ABSTRACT
This chapter presents drama-based participatory research conducted by the author with Afro-Colombian youth. This initiative aimed to explore how the embodiment and performance of historical documents is a distinctively unique approach to healing the intergenerational trauma of enslavement. In 2019, a research group at the National University of Bogotá (Colombia) identified historical letters dated 1743–1966, written by a slave foreman working in a mine on the Colombian Pacific coast and addressed to the slave master living in a city of the interior. The letters provide details on the living conditions of enslaved people and their strategies of resistance and adaptation. The National University identified a community on the Colombian Pacific coast whose biological ancestors were the enslaved people mentioned in the letters, and invited members of this community to participate in a theatre workshop where they would embody and perform the events described in the letters. Data show that the combination of dramaturgy based on historical documents, the embodiment of ancestral stories, public performance, and reflection help communities affected by intergenerational traumas to re-signify their experience, heal their collective wounds, and imagine a different future.
