Yearning to learn: a pandemic-inspired approach to grief literacy

The COVID-19 global pandemic exacerbated and altered death- and non-death-related loss, insisting that grief and bereavement adhere to protocols that were unfamiliar and sometimes even prohibitive to moving forward in a healthy manner. As a dying, death, and loss educator who explores grief using applied theatre methods with children and adolescents, I responded to this recommendation by contemplating safe and novel ways to provide acute support within these new and uncertain parameters. To meet the long-term needs of the bereaved, development of grief literacy was recommended (Breen et al., 2022). When my beloved uncle Chris died unexpectedly on May 17th, 2020, I grappled to negotiate my own pandemic-restricted grief. This caused me personal and professional angst: if I, with the appropriate tools and strategies at hand, was struggling, how was I ever going to be capable of holding space for others? I yearned to learn how to grieve in this new realm to subsequently hold space for others and enrolled in an online workshop to learn about digital storytelling. This autoethnographic study examined my own pandemic-restricted grief experience through the digital storytelling workshop’s process and product (digital story) as well ascertaining its applicability in my applied theatre praxis within dying, death, and loss education. [...

Arts-based approaches to promoting health in sub-Saharan Africa:A scoping review

Introduction: Arts-based approaches to health promotion have been used widely across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), particularly in public health responses to HIV/AIDS. Such approaches draw on deep-rooted historical traditions of indigenous groups in combination with imported traditions which emerged from colonial engagement. To date, no review has sought to map the locations, health issues, art forms and methods documented by researchers using arts-based approaches in SSA. Methods: Using scoping review methodology, 11 databases spanning biomedicine, arts and humanities and social sciences were searched. Researchers screened search results for papers using predefined criteria. Papers included in the review were read and summarised using a standardised proforma. Descriptive statistics were produced to characterise the location of the studies, art forms used or discussed, and the health issues addressed, and to determine how best to summarise the literature identified. Results: Searches identified a total of 59 794 records, which reduced to 119 after screening. We identified literature representing 30 (62.5%) of the 48 countries in the SSA region. The papers covered 16 health issues. The majority (84.9%) focused on HIV/AIDS-related work, with Ebola (5.0%) and malaria (3.3%) also receiving attention. Most studies used a single art form (79.0%), but a significant number deployed multiple forms (21.0%). Theatre-based approaches were most common (43.7%), followed by music and song (22.6%), visual arts (other) (9.2%), storytelling (7.6%) and film (5.0%). Conclusions: Arts-based approaches have been widely deployed in health promotion in SSA, particularly in response to HIV/AIDS. Historically and as evidenced by this review, arts-based approaches have provided a platform to facilitate enquiry, achieved significant reach and in some instances supported demonstrable health-related change. Challenges relating to content, power relations and evaluation have been reported. Future research should focus on broadening application to other conditions, such as non-communicable diseases, and on addressing challenges raised in research to date

Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) at Home: Digital Art-based Mental Health Provision in response to COVID-19

This article will provide an example of how the Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP): online psychosocial support through the arts in Rwanda project used digital art-based workshops to facilitate social and community cohesion and mental health provision. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increased need for psychosocial support due to the economic and social pressures of lockdown and yet, many individuals had less access to mental health provision. While many mental health services around the world went online, there was still a gap between the Global South and Global North in terms of digital literacy, access to smart phones and computers, and the variation between psychosocial support through individual versus collective healing alongside indigenous and traditional versus Western psychosocial approaches. Implications for the use of art-based digital methods as a tool for mental health provision during and after the wake of the pandemic are explored

Deadly Masculinities: Towards a Theatrical Toolbox for Exploring Identity and HIV with Young Malawian Men

My thesis examines the effectiveness of a range of participatory theatre-based methodologies as tools for enabling young men to examine and interrogate dangerous formulations of masculinity. My hypothesis was that current applications of Theatre for Development in Malawi are woefully inadequate for the purpose of meaningfully engaging with young men in order to help them stay sexually safe and to examine their understandings of Malawian masculinities. Therefore, my study primarily set out to investigate what theatre forms can be impactful for engaging with young men to explore these masculinities that increase their, and their partners, HIV risk and to enable them to define themselves as male in alternative ways that mitigate high-risk sexual behaviours and violence against women. In chapter one, I discuss the history of popular theatre in Malawi. Chapter two analyses the existing problems with the teaching of TfD at Chancellor College and NGO TfD methodologies in contemporary Malawi. In chapter three, I discuss my practical theatre-based experiments on masculinity and HIV with groups of male students from two secondary schools (Mulunguzi and Dzenza) and one university campus (Chancellor), before concluding with the findings of my research. I argue that in Malawi young men are under social pressure to perform masculinities that increase their HIV risk, and that of their partners, in order to affirm themselves as men. They do this by taking on high-risk sexual practices such as not using condoms, having multiple sex partners and being violent towards women. It is my contention that unless young men are engaged to challenge and change these ‘deadly’ constructions of masculine gender identity the disease will continue to spread. My findings show that the methodology I experimented with impacted some participants; however, in order for meaningful change to occur this work needs to be further developed and boys and girls have to be engaged using creative and critical thinking to discuss sexuality, gender and HIV

Oudano as praxis: archives, audiotopias and movements

Several Namibian studies have looked at Oudano as an expansive Oshiwambo and Rukwangali concept that implies utterances of play, performance, and performativity in spheres of culture, sports, religion, and politics. This thesis offers experiments that explore the critical usefulness of Oudano. I embark on these experiments in a deliberately undisciplined way, crossing media, time periods, ethnicities, geographies, and emphasising embodiment and mobility. In the process I show how Oudano is a practice of critical orientation in various respects, by looking at cultural work that questions institutional constraints and exclusions. This study departs from the disjuncture between cultural work that is authorised by hegemonic national heritage discourse and unauthorised cultural work in action, offering other ways of knowing with different aims that slide into the cracks, between and outside of power. The disjuncture endorses structural disparities that are a direct result of a cultural hegemony, its aims and exertion of power. I was motivated by a deep anxiety caused by Namibia's post-apartheid dominant epistemologies that fundamentally exclude indigenous and subaltern methods of knowledge production. This thesis was aimed at finding a range of conceptual and methodological approaches for critical consciousness and radical imagination across place and time. I made a choice to focus on a set of ‘unrelated objects' which include my cultural practices and those of other cultural workers in Namibia. African queer and performance theories are interfaced with Oudano to demonstrate the relatedness of these objects. The objects gathered and analysed in this study were given status of archive to point to their role of memory making in social and cultural movements. Methodologically, I relied on Archival research and Practice-as-Research (P-aR) to interweave my (performance and curatorial) practice and historical research. The thesis is a collection of six papers divided in two movements which offer specific insights about the various objects of analysis. These objects include lino-cut prints, rock art, colonial photography and sonic archives, performance art, museum theatre, site-related performance, jazz, struggle music, HipHop, Kwaito, Shambo, documentary film, orature, oral history, protest action, as well as curatorial practice. Given its epistemic potential, Oudano is a generative approach of decolonising our understandings of performance cultures. Through close reading and listening to works of Oudano produced in Namibia, I demonstrate how people have historically practiced Oudano to construct audiotopic imaginations and build social movements. While this offers decolonial lessons for both performance and archivality, Oudano is an indigenous framework of preserving and queering knowledge. In that sense, a queer understanding of Oudano exceeds geo-political and ethnic borders, signifying how it has historically accompanied historic migrations of artists and material culture, as well as activists and non-normative ideas. By reading Oudano across time allowed this study to interrupt periodisation, showing Oudano's potential as a trans-temporal practice. Overall, this study contributes to the long- existing gap of performance studies as a field in Namibian studies. It pays attention to overlooked archives of cultural work, most of which have hardly received any scholarly attention. The thesis exceeds my disciplinary training of drama and theatre, demonstrating Oudano as an intellectual praxis that is leaky, slippery, and undisciplined

The dramatic property: a new paradigm of applied theatre practice for a globalised media culture

This thesis tests through theatre and drama the Dramatic Property as a new paradigm of Applied Theatre activity. It does this through the artistic practice of The Dark Theatre, Cambat and the livingnewspaper.com - projects developed by Paul Sutton, Artistic Director of the Theatre Company, C&T - and through the analysis of these works. These are presented here as four Dark Theatre comics, an archive CD-ROM of the Cambat website and two CD-ROMs for the livingnewspsaper.com. The first of these is an actual part of the livingnewspaper.com project, as used by participants. The second disc is a presentation of the processes and functions of the project on and offline. The written component of this thesis marks out the practical and theoretical territory that the paradigm of the Dramatic Property seeks to occupy. It does this by setting out the early practice of C&T and by identifying the factors that led the company to seek to develop a new model of practice. It then moves on to explore young people’s relationship to the fabric of early twenty-first century media culture and their engagement with it. It argues that the processes of drama naturally underpin this fabric, particularly when considering immersive digital media. It then goes on to extrapolate from the practice-as-research dimension of this thesis the concepts, forms and synergies that underpin the paradigm as a whole. In particular it identifies five qualities so far generic to all Dramatic Properties and maps out the synergies that underpin their value to the paradigm. Finally, case studies of the three Dramatic Properties under examination contextualise and theorise the practice documentation

A Stage of Emancipation

As the prominence of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can foster social emancipation. This volume of essays uncovers a wide range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish culture and society, both historically and in more recent times. The Gate’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Michéal mac Liammóir, promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During Selina Cartmell’s current tenure as director, cultural diversity and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the Gate’s agenda, with various productions exploring issues of ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised societies

Into Ulwembu: exploring collaborative methodologies in a research-based theatre production on street-level drug use in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Over a yearlong creative process starting in 2014, The Big Brotherhood, Mpume Mthombeni, Dr Dylan McGarry and myself, Neil Coppen, came together to devise a collaborative theatrical intervention in response to the ‘whoonga crisis’—a proliferation of heroin-based street-level drug abuse—in Durban, South Africa. The transdisciplinary, action-led, research process we adopted for Ulwembu would emerge as, and be refined into, an applied, syncretic theatre-making methodology—a methodology that we would come to call ‘Empatheatre’. Over this thesis, I provide a detailed narrative around the research, devising and dissemination of our production, unravelling the context and conditions from which Ulwembu arose, as well as unpack the process of testing and shaping our new methodology, arriving at an iterative definition of the Empatheatre methodology. By focusing on a variety of practices and methodological approaches employed across research-based theatre forms, I explore some of the complexities that arise when one attempts to bring research to life on the stage, including how empathy in applied theatre approaches may be considered either a ‘cathartic cop-out’ or ‘epiphany inducing catalyst’. In acknowledging the integral role empathy was to play—both in shaping our creative journey and our critical responses as practitioners, as well as impacting the reception of the production—I attempt to measure the pedagogical impacts of our project on both the Empatheatre practitioners and audience members. I do this primarily—but not exclusively—through the lens of the pedagogical empathetic impacts that the devising and dissemination of Ulwembu was to enable. I ask, firstly, how the experience of co-creating Ulwembu—and our deep immersion in the research process—transformed our understanding of street-level drug addiction and the way we subsequently devised Ulwembu. These transformations also shaped the way we intend to approach social justice theatre projects of this kind in the future. In exploring this process, I take a critical look at my own role and function within the Ulwembu theatre-making processes as cofacilitator, playwright and director. Secondly, I ask if, how, and to what extent, our Empatheatre methodology and production was able to shift perceptions around drug use and the whoonga ‘problem’ in Durban and inspire greater reflexivity in local city institutions and organisations, to ultimately move them collectively towards less judgmental and more compassionate outcomes