Street Rat: An Ethnodrama

Acting Up: Theater of the Oppressed as Critical Ethnography

“…This is an explicitly political and social way of doing drama. Contemporary scholars have developed this further, using drama to resolve conflicts and address social concerns (Salazar, 1991; Saldaña, 1999, 2003, 2005). A variety of alternative forms of theater sharing these basic ideas gained popularity in recent decades.…”

“…The purpose of this paper is to report on methods and findings associated with my adaptation of Boal's (1985) Theater of the Oppressed for critical ethnography. This paper contributes to a growing scholarship that uses theater as research (Conrad, 2004; Donmoyer & Yinnie-Donmoyer, 1995; Norris, 2000; Saldaña, 2005). The particular research questions include…”

Amicus cum Laude: Ethnodramatic Inquiry Regarding Sharing Mental Health in College

“…Although sometimes used interchangeably, Saldaña (2005, 2016) noted ethnodrama is a written script from data while ethnotheatre is the art of making the script into a live performance for an audience based on the data. Nonetheless, the goal of ethnodrama/theater “is to investigate a particular facet of the human condition for purposes of adapting those observations into a performance medium” (Saldaña, 2005, p. 1). Although researchers placed the roots of ethnodrama/theater in ethnographic methods (Mienczakowski & Morgan, 2001), any researcher could create an ethnodrama/theater so long as they embrace both embodied and experiential knowledge (Tracy, 2019).…”

“…Because the two studies I detailed above were from the opposite perspectives of participants around the same topic, I wanted to put these two pieces in conversation with one another to provide a more holistic understanding of disclosure processes regarding mental health. To answer my question, I decided to create an ethnodrama, or script that details the lived experiences of the human condition (Saldaña, 2005). Thus, to answer my research question while creating a coherent narrative, I combined both extant data sets into one set of data.…”

“…From Ensler’s (2000) portrayal of women’s reproductive health and sexual experiences in The Vagina Monologues , Yorkey and Kitt’s (2010) representation of bipolar disorder in Next to Normal , to Levenson et al’s (2017) story of social anxiety and suicide in Dear Evan Hansen , the modern theatrical experience not only entertains but brings lived experiences of stigmatized conditions from the private into the public sphere (Wallin, 2013). In acknowledging this power of the theater, researchers use a methodology described as ethnodrama—creating a theatrical script from data (Saldaña, 2005)—which serves participants and those represented “to elevate and legitimize their individual experiences” while giving “them hope that the institutional systems, in which they felt trapped and ill-served, could be made visible to the public” (Eakin & Endicott, 2006, p. 56). Thus, to understand ethnodrama as a method to create the participants’ lived experiences to page and from page to stage, I (a) explore ethnodrama as a method of artistic inquiry particularly prescient in mental health-related contexts, (b) discuss a guide for creating an ethnodrama from extant mental health data, and (c) offer implications to consider in translating the provided ethnodrama into ethnotheatre.…”