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About me and my work
I am a socially-engaged performance practitioner, scholar and educator from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American family background. Over the past 15 years I have developed my arts/research practice in the US, Russia, England, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia. My life experience has been the discovery of performance as a transnational pathway for coming into contact with different ways of seeing, knowing and being. In 2023, I completed my PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis (more information here) and am currently living in Bogotá, Colombia.
I received a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City and studied abroad at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Dublin and the Moscow Art Theatre. As a postgraduate, I studied Russian stage movement at the Vakhtangov Theatre Academy in Moscow and then completed a Masters of Arts in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, in England. I have worked with a number of theatre companies and cultural centers, facilitated educational and community theatre programs, devised original performances, and taught courses in schools and universities (more about workshops I facilitate here).
My work explores participatory techniques for exchanging perspectives, making connections across barriers of difference, and creating spaces to feel the mutability of ‘belonging’ and ‘community’. I use performance to encourage freedom of expression and promote equity, amplifying voices not usually heard in society and inviting active listening from the body. I have facilitated socially-engaged projects that voiced the stories of refugees in rural England, developed the communication skills of youth in New York, enhanced the interactive pedagogical tools of English teachers in Caracas, and visibilized the perspectives of inmates in Chilean prisons (more about my different projects here).
My PhD research in Performance Studies at UC Davis, with designated emphases in Practice as Research and Human Rights, focused on facilitating the expression of experiences of mobility and enclosure, specifically among incarcerated, migrant and displaced women and children in California, Chile and Colombia. My dissertation aimed to contribute to applied theatre facilitation practices by re-thinking frames for valuing its ‘impact’ from a hemispheric and decolonial perspective, showing how facilitation can work against dehumanization by centralizing affect and embodiment. During 2019-20 I conducted fieldwork in Bogotá, Colombia, as a Fulbright US Student Researcher, studying socially-engaged performance initiatives engaging internally displaced people and Venezuelan migrants.
My recent publications address contemporary performance in Latin America and specifically in the context of Colombia’s armed conflict, devised theatre methodology and the importance of affect to applied theatre in contexts of dehumanization (such as prison and immigrant incarceration), and my embodied practice of witnessing testimonial narratives of deportation and violence. Research areas include applied theatre, human rights, performative ethnography, decolonial theory, affect theory, embodiment, migration studies, carceral studies and performance studies. Overall, my current performance practice/research explores the intersections and overlaps between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘local’ and ‘foreign’, performer and audience, participant and facilitator, tackling ethical and aesthetic questions about engaging community participants as protagonists in artistic/academic exchanges (for more information, see my recent presentations).
I am currently Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, where I teach Theatre for Social Change, Latin American Theatre & Performance, and Practice-as-Research: Performance Activism. If you would like to share your thoughts with me, connect and ask questions, brainstorm ideas for a participatory theater project, organize an educational seminar, or pick my brain about resources in the field of socially-engaged performance, drop me a line!
sarahashfordhart@gmail.com / sahart@wm.edu
For more about what I do, take a look at my CV: Sarah_Ashford_Hart_CV_2024
A quick look at my current work:
Presentation of my PhD research for the “Practices of Liberation in the Era of Mass Deportation, Incarceration and Displacement” Work Group at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Encuentro “The World Inside Out: Humor, Noise and Performance” held at UNAM, Mexico City in 2019 [English]:
Trailer for Moving-with Anastasis Corporal, my most recent practice-as-research project (June 2021), which engaged performing arts students from the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (via Zoom) in actively witnessing the embodied testimonies of female victims of Colombia’s armed conflict [Spanish]:
PechaKucha Presentation Moving-with Anastasis Corporal, a path to implicated witnessing for the “Reimagining Intimacy Symposium: Immersive and Participatory Performance in the Era of Covid-19″ hosted by the University of Calgary, Canada in December 2022 [English]:
Sarah Ashford Hart 