The Hospital Scene: Deepening Democracy with Theatre-led Inquiry

Abstract

This chapter proposes one way of building democracy through theatre. The empirical content is drawn from a workshop conducted in Greece 2019, at a conference dedicated to performance activism worldwide (“Play Perform Learn Grow,” 2019). Performance activism draws upon the human capacity to play, create and perform, the premise being that people – even if their economic, social and/or political interests are in conflict – can create new relationships, new activities and new ways of moving forward together. The aim of the workshop was to allow a creative conversation that would unpack multiple ways of creating understanding from a real-life incident from rural Uganda, in which a pregnant woman was refused help to give birth at a clinic. Theoretically framed within Brechtian thinking and the concept of deep democracy as introduced by Amy and Arnold Mindell (Amy Mindell, 2008), the chapter argues that the theatre-led inquiry contributed to destabilise customised thinking and provide potential for multifaceted thinking and awareness. In this way, the workshop design enabled complex and embodied ways of reflecting, providing an example of how to build and deepen democracy through theatre.