This paper reflects on my experience of using personal stories to create a Pot Gan performance exploring the complexity of how lives are lived, how the experience of climate change is shaped by poverty and struggle, but also strength in facing adversity. Bringing real stories to the stage had more meaning, emotion and personal connection for…

In this article, I focus on the empowering potential of a participatory practice that frames walking as integral to a performative, self-mapping, and aesthetic process. By discussing my experience as a participant in "Ere Be Dragons" (2007), a work by the artists collective Active Ingredient (Rachel Jacobs and Matt Watkins), I set out some new…

This paper focuses on issues of embodiment specific to the experiences of an asylum seeker represented in the play "Refugitive" (2003). The play was written and performed by Shahin Shafaei, an Iranian asylum seeker who spent a period of 22 months in an Australian detention centre. The narrative of the play emerges through a conversation…

This essay seeks to unpack some of the issues concerning representation when performing refugee stories using playback theatre. It questions the reductive influence of narrative structure and, using the framework of "artist as ethnographer," it argues that strong aesthetic production is required to overcome the dampening effect of empathy when…

The happy ending is that The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah has arrived at a clear statement of aims and objectives, and the long story is the 20 years of theatre making within the field of theatre in education, involving moments of clarity followed by periods of complete confusion as to why we were doing what we were doing. The question which…

In this article, the authors respond to Jerzy Trzebinski's "Narratives and understanding other people." The first author's viewpoint comes from his work as a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a social psychiatrist preoccupied with rehabilitation and recovery for people with severe mental illness. According to him, Trzebinski's work raised important…