In my second year as a doctoral student from the Drama department, I became a 2020-2021 Newkirk Fellow with the Research Justice Shop and took part in the COVID-19 Narrative Project.
In pre-COVID times, to get from Arts to Social Ecology on UCI campus, one needs to cross an earthquake-safe bridge to pass through Humanities, before treading along one-third of the rim of the Aldrich Park. Working with the Research Justice Shop on the Californian Essential Worker COVID-19 Narrative project as a RJS fellow provides me the virtual bridge to bring theatre, social justice, and community-based research into a convergence. Though disciplinary isolation puts me through a process of acclimation, these fields share exciting common grounds, such as advocacy for marginalized peoples and narratives. What is the benefit of bringing them together? How do they inform each other in practice? These are questions that follow me through as I keep navigating my place in the project.
(A performance photo of Anna Deavere Smith in her one-woman show Notes from the Field addressing the racial tension in contemporary US. Documentary theatre is one of the ways that bring together performance, social justice, and community work. [1])
The Research Justice Shop defines community-based research as
…a process of inquiry that promotes collaboration, challenges historical and on-going structural inequalities, disrupts extractive research practices, attends to relationships, centers those most impacted by social and environmental problems, and draws on anti-oppressive theories, methods, and movements to encode justice into knowledge production. [2]
This rich definition strongly resonates with my understanding of theatre. Here is how:
“a process of inquiry” | Theatre, and especially community-based theatre, starts off with a question. To be or not to be? Who is “essential” during the pandemic? Sometimes performance offers a resolution at the end, but more often stories are left open-ended, or prompt the audience to continue seeking for answers in the real world. |
“collaboration” and “relationship” | Theatre denotes a space where public performances take place in front of a communal assembly, which is called an audience; theatre also denotes a type of coordinated work, for which a group of people collaborate with their own different capacities, starting from the initial production meeting until the last curtain call. Through shared presence, theatre builds relationships on and off stage. |
“challenge” and “disrupt” | With the protection of drama, theatre often harbors social critique and incubates social change. For example, Brazilian theatre theorist and practitioner Augusto Boal uses theatre to manifest hegemonic systems of oppression, mobilize participants to disrupt such systems and find alternatives. [3] |
“center,” or re-center | Theatre is a medium for dramatic reenactment which requires the presence of discrete bodies and voices. When we lean into what is re/presented on stage, we suspend the dominating narrative that sustains the unsatisfying status quo, and allow underrepresented narratives to take the spotlight, as well as our sense of space, time, and perspective. |
“knowledge production” | Besides prioritizing the qualitative over the quantitative, the prerequisite of the body in theatre opens up a new territory of epistemology that challenges and complements logocentrism. Rather than focusing on the abstract and the reductive, theatre invites us to pay attention to the specific and the visceral; that is, to know and to produce bodily knowledge through non-verbal movements and pre-conscious senses. |
Now, what do theatre and performance studies have to offer to community-based research, particularly the COVID narrative project?
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First of all, theatre and performance studies provide analytical languages for power dynamics and the issue of authority in representation. No body is neutral and no medium can be transparent; so it is important to ask: Who is telling the story? How is the story told? What role do we play as researchers?
(Drawing by Alberto Beltrán, reproduced in Diana Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire, from right to left illustrating the conversion process from oral history to written history in post-Conquest Mesoamerica. [4])
When the interlocutor tells a story of their life, it is already a subjective representation of the actual embodied experience, organized in their own language. Oftentimes, researchers are outsiders of the target community, who arrive on the scene with normative research approaches, standardized tools, existing frames of understanding, and the goal to present the findings to a broader or professional audience. Such a scholarly toolkit does not guarantee that the research yields an “authentic” and “ethical” result, because the story is, on the one hand, displaced from the interlocution where it is first generated, and on the other hand, filtered through researchers’ perspective and interpretation. Therefore it becomes a representation that is at least twice removed from the actual experience. Rather than aiming for an objective representation, it is more realistic and generative to consider us researchers as accountable collaborators and formative channels of the storytelling.
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Secondly, theatre and performance studies promote the body as an alternative epistemology, to the verbal, the conceptual, and the deductive, which conventionally rule “scientific and objective” studies. To perceive the body as an epistemology, it is not enough to treat bodily senses and actions as objects of study, but to allow senses and actions to inform the way we generate knowledge.
Performance scholar Olu Taiwo offers a way to consider research as a mode of performance, in which neither the subject nor the researcher is passive or reductive: “Observation in action in this context [of practice as research] does not only focus on the spectator/observer’s eyes for pattern recognition, it also includes the practitioner’s whole body – their reflective and reflexive observations regarding the process of skill acquisition, self-knowledge and devised performance by what I call their ‘physical journals.’” [5] Taiwo’s idea of “physical journals” reminds us of the vast reservoir of memory and experience in the body. By way of “reflective and reflexive observations” in action, researchers might become more acutely aware of the power dynamics in the conversion of local knowledge into scholarly production. For example, jotting down our immediate bodily reaction during the interview could be a practice of observation in action that helps to capture unexpected points of perceptual discrepancy, which could lead to further inquiry or clarification.
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Last but not least, theatre and performance studies recognize the power of imagination and hypothesis. Since theatre is an enactment in the subjunctive mood [7], it opens up the imaginative space for possibilities and answers the question of “what if.” As mentioned above, many applied theatre practitioners including Boal use theatre as a rehearsal for revolution and social change, where participants are encouraged to actively think towards problem solving beyond boundaries.
(Left: “The tree of Theatre of the Oppressed” by Augusto Boal. Notice one of the branches of Forum Theatre is Direct Actions. [8] Right: A process roadmap of Boal’s Forum Theatre. [9])
How can these benefits of incorporating the mindset of theatre and performance studies get translated into our COVID narrative project? First and foremost, we adjusted the definition of “essential worker” and our outreach approaches to give the mic to the more vulnerable and underrepresented population in the given circumstances. Then, we tried to engage our participants in more casual conversations, opening ourselves up as three-dimensional humans and building relationships across the internet as much as possible. Furthermore, we observed and reflected during and after interviews to be aware of the way our presence, positionality, and questions shape the story. We asked our interviewees about their sensory experiences of the pandemic and jotted down post-interview notes about what was transmitted to us nonverbally. Last but not least, we also invited our interviewees to imagine what kind of policy or support could have helped them through the pandemic.
There is certainly more to explore in the crossover of arts and social ecology. My involvement in the COVID-19 narrative project will be the beginning of my interdisciplinary journey towards mindful scholarly practices of social justice.
Chengyuan Huang was a PhD student in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine at the time she wrote this blog. She was a 2020-2021 Newkirk Fellow with the Research Justice Shop. You can reach her through email (chuang12@uci.edu). For more information regarding the Research Justice Shop please visit the website or contact researchjustice@uci.edu or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Notes
[1] Ethan Zuckerman and Erhardt Graeff. Blog post. https://erhardtgraeff.com/2016/09/11/the-activism-of-anna-deavere-smiths-notes-from-the-field/
[2] RJS. https://newkirkcenter.uci.edu/researchjustice/
[3] Augusto Boal. Theatre of the Oppressed (2008, c1979).
[4] Diana Taylor. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), p16.
[5] Olu Taiwo. “The Dance of the Return Beat: Performing the Animate Universe.” The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Ed. David Harvey (2014), p492.
[6] Siobhan Burke. Newspaper article. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/arts/dance/bringing-butoh-to-new-york.html
[7] As one of the three moods in English grammar, the subjunctive mood is for expressing wishes, desires, suggestions, or imagined situations. Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/getting-in-the-subjunctive-mood
[8] Augusto Boal. The Aesthetics of the Oppressed (2006).
[9] Khmer Community Development. Blog post. https://kcd-org.ngo/2019/10/what-is-forum-theater
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