Introducing Instinctive Theater

Instinctive Theater started with a series of questions I kept returning to across years of working in theater, education, community engagement, organizing, and research. Once people share their stories through a performance process, what happens to those stories afterward? Where do they go? Who keeps them? Who studies them? Who decides what they mean? How do we make sure the people who shared the stories remain connected to the knowledge created from their own experiences?

Instinctive Theater grew from years of working inside forms that taught me a great deal. Playback Theater taught me about listening, reflection, and receiving a story in the moment. Through that work, I found multinational mentorship, I traveled, performed, taught, and learned across the United States, the UK, South Africa, and Senegal. In those engagements, I also began to unravel the parts of these forms that were not culturally accommodating to my experience as a Black woman from the south. Verbatim and Documentary Theater, especially Anna Deavere Smith’s work, taught me the power of people’s actual words. Theater of the Oppressed, Forum Theater, Invisible Theater, and Rainbow of Desire helped me think about performance, systems, and the internalized oppression we carry and the possibilities for transforming it. Instinctive Theater also comes from the Black church, gospel music, blues music, juke joints, front porches, kitchen tables, nursing home visits, community gatherings, and the way information has always moved through Black communities.

So when I talk about Instinctive Theater, I am talking about a theater integrated research methodology. That is the clean language for it. But what I mean is that Instinctive Theater uses performance, storytelling, listening, oral history, observation, documentation, community participatory research, and reflection to help communities study their own experiences and preserve what they know.

At its heart, Instinctive Theater is about relationship, memory, performance, research, and responsibility. It asks what we owe to the people who trust us with their stories. It asks what becomes possible when communities are allowed to study their own lives with seriousness, imagination, and respect. And it asks what happens when performance does not simply represent a story, but helps preserve it, question it, and return it to the people who made it possible.

So it has been said. And it is so.

Learn more: Maryam@hbc430.com