FWF-Workshop #ConnectingMinds VOICEsEMPOWER

Description

VOICEsEMPOWER investigates the “Theatre of the Oppressed” (TO)’s potential to empower women, girls and their allies and enhance gender equality in contemporary Europe. To this end, our transdisciplinary project combines scholarly work on theater and dance studies, political science and social psychology with the practical know-how of artists, educators, therapists, social workers and political activists.
TO is a specific form of participatory theater that was developed by Brazilian Augusto Boal in the 1970s; its aim was to facilitate dialogue and enable social change. Reinvigorating the TO in the context of contemporary Europe could help address persistent gender inequalities. Despite significant advances in recent decades, much remains to be done (from pay gaps to unequal representation) to achieve gender equality. The TO might act as valuable tool to move beyond habits of gender stereotyping and enable social change against gender inequalities. How so? TO’s methods of voicing inequalities shift the focus from representation to participation in both aesthetic and political terms. The TO dissolves the boundaries between actors and spectators and creates spect-actors. Participants are encouraged to become protagonists on stage, and re-write the ‘drama of their life’. In this intimate and protected space, participants can experiment and perform actions that they considered unthinkable before. This practice of alternative modes of thinking, feeling and perceiving can open the space for different perspectives that go beyond narrow gender concepts, norms and relations.
The critical revisiting of the TOs artistic methods is a necessary first step for examining its potential in the contemporary European context. Since the struggle for equality cannot ignore the intersections of gender with race and sexuality, our revisiting of the TO is strongly linked to decolonial and queer studies. Implementing Boal’s idea of theatre as a ‘rehearsal of revolution’ for a gender equal societal order, our transdisciplinary project investigates if, why and how the revisited TO may offer a potential pathway to inform social change through artistic practice. VOICEsEMPOWER studies the TO both as art (aesthetical strategies) and intervention (experimental treatment) for understanding issues of gender inequality (awareness) and for acting out solutions (action). Interweaving social activism and aesthetics, our project aspires at a model of empowerment and agency against gender inequalities through artistic practice.

Period	17 Dec 2020 → 19 Dec 2020
Event type	Workshop
Degree of Recognition	International