Expressions of Experience and Transformation: Performing Illness Narratives

Abstract

Collaborative storytellers have the opportunity to embody stories reflecting personal and social experience and to communicate in such a way that restores a richer understanding of those experiences, but they also situate performance as an act of transformation and a declaration of change. This essay documents a multilayered performance process used to stage an interactive performance about HIV/AIDS. This process generated an impact on participants by enhancing their abilities to be social agents and by illustrating performance as a public practice invested in advocacy. The project also examines how interactive performances have the capacity to reveal the need for change, create solidarity between those gathered, offer opportunity for the gathered collective to practice interventions, and become the change they wish to see in the performance. Interactive performance creates space to understand empathy as a reciprocal process and to clarify performance as both public discourse and an invitation to intervene.

Keywords:

• Empathy
• Boal
• HIV/AIDS
• Illness narrative
• Forum Theatre

Acknowledgments

She acknowledges the reviewers of this manuscript and Sohinee Roy for their insightful remarks and encouragement.

Notes

1. The script was also submitted to the director of the group home for review.

2. All names used in this manuscript are pseudonyms.

3. Residents, volunteers, and the unit director were invited to attend the performance. Only the director and two volunteers attended the performance.

4. I analyzed multiple data to assess the impact of the performance in terms of personal and social transformation. I examined information provided by the ten performance students in the course and the 75 students who attended the performance. Data analyzed in this study include entries in the journals kept by the performance students and a formal five-page reflection paper submitted at the conclusion of the project; both documents were requirements for course completion. In addition, I analyzed the notes taken during the postperformance discussion. I used open coding to create inductive categories comprising similar experiences; all data was placed into one category and all data was used (Strauss and Corbin). Those inductive categories served as the basis for the qualitative results of this study as they revealed patterns about the impact of the performance on students’ understanding of themselves, messages about illness, and the delivery of the message.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Leigh Anne Howard

Leigh Anne Howard is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Southern Indiana. This essay was the Top Paper in Performance Studies at the 2011 National Communication Association Annual Convention in New Orleans, LA