"We want to be heard!" : A study about community theatre with adolescent girls

The subject of this study is a community theatre for, with and by girls aged 13–17. The theatre practice is situated within the field of applied theatre and as a communitarian practice engages with artistic, social and political ambitions by staging the everyday of marginalised people. When describing and researching these kinds of theatre practices, emphasis is often placed on their democratic potential and positive notions of empowerment. However, the challenges which arise when participants with little or no previous theatre experience are to perform their lives in front of an audience are not often discussed in research. Accordingly, the aim of this ethnographic study is to explore how the participants’ lives are turned into creative and artistic expressions in the drama room and staged in front of an audience. By working with post-constructionist and spatial theories, humans as well as space, place and affectivity are acknowledged as co-producing actors. These theoretical positions, articulated by philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, Gillian Deleuze and Michael Foucault, enable an analysis of how place, playfulness and vulnerability influence the theatre practice and how it simultaneously produces both possibilities and constraints for the girls. In four articles, the study addresses how tensions are produced in the process of staging the everyday. Article I engages with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, addressing how the drama room is co-created with local context while also being an isolated room. Through an analytical mapping, the article discusses how theatre practice enables the girls to act creatively in relation to limiting norms in the drama room and other places such as school. Article II focuses on how vulnerability is both a generative and restrictive force when creating artistic expressions. The study points towards the importance of professional leadership that can navigate through multilayered spaces that are explorative as well as artistic. Article III breaks with the somewhat taken-for-granted role of playfulness in community theatre and applied theatre. The analysis implies that although playfulness creates agency in relation to restricting norms, playfulness can at the same time reinforce these norms. The article also challenges ideas of how playfulness bridges the gap between creative explorations and professional art. Article IV explores how the content of the theatre practice is created through negotiations between bodies, affects and feeling as well as space and place. Through the concept of an extended relational didactics, the article also discusses how the leader can relate to a content that is highly unpredictable and co-created by several actors. Altogether, the four articles show how community theatre is both a relational and spatial practice that is consistently transforming. Moreover, they show how frustration, confusion and exclusion as well as pride, joy and agency are part of the practice by exploring tensions such as those that exist between ethics and aesthetics. The study suggests that the participants’ experience is more likely to be positive if the leaders are able to navigate through the multiple spaces that are produced in the theatre practice while also being firmly established in the local context