ARTSPRAXIS

Emphasizing critical analysis of the arts in society.

ISSN: 1552-5236

EDITOR
Jonathan P. Jones, New York University, USA

EDITORIAL BOARD
Selina Busby, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK
Amy Cordileone, New York University, USA
Ashley Hamilton, University of Denver, USA
Norifumi Hida, Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music, Japan
Kelly Freebody, The University of Sydney, Australia
Byoung-joo Kim, Seoul National University of Education, South Korea
David Montgomery, New York University, USA
Ross Prior, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Daphnie Sicre, Loyola Marymount University, USA
James Webb, Bronx Community College, USA
Gustave Weltsek, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

ArtsPraxis Volume 7, Issue 1 looked to engage members of the global Educational Theatre
community in dialogue around current research and practice. This call for papers was released in
anticipation of the publication of ArtsPraxis Volume 6, Issue 2. The submission deadline for
Volume 7, Issue 1 was November 15, 2019.

Submissions fell under one of the following categories:

 Drama in Education (i.e., studies in drama/theatre curriculum, special education,
integrated arts, assessment and evaluation)
 Applied Theatre (i.e., studies in community-based theatre, theatre of the oppressed, the
teaching artist, diversity and inclusion)
 Theatre for Young Audiences and Play Production (i.e., studies in acting, directing,
dramaturgy, playwriting, dramatic literature, theatre technology, arts-based research
methodologies)

Key questions the Issue was to address included:

Drama in Education
 How and why do we teach drama and theatre in schools and community settings?
 How do the roles and responsibilities of the teaching artist differ from those of the
classroom teacher (primary, secondary or higher education)?
 What is the contemporary role of drama and theatre in arts education?
 How do we prepare future theatre artists and educators in the 21st century?
 What are innovative ways of devising original works and/or teaching theatre using
various aesthetic forms, media, and/or technology?
 To what extent can the study of global theatre forms impact students’ learning?
 To what extent should we distinguish theatre-making from drama as a learning
medium?
 How can integrated-arts curricula facilitate teaching, learning and presenting the craft of
 theatre?
 How do we assess students’ aesthetic understanding and awareness?
 What research supports the potential of drama as a learning medium?
 How do drama and theatre make connections across curricular content areas and
beyond schools?
 How do drama and theatre education contribute to lifelong learning?
 What role do drama and theatre play in community agencies?

Applied Theatre
 How can drama provide a forum to explore ideas?
 What are innovative strategies for using drama to stimulate dialogue, interaction and
change?
 How is theatre being used to rehabilitate people in prisons, health facilities, and
elsewhere?
 How do we prepare future artists/educators for work in applied theatre?
 What ethical questions should the artist/educator consider in their work?
 In what ways are aesthetics important in applied theatre? How do we negotiate a
commitment to both the process and product of applied theatre work?
 How do artist/educators assess participants’ understandings in an applied theatre
project?
 What are the major tensions in the field and how are these being addressed?
 To what extent has recent research on affect influenced community-based praxis?

Theatre for Young Audiences/Play Production

 Theatre for young audiences is an international movement and the borders are
breaking down so how do we present and respond to work from other countries?
 Who exactly are our new audiences– who are we talking to?
 Are we as brave as we think we are? How does what we think we should do relate to
what we want to do as artists?
 Is the writer at the heart of future theatre creation? What has happened to dramaturgy
in the brave new world of immersive, experiential, visual/physical theatre?
 Theatre for Young Audiences has always been in the forefront of theatrical innovation.
So what is next?
 What have we learned about nurturing the artist of the future– playwriting, theatre-
making, performance?
 How do artists establish rigorous, intentional new works development processes that
are innovative and sustainable?
 How does accountability serve the stakeholders in a new works development process?
 How do we define and measure success in theatre for young audiences?

We encouraged article submissions from interdisciplinary artists, educators, and scholars. Our
goal was to motivate a dialogue among a wide variety of practitioners and researchers that will
enrich the development of educational theatre in the coming years.

Call for Papers

Papers were to be no longer than 4,000 words, had to be accompanied by a 200 word abstract
and 100 word biographies for the author(s), and conformed to APA style manual.

Reviewing Procedures
Each article will be sent to two members of the editorial board. They will provide advice on the
following:
  Whether the article should be published with no revisions/with revisions.
 The contribution the article makes to the arts community.
 Specific recommendations to the author about improving the article.
 Other publishing outlets if the article is considered unacceptable.

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to Jonathan P. Jones, New York University,

Program in Educational Theatre, Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East, Rm 223, New York, NY
10003, USA. Email: [email protected]

Cover image from NYU’s Program in Educational Theatre production of The Triangle Project
directed in 2011 by Dr. Nan Smithner.

© 2020 New York University

ARTSPRAXIS

Volume 7 Issue 1 May 2020

Editorial: No End and No Beginning i

Jonathan P. Jones

“I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You”: Self-Reflection and Construction 1

of Self
Gina L. Grandi

Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Reflections on Authorship and 14

Ownership in Devised Theatre-Making and Ethnodrama with
Young People
Anna Glarin

Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects: The 25

Case of Safe Cities (2015)
Nkululeko Sibanda
ArtsPraxis
Volume 7 Issue 1
© 2020

Editorial: No End and No Beginning

JONATHAN P. JONES
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Welcome to the new home for ArtsPraxis!

ArtsPraxis was founded in 2003 by Philip Taylor following the NYU
Forum on Arts Assessment as a peer-reviewed journal that would
provide publication opportunities for selected papers from that
conference and others which were submitted for review that responded
to similar questions as those explored at that event. The genesis of the
journal was informed by the results of my literature review which
identified over 60 journals in the arts disciplines but few which facilitated
dialogue across and between the arts disciplines. The NYU Forum on
Assessment in Arts Education brought together over 130 participants
committed to discourse among arts educators and the inaugural issue
of ArtsPraxis was published in 2004. Thereafter, Christina Marín edited
a second edition in 2010 following the 2005 Forum on Ethnotheatre and
Theatre for Social Justice. Subsequently, I became the editor in 2016
and since then, we have published six issues.
I write this as I commence the third month of the stay home order in
the New York City region due to COVID-19. We understand that a
significant social shift is developing. For educators, distance learning
i
Editorial: No End and No Beginning

has become our primary mode of instruction. For theatre artists, sharing
of work is either done digitally or not at all. Theatres are closed; in-
person rehearsals are verboten. And yet, we persist. The need for
community engaged theatre and school-based arts programs remains
as vital as ever. To that end, I am excited to remain active in the pursuit
of sharing research and practice with artists and educators—and look
forward to continuing this work through the rest of the year.

IN THIS ISSUE
Our contributions in this issue come from artists and educators whose
praxis focuses largely on creating and devising theatre with young
people. The first article is from Gina L. Grandi. Upon winning the AATE
Distinguished Dissertation honor in 2019, I listened to her give a talk
about her devised theatre work with girls of color in New York City. As I
am strongly supportive of promoting this culturally relevant drama
pedagogy, I invited Gina to write an article for this publication. In the
second article, Anna Glarin explores her work creating theatre with
young people in the UK. Like Gina, Anna’s writing highlights the
necessity to center student voice in the theatre they create, while
navigating power dynamics and ethical considerations. Finally,
Nkululeko Sibanda, a practitioner based in South Africa, interrogates
the aesthetics of applied theatre projects.

LOOKING AHEAD
From the time government agencies and the press reported the
emergence of a novel coronavirus in late 2019, we have collectively
faced the need to reconsider the way we congregate, communicate, and
educate across the world. Artists and educators have been called upon
to reinvent their practice seemingly overnight. While we struggle to
balance our personal health and wellness, ArtsPraxis invites you to
share your scholarship, practice, and praxis in Volume 7, Issue 2a. As
we’ve asked before, we welcome teachers, drama therapists, applied
theatre practitioners, theatre-makers, performance artists, and scholars
to offer vocabularies, ideas, strategies, practices, measures, and
outcomes that respond to Educational Theatre in the Time of COVID-
19.
ii
 Jonathan P. Jones

Concurrently, as of this writing, we find ourselves about ten days

into international protests following the murder of George Floyd by police
in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protesters the world over have made some
specific calls to action, which include: acknowledge that black lives
matter, educate yourself about social and racial injustice, and change
the legal system that allows these heinous acts to go unpunished. In
thinking through how we in the field of educational theatre can
proactively address these needs, I reminded myself that there are many
artists and educators who are already deeply engaged in this work. And
while scholarship and practice around racial and social justice permeate
so much of what we do, now would be a good time to document current
examples of best practices, organize them, and share them. As such,
we will have a companion issue of ArtsPraxis—this one, Volume 7, Issue
2b. Again, we welcome teachers, drama therapists, applied theatre
practitioners, theatre-makers, performance artists, and scholars to offer
vocabularies, ideas, strategies, practices, measures, and outcomes that
respond to Social Justice Practices for Educational Theatre.
These companion issues will publish later in 2020. Thereafter, look
to the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU for the 2021 Forum on
Humanities and the Arts, and the Verbatim Performance Lab. ArtsPraxis
will return to general topics in educational theatre for early 2021.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Jones, J. P. (2020). Editorial: No end and no beginning. ArtsPraxis, 7
(1), i-v

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan P. Jones, PhD is a graduate from the Program in Educational
Theatre at New York University, where he earned both an M.A. and a
Ph.D. He conducted his doctoral field research in fall 2013 and in spring
of 2014 he completed his dissertation, Drama Integration: Training
Teachers to Use Process Drama in English Language Arts, Social
Studies, and World Languages. He received an additional M.A. in
English at National University and his B.A. in Liberal Arts from the NYU's
Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Jonathan is certified to teach
English 6-12 in the state of California, where he taught Theatre and

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Editorial: No End and No Beginning

English for five years at North Hollywood High School and was honored
with The Inspirational Educator Award by Universal Studios in 2006.
Currently, Jonathan is an administrator, faculty member, coordinator of
doctoral studies, and student-teaching supervisor at NYU Steinhardt.
Jonathan has conducted drama workshops in and around New York
City, London, and Los Angeles in schools and prisons. As a performer,
he has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Town Hall,
The Green Space, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, The Cathedral of St. John the
Divine, The Southbank Centre in London UK, and the U.S. Capitol in
Washington, D.C. He co-produced a staged-reading of a new musical,
The Throwbacks, at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2013.
Jonathan’s directing credits include Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius
Caesar, Elsewhere in Elsinore, Dorothy Rides the Rainbow, A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bye Bye Birdie, The Laramie Project,
Grease, Little Shop of Horrors, and West Side Story. Assistant directing
includes Woyzeck and The Crucible. As a performer, he has appeared
at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Town Hall, The Green Space,
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The
Southbank Centre in London UK, Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin,
and the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Production credits include co-
producing a staged-reading of a new musical, The Throwbacks, at the
New York Musical Theatre Festival and serving as assistant production
manager and occasionally as stage director for the New York City Gay
Men’s Chorus since 2014, most recently directing Quiet No More: A
Celebration of Stonewall at Carnegie Hall for World Pride, 2019.
At NYU, his courses have included Theory of Creative Drama,
Methods of Conducting Creative Drama, American Musical Theatre:
Background and Analysis, Seminar and Field Experience in Teaching
Elementary Drama, Drama across the Curriculum and Beyond,
Assessment of Student Work in Drama, World Drama, Development of
Theatre and Drama I, Acting: Scene Study, Seminar and Field
Experience in Teaching Secondary Drama, Directing Youth Theatre,
Dramatic Activities in the Secondary Drama Classroom, Shakespeare’s
Theatre I, and Devising Educational Drama Programs and Curricula.
Early in his placement at NYU, Jonathan served as teaching assistant
for American Musical Theatre: Background and Analysis, Seminar in
Elementary Student Teaching, Theatre of Brecht and Beckett, and
Theatre of Eugene O'Neill and worked as a course tutor and
administrator for the study abroad program in London for three
iv
 Jonathan P. Jones

summers. He has supervised over 50 students in their student teaching

placements in elementary and secondary schools in the New York City
Area. Prior to becoming a teacher, Jonathan was an applicant services
representative at NYU in the Graduate School of Arts and Science
Enrollment Services Office for five years.
Recent publications include Paradigms and Possibilities: A
Festschrift in Honor of Philip Taylor (2019) and Education at
Roundabout: It’s about Turning Classrooms into Theatres and the
Theatre into a Classroom (with Jennifer DiBella and Mitch Matteson) in
Education and Theatres: Beyond the Four Walls (edited by Michael
Finneran and Michael Anderson; 2019).
In addition to his responsibilities at NYU, Jonathan currently
teaches Fundamentals of Speech, Introduction to Theatre, and Theatre
History at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

v
ArtsPraxis
Volume 7 Issue 1
© 2020

“I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You”: Self-Reflection and

Construction of Self

GINA L. GRANDI
APPALACHIAN STATE UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT
For seven weeks, I worked with thirteen high school girls to explore
issues of identity through a devised theatre performance. Throughout
the process, I found evidence that the process of working through
theatre mitigated the ways young people filter their responses and
provides a platform in which they can interrogate their perceptions and
opinions. This article discusses how, while working through theatre
provided a space in which the girls I worked with expressed
uncensored thoughts and opinions, there was a return to constructed
personas when creating a public performance.

At 3:15 p.m. on July 5th, 2016, in a basement rehearsal studio in the

Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, eleven high school girls were

1
I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

writing about their identities. Some had cleared spaces on the room’s
single table, shoving aside the stacks of permission slips and loose-
leaf paper. Others perched on folding chairs, leaned over the
windowsill, or sat on the floor, notebooks propped in their laps.
Within a few days, the girls would number thirteen. In the weeks
that followed, we would work to create a full length, original theatre
performance through writing, improvisation, theatre activities, and
discussion. The girls wrote close to two hundred poems, monologues,
dialogues, and diatribes. They improvised and created dozens of
scenes. They talked with me and with each other. They experimented
with theatrical structures and with forms of writing. By the end of seven
weeks, they had written, rehearsed, and presented a twenty-six page
script, and I had a stack of script pages, writing, field notes, memos,
and transcripts.
For my dissertation study, I worked with thirteen high school girls
for seven weeks to create an original performance. For three hours a
day, three days a week, the girls experimented with scene work,
movement, poetry, and dialogue. After three weeks, they looked over
their work to identity throughlines and themes. From there, they
developed and rehearsed a final performance: a collage of theatrical
scenes and spoken word pieces. They presented their work in a
professional theatre space to an invited audience. Each performance
was followed by a facilitated talkback.
This study was done in collaboration with an existing theatre
program, Summer Theatre Experience (STE).1 We began with thirteen
girls—Mazzie, Ashley, Maya, Liz, Eva, Melanie, Anna, Asia, Janelle,
Jordan, Akila, Mia, and Adriana—eight of whom identified as black,
one as Dominican, one as Puerto Rican, one as South Asian, and two
as mixed race. All the participating girls lived in Brooklyn and all
attended public or charter high schools with free and reduced lunch
rates of over 70%. Janelle and Jordan did not complete the program,
although their writing was represented, with their permission, in the
final performance.
My original research objective was to investigate the ways in
which theatre creation might serve as qualitative method, providing
potentially more nuanced data than might be achieved through
traditional methods. While the resulting study yielded insight into the

1 All names of organizations and participants are pseudonyms.

2
 Gina L. Grandi

ways the participating girls viewed themselves and their peers, their
thoughts about race, power, and personal agency, this article focuses
on the ways in which this process served as a vehicle for self-reflection
and personal understanding.

POWER OF THEATRE
As a former high school teacher, I have seen firsthand the ways in
which participating in drama activities and creating theatre can be a
catalyst for community building and self-reflection. Theatre of the
Oppressed creator Augusto Boal refers to theatre as “a rehearsal for
the revolution” (Boal, 1979, p. 122): the means by which an individual
might train themselves for real-life action. I see theatre as a space in
which personas might be tried on and strategies to various situations
considered. One can experiment with relationships and attitudes
without real world consequences. As drama is an inherently group
activity, practitioners also have to learn to work effectively and
productively with other people.
This study employed devising, the common theatrical term for the
process by which a piece of theatre is created by and originates with a
particular group. It is, in short, theatre that is generated, rather than
starting with a script (Govan, Nicholson, & Normington, 2007; Oddey,
1994). While it is a collaborative process, there is no prescribed
methodology to the form that collaboration might take (Bicât & Baldwin,
2013; Oddey, 1994).
Devising is well suited to examining individual experience, as it
allows space for individual perspective and reflection (Oddey, 1994,
2007). I was able to introduce ideas, themes, and skills, but let the
participating girls decide what themes and ideas they wanted to
explore in more depth and which they wanted to leave behind. There
were ample opportunities to incorporate full and small group
conversations. Only writings the girls chose were included in drafts of
the performance script, and throughout the rehearsal process, the girls
had final say over the content and presentation.
When devising with young people, the workshop leader walks a
fine line. On the one hand, the work is participant-generated. On the
other, the facilitator, as an experienced theatre practitioner, has the
responsibility of pushing the acting and production value to a higher
level. For this study, I was teaching acting, production, and playwriting
3
I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

skills as well as working to create a space in which students felt able to

speak and write freely and honestly.

EXAMINING HONESTY
Researchers have found that adolescent girls often demonstrate the
internalization of cultural expectations and stereotypes, even when
challenging them. Researcher and arts practitioner Dana Edell (2010)
describes this in detail in her doctoral research, which investigates the
playmaking work of a similar demographic. Edell speaks of the mix of
internalization and rebellion that often manifested in the girls’ writing.
Edell’s conclusion that “uncensored” does “not mean unchecked and
unquestioned” (p. 324) served as a reminder to me that these
internalizations ran deep, and that open and honest discussion and
communication was essential when working with the group. My
responsibility during the first several workshops was to create a space
in which the girls felt they were able to speak without judgment, while
providing the kind of probing questions that would open space for
deeper thinking.
At the end of our first week together, I set up a group conversation
to discuss some of the themes that had come up so far in our work. I
chose to structure this as a graffiti discussion, a common classroom
strategy designed to facilitate equity of access. In a graffiti discussion,
questions are posted around the room on large pieces of paper. Each
student takes a marker and responds to each question on their own,
then to each other’s responses, all in writing. In this way, students
have the chance to process and reflect before having to speak. They
have the opportunity to read others’ opinions and thoughts, which may
spark new ideas of their own. For this discussion, instead of posting
questions, I posted quotes and asked the girls to respond.
During this activity, I noticed we had reached a point where the
girls were feeling comfortable asking each other to think more deeply
and questioning their own responses. Under “There is no greater
agony than bearing an untold story inside of you,” responses included:

Having to hold in your true identity is like drinking poison and

expecting someone else to die—it is a lifetime of captivated
angry. That is no way to live.

4
 Gina L. Grandi

That is a great simile, but what does it truly uncover?

Agreed b/c when you hold something back it gets worse

instead of it getting better.

I think it can make you super sad to hide your roots.

I agree because it’s like when you’re angry about something if

you continue to hold it in and not let it out sooner or later you’re
going to explode and it’s going to be crazy.

It’s either we are forced by authority to not speak up, or we are

scared. Sometimes we are not able to express ourself and that
is caused by us not being able to have the courage to tell how
they really feel. So they keep whatever they have balled up
inside of their selves.

I’ll admit that I do this a lot and I feel like it’s second nature to
me. I would rather keep it to myself instead of bothering
someone else with my troubles.

The girls were starting to dig more deeply into each other’s statements.
asking what a quote really meant, or pointing out that perhaps no one
is ever satisfied with ‘who they are.’ There were connections being
made to personal experience and musings as to why such situations
might occur.
While there were many thoughtful responses during the
‘conversation,’ there were also glib statements such as “negative
influence leads to negative consequences” and “there’s no such thing
as normal.” One recurring platitude I noticed was “just be yourself,” in
statements such as “Be happy with yourself,” “I agree we should be
comfortable being ourselves all the time,” and “You can’t become
better or the person you’d like to be unless you’re true to yourself and
comfortable with who you are.”
About halfway through the verbal discussion about what they had
read and written, I pressed the girls on this point. “So here’s a question
I’ve been wondering,” I said.

I see on a lot of these ‘it’s really important to be true to yourself’

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I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

and ‘be happy with who you are’—there’s a lot of those

comments. So my question is, what if you can’t? This says
‘make decisions to be true to yourself’, but what if what you
want to do is not what your family wants? Or teachers? What if
what’s being expected of you is not what you want in that
moment?

Eva was first to answer, saying she believed that this was a
relevant question because, “I feel like teachers, they don’t really
understand your process of thinking.” She went on to talk about her
frustration with her school’s expectation that she act in a specific way.
Anna jumped in to agree and echo Eva’s sentiments, mentioning
college and, “I know we have to do it or whatever.”
“Why?” I asked again. “Why do you have to?”
From there the girls took over the discussion while I stayed quiet.
Janelle talked about her father leaving her mother to start another
family, and how, while she knew he was ‘following his heart,’ she
wondered if he could be completely happy after making that choice.
She also talked about how she wasn’t able to come out as bisexual to
her religious mother, and that she would have to wait for a different
time in her life to be fully herself. The girls talked about the difficulty of
truly accepting others, the complications of pursuing artistic ambitions,
and feeling torn between school and home culture. Although the
conversation meandered in a variety of directions, the act of stopping,
thinking, and having the space to try out new ideas seemed to move
the girls away from glibness and into nuance.
The “be yourself” theme came up again over the course of the
summer, and there was a great deal of that message in the final script.
This conversation, though, marked a turning point. The girls were
weighing consequences and possibilities and taking the time to
examine their initial reactions to questions and statements. It felt as
though when “be true to yourself” came up again, there was a deeper
understanding of some of the complications behind the statement.

CONSTRUCTING PERSONAS
Through this process, I discovered a great deal about what these
young people thought and felt about themselves. What was interesting,
and what I had not anticipated, was that when the girls went through
6
 Gina L. Grandi

the process of curating their work and deciding what they wanted to
present, they also went through the process of making that
performance presentable. The fact that there was an audience
mattered to them; even knowing the audience was ostensibly there to
witness their truth, the girls chose and constructed their public
personas within the framework of that performance. Those personas
included expressing vulnerability they may not have risked expressing
six weeks earlier. They included anger and grief in ways the girls may
have been previously unwilling or unable to publicly inhabit. However,
the fact of an audience impacted the way in which those personas
manifested. While the girls used the workshops to process, the final
performance was what, ultimately, the girls wanted an audience to
hear and experience.
The writing and scene work the girls created during our first
workshop expressed many of the themes we explored over the next
several weeks, including those our final show eventually centered
around. The creation work our first day revolved around themes of
‘rising above.’ One group portrayed a figure literally breaking out of
situation in which she was held down, the other a series of figures
ascending. In both writing and creation, expressions of self-confidence
were prevalent. The final show returned to these themes, to messages
of ‘I will not be brought down’ and ‘I will succeed.’ It was a reversion to
clichés, but, it seemed, clichés they wished to inhabit. In the world they
created on stage, the girls recognized those things that made them
angry, those things that made them frustrated, and then broke away
from them, creating a unified, confident, ‘see me’ finale. While the girls
wanted their dissatisfactions to be heard by their audience, they also
wanted to be seen in a certain way.
Perhaps they weren’t just telling their audience, but were also
telling themselves. Perhaps there was an element of wish fulfillment
embedded in what they presented. Edell (2013) notes that the young
women she worked with often re-embodied oppression and presented
stereotypes in their original performances. In some ways, this was the
case here. It also seemed as though the girls were striving, in their
conclusion, to portray their best selves. The performance felt like a mix
of genuine expression and constructed narrative. However, there
wasn’t anything that didn’t feel honest. They weren’t lying, but they
were also being careful about the way they were presenting
themselves.

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I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

PROCESS, PRODUCT, AND IMPACT

In my experience as a classroom teacher and as a teaching artist, I
have observed that the act of performing, particularly performing self-
written work, has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for
young people. But is it the process of creation, and of being part of a
supportive community, that makes the experience a profound one?
There is a specific kind of validation inherent in performance. Drama
therapist Stephen Snow (2009) speaks to the particular benefits of
performance: both the build up during the rehearsal period and the
“intensity and concentration” creates an “effective, focused rite of
passage” (p. 132). Snow contends that this final rite was essential in
terms of bringing closure to participants and providing outside
acknowledgment of their work. Although Snow was referring
specifically to therapeutic experiences, the same argument could be
made for any devising process: the final validation of presentation
bringing closure and meaning. In our situation, one could argue that it
was the process that contributed to any deeper understanding or
insights the girls may have walked away from, but the performance still
offered a culminating event, a public acknowledgment of their work
together. As a researcher, I found both process and product valuable,
particularly when comparing the two and examining the differences in
the roles the girls inhabited on and off stage, but in terms of the impact
the work had on the girls themselves, I think the performance made
less of an impression than the work moving towards it.
Mia, for example, was engaged throughout the workshop process.
While she wasn’t always vocal during full group conversations, she
often took on a leadership role in small group creation work and her
feedback when reflecting on writing and scene work was thoughtful
and insightful. She expressed interest in the process, contributing a
great deal of writing to the final performance. At the post-show
talkbacks, though, she was quiet, slumped in her chair. When an
audience member asked the girls what impact the process had had on
them, she replied, “I think this was a great experience, but it’s not
going to impact me on any type of way.” Were Mia’s words merely
disappointment that the program was ending, and she was returning to
a school in which she was unhappy? Or did they speak to a greater
sense of futility? Was she truly leaving the program unaffected in “any
type of way?”
Asia, another otherwise largely silent presence during the
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 Gina L. Grandi

talkbacks, responded. “I agree with Mia,” she said. Mia elaborated,

explaining how she didn’t think that the teachers from her school
hearing her words would matter:

Honestly, I feel like [teachers in the audience] going back to the

school and telling them about this place, ain’t gonna do that
much … Because they feel that what they’re doing is right.

Mia believed that even if the teachers in attendance told other teachers
and administrators what the girls had communicated on stage, nothing
would change, and Mia’s understanding of ‘impact’ was that something
changes. She was leaving a seven-week process that culminated in
constructing a message that she believed wouldn’t be heard. If we had
not had a final performance, would Mia have expressed a different
opinion about the way the work had impacted her? Did her
understanding of the final performance as pointless color the entirety of
the summer?
One of the girls, Mazzie, didn’t come to the second performance.
While I found out later she had mentioned to a couple of the other girls
that she would only be performing one of the two nights, she did not
tell me that she would be absent. She had missed a week and a half of
rehearsal time to attend another program and her speaking parts in the
show were limited. Did Mazzie not feel invested in the project as a
whole, having missed much of the writing of the script, or did this
speak to the performance not being what she viewed as the ‘point’ of
the program?
The potential of theatre as a means as a means of empowerment,
particularly with marginalized communities and young people, has
been written about extensively (Boehm & Boehm, 2003; Sola, 2012;
Wernick, Kulick, & Woodford, 2014). Companies that work with young
people through theatre use the word in their mission statements,
testimonials, or “about” sections (Opening Act, n.d.; Marquee Youth,
n.d). Did the girls find the performance empowering? They expressed
pride at the conclusion of the performance. During the talkback, many
expressed their general happiness that they had participated. Would
the workshops on their own have accomplished that? Some may have
needed the culmination, the public acknowledgement of what they
have to say. For others, like Mia, the public nature of the final
performance may have merely underscored what they saw as

9
I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

systematic stasis.
What the final performance did provide was the opportunity to
publicly inhabit roles of their choice. These roles were filtered for public
consumption, but they were actively chosen roles. Anna and Eva
spoke, without interruption, against the systems in their school they felt
frustrated with. The girls introduced themselves with words they felt
were important. The finale presented a unified, connected line of girls,
demanding to be seen.

CONCLUSION: BEING HEARD, BEING SEEN

Throughout this process, I found evidence that the girls felt
opportunities for speaking and for speaking out were limited in their
day-to-day lives. They often commented on their lack of space for
expressing their opinions, particularly those opinions that might be
unpopular with parents, teachers, or adults in power. It was clear that
the workshop space offered an uncensored platform that they did not
feel they had elsewhere.
In many instances, the girls specifically expressed the lack of
opportunity to voice their thoughts in school. When I spoke to Liz and
Eva before the first performance, I asked what they hoped any
teachers attending might take away from the show. Liz said, “I’m
hoping teachers just take away that school is hard. And you’ve got to
be able to express yourself. And I guess this was the way to do it.”
“[I think they should] have more students be vocal about [issues
and opinions],” Eva added, “because we had the opportunity [in STE]
to be vocal about it, where we usually won’t. And our voices would be
shut down. But now we are not shut down, and we have the
opportunity to allow people to hear.”
Both Liz and Eva saw the workshop and performance as their
opportunity to speak their minds, particularly about issues where they
didn’t feel heard otherwise. They viewed our space as a direct contrast
to their space at school. Eva, before heading backstage as we
prepared for the audience to enter the first night, told me how much
she likes being honest without “getting into trouble.” At school, “they
don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“I like this program,” Ashley said when I spoke to her and Maya
after a workshop one day. “In school, I guess, like, we’re given the
opportunity to do different things, academic-wise, but we don’t get a
10
 Gina L. Grandi

chance to express ourselves as much as we want.” Ashley tended to

be quiet during group discussions and a lot of her writing addressed
the idea of living “in the background” or “in the shadows.” The
workshops allowed for individual expression through a variety of
mediums including writing and silent movement—opportunities to be
‘heard’ without necessarily speaking.
The girls talked about the process of creating this performance as
a vehicle for their words, regardless of their interest in theatre or acting
on its own. Some of the girls were required to participate in an
approved summer program and STE was on the short list of
acceptable opportunities. “They make us [participate],” Liz said, before
our first performance. “So like, ‘I’m gonna use it to tell you.’” Liz, like
many of the girls, appeared to have chosen the program not because
she was particularly excited about drama, but because she was drawn
to the offer of uncensored expression.
Much of what the girls had to say didn’t change dramatically from
the first day to the last. However, they spent time more deeply
examining their attitudes and opinions, questioning themselves and
each other. Drama was a catalyst for critical thought. The nature of the
work meant that when I asked probing questions or challenged their
statements it wasn’t a confrontation. Instead, it was an attempt to
better understand what they had to say. This was not an interview or a
focus group; this was a room in which they were told from the
beginning that their uncensored stories and questions were wanted.
It’s clear to me that the process of devising created a space in which
this group of girls felt they were able to openly and honestly talk about
their opinions and ideas, free from constraints of what they might have
imagined was expected of them.
And perhaps what was ‘empowering’ about the public performance
was that the girls did circle back to platitudes, but after exploring those
platitudes’ limitations. They presented themes of rising above, of self-
belief, and of intrinsic worth that overshadows stereotypes and
negative expectations. They chose the idealized clichés they wanted to
be reality. What this may mean is that actively questioning bromides
and narratives—even positive ones—might be useful in that this
questioning provides an ownership that didn’t previously exist.

11
I’m Gonna Use It To Tell You

SUGGESTED CITATION
Grandi, G. L. (2020). “I’m gonna use it to tell you”: Self-reflection and
construction of self. ArtsPraxis, 7 (1), 1-13.

REFERENCES
Bicât, T., & Baldwin, C. (Eds.). (2013). Devised and collaborative
theatre: A practical guide. Wiltshire: The Crowood Press.
Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Urizen Books.
Boehm, A., & Boehm, E. (2003). Community theatre as a means of
empowerment in social work: A case sudy of women’s
community theatre. Journal of Social Work, 3 (3), 283-300.
Edell, D. (2010). “Say it how it is”: Urban teenage girls challenge and
perpetuate cultural narratives through writing and performing
theater. (Doctor of Philosophy), New York University.
Edell, D. (2013). “Say It how It Is”: Urban teenage girls challenge and
perpetuate stereotypes through writing and performing theatre.
Youth Theatre Journal, 27 (1), 51.
Govan, E., Nicholson, H., & Normington, K. (2007). Making a
performance: devising histories and contemporary practices.
London; New York: Routledge.
Marquee Youth Stage. (n.d.). Home.
Oddey, A. (1994). Devising theatre: a practical and theoretical
handbook. London; New York: Routledge.
Oddey, A. (2007). Re-framing the theatrical: interdisciplinary
landscapes for performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Opening Act. (n.d.). Mission and Values.
Snow, S. (2009). Ritual/theatre/therapy. In D. R. Johnson & R.
Emunah (Eds.), Current approaches in drama therapy.
Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas.
Sola, F. (2012). Drama and theatre as vehicle for youth empowerment
and reorientation: A proposition for national development and
integration. Drama and Theatre as Vehicle for Youth
Empowerment and Reorientation A Proposition for National
Development and Integration (3), 422.
Wernick, L. J., Kulick, A., & Woodford, M. R. (2014). How theater
within a transformative organizing framework cultivates individual
and collective empowerment among LGBT youth. Journal of
12
 Gina L. Grandi

Community Psychology, 42 (7), 838-853.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Gina L. Grandi teaches theatre and theatre education at
Appalachian State University. Her doctoral research at New York
University revolved around using theatre as qualitative theatre
method—specifically using devising to explore issues of adolescent
identity and cultural narratives. In her pre-university life, she was a full
time public school teacher in San Francisco and a teaching artist and
arts administrator in New York, working to bring theatre programs to
underserved high schools. She is the co-founder and director of The
Bechdel Group, a theatre company dedicated to new plays in
development by writers writing for women. In addition, Gina is a
dramaturg and artistic associate with NYU’s New Plays for Young
Audiences series and on the editorial board of the peer reviewed
journal Voices in Urban Education. She has a bachelor’s degree from
Vassar College, a master’s and PhD from New York University, and an
extensive finger puppet collection.

13
ArtsPraxis
Volume 7 Issue 1
© 2020

Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Reflections on

Authorship and Ownership in Devised Theatre-
Making and Ethnodrama with Young People

ANNA GLARIN
YORK ST. JOHN UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT
A paradigm shift to research ‘with’ young people as opposed to ‘on’
young people has led to focus being placed on young people’s voices in
matters concerning them as they are viewed as the experts on their own
lives. This article reflects on authorship and ownership of work created
collaboratively with young people and on the devised theatre-making
process which lead to the creation of ethnodrama, a script of dramatised
narratives. The applied theatre practitioner and researcher devising
work and creating ethnodramas with young people (and indeed other
community groups) faces additional challenges compared to the
traditional playwright; they do not just have to entertain but also convey
narratives from and about people. This article argues that while aesthetic
judgement can be exercised to some degree in the process of scripting
the narratives, there are competing tensions involving power dynamics
and ethical considerations that must be carefully negotiated and
14
 Anna Glarin

renegotiated through a collaborative process of (re)creation,

(re)presentation and (re)telling of the young people’s narratives. The
article gives examples of practice which supports the idea when making
work with young people it is this collaborative process that is key to the
notion of authorship and ownership. It concludes that through this
process, the aspiration is that authorship is shared between everyone
involved in the process, but that the ownership lies with the young
people, from whom the narratives originate.

INTRODUCTION
Devising original work with teenagers is exhausting, exhilarating and
exciting. They have plenty to say and are keen to say it. Personally I do
not subscribe to the notion of ‘giving young people a voice’, a phrase
commonly used in youth settings; in fact, I find it rather condescending.
Who are we to say that young people do not have a voice, or that they
need it and indeed want it? As a theatre practitioner with over fifteen
years’ experience of working with young people and currently pursuing
a PhD, my firm belief is that young people have a voice, but what they
often need and want is a platform to help make it heard. My theatre-
making practice and research methodology with young people is one of
reflection practice (Mirra et al. 2015; Mackey 2016); we create new
theatre work which is reflected upon and re-worked in a continuous
cycle. This article will reflect on the notion of, and explore the difference
between authorship and ownership when devising and creating new
work with young people. As a group we create scripts which technically
originate from them; the ideas and stories we share are theirs and the
words conveying these stories, often verbatim, are theirs. Yet I am the
one putting it all together into a workable shape, a script if you like, and
therefore, it can be argued, it is I who is the author. So who can rightfully
and ethically claim authorship and ownership of the work? The
reflections in this article will offer insights into the dynamic writing
process with young people and how this affects the authorship and
ownership of the text.

15
Whose Story Is It Anyway?

RESEARCHING AND WRITING ‘WITH’, NOT ‘ON’ OR ‘ABOUT’

YOUNG PEOPLE
Research “with” as opposed to “on” young people (Reason 2010;
Fielding 2010; Coyne & Carter 2018) aligns with research into the “new
sociology of childhood” (Coyne & Carter, 2018, p. 9), which highlights
the rights of the child to have a say in matters concerning them (United
Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child). While my practice has
always been centred around young people and their voices, embarking
on a PhD has enabled me to also consider young people’s vital roles in
research. By asserting young people as “experts in their own lives”
(Coyne & Carter, 2018, p. 8 ) and placing them at the heart of research
agendas they give “voice to the study community” (Taylor et al. 2017, p.
533). As researchers and practitioners we ought to take note of that
voice and seek to incorporate it into our research and theatre-making,
with young people recognised as competent “beings” (Kallio, 2008;
Coyne & Carter 2018). Water (2018), whose research focuses on health
care ethics and youth voice, claims that a participatory approach with
young people by its very nature suggests an “ethical standpoint” as it
values the “agency and right of the children and young people to have a
voice in things that matter to them” (p.37). Thus, the approach I adopt is
one of research and development (R&D) around specific themes or
topics, always selected and steered by the young people. My co-artistic
director and I facilitate creative workshops with young people in which
improvisations and scenes around their ideas are created. All ideas are
recognised and considered through a democratic process of discussion
and trying-things-out, a process of “plussing” (Belliveau, 2015, p. 11).
Some are rejected immediately, while others are further developed; one
young person reflected on this process and noted that “when one person
has an idea, everyone tries to improve it” (Waterloo Community
Theatre). The young people’s responses are captured and I, alongside
my co-artistic director and the young people, co-author a script with
verbatim text which is shared with an audience. Theatre scholar
Saldaña, with a background as a theatre educator, director, playwright
and qualitative researcher, refers to this process as ethnotheatre, and
the script as ethnodrama (1998; 2005; 2008; 2010). Both are achieved
through a collaborative process of generating, scripting and performing
material that originates from the young people. While every effort is
made to retain the aforementioned ethical standpoint through a
16
 Anna Glarin

collaborative approach which involves constant dialogue and continuous

negotiation and renegotiation, unavoidable power relationships make it
a challenging and dynamic process (Hart 1992; Mannay 2016; Water
2018).
Reflecting on a recent project with young people, the challenges of
the scripting and playwrighting process came to the fore. We generated
a great deal of material and I found myself torn between what to use and
what not to use; who is represented and how are they represented – and
how do I ensure authenticity? It led me to ponder that it is not how they
create, present and tell their stories to the facilitators and each other in
our sessions, but rather how we (re)create, (re)present and (re)tell them
together, and the importance of not undertaking this process in isolation,
but rather in collaboration with the young people. As one young person
said when asked about what they enjoy about coming to the sessions:
“we’re kind of in control, I enjoy that we have that control and the adults
don’t make it that they’re only ones in control, if we have an idea, we can
actually say it”.

(RE)CREATION, (RE)PRESENTATION AND (RE)TELLING

Young people create, present and tell stories all the time; in school, in
youth settings and on social media. The tension, and often the dilemma,
is in how we choose to (re)create, (re)present and (re)tell them and as
theatre practitioners we use theatre as a medium to do so. O’Toole et
al. (2010) likens it to the process of any playwright who researches
material for their play, claiming that the “re-creation of researched
communities … make sense” (p. 5). It does indeed make sense; it
provides a platform for unheard voices. Although, on the contrary to how
traditional playwrights might work, playwrights of ethnodramas do not
“write” them, we “adapt” them (Saldaña, 2010, p. 4). We generate
fieldnotes, footage and quotes and our job is to transform these into
performances; we are the ‘writer-uppers’ of the fieldnotes. Therefore,
while I assume a role of playwright in the sense that I write up the
fieldnotes, these scripts are not “”play scripts” in the traditional sense,
but essentialised fieldwork reformatted in performative data displays”
(Saldaña, 2010, p. 5). The process of (re)creation, (re)presentation and
(re)telling can therefore be viewed as one of (re)formatting; finding a way
to transform—to reformat—fieldnotes into performances. This process
of reformatting is multi-layered, it is not only the words and the content
17
Whose Story Is It Anyway?

that need to be taken into consideration but also the performative

elements; how to perform the text to best serve the content. Thus, the
result should not only engage and entertain, but also convey the
narratives.
There is of course the challenge and the ethical dilemma of
maintaining fidelity to the fieldnotes and transcripts. In an attempt to
achieve this fidelity, it has become our process to continuously validate
the data (Mienczakowski, 1995)—the ethnodrama—with the young
people and ask them: ‘is this what you said?’, ‘is this what you mean?’,
’did I interpret that correctly?’, ‘do you think this works?’ etc. This
process starts with a scene that is created by the young people, it is
recorded and transcribed. The young people then read the transcription
and make edits. This validation is often repeated several times until
everyone involved are satisfied, it is negotiated and renegotiated. The
final script is read together as a group and a discussion about the tone,
the choice of words and the structure takes place and together we
decide how to take it forwards. It is a process that while completed in
stages is never fully complete until the piece is performed, and even
then, changes can still occur. This to-ing and fro-ing is crucial; I have
found that in order for my adaptation—my reformatting—to be faithful to
the narratives the young people tell us they must be consulted at every
stage of the process; they need to have an equal stake in that process,
despite the added layer of ‘messiness’ it undeniably brings (Hughes et
al. 2011; Coyne & Carter 2018; Baxter 2019). The constant dialogue is
paramount to achieving fidelity. Care must be taken to retain the
authenticity of the stories that are being re-told; by being faithful to the
original stories. Saldaña (2015) asserts that a playwright of ethnodrama
“is not just a storyteller; she is a story-reteller” (p. 20). Despite me being
in a position of power and, for all intents and purposes, assuming the
role of playwright, this fidelity can only be achieved through collaboration
and continuous validation with the young people. It is this process of
(re)creating, (re)presenting and (re)telling that impacts ownership and
authorship of the text. Be that as it may, in a process that by its very
nature involves a group of people, one cannot escape the fact that there
is ultimately one person who commits the final words to paper, or more
commonly, the final tap of the keyboard, and thus makes a final decision
as to what is included and how it is (re)created, (re)presented and
(re)told in the text. How and to what degree one exercises that aesthetic
judgement must also be considered.
18
 Anna Glarin

AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT, AUTHORSHIP AND OWNERSHIP

I recall a recent incident in our R&D process in which the young people
were asked to write a monologue on flip-chart paper based on prompts
that I provided them with. While typing up the monologues I exercised
my aesthetic judgement to omit the things I thought did not work in the
context of the monologue and with the wider message and theme of the
work, re-shuffled some sentences and highlighted everything that
needed clarification. I then brought them back to the young people the
following week. They were asked to read through their edited
monologues alongside the originals and approve (or disapprove) the
changes I had made, as well as clarify words and meanings. One young
person had used a lot of acronyms and linguistic features that I was not
acquainted with, ‘youth-language’, for lack of a better term. While
explaining the meanings of the words and acronyms to me, they made
it clear that while they did not mind the omitted parts, their language and
how they chose to present their story to me, was not to be changed; they
had strong feelings about how their words were (re)presented. In fact,
overall, while the young people did not mind changes such as sentence
re-structuring and other logistical changes; changes that in my
experience had potential to enhance the performative elements, they
wanted their original language to be kept intact. They wanted us to be
faithful to what they had said, the words they had used. Thus, the text
we ended up with was indeed a combination of their topical knowledge,
of which, in this context, they are the experts, and my
theatrical/professional knowledge, of which I am the expert. The
described incident could suggest a subconscious awareness of this
process on behalf of both parties; both knowing and recognising the
expertise of the other and be viewed as an example of “respecting
different knowledges and skills and a proactive construction of balance
and equity” (Mackey, 2016, p. 485).
So long as the focus is on maintaining and not restory-ing the
narratives, Saldaña (2005) argues that the playwright can ‘creatively and
strategically edit the transcripts’ (p. 20). I would suggest this is using my
aesthetic judgement as the one more experienced in theatre-making. I
undoubtedly exercise my aesthetic judgement as playwright in the
choices I make but as it is a constant process of writing, editing and re-
writing, involving the young people and theatre practitioners in equal
measures, we arrive at a final text we have all had equal input into. This
eliminates the need to exercise aesthetic judgement to any degree that
19
Whose Story Is It Anyway?

would risk upsetting the carefully negotiated balance. Thus, I am not re-
storying the narratives but facilitating a democratic process of
collaborative playwrighting. Through the constant validation and
renegotiation with the participants, playwrighting equilibrium is
established and an ethical standpoint maintained.
However, there is no doubt that this is a delicate balance to strike
and Saldaña (2010) stresses that it must not “paralyze us from thinking
imaginatively about a research study’s staging potential” (p. 6). It can be
argued that theatre, by its very nature, exists to entertain. The first
“archetypal post-performance question” one tends to ask of an audience
post-performance is “did you enjoy it?” (Reason, 2004), suggesting the
main reason for attending is for enjoyment; to be entertained. Indeed,
Saldaña (2005) claims that “one of the playwright’s functions is to use
an economy of words to tell a story” (p. 20), and therefore the verbatim
transcript is minimised to the “juicy stuff” for “dramatic impact” (1998).
Of course, as playwrights we want to entertain and enthral an audience,
but it is equally paramount that as applied theatre artists we also
exercise our aesthetic judgement to ensure the ideas we choose
(re)create and stories we (re)tell are authentic and (re)presentative of
the community we work with. Therefore, I argue that the notion of
ownership is distinctly different from that of authorship.

Youth as a stage of becoming (Tilleczek, 2011) suggests it is a

transitional period with multiple changes taking place; for example
puberty, moving from primary to secondary school and forming new peer
groups. As adults, having already gone through these transitions in life,
it is impossible to claim knowledge of what it means to go through them
today. Adults can therefore be viewed as ‘outsiders’ in relation to youth
culture and “[o]utsiders cannot produce works that are authentic
expressions of a culture they have not lived” (Young, 2008, p. 60). Thus,
it can be argued that young people and adults inhabit different cultures
and “[y]oung people … are inseparable from their cultures” (Tilleczek,
2011, p. 5). The stories the young people tell us facilitators therefore
belong to and are situated in their world, their culture. As illustrated by
the young person who claimed ownership of her words in the example
above, the stories belong to their culture which adults do not have
knowledge or experience of. As the originators of narratives which are
produced in a culture far removed from that of adults, they own them;
they are the stories. They embody the narratives because they are the
20
 Anna Glarin

narratives, the “embodied focus” (Mackey, 2016, p. 482). Once the

narratives have been offered to and shared with the facilitators and/or
researchers, they have moved from a personal sphere to a space where
we re-create and re-tell them together. While the theatre practitioner
and/or researcher uses their aesthetic judgement and “’authors’ the
research ideas; the participants might not be co-authors, perhaps, but
certainly they comprehensively inhabit the research findings” (Mackey,
2016, p. 486). Wong (2019) concluded in her article about a participatory
community-based playbuilding project that the young people she worked
with “thanked me for teaching them how to do drama but reminded me
that the stories belonged to them” (p. 36). In other words, if it were not
for the young people the stories would not exist. Ownership, therefore, I
argue can only be attributed to those who told the stories in the first
place, while authorship ought to be attributed to all those who were part
of the (re)formatting process as they all have equal stakes in the
(re)telling of the stories.

CONCLUSION
The devising, writing and research process with young people, or indeed
other community groups, is not linear, nor is it straightforward. I concur
with Mackey (2016), Professor of Applied Theatre and founder of the
first UK undergraduate degree in applied theatre, who muses that in
applied theatre situations “research ownership becomes interestingly
ambiguous” (p. 486). As demonstrated above, the process involves
active input from young people and practitioners/applied theatre artists
alike and the finished product may contain words, phrases and ideas
from both, hence “[t]he results are a participant’s and/or researcher’s
combination of meaningful life vignettes, significant insights, and
epiphanies” (Saldaña, 2005, p. 16). There is no one single correct
answer, rather it must be negotiated by the process through which the
content is generated, “knowledge production is therefore shared—and
complex” (Mackey, 2016, p. 486). Thus, the debate on the “tension
between an ethnodramatist’s ethical obligation to re-create an authentic
representation of reality (thus enhancing fidelity), and the license for
artistic interpretation of that reality (thus enhancing the aesthetic
possibilities)” will undoubtedly continue (Saldaña, 2005, p. 32).
Nonetheless, despite the fact that young people often are perceived as
lacking decision-making power and agency simply by virtue of being
21
Whose Story Is It Anyway?

young (Hart 1992, Water 2018), I argue that they ought to be in charge
of their own narratives, because they own them. Therefore, it is my duty
as an ethical theatre-maker to offer a mechanism through which these
narratives can be told most effectively and authentically. I suggest that
it is in this process; from young people creating, presenting and telling
their stories to the theatre practitioners/researchers, to us (re)creating,
(re)presenting and (re)telling their stories with them, that the magic
happens. But it is also in this process that many questions arise and
transparent negotiation and constant renegotiation is key. The
ownership of the stories will always be attributed to the young people,
after all, they created and shared them and without the young people
the stories would not exist. Authorship, however, is shared as a result of
a collaborative process of (re)creation, (re)presentation and (re)telling.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Glarin, A. (2020). Whose story is it anyway?: Reflections on authorship
and ownership in devised theatre-making and ethnodrama with
young people. ArtsPraxis, 7 (1), 14-24.

REFERENCES
Baxter, H. (2019, January 30). The myths of messiness – A reflection on
ethnography based drama practice. Qualitative Research
Symposium, Myths, Methods and Messiness: Insights for
Qualitative Research Analysis, University of Bath.
Belliveau, G. (2015). Performing identity through research-based
theatre: Brothers. Journal of Educational Enquiry, 14 (1), 5-16.
Coyne, I. and Carter, B. (Eds.). (2018). Being participatory: Researching
with children and young people. Cham, Switzerland: Springer
International Publishing.
Fielding, M. (2010). The radical potential of student voice: Creating
spaces for restless encounters. International Journal of Emotional
Education, 2 (1), 61-73.
Hart, R. A. (1992). Children's Participation: From tokenism to citizenship.
Innocenti Essays, 4, International Child Development Centre,
Florence.
Hughes, J., Kidd, J. and McNamara, C. (2011). The usefulness of mess:
22
 Anna Glarin

Artistry, improvisation and decomposition in the practice of

research in applied theatre. In Kershaw, B. and Nicholson, H.
(Eds.). Research methods in theatre and performance. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 186-209.
Kallio, K. P. (2008). The body as a battlefield: Approaching children’s
politics’, Geografiska Annaler/Human Geography, 90 (3), 285-
297.
Mackey, S. (2016). Applied theatre and practice as research: Polyphonic
conversations. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of
Applied Theatre and Performance, 21 (4), 478-491.
Mannay, D. (2016) Visual, narrative and creative research methods:
Application, reflection and ethics. Oxon: Routledge
Mienczakowski, J. (1995). The theater of Ethnography: The
reconstruction of ethnography into theater with emancipatory
potential. Qualitative Inquiry, 1 (3), 360-375.
Mirra, N., Garcia. A and Morrell, E. (2015). Doing youth participatory
research: Transforming inquiry with researchers, educators, and
students. London: Routledge.
O'Toole, J. (2014). Introduction. In O'Toole, J. et al. (Ed.). Young
audiences, theatre and the cultural conversation. Dordrecht;
Heidelberg; New York; London: Springer, 1-13.
Reason, M. (2004). Theatre audiences and perceptions of ‘liveness’ in
performance. Participants: Journal of Audience and Reception
Studies, 1 (2).
Reason, M. (2010). Asking the audience: Audience research and the
experience of theatre. About Performance, (10), 15-34.
Saldaña, J. (1998). Ethical issues in an ethnographic performance text:
The 'dramatic impact' of 'juicy stuff'. Research in Drama
Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 3
(2), 181-196.
Saldaña, J. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre.
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Saldaña, J. (2008). Ethnodrama and ethnotheatre. In Knowles, J. and
Cole, A. (Eds.). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research:
Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. [Internet].
Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc, 195.
Saldaña, J. (2010). Reflections on an ethnotheatre aesthetic. ArtsPraxis,
2 (1), 1-14.
Taylor, J., Namey, E., Carrington Johnson, A. and Guest, G. (2017).
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Whose Story Is It Anyway?

Beyond the page: A process review of using ethnodrama to

disseminate research findings. Journal of Health Communication,
22 (6), 532-544.
Tilleczek, K. (2011). Approaching youth studies: Being, becoming, and
belonging. Canada: Oxford University Press.
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). (1989).
UNICEF.
Waterloo Community Theatre. (2020, February 15).
Water, T. (2018). Ethical issues in participatory research with children
and young people. In Coyne, I. and Carter, B. (Eds.). Being
participatory: Researching with children and young people.
Springer International Publishing, 37-56.
Wong, J. (2019). Importance of the outsider. ArtsPraxis, 6 (1), 26-38.
Young, James O. (2008). Cultural appropriation of the arts. Oxford,
Blackwell Publishing.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Anna Glarin is the Founder and Co-Artistic Director of London-based
award-winning young people’s theatre company Waterloo Community
Theatre. She has a background in formal and non-formal education,
including eight years of teaching in London schools and several years
of managing arts events and creative programmes for all ages for social
enterprise Coin Street Community Builders on London’s South Bank.
She is a PhD student at York St John University and her practice-based
research explores the practice and potential of making theatre with
young people. Anna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).

24
ArtsPraxis
Volume 7 Issue 1
© 2020

Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre

Projects: The Case of Safe Cities (2015)

NKULULEKO SIBANDA
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

ABSTRACT
This account engages the aesthetic possibilities in the choice and use
of space in University of Zimbabwe applied theatre project, Safe Cities
(2015). This paper argues that design has, for quite some time, been
considered peripheral in applied theatre performances, thus creating
challenges for designers who seek to foreground communicative
efficacy on it. In most university projects, student-practitioners pay
particular focus on the performative presentation of their productions,
overlooking the influence of space on their performances. This article
exposes the blind spots in the choice and use of Beit Hall to host the
Safe Cities (2015) project. The article submits that beyond the efficacy
of an applied theatre project, it is fundamentally important for applied
theatre practitioners to pay particular attention and embed
scenography, in its totality, into their presentations.

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Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects

INTRODUCTION
This account engages the aesthetic possibilities in the choice and use
of space in University of Zimbabwe applied theatre project, Safe Cities
(2015) and, by extension to other similar applied theatre projects. The
article adopts, as its point of departure, Christopher Odhiambo’s (2004,
p. 6) observation that applied theatre projects are first and foremost
theatrical “performance about the people by the people for the people,
expressing their struggle to transform their social conditions and in the
process changing those conditions.” This characterisation of applied
theatre projects as purely theatrical performances demands an
analysis framework that moves away from an emphasis of effects to an
aesthetic experience (Thompson, 2011). Consequently, most applied
theatre projects in Africa have largely focussed on the efficacy of
narratives and dialogic nature of the presentations (Sibanda, 2017).
The central argument of this paper, which extends on my argument
elsewhere (Sibanda and Gwaba, 2017) is anchored on the pretext that
the Safe Cities (2015) project was principally a performance presented
to spect-actors, witnesses and audiences. As a performance, it was my
expectation that the students would deploy aesthetic designs to
complete their performance. Yet, when these students were assessed,
the aesthetic component was not considered and therefore did not
have an effect on the overall marks allocated to the students. It is the
contention of this paper that this act is ultra-vires the framing and
presentation of the project. I therefore, through this paper, seek to
highlight the missed aesthetic opportunities and blind spots that
university applied theatre projects such as the Safe Cities (2015)
project overlook.

SPACE AND POLITICS: PERFORMANCE AND PRACTICE AT THE

UNIVERSITY OF ZIMBABWE’S BEIT HALL
Space is an important and influential element in applied theatre and
theatre performance, in general. It affects and influences the theatrical
experience and communicative aspects, and shapes audience
meaning and reception of the performance. Performance spaces are a
site for the struggle between the power of performance in the arts and
the performance of power by the state (wa Thiongo, 1997, p.11). With
space come politics, horizon of expectations and meaning (Kershaw,
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 Nkululeko Sibanda

2000, p. 138). Pearson and Shanks (2001) in Victor Ukaegbu (2013, p

33) submit that, as a result of this politics, expectation and mode of
spectatorship, “audiences experience the performance in a state of
preparedness which derives from the past experiences and the way in
which they have chosen to order them and accord then significance.”
The applied theatre practitioner needs to exploit the “different
potentialities” (Sloan, 2018, p. 587) that may lie in his/ her chosen
space due to these different experiences brought by the participants
and facilitators.
The University of Zimbabwe’s (UZ) Department of Theatre Arts
uses the Alfred Beit Hall as its performance space. The Beit Hall is a
colonial residual space modelled as a proscenium arch design. It is
within this space that all university theatre performances, inclusive of
the case study project, are performed. The UZ’s Theatre Arts
programme, according Robert McLaren (1993, p. 36) was introduced,
initially as drama courses in 1983, as a strategy of transforming the
University into a ‘people’s university’ through fostering a symbiotic
relationship between the university and surrounding communities. In
1988, the UZ introduced the ‘Theatre in the Community’ course with
the sole purpose of training students in practice and methodology of
theatre for development and theatre in education (McLaren, 1993). The
course was divided into three modules: Practical Drama I and II and
Community Outreach. Students were taught acting, playmaking,
improvisation, script writing and directing under Practical Drama I and
II and used the Community Outreach module to gain practical
experience through performing collaborative community plays that
addressed development issues in the Harare community (McLaren,
1993). This paper submits that three and half decades later, the
University of Zimbabwe is still using this model for its applied theatre
courses. It is this foundation, pivoted in performance in its strictest
sense that I argue in this paper for the inclusion of scenography as a
part of the communicative strategy in projects such as the Safe Cities
(2015) especially in light of new research and developments in the
area (Mackey 2016; O’Grady 2017; Sloan 2018).
Although the Zimbabwean socio-cultural and economic landscape
has changed over the years, the approach to applied theatre practice
at UZ seems to have not changed. While in the early 1980s through
the 90s, students collaborated with the prisons and national army,
albeit with security imposed restrictions, currently students collaborate
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Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects

with primary and secondary pupils, government departments and civic

society organisations. This comes with its own gate keeping, self-
censorship and surveillance challenges. As it came out of the
deliberations during the Safe Cities (2015) presentation, government
institutions view university students as ‘enemies’ because they expose
them or put them on the hot seat when they do not have the juridical
power to make pronouncements or decisions. As a result the process
of getting clearance for applied theatre projects is long, tedious and
time-consuming, a privilege students do not have especially in a
semesterised education system. These challenges force students to
abandon the applied theatre process approach and adopt a
performance one, where they present a ‘play’ dealing with issues
raised during research and anticipate an in-depth discussion that will
yield positive results – navigating towards self- and collective
transformation. Because these projects are presented in the Beit Hall,
a known performance space with an inscribed conventional horizon of
expectations and meaning, I attest that students must adopt a
complete approach to performance or they run a risk of being labelled
‘badly performed pieces’.

SPACE AND SPECTATORSHIP

Marvin Carlson observes that spaces determine the social and cultural
interpretation of aesthetic designs. The use of a theatre or a space that
does not have a link or significance to the community necessitates the
semiotic interpretation of aesthetic designs from the perspective of the
space rather than community. When applied theatre performances are
presented in conventional theatre spaces or rented spaces, the social
realities confronted by the spectator are coded differently from his/her
conditions in the source community (Sibanda and Gwaba, 2017).
Nkululeko Sibanda and Privilege Gwaba (2017, p. 530) further submit
that the Theatre Arts degree programme at the University of Zimbabwe
has an integrated approach to teaching and learning that demands
students to transfer knowledge gained in one course in practical
examination of other courses. It is therefore a given that every
performance must draw knowledge and expertise from other courses,
to enrich the aesthetic image of the final presentation. This provides a
need to assess the influence of this teaching and learning strategy on
28
 Nkululeko Sibanda

the execution of applied theatre projects.

A (performance) space has the power to influence and transform
the audience into different states of spectatorship. This process of
transforming and shaping of participants through space is affixed on
conventions attached to the space. Buildings in which performances
take place are presented as ‘cultural spaces.’ These cultural spaces,
created by architects, enable practitioners to attach cultural codes that
determine the reception and appreciation of performances within these
spaces. These cultural codes are not only associated to the physical
forms of these spaces, but also the behaviours within these physical
forms (Balme, 1999, p. 228). The context specific spatial concepts
latent in cultural spaces influence performance space structures in
terms of their physical form show that “places of performance generate
social and cultural meanings of their own which in turn help to structure
the meaning of the entire theatre process” (Carlson, 1989, p. 6).
Aesthetically, spatial designs are therefore coded with meaning which
influence the spectator’s reception of cultural products. The Safe Cities
(2015) project was staged in the Beit Hall auditorium although the
spatial narrative of the performance located the characters in the
streets of Harare. Is the contention of this paper that the use of the Beit
Hall as a performance space characterised the participants into
different categories of spectatorship.
Freddie Rokem (2002) identifies three types of participants who
come to a theatre. There’s what he calls a spectator, an audience and
a witness (Rokem, 2009). A spect-actor is one who watches a
performance and participates in it (Boal, 2013). Ken Gewertz (2004)
submits that Boal’s spect- actor is free not only to comment on the
action, but also to step up on stage and play roles of their choice. In
doing so, they discover new ways of resolving the dilemmas that the
play presents. To bear witness is to interrogate the “role of the person
present and by extension, in the act of recounting the event that has
been witnessed” (Das, 2016, p. 20). The process of witnessing
describes an engagement with artworks that are created with the
intention to share intimate experiences such that they might allow for
possibilities of social transformation (Das, 2016). Kelly Oliver’s (2001,
p. 251) conceptualisation of witnessing invokes Augusto Boal’s (2013)
transformation of a bystander audience member into a critical and
participatory ‘spect-actor’ in performance. Boal’s approach to
performance separates a [passive] audience from an audience as a
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Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects

witness by destroying the barriers between a performer and spectator.

He observes that “all must act as protagonists in the necessary
transformation of the society” (2013, p. 34). An audience member is
one who comes into a space, passively watches the performance and
does not participate or comment till the end.
The role of applied theatre is to initiate transformation at an
individual and collective level. As a result, it demands the kind of a
participant who will actively and critically participate in the process of
problem identification, critical reflection and action-process towards
developing a solution to the identified problems. This foregrounds
Boal’s spect-actor as the ideal participant in applied theatre. Although
Das’ concept of the witness highlight characteristics critical to social
transformation, the fact that catharsis is at an individual level and does
not spur action towards collective transformation creates challenges to
an applied theatre presentation, such as the Safe Cities (2015) project,
achieving its desired objectives. The witness is couched in the hybrid
space between a passive audience member and a spect-actor; a no
man’s land in respect of applied theatre.

STAGING THE SAFE CITIES (2015) PROJECT AT THE BEIT HALL

The Safe Cities (2015) was a follow-up project to the Uses of Theatre
project (2014) conducted by the UZ’s Bachelor of Arts Honours Level
Two 2015 class (Sibanda and Gwaba, 2017). Initially, it was designed
as an intervention to address the frosty and condescending working
relationship between the Harare City Council (HCC) and informal
traders, at one level and HCC administration and the Greater Harare
Association of Commuter Operators (GHACO), representative
association of commuter omnibus operators, at another level1. A need
for a safe space for engagement was thus needed urgently for these
involved parties and the Safe Cities (2015) provided that platform for
discussion and interface between ZRP, GHACO, NAVUZ, Ministry of
Health and Child Welfare, Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises,
Ministry of Local Governance, Town Planners Associations,
Environmental Management Agency (EMA) and Harare City Council
on these issues, using the medium of theatre. The presentation
modelled as a workshop was conducted at the UZ’s Beit Hall with a

1 Please see Sibanda and Gwaba (2017) for a more in-depth narrative of this project.
30
 Nkululeko Sibanda

performance by the students followed by discussions between the

parties present who represented these different entities (Sibanda and
Gwaba, 2017).
While the Safe Cities (2015) project was performed at the Beit
Hall, the 2014 one used an open space at Copa Cabana2. Critical to
these two performances is that they were meant to attend to the same
spec-actors/ stakeholders, with the exception of the multitudes of
vendors and commuter omnibus drivers. This transposition of the
stakeholders to an enclosed Beit Hall ‘safe’ space within a recognised
university, far-removed from troublesome and ungovernable streets
creates a new horizon of expectation and directly affects the process of
engagement. This invokes Richard Schechner’s notion of “negotiating
with an environment, engaging in a scenic dialogue with a space”
(1994). In reframing the horizon of engagement from Copa Cabana to
the Beit Hall, the spect-actors, performers and facilitators of the Safe
Cities (2015) had to negotiate with the historically inscribed meanings
on the space during and after the performance. Interesting to note is
that during the post-performance discussion, spect-actors kept
referring to the presentation as a ‘performance’ highlighting the frame
through which they were using to engage both the project and issues
raised.
The use of a conventional performance space for a project that
demanded a site-specific space moves the presentation away from the
basic principle of applied theatre (Nicholson, 2005). When conducting
an applied theatre project, one should identify a community and work
with the concerned people in identifying common developmental
problems. Although, this has its own challenges associated with power,
hierarchy and interests, within the UZ set-up, it is the best approach.
Community located spaces grant relevancy and contextuality to issues
raised as these spaces are usually an embodiment of the totality of the
people’s lives and experiences. These spaces also grant the site-
specificity to the presentation and issues raised in performances. Yet,
the students who facilitated the Safe Cities (2015), identified a
community with a developmental site-specific problem but chose to
use the UZ’s Beit Hall, a space that belongs to a different community,
far removed from these challenges and its own historically generated
meanings and horizon of expectation. Once a site-specific community

2Copa Cabana is located downtown Harare. The performance took place on the edge
of a taxi rank.
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Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects

based project is taken away from that community, expectations and

meaning of performance change and issues raised lose currency and
agency. By bringing the project to the Beit Hall, the students therefore
downplayed the agency and currency of the issues raised and
sabotaged their project.
From a spatial aesthetic perspective, the Beit Hall was not the best
space for this kind of a project because when one walks into the Beit
Hall, they come with the expectation of watching a performance or a
show, not to be part of a dialogue or discussion. While the students
assumed (and expected ) that the audience would adjust to the forum
theatre presentation, I argue that this was an aesthetic oversight,
though historical, and has continued to affect applied theatre projects
at the UZ, in this instance created more challenges than opportunities
for the students. It is this failure to acknowledge the influence and
effect of spatial aesthetics on applied theatre projects such as The
Safe Cities (2015) that university and by extension, community theatre
practitioners disrupt the communicative efficacy of their presentations.
The use of the Beit Hall as a performance space for Safe Cities
(2015) project created all these three types of a participant. The
participants were made up of Theatre Arts students, officials from the
Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA), NAVUZ, Harare City
Council, the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education and the Ministry
of Health and Child Welfare. As the performance started, the student
performers invited everyone to join and participate in warm-up games.
The warm up games transformed everyone who participated into
spect-actors (Boal, 2013) or “actor substitutes” (Tompkins (2012, p.10).
However, these spect-actors did not participate at their free will, as
Boal demands, but through compulsion. In such a scenario,
participants are always aware that they are part of a scheduled and
determined process which must be undertaken so that the project rolls
on. Yet, during these warm up games, another group was created; the
witnesses. This group comprised most of the invited parties, mainly
from the two ministries, City Council and University of Zimbabwe
students, who were not part of the Theatre Arts Honours II class. This
group witnessed the warm-up games, giggling and laughing at those
who made mistakes and encouraging, by clapping, those that did well.
As such, this group was not fully active and participative such that they
could reach a stage of critical consciousness and self-awareness.

32
 Nkululeko Sibanda

The third and final group, arguably the biggest, that was created and,
emerged due to the choice of the performance space, was the
(passive) audience. As alluded to before, an audience member is one
who enters the performance space, sits, watches the performance,
applauds and leaves, without participating or commenting. An
audience member is not interactive with the performer or core-
audience members. The audience members were largely made up of
First Year Theatre Arts students, Ministry and CHRA officials. I
observe that these parties, especially those from the Ministry and
CHRA simply attended the workshop in response to the invitation. In
most cases, these were junior staff members with no power and
authority to make decisions and contributions that would have an
impact on the issues debated and operation of their organisations. As
a result, they sat and took notes, presumably so that they could use
them as proof that they attended the assigned event. It can be argued
therefore that, some of these officials attend these projects as part of
their organisation’s public relations management strategies. This is the
reason why there have been so many follow up applied theatre
projects over the years because issues are not debated conclusively.
These audience members only contributed when they had been asked
to do so, sitting comfortable in the ‘safe zone’ provided by the Beit Hall,
which sits in the heart of the UZ.
The failure by students to appropriate the Beit Hall into what Jenny
Hughes and Helen Nicholson (2016, p. 5) call an ‘appropriate ecology’
that allow indeterminacy, opens up possibility into potentiality. In using
the Beit Hall as a venue for the Safe Cities project, the students were
operating at a possibility level. Possibility is “what a thing can be said
to be when ‘on target’ and so it is limited by normative notions of what
that target should be” (Sloan, 2018, p.586). In staging the the Safe
Cities project in the Beit Hall, it was therefore received as a
‘performance’ in its normative sense, rather than an applied theatre
performance meant to create a platform for engagement.
If the students had explored the ‘potentiality’ (O’Grady, 2016) that
lay in the Beit Hall through design or took the performance back to
Copa Cabana, the Safe Cities (2015) project could have modelled its
participants into the desired ones if the students had chosen a
contextually relevant site-specific site. Although, in every performance
one is bound to find all these three types of participants, and even
many more, this project desired a specific type of a participant; the
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Negotiating Design in University Applied Theatre Projects

Boalian spect-actor. If the students had taken this project back to

Copa-Cabana, where the vendors and commuter omnibus operators
work from, the majority of the audience members would have been
transformed into spect-actors. The street is more interactive and takes
away the surety of safety granted by the university and the Beit Hall. In
the words of Cathy Sloan (2018, p. 586) such as a space “evades
normativity based on hegemonic values and the imposition of neo-
liberal social impact agendas.” Second, as a follow-up project, taking it
back to where it was initially performed meant that there was a
possibility for and/ of continuity. Some vendors and commuter omnibus
operators who participated in the previous edition could have also
participated in the 2015 edition, further enriching the discussions. In
drawing it away from the initial site of the first performance, continuity
was curtailed.

CONCLUSION
I have argued throughout that community theatre practitioners should
appreciate and understand the currency of what I term ‘the politics of
design’ (Sibanda, 2017). I frame the politics of designs as “a process
and conduct of decision making” in the creative process of developing
and implementing scenographic designs in performance (Sibanda,
2017, p. 322). For example, the politics of space relates to the
considerations of the performance spaces used for rehearsals and
performances. Most of these challenges that I have raised specifically
with the Safe Cities (2015) project are a result of a failure to appreciate
and understand the politics of design, which would destabilise the
suppositions of the Beit Hall. Key to this failure was the absence of an
appointed focal person in charge of design. If the students had
appointed a focal person to oversee their design needs, the Safe Cities
(2015) project would have communicated, effectively, at two levels and
allowed its spect-actors to enjoy a total theatrical experience, yet
achieve its set objectives.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Sibanda, N. (2020). Negotiating design in university applied theatre
projects: the case of Safe Cities (2015). ArtsPraxis, 7 (1), 25-36.
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 Nkululeko Sibanda

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Nkululeko Sibanda holds a Ph.D. (Drama and Performance Studies)
and teaches drama at the University of Pretoria. Dr Sibanda is a
practising scenographer in South Africa and Zimbabwe, having worked
with esteemed companies such as Theory X Media (Harare), Intuba
Arts Development (Durban), Harare International Festival of Arts
(HIFA) and Intwasa Arts Festival KoBulawayo. The need to develop a
formidable, relevant and effective scenographic theory and practice
model within Zimbabwean performance practice (from an African
paradigm) sits at the base of his research endeavours. His research
interests include African Theatre, alternative scenography, alternative
performance and identity and performance and memory.

36