The Researcher and the Philosopher's Stone

My work in community theatre is driven by a desire to find the voices of the participants, and to locate a means of amplification. However, when I sat down to write an account of my most recent project, I could not find my own voice. Eventually, I came to appreciate the irony. For months I had worked with young people who seemed to have little opportunity to 'speak'. They clamoured to be heard, and revelled in the drama experiences I brought to them. On occasion, it seemed that they were able to find a voice, through workshops, and performance. Sometimes they didn't know what to say, or were reluctant to use the opportunities to reveal themselves, but they liked being asked. I wanted to make sense of this and to report my findings about the importance of aesthetic processes and community identity in disengaged communities, and about finding ways of collective art-making in which responsibilities for form and content could be shared. Words failed me.