Performance as Language for Change, and the Scholarly Debut

I was surprised when I was invited, from Colorado, to attend this year’s Texas Educational Theatre Association’s Academic Symposium: It Happens Here had been nominated as a project embodying the use of a second language to communicate for social justice. That language? Performance.

I traveled to Texas, where I presented my report on the project to a room of scholars, professors, students, and practitioners, who responded that the project was inspiring and bold.

I had just thought it was necessary.

This was a performance project featuring interactive installations, immersive performances and invisible theatre. I conceptualized the project and created it with a set of students who were upset about the institution’s response—and lack thereof—to the #MeToo movement. The language of the academy wasn’t working. The infrastructure through which students could respond was convoluted. So, we created another way to communicate the need for direct attention and action regarding this issue.

We staged scenes of violence throughout campus and engaged staff, faculty, and students who were present to respond; to become active; to practice interrupting the systems currently in place. We worked with the Phoenix Center at Auraria to develop immersive scenarios in which participants could experiment with supporting victims in situations which they recognized as theatrical—in opposition to our invisible theatre scenarios, which invited participants to engage without knowing the event was staged. We also partnered with the visual arts department to create interactive installations throughout campus which served both to inform and to gather personal narratives of harm occurring on campus as evidence that the issues being discussed in the #MeToo movement do, in fact, happen here.

It was, as Boal states, theatre being implemented as rehearsal for revolution. It was performance that invited the audience to engage, to question, and to call for change when the language and dialectics most often used in academia faltered our U.S. socialization to ignore and quietly endure harm. And the administration, seeing this tide rising, responded.

I am honored to be able to say that the board of the Texas Educational Theatre Association Academic Symposium awarded me with the first place Scholar’s Debut Award for this project and the corresponding paper which I wrote about it, and that I was able to provide consultations and assistance for other professors who would like to create similar projects on their own campuses. When the languages of politics and academia fail, the language of performance speaks to empathy and enacts change.