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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2019
In 2017, a group of African women migrants and I devised Uncomfortable Conversations for FORWARD, a London NGO, to speak publicly about FGM and gendered marginalization. This article, braiding theories from Tompkins, Rancière and Kershaw, explores the effects on participating actors.
1 Rancière, Jacques, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 17Google Scholar.
2 Based in London, FORWARD (the Foundation for Women's Health Research and Development) is an NGO working for gender equality and the rights of African girls and women in the UK and Africa. I would like to express my thanks for the opportunity to work on this project to the administrative staff at FORWARD, including director Naana Otoo-Oyortey, Toks Okeniyi, Naomi Reid, Mahasin Abu and Kabung Lomodong.
3 Kabung Lomodong, FORWARD staff member, personal interview, 29 June 2018.
4 There was no set; simply a table and chairs, and minimal blocking and props. Staff members gamely jumped into roles at the last minute.
5 Kershaw, Baz, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 257Google Scholar.
6 While the NGO wanted to have this scene included in the play, no actors chose to work on developing it. I wrote it from the information provided by FORWARD staffers, and blocked it in parallel. The wife spoke the letter as the husband read it, allowing her to avoid looking directly at him (culturally appropriate for the actors). However, I had the couple turn to face each other in dialogue with a new understanding at the end.
7 Waite, L. J. and Cook, J., ‘Belonging among Diasporic African Communities in the UK: Plurilocal Homes and Simultaneity of Place Attachments’, Emotion, Space and Society, 4, 4 (2011), pp. 238–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Lesley Delmenico and FORWARD participants, Uncomfortable Conversations, unpublished manuscript, p. 16.
9 See Tompkins, Joanne, Theatre's Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014)Google Scholar.
10 In this setting, the private, backstage speech theorized by Erving Goffman entered the public sphere of civic discourse that Jürgen Habermas framed as the space of effective speech practices. This play's speech took place in an ordinary meeting room, repurposed for the evening as a place of theatrical performance, an alternative spatial practice that allowed out-of-the ordinary things to be said and new meanings to be created. See Goffmann, Erving, The Performance of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959)Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)Google Scholar. On the transformation of public space by unexpected (thirdspace) uses, see also de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
11 Tompkins, Theatre's Heterotopias, p. 1, defines a theatrical heterotopia as ‘a location that, when apparent in a performance, reflects or comments on a site in the actual world, a relationship that may continue when audiences leave a theatre’.
12 Erel, Umet, Reynolds, Tracey and Kaptani, Erene, ‘Participatory Theatre for Social Research’, Qualitative Research, 17, 3 (2017), pp. 302–312, here p. 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Polletta, Francesca, ‘Free Spaces in Collective Action’, Theory and Society, 28, 1 (February 1999), pp. 1–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 8.
14 Uncomfortable Conversations actors, personal interview, 15 June 2017. Actors’ expressed desires to participate further may have been simply polite, but appeared enthusiastic.
15 Kabung Lomodong, personal interview, 29 June 2018.
16 Actor F, personal interview, 26 June 2018.
17 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator.
18 Ibid., p. 16.
19 Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, pp. 34–5.
20 See Schechner, Richard, ‘Believed-in Theatre’, Performance Research, 2, 2 (1997), pp.76–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the effects of performances for communities by community actors.
21 Kershaw, The Politics of Performance, pp. 27–8.
22 Actors recognized the negative responses of some non-Muslim neighbours to women wearing hijab. One actor told an anecdote, incorporated into the script, about discussions with a neighbour about gendered Christian, Jewish and Sikh head coverings. She described that the neighbour, having interacted with her over time, came to the conclusion, ‘I trust you more than my daughter’. Lesley Delmenico and FORWARD participants, Uncomfortable Conversations, p. 15.
