Abstract
Coping with global environmental change demands new forms of civic engagement and interaction able to transform passive audiences attending to the drama of unsustainability into committed actors for sustainability. This entails linking diverse sources of scientific knowledge with personal experiences, emotion and ethical judgments. In this paper, we assess the potential as well as the limitations of innovative theatre-based participatory tools and methods aimed at supporting sustainability learning and agent transformation. To this aim, we first review a series of experiences using theatrical performance and introduce the notion of performative methods. Second, we assess to what extent these new approaches can be of relevance in environmental action research and sustainability science, practice and learning. Finally, we list a series of key research questions to further guide methodological innovation in this promising area of sustainability science and practice. Our findings show a growing and successful use of such methodologies worldwide, both in academia and in implementation-oriented approaches. An increasing number of topics and complexity is being embraced by these methods, offering a fertile ground for innovation in participatory sustainability science.
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We associate both the artistic and the aesthetic practices and experiences to those expressive activities whose interpretations (unlike science) do not require a single or predefined code of interpretations and therefore are open to multiple meanings depending on the contexts and interactions between artists and their audiences. This is coherent with the framing of sustainability as a procedurally emergent property of social practices (O'Shea 2012) and this is why our research mostly focuses on the procedural and conceptual aspects of arts-based reasoning and practice, that is, on the processes that create possibilities for reflexivity, experiencing and reframing, rather than on final outcomes of the art work.
As observed by Conrad (2004), we borrow this term from performance studies and anthropology, where it is used as “performative research or inquiry”.
Although the empirical basis for this article are the experiences reviewed from the literature, it also builds upon the knowledge of the main author, who has been member of theatrical collectives for the last 10 years and has training in social theatre, as actress and facilitator.
Our approach is akin to phenomenological tradition in sociology (Berger and Luckmann 1967) in so far as we understand knowledge always as socially constructed and whereby facts and truths are mediated by social arrangements, contextual interactions and commitments. From this perspective, what is crucial in the understanding and in the creation of the various forms of knowledge and learning is not only the ‘objective world out there’, but also the mediating artefacts and entities between them and the individuals (e.g., texts, language), as well as actual experiences and other social processes (with regard to the role of the evolution of body and movement and its relation to knowledge, see Ingold 2011). While we consider that looking at the contributions of phenomenology is especially important in integrating everyday and commonsense knowledge as well as in the creation and interpretation of meaning, our focus in this review is much more limited. In particular, we narrow our analysis on a first account of experiences already using such perspective in the development of participatory methods in environmental and sustainability research.
This term was first introduced by Schön (1983) to describe knowledge inherent in practice that, like in the artistic process, is developed in a constant reflective manner (doing- reflecting- doing again-reflecting, etc.).
According to the author, the search process of sustainability is first and foremost to be understood as a search for self-reflective, dynamic and porous “cultures of sustainability”, acknowledging that culture includes the combination of values, beliefs, symbols, practices and “scripts” or rationalities that characterise social life in a specific spatial and historical context (Kagan 2010).
Based on Dewey’s understanding of aesthetics as experience and Bateson’s notion of the aesthetics as the pattern that connects, Kagan defines aesthetics of sustainability as “a form of relation and process-centred aesthetics, which bases itself on a sensibility to patterns that connect at multiple levels” (Kagan 2011). This sensibility is unfolded in practice in many different ways through: topics that connect diverse patterns of relationships between different dimensions or levels of reality (considering as much antagonisms and competitions as complementarities and symbiosis); open processes enhancing skills for multiple reflexivities (beyond more rational ones); and explicit political values within an open-ethical framework (Kagan 2010).
Table S1 is available in the electronic edition of this journal as Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM).
Evaluation methods applied and outcomes are present in the ESM. More discussion on assessments is presented in Sect. 3.
Applied drama was incorporated in Africa during the 1980’s and 1990’s, mostly under the form of Theatre for Development, which has been increasingly applied as a way of enhancing popular participation in the development process (Mda 1993).
Legislative theatre was created in the late 1980’s by Brazilian theatre director and practitioner Augusto Boal. Boal, was the father of the Theatre of the Oppressed, one of the most influencing applied theatre approaches, and through Legislative theatre he developed a variation of Forum Theatre as a tool to engage people in policy making (Boal 1998). In Legislative theatre, the audience is composed of technicians, elected representatives and citizens. From the insights and discussions facilitated by the interactive forum theatre play, the audience makes proposals of action. These proposals are then reformulated in legislative terms by the technicians and discussed and voted during the session, generating policy proposals as an outcome of the session.
PAR involves researchers and participants working together in a cyclic and self-critical research process oriented towards explicit social change and it is aimed at co-producing shared benefits of the research process. PAR processes are generally designed as a participation continuum (Pretty et al. 1995) negotiated by co-researchers and participants during the ‘research’ process. Its action-oriented and locally committed approach hence creates a more flexible and socially owned process, where a diversity of methods and epistemologies can be put into practice.
At this point a distinction between changing individual behaviour and transformational change should be made. Indeed, individual behaviours may change but this does not mean that such changes will bring about transformational change (e.g., adaptive changes without any intention or effect on changing the actual contextual or structural/system conditions).
In this way, we understand that, in contrast to other more positivist or reductionist approaches to knowledge production and understanding, these alternative forms of experiencing and learning can be more conducive to transformational change. Nevertheless, it is true that transformational change, and even less sustainability transformational change will not be guaranteed per se, precisely due to the complexity, open-endedness and the many uncertainties derived from any conscious intervention in the dynamics of social-ecological systems.
In the last decades an ecocritical discourse has been slowly permeating different theatrical and performance art practices and theorisations outside the realm of applied theatre (see, for instance, Giannachi and Stewart 2005; Kershaw 2007; May 2007; Heddon and Mackey 2012). Due to the scope of the paper, in the following analysis we will focus only in applied theatre’s potentials and limitations.
Generative themes, or meaningful thematics within the universe of participants (Freire 1970), have the potential to trigger a rich aesthetical dialogue and critical reflection within these spaces of creative exploration, as they unfold into again as many others and express dialectical interactions with their opposites.
Institute on Environmental Science and Technology- ICTA (UAB), Barcelona, Spain. The experiment was carried out as part of an event called “Passion and Interdisciplinarity: a dialogue about interdisciplinary dialogue”, co-organised by Katharine N. Farrell, in February 4, 2013.
Following Maanen (2009), by this we mean the direct effect or experience that comes into being through interaction with the artistic utterance.
Indeed, unresolved tensions within the process put at risk the participatory nature of this approach. As a few examples, non-resolved hierarchies within the group may lead to a colonization of interpretations and views, reinforcing an uncritical status-quo (Hamel 2013) and tensions associated to the influence of the facilitator/artist, can result in an intervention of participant’s discourses, imposing a pre-determined ideological agenda (Snyder-Young 2011).
See, for example, the experience of the European Commission with artists, scientists and ICT, available in: http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fet-open/docs/ict_and_art/ict-and-art.pdf and http://www.euclidnetwork.eu/files/artandictreport.pdf.
Barone and Eisner (2012) propose some general criteria as a starting point for judging quality in ABR. These include: incisiveness, concision, coherence, generativity, social significance, evocation and illumination (see reference for further development).
The assessment of impacts in applied theatre is still an unchartered field for practitioners. See for instance Etherton and Prenkti (2006) and the special issue “Impact Assessment and Applied Drama” Research in Drama Education, Vol. 11, Number 2, June 2006.
For instance, instead of internal and external validity, Rolling (2010) speaks about interpretive and iterative validity. Acknowledging that in the arts it is not plausible to isolate cause from effect, interpretive validity invokes each of the multiple readings within a research study to serve as a criterion for trustworthiness. On the other hand, iterative validity stands in opposition to the predictive character and generalizability of external validity, invoking instead the self-similarity of variations on a concept over time.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Grant (FI-DGR-2011) from the Catalan Government. We would like to thank Katharine N. Farrell for her reflections and for providing the opportunity for developing the theatrical workshop at ICTA, as well as Arnim Scheidel, Fiona Thomas and Ilan Chabay for their helpful feedback. Also special thanks to all the participants of ICTA’s workshop, and to Inma Pascual and Óscar F. Vega, for their fantastic work as co-facilitators. J. David Tàbara would like to acknowledge the Knowledge, Learning and Societal Change project (www.klscproject.org), the support of the Global Climate Forum (www.globalclimateforum.org) and of Carlo C. Jaeger in particular. Finally, we would like to thank the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers which greatly helped us to improve the final text.
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Heras, M., Tàbara, J.D. Let’s play transformations! Performative methods for sustainability. Sustain Sci 9, 379–398 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0245-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0245-9