Thirteen - Building peaceful communities: collaboration and co-creation through theatre

Summary

Introduction

State-centric binary understandings of peace and conflict have been critiqued for their inability to satisfactorily consider the range of actors involved, or the complexity of building peaceful communities, at ground level. Rebuilding societies and sustaining peace requires nuanced approaches that focus on people and are embedded in the everyday life of a given community. Practices and processes that can build community at ground level and create solidarity are important here. Thus, we need to explore creative, pluralistic approaches that can work with and through local cultures to successfully challenge ingrained conflict-prone and oppressive identities and ways of relating to each other.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how theatre can contribute to building community and peace in different contexts. Theatre has a history of being used for social and political transformation. Specific theatre forms, such as agitprop, bring politics to the ground to rally support for political causes (Brown, 2013) while Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) encourages dialogue and emancipatory action through participation (Boal, 2006). McCarthy (2012) offers theatrebased activities that are specially designed for development professionals and activists. As an approach that can be participatory and flexible (Nicholson, 2014), theatre can work in plural ways. However, there are limited studies on how different theatre forms are used to build community and peace in different settings, and we need further empirical and analytical inquiry into the area.

I examine two theatre groups for the ways in which they build community in their respective contexts: Jana Sanskriti from India and Jana Karaliya from Sri Lanka. Jana Sanskriti, as a political theatre group, engages with communities in West Bengal through Theatre of the Oppressed, tackling issues of structural injustice and inequality. Jana Karaliya, as a multi-ethnic, bilingual mobile theatre group, addresses the ethno-linguistic divisions resulting from the Sri Lankan conflict, and brings together Sinhala and Tamil communities. Thus, the groups differ in their approaches towards theatre and community engagement. The chapter illustrates how, despite these distinct entry points, both strive to build peaceful communities through their respective processes of artistic collaboration and cocreation. Jana Sanskriti challenges narratives of structural violence and unsettles the present in the communities they work in, while Jana Karaliya produces narratives of interethnic cohesion and encourages envisioning a shared future.