El estado y las políticas públicas

Applied theatre, as a form intending to be mutually progressive, inclusive and transformative can often be sacrificed in order to promote a different ideology ‘which may not be really compatible with the concrete situation and mind set of the people it needs to reach […] therefore turning out to be an imposition’ (Prentki, 2015, p.39). This implies that the benefits of the work may be compromised and sacrificed for the intentions of a wider, and often political, process.

As an example, Thompson explains how he became conscious of a major political association within his work. When undertaking discussions about ‘the Unicef-funded project in Northern Sri Lanka in 2000, he became more conscious of the dual nature

79 of applied theatre’ (in Arnot, 2009). During the day he was creating issue-based drama pieces about the effects of living in a war zone; but through the project he faced the difficulty of separating the work being identified as a form of resistance, from it being sacrificed as a form of propaganda. He questioned whether through the project the ‘theatre/performance event doubled up as recruitment for young children into the Tamil Tigers’ (Arnot, 2009).12 _{The example demonstrates how the benefits of the work can}

be overshadowed and sacrificed to the overriding political process and suggests that regardless of how well intentioned the work professes to be; it is bound to agenda and politics.

Community sacrifice can also be found in the destruction of diversity as projects praise the similarities and not the differences of a culture. Cultural plurality is inconvenient for development and often it is the preferred outcome for cultures to not ‘get in the way of political or economic progress [and instead] share a set of universal values which make them respond uniformly to change’ (Prentki, 2015, p.64). This is tied up with community sacrifice, and Conquergood’s (1985) ‘Four Ethical Pitfalls’ which are referred to as performative stances progress this notion. Conquergood presents: ‘the custodian’s rip-off, ‘the enthusiast’s infatuation’, ‘the curator’s exhibitionism’, and ‘the sceptic’s cop-out’ as the extreme corners of a moral map which relate to ‘when one seeks to express cultural experiences which are clearly separate from his or her lived world’ (Conquergood, 1985, p.4).

‘The enthusiast’s infatuation’ looks at the idea of sacrifices which trivialise the community by asking ‘aren’t all people really just alike?’ (Conquergood, 1985, p.6).

12 _{‘Tamil Tigers are a guerrilla organization that sought to establish an independent Tamil state,}

Eelam, in northern and eastern Sri Lanka’ (Arnot, 2009). They are classed as one of the most organised, effective and brutal terrorist groups in the world.

80 This favours ‘a glaze of generalities’ (Conquergood, 1985, p.6) and the identification with the community here is superficial and surface. This may attend only to similarities, therefore being in danger of becoming a vehicle for exploitation and community sacrifice. Projects become unconcerned with specific cultures, and instead aim towards a sacrifice for ‘the universal’. This is a process of appropriating, decontextualizing, representing and sacrificing cultures through its direct connection to the political process. It is often an application that oppresses those:

‘who are not European, white, male, middle-class, Christian, able- bodied, thin and heterosexual. The ideal expressed in much of the literature in critical pedagogy is that students should be encouraged to speak with their "authentic voices" thus making themselves "visible" and help them define themselves as authors of their own world […] However, sharing these experiences can be problematic: White women. Women of colour. Men of colour. White men against masculine culture. Fat people. Gay men and lesbians. People with Disabilities and Jews do not speak of the oppressive formations that condition their lives in the spirit of "sharing”’ (Grady, 2003, p.75).

Transformation then is often in danger of being used and presented as a vehicle to undermine collaborative reflection by situating human experience as an individualistic transaction, rather than a communal negotiation. This links the work to neoliberalism, shifting from the community and social to the individual and personal.

Projects that only address the similarities of the community universalise all participants and present them as one and the same and can be seen as a programme of activity that does little more than confirm the social order. This is an example of intersectionality in which the oppression and discrimination becomes the result of an individual's social identity. Therefore instead of emancipating ‘marginalised’ communities from their oppression, they are intersectionalised and disadvantaged by

81 ‘their race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and/or other identity markers’ (Crenshaw in BostonBlog, 2017).

Conquergood also explores the risk of highlighting only the differences between cultures, sacrificing a community in its desire to ‘astonish rather than understand’ (Conquergood, 1985, p.6). Conquergood’s study of the ‘curator’s exhibitionism’ is committed to the differences between the practitioner and the community, ‘the wild- kingdom approach, which grows out of the fascination with the exotic, primitive, culturally remote’ (Conquergood, 1985, p.7). Community members are used for demonstrative purposes, they are made into museum-exhibits and according to this view the project sacrifices the community to exploit differences.

To demonstrate an exploitation of differences, Baxter & Low (2017) offer the example of the South African project of the early 1990s titled Sarafina II. In 1995 the Department of Health awarded the playwright Mbongeni Ngema upwards of R14 million (£637,000) to produce and tour a musical based on AIDS for local learning and entertainment purposes. The musical was deemed to be entirely misleading on the subject of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and dying and was questioned regarding its relevance, faithfulness and ability to really create change. The suggestion that the director undertook no research nor contacted any AIDS organisations to support the construction of the work demonstrates the lack of knowledge by the practitioner(s) in relation to the issue suggests that ‘Sarafina II is a classic example of how a top-down, big budgeted approach is applied to a small medium and how this kind of quick-fix solution can ensure failure of an otherwise useful strategy’ (Durden in Francis, 2012, p.4). It also more significantly suggested that the project ran the ‘risk of undermining objectives of health intervention, putting people’s lives at risk and bringing the

82 theatrical approach into dispute, due to only sufficient and contextual knowledge of the issue’ (Baxter & Low, 2017, pp.69-70).

It is important to recognise the tension of both over-familiarising yourself with a culture you have little or no prior experience of or entering a community and promoting your own values and ideals at odds with what the community needs and/ or would benefit from (assuming that the starting point of the project is representative of an outsider going into a community, rather than specific groups working in partnership to help define the practice. See 3.1.1). The sacrifices made for transformation can often be at the behest of a community. To avoid any element of sacrifice is difficult, but there must be an attempt to try and promote an open dialogue with those involved in the work in order ‘to develop a culture not based on methods and models of change, but on shared political values and on an ethics of practice’ (McDonald, 2005, p.70). It will be important to recognise that applied theatre, whilst intending to achieve inclusion, progression and transformation may simultaneously, and perhaps unknowingly, achieve its antithesis.