A brief context introduction on ethnotheatre

In the transition to the 21st century and the disciplinary areas of theatre (Saldaña 2011), education (Cranston & Kusanovich 2016; Finley, 2005), health (Mienczakowski 2001; Mienczakowski 2009; Gray & Sinding 2002), and oral history (Pollock 2005), ethnotheatre begins to be thought and conceptualised as practice and methodology. In the scope of the contamination between anthropology and theatre, the emergence of ethnotheatre echoes the performative turn, and the creation of new interdisciplinary extensions for anthropological sensitivity embrace artistic practices as a process of participant observation and of producing other outputs then writing (Ingold 2013; Dattatreyan, E. G. & Marrero-Guillamón, I. 2019). These studies highlight a reconfiguration of traditional inquiry, ethnographic methodology, and social drives. Fieldwork became a progressively collaborative process (Estalella and Sánchez Criado 2018; Lassiter 2005), a more performative rather than informative knowledge (Fabian 2004). The other genealogic arm comes from what has been called community-based performance (Cohen-Cruz 2005), applied theatre (Nicholson 2005), social theatre (Bernardi and Malini 2021) or, more broadly, community theatre.

Ethnotheatre as methodology 

Ethnotheatre is a critical world-making practice that combines ethnography, social knowledge and the performing arts. As an art-based methodology, it aims to research a common ground with a group of people to adapt these observations and knowledge to an aesthetic performance as the practice of participant observation, and the anthropology toolkit methodology. It dramatises personal, sociocultural observations and real-life arguments in a social context. The performance-based artistic practice is the trigger or elicitation for participant observation to accomplish the ethnographic gesture. It is also the opportunity for creating community definitional ceremonies (Myerhoff 1982) – a self-defining ceremony within a community of practices (Lave and Wenger 2009), meaning a group of people connecting a shared know-how or form of living, framed as a social practice that characterises situated learning and nurtures community membership. Ethnotheatre becomes both a tool for ethnographic research and social inclusion practices.

From the perspective of anthropology as a way of doing things, as action research, ethnotheatre ensures the path to the context of analysis with which we want to work, reconfiguring the framework of the research practice, diversifying the roles of the researcher, the nature of encounters with the interlocutors, the interview apparatus, the sensible forms of mapping, and the possible modes of documentation. It expands participant observation, enriching the mode of ethnographic expression with art-research outputs closer to diverse spectators, including stakeholders (in a prison context, at least, it facilitates reflexivity inside the institution). The experience of artistic practices also may impact participants, like self or community empowerment in the public space, visualising sociocultural realities that often have no public voice. Recently, several performing arts productions in Portuguese prisons increasingly happened in Portugal, although just in some jails and differently engaging with the inmates’ type of participation.

From the perspective of performance-based methodologies, the participants engage in an artistic environment where everyone participates intensely and collaboratively in a joined theatre, dance or film production about their social reality or any site-specific ordinary matter. The facilitator (or the facilitators – when the anthropologist collaborates with an artist) complements the group, eliciting worldviews of themselves to stage it, embracing a participatory dramaturgy to write a script about the participants’ worldviews. The research facilitator may develop research riddles about the participants’ group so they engage. The performance-based methodologies let participants compose their one habitat of meaning, the material we’ll use for the script.

The quality of participation can vary in different kinds of the so-called community theatre or applied theatre umbrella. In a participatory dramaturgy, everyone participates in the scriptwriting. The participation may be to create or select biographical stories in an autoethnographic gesture or resulting from an interview between researcher and interlocutor; may be to create a scene that concretises a vernacular reality with documentation or oral history or resulting from focus group debates about any social common predicament, or to improvise about selected common themes, practices or social predicaments. The improvisation methods and techniques serve as triggers for participant observation, reinventing the interview apparatus. As we will see, ethnotheatre impacts participant observation modes of inquiry and envisions social impact on the participants as makers of their world.

As a case study, an ethnotheatre project in prison wants to understand how inmates relate to and act about the problematic human conditions they experience. The research riddle was deciphering the mechanisms of resistance and control underlying inmates’ relationships in their confined lives. Using ethnotheatre as a performance of participant observation, we explore the perception and experience that young inmates have of the living conditions inside a prison to perform a theatrical performance about this passage in their lives. 

In the process of participant observation, collaborative work brings to light problematic conditions and radical ways of life in the face of the control mechanisms involved in prison and “what do you have to do to survive?” taking into account the logic of the rules of conduct between inmates and with the institution that punishes them but aims to rehabilitate them. The issues addressed various systems of oppression and highlighted the possible effects of the visibility of hidden forms of resistance (Scott 1990) that inmates engage in to deal with the informal and hidden activities that frame, for instance, the parallel economy in the prison context, or concepts of sexual orientation within the inmate community (Salgado 2022, 2023). The project created a framework to deal with invisible riddles, hearing inmates’ voices, as a mode to allow them to compose an inmates’ point of view about the prison living context that people outside cannot see, and they could represent it now as a heard voice – the first step for social inclusion. 

Let me note that the Portuguese Directorate-General for Reinsertion and Prison Services approved this study, and inmates informed their consent to participate in this project. While writing the script, we debated the ethical limits of what and how to approach some sensible themes we were dealing with. We were thinking about the ethics of emancipation because some exposure to, for instance, inmates’ slang-coded language could destroy its purpose of hiding communicating meanings near the guards. On the other hand, talking about sexual relations inside the prison could be a mode of potential emancipation for homosexual worldviews by the inmates.

On the performative interview: through inmates’ relationships

Interviewing is the most widely used method to research the social world. The ethnographic interview is a social, sensory and emotional encounter, open to different frames and set-ups in flexible ways that affect moves. An interview is a semi-structured device for eliciting knowledge about the sociocultural world. Sarah Pink proposes to consider the interview as a “place-event” 

“where researcher and interviewee are mutually emplaced as they move along its narrative. They are in a situation where they interact in ways often more intense than in everyday life, producing heightened reflections and new ways of knowing. Interviews are not only places where researchers learn about other people’s experiences, but where interviewees might arrive at new levels of awareness about their own lives and experiences.” (Pink 2015: 80)

Communities of practice have repertoires of local metacommunicative events (Briggs 1984) that they use to generate notions of themselves and their experiences. According to Briggs, researchers need to gain competencies in these local repertoires and not rely on the communicative routine of their community references. This sociolinguistic competency often operates through hidden transcripts Scott (1990) discusses.

The contamination of ethnography and performance-based methodologies allows us to experiment with different interview apparatuses or dispositif. Performative interview revolutionises the formal concept of the interview, accentuating the relationship between interviewer and interviewee differently. “The performance interview is an apparatus that uses dramatic play to activate vernacular ethnographic reflexive thought, eliciting personal narratives or life experiences and allowing the analysis of these issues collaboratively.” (Salgado 2023: 5). 

There are many ways of staging a performative interview. The first example of using performative interviews in the prison context was video elicitation. We started by watching the series Orange is the New Black, based on the book by Piper Kerman (2011), adapted for Netflix by Jenji Kohan, Sara Hess and Tara Herrmann in 2013. The TV series dramatises Piper’s time in Danbury women’s correctional facility in Connecticut (USA), imprisoned for fifteen months for carrying a suitcase containing money from drug trafficking. During this time, Kerman learns to live in this strange world, flanked by unusual codes of behaviour and rules as restrictive as arbitrary. Addressing the life cycle of the prison experience, it gives an account of numerous hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) that helped methodologically to address issues in the viewing sessions of the series, inspiring us to write the ethnodrama or script we wrote together.

Whilst watching the episodes, an action that excited inmates greatly, sometimes we heard spontaneous interventions about prison reality: simple interjections or comments, laughter or a joke. Some facts in the series trigger the potential revelation of vernacular thoughts, coming from simple things from the day-to-day routine but which begin to compose a social habitat of the meaning of being confined. Some examples pick on the activities inmates do during the week, between days alone in the cell, going to school or the yard, going to work or making a phone call. 

In these moments of reaction to scenes from the series, I activated informal conversation about the commentaries or interjections inmates did during a scene, in private discussions or focus groups. Triggered by any scene of the series, the participants began to tell stories about what happened in the prison spaces and the times they lived. Video elicitation proved a promising methodology for activating vernacular issues and fuelling the analysis of prison inmates’ lives. Ultimately, in a performative interview, we don’t need to introduce the themes of inquiry while doing the interview. 

The performative interview may also use participant observation through improvisation methodologies, making interviewing a different gesture of just asking questions and listening to the answers. The framework of the improvisation environment triggers an answer about vernacular thoughts in a playful temperament while talking and thinking about our reality critically. Listening to the performative manifestations during dramatic or improvisation exercises is essential to capture it as a source to understand inmates’ conduct and sayings. Interlocutors may highlight shared issues, allowing for the deciphering, for instance, of slang language or standardised cultural behaviour they practice (Salgado 2023). That is an example of what Briggs (1986) calls the vernacular metacommunication repertoire, where hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) usually happen.

Performative interview activates performative knowledge. As mentioned elsewhere (Salgado 2019, 2022, 2023), different theatre methodologies elicit different data or reflexive thoughts. There are theatrical or choreographic methodologies that may not be as productive in eliciting vernacular reflexivity as, for example, ballet, with its rigid vocabulary, may not be the best way to understand the ways of moving or the standardised gestures of the interlocutors’ bodies, if this is the aim of the research (Blumenfeld-Jones 2008). Studying forms of resistance, we may consider it pertinent to practice a specific improvisation theatre methodology for eliciting data, such as the methodology of the theatre of the oppressed (Boal 2005), which is excellent at doing it. This practice allows us to approach forms of oppression directly and clearly, with great effectiveness for observing resistance. The improvisations were mainly about fights and relations with guards (oppressor/oppressed events). In reality, however, the methodology forces a particular type of image that nuclearises (in a way limits) one kind of resistance but quickly in a monolithic way. On the other hand, although accomplishing high social impact, the theatre of oppressed aesthetics seems crystalised in a “poor theatre” expectation.

Using the Viewpoints improvisation methodology (Bogart and Landau 2005) made it possible to approach hidden transcripts more subtly and effectively. Viewpoints is an improvisation and composition methodology that uses markers (the Viewpoints) for ruling one improvisation. Performers go to the stage focusing on each Viewpoint (space, time, shape, architecture, speed, gesture, etc.). Whatever they begin to improvise, the chosen Viewpoint must be the command for surviving during the improvisation. Practising Viewpoints, the approach to resistance was more subtle and elicited themes publicly hidden in inmates’ relations with each other (we did improvisations, for instance, in the bathroom or the yard). My point is that a more obvious theatrical or choreographic methodology for studying a particular phenomenon may not be the only one to provide reflexivity among the participants that suits the study in hands. Likewise, we made improvisations about vernacular situations that we signalised in the viewing of the series and elicited by the conversations we had about those scenes, approaching now the vernacular reality through performance.

We began to glue these events to make the script using a participatory dramaturgy. We made several improvisations about inmates’ thoughts on their living conditions relating to the prison’s common and private spaces (like the yard, the bathroom, encounters with other mates, the lowliness, the mobile traffic, drug use, sexuality, or phone calls). Without asking for details, improvisations began to frame several common issues that composed patterns of meaning about several dimensions of the confinement mode of living. The stories and thoughts of these improvisations began to frame possible scenes while informing the researcher about any research riddle. 

The process of constructing participatory dramaturgy is the most important for the ethnographic gesture, not so much for documenting but for capturing and sharing ideas, discourses, and events and interpreting them with the participants. Ingold calls this “studying with and learning from” (Ingold 2023: 3). The relationship the researcher triggers is to better correspond with interlocutors’ perspectives, he argues. Ultimately, we create a theatre or film production about our worldviews. The première impacts the community of practices’ public voice and the participants’ view of themselves concerning this communal belonging. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic determined the impossibility of performing the play. We wrote the script and began the first rehearsals to set up the play.

Notes on world-making practice

After considering ethnotheatre as an expansive and multimodal methodology that applies anthropology sensitivity to ethnographic gesture, we add some notes to understand it as an art-based world-making practice. Myerhoff (1986) suggests these practices configure definitional ceremonies. As the author says, these usually happen when a crisis of invisibility provides “opportunities for being seen and in one’s own terms, garnering witnesses to one’s worth, vitality, and being”. (266–267). To have a heard voice is already a trigger that affects relations within social life and practices among, for instance, a stigmatised group of people, promoting inclusion.

Impact studies evaluating the impact of community-based performance (Cruz 2021; Matarasso 1997) and social research evaluation (Reed et al. 2021) are on the road. Along with the holistic approach designed by the insightful toolkit for artists, partners and participants (Creative Scotland, 2016), it tells us that participation in artistic activities may bring social empowerment and that, although complex, social impacts can be assessed and planned (Matarasso, 1997). These studies mark some social indicators to evaluate the impact of community-based performance: the quality of interlocutors’ participation, the continuity of the project, the emotional trust of the community, the competence of the artist or the researcher, the risk of instrumentalising art to achieve the ends of complex themes, as well as the aesthetic dimension. Social impact indicators need the ethnographic gesture all the way.

In contexts of marginalisation and social fragility, we hear a voice through the performative codes, a being in the world experience highlighted in an invented and playful way, feeding with a positive mood to create living forms critically. Having a heard voice is the punctum for social impact. Ethnotheatre combines community-based performance and dialogical ethnographic gestures to envision the social transformation of more participatory science and democracy, aiming for positive social impact. By creating and composing invisible worldviews in the public space discussion and imagining new performative and communal frames that drive positive affect, we trigger our being in the world in a more participatory democracy.

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