Theater as Social Medicine and Opportunity for Social Change

Hello! I am a student in the University of Louisville’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. My primary research involves exploring how art, theater, and literature can affect social change and, more specifically, interrupt civic and consumer oriented apathy. To start with, I believe theater is society’s medicine. If we look at a person’s hierarchy of needs, with food, water, and shelter at the basic level, community at the middle rung, and individual creative, intellectual, and/or material freedom and pursuit at the higher level, theater has the potential to help people satisfy these needs. We see this in the range of theater expressions found around the world. Social justice oriented theater demands political agency around access to basic resources of survival, including the demand for human rights. Community theater brings people together around common practices and themes. Professional theater primarily offers individuals an avenue for creative and intellectual expression, a privilege in that professional theater practitioners are free to create theater with less of an economic or political burden. These three categories of theater are not distinct as many theater artists, companies, and works exhibit an overlap of all three. At the heart of all of these manifestations of theater is the craft itself, a craft that offers people of all abilities and vision to find their niche be it performance, writing, music, management, technical artistry, leadership, or criticism.

  To me, theater is storytelling or, more simply, bodies watching bodies tell stories. Within each community there are different ways of telling stories and different stories being told. This is important to keep in mind as we embark on our devised theater project. We need to be careful to allow the stories and ways of storytelling that already exist on the community we are collaborating with to stay central to our process. Many community and political organizers who come from outside the population they are helping, such as the folks who access refugee resources at Catholic Charities, understand the importance of checking their privilege and carefully limiting how their stories, or biases, beliefs, perspectives, etc., influence the organizing process. The same holds true in devised community theater. The objective is actually the opposite, where I, as an outsider and ally, humbly accept and explore the stories and ways of telling them already existing in the community I am in collaboration with.

By surrendering my perspectives and stories and allowing others to imbue me with their experiences, especially people from marginalized populations, I engage in a process of decolonization wherein I attempt to wash away habits taught to me by mainstream society which can be racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, etc. The social conditioning I have undergone, and presently undergo, under the scope of Western white-supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, corporate, consumer civilization, can only be interrupted by decolonizing myself through acts of humility and creative collaboration with a group larger than myself. I am excited to see the ways in which together we can find freedom from Western oppression. Hopefully there is some fun to be had amongst the important hours of curious listening, and the collective accountability process!