Contact Dr. Mouzet with questions: aureliam@email.arizona.edu
Talk-it-OUT! is an inquiry-based theater workshop program that teaches students how to use interactive performance techniques to spark meaningful conversations, raise awareness about social challenges, and explore issues of access, inclusion, and shared learning.
Program participants are undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Arizona, primarily from the College of Humanities. Through guided discussion, students develop original skits (in French or English) based on topics relevant to contemporary life experiences. These skits may be performed at schools, universities, libraries, and community centers, allowing students to engage with diverse publics through interactive theater methods grounded in participatory performance.
Core Interactive Methods
- Forum Theatre: Participants perform scenes involving everyday conflicts; audience members are invited to step in, offer solutions, or direct actors to try different outcomes.
- Image Theatre: Participants use still images to represent personal experiences or challenges; these images are interpreted and reshaped through audience engagement, offering embodied and symbolic forms of understanding.
- Playback Theatre: Audience members share real-life stories, which are then dramatized on the spot by the actors in creative, improvisational form.
Major Workshops & Recent Initiatives
To deepen the program’s impact on community awareness, inclusivity, and critical dialogue, Talk-it-OUT! has recently organized several targeted workshops and events, with the generous support of COH Dorrance Award for Research and Entrepreneurship:
- Forum Theatre for Change (November 2025), a workshop co-led with Bernard Grosjean, former assistant to the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal, which emphasized deep engagement with Forum Theatre practice, collective storytelling, and the use of performance as a site of shared inquiry and social imagination.
- Breaking the Mold: Forum Theatre for Accessible Learning (August 2025), an interactive forum theatre event engaging audiences in scenes around learning disabilities and inclusive education, inviting participants to step into the action and collaboratively explore possibilities for more supportive systems.
- A Forum Theatre Intensive Workshop for Shared Learning Spaces (July 2025) that offered extended practice in devising, facilitating, and refining Forum Theatre techniques tailored to collaborative educational environments, encouraging participants to envision more supportive and participatory learning contexts.
- A Visual Impairment Awareness Workshop (April 2025) centered on accessibility and sensory experience, engaging participants in interactive exercises designed to explore visual impairment, perception, and embodied understanding.
Impact and Skills Development
Through these methods and workshops, Talk-it-OUT! helps participants and audiences practice active listening, creative problem solving, and collaborative thinking. The program encourages reflection on real-world issues—such as peer pressure, digital habits, access barriers, disabilities, and mental well-being—while fostering empathy, critical thinking, and constructive dialogue.
Broader Goal
The broader goal is to help students become more engaged and thoughtful members of a global society by building tools for connection, empathy, and meaningful exchange across differences.
Talk-it-OUT ! Program Director:
Dr. Aurélia Mouzet
Associate Professor, Francophone Studies, University of Arizona
