This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular body hair removal. The analysis shows how playfulness is an ambiguous feature enacted together with bodies, affects and materialities. Moreover, playfulness became both a restricting and a transformative force reproducing the already known while also opening up a critical approach of playing with the violent aspects of hair removal. 

The subject of this study is a community theatre for, with and by girls aged 13–17. The theatre practice is situated within the field of applied theatre and as a communitarian practice engages with artistic, social and political ambitions by staging the everyday of marginalised people. When describing and researching these kinds of theatre practices, emphasis is often placed on their democratic potential and positive notions of empowerment. However, the challenges which arise when participants with little or no previous theatre experience are to perform their lives in front of an audience are not often discussed in research. Accordingly, the aim of this ethnographic study is to explore how the participants’ lives are turned into creative and artistic expressions in the drama room and staged in front of an audience. By working with post-constructionist and spatial theories, humans as well as space, place and affectivity are acknowledged as co-producing actors. These theoretical positions, articulated by philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, Gillian Deleuze and Michael Foucault, enable an analysis of how place, playfulness and vulnerability influence the theatre practice and how it simultaneously produces both possibilities and constraints for the girls. In four articles, the study addresses how tensions are produced in the process of staging the everyday. Article I engages with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, addressing how the drama room is co-created with local context while also being an isolated room. Through an analytical mapping, the article discusses how theatre practice enables the girls to act creatively in relation to limiting norms in the drama room and other places such as school. Article II focuses on how vulnerability is both a generative and restrictive force when creating artistic expressions. The study points towards the importance of professional leadership that can navigate through multilayered spaces that are explorative as well as artistic.  Article III breaks with the somewhat taken-for-granted role of playfulness in community theatre and applied theatre. The analysis implies that although playfulness creates agency in relation to restricting norms, playfulness can at the same time reinforce these norms. The article also challenges ideas of how playfulness bridges the gap between creative explorations and professional art. Article IV explores how the content of the theatre practice is created through negotiations between bodies, affects and feeling as well as space and place. Through the concept of an extended relational didactics, the article also discusses how the leader can relate to a content that is highly unpredictable and co-created by several actors. 

Altogether, the four articles show how community theatre is both a relational and spatial practice that is consistently transforming. Moreover, they show how frustration, confusion and exclusion as well as pride, joy and agency are part of the practice by exploring tensions such as those that exist between ethics and aesthetics. The study suggests that the participants’ experience is more likely to be positive if the leaders are able to navigate through the multiple spaces that are produced in the theatre practice while also being firmly established in the local context.

: The presentation investigates a drama space belonging to an all girls’ community theatre group in an industrial town in Sweden. The girls, aged 13-17, do drama in their spare time and the artistic work produced relies on a participatory process where the girls’ input is vital. This presentation explores the political characteristic of the girls’ drama room which reflects, juxtaposes and opposes particular sites in the participants’ everyday life such as school and family. By working with Foucault’s idea of Heterotopia this presentation examines how the drama room functions as an exclusive and excluding space as a well as a space of resistance. Based on interviews with the girls, this ethnographic study challenges the assumption that applied drama is only an interrelational matter between the drama participants. By examining the drama room as the ‘other place’ in the girls’ everyday lives while also being embedded in the town they live in, this paper explores and problematise the drama room as space for the girls to have agency, there and elsewhere. The study puts spatial and postconstructionist theories to work why notions of space and place are foregrounded. This allows for a ‘dramaspaceknowledge’ to emerge, the influence of which stretches beyond the drama room. This presentation argues that the girls’ ‘dramaspaceknowledge’ is utilised when creating a performance and while challenging structures and norms elsewhere, such as in their schools and the town they live in. This presentation will explore this ‘dramaspaceknowledge’ in more detail as well as problematise the implications of working in a heterotopic space.

In this presentation the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in a community theatre practice with teenage girls will be explored. This presentation will explore vulnerability as a potentially generative matter that enables resistance in line with Judith Butler (Butler, 2016). By drawing on post-constructionist ( e.g. Lykke, 2009, 2010) and spatial theories (Massey, 2005) the presentation troubles how aesthetic spaces emerges when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. The empirical material in this presentation comes from a one year ethnographic study following the theatre-groups’ work creating a performance based on girls’ stories and experiences of becoming woman in a particular Swedish town.  Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force in the performance work the tensions produced in the process are discussed with the aim to highlight the multitude of ethical dilemmas that arise when staging the everyday. Also brought to discussion is the embeddedness of the drama practice as it merges with, and challenges, the local context and the participants’ everyday life. In this presentation I will argue that this embeddedness is a prerequisite to turn vulnerability into a generative force, enabling the participants to feel hope and be proud of what and who they are in relation to limiting structures.

By bringing space and place to the foreground, this presentation will trouble who and what have agency in the drama room. The theatre practice will thus be explored through post constructionist and spatial theories which will provide for new questions and findings within a field that tend to focus on human agency and interaction. 

In this presentation the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in a community theatre practice with teenage girls will be explored. This presentation will explore vulnerability as a potentially generative matter that enables resistance in line with Judith Butler (Butler, 2016). The empirical material in this presentation comes from a one year ethnographic study following the theatre-groups’ work creating a performance based on girls’ stories and experiences of becoming woman in a particular Swedish town (Szatek, 2021).  Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force in the performance work, the tensions produced in the process are discussed with the aim to highlight the multitude of ethical dilemmas that arise when staging the everyday through participatory methods. One such dilemma is how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. By drawing on post-constructionist (Lykke, 2010) and spatial theories (Massey, 2005) this presentations also intend to discuss is the embeddedness of the drama practice as it merges with, and challenges, the local context and the participants’ everyday life. 

This article explores the risks and potentials of staging vulnerabilityin community theatre with teenage girls. By drawing on postconstructionist and spatial theories, the article elaborates on how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force, the article debates tensions produced in the process in terms of potentia and potestas. It examines the embeddedness of the drama practice as it both challenges and merges with the local context and the participants’ everyday. The article argues that this embeddedness is a prerequisite to turn vulnerability into potentia.

This article is aimed at exploring the political characteristics of the drama space, which reflects, juxtaposes, and opposes particular sites in a participant’s everyday life, such as the school. By putting spatial theories to work, this article investigates the drama space belonging to an all-girls community group in Sweden, participation in which is voluntary and where the artistic work produced relies on a democratic process, with the girls’ input being vital. I conceptualise the drama room as a heterotopia that functions as an exclusive and excluding space as a well as a space of resistance. Based on interviews with the girls, this ethnographic study challenges the conventional notion that applied drama is only an interrelational matter between the drama participants. By examining the drama room’s role as the ‘other place’ in the girls’ everyday lives while being connected to ‘everyday’ places, this article demonstrates the drama room as an important space for the girls to have agency, there and elsewhere. When placing space and place in the foreground, a ‘dramaspaceknowledge’ emerges, the influence of which stretches beyond the drama room. This article argues that the girls’ dramaspaceknowledge is utilised when creating a performance and while challenging structures and norms elsewhere, such as in their schools and communities.