Through community-engaged performance, I explore theatre’s role in: creating and reflecting on community, examining and proposing solutions to real-life problems, addressing and repairing injustice and trauma, and transmitting history. This creative research is co-created with my students, in dialogue and reciprocal exchange with our community partners. 

My approach to community-engaged performance draws from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, which he developed in dialogue with Paulo Freire’s teachings in Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s. Joining a vibrant group of theatre artists and scholars who have worked to update these compelling theatrical tools for diverse settings, I take inspiration from the writings, pedagogy, and practice of Boal, Freire, bell hooks, Michael Rohd, Carolyn Levy, and others to teach and share community-based theatre (CBT) tools for community building, embodied understandings of power, dialogue, and creative, collaborative enactments of freedom and justice. 

I have been working to combine CBT with performing the archive (inspired by my collaborator Amma Y. Ghartey Tagoe-Kootin) techniques. These allow us to express and interpret history creatively, with our bodies and artistry. We present original historical archival materials (e.g.., newspaper articles, photographs, personal letters, diary entries, and testimonies) to audiences by way of our performances, therefore exploring how we (as students, teachers, and community members) can carry, learn from, and grapple with the past in the present. Theatre invites us to wake to histories and legacies of violence and oppression. We imagine and rehearse for more just, collaborative futures together. 

This creative work is intertwined with my teaching and my community engagement. I devise collectively with my students, and our creative process involves experiential learning in interpreting archives and understanding history and its afterlives. Our workshops and performances are always built on collaborations and community partnerships. I develop the projects in dialogue with partners and community organizations, in response to needs identified by our partners.