ABSTRACT

This chapter weaves formative performance narratives from sustained collaborations with English and African theatre-practitioners in exile (London), excluded youth in post-industrial Manchester (England), occupied Derry (North of Ireland) and the Landless Movement and the Afro-indigenous community of Cabelo Seco (Brazil) into a layered narrative to explain the emergence of the Transformance pedagogic quest for social justice over nearly 40 years. Drawing on extended dialogues with Edward Bond, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Frontline: Culture & Education collectives, Mok Chiu Yu, Manoela Souza and Rustom Bharucha, this multiple narrative brings into focus key overlapping, intimate community and public thresholds between repression, resistance and self-determination, to identify unexpected resources of transformation and hope. By including transcultural narratives of storytelling to story-making written shortly after the author lived their performance, the emergence of key pedagogical insights and concepts is brought to life, inviting the reader to experience Transformance in action and imagine how such techniques might be adapted in every dimension of life and context towards the nurture of a paradigm of bem viver (good living).