How Narrative Performance on Stage Made Transformation Possible: A Case Study

Abstract

A burgeoning literature on narrative identity has emerged during the last decades simultaneously with a “performative turn” in the methodology of qualitative social research; both changes indicate a move away from the paradigm of “representation” that emphasizes linear and singular interpretation of “facts” and toward an acknowledgment of the complexity of the social world preferring a dialogic space, open for multiple interpretations and voices. This article aims to explicate how a nonrepresentational narrative stage performance, “We Are All the Same,” by a group of people who had suffered from mental illness opened up space that made transformation possible.