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“Teaching how to think, versus what to think”: Improvisational theatre rehearsals as queer praxis for sex education in higher ed

Wed, April 23, 12:40 to 2:10pm MDT (12:40 to 2:10pm MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 303

Abstract

Butler (2016) calls us to challenge the binary that constitutes the oppositional relationship between vulnerability and resistance and, instead, to imagine that vulnerability could be the very condition for resistance. By drawing on this ontological commitment as a framework of inquiry, this paper examines improvisation rehearsals with an undergraduate theatre-based sexual health peer education program as praxis for queering sex education in higher ed.

This program was part of a dynamic course combining sex education training, artistic reflection, and improvisational theatre. Students workshopped creative assignments inspired by their personal experience to devise an original show, which they performed for local high schoolers. Because these assignments were deeply personal, students mentioned that writing them for an audience felt risky (Goffman, 1990). Their rehearsals, grounded in improvisation, invited students to experience vulnerability critically: with a sense of safety and intentionality that made this exposure to risk productive (O’Grady, 2017). Our institutions equate vulnerability with passivity, precarity, and danger. However, these improvisation rehearsals afforded students the autonomy to transform vulnerable moments into opportunities for embodied resistance (Butler et al., 2016; Vasudevan, 2023) to lay bare, make sense of, and connect over tensions surrounding their personal narratives.

This paper draws on Boal’s (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), which challenges the decontextualized, disembodied, and prescriptive curricular approaches often used in traditional and abstinence-based sex-ed. TO uses theatre games and improvisation exercises as embodied pedagogy to spark collective awareness around oppressive forces (Freire, 1968). As a “rehearsal for life,” TO reminds us that we are always performing, constantly producing and reproducing our identities within everyday social interactions (Waring, 2017). The Boalian methodology is inherently queer, rejecting the didactic nature of education and embracing the messiness of dialogue to explore multiple possibilities rather than dictate one solution (Cavanaugh et al., 2023). Thus, these improvisation rehearsals acted as a heuristic to investigate practices of sexuality that exist outside of the established binaries.

Incorporating bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy (2014) into my methodological orientation, I enrolled in the course alongside the undergraduates. I used an ethnographic person-centered approach (Levy & Hollan, 2015), collecting data from class rehearsals, our final performance, and interviews with three focal participants. Our interview space was an extension of our rehearsals where we co-examined our experiences in the program (Vossoughi & Zavala, 2020). Discourse and narrative analysis, and autoethnographic methods were employed to triangulate across data sources.

Analysis demonstrates that the improvisation rehearsals invoked behaviors that sought to build intimacy (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). For example, the students took initiative to break out of the dramatic frame through laughter and metacommentary about what they just rehearsed
(Bateson, 1953; Goffman, 1974). While “breaking the frame” goes against standard rules of improvisation, this context, metaxis or in-betweenness (Boal, 1992) allowed students to share their personal stories in a way that felt safe.

This paper contributes to educational research that anchors knowledge in young peoples’

experiences and desires. With increasingly restrictive sex education bills, theatre as pedagogy empowers youth to act based on what they do want rather than focusing on what they do not want or wish to avoid. This issue has real-world implications. Many of the students in this ensemble were queer youth of color whose experiences continue to get silenced. Foregrounding their stories is a step toward remedy and repair.

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