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,
3
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
4
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
5
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
12
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
13
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
18
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
19
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.
20
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
24
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.
27
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.
29
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
32
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
35
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
36
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
37
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)
38
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
40
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
44
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
45
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
49
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
52
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
54
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
62
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
65
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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