What about performance offers a unique opportunity to learn from and with communities?
How might dramatic performance be used to
share information while learning from an audience?
This course examines the work and research of young artists from Liberia, West Africa who used street theatre to teach best practices for prevention during the Ebola crisis and considers how their use of dialogical performance contributed to critical knowledge which iteratively informed interventions throughout their awareness campaign. The visiting artists will share their firsthand experiences and guide the class through the use of their playwriting model for community change.
Students will design public performance projects around local-global community-based concerns using the tools they have learned. In partnership with the African Family Health Organization (AFAHO) in West Philadelphia, students will develop performance-based public health messaging informed by a communications for development approach. This performance work will be created collaboratively in workshops during class and in team meetings and shared digitally through video with the AFAHO and Penn communities.
Public health researchers who are looking for innovative ways to share their data will gain insights into this experimental ethnographic method and practitioners who want to offer their communities ways to connect best practices to lived experience will develop new pedagogical tools. This is an ABCS (Academically-Based Community Service) course in partnership with the Netter Center and supported by The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.