The Transformative Impact of Participatory Art: A Descriptive Analysis on Women s Theater Experience

15465

Participatory art studies that primarily target women s participation can provide opportunities for women to gain awareness of their own problems while at the same time providing areas for realizing and expressing themselves. The project entitled “Women Meet the Theater”, which was initiated in Antalya in 2010 aiming at the participation of housewives especially living in disadvantaged areas, is a “participatory art” project. In the project, it was aimed to use the theater scene as an environment where women can share their problems, hopes, fears and expectations. The project consists of screenwriting stories written by women from their own problems and gaining skills for performing arts. A significant number of project participants women are housewives living in disadvantaged areas of Antalya in terms of social and economic aspects. The four plays, three of them were written by themselves, were staged by these women, forty times in the country and once abroad by participating women, between 2010-2017. Of the 34 participating women, 13 women who had in-depth interviews are still in the project. In 2011 and 2015, 13 women interviewed by in-depth interviewing techniques expressed their progress in expressing their skills and expressed their experience of freedom in the process of theater project, which they regard as a field of freedom. Women s perceptions of freedom were assessed within the scope of the freedom approach that Bauman analyzes as a “social relationship”.

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Gender , Women s struggle , Participatory art , Theater , Zygmunt Bauman

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities

421

Mediterranean Journal Of Humanities