Workshops
University of San Jorge
Entering Community: Community Specificity as a Prerequisite for Collaboration
Workshop Presentation Megan Lovely
How can theater facilitate an artist’s understanding of their relationship to their surrounding community? As a community-based artist, I have often thought about where I’m reaching towards in my collaborations, and less about where I’m reaching from. In addition to where I’m from, there’s also the who, what, when, and why I’m from. In my eagerness to decenter myself as a white artist and help tell marginalized stories, I have taken myself out of the story entirely. Doing so has only perpetuated the dominance of the white narrative. This workshop is a group exploration of the communities we come from, how we shape and are shaped by our communities, and how we carry our communities forward with us in our collaborations. Guided by the Story Circle methodology of Junebug Productions and Roadside Theater, and Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre exercises, participants will co-create a definition of community. Through reflecting on the power and limits of the stories that pattern their communities, they will rehearse new modes of relating across differences. It is a microcosm of my own experience moving to Baltimore, MD. Presenting my self-research in a workshop setting invites participants to contribute their own community histories to my thesis that community specificity is a prerequisite for collaboration, contributing to the forward trajectory of the field of community-based theater.
Born to Stand Out: The Role of Hip Hop for Young South Sudanese Australians in Building Political Voice to Resist Australian Whiteness Discourse: An Interactive Multi-media Workshop Featuring Alternative Forms of Artivism View Digital Media
Workshop Presentation Sarah Williams
This workshop explores the role of Hip Hop for building the political voice of young South Sudanese Australians to resist Australian Whiteness discourse. It draws evidence from 35 interviews, artefacts and a youth participatory action research project facilitated by a small non-profit organisation, Footprints. Findings suggest that participants reject any goal or focus on ‘fitting in’, and instead together we developed the notion of being ‘born to stand out’. South Sudanese Australian Hip Hop artists actively define their diaspora identities in resistance to the backdrop of harmful political agendas relating to their presence. Through the topic 'born to stand out' artivists are carving out space in the face of Australian Whiteness discourse and essentially create their own lane or alternative subcultures. Through the lens of new social movements and critical race theory, this research complements recent scholarly work in Australian and international youth development studies by further incorporating race and ethnicity as a central theme. It does so by exploring how the political voice of this group of young South Sudanese Australians manifests in important new ways that conventional theories of activism and resistance may not capture. Findings point to the necessity to further explore racialisation discourses through the ways in which young people re-frame and assert their multiple identities through their Blackness; pride in culture and establish themselves as social agents in the world. Through a consciousness-raising journey utilising Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy, this challenges the perception that young South Sudanese Australians remain apathetic to issues surrounding their communities.
