Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication

This book analyses the partnership between applied theatre and sexual health communication in a theatre-making project in Nyanga, a township in South Africa. By examining the bridges and schisms between the two fields as they come together in the project, an alternative way of approaching sexual health communication is advocated. This alternative considers what it is that applied theatre does, and could become, in this context. Moments of value which lie around the margins of the practice emerge as opportunities that can be overlooked. These somewhat ephemeral, intangible moments, which appear on the edges, are described as ‘apertures of possibility’ and occur when one takes a step back and realises something unnoticed in the moment. This book offers an invitation to pause and notice the seemingly insignificant moments that often occurs tangentially to the practice. The book also calls for more outcry about sexual health and sexual violence, arguing for theatre-making as a route to multitudes of voices, nuanced understandings, and diverse spaces in which discussions of sexuality and sexual health are shared, felt, and experienced.

1.      Endorsement

Kim Solga, Professor of Theatre Studies, Western University

Applied Theatre and Sexual Health Communication demonstrates our community-engaged labour at its best. Low reveals the processes through which our work with individuals comes to impact whole communities, and to shape informal pedagogical networks that have significant social impact. Asking at what price we value “measurement” of our outcomes above all else, Low simultaneously reveals the risks of closing off other ways to assess the value of what we do. This is urgent work.

Dr. Katharine E. Low is a practitioner and researcher in socially engaged theatre making and sexual health communication. Her work and research focuses on the intersections of health, labour and care in applied practice, and motherhood and academia. Katharine has written about her practice research in a number of journals and co-edited Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing for Methuen Bloomsbury (2017). She is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Theatre and Community Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.