Takeaways by Céline Calvé about "Applied Theatre for Gender Equality and Social Inclusion"

This post was written by Céline Calvé, a participant in the inaugural session of “Applied Theatre for Gender Equality and Social Inclusion” with Aanchal Jain and Lucy Ferguson in October 2023. Sign up for the next session of this course here.

Ever since I participated in a Forum Theatre game at the La Maison des femmes de Saint-Denis IN VIVO event in 2022, I have been looking at how to integrate applied theatre into my current practice as a gender and gender-based violence (GBV) trainer.

I was VERY lucky to then participate in a 5-day training about Applied Theatre for Gender Equality and Social Inclusion delivered by Lucy Ferguson, PhD and Aanchal Jain. I particularly enjoyed learning from them about how applied theatre and principles for feminist pedagogy intersect.

With a fantastic group, we created a safe space where we learned and practiced different short and long forms of games such as storytelling, image theatre, forum theatre. We explored how we can use these techniques for bringing about transformative change.

It was a truly inspiring week!

Here are some of my main take-aways :

🔸 “Theatre is a form of knowledge” (Augusto Boal)

🔸 Applied theatre helps us reflecting upon our actions

🔸 It creates space to work with our personal experiences and feelings

🔸 A lot of learning actually happens and is experienced with our bodies and applied theatre facilitates this process

🔸 It’s intimidating at first but actually okay to jump from being a spectator to becoming a spect-actor·ress and enact

🔸 Applied theatre also benefits us as Gender and GBV trainers to practice creativity and group dynamics

If you are looking for bewilderment and interested to learn more about this training, then Cynara Gender Training Platform is the place for you to go.

~ Céline Calvé