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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Workshop

Empowering through Theater: Unveiling Self Society, and Power Dynamics

convenors

    Lise Landrin

    Nationality: France

    Residence: France

    Researcher, Teacher, Artist, Activist

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

In 1985 G.C. Spivak posed the question: Can the subaltern speak? The answer is yes, but it depends on the methods and spaces of self-enunciation that are offered. Accusing academic sphere to be hegemonic, she raises the importance of unleashing voices. The rights to tell one's own story and knowledge are unevenly distributed in societies according to power relations and self-censorship. To rebalance the forces, we need methods. The Theatre of the Oppressed, born in Brazil under the impulse of Augusto Boal is one of the techniques operating the connection of knowledge/body/empowerment. Spread worldwide, the practice of theater can involve individuals and groups who have never been on stage to test what they have to say and effect concrete change in our life. Practicing theater as an anthropologist aligns with sciences in action, science in motion. It rejects extraction of knowledge and essentialism, it allows not to speak in the name of others. Research is a narrative among others, and an ethical concern is first and foremost a methodological concern. How to launch spaces for creative and emancipatory voices? How to foster plurality of knowledge? Our experience is that Theater and stage can help on it. An artist-researcher collaboration moves towards a redistribution of imaginaries, bodily techniques, and commitments to produce a multitude of voices. Our bodies are our first allies, our engines for encounter and expression, but also the primary objects of projection of social norms. Therefore, through the body we can explore power relations but also reopen our imaginations and respond violence. Based on five years experiences in rural Nepal, urban France, and Senegal our workshop proposes to train a group in the basic techniques of the Theatre forum. We will question together how to trigger knowledge in a secure framework adapting to the context of various research.

Keywords:

Theater; safe-space; storytelling; embodiment; performance