The Art of Witness in Popular Theatre

Abstract

Popular theatre is traditionally a movement from the grass roots where people outside mainstream culture “tell their stories” through all stages of the process: to each other, to the artists and cultural animators who work with them, and to an audience. It is a public and distinctly pedagogical enterprise, with aims historically rooted in the efforts of disenfranchised peoples throughout the world to stage and realize alternatives to the status quo. I have worked in this field as an animator and playwright since the early 1980s, primarily in Toronto and Vancouver. Recently, a concern has risen amongst me and my colleagues about how little we understand of what actually happens inside the process of telling and listening. People who bring their stories to popular theatre have often lived through incidents of psychic and social disruption that may result in them carrying a living memory of trauma. What might this mean to our practice?

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