Toward "Compassionate Witnessing": Community-Making Through Theater

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

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:
In this paper, we would like to reflect upon the impact on our visiting research team from Toronto, Canada, who spent 10 days in Coventry, England, during the tumultuous time of the Brexit referendum, witnessing an oral history performance process for a group of young theatre-makers. Brexit, and the ensuing political discourse, was instrumental in shaping our experience of Coventry and our engagement with the youth. We put forward the notion of “compassionate witnessing” to make sense of what it means to receive the stories of youth, and wrestle with our desire to represent justly not only the young people we met, but also ourselves as receivers of their stories, their worries, their pleasure, and their hope, offering some important ideas about how to navigate international research with youth in times of social and political global uncertainty.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
We draw on Arendt’s (1979) notion of ‘visiting’ others’ stories, as opposed to simply consuming them. More importantly, she challenges us to work in such a way that critical categories are not imposed on, but inspired by, one’s engagement with a phenomenon (see Disch 1994).

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
The data informing this paper emerge from the oral history performance process carried out by Canley Youth Theatre, a youth theatre group of the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England. The paper will draw from individual interviews, participant observation, performance recordings, field notes, and other artefacts as points of analysis, from our visit, as well as digital data shared through the on-line communication platform of our global study.

RESULTS:
For ourselves as researchers, as with the young theatre-makers in Coventry we observed, we put forward the notion of “compassionate witnessing”, which is about finding a “distance from which one can offer one’s attention, thought and emotion” as part of “intellectual rigour and dedicated consideration” (Tracey, 2017, p. 8). This paper is a move in that direction as we consider what it means to respectfully, creatively and compassionately share with others the youth stories and creative practices so generously shared with us.

SIGNIFICANCE:
There can be no doubt that growing inequality, economic polarization, and social dislocation are threatening strong pedagogical models of learning and youth citizenship; interlocking crises (economic, political, ecological, forced migration, war…) are, in short, threatening the very stability of a world order. We were witness to many hopeful practices in Coventry, England, where we not only admired how the young people and their adult collaborators experimented with the drama pedagogy of oral history performance but also how their very practice was a model to us of how to listen with care to others, how to be unthreatened by difference, how to accommodate a diversity of views and how to respond creatively to the darkness of a political moment.

Author

• Nancy Cardwell, University of Toronto