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Send to friendPractitioners using theatre for human rights education and action
Note: If you would like to contact a practitioners listed below, please click on their name to go to their New Tactics account biography. Then click on the 'Contact' tab and write your message.
Kayhan Irani is an artivist dedicated to unleashing beauty and truth from unconventional and irregular platforms. After receiving traditional theater training from the High School of Performing Arts in New York City (a.k.a FAME), Kayhan went on to expand her repertoire doing traditional and non-traditional theater at various venues such as Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, Chashama Theater, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum and on city streets. Her one-woman show entitled We've Come Undone, highlights the lives of immigrant women post 9/11, is an experiment in how contemporary performance can be combined with participatory theater to engage audiences in political and social change. It has been presented across North America at college and university campuses, international theater festivals, fundraisers, and even at Burning Man! Kayhan seeks to use theater to activate audiences and transform society. Click here for more information on Kayhan and to contact her.
Magan Wiles is a professional actress and teaching artist residing in
St. Louis. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Performance and
is a regular performer on St. Louis stages. Magan serves as the
Artistic Director of International Play Ground, a performing arts group
for refugee and immigrant high schoolers and a program of the Center
For Survivors of Torture and War Trauma. She also works as as a
teaching artist for Prison Performing Arts in the St. Louis City
Juvenile Detention Center, teaching acting, improv, and play devising
to incarcerated youth. In 2006, Magan travelled to the West Bank in
the Occupied Territories of Palestine where she did human rights
documentation and intervention as well as teaching theatre in Balata
Refugee Camp. Her play Beautiful Resistence, based on her experiences
in Palestine, was produced by Playback Workhshop Theatre this summer. [contact Magan]
Abdelfattah Abusrour was born in the Aida Refugee camp, Bethlehem. He is a painter, and playwright. He holds a Ph.D. in Biological and Medical Engineering from France. He trained in theatre as an actor, and director, and he was a founding member of the Paris-Nord Theatre in 1990. In 1998, he founded the Alrowwad Cultural and Theatre Training Center for Children in the Aida Camp in Bethlehem-Palestine. He participated with Theatre Day Productions in the Children’s Theatre Festival in Croatia in 1998. In 1999 he received a playwriting scholarship in the Royal Court Theatre, where he wrote The New Born. Mr. Abusrour theatre works include “Twenty One Positions” (commissioned by the Guthrie Theatre, Mineapolis, in 2006, with Naomi Wallace and Lisa Schlesinger), “Far Away from a village close by” (Won the first prize in Deir Yassin Remembered- Palestinian Theatre in Motion Festival-London, 2006), “We Are the Children of the Camp” (performed by Alrowwad children troop) and “Tent” (performed by Ibdaa children troop), were performed in Europe, the United States, and different Arab countries. His Alrowwad Children Theatre Center in the Aida refugee camp strives to provide a "safe" and healthy environment to help children through creativity with the discharge of stress in the face of war has gained an international recognition. Mr. Abusrour, was the first recipient of Ashoka Fellowship in Palestine in 2006 for his work in “Beautiful Resistance” through arts and theatre against the ugliness of Israeli occupation and its violence. His last play is “Blame the wolf” which toured for 45 days in France and Belgium in summer 2008
Janelle Treibitz began her career studying theater in New York City. She quickly turned to community organizing when she moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 2004 and worked with the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center on voter registration and reform. For the past five years she has spent her summers working with Bread and Puppet Theater, a 40 year-old radical puppet company based in Glover, Vermont. In 2006 she moved to Washington, DC and began combining her puppetry and organizing skills, working with various organizations and campaigns to create puppet shows, street theater, creative popular education tools, and creative direct actions. She has worked with Organizing Neighborhood Equity DC (ONE DC), the DC Grassroots Empowerment Project (Empower DC), Mexicanos Sin Fronteras, Tenants and Workers United, Teatro Indígena (Chihuahua, Mexico), and the Anacostia Watershed Society. She has been actively organizing in her neighborhood, helping found a community group called Hear Mount Pleasant. They deal with race and class tensions in Mount Pleasant’s diverse community through cultural events and neighbor-to-neighbor organizing. She is also a long-time waitress and currently works at the Tabard Inn Restaurant in DC. She has a BFA in Theater from New York University.
Anna Weekes has worked in the field of community engagement and empowerment
for several years now. This work has taken the form of theatre and arts
as a tool for communication, from street theatre for political
activism, theatre and film for the engagement of refugees, to awareness
theatre in underprivileged communities in Australia and Cambodia. Anna
believes that theatre and the arts provides individuals a platform for
expression within the community and beyond, it is a powerful education
tool and avenue for positive social change.
Annie Sloman has been working in the field of community cultural development, specialising in theatre, circus and arts management for the last 10 years. She has worked extensively with communities in Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Australia, including Australian indigenous communities. She has worked with numerous organizations and festivals including Bibi Bulak Performing Arts and Music Troupe, Kommunitas Tuk and Festival Mata Air, Taring Padi, Westside Circus, Darwin Theatre Company and the Wardabirr Festival, PPPG Kersenian Yogyakarta, The Women’s Circus, Soru Mutu Ba Dame Festival and helped establish the Timorese theatre network MATTIL. Annie has a strong belief and passion for using the arts as a tool to aid change, as well as the joys that working cross-culturally bring. Annie currently spends her time moving between Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Timor-Leste working with a number of organizations and art activism collectives, while also completing her masters in international and community development. 
Shirin practices theatre to spread messages of love, non-violence, diversity and inclusiveness, economic and social justice and gender-equality. She is a co-founder of Arts for Change Theater collective, Washington, DC and a life long member of Nishant Natya Manch, Delhi. Born to actor-director parents, Shirin was exposed to the inner workings of producing plays, acting and direction at a very early age. Trained extensively to perform both on the street and the stage, Shirin has over two decades of experience performing, directing and script-writing. She has done plays on issues including sectarianism, caste and untouchability, violence against women, racism, globalization, HIV-AIDS and childcare in remote areas of India and Nepal and parts of Pakistan with Nishant Natya Manch. In the process, she has also become a sought-after trainer, conducting theater trainings for civil society organizations, schools and universities, including Social Action and Leadership School for Activists (SALSA), DC, Florida State University and San Francisco School of the Arts. Shirin has authored articles in journals and written a small book entitled "Change is our Message; Street is our stage" on street theatre.
Max von Duerckheim is an actor and facilitator who uses theatre as a tool for community dialogue and action. His work has included peace-building theatre in the Sudan, Theatre of the Opressed work with homeless people in the UK, and training of trainers in Egypt. Max also uses drama tools to foster organisational change. Max practices Playback Theatre and is very interested in dramatic processes, especially personal story-telling and improvisation, as ways to provide the potential for personal and communal healing.
Muhammad Waseem, Director of Interactive Resource Centre (IRC), introduced Interactive Theatre in Pakistan. He was instrumental in raising human rights issues, promoting democracy and generating dialogue among communities and other stakeholders through theatre and media. In the last eight years, he trained more than 150 groups that staged almost 7000 interactive theatre performances. Due to his efforts, IRC was amongst four finalists of World Culture Open Award (a global celebration-similar to an Olympic festival of cultures-to honor artistic and cultural traditions for building a peaceful global community).
Xris Reardon is the Artistic Director of Third Way Theatre. Xris uses
creative methods, theatre in particular, as a means to collectively
address both the personal/ social / legislative obstacles
to transforming conflict / cultures of alienation. The desire is to
advance spaces for a more just world in which basic needs are met,
in order that life can be lived beyond: 'silence, shame,
survival'....beyond fear, into a greater, an undreamt potential of
communion.Third Way Theatre works with the community to find 'creative'
means to give voice to narratives that are often hidden, not
represented or misrepresented. Stories that address issues of struggle,
for justice against systems, policies, normative understandings that
create and contribute to discrimination/violence. Communities, through
the use of theatre, films, photography, music and dance create
narratives that express the symbolic truth of their reality. Stories/
plays, will most often end in unresolved moment. The audiences, a
diversity of stake holders, are then asked to engage in an
embodied dialogue. They are invited to get up on stage and replace the
characters whose struggle they understand in order to create healthy
outcomes. Third Way Theatre uses theatre to make discoveries,
dismantle 'learnt' ignorance through naming obstacles. These learnings
are tested out in the symbolic space of the stage, a place where
dreams, and possible steps towards futures of inclusion can be
experimented with. 'When you put your body on the line to defend your
ideological positions something different happens. In the work for
change, safe places to experiment with ideas, solutions....are
invaluable before taking these strategies out into the world'" (Xris
Reardon A.D) What can occur is: 'an opening to new narratives, to
the uniqueness of a moment which has not yet been mapped where there
are new possibilities for being together, which is in the end the very
heart of politics - the emergence of the new' (a.u) Performance themes
to date have focused on Human Rights issues which
included: displacement, economic security, racism, child welfare,
disability, homelessness, addiction, climate change, transphobia,
homophobia, sexual health.
Drama for Life Scholars
Selloane Mokuku is an actor, writer, poet, director, facilitator, researcher and consultant currently pursuing a Masters in Dramatic Arts at the University of Witwatersrand. She is co-director and founder of Liatla Productions (Pty) Ltd; an independent productions company that uses mass media for education, and has been actively involved in an International theatre initiative; Project Phakama.
She facilitated learning at the university level, worked as an independent consultant for government, local, regional and International organizations and chaired the task force that produced the 2005 Lesotho National Cultural Policy. Her passion and expertise is in children, gender, governance and HIV/Aids. She is multi lingual. Her research is on The role of rapid cognition in the facilitation of theatre-making: A case of the 2008 Winter/Summer Institute in Theatre for Development (see http://www.maketheatre.org).
Grace Meadows has centred her work on using drama as rehabilitation and activism, particularly with reference to social trauma.She is interested in legislative theatre and prison reform escpecially concerning juveniles. Grace has travelled extensively on the African continent and cites her proudest achievement as project managing and directing a documentary on The Lonely Road Challenge, a journey from Johannesburg to Moshi, Tanzania and a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro to call attention to the plight of orphans and vulnerable children. www.thelonelyroad.org
Meadows' film and media background and her 10 years of experience in entertainment television makes her a contemporary voice with a public profile. She is comfortable speaking with the youth and is a strong believer in the fusion of disciplines and expressions. Her style and approach is multi-media and cross-cultural and she has been recognised with an award for her role in public enlightenment, international friendship and mass communication. Grace is currently a Masters candidate in the Drama for life postgrauate program at Wits University. Her research report follows a practie as research paradigm and is entitled; Emancipation Ceremonies. Theatre As Activism within the context of Human Rights in Southern Africa. www.dramaforlife.co.za
