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Abstract
Performance-making and peace-building are processes predicated on the production of safe space. But what is ‘safe space’? In performance-making, what is it that makes space safe without losing the creative potential of tension? What role is there for risk? And, once achieved, how does safe space become meaningful beyond its immediate community of participants?
This paper examines the value of the concept of ‘safe space’ in performance, suggesting that for applied theatre practitioners it is more than just a precursor for the art-making processes it supports. Here, safe space is considered as a processual act of ever-becoming: a space of messy negotiations that allow individual and group actions of representation to occur, as well as opportunities for ‘utopian performatives’.
Contact Inc's Peace Project is profiled as a performance-based program that grounds these issues and offers insight into the ways in which ‘safe space’ might function beyond its conventional connotations of protection and guardedness to be mobilised in a broader grassroots agenda for social change.
Notes
1. The Peace Project was initiated in 2001 under the working title, The Peace Initiative. From 2003 to 2005, participants in the annual series of workshops titled Peace Potion (2003 and 2004) and Symphony of Survival (2005) produced original music and filmclip DVDs. The 2006 workshops and performance were titled Peace Potion Dreaming. The multiyear project is referred to as the Peace Project in this essay.
2. For more detailed examination of this project, see Hunter Citation2005.
3. Jane Jennison, personal interview with the author, Fortitude Valley, 4 August 2004.
4. John Paul Lederach critiques the conventional space of conflict mediation as one that is intermediary, exclusionary and ‘has the narrowly defined task of reaching agreement’ (Lederach Citation2005, 95). Preferring a more open and sustainable approach to peace-building, Lederach is instead committed to fostering spaces of ‘imaginative mediative capacity’ (95), particularly whereby the sharing of social space can broaden and deepen ‘the purpose of transformative intermediary … action’ (95).
5. Lyrics reproduced with kind permission of MC Beka.