Theatre, Empathy and Community The role theatre can play in deconstructing and constructing notions of the self and the other. Selina Busby
MA Applied Theatre: Drama Education and Drama in the Community MA Applied Theatre: Drama in the Criminal Justice System
Live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting imitations of a better world…audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential. Dolan 2005,2
Compassion is the sentiment we feel for particular other human beings – where as pity is a general sentiment towards the misfortunate, from a distance‌distance is an obstacle to empathy, and creates a deterioration of compassion. Arendt 1963, 84
Empathy • Knowing another person’s internal state • Adapting the positive or matching the neural responses of another • Coming to feel as another person feels • Intuiting or projecting one self into another’s situation • Imagining how another is thinking and feeling • Imagining how one would think and feel in another’s place • Feeling distress at witnessing another suffering • Feeling for another person who is suffering.
Empathy • Knowing another person’s internal state • Adapting the positive or matching the neural responses of another • Coming to feel as another person feels • Intuiting or projecting one self into another’s situation • Imagining how another is thinking and feeling • Imagining how one would think and feel in another’s place • Feeling distress at witnessing another suffering • Feeling for another person who is suffering.
Theatre
• Imagine how another is thinking and feeling • Imagine how one would think and feel in another’s place • To feel distress at witnessing another’s suffering • To feel for another person who is suffering.
The result of reading a utopia is that it puts into question what precisely exists; it makes the actual world seem strange. Usually we are tempted to say that we cannot live in a different way from the way we presently do. Ricoeur 1986, 299