Nurturing Dreams, Cultivating Sisterhood: What a Drama-Informed "Universe of Care" Teaches Us Through Counterstory

• In Event: Dreaming the Possible: Exploring Global Worlds and Micro-Ecologies Using the Pedagogies of Drama

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:
This paper draws from data from our site in India - Prerna Girl’s School, located in Lucknow, and educating girls from lowest castes and socio-economic backgrounds. Specifically, this paper interrogates how these young girls, whose futures have been over-determined by a patriarchal society, see possibilities and dream big, in and through the pedagogy of critical feminist dialogues that employ applied theatre techniques as a force for change.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
Using a Desi-centered theoretical framework becomes important to simultaneously contextualize the experiences of the Prerna girls both in a historical and contemporary moment. This paper draws on critical feminist theory (Mohanty, 2003) as well as Singh’s (2009) ideas around the aesthetics and politics of Indian feminist theatre.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
The data informing this paper emerge from the Verbatim theatre work done by the Prerna girls during Year 1 of the research project. The paper will mobilize individual interviews, participant observation, performance recordings, field notes, and other artefacts as points of analysis, as well as digital data shared through the communication platform of our global study.

RESULTS:
This paper will use counterstory to illustrate the discoveries about this site, specifically focusing on Nita – a 22-year old Prerna graduate. She worked on the verbatim theatre devising process, played the lead role in the performance, and now as a graduate of Prerna, continues to work with Prena’s parent NGO. Nita, like many Prerna girls, faces constant pressure to get married and take up employment, often at the cost of their own dreams. In observing their devising process, speaking with youth like Nita, we learned that there is a pressing tension – they don’t want it to be an either/or choice – either dreams of another life, or succumb to the pressures of early marriage, leaving school, and domestic servitude. The girls talk about wanting the space to be both/and; to seek agency to define their identity and their futures on their own terms.

SIGNIFICANCE:
The Prerna girls seek the space to negotiate where, when and how their responsibilities might be fulfilled. As young women, they yearn for autonomy where they can self-author their dreams that simultaneously accommodate while also subvert and resist tradition and the new global world order of increasing exploitation of the young and vulnerable in the global south. This macro-reality is most vociferously challenged by the school’s philosophy of “universe of care” along with the pedagogy of critical feminist dialogues that frame their learning. This locally-attuned story sheds much light on how marginalized communities, here and elsewhere, often come to practice hope as a political alternative that is radically lived in the present.

Author

• Dirk J. Rodricks, University of Toronto