Paper short abstract:

With Rudy Estela Posada (campesina leader, river guardian, and human rights activist from rural Colombia), we present our use of story-based theatre for communities in resistance to a hydroelectric mega-project that has decimated their lands and lives, to access, name and mobilize capabilities.

Paper long abstract:

Carolina Osorio Gil and Rudy Estela Posada Mazo discuss the collaborative Participatory Action Research (PAR) study with and about Movimiento Ríos Vivos Colombia (MRV/Living Rivers Movement), a campesina/o (“peasant”) movement are in resistance to the largest hydroelectric dam in the canyon of the Cauca River in Colombia, which has been built on their ancestral homelands on the river that they have depended on for generations. Cañonera/os (people of the canyon) have a particular way of understanding the world that is being enacted right now in their resistance and with their river. A pillar of their movement is that their river is alive and that they, as ancestral gold panners, fisher-men and -women and farmers, are experts on the river better know what is appropriate for this region than those who own and manage the dam, which has led to an environmental and socio-cultural crisis.

For the past 2.5 years, for this PAR project, MRV and Osorio Gil have been propelled by MRV’s question: How will cañonera/os move forward with their lives, whether or not their resistance movement is successful in closing down the dam? Our project utilises participatory story-based theatre methodology for MRV members to identify their capabilities and knowledges, in order to assign value to how those individual and collective capabilities can help them build collective futures.

Posada Mazo is the president of Amarúd, a campesino/a women’s group in defense of water and life, and one of the 14 regional grassroots organisations from four regions of Northern Antioquia that make up MRV. A victim of the armed conflict in Colombia and re-victimised by the megaproject, she is a human rights defender and guardian of the Cauca River. She has been displaced by armed groups 11 times, and forcefully displaced 5 times by EPM, the company that owns and operates the dam.

Drawing on Story Circle methodology from the Free Southern Theatre of the US Civil Rights Moment and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Osorio Gil has used story-based theatre with rural communities in Colombia and Mexico, to access and co-create land-based knowledges and capabilities. The methodology attempts to operationalize Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach in the context of Latin American resistance movements to large-scale development projects.

UNESCO describes futures literacy as “the competency that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do”. Story-based theatre is a can help do just that – enact collaboratively created visions of what the future might look and feel like by trying it out in a safe and creative performance space. This novel methodology for accessing knowledges and capabilities based on each other’s lived experiences, allows participants to collaboratively create re-presentations of each other’s past memories, of their common present struggles with the dam, and, eventually, of co-imagined futures. In the words of Boal (1992), “Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should be and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it”.