Deep Listening in a Feminist Popular Theatre Project: Upsetting the Position of Audience in Participatory Education

Abstract

Investigating the participatory, collaborative, and conflictual character of learning within feminist coalitions was the focus of an interdisciplinary community-based project that used popular theatre as the methodology. Popular theatre, with its creative approach to analyzing, naming, and acting on problems and working creatively with conflict, created a unique opportunity to enrich and complicate one's understanding of deep listening—an embodied and active stand-point for speaking and listening across difference. This article outlines some of the deeper under-standings about feminist politics, theatre processes, and the creation of democratic sites of learning that emerged from this study. The authors focus on theatre processes that created new opportunities for high-risk storytelling and deep listening. Insights from this study can be applied to the learning processes of movements for social justice, particularly feminist coalitions, and to the ways the participatory process and democratic intent of adult education class-rooms are understood.