Importance of the Outsider: Reflections from the Facilitator of a Community-Based Playbuilding Project

Abstract

Facilitators entering a community to do applied theatre work often carried the identity of an outsider to the community. This identity is frequently problematic because there are several assumptions critics to the field make about the inherent privileges and imbalance in powers an outsider, in the form of a facilitator for an applied theatre programme, possesses. And it becomes a sticky argument especially when the communities applied theatre practitioners work with are often likely to be vulnerable, marginalized and/or disenfranchised. In this article, I argue that there are benefits to being an outsider to the community where the applied theatre work is happening. The applied theatre practitioner’s identity as an outsider serves the function of maintaining a critical distance from the lives of the participants in a playbuilding project. The lack of knowledge and access to the culture and people within the community where the playbuilding work was situated provided the participants an added layer of safety when they examined issues and problems which they experienced in their daily lives. The desires to connect with the applied theatre practitioner through the performance making process in the playbuilding programme motivated the participants to produce sharper pieces of theatre.