Embodying resistance: A workshop of performative dialogues between women from three Ibero-American dramaturgies

Abstract

This paper aims to recall the implementation of a workshop of performative dialogues on three 20^th-century Ibero-American dramas, with a gender perspective. The workshop was held in the context of a shelter in the city of Aguascalientes, Mexico, for women who have suffered violence in their family environments. The participants, housed anonymously for safety reasons engaged in a creative and co-participatory experience that sought to foster dialogue, reflection and symbolic resistance. I will discuss here, first, the motivation for holding the workshop, from an academic, but also a personal and political perspective. Second, I will present the theoretical and methodological assumption that guided the workshop design, in particular, the idea of a performative dialogue as a guide and development of the workshop, constructed based on conceptual and technical elements of the Theater of the Opressed People (Boal, 1980). Finally, I will describe the workshop proposal and propose and interpretation of the results, considering that literary criticism of theater can serve as a basis for extending its practical application to social projects; in these case though a performative dialogue workshop with characters and plays.