Location: Movement Room
Moderator: Marlis Schweitzer
Rebecca Harries, “A theatre tool for all: Boal’s Sculptures in Youth Engagement Settings”
The theatre methods and ideas of Augusto Boal provides community youth leaders with tools that support inclusive and egalitarian values even when participants don’t have the capacity or resources to develop forum theatre scenarios. From my experience of the last two years, as the theatre expert participant of the Hearing Unheard Moments Project, I would encourage theatre workers and academics to connect with community leaders and share their theater expertise as a way to build for inclusive, exploratory spaces. The proposed paper analyzes the sculpture exercise in the context of youth community groups.
The sculpture exercise is related to theater of images, and often used as a preliminary step to developing forum theater. In this exercise, there’s a prompt (e.g., “justice”), and then individuals shape their bodies in response to the prompt (i.e, a pose that models justice). Participants observe each other and offer modelling for the human sculptures to engage dialogue and expand our understanding of the experiences of other.
Three reasons why the sculpture exercise is interesting in a youth engagement setting: the entire group can engage as both participants and observers; sculptures allow for dialogue that isn’t dominated by individuals with the most verbal skill; the activity mitigates the potential harm of one narrative, sometimes the most traumatic, dominating the group. This paper will share approaches around how theatre scholars can collaborate and share for community benefit.
Katharine Low and Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, “Holding Each Other Up: Joy, Vulnerability, and the Future of Academic Mentorship”
This paper reimagines the possibility of mentorship through the lens of bell hooks’s pedagogy, with a focus on joy as a sustaining and transformative practice. Traditional mentorship models rely on hierarchies, framing knowledge as something passed down from the experienced to the novice. hooks, however, envisions education as a space of mutuality, care, and co-creation. This pedagogical model provides a radical principle for imagining where mentor and mentee learn with and from each other rather than through one-directional guidance. We argue that joy is central to this vision of mentorship.
Drawing on feminist scholarship on relationality and collective academic practice, we understand joy as a generative, embodied practice that emerges through collaboration and shared connection with each other as we navigate the minefield of the academy and the unique challenges experienced by performance and theatre practice and research. Joy not only fosters belonging but also challenges the alienation and harm often embedded in academic structures. By centering hooks’s pedagogy and the relational power of joy, this paper presents mentorship as a practice of care, presence, and mutual growth. It offers a model where mentorship is not about hierarchy or professional advancement but about sustaining relationships, nurturing intellectual and emotional flourishing, and creating transformative spaces within the academy, and especially so in the creative arts.
Stephanie Dotto, “Joyful Actors: Aging Futures and the Potential of Intergenerational Theatre”
By examining a verbatim theatre performance that brought together older (aged 60 and up) and younger (aged 18–25) adults, this paper finds that staging intergenerational theatre produced intergenerational joy: a collective, interdependent experience not devoid of struggle and challenge that prioritizes the here and now while also envisaging more promising futures. The actors in this project thus challenged normative neoliberal attitudes that suggest that the old have nothing to offer the future, and that the young have little to offer the present. Moreover, the play offered a structure through which actors could challenge societal norms isolating generations from each other and encouraging intergenerational antagonism. The stress involved in undertaking a community-based theatre project was not an obstacle but a gateway to joy, as it produced (and even demanded) a level of interdependence and solidarity not found in other intergenerational relationships commonly structured by hetero-normative family relations.
Biographies:
Stephanie Dotto is the McCain Postdoctoral Fellow in Drama and Screen Studies at Mount Allison University. She received her doctorate from the Frost Centre for Indigenous Studies and Canadian Studies at Trent University.
Rebecca Harries is a Full Professor of Drama at Bishop’s University. Her current research brings theatre performance and research to real world challenges. She is currently involved with the national Hearing Unheard Moments initiative, working with community youth-led groups.
Katharine Low is a practitioner-researcher and is Senior Lecturer in Performance and Medical Humanities at King’s College London. She has over 20 years’ experience in applied theatre practice and health, working in the fields of sexual health, gender equity and urban violence, in the UK and internationally. Her research is embedded in collaborations with arts and cultural organisations, medical practitioners and NGOs to co-facilitate participatory theatre and arts-based projects based around social concerns. Recent publications include: Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication: Apertures of Possibility (2020, Palgrave Macmillan). She currently hosts a podcast called Positively Women: Past and Present.