapable of struggling for their own well being. (No One is Illegal, 200713)

No One is Illegal and a similar organization, Solidarity Across Borders, held several

demonstrations and marches in Park Extension over 2007 to address what they argued were

the systemic causes of poverty: unsanitary and dangerous working conditions, the lack of

affordable and safe housing as well as precarious legal status. Their approach to addressing

poverty requires action that is rooted in a struggle for equality requiring both social

awareness and legal action. It is within this context that a joint collaboration between

theatre artists and lawyers, such as that attempted through the Rights Here! project, starts to

make sense.

Also central to an understanding of the context in which this project takes place is

the debate concerning the use of Human Rights discourse in advancing arguments for equity

No One Is Illegal Solidarity March, May 7, 2007, Location: Park Extension Source: No One Is Illegal

No One is Illegal Poster written in Bengali Location: Park Extension Source: Cristopher deWolf, Spacing Montreal And No One is Illegal14

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across lines of difference. Razack (1998) identifies the problems in using a human rights as

a basis from which to forge solidarity against oppression. She describes the problem as two-

fold:

How can we talk about power and privilege using a concept-rights-that leaves no room for a discussion of histories of subordination? Rights thinking is based on the liberal notion that we all individuals who contract with one another to live in a society where each of us would have the maximum in personal freedom. Starting from this premise, then there are no marginalized communities of people and no historical relations of power. Each man, and the prototype is male, makes himself anew. Second, when histories do enter the discussion, for instance when we examine how slavery and racism affected the freedom to engage in this contract, or when we consider how violence against women secured the freedom and autonomy of men, they implicate dominant groups and are thus strenuously resisted through the narrative that we are all just human beings (17). However, Nussbaum (2000) advances an argument for substantiated freedoms that is

cognizant of and intertwined with social and economic discrepancies in her capabilities

approach to human rights advocacy. She argues that the provision of human rights by the

Nation-State should be linked to the inherent capabilities of a human being, that is what one

can be and do. She argues that Nations face a moral imperative to ensure a basic minimum

of material prerequisites necessary to ensure that one is able to fully exercise his/her rights.

The combination of inherent capabilities and enabling external conditions, what she refers

to as ‘combined capabilities’, ensures that the exercise of a function, like the right to vote or

the right to work, becomes an actual option. She also advances that, to the extent that

‘private’ citizens affect the actions of their governments and public agencies, they are

responsible for the failure of governments to implement the conditions that promote a fair

level of capabilities for everyone. In principle, human rights are everyone's business and

require constant vigilance and evolution dependent on the capabilities of a Nation’s

inhabitants. Including human rights as a basis for engagement and future solidarity efforts in

Park Extension required grappling with the complexities of this discourse.

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Timeline Phase I: Rights Here! was initially envisioned to

take place in two Phases (ACCF grant, 2006). Phase

One took place in December, 2006. Emerging and

professional artists including Indo-Canadian actors

as well as law students and theatre students,

undertook three weeks of hands-on training in Indian

street theatre provided by the Centre for Social

Action in Bangalore, India. In total, 15 members of

the project, including myself, took part in this phase.

Phase II: Phase Two took place from January to June of 2007.

Questions of human rights realizations and violations

such as forced marriage, racial profiling, reasonable

accommodation, and landlord and tenant rights were

addressed through creative investigation with youth

from Park Extension. The culmination of phase II was

a performance that could be presented to the public as

well as tour to various communities in traditional as

well as non-traditional settings.

Phase III: From the inception of the project, it was felt that there should be follow up

activities to the performance in order to encourage ongoing activism in Park-X around

human rights in order to ensure that the public impact of the project was significant.

Rights Here! Street Theatre Location: Rajendranagar, Urban Slum Bangalore, India Photo Credit: Centre for Social Action

Rights Here! Individual v.s. Collective Scene Location: In front of Metro Mont-Royal Photo Credit: Ted Little

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The idea of a Phase Three to the project evolved during

conversations with project partners and participants during

Phase Two. It was envisioned to follow the performance

in June and result in the development of a School for

Human Rights Advocacy that would include continuing

education about human rights and legal support for

residents of Park-Extension.

Intention There were several intentions embedded within the scope of this project. The primary

goal was to develop “ an aesthetically and emotionally powerful performance designed to

assist young people, their parents, and their community to understand human rights as a

living and empowering experience, rather than a set of legal instruments and norms: a

culture to which they can have access and insert their presence and their voices.” (ACCF,

2006). The following objectives were articulated in the grant application submitted in 2006

to the Artist and Community Collaboration Fund (ACCF) of the Canadian Council for the

Arts:

• To find new ways that theatre practice can integrate and enhance the

visibility of communities of color among the larger Canadian population.

• To employ community participatory theatre as a tool to educate "about" and "for" human rights in a specific target community as well as among participating artists. Following the performance to provide opportunities for participants to remain involved as human rights activists.

Rights Here! Image Theatre Location: Park Extension Youth Organization Source: Montreal Gazette15

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• To provide young people with an opportunity to understand human rights as a living and empowering experience To explore and communicate the complexities of different perspectives on what ‘human rights’ mean in different contexts.

• To ensure that all participants can contribute in meaningful ways to the creation of a

moving and educative piece of theatre that communicates essential perspectives on human rights. To create a work of art that demonstrates the social value and potential of participatory theatre and advances the genre as an art form.

• To allow audiences to leave our production with the kinds of resonating impressions

and questions that can prompt both individual and social change.

• To create a theatre piece which reflects, represents, expresses and expands the multicultural diversity of Canada.

• To evaluate for the future how this methodology can continue to enhance

awareness, interest and action around human rights issues both locally and globally.

Alliances Rights Here! was a project that represented multiple possibilities for relationships

between arts and social service funders, universities, individuals, and community

organizations. It was initially conceived as a collaboration between Teesri Duniya Theatre,

the Quebec Division of the Canadian Bar Association, Park Extension Youth Organization

(PEYO), the Theatre and Development program at Concordia University, and the Centre for

Social Action in Bangalore, India. The Teesri Duniya project team comprised the following

people: Edward Little, Project Artistic Director, Associate Artistic Director of Teesri

Duniya, and coordinator of Theatre and Development at Concordia; Rachael Van Fossen,

founding Artistic Director of Common Weal Community Arts, and acting as

Creative/Staging Director and Playwright for Rights Here!; Rahul Varma, Dramaturge for

Rights Here! and Teesri Artistic Director; Dipti Gupta, filmmaker and Rights Here!

Videographer; Mireille Deschênes, lawyer and human rights advocate, Rights Here! Project

Leader; Nisha Sajnani, artistic director of Creative Alternatives, and leader of community

outreach and orientation in the Park-X neighborhood for the Rights Here! project; Jo-An

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Jette, Park Extension Youth Coordinator; and Jaswant Guzder, M.D., specialist in Child and

Transcultural Psychiatry and a cultural and community health consultant regarding

development of Rights Here!

This project also afforded opportunities to form alliances between artists, legal

professionals and students of theatre and law from Concordia and University of Montreal as

well as youth and families from Park-Extension. However, in the final instance, there was

an unequal representation of Park-X residents versus students involved in the production.

As noted by Crawford (2007) in his summative evaluation of Phase II, “Although the cast

was somewhat ethnically diverse, there was very little interaction between the mostly white

and female Concordia University students and the Extension community-at-large.”(42).

Both law students had retracted from the production during this phase as did the Park-X

youth who initially responded to the efforts at outreach. There were three young South

Asian women from Park-X that remained involved and, to my knowledge, at least one is

still involved in the Phase III of the project today. There were also opportunities to form

alliances with community groups working in the Park-X neighborhood on issues pertaining

to human rights. There were two community organizations that contributed to the final

production and several whose materials were made available to the attending public.

Although No One is Illegal was not a collaborator on the project16, they provided copies of a

resource booklets of social service and advocacy agencies involved in Park-X that they had

prepared for their outdoor march in May, 2007. These were also made available to the

audience after the performance.

Audience Conceptualization

The principal audience targeted for this production was the neighborhood of Park

Extension itself. It was hoped by project partners that the months of workshops, orientation

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sessions, story gathering sessions, and summer employment for students and residents of

Park Extension leading up to performances, would ensure that the project would be eagerly

awaited in the neighborhood. For example, the play may have been awaited by a Park-X

resident whose story, gathered during the rehearsal process, formed the basis of a scene

dealing with landlord and tenant rights. The audience was also intended to be the general

public of Montreal. With this in mind, the choice of outdoor venues was decided primarily

for their proximity to new immigrants of color in Park Extension and, secondly, the general

public in Montreal. Two performances were brought to public parks in Park Extension and

two to locations outside this neighborhood. Audiences to these outdoor performances were

invited to extend an invitation to the indoor performances.

Audience Participation There were several opportunities to engage audiences in the

gathering, production and dispersal phases of the

outdoor and indoor performances:

(1) Story-Gathering

Gathering experiences from Park-X residents was

considered a necessary component to ensuring a

receptive audience in the neighborhood. The stories

gathered formed the basis of the performance script.

(2) Choice of Venue: A fair deal of consideration went into choosing the outdoor

and indoor venues. The choice of outdoor venues was decided primarily for their

proximity to residents in Park-X and, secondly, the general public.

First Outdoor Performance (May/2007) Location: Mont-Royal metro station Photo credit: Ted Little

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(3) Direct Invitation: In addition to the play being of relevance to the audience, a key

learning that emerged from Phase I was that street theatre must work to gather its

audience and that using music and song were useful in drawing immediate attention.

About an hour before each outdoor performance, the performance team gathered

instruments and flyers written in English, French, and several South Asian languages

and walked an approximately one kilometer perimeter around each outdoor venue,

distributing flyers, talking with passers-by about the upcoming performance and

generating a creative disturbance. As one performer noted, “I enjoyed calling our

audience in on the street before performances; I liked the journey the audience had

to take through the found spaces in our performances; I enjoyed the grittiness and

unexpectedness of actually performing in public spaces. You could also reach a

wider audience that way too.”(Crawford, 2007, p.30)

(4) Pre-show: Approximately 45 minutes prior to the commencement of the indoor

performances, the performance team as well as two community organizations that

use theatre to advance their work relating to violence against women, provided short

scenes, acrobatics, and a carnivalesque atmosphere complete with giant puppets to

draw attention and engage audiences in brief interactions relating to human rights.

(5) Promenade Staging: The final indoor production took the form of a ‘promenade

staging’, where audience members stand surrounded by stages, and where the action

of the play thus takes place around and through them, with opportunities for

spectators to interact. This choice of staging was chosen because of its suitability as

an aesthetic representation of public space (the “street”). Further, the promenade

style implicated audience in the action of the play and hence in the community itself,

by functioning as both a metaphorical and an actual interactive space. As one

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audience member put it, “ I loved the procession from the outside (public) space to

the inside (private) space, neighbors and kids saw this and came to check it out!”

(6) Interspersed Questions: During the indoor performance, each scene was

interspersed with questions to the audience to surface the key human rights

dilemmas represented in each scene and to provide the audience with several

opportunities to consider their own relationship and responses to the injustices

staged. For example, after a brief scene about discriminatory behavior by a

Montreal landlord, I would ask the audience “if anyone recognized the scene, does

this happen?” After a few responses, I would ask “ Does anyone know what to do if

this happens to you or to someone you know?” Here, the goal was not to determine a

course of action regarding the injustices staged but to inspire the audience’s

awareness about the reality of the dilemma (as they heard some amongst them

recognize the scene) and to inspire their curiosity about what could be done about it.

Post-performance Inquiry: After each indoor performance, audiences were invited

to ask questions and comment on the performance. This was shaped as an

opportunity for audiences to pose questions and to reflect aloud about human rights

and options for action. At one of the first indoor performances in particular, a man in

the audience stood up and addressed the audience directly. He introduced himself as

the coordinator of a community organization in the same building that provided

support to those seeking affordable housing. This inspired a few others in the

audience to talk with him in that moment and as the audience dispersed. This action

inspired me, in that moment and in remaining performances, to ask the audience

directly if there was anyone in the room who was working directly on the issues

staged. This provided an opportunity to, once again, assert the reality of the issues

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staged and to identify possible partnerships for continued action. It also afforded an

opportunity for the audience to speak to itself and seemed to contribute to a sense of

accountability amongst audience members as evidenced by this audience member’s

comment included in her survey “'I'm a performer, on the boad of directors of

Santropol Roulant and I failed to say to all the group that I am secretary of the

board of DAM (Diversité Artistique Montréal) a new non-profit lobbying for the

integration of the diverse artistic community and for these to have a voice on issues

that this community lives.”.

(7) Audience Response Questionnaire17: Questionnaires were distributed to the

audiences immediately following each indoor performance and were available in

English and French. Each questionnaire included an optional space where they

could identify themselves and provide contact information. Here are the statistics

and highlighted responses from this survey (Crawford, 2007)18:

Statistics: 68 audience surveys were received. Of these, 54 (79%) were in English and 14 (21%) were in French. 39 (57%) people signed their names and/or included contact information. Of these, 32 (89% of those who signed, 47% of the total response) expressed an interest in participating in Phase III in some form. Common themes that audience members expressed (ranked in order of frequency from highest to lowest):

1. children and teens should see this show; show it in schools 2. take this show to other neighborhoods, arrondissements, communities in Montréal 3. privileged folks, elites, MPs, MNAs, city councillors, police, Human Rights Commission officers and officers of the Régie du logement should also see this show 4. make the show much shorter; it was too long 5. more advertising around Montréal and have more media coverage 6. ensure French and English are used equally; include more languages 7. add more complexity to the issues (especially, racial profiling and hiring by quotas) 8. was difficult to hear at times what actors were saying due to echo (bad acoustics indoors) or drumming was too loud at times (especially outside) 9. more audience interaction 10. more chairs to sit on

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11. more queer / lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered issues

Quotes

''I would challenge and push the envelope further. There's a difference between wishy-washy and holding real debate (marriage section).'' ''The audience that was drawn [to the shows] is what meant the most to me.'' ''I loved the recycled methods, spoke a lot about environmentalism even if not addressed overtly; loved the unconventional spaces.'' ''Congrats! The most meaningful and important play I've seen. You should be proud.''

''The piece on marriage is not so accessible especially to a young audience.''

Question: Was there a moment in this performance that was meaningful to you or that left an impression on you?

''The parts that were in Hindi. The part with the police officer [racial profiling scene]--that happened to me.'' Question: Who else should see this performance? “My dad.” “More business owners from the Park-X community.'' “East Indian Male elders”

(8) Presence of Community Organizations: After each indoor and outdoor

performance, the audience was directed to a person and/or a table that contained

pamphlets and flyers from organizations in Montreal, and in Park-X in particular,

that were involved in addressing the human rights issues staged.

Post Performance Assessment

The overarching intention of this performance was to raise awareness about human rights

and to inspire audiences to see human rights as an evolving discourse rather than a fixed set

of legal norms within communities in Park Extension. In general “audience members who

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answered the surveys gave high praise for the performance and continuously stressed that

human rights issues are important and that more theatre for human rights education should

exist in Montréal, especially in schools” (Crawford, 2007, p.9). Many appreciated the

scenes and felt that they were informative. However, they also indicated that the impact of

particular scenes was inconsistent and not complex enough at times. I also witnessed three

South Asian women who attended the indoor performance leave mid-way stating that they

did not understand the performance as it was primarily in English and French. This mixed

response is also consistent with the evaluation conducted with the performance team who

also concluded that the notion of human rights as a ‘living culture’ was not conveyed with

enough complexity to the performance group nor to the audience. The evaluation provided

by Crawford (2007) attributed this lack of complexity within the process and performance

to the inconsistent alliance between the creative and the legal partners associated with the

project. In the absence of legal direction, the production still managed to represent the

realities of poverty, racism, and violence. However, the correlation between these systemic

violations and the discourse on human rights was not easily accessible within the

production. That said, there was a lot of interest generated, as indicated by 47% of survey

respondents, to remain connected with the project in Phase III where grappling with human

rights as a living culture was to be an ongoing initiative. Further, the lack of an equal

presence of Park-X residents and, ergo, relevant material for the performance, inconsistent

alliances, the predominance of English language, lack of sufficient media coverage in

neighborhood languages (and absence of a dedicated publicity person), resulted in less

opportunities to create a sustainable dialogue about human rights within the Park-X

community in the months leading up to the performance19.

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Summary Several aspects of this project emerge as critical to an understanding of audience

engagement processes that can effectively challenge the conditions that preserve the

harmful marginalization of racialized immigrants. There were several opportunities to

engage audiences embedded in the gathering, production, and dispersal phase of each

performance (Bennett, 1997; Little, 2005). During the gathering phase, it was hoped that

audiences would be cultivated through the story gathering process. This did not occur to the

degree anticipated but, for one local resident whose story was translated into the

performance, it proved to be an effective means of reaching the intended audience. The

gathering phase also included ‘direct invitations’ right before each performance, a strategy

unique to the needs of street theatre, given its localized audience and the immediacy of the

form.

The obvious asymmetry between outsiders to Park-X and local residents as well as a

lack of consistent partnership between the legal and creative team in Phase II was noted

several times during the evaluation (Crawford, 2007). Also important to note in this

performance is the unequal presence of Park-X residents, or the ‘marginalized’ group,

amongst the planning and production teams. This created particular tensions amongst the

production and performance teams as the resulting performance was only minimally

substantiated by local experience. As one performer noted, “ I would have liked to see more

interaction with the community to determine what would be interesting to them. What

issues are important to them. What would seem interesting to watch for them” (Crawford,

2007,34). An increasingly participatory process in which our intended audiences might have

additionally informed the material of the play might have brought us closer to the

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ideological compatibility described by Kershaw (1992) and the relational aesthetic

described by Little (2005). This was experienced as lacking by another performer who

stated “I didn’t think that audience participation was something which was ever focused on

for the group. I believe that our performance was more of “you audience, and we actor, you

watch us, we perform for you!” (Crawford, 2007, p.34). Here, the frustration felt by this

performer is palpable and most likely counter productive to sustaining alliances post-

performance.

Because of my involvement in several South Asian communities through another project

described in this thesis (Creating Safer Spaces) the project organizers and I felt that I would

be ideally placed to pursue outreach. As the outreach coordinator, I take responsibility for

the fact that there were only a handful of Park-X youth involved. I did not live in Park-X

and while I was able to pursue some outreach to organizations in the neighborhood, my

efforts were not sufficient at engaging many youth to attend. This may have been because of

my limited knowledge of the networks in the area, the fact that I did not speak any of the

South Asian languages adequately enough to enter into comfortable conversations with

families in the area that might have engendered the trust of parents to let their youth be

involved in the project. However, what seemed to work in the end was having a youth

participant who lived in the neighborhood spread the word and inspire interest amongst her

peers. This leads me to some of the structural reasons that, from my perspective, limited the

involvement of youth from Park-X. At the outset of Phase I, the group that was selected to

travel to India, to learn street theatre methods, and to travel back to Montreal to embark on

this localized project did not include any youth from Park-X. While this was primarily due

to constraints in the time allotted to benefit from the grant that would enable Phase I, it also

meant that the intentions for Phase II were pre-determined insofar as the participants and

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project were imagined without the involvement, consultation, or collaboration of local

residents with the exception of our partnership with the Park Extension Youth Organization.

This partnership was primarily with one staff person who did not live in the area and who

was also brought into the project after Park-Extension was already designated as the

location for Phase II. As a result, I believe I faced a larger challenge in recruiting

participants into a project that was not of their own making. In addition to this, the group of

youth that I had nurtured during the outreach process were often delegitimized as not being

the ‘target’ group. Several of the project initiators wanted the production to focus on the

realities of South Asians living in Park-X and the preliminary group of youth interested in

the project were from Haiti or African-Canadian. Further, the aesthetic needs of the

production and the need for Concordia students to earn course credits often appeared to take

precedence over the needs of collaboration between Park-X residents as we approached

public performance dates.

In spite of the asymmetrical involvement of Park-X youth and Concordia students,

many audience members thought well of the performance, felt that it raised important

issues, and indicated that it ought to be seen by those who had the legal or institutional

power to effect change in the area (Crawford, 2007). This is something that was not fully

considered in conceiving of the audience. However, Mireille Deschenes, the project’s legal

partner, arranged for an opportunity for members of the performance team, including

myself, to perform an excerpt of our performance to members of the Montreal Human

Rights Commission at the municipal court house which was well received and discussed.

Here the mobility of the performance was important as the courthouse was, just as the parks

were in Park-X, a public venue that allowed for a particular audience.

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The choice of promenade staging and audience interaction through the role of an

intermediary during the indoor performance also provided a means to stay in dialogue with

the audience (Boal, 1979; Fox, 1994;Salverson, 2001) and enabled the distancing required

to engage the audience in a critical reflection of the themes raised (Brecht cited in

Willett,1964).

During the dispersal phase, the questionnaire provided useful feedback towards the

evaluation of this project and towards Phase III. As noted by a member of the performance

team, “It was great how many different community organizations were involved and came

out to see the show, and in some ways I feel that these people were the most impacted

because they are working directly with the issue and in/with/against the system, struggling

to raise awareness, provide advocacy for disenfranchised people” (Crawford, 2007,p.34). It

is interesting to note, however, that the awareness of the presence of community

organizations during the post-performance inquiry was quite accidental and was almost

received as an interruption to what was a highly structured audience participation process.

This proved to be one of the more interesting moments during the post-performance inquiry

as, when that man stood up and introduced himself and his work, he inspired others to do

the same. This was the only moment, aside from the brief interactions that took place when

the audience moved from scene to scene (promenade), that the audience was free to speak

about their thoughts relating to the themes and potentially form alliances with one another.

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Chapter 6: Creating Safer Spaces with South Asian Women: A Violence Prevention Program Using the Applied Arts

The Creating Safer Spaces program (CSSP) was an initiative of the South Asian

Women’s Community Centre (SAWCC)20. SAWCC is an organization with a 20-year

history. It provides settlement and support services to immigrant and refugee women from

India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Over the years, the Centre has tried

several different approaches to addressing the persistent problem of violence against women

within the many communities with which it works. Since 2003, SAWCC has hosted a

community theatre project to address violence against immigrant seniors. This in turn

inspired the centre coordinator, Sadequa Siddiqi, to hire Denise Nadeau and I to create a

community performance about the complexities of violence against South Asian women in

Montreal amongst other South Asian communities. Between 2004 and 2006, Denise and I

developed and co-facilitated three series, each consisting of a ten-week combined popular

education and creative arts therapies process, for groups of 6- 10 women culminating in a

Forum theatre performance that depicted several scenes involving women’s encounters with

structural violence (racism-classism-sexism) and intimate violence (domestic partner

emotional and physical abuse). We brought this performance and a workshop on ‘creating

equal and healthy relationships’ to various South Asian communities and then into the wider

community, to women’s centres, and neighborhood health centres that had an immigrant

population base.

The Context

Particularly since September 11, 2001, racialized immigrants have experienced

racism and various types of marginalization in Canadian society and in Quebec. Montreal

has a large Arab and Muslim population and the racial profiling that intensified against

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these populations, and those with similar features, throughout North America has emerged

in various ways in Montreal. The indiscriminate racist makes no distinction between

peoples of different faiths from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka or the Middle East

resulting in an exacerbation of what anti-racist theorist, Himani Bannerji, describes as the

fetishization and essentializing of culture and the ethnicization of difference that has

proliferated in a climate of state sponsored multiculturalism (2000). Canada’s celebrations

of cultural diversity, in Bannerji’s analysis, emerge as an impotent and patronizing

multicultural aesthetic designed to reinforce the modernity of white Canada and emphasize

the backward religious and cultural traditions of all others. She asserts that this enables the

construction of uncomplicated, diverse minority groups, voided of any historical or social

relations of power, while leaving the cultural, political, economic, and representational

apparatus of the dominant majority intact. This is the context in which the South Asian

community, an ideological and imagined category of the state, has been constructed.

Sherene Razack, another leading anti-racist feminist theorist, emphasizes how race,

gender and class interlock within immigration, settlement, and multicultural policies and

procedures in the lives of women of color who immigrate or seek refugee status to Canada

(2008). This is central to understanding the kind of violence and oppression these women

face inside and outside their homes. Under the political climate of organizing difference

around essentialized and static cultures, Canada’s “others” had or have to base their cultural

politics on their only grounds for eligibility: their visible differences from the average white

Canadian. These cultural politics leave out problems of class and patriarchy and create an

artificial division of the public and private sphere. It is assumed by both the state and media

as well as the legally endorsed, male representatives of these newly constructed so-called

communities, that South Asians are essentially traditional and as such, patriarchy is a

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natural part of their cultural identity and, therefore, violence is a natural part of their cultural

identity and off limits. The result is that “insiders” are reluctant to speak about it and

“outsiders” are reluctant to intervene (Bannerji, 2000).

Further, Bannerji points to the risks involved in speaking out in a political climate

where violence against immigrant and refugee women of colour is interpreted by the

dominant society as the result of cultural practices. “We are worried, understandably, to

speak of ‘our’ brutalities and shortcomings, because of not being even minimally in control

of the public and political domains of speech and ideological construction” (2000,136). In

cases of domestic violence the media focus is often solely on physical acts of violence by

the husband on a wife (the result of “their culture and religion”) and all other forms of

intimate violence, as well as the structural factors and forms of violence that have made

immigrant woman of colour vulnerable to intimate violence, are ignored. Violence against

immigrant women of colour and Aboriginal women, as is violence against white women, is

treated by the courts, medical and counselling systems as a purely psychological problem

located in the individual rather than the combined result of intimate and structural violence

that can only be remedied by structural and community solutions (Sajnani and Nadeau,

2006).

One of the first things we did was to create a representation of the structural violence

identified by the women in our groups to complement and complete the analysis offered by

the often used Duluth Minnesota Wheel of Violence Against Women that describes the

multiple areas of life affected by intimate partner violence21. In our group, we collectively

identified the multiple ways that mobility is restricted amongst negatively racialized

immigrant and refugee women. In the area of education, women experience deskilling and a

lack of accreditation, less access to adequate training and knowledge of dominant systems.

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In the area of health, women come to Canada having experienced the trauma of forced

migration, sexual violence and the violence of war, which is often treated with overly

individualistic interventions rendering structural violence invisible. Within our legal system,

women suffer from the criminalization of racialized groups and a lack of knowledge

regarding their legal rights. In the area of employment, women experience difficulty with

transportation as well as ghettoization in dangerous and low paying jobs, in addition to

occupational health hazards. Within their so-called communities, or relational groups,

women can also experience a lack of anonymity and confidentiality, resulting in a

potentially devalued status in and/or outside the community and/or family and potential

ostracization and exclusion. In the area of status, immigration policies and procedures

position women as an appendage of her male counterpart, leaving her dependant on her

sponsoring spouse; she may also fear that disclosure could result in deportation. Immigrant

women of colour also experience a lower social and economic status. In accordance with

Razack’s analysis, these areas of exclusion and violence are the daily lived experience for

these of women and exemplify the interlocking of racism, classism, and sexism in their

lives. Isolated and excluded through multiple forms of structural violence and a lack of

language skills in both English and/or French (in Quebec), the immigrant woman of colour

is at higher risk of intimate forms of violence.

Intention The primary intention of this project was to create a community theatre performance as

part of an ongoing community organizing strategy that could raise awareness and galvanize

collective responsiveness and accountability to intimate and structural violence against

women within the South Asian Diaspora living in Montreal. Within this overall goal were

several therapeutic and educational objectives.

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• Validate and draw on the individual, cultural and collective strengths and talents of the participants.

• Develop a collective analysis of the structural factors that contribute to violence against

immigrant and refugee women. • Teach the building blocks of drama, dance and voice for supporting resilience through creative expression and in performance. • Teach self-care skills to counter the negative health impacts of intimate and structural violence and to build awareness of needs and of the body. • Discuss the values and principles of popular education and popular theatre. • Emphasize community accountability as a strategy to address violence against

immigrant and refugee women. Timeline This project can be understood as taking place over three continuous, iterative phases

that informed one another:

Phase I: Women were referred to the Creating Safer Spaces Program if they expressed an

interest in the aforementioned objectives. Often the SAWCC staff would refer women who,

by their own account, were interested in meeting others and in gaining increased language

skills. Over the course of 6-8 sessions, these women drew from their own experiences of

intimate and structural violence to create a series of scenes that represented, in the final

instance, an amalgam of their individual stories. The social service needs of each participant

were met in coordination with the staff person who had referred them as this was also their

case-worker at times. Phase I would culminate in an in-house performance for SAWCC

staff and invited guests.

Phase II: In this phase, the performance was brought out to other South Asian women’s

groups in Montreal. Women who witnessed the performance were invited to participate in

the CSSP project by attending ongoing training/rehearsal meetings. New participants

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informed the development of new scenes and altered our original scenes to increasingly

reflect the realities they faced.

Phase III: In this phase, the audience was enlarged to include multi-ethnic women’s

groups, and two mixed groups of men and women. In this phase, women also brought the

performance to conferences and symposiums about violence against women. Here, they had

moved into the role of public educators and advocates for equal and healthy relationships.

Alliances

SAWCC has partnered with several organizations over the years that were

supportive of its overall mission including the Quebec Ministry of Immigration, the South

Asia Research and Resource Centre (CERAS), and the McGill Centre for Teaching and

Research on Women (MCRTW). As this project took place within SAWCC, it did not have

any other external partners that had a direct bearing on the outcome of the project. Denise

and I had deepened our relationships with the very experienced and multilingual staff of the

South Asian Women’s Community Centre and this made it easier for the Centre’s staff to

refer women to our program. This was crucial to the success of the program as the women

who attended were supported by a SAWCC case worker in addition to participating in this

group. Further, SAWCC was able to provide childcare and subsidize transport costs for

participants in addition to providing them with a small honorarium for their participation in

community education workshops.

Our relationship with Centre staff also made it easier to identify other organizations

that would be interested in seeing the performance. The staff also provided translation when

needed. Once our performance began to tour to different locations in Montreal, we began to

form alliances with representatives and women of South Asian and mixed ethnicity

community organizations that expressed a similar desire to work towards ending violence

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against women. These organizations included: The Hindu Mundir (temple), AMAL

Women’s Centre (Muslim women’s group), the Cote des Neiges Womens Centre, Femmes

du Mondes (Women of the World), the women’s group of the Ismaili Community Centre,

the Afghan Womens Group, the Italian Women’s Group, and a mixed ethnicity Pre-Natal

Women’s group at the Park Extension Health Centre (CLSC). Often women who saw the

performances would become interested in the Creating Safer Spaces program or in

SAWCC. In either case, we were able to provide useful resources to women and, at times,

gained new project participants who were able to contribute to the development of relevant

scenes for their communities.

The Creating Safer Spaces Program (CSSP) changed over the course of the project

dependent on the availability of the women involved. Relationships were created between

several participants and even though many are no longer involved in the project, many keep

in touch. In fact, many women stated that they joined the project to make friends, to learn

English or French, or to learn about resources they might need. This is consistent with what

the SAWCC has known for some time, that a primary mediator of adverse situations faced

by the new immigrants, forced migrants and refugees they work with is the network of

social support they have available to them (Punamäki et al., 2005).

SAWCC initiated an outreach program in 2006 called Autonomous and Independent

that had a staff of three South Asian women. This staff would engage women in their own

neighbourhoods and initiate programs based on the needs of the women they met with. The

rationale for this program was that, as SAWCC was not located within a neighborhood

populated by South Asians, it was necessary to reach women where they lived, especially as

new immigrants could not be expected to navigate the public transport system. The director

of this project was Farah Fancy. Denise and I came to know her and the work of this project

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and began a collaboration between both projects that continues under Farah’s direction

today.

Audience Conceptualization In Phase I, SAWCC’s staff, board and invited guests comprised the audience. This

permitted women involved in the project to gain confidence in performing and co-

facilitating the community forum ‘in-house’. Many of the project’s participants had not

performed before and for some it meant risking being seen in a way that was not culturally

permissible in their communities in their home countries. These risks were navigated on an

individual basis and the safety of each participant was always paramount.

In Phase II, the audience was expanded to include South Asian women’s groups in

Montreal and in the surrounding area. The rationale for this was to provide an environment

where South Asian women could attend to the violence happening in their own families,

without having to contend with the scrutiny of outside groups who, already exposed to

mediated stories conflating violence with culture, might judge them.

In Phase III, the audience was expanded to include multi-ethnic women’s groups, and

two mixed groups of men and women as well as performances at conferences and

symposiums22. Women who had already performed to in-house audiences and to audiences

of other South Asian women and who were interested in performing for mixed groups

participated in these performances. The rationale for expanding the audience was simply

that a zero-tolerance response to violence against women required the effort of everyone,

not just South-Asian women.

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Audience Participation

(1) Invitation23: Careful thought and consultation went into the wording on the

invitation to women to attend our workshop. SAWCC staff advised us that announcing

a performance about violence against women would deter some women from

participating. We couched the emphasis of our work in appreciative language: ‘creating

equal and healthy relationships’ in publicity materials that we provided each host

organization. They would adapt these materials for their use. Further, before agreeing to

visit an organization, we also needed to establish the language spoken by the women

who would comprise our audience and also confirm that we would have a co-facilitator

from their group with whom we could discuss the outline of the workshop.

(2) Shared Facilitation: Each workshop/performance was co-facilitated by myself

and a coordinator or representative of the host community. This was done to heighten

receptivity, as ‘one of their own’ would be co-leading the Forum, and to provide

adequate translation.

(3) Introductions: We began each workshop by introducing ourselves as a team. We

then asked audiences to turn to one or two others in the audience, introduce

themselves, to let each other know one way in which they find themselves to be

strong, and to identify the languages one another spoke. We recorded on a large sheet of

paper and, in this way, acknowledged all of the ways in which women declared their

strengths and took note of any last minute language requirements. The sheet listing their

strengths remained visible throughout the performance.

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(4) Grounding: We let the audience know that they were about to see a performance

about violence against women and about creating equal and healthy relationships and

that it might be upsetting to some of them especially if it reminded them of an

experience they had either witnessed or experienced themselves. Denise often

demonstrated a self-care exercise that involved noticing the sensations in one’s body

during moments of distress and breathing exercises to bring oneself back to the present

moment. We did this to acknowledge the prevalence of violence in women’s lives and to

provide them with immediate skills that could be used during the performance.

(5) The Performance: We introduced the performance by letting audience members

know that we would be showing them two scenes that depicted ‘a day in the life of

one woman’. Two scenes were presented in silence24. The first depicted a woman in a

hijab (head scarf) who was subtly mistreated at a job interview. She returns home and

in the second scene, is confronted by an angry spouse who threatens to hit her when

his meal has not been prepared on time and then walks out of the house angrily

slamming the door behind him. All the while, another actor is standing off to the side

with their hand cupped over their ear as though to indicate that they have heard what has

transpired in this woman’s home.

(6) Decoding and Establishing Proximity: After the scenes ended, I and my co-

facilitator asked audiences to recount what happened in both scenes and if they

identified with or recognized the scenes portrayed. We asked, “Has anything like this

every happened to you or someone you know?”

(7) Decoding: Identifying Structural Violence: We then directed the audience’s

attention to the first scene and asked them if they recognized any forms of violence.

Most often, audience members would identify racism operating in the scene. We pressed

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this further asking for the cues that let them know that racism was present. We would

usually ask audiences if they knew of any resources that could be useful to the

protagonist in the scene (the woman in the hijab). This would lead to a brief sharing of

resources. We offered suggestions for advocacy and human rights groups known to take

action on such incidences as well.

(8) Decoding: Identifying the Link between Intimate and Structural Violence:

I then asked the audience, “Is there is a link that they see between the first and the

second scene?” Audience members have usually been able to identify that the

protagonist facing challenges outside the home that make her tired, lonely, and/or sad

and that her inability to find work left her isolated at home and more dependent on

others for her survival. On one occasion with a mixed gender audience at Bharat

Bhavan, a local South Asian community centre, one man said that “she was out all day,

so she could not get home to make her husband’s food in time, she should learn time

management!”. It was important for us, as facilitators, to ensure that we asked for

multiple perspectives for every question we asked throughout the workshop and to avoid

having only a few voices dominate the decoding of the scenes.

(9) Cops in the Head (adapted): I then directed the audience’s attention to the second

scene and asked the actors to create a still image of the last moment in the scene where

the protagonist is seen leaning over in a chair, visibly upset, her spouse is at the door

about to leave, and the unidentified third person is standing to the side listening in. I

approached each character in the scene and asked the audience to a) call out who they

thought the character was,b) call out what they thought that character was thinking or

feeling in that exact moment, and c) to imagine what ideas or messages, received over

their lifetime from family or society, might be contributing to that character’s actions at

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that moment. This last stage kept the structural realities operating in the scene available

for discussion. For example, audiences of South Asian women often identified the

message “ good South Asian girls are obedient and don’t complain’ as one of the sexist

messages influencing the protagonist’s behavior. Audiences often thought of the

bystander (third character) as a child, a neighbor, a passer-by, a friend, an aunt, a

relative, or another in-law (usually the protagonist’s mother in-law). We would have a

conversation with the audience at this time about the thoughts and feelings of each of

these possibilities. This permitted an expression of multiple realities that the audience

may have been familiar with.

(10) The Image of the Ideal: After the aforementioned ‘conversation’, I asked

audiences to look at the still image in front of them and to imagine what an equal and

healthy relationship would look like. I asked audience members to volunteer to come to

the stage to ‘sculpt’ or reshape the characters into an ‘ideal’ image. Some audiences

were more willing than others and we attributed this to the level of comfort audiences

felt amongst one another and with the pedagogical emphasis of our performance. We

felt that this stage was important in order to develop our collective capacities to imagine

alternate realities to what was initially presented.

(11) The Forum: I then explained the rules of the forum stating that “We are going to

rewind the second scene and any time you see a moment of violence, we invite you to

call out ‘stop!’ and we will stop the scene and also call out ‘stop!’ if you have an idea of

what the main character or the bystander can do to move this relationship closer to the

‘ideal’ you just created. You can come up and replace these characters and replay the

scene from a point of your choosing. You can also choose to add one or more people to

the scene if you think it will make a difference.” The forum would ensue and we would

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encourage as many different interventions in the scene as possible. Before each

intervention, we would ask the audience member who called out ‘stop!’ to tell us what

they noticed. After each intervention, we would ask the audience to recap what the

audience member(s) did to intervene and to speculate as to whether it could work in real

life.

(12) Main Messages: The performance team each held one large poster board size

card that each stated one message we wanted to share about violence against women.

Each member of the performance team said her message aloud in her mother tongue

and in English or French. The message was repeated by the co-facilitator in the

language of the audience.

(13) Resources25: We provided audiences with a pamphlet that contained the main

messages as well as contact information for legal and social services including

SAWCC’s information.

(14) Small Group Discussion: We invited the audience to divide into small groups with

some of the women they had met at the beginning of the workshop and one of the

performance team members. In these groups women were asked to reflect on the

workshop and to consider three questions: What did you learn or relearn from this

workshop about violence against women? What is one thing you can do alone or with

others in the next month if you meet a woman facing similar difficulties? What is one

thing you want to add or change about this workshop?

(15) Invitation: Usually, we ended each performance with an invitation to participate in

Creating Safer Spaces Program, to speak with a member of our group if they wanted

more information, and to visit the South Asian Women’s Community Centre.

(16) Meal: On several occasions, a meal was offered before, but usually after the

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performance. This provided an informal opportunity to get to know the women at

the centre where we were performing and for them to get to know us. We were

also able to meet with women requesting particular resources or who wanted to

discuss a personal situation in further detail.

Post Performance Assessment

The intention of this project was to create a community performance that could raise

awareness about violence against women and promote community responsiveness and

accountability within an ongoing community organizing strategy. It was a mixed creative

arts therapies and popular education model of intervention that emphasized the needs of the

women in the group as well as the social objective. Many women joined and remained in

the project in order to meet others, learn the dominant language, or to gain additional

resources. However, they also stated that they had found it to be a very supportive group

and that they had learned a lot about violence against women and had found themselves in a

position to pass on valuable information to women they knew facing similar situations.

Evaluations from performances suggest that the performance was effective in raising

awareness about violence against women and this is further evidenced by the interest

women showed in becoming involved in the project. However, there were also several

challenges that arose during performances with each audience and especially with mixed

group audiences as the audience participation process often brought out divergent and

conflicting ideas and perspectives. Further, each audience had their own internal power

dynamics that subtly shaped what could and could not be said aloud. This required skillful

facilitation in order to maintain the willingness of the audiences gathered to continue

voicing their ideas amongst each other as honestly as possible. We cannot say, at this point,

that this project is able to address the structural causes that render women vulnerable to

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intimate violence, nor that this project has motivated collective accountability however, we

have mobilized a growing number of women who are able to identify the relationship

between their experiences of violence inside and outside their homes and able to speak more

openly to one another about it.

The women who stayed in connection with this program became peer educators. They

joined the project amidst the precariousness of their living situations. Many of them were

between countries, between jobs, between legal status, between families, and surviving

despite economic instability. Their unstable status, coupled with ongoing new membership

often made it difficult to fully build upon the learning from each performance. However,

women who attended the CSSP program contributed ideas as to what violence actually

looks like in their communities and, when it became possible to return to the same

organization twice, these new scenes were easily recognized by others in the community.

Further, the inclusion of the CSSP within the scope of the Autonomous and Independent

program ensured that women who were newly arrived were greeted with a supportive

network that could respond to practical questions as well as provide them with a creative

means to express experiences that they either had personally or witnessed, in addition to

moving into an advocacy role.

Summary

In addition to the women who participated in the CSSP project, the audience shared

a central role. Facilitating alliances between audience members was privileged

as evidenced by the multiple opportunities for engagement and participation especially

during the small group breakouts. The extensive decoding and the bystander role proved to

be particularly effective in inviting audiences to identify the relationship between scenes

and to see themselves as complicit in maintaining the silence that surrounds violence against

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women, keeping it a ‘private’ matter. As Denise and I have noted elsewhere, our political

claim is that we are teaching audiences not to look away from the structural violence

operating in a situation of intimate violence (2006). Granted, this claim was not fully

realized at every performance and was especially lacking in the moment when, in an

incident described earlier, a man in the audience suggested that the woman in the scene

develop better time management skills.

Couching the performance within an ongoing community organizing strategy

ensured that the social objective of the project remained centre stage. The aesthetic

accomplishment of the CSSP performance was not as strong as the other two projects

discussed in this thesis largely due to the minimal funding with which this program began

and continues to survive and due to its constantly changing membership. However, the

minimalist aesthetic of the performance facilitates its mobility. Rather than waiting for

audiences to come to the workshop, this project brought the performance to target

audiences. Again, attention to the gathering and dispersal phases of the performance with a

reception prior to or post performance engages actors and audiences in an informal space

where relationships are more likely to begin (Bennett, 1997).

The risks shared by the women who performed or participated in the workshops

from the CSSP were moderate although they varied at times dependent on who was in the

audience. They were not ‘coming out’ with their own stories in the same way as the adults

with developmental disabilities were in the first project discussed in this chapter. However,

they were the very women who were affected by the violence we were presenting and were

sensitive to the audience’s reception, perhaps more so than the predominantly student group

who performed in Rights Here! As a result, there were provisions made at the end of each

performance as though it were a form of therapeutic theatre (Snow, 2009). We ended each

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performance with a closure exercise for the performance group and debriefed each

performance at the next group rehearsal. Women in the Creating Safer Spaces program

including Denise and myself also felt that our performance needed to be seen by men and

women outside the South Asian Diaspora in order to truly push for community

accountability for a zero-tolerance response to violence against all women across cultural

communities.

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Chapter 7: Discussion

In this chapter, I will present a theoretical model for a critical, collaborative performance

pedagogy and provide examples from the case studies of how this model might have been

applied. Up to now, I have advanced that the relationships formed between and within

centres and margins of power are important to the realization of progressive social

objectives and therefore central to a CCPP. In general, a CCPP would include attention to:

Critical Engagement: A critical, collaborative performance pedagogy must involve a

participatory process by which the historical, social, and political forces that give rise to

harmful and restrictive marginalization are identified and brought to bear upon the

determination of a project’s intentions and potential indicators for change (Shragge,1997;

Razack,2008). Further, this analysis must be extended into audience participation

processes. In this way, applied theatre practice must be situated as a form of participatory

action research that engages the intended audience well before the performance (Fals-Borda,

1981; Park, Brydon-Miller, & Hall, 1993; Wadsworth, 1998; Reason and Bradbury, 2008.).

Collaborative Alliances: Audiences must be understood as being populated with socially

located beings with varied and interlocking privileges (Razack, 2008). As such, the

audience will have diverse ways of identifying, recognizing, or resonating with

performances depicting examples of social suffering (Boal, 1979; Jones, 1996). Here, it

becomes important to emphasize multiple opportunities for audiences to interact with each

other and with those on stage at various intervals in the gathering, production, and dispersal

phase (Bennett, 1997) of each project as a means of encouraging diverse groups to move

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closer to seeing themselves as implicated in the struggles of one another (Kershaw, 1992).

This engagement is facilitated with a mediating role; an emcee of sorts capable of drawing

attention to the issues raised while engaging the visceral and intellectual attention of the

audience (Brecht in Willet, 1964; Boal,1979; Fox, 1994; Salverson, 2001; Little, 2005).

Further, alliances are also needed between internal and external agencies in order to ensure

that the implications of what arises throughout the process can continue to be debated,

usefully integrated, and can result in a desired change; be it increased local control over

resources and/ or greater decision making power, and/or a redistribution of wealth

(Levesque & Mendell, 2001; Mendell, 2003).

Popular Pedagogy: Audience participation in applied theatre must be situated within a

popular pedagogical approach with its ideas of shared and situated experience as an

experience of, not only a precursor to, action (Freire, 1970). Here, audiences are invited to

reveal themselves and their proximity to the issues staged, to build upon their shared

experiences and deepen their collective analysis, and to incorporate new information

derived from the performance into action (Kidd, 1982; Selman and Prentki, 2000). The

analysis elicited from this process will have implications for when, how and where projects

and performances are undertaken. Fundamental to this pedagogy is the concept of a mobile

and relational politic capable of engaging people where they are situated (Amin et al.,

2003).

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Participatory Analysis of

Context WHERE

Post-Performance Assessment

WHY

Critical Collaborative Performance

Pedagogy Horizontal

and Proximal Audience

Participation HOW

Audience Conceptualization

as the basis for forming Alliances

WHO

Participatory development of Intentions

WHAT

Ongoing Timeline WHEN

A Critical Collaborative Performance Pedagogy

When considering the design and evaluation of audience intervention strategies in

applied theatre, I propose these seven axes: context, alliance, intentions, timeline, audience

conceptualization, audience participation, and post-performance assessment as indicated in

Figure 7.1.

Figure: 7.1: Model of a Critical, Collaborative Performance Pedagogy

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Context

A critical, collaborative performance pedagogy necessitates the collective and

participatory naming of one’s context, the where of art, in order to situate oneself in relation

to the historical, social and economic forces that have given rise to present-day inequities

towards deriving a shared understanding of a project’s rationale and intentions. This

collaborative process is what sets the stage for the project and contributes to decisions about

where the stage will be. For example, each of the locations chosen in each project: the

courthouse and the neighborhood park in Rights Here!, or the Italian Women’s Centre in

Creating Safer Spaces, was chosen in light of each project’s context and intentions.

In addition to this, a CCPP situates acts of change as occurring throughout the

process leading up to and after the performance event, during the gathering and dispersal

phases (Bennett, 1997). In this way, applied theatre is situated as a form of participatory

action research. For the purposes of this thesis, I articulated what I felt to be salient aspects

of the context surrounding each project. An analysis of the context surrounding each project

revealed present-day stratifications of power that continue to result in the harmful

marginalization and limited social mobility of racialized immigrants and the

developmentally disabled in Montreal. The boundaries that limit the advancement and

maintain the poverty faced by these groups is linked to the interplay between structural and

interpersonal forms of violence. For example, the stigmatization and exclusion faced by

adults with developmental disabilities arises from ableist policies and practices that amplify

vulnerability, placing these adults at greater risk for violence in their interpersonal

relationships and encounters (Razack, 1999). Through this analysis, one is able to better

understand complicity as a form of collusion with the fixed roles of rescuer and rescued that

surround and limit the stated purpose of intervention. Further, an awareness of the context is

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what provides a significant rationale for the existence of each of these projects; all three

projects were important in that the inequities they sought to address are real.

However, this contextual analysis would ideally be co-constructed by those

implicated in the project. This was partially realized in It’s A Wonderful World and Creating

Safer Spaces as project participants revealed, through the sharing of their stories, the

difficult realities they faced and this, in turn, shaped decisions about who should see the

play and where the play would be. In the former, the decision to hold the play at the

rehearsal location was partially in response to the many challenges participants stated

having with public transport and with autonomous mobility. However, I am suggesting a

broader definition of implicated is required in order to get at what Kershaw is getting at in

his suggestion to attend to processes that can bring diversely located individuals and groups

into the same ‘community of interest’ (1992), into a place of willing solidarity with one

another. In Rights Here!, project partners might have included more community members

from existing, embedded, neighborhood community centres alongside multiple external

representatives from decision making bodies at the outset of the project who may have been

able to facilitate community forums in Park Extension that would have elicited, not only

common challenges faced by residents, but also generated dialogue and possible interest in

the use of theatre as a means of extending their collective analysis into the wider

neighborhood community. Again, this highlights that the practice of applied theatre needs to

align itself as a form of participatory action research (Fals-Borda, 1981; Reason &

Bradbury, 2008) with one important difference in that research into the reasons for the

harmful marginalization of particular groups is questioned not only by those living harmful

realities, but by those who enjoy the benefits of the centre. By engaging in a collective

inquiry into the context, the project of irrigating divisive and rigid boundaries begins.

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Alliances

Each of these projects brought many interested and capable people from both margins

and centres of power together in the service of creating socially and aesthetically efficacious

performances. However, there were several challenges faced in leveraging these alliances

to more fully meet the social objectives of each project. At times, we felt as though we were

doing a lot of ‘preaching to the choir,’ albeit for different and un/intended reasons. In the

Creating Safer Spaces project, the audience was initially women in the South Asian

Diaspora because we did not wish to risk the easy conflation of violence and culture in the

eyes of a public that was already immersed in an understanding of culture as a fixed and

unchanging phenomenon. Denise and I felt that we needed to develop a strong analysis of

intimate and structural violence amongst our evolving group membership as well as

strengthening the networks between each community group we visited before moving the

performance into a wider public. In this case, our group agreed that the ‘choir needed

practice’.

Perhaps the effort required to mount the performances themselves was sufficiently great

to explain why there was less effort available to overcome the challenges of recruiting wider

audiences. However, it is also possible that such a task would reveal, prior to the project,

the obstacles stacked against coordinated institutional or cultural change. Perhaps this

revelation is intentionally avoided in order to preserve the idealism of the artist and the

communities involved. If theatre is a like a dream, and these projects are a form of dreaming

of a better world, then the difficulties associated with engaging and collaborating with the

Other and in sustaining broader audiences may constitute a rude awakening.

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In the final instance, a CCPP would require the development of broad, localized, and

ongoing alliances in order to achieve more sustainable outcomes. We must find ways of

identifying the ‘who’ of applied theatre rather than maintaining the anonymity of the

audience; who is performing for who. We must continue to privilege the development of a

relational politic (Amin et al. 2001); to build alliances and collaborate with the Other across

multiple spaces of power and investment. In this case, the Other includes those who have

the power to effect the institutional and political changes required to facilitate greater

awareness and integration of differences towards the eradication of harmful marginalization

similar to the legislative theatre processes developed by Boal (1998). By not involving or

revealing those whose actions continue to shape the interactions between the centre and the

margin, we continue to leave the centre ‘off the hook’ for the preservation of harmful

divisions of power.

Intention

Within a CCPP, it would be important for collaborators involved in applied

theatre projects to determine the kind of change they seek and how they intend to reach their

intended goals. The possibilities might include, but are not limited to, empowering local

‘actors’ to pressure the state or other legislative bodies (Nussbaum, 1993), mobilizing

communities to meet their own needs through the identification and development of

necessary social programs (Kretzman and McKnight, 2000), and/or whether the applied

theatre project seeks to insert itself within the ‘third space’ of the social economy in some

form (Ninacs, 2002; Mendell, 2003). Defining one’s orientation to change and change

processes has implications, of course, for who should be in the audience and/or involved

from the conception of the project.

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Many of the intentions of each of the projects surveyed are understandable given the

alliances formed or sought out and the context each project took place in. However, they

were determined without developing measures to assess the success of their realization. An

assessment of applied theatre is necessarily contingent on identifying and measuring

relevant indicators of success directly related to both the aesthetic and social intentions of

the project. Further, the intentions of each project were derived by the initiators of each

project largely without the participation of intended project participants. This reality,

coupled with unconfirmed and/or inconsistent funding, presented a challenge to the broad

social goals each project claimed.

A participatory or collaborative approach to deriving core concerns will, ideally,

yield increasingly relevant intentions and increase the likelihood that they are adopted and

integrated into the long term planning by the host or targeted community. Additionally,

some of the stated intentions in all three projects went far beyond what could reasonably be

achieved (although it bears mentioning that, in each case, funding was successfully

secured). In each case, the success of the performance event itself appears to have been

relied upon to establish the success of the project, even though the goals and intentions of

each project were usually described in terms of changes within the audience members. For

example, “changing the way society looks upon persons with developmental disabilities”

(Snow, 2006, p.3) in It’s a Wonderful World and “generating community accountability for

a zero-tolerance against violence against women” in Creating Safer Spaces. To be fair,

some of the intentions stated in grant applications were more conservative and perhaps more

easily realized such as the intention to have audiences “leave our production with the kinds

of resonating impressions and questions that can prompt both individual and social change”

in Rights Here! (ACCF grant, 2006). However, the absence of substantial follow-up

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measures or in-depth assessments of changes in the audiences is striking. A critical,

collaborative performance pedagogy necessitates an increased emphasis on the experience

of the intended audience and a participatory approach to identifying relevant indicators and

objectives for change that would need to be measured prior to, during, and after the

performance event. In effect, the context (‘where’), and the people involved both as actors

and anticipated audiences (‘who’) will determine the intentions or the ‘what’ of the project

towards ensuring that the majority of the benefits derived from engagement are determined

and remain with the community most affected by the inequities staged.

Timeline

Each project anticipated a reasonable timeline to realize the performance project.

Two of the three projects had a timeline that included a separate phase to pursue the social

goals identified in each project such as the School of Human Rights Advocacy indicated for

Phase III of Rights Here! or the touring and dissemination schedule determined for Phase II

and III of It’s A Wonderful World. Here, it appears that the initiators of each project

determined that the performance was understood to be a catalyst for continued social action.

This approach differs from the timeline established in Creating Safer Spaces that had an

ongoing approach in which the performance was used to recruit participants and to establish

relationships with allied community groups. In this approach, the performance was situated

as part of an ongoing community organizing strategy paid for and embedded in the mission

of an established organization, the South Asian Women’s Community Centre. This was also

the case for It’s A Wonderful World that was embedded within the ongoing work of the

Centre for the Arts in Human Development. To my knowledge, the latter phases of each of

these projects is underway, albeit with varying levels of collaboration amongst individuals,

agencies and institutions directly and indirectly implicated in the project.

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It is typical within applied theatre projects for the final phase to include activities

that attempt ‘to extend the work of the performance into the wider community’. That is

certainly true for each of these projects. Too often this phase is not quite reached and often

not sufficiently thought-through. It is common to hear, in the aftermath of production, of

the ‘unfortunate’ events that arose that prevented the project from continuing its work or

from reaching its stated intentions. Therefore, in a critical collaborative performance

pedagogy, the work of engaging with the wider community may be better placed in the

beginning of the project, in Phase I, where critical alliances and confrontation with the

institutional obstacles can be engaged, prior to the work on the performance. In the final

instance, applied theatre that seeks to effect sustainable change necessitates a timeline, or

the ‘when’ of a project, that will enable sustainable relationships committed to an ongoing

effort.

Audience Conceptualization

Each project was created for particular audiences. It is important to note that each

project had a different combination of people from the ‘margin’ and the ‘centre’ and that

this had an impact on who actually attended the performance. In Rights Here!, the

performance was primarily coordinated and performed by people from the ‘centre,’ English

and French speaking students and professionals who did not live in Park Extension nor

living the same realities of racism, poverty, language barriers, precarious housing,

hazardous work, dismissed education, or ambiguous legal status (except for a minority of

project participants). Members of this project sought to perform for people living these

marginalized realities in Montreal and to raise awareness amongst the general public about

human rights violations. In It’s A Wonderful World, participants living the stigmatization of

being developmentally disabled performed for family, health care providers, and the

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‘general public’, though that public consisted of people relatively close to the project

personnel. In Creating Safer Spaces, women living the reality of sexism and similar realities

to those faced by racialized immigrants in Park Extension performed for other women in

their own cultural community before moving it to the wider, albeit highly controlled, public.

In It’s A Wonderful World and Creating Safer Spaces, targeted invitations made to already

existing networks ensured that the audience intended for each performance more or less

materialized. However, the projects did not determine who actually attended and/or how

they are related to one another and/or how they are implicated in the realities staged. Here, it

is important to note the difficulties implicit in playing to an anonymous audience as this

presents a challenge to establishing the particular needs of the audience, such as the need for

translation in Rights Here! Given that the project intentions are usually described in terms

of changes in the audience, or representatives of the society that needs to change, it is

striking that little effort was made to identify or reveal them. There were exceptions to this

in these projects. In Rights Here!, the interruption by a resident community organizer in the

audience after the performance impelled me to ask audience members to reveal themselves.

In Creating Safer Spaces, we often began with an introduction sequence that invited

audiences to reveal themselves, if only by name. In writing this thesis, I was reminded by

one of the project initiators, Edward Little, that Montreal City Councilor, Mary Deros, had

attended the performance numerous times26. I had not known this and, to my recollection,

she did not introduce herself or speak to the issues presented when the audience was invited

to do so. This may be another example of how well the identities of audience members are

concealed in the common practice of affording the audience its traditional role: anonymous,

in the dark, protected.

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Based on observation and from a review of the names provided on audience

response questionnaires in Rights Here! and It’s A Wonderful World, the indoor

performances were largely attended by friends and family of cast members and

organizations with whom the project had a previous relationship with.This relational

aesthetic (Little, 2005) is certainly important and differentiates these performances from a

‘traditional’ professional production in which relational networks between audiences and

actors are not considered as relevant. However, audiences that would most likely benefit

from an opportunity to challenge their perceptions about adults with developmental

disabilities and who could potentially enable political and institutional change towards

ensuring that the basic threshold is met for people to enjoy their human rights were, for the

most part, not present. Though the intended audiences were supposed to represent an

extension of the networks of the project sponsors and participants, the actual audience

almost always comprised members of already familiar and proximally allied groups. I draw

attention to this not because close relational networks are a liability but rather because, it

has specific implications for what might be possible through the audience engagement

process.

Thus a CCPP must confront the need for the audience of the performance to include

those members of groups who usually would not be interested in attending such

performances. To the extent that theatre is a free act of engagement between actor and

audience member, the conceptualization and gathering of the audience to the performance

becomes the central task of a successful outcome.

Audience Participation

I used a wide variety of audience participation strategies in each project that, in

retrospect, seem overly restrictive. Audience engagement strategies in It’s A Wonderful

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World and Rights Here! were, for the most part, highly managed, unidirectional invitations

where audience members provided individual responses to the MC, the camera, or through

the questionnaires. The questionnaires did reveal important information about who, in

general, was watching and about which issues and themes were of importance to

respondents. This information could be used towards the development of future

performances, future phases, and towards recruiting appropriate and diverse audiences. In

the case of It’s A Wonderful World, responses collected through the questionnaire have

informed the direction of future phases such as to which audiences the production will tour.

However, what appeared to be missing, in both of these projects, was any horizontal

engagement between audience members or between audience members and the actors about

the implications of what they had been witness to. Horizontal and collaborative interactions

were privileged in Creating Safer Spaces and tangible in the introductions, which broke the

anonymity of the audience, during the Forum where audiences were invited to think

together about what they might do together to effect change in the situation presented, and

in the small group discussions where audience members were invited to think about the

implications of the performance on their beliefs about violence and on their potential action.

In the absence of this horizontal dialogue, the audience is left unburdened by the realities

staged, possibilities to forge new alliances are constrained, and the division between the

roles of rescuer and rescued remains untouched.

Further, opportunities for audience participation were available during the gathering

and dispersal phase of each production as well during the performance in each project.

However, the possibility for proximal encounters between audience members and between

audiences and actor/participants was perhaps best realized during the informal convivial

space of the reception held after the last performance of It’s A Wonderful World. This

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possibility also emerged in Rights Here! catalyzed by the unplanned interruption of one man

who felt compelled to address the audience directly and, in so doing, inspired others to do

the same. Therefore, the intentions of applied theatre projects necessitate different audience

engagement practices. That said, engaging the audience should take place during the

gathering and dispersal phases of production as well as during the performance itself and

should involve horizontal forms of interaction that can enable collaborative relationships

between audiences and the stage as well as between audience members.

The choice of audience participation strategy, or the ‘how’ of audience engagement,

will rely upon the project’s intentions, ‘who’ is actually in the audience, and ‘when’ the

interaction takes place (i.e. prior to, during, and/or after the performance). Further,

audiences need to be brought closer to the themes raised through questions that ask them to

resonate, identify with, or recognize the realities presented (Boal, 1979). Overall, a CCPP

may conceptualize important audience interventions as occurring in apparently informal

times and spaces as well as privileging horizontal and interactive audience participation

strategies that encourage a proximity to the realities staged. These strategies appear to fit in

more smoothly in events where the “performance” is less spotlighted, for traditional

performance etiquette requires that challenging or critical comments be held to a minimum

to preserve the sensitivities of the actors, whose creative act must be respected (Snow,

2009). It might be possible, however, to conceptualize and present a highly prepared

performance with the understanding that afterwards the audience will be invited to

participate in some form of useful dismantling. Here, the question that arises is how one

might question and challenge the intrinsic, deeply-preserved etiquette of the “polite

applause” of the audience towards a more critical engagement with the issues raised.

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Post-Performance Assessment

Based on the responses gathered through audience response surveys and small group

discussions, it appears that each performance had successfully raised awareness, however

briefly, in its respective arena of intervention. However, there was very little done in any of

the projects to legitimately ascertain the impact of the performance on the attitudes, beliefs

or behaviors of audience members in relation to the themes raised by the performance. A

thorough assessment has to take into consideration the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of

audience members prior to and after witnessing performances. For example, in Rights

Here!, one would have had to evaluate the knowledge audience members had about human

rights before and after the performance in order to substantiate a claim that the performance

had fulfilled its educational goals. Further, as I mentioned earlier, an assessment of applied

theatre is also contingent on identifying relevant indicators of success directly related to

both the aesthetic and social goals of applied theatre and methods of measuring the degree

to which these indicators have changed in the short and long-term following the

performance. Here, an assessment of ‘why’ the performance had or had not been a success

must be informed by desired indicators of change determined by those marginalized within

the context in which the project takes place and can also happen at multiple points during

the life, or timeline, of the project. Finally, the broad intention to raise awareness about

developmental disabilities, human rights, or violence against women is worthy. However, it

may be an easy statement to make and perhaps used too easily in projects led by those who

are not able to assess the impact of their work on specific social issues.

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Chapter 8: Conclusion

Familiar ways of conceptualizing our practice are no longer effective when faced

with the ongoing struggle for equity faced by many individuals and communities as a result

of their social group membership(s). Each of the three projects presented in this study

intended to disrupt the boundaries that restrict the mobility of particular communities by

drawing the attention of the audience towards examples of inequity. In this chapter, I will

present specific suggestions for, and describe the challenges to, realizing a relational praxis

of social empowerment suggested by a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy and

will identify directions for further inquiry.

In the previous chapter, I stated that to the extent that theatre is a free act of

engagement between actor and audience member, the conceptualization and gathering of the

audience to the performance becomes the central task of a successful outcome. Often, the

challenge of securing funding and the demands associated with creating an effective

aesthetic overshadow and limit the resources available to consider, gather, and work with

local partners and influential external agencies. The continued involvement of people in

each of these projects was contingent on substantial funding and this highlights the

importance of establishing the specificity and efficacy of this practice in the eyes of funders

as well as the importance of diversifying the individuals and interests represented in funding

institutions. It also speaks to the substantial material conditions required to enable effective

intervention. Here, I question and would encourage further inquiry into the relationship

between aesthetic accomplishment, audience engagement and social efficacy partially

considered by Brecht (cited in Willett, 1964) in his provocative dramaturgical choices and

methods of engaging the critical faculties of his audiences; by Boal (1979; Cohen-Cruz &

Shutzman, 1994, 2006) in his embodied approaches to audience engagement and

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specifically on the emphasis he places on the need for audiences to identify, resonate, or

recognize the realities staged as a precursor for action; by Bennett (1997) in her survey of

the relationship between dramaturgical conventions and audience responsiveness; by

Salverson (2001) in her articulation of the role of the clown in negotiating the space

between audience and the stage especially when faced with painful realities; and by Little

(2005) in his research into the relationship between aesthetic accomplishment and social

efficacy in community-engaged theatre.

It is difficult to disrupt the silent, albeit mutual, agreement between audiences and

actors in the traditional theatre wherein pivotal stories are highlighted while the audience

remains in the shadows. Within applied theatre practice, there may exist more of an

opportunity to invite audiences to be seen and heard during the gathering and dispersal

phases of the performance process. However, the habitual behaviors associated with the

theatre such as the etiquette of the ‘polite applause’ with which audiences respond needs to

be questioned insofar as it limits the capacities of the audience to respond to the material

presented and, as is the central thrust of my argument, limit their response/ability to do

anything about it. Here, the applause may serve the function of preserving a necessary

distance between the realities staged and to reaffirm the temporary nature of the audiences’

collective attention, thereby maintaining the boundary between those who hear and those

who tell. Revealing the identities, investments, and tensions of audience may not be

welcomed and perhaps even resisted. Here, I question the scaffolding required to develop

new habits of witnessing amongst audiences and would review the constructivist

philosophies of psychologists Jean Piaget (1955) and his articulation of accommodation and

assimilation and Lev Vygotsky (cited in Van De Veer, 2007) and the relevance of his zone

of proximal development on audience reception. How can we encourage the desire amongst

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audiences to respond to inequity, and further, what are the implications of the audience

being burdened by what they see on stage?

There is often much done within the development of the production to avoid

upsetting the sponsors, actors and the audience beyond what is considered tolerable. This is

evidenced by the absence of invitations to those who might openly disagree with the

experiences and analysis offered through the stories staged or in the lack of an invitation to

disagree in current audience engagement processes. In fact, most of the processes were

highly managed to avoid disagreement. It is also evidenced within aesthetic choices that

minimize or attempt to conceal the relationships that give rise to inequity. Further, it is

evidenced in the avoidance to locate, invite, or reveal the perpetrators of injustice, those

who are directly responsible for sustained inequity faced by marginal communities. I

question to what extent those who have benefited from histories of colonization, economic

imperialism, and other forms of perpetration can successfully avoid re/producing these very

patterns of injustice in their work; and I would direct readers to the work of Ingrid Mündel

(2003) on reproducing hegemonies in the theatre; and to Della Pollock (2005) and her

writing on performance, memory, and performativity in the staging of oral histories. Here, I

also question the role of avoidance in maintaining inequity. I question how bold the theatre

can be in unmasking complicity. Without coming to terms with our own complicity, I am

not sure how we will be able to motivate and sustain solidarity; for it might require a

relinquishing of power, the power to author one’s experience, to have that experience

reflected in one’s surroundings, and to determine one’s quality of life even if it is at the

expense of another.

In keeping with this last question, I question the efficacy of theatre in motivating

social change. Surely the mass presentation of diverse lived realities and the dissemination

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of alternate ideologies and examples of solidarity reach a wider audience through television,

internet and film. What is perhaps most tangible in the space of the theatre is the visceral,

immediate opportunity to be amongst people, to benefit from a cross-pollination of ideas

and cultures, to encounter different bodies of experience, and to entertain the possibility of

interpersonal relationships, partnerships, and useful alliances. Further, when applied theatre

is situated within a local context, the opportunity to develop practical partnerships is

perhaps most tangible. Our methods of intervention will continue to benefit from

broadening our attention to include the dynamic relationship between socio-political forces

and psychological change and from an investment in methods of engaging both the witness

and the teller in a coherent and collaborative analysis of the challenges and inequities we

face. Towards this end, I encourage ongoing, interdisciplinary scholarship into the forces

that sustain inequity and that have supported sustainable relational change.

Finally, the importance of aesthetics: of beauty, poetry, and metaphor, in inspiring

transformative insight within our theatre practice is not forgotten in this thesis. However, in

the final instance, the central components of a critical, collaborative performance pedagogy

emphasize the community organizing aspects of change oriented performance projects.

These components are intended to surround our art form and provide the necessary building

blocks for a platform upon which to sustain desired change. As discussed at length in

chapter seven, these components include: critical engagement, collaborative alliances, and

a popular pedagogy. Each of these components is intended to foster, amongst variously

located and diverse social actors, the permission to participate at each level of the

performance project from its conception, to the identification of its intentions, through to the

gathering and dispersal phases of the performance project. As such, a CCPP comprises a

relational praxis of social empowerment in applied theatre.

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ENDNOTES 1Art As Witness Conference program, Concordia University, Montreal, 2007. 2 I received personal communication from the director of the project, Stephen Snow who alerted me of the development of this project since my involvement. He wrote “through Phase II, we learned that our "real audience" was not, in fact, health professionals and care-givers, but elementary school children, those who will become the opinion-setters and policy-makers of the future. Since Spring 2009 (Phase III), the project has taken on a whole new life, with a pre-and post-questionnaire, the showing of a research version of the documentary, In Their Own Voices, and the presence of one or two of the participants/actors in the classroom.” 3 The names of the project participants for the performance, It’s A Wonderful World, can be found in the performance program included in the appendix. 4 This is evidenced by the high number of respondents to the audience response questionnaire who named Lenore Vosberg as the reason they came to know about the play. 5 The choice to have an affirming group of witnesses as the first audience is in line with the considerations suggested in writings about therapeutic theatre (Mitchell,1994; Snow,2009). 6 The Audience Response Questionnaire for It’s A Wonderful World is provided in the appendix. 7 Everyone who attended the performance over the three nights was invited to the reception. 8 For video excerpts of outdoor performances see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi-xqP480yA 9 Facts retrieved from http://www.arrondissement.com/villeraystmichelextension on January 8, 2007. 10 Down and Out in Montreal, retrieved January 8, 2007 from http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/1999/040199/cover.html 11 Spacing Montreal: www.spacingmontreal.ca 12 Common Sense About Reasonable Accommodation, Montreal Gazette, May 17, 2008, http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=8327918d-a591-4e11-bf48-4d46c58ab132, retrieved on November 5th, 2008. 13 Quebec Centre for Alternative Media, retrieved Janurary,10 2008 from www.cmaq.net

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14 Copies of this poster in multiple languages can be found at: http://nooneisillegal-montreal.blogspot.com/2007/04/blog-post.html 15 For the full article, see: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=ebd1bdb2-cd29-4745-bbad-a0f6727665c1, retrieved February 14, 2009 16 Members of the Board of Park Extension Youth Organization had cited ideological differences in how they approached social service advocacy and, ergo, did not wish to be formally affiliated with No One is Illegal. However, I had a relationship with them and was able to secure relevant materials. 17 A copy of the Audience response Questionnaire for Rights Here! is provided in the Appendix 18 Audience surveys were generated by Nisha Sajnani, Youth and Community Outreach Coordinator and M.C. for the production. Jason Crawford, the evaluator, coded responses for similarity and frequency. This summary is taken from his evaluation report. 19 For complete details of the evaluation see, Crawford, J.(2007) Evaluation of Phase II of the Rights Here! Theatre and Law for Human Rights Project, Concordia University Theatre Department. 20 For a full description of the Creating Safer Spaces project, please see Sajnani, N. & Nadeau, D. (2006). 21 See Appendix A for a copy of the Duluth Minnesota Wheel of Violence Against Women and the Wheel of Structural Violence Against Women (Sajnani and Nadeau, 2006). 22 For example, the National Transcultural Health Conference, May 10-11, 2007 in Montreal. 23 A copy of the invitation sent to community organizations is provided in the appendix. 24 The scenes changed as the project evolved. However, there were usually two presented in order to demonstrate the link between intimate and structural violence. 25 A copy of the resource pamphlet that was distributed to all audiences after each performance is provided in the appendix. 26 Personal Communication, Edward Little, March 8, 2009.

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Appendix

1. Definition of Terms

It’s A Wonderful World

2. Invitation 3. Program 4. Questionnaire

Rights Here! Theatre and Law for Human Rights

5. Program 6. Questionnaire

Creating Safer Spaces

7. Workshop invite 8. Resource Pamphlet 9. Wheel of Violence Against Women 10. Wheel of Structural Violence Against Women

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Definition of Terms

An Ally is understood to be an individual or group that is invested in sharing responsibility for safeguarding the freedom of another individual or group. Applied Theatre is a term used to describe any theatre process or drama production that is applied to a specific context with a specific audience in a specific setting with specific objectives. Applied theatre implies a specific intention related to ‘change’ and audience participation. Applied theatre is used here as an umbrella term for drama therapy, popular theatre, community theatre, and theatre in/and development. Audience Participation refers to embodied, critical, verbal and/or combined strategies used to engage witnesses to an event. A Critical Collaborative Performance Pedagogy (CCPP) is a relational praxis of social empowerment within applied theatre. Essential components of such a pedagogy include dialogic processes between audience members and between audiences and actors towards galvanizing collective analysis and action within a larger community organizing strategy. Community is defined as a network of individuals bound by a singular or multiple common interests, language, identity, geographic location, historical struggle and/or goal. A community can be referenced internally, be a member of a self-determined group, or can be articulated by an external agent (Bannerji, 2000). A community is an imagined territory (Anderson, 2003). Ethnodrama is a genre of dramatic production developed by James Mienczakowski (1995,2001) that refers to a performative mode of social inquiry and research dissemination in which the lived realities and cultural phenomena of a particular group are dramatized and staged. Other proponents of ethnodrama include Conquergood (1985), Jones (2002), Denzin (2003), Saldana (2005, and Jones, Gergen, Yallop, deVallejo, Roberts, & Wright (2008). Freedom is understood as having both internal (psychological and philosophical) and external (social and political) dimensions. Freedom is understood as the opportunity of individuals and groups to choose to realize the totality of what they can be and do and is reliant upon material requisites to the exercise of free will (Nussbaum, 2000). Forum theatre is a style of theatre developed by Augusto Boal (1979) within a larger system of theatre techniques known as the Theatre of the Oppressed. In ‘forum theatre’ a short scene is presented that represents the problems of a given community such as access to water for a community facing drought or sexism in the workplace for a group of concerned employees in an organization. A short scene is created either by an external group or by those directly affected. The play, lasting between 5-10 minutes, is performed for an audience of those directly affected and, ideally, at varied levels of investment, complicity, and power over the situation presented. The scene must contain an

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identifiable protagonist and an antagonist, though there may also be other characters present in the scene such as bystanders, and collaborators. The play is performed once through and then a second time with the direction that audience members may stop the scene at any time they feel that the protagonist may do something different to achieve his/her desired outcome. Audience members interact by replacing the protagonist in the scene and by improvising new solutions to the problems being presented. In so doing, they mobilize the desire to challenge the culture they have grown frustrated with. The role of the Joker in Forum Theatre is to compel an active dialogue and embodied search for solutions by inviting as many active suggestions as possible, providing a brief summation after each solution offered, and keeping the action going. Hegemony is a concept developed by Gramsci (1971) used here to describe how dominant groups leverage moral, cultural, and legislative authority to persuade others to accept, adopt, and internalize their norms and values, thereby maintaining centres and margins of power. Interactive audience is a term developed by Jones (1996) in reference to a core process in drama therapy in which the audience is described as a role, and witnessing is an interactive act. The Joker is a term developed by Augusto Boal (1979) to describe the facilitator in a Forum Theatre process/performance. The term ‘joker’ is in reference to a neutral role in a deck of cards, but also references the trickster who disrupts and reveals the complexities present in the embodied and/or staged processes which comprise the composite system of Boal’s techniques known as the Theatre of the Oppressed. Margins and centres are terms used to describe a spatial arrangement of power involving a concentration of resources at the center that deplete or become increasingly unstable towards the margins or periphery. In this thesis, I maintain that power in society is organized through multiple hegemonies that restrict the mobility of ideas, people and resources, thereby creating boundaries that divide into centres and margins of power. Participatory Action Research (PAR) is, ideally, a democratic and non-coercive approach to research that involves all relevant parties in actively identifying and examining areas of concern through a contextual analysis of the historical, social, political economic and/or other relevant contexts that have given rise to a problematic situation(s) in order to change and improve it. PAR does not present research as a caveat to action; but, rather,is an action which is researched, changed and re-researched, within the research process by participants. The goal of PAR is to enable those who are most affected by problematic situations to determine the purposes and outcomes of their own inquiry. Major proponents of this approach include Fals-Borda (1981), Park, Brydon-Miller, & Hall (1993), Wadsworth (1998), and Reason & Bradbury (2008). Popular education is a set of politically oriented pedagogical approaches that seek to transform society through valuing the situated expertise of individuals and groups, identifying common themes, and resulting in individual and collective action. In this

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thesis, I have relied on the Freirian conceptualization of popular education that involves a dialogic process rooted in praxis, an iterative cycle of action and reflection resulting in the development of a critical consciousness (Freire, 1970). Power is the potential of individuals and groups to transform and sustain their way of life and has both internalized psychological properties and externalized socio-political expressions (Giddens, 1984). Racialization is understood as the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Situated Expertise Agents of change are not limited to professional experts, the political, medical or social service professional, but include the situated experts who are cognizant of the influence of their social location on the perspectives they are able to offer. The Spect-actor is a term Boal (1979) developed to counter the passive receptivity associated with the traditional division of the theatre which had expert actors on the stage invoking and (re)enacting potentially troubling social dynamics while audience members remained seated with their gaze fixed upon the action. By interpellating people as spect-actors, Boal transgresses this divide and reminds his participants and audience members to act upon oppression rather than only observing it. The spect-actor is the active witness. Social justice is understood as involving a redistribution of wealth and social resources in order to ensure mobility between the boundaries that limit or mute the totality of what one can be or do (freedom) within an ethical framework and an obligation to do no harm. Solidarity is understood as an expression of an economy of care in which individuals, regardless of their social or economic status, are allied in their interest to assume responsibility for safeguarding the basic minimum and material threshold needed to assert choice (Nussbaum, 2000). Solidarity assumes that the freedoms of one are intrinsically connected to the freedom of everyone. Therapeutic Theatre is a performance-based approach which encourages the awareness, healing and/or growth from the actors and the audience. In Snow’s articulation of ritual/theatre/therapy, it is a performative drama therapy process which utilizes the evocation and embodiment of archetypes or key themes in the construction and enactment of various kinds of performances for the purposes of providing a container for the healing of the clients/actors or changing behavior (Snow, 2009). Violence is understood as comprising ideas or actions or an absence of ideas or actions that directly or indirectly limit or disrupt the freedom of individuals or communities to move across psychological, social and economic boundaries. Violence can be internalized, relational or systemic in nature (Jiwani, 2006).

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Witnessing is understood as simultaneously the capacity and act of attending and responding. Jones (1996) differentiates between the act of being witness or audience to oneself and the act of being an audience, or witness to others in a context of personal insight and development.