ABOUT
About
What is Empatheatre?
Empatheatre is a research-based, theatre-making methodology that emerged from friendship and solidarity between artists, academic researchers and responsive citizens. The process begins with extensive action-based research in which co-participants and key partners work to identify matters of concern and a pressing central question.
Through these research explorations the team works iteratively to shape the research data into an engrossing, relevant and true-to-life theatrical experience. The theatre production offers new ways of seeing different perspectives on a complex situation, and above all honours the participants’ narratives. The script is first performed to participants and partners to check the credibility of the play.
Performances are then rolled out to strategic audiences. Audiences are made up of people with different levels of agency, power and privilege in relation to the matter of concern. Audience members are invited who hold diverse, even conflicting, views on the central concern represented in the play.
Post-play facilitated dialogues with the audience allow for another layer of reflexive data to emerge in relation to the issue of concern. In this way Empatheatre is a method of conducting and publicly interrogating research that democratises the way in which we surface and co-create knowledge.
Theatre making as research
Empatheatre allows us to amplify a chorus of voices, particularly those of marginalised groups, with and for our non-academic research partners, in powerful and validating ways. It allows for collaborative exploration of research findings and their implications, with diverse publics; in this way it can help to bridge the divide between multiple research disciplines, policy forums and the wider society. The methodology is not merely a way to share findings from research, or a device for one-way dissemination. While accessibility and reach of research to a broad public is an aspect of the methodology, the research and theatre making processes are inextricably linked throughout:
- IDENTIFYING A CONCERN: In collaboration with partners the Empatheatre team identify, or are approached by civil society, on an area of social conflict and concern. Further discussions assist in refining research questions.
- RESEARCH: After an initial literature review, research is carried out through narrative methods, such as interviews, focus groups, oral histories and archival records. The data is analysed collectively by both the research and theatre team to develop the first iterations of the script.
- MEMBER CHECKING: Early readings of the script are ‘Mirrored back’ to partners on the ground and participants through table readings, often leading to reflexive iterations of the script.
- PERFORMANCES: The play is then performed for strategic audiences. Each performance is followed by a post-performance facilitated discussion.
- ADVOCACY AND POLICY FORUMS: The research and theatre team work extensively to build up a wide network of partners through which to stimulating public conversations about the research issue, to share findings from the research and to invite strategic audiences. This moves the research into direct contact with governance and policy processes, with the aim to bring about transformations in decision making.
Complex problems in unequal societies require careful yet rigorous explorations of different ways of knowing, being and doing. When popular and political debates are polarised and filled with judgements, entangled livelihoods and marginalised voices are often ignored. It’s why we believe that creative and empathetic methods can facilitate multiple forms of listening to and sharing knowledge across diverse publics. Empatheatre is one such method. Emerging from the South African context, Empatheatre has, over the past five years, developed innovative new ways of constructing social spaces for equitable public dialogue. Creating an amphitheatre for empathy that embraces rather than shies away from complex entanglements in society.
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