UC Davis

This dissertation rethinks applied theatre facilitation from a hemispheric perspective, to revalue its impact. I argue that affective transformation is a central aspect of applied theatre that is too often overlooked, when the focus is placed only on social change, which is not liberatory when instrumentalized within neoliberal institutional agendas that promote self-development rather than addressing systemic inequality. I propose that an affective approach to facilitation can provide frames for liberatory transformations by making space for the emergence of counterhegemonic, life-affirming relationalities, rather than producing measurable results, particularly in Latin American spaces of (de)humanization. There has been much interest in theater as a public sphere⁠ for human rights claims, emphasizing the ways representational performances intervene in hegemonic discourses. This framework, however, remains trapped within socially constructed concepts of individual identity and largely ignores how applied theatre also moves us towards a more collective experience of being. I argue that face-to-face creative encounters call attention to our response-ability as relational, sentient, embodied beings, which extends beyond that which can be understood subjectively or represented in symbolic and narrative terms.

A motivation for this research is the sparse dissemination of contemporary approaches to applied theatre coming from Latin America. Most of the existing texts in English are products of the Global North and inadvertently reproduce (neo)colonial epistemologies; a more decolonial framework is needed, from the perspective of the Global South, to allow a focus on experiential knowledge from below. I therefore look at case studies of my own and others’ practices in diverse Latin American contexts of (de)humanization, from immigrant detention centers to victims’ groups, from displacement, disappearance and deportation to privileged detachment, in Colombia, Chile and California. Each case study generates distinct insights about negotiating complicity and resistance within violent state/institutional processes of isolation and confinement (understood here as dehumanizing enclosures). There is a common need to reassert the humanity of all those involved in a decolonial sense (by presencing our implication in vital networks of care, as response-able to and interconnected with other lives). This offers an alternative perspective to the large body of existing research that focuses on representation and social integration, moving the conversation from individual self-development towards feeling-with and being-with.

The chapters track how different approaches to affective facilitation emerge in each context. Chapter 2 explains how the concepts afecto and cuidado emerge from my practice-as-research with (im)migrant women incarcerated in Chile and Central American youth detained in California. Chapter 3 examines three Colombian facilitators’ projects that engage female victims/survivors of the armed conflict, exploring how narrative representation and embodied copresence entwine to facilitate healing. Chapter 4 reveals how audiences can be moved by recorded testimonial performance to feel viscerally response-able to histories of violence, through an analysis of my practice-as-research moving-with digital stories of deportation to Mexico and the embodied testimonies of female victims/survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict. Overall, I show how engaging bodies in kinesthetic expression and witnessing in relation to narrative, each other and the context, can facilitate afecto (a connection of care and solidarity), in diverse ways, allowing all those present to attune to love-for-vitality. My main argument is, essentially, that the impact of applied theatre is not only the effect on our ideas and (inter)actions, as in social change, but also a widened sense of what is possible in terms of ways of being and becoming in/with the world.