Edgar Munoz

EDGAR MUNOZ, then a graduate student at Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia, was granted funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Unraveling Theatre for Young People: Performance and Agency in Cali’s Community Theaters, Colombia,” supervised by Dr. Jan Grill. This project explored interventions and performances in two community theatres and their role in the (re)construction of youth agency in marginalized branches of Cali, Colombia, as a way of facing “social suffering.” The study asked what the role of community theatre for the youth in urban margins punctuated by territorial stigmatization, internal displacements, economic dispossession, and violence. Through tracing the trajectories, practices and experiences of the students and instructors, the project examined how the performances, choreographies and dispositions acquired through studying and teaching theatre become constitutive of re-making of agency and reorientations of creating a life worthy of pursuing. While the theatre pedagogy and its strategies are marked by participants’ experiences in a community penetrated by a continuum of violence and social suffering, it offers an alternative space of resistance for subjects to springboard into a sense of autonomy, transforming the self and propelling them towards particular moral and future-oriented strivings for alter-realities. Therefore, this work constitutes a critical approach to health research that transcends the individual biological explanation of discomfort.