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STAND Foundation Summer School Course with Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni.
STAND Foundation Summer School Course with Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni.
Empatheatre: A four-part interactive course on the Emaptheatre theatre-making methodology
Facilitator: Neil Coppen, Dylan McGarry, Mpume Mthombeni.
Course description: Empatheatre is a research-based, theatre-making methodology and award-winning Theatre company which emerged ten years ago from friendship and solidarity between artists, academic researchers, activists and responsive citizens.
The Empatheatre 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.
Over four sessions, Empatheatre co-founders Neil Coppen. Dylan McGarry and Mpume Mthombeni will talk through case studies of their companies previous productions as examples, guiding participants through the process of developing their own mini Empatheatre monologues and pitches.
This course is aimed at anyone interested in using theatre to address social justice concerns as well as exploring the possibilities of theatricalizing and making accessible aspects of academic research.
Length of course: 4 sessions of 2 hours each
Venue: Online, Zoom
Number of participants: 15
Dates: 9, 11, 16, 18 March
Times: 16:00 to 18:00
Fee: R250
Bursaries to cover fees and data to facilitate participation are available
To apply, click here
Empatheatre with support from the Bertha House, is excited to be hosting a screening and post-film discussion around Complicite’s film Can I Live? at the Bertha House cinema in Cape Town on the 12th of October from 16:00 - 19:30.
Empatheatre and Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA)in association with Amehlo Productions are proud to present a short documentary film centring on the devising of their acclaimed musical theatrical production Umkhosi Wenala .
How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa.