The Performative is Political: Using Counter‐Storytelling through Theater to Create Spaces for Implicated Witnessing

Abstract

Performative counter‐storytelling can be a powerful experience for both the artists who create these stories and the audiences who witness them. This study examined audience responses to a counter‐narrative (entitled “AMKA”) performed by Africans in Australia which intended to present more complex, holistic, and strengths‐based representations of their communities than those currently circulated by dominant discourses. Guided by a critical whiteness lens, the study explored how 34 self‐identifying white audience members interpreted the performance and how they questioned whiteness by assuming the role of implicated witnesses. Following thematic analysis of mixed closed‐ and open‐ended post‐performance survey responses, audience members made connections between the content of AMKA and the contemporary political and cultural contexts in which it was performed and began to examine their positions of privilege and power. This study has provided evidence for the potential of political theater in creating spaces of encounter whereby responsible listening positions can be nurtured in the journey toward dismantling personal, and potentially structural, racially‐based injustices.

“Why is it that all the Dangerous Children are Black From the Neighborhoods?”: Critical Phenomenology of the Concept of Risk Among Adults Educated at Therapeutic Boarding Schools

“…Why are the interactions between individuals' classifications and the classified individuals themselves not at the core of the proposed intervention programs in RCSs (Follesø, 2015)? Why have the clinical and educational experts in our studies, as in other RCSs (Foster & Spencer, 2011), not attended to the socio‐therapeutic alternatives (or counterstories; see Maxwell & Sonn, 2020) offered by the at‐risk children?…”

Freedom dreaming from the university‐community nexus: Relational praxis as counterspace

“…For some people who defined themselves as Anglo or white Australian in the surveys, the performance generated various effects, for some the injustice conveyed revealed a psychological distance, as one person shared that what they had learn from the show was a

reiteration of how as a white person being seen as ‘the norm’ in society, how much is so easy for me. But that this is not always a good thing, in ignoring our own culture, ancestry and history we’re muting our own understanding of ourselves and the world and limiting our connection with others (Audience Member, as quoted in Agung‐Igusti & Sonn, 2020, p. 61).

For others it produced a sense of shame, and others rejected the discomfort, choosing not to see injustice, ‘I do not get anything from a piece of theatre when the actors are only playing aggression to get their point across’ (quoted in Maxwell & Sonn, 2020, p. 55). For those who identified as from African and other racialised diasporas, there were resonances, the story was familiar, and their parents had shared similar stories of displacement, of being othered, and of re‐membering cultural practices in the re‐mooring of stories, metaphors, and memories.…”

“Strained relationships”: A participatory action research study examining relationships between Black communities and historically White institutions.

“…After much research and reflection, we searched the literature and learned of performative counter-storytelling, a technique to artistically communicate and present issues related to social justice (Maxwell & Sonn, 2021). While we knew we had a collection of "powerful" stories, we wanted the characters to "come alive" and evoke real emotion.…”