Into Ulwembu: exploring collaborative methodologies in a research-based theatre production on street-level drug use in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
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Date
2019
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Abstract
Over a yearlong creative process starting in 2014, The Big Brotherhood, Mpume Mthombeni, Dr
Dylan McGarry and myself, Neil Coppen, came together to devise a collaborative theatrical
intervention in response to the ‘whoonga crisis’—a proliferation of heroin-based street-level drug
abuse—in Durban, South Africa. The transdisciplinary, action-led, research process we adopted
for Ulwembu would emerge as, and be refined into, an applied, syncretic theatre-making
methodology—a methodology that we would come to call ‘Empatheatre’. Over this thesis, I
provide a detailed narrative around the research, devising and dissemination of our production,
unravelling the context and conditions from which Ulwembu arose, as well as unpack the process
of testing and shaping our new methodology, arriving at an iterative definition of the Empatheatre
methodology. By focusing on a variety of practices and methodological approaches employed
across research-based theatre forms, I explore some of the complexities that arise when one
attempts to bring research to life on the stage, including how empathy in applied theatre
approaches may be considered either a ‘cathartic cop-out’ or ‘epiphany inducing catalyst’. In
acknowledging the integral role empathy was to play—both in shaping our creative journey and
our critical responses as practitioners, as well as impacting the reception of the production—I
attempt to measure the pedagogical impacts of our project on both the Empatheatre practitioners
and audience members. I do this primarily—but not exclusively—through the lens of the
pedagogical empathetic impacts that the devising and dissemination of Ulwembu was to enable. I
ask, firstly, how the experience of co-creating Ulwembu—and our deep immersion in the research
process—transformed our understanding of street-level drug addiction and the way we
subsequently devised Ulwembu. These transformations also shaped the way we intend to
approach social justice theatre projects of this kind in the future. In exploring this process, I take
a critical look at my own role and function within the Ulwembu theatre-making processes as cofacilitator, playwright and director. Secondly, I ask if, how, and to what extent, our Empatheatre
methodology and production was able to shift perceptions around drug use and the whoonga
‘problem’ in Durban and inspire greater reflexivity in local city institutions and organisations, to
ultimately move them collectively towards less judgmental and more compassionate outcomes.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.