This article concerns acting in one's story in public spaces, speaking the unspeakable in mixed company, and the possible effects of such acts on performers as well as on community audiences. It addresses a performance project on which I am attempting to gain critical purchase as a cultural outsider but artistic insider. Titled Uncomfortable Conversations, the play participates in recent attempts by FORWARD, a London NGO, to approach key social issues through the arts. In summer 2016 I began workshops with UK African diaspora migrants to devise their first foray into theatre. Active in the UK and Africa, FORWARD focuses on gender violence against women (including female genital mutilation or FGM, and forced/child marriage),Footnote ² and participants had been previously mobilized about these issues in meetings. However, it is one thing to speak abstractly about ending harmful practices, and another to embody taboo issues onstage in mixed company with outsiders present. This is especially true for women for whom the public sphere is anywhere outside the home; virtuous womanhood is silence, deference and modesty in the presence of elders and males, and honour is paramount.Footnote ³ Performers were migrants from African countries, including Sudan and Somalia, which are particularly stigmatized in current immigration debates.

During February and March 2017, I devised/wrote and directed the script for two performances at the Paddington Arts Centre in North London. We used the public meeting room (rather than its stage) as a more familiar and comfortable performance space. Although most of the women had originally said that they would participate in workshops but never appear onstage, they all decided to perform. Even by community theatre standards, devising and rehearsal times were extremely limited: just six weeks of Wednesday mornings. Three women dropped out because of unspecified immigration issues or because they had been forbidden to attend for fear of damage to their husbands’ reputations.

Rehearsal times and spaces were necessarily improvised. Actors performed script-in-hand (none had ever memorized lines and English was not a first language).Footnote ⁴ Our only full run-through was on opening night. Despite the limited publicity of a week's postering and word of mouth, the room was filled with an almost equal mix of men and women, some children, and a dozen non-community members and officials. The production incorporated what Baz Kershaw calls the authenticating traditions of community performance – based on its conventions of gathering and dispersal.Footnote ⁵ It included a post-show conversation (with actors, physicians and social-service providers) and, importantly, an informal shared meal. During both evenings, audiences were lively and engaged in the discussion.

The script consisted of short curated scenes that pieced together verbatim information gathered in workshops. An exception, the ‘Letter to My Husband’, addressed the effects of FGM on sex and childbirth.Footnote ⁶ This scene discussed the hidden psychological trauma and physical issues imposed by FGM and elicited spontaneous applause, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that open discussion of sex is forbidden, especially in mixed company. Another scene focusing on FGM, ‘I'm More Than That’, defied women's definition solely by circumcision.

The majority of scenes addressed how migration affects identity, with a structural arc from initial questioning of traditions to final assertions of individuality within cultures. ‘My Instagram Life’ acknowledged the pervasiveness of shame, with ‘perfect’ poses dropped to speak imperfect, hidden truths: a son in prison, a friend whose husband beats her, unexpected divorce. Scenes also included second-generation issues and defining ‘good womanhood’ in tension between home country and British expectations. The last scene, ‘See Me’, reconsidered the balance between traditional, individual, and plurilocally focused community responsibilities.Footnote ⁷ Actors’ final ‘I am’ statements validated their qualities, accomplishments and efforts at creating work-in-progress identities. They urged the audience, ‘You need to get to know me before you can judge me’, and claimed public presence in the last line, ‘How can I shut my mouth? These are things I need to speak out about.’Footnote ⁸

Before turning to the effects of this public performance on actors, I want to note the possible interactions of socially engaged performances, not only with spectators and actors, but also with perceptions about the public spaces in which they take place. Joanne Tompkins has observed in Theatre's Heterotopias that performances in non-theatre sites (like meeting rooms) can intersect with the past histories/uses of such spaces, creating possibilities for changed present and future responses as ‘theatrical heterotopias’.Footnote ⁹ For Uncomfortable Conversations, performed in a rented room previously used for the less personally revealing and non-transgressive speech used in community meetings and social events, this gathering layered new traces of behaviour on its site.Footnote ¹⁰ It is possible that the play will create openings for social change because of performative speech that exceeded usual/historical community practices in this site.Footnote ¹¹

Heterotopic performances may develop, as in this case, in unsurveilled spaces where people can risk speaking freely. Sociologists Erel, Reynolds and Kaptani argue that marginalized women may move beyond their social isolation through safe public sharing of their stories, which acts as a catalyst for ‘enacting citizenship’.Footnote ¹² For FORWARD participants, regular coffee hours generated such a (gender-segregated) free-speech space and fostered women's riskier involvement in devising workshops and performances. There they negotiated gendered social marginality and pushed against the acceptance of harmful traditions while attempting to maintain their public social standing.

Further, sociologist Francesca Polletta observes of free-speech sites, ‘Physical gathering spaces … demonstrat[e] the co-presence of others … showing people that issues they thought taboo can be discussed.’Footnote ¹³ Although, as Polletta notes, such open speech is frequently deployed against oppressive forces outside the community, here speaking freely negotiated gendered power relations within the community, as performance pushed the boundaries of ‘decency’.

In a feedback meeting soon after the performance, I asked actors if they felt that appearing onstage had changed them. Surprisingly, their initial responses were, ‘Now we're all celebrities’, with expressions of eagerness to participate in another show and appreciation for the breadth of the community's concern about FGM.Footnote ¹⁴ But what were the long-term results?

I recently talked with FORWARD staff member Kabung Lomodong (who participated in Uncomfortable Conversations) and two other actors about the efficacy of the production fifteen months after the last performance. Lomodong observed that the play had created a sense of community cohesion through audience identification. For the NGO, it had become a ‘hands-off experience, emotional because powerful women and men in the community came forward to take it on’. Although actors had gained confidence by performing conflated characters without directly exposing their own experiences, she also said that, by speaking onstage, they'd became public people ‘who need to stand despite backlash’ and whose ‘reputation is on the line’. Lomodong also mentioned that two married women regretted participating (although one drop-out improvised her way back into a scene during a performance, perhaps in protest against her husband).Footnote ¹⁵ Another actor recently mentioned a few negative comments from audience men.Footnote ¹⁶

It was culturally important that both married and non-married women participated, as, in honour-based societies, it requires particular courage for single women, lacking spousal protection, to speak in public. Perceptions of shameful behaviour can destroy the reputation of entire families, and respect ‘is more important than your own well-being’. Lomodong notes, however, that an actor who left an abusive relationship during rehearsals now speaks in schools. Other company members would also now speak more assertively in public, ‘given the opportunity’. Some, less engaged in the production, remained unchanged.

These mixed results for actors correspond to contemporary theories of spectator response. Community actors are active (or ‘emancipated’) participants who interpret their onstage actions within the context of their lives. To explore the effects of their participation and the audiences’ responses, I attempt to braid Jacques Rancière's and Baz Kershaw's analyses of spectator effects and performance efficacy. In The Emancipated Spectator Rancière proposes uneven, multilateral and active reception by audience members who connect performance texts in the contexts of their own lives and reach individual critical conclusions.Footnote ¹⁷ He argues, ‘What exactly occurs among theatre spectators that cannot happen elsewhere?’, dismissing the communal experience of theatre as a special case in its effects on audiences (and actors). Rancière posits theatre's equivalence to unilaterally embodied experiences (like public film screenings) or to object-focused events (like public gatherings in a museum).Footnote ¹⁸

While I agree with Rancière that an audience's experiences are individual and that theatre shares characteristics with other performance forms, I have experienced that energy flows in a powerful (though uneven) way among those sharing the spaces of theatrical performance. Like Rancière, Baz Kershaw recognizes individual responses, but also that performance meanings may be shared, even though theatre may ‘feed contrasting ideologies’, as Uncomfortable Conversations did for its audiences.Footnote ¹⁹

In pushing against traditional boundaries of speech, theatre can enlarge free spaces for heterotopic imaginings in both actors and audiences, particularly when the impact of sharing stories is heightened because actors speak to and with peers.Footnote ²⁰ Such performances may, as Kershaw claims, generate a community crisis when the contents of the play transgress normative social rules. While thus both breaking and keeping these rules, the event finally returns audiences to ‘what is’. However, it can also leave ‘what-if?’ heterotopic traces on both participants and performers. Maintaining the community's rhetorical gathering and dispersal conventions (in this case the pre-show sociability and post-show meal), performances like Uncomfortable Conversations challenge, but do not breach, community boundaries.Footnote ²¹ This play's primary lasting effect may be simply that, for an hour, women placed themselves in the public gaze and contravened rhetorical traditions of community speakability, rehearsing change.

In performing the play, private women acted to redefine themselves, literally demanding to be seen. For at least some of the actors, risk taking helped to create larger self-imaginings, an attempt to expand their influence within the community and, in speaking to an audience that included politicians, within the larger British sphere. This performance took place in the midst of post-Brexit vote anxieties about migrants, in which the generic headscarf-wearing Muslim woman symbolizes possible limits to British notions of multiculturalism. Actors’ public speech reflected the need to reshape spaces in diaspora that recognize migrants’ diverse experiences, skills and plurilocal attachments.Footnote ²²

While there is no easy, unambiguous answer to the question ‘What did this performance do?’, enough has changed in its community as a result that FORWARD's current goal (and mine) is to remount the production for diaspora communities in London and Bristol, to raise awareness about the illegal practice of returning girls to Africa for ‘cutting season’ during school holidays. FORWARD is currently in the fundraising process to make these uncomfortable conversations happen elsewhere in the UK.

Recent emphasis on the evaluation of efficacy for grant funding focuses on theatre's effects on its audiences, yet audience members are increasingly theorized as completely isolated in their responses. The effect on actors of participating in community performances is also less studied. This article has focused more holistically on the workshop-to-performance process, exploring the mutual circulation of ideas, affect and effect when actors are members of the community that they address. The central question is: how can migrants who are doubly marginalized by cultural traditions of gendered silencing and male domination at home, and by their visible cultural distinctiveness as migrants to the UK during a time of anti-immigrant bias, attempt to bring these issues into public rhetoric? At this historical moment, the number of migrants who face such dual challenges continues to increase.