The Arrest – Personal narrative
As a theatre practitioner for ten years, my main focuses has always been performing for a particular audience and leaving the stage with no intentions of attachments and effects. Fox (1994) in Johnson and Emunah (2009) states that playback’s attention to process, inclusivity, well- being of the performer as well as the audience makes it different from other forms of familiar forms of theatre in which artistic success of the production is the ultimate goal tha matters (p445). This means that the stories that I had been performing had nothing to do with how the audience members reacted to them, but it was just for entertainment. This has been because of the kind of theatre I was involved in was only to bring a certain topic to the fore but not really interrogate its relationship to the actors and the audience. Hence, coming to study at Drama for life gave me another perspective. I remember in an applied drama process, my lecturer asked me if I had any idea on how I would create a safe space for the participants and how I would do so? This caused me a lot of confusion in me because I didn’t know where to start because all I could think about was to only execute a piece of theatre piece for them and never thought of making the participants feel safe in the space. In the past workshops I was involved in, I was the main focus and would be required to have outcomes of a certain topic which meant that I had to work with time against the knowledge I