Living the interdiscipline: Natalie Alvarez speaks with Kim Solga about conceiving, developing, managing, and learning from a large-scale, multidisciplinary, scenario-based project supporting police de-escalation training in Ontario

ABSTRACT

Ryerson University theatre professor Natalie Alvarez is currently helming a large, interdisciplinary team in southern Ontario that is testing the power of Forum Theatre to build better, more responsive scenarios for police officer training in de-escalation and mental crisis response. In this interview, Alvarez sits down with issue editor Kim Solga to talk about where this project came from, what challenges arise when working in an intensively interdisciplinary way – and how theatre and performance can serve effectively as a methodology at the heart of a wide range of scholarly investigations, both inside and outside of the arts and humanities.

KEYWORDS:

• Scenario training
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• mental health
• performance studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Natalie Alvarez is Associate Professor in the School of Performance at Ryerson University. She is the author of Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance (Michigan, 2018), and is principal investigator on the SSHRC-funded, four-year interdisciplinary project, ‘Scenario Training to Improve Interactions Between Police and Individuals in Mental Crisis: Impacts and Efficacy’.

Kim Solga is Professor of English and Writing Studies at Western University. Her most recent books are Theory for Theatre Studies: Space (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019), A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Theatre & Feminism (Palgrave, 2015).

Notes

1. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s allusion to the idea of performance ‘as an organising concept for a wide range of behaviour’ (2004, 43) in her essay, ‘Performance studies’ in The Performance Studies Reader.