ABSTRACT
The directors provided dramatic exercises to elicit expanded narratives about participants' experiences, helping performers to share ideas and encouraging empathy, reciprocity, and openness among people who previously had been strangers. This chapter describes the experiences of female activists in Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Movement, a protest movement for greater democratic participation, and how this evolved into devised theatre and research connected to feminist movements in Hong Kong and Mainland China. As the early 20th-century critical theorist Walter Benjamin noted, film provides the opportunity to communicate the reality of social conditions to a wide spectrum of people. Drama than documentary filmmaking a nontraditional space for teaching, learning, and documenting the process through the arts, existing outside formal political institutions, might also serve to influence democratic movements. The splits in views among activists escalated over time, with harassment against women becoming increasingly hostile. To a significant extent, pursuing change through social activism requires shifting audiences' perceptions and beliefs.
