Contact Dr. Mouzet with questions: aureliam@email.arizona.edu
Talk-it-OUT ! is an inquiry-based theatre workshop program that teaches students from the 7th grade through college how to use interactive theatre performance to foster discussion and enhance the community’s awareness of issues that youth and minorities have to deal with in today’s world.
Program participants are students, both graduate and undergraduate, at the University of Arizona, majoring or minoring in the College of Humanities. They participate in a weekly workshop (may be partially led in French) over one or two semesters. Weekly discussions lead to the creation of skits (written in English) dealing with youth-related issues. Monthly performances in schools, universities, libraries and community centers allow university members to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the community through three interactive theatre tools:
- Forum Theatre: Participants enact conflicts related to diversity issues. Audience members are then asked to improvise on stage with the actors or to direct them to enact solutions to these conflicts;
- Image Theatre: Participants make still images of their personal experiences and/or macro/micro-aggressions. The audience will then suggest titles and themes that become frozen images using the participants’ bodies as clay. It will be used with younger audience to illustrate conflicts without having to rely on spoken words;
- Playback Theatre: Audience members share their personal stories, then the actors improvise and enact those stories before the audience.
Talk-it-OUT! will enhance the life-long application of problem solving in providing participants and audience members with strategies to improve conflict resolution, and provide a better understanding of different cultures to allow participants to embrace diversity instead of fearing it. It will also help discussing other issues that youth have to face in our contemporary world (cyberbullying, screen addiction, eating disorders, etc.)
The broader impact of the project is to contribute to making students/youths better citizens of the world, a world more transcultural in nature. Talk-it-OUT! provides the participants with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to promote diversity, inclusion, compassion and understanding.
Talk-it-OUT ! Program Director:
Dr. Aurélia Mouzet
Assistant Professor Francophone Studies, University of Arizona
aureliam@email.arizona.edu