ABSTRACT

Ethnotheatre, a word joining ethnography and theatre, merges ethnography and theatre in a live or mediated performance event. Ethnographers could help drama students during rehearsal, if not by direct participation, at least in the role of dramaturg, that is as advisers to the performers and director. This is how theatre, performance and anthropology come together. Narrator devising, or crafting an ethnodramatic scriptinvolves moving from epiphanic experiencesto a fully crafted performance text. Performance and activism are mutually constitutive: together public space is transformed, heightened, and made more communal. Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire’s theatre’s of the oppressed, like Smith’s monologues, Saldana’s ethnodramas, and Madison’s critical ethnography, use performance, ethnography, theatre and dramatic theory to criticize neoliberal discourse, to inspire acts of activism. Ethnodrama, a word joining ethnography and drama, is a play script that dramatizes ethnographic narrative collected from interview transcripts, participant observation field notes, journal entries, personal memories/experiences, print and media artifacts, and historical documents.