Facilitating consent, voyeurism, and power: improv and image theatre, sexual (mis)conduct, and the limits of critical pedagogy in drama workshops with British Muslim youth

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on two moments from drama workshops I conducted with British Muslim youth in Manchester, UK, this paper explores how we – as facilitators – should wield power vis-à-vis image and improv theatre. Through an intersectional racialised and gendered (auto)ethnographic analysis of the straight, Brown, Muslim, male theatre workshop facilitator’s role, I draw on embodied knowledge to argue that the positionalities and assumptions of the facilitator are themselves forms of power, ones that – unexamined and unaltered – risk turning techniques like improv and image theatre into tools of oppression rather than liberation, undermining the possibilities of critical performance pedagogy in the process.