Theatre of Imagination: Reclaiming our Bodies as an Emancipatory Peace Praxis in Africa

In this presentation, “theater” will adopt the African meaning of the term to signify and amplify the heuristic, discursive and inclusive liminal spaces in the community and the larger society. It is significant that theater in most African settings is radically different from the way theatre is understood and practiced in the West (actually most African languages have no equivalent for "theater"). For instance: (a) theater in most African settings is both formal and informal space where the division between the storyteller/performer and thespectator is easily blurred; (b) theater is a hybrid of expressive arts that would include song, dance, storytelling, dramatic skits, amongst others; and (c) is fundamentally a process of education, of passing knowledge from one generation to another and, more significantly, of resolving problems in the community. Theatre therefore is also conceived as a way of knowing and being the African world. This presentation will showcase how theatre has been utilized by Green String Network to provide grassroots communities with repertoire of humanizing tools and pedagogies to break cycles of internalized oppression and communal violence as pathways to reclaiming human agency and imagining social change in Africa. The presentation will include a little bit of theatre exercises and movement activities interspersed throughout the presentation with discussions at the tail end. The session will be open to all participants at different stages of expertise in their embodied fields related to transforming issues of trauma and social change in inter- cultural contexts.