The reflective lenses on forum theatre about marriage—negotiation of identities within multicultural community practice

ABSTRACT

This paper is a reflective journal of a university drama teacher’s practice. The author tries to find out the details of communal learning in two pieces of devised forum theatre under the concept of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). The group projects described here show the tutor’s facilitation in harnessing the group toward a consensus on an agreed theme, followed by interesting interactive forum sessions within the multicultural community. With the view of harnessing students toward the use of their own daily life experience, the author reflects on his policy of promoting participants’ use of first languages and cultural capitals. He arrives at the conclusion that such language policy, as opposed to the official policy of the university he serves, actually enhanced negotiation and formation of identities. Such enhancement was also a key factor in the success of this institutionalized group’s learning through forum theatres. In a word, the author has demonstrated his reflective practitioner’s lenses of teacher-as-administrator, teacher-as-participant, and teacher-as-artist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The member checking process was done through exchanging in-box messages with attached files.

² Whatsapp is a mobile phone application software very commonly used in Hong Kong, for sending instant verbal and voice messages and photos.

³ This is a Cantonese phonetic transcription using phonetic symbols taken from Guangzhouhua Zhengyin Zidian (Cantonese Standard Pronunciation Dictionary《廣州話正音字典》).

⁴ This is a Cantonese phonetic transcription, see (ii).