Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage by Jonny Saldaña (review)

Arizona State University professor of theater Johnny Saldaña coins a new genre of performance titled “ethnotheatre.” His text provides a thorough introduction to theory, method, and practical concerns for creating performances, quoting qualitative methods guru Norman K. Denzin, who claims performances are “the single most powerful way for ethnography to recover, yet interrogate the meanings of lived experience” (Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21^st Century [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997], 94–95). For Saldaña, post-structuralism recognizes the complexities of social contexts; performance provides an appropriate forum through which representation of those complex social phenomena matches those complexities. In particular, for oral historians, the author acknowledges that interviews are an important source, although not the only documentary materials, for performative dramatization.

The purposes of ethnotheatre are outlined in the first chapter: adapting or dramatizing documentary sources for educational and pedagogical purposes. The creative process provides opportunities for generating self-reflexivity for individuals, groups, or communities and, for groups or communities, creating dialogue (interests in social justice frame this dialogue). For researchers, ethnotheatre can be a transformative mode for studying social life, shaping their investigations by using an aesthetic frame and subsequently leavening archives with new genres of ethnographic documents designed for future research. For narrators, who are often also the performers, ethnotheatre is an ideal form for representing their life experience to others. And for audiences, the work provides opportunities for coming into attunement with issues that impact them and their communities. The author clearly holds ethnotheatre responsible for generating equity, but not only social equity: Saldaña calls for a collaboration between the legitimate concerns for representing and addressing diverse issues of social equity but also producing artistic equity. As a practitioner, Saladaña insists that achieving high-caliber success in multiple aesthetic areas is crucial in order to achieve the potential for transformative social equity through performance.

To this end, the text is weighted heavily, in chapters two through five, towards addressing aesthetics. Early in these chapters, typical concerns of oral historians, such as seeking permissions from narrators, working with institutional review boards within university settings, and generating equivalent agreements outside of academia, are addressed. Questions of ownership, that is, intellectual property of and artistic rights for the work are also discussed. Within the world of performance, Saldaña contributes new thinking to these important issues. He asks: “What are the ethical responsibilities of the audience?” The author notes that ethnotheatre audiences are often confronted with challenging material framed by compelling aesthetic forms: spoken text, movement, costumes, sets, and media. In order to maximize reception of such works, Saldaña offers a rubric for audience ethics: edit their own reactivity to works that push buttons on real issues. Know what you are getting into; make a responsible choice about attending AND staying. Know that you have taken responsibility for those choices once you are there and act accordingly. On the part of an artistic director and the performers themselves, he offers the following rubric: do no harm, that is, “participants first; playwrights, second; audiences, third” and no matter what the artistic director wishes, “participant’s desires for how they wish to be represented and presented on stage take precedence” (42, 43). Referring to the general purpose of ethnotheatre, where social concerns are melded with aesthetic forms, the basis for generating a mutual dialogue and thereby potential for increasing social equity occupies a protean space between performers and audiences. The resulting “text” that occurs in that mutual reception must tilt toward privileging self-representation by the original narrators.

Further practical discussions in chapters two through five include studio exercises for generating artistic material from documentary sources, generating monologues and dialogues that frame that material, and theatrical staging of works. Each chapter is substantial, offering a short theoretical background on each specific topic. There are a few places where the theory is not substantive. In a discussion of poetics, works on orality by Dell...