Geography
Lise Landrin, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Sciences Po Grenoble, PACTE, 38000 Grenoble, France
As a geographer, I discovered community theater in Nepal in 2017 within the context of my thesis fieldwork. I was immediately inspired to link geography, performative arts and fieldwork. After having completed my PhD, I continued cultivating this research-creation project with the company Ru’elles, or, more recently, in the scope of the European Capital of Culture “Esch2022.”
Triggering theater is a term coined in French théâtre déclencheur by the artist Julie Arménio (Ru’elles). It considers our bodies as living archives and imprints of multiple relations of domination. Consequently, engagement in theater practice seeks to transform the nature of our ordinary performances through tools such as image theater, dance composition, poetry, sensitive mapping, or various spatial exploratory practices like urban drifts. Triggering theater is thus not in search of a scene or an acting performance in the professional sense of the term, but aims to reappropriate the ordinary through bodily exploration.
Following an encounter with Julie Arménio in 2017, we began working together to bridge the fields of geographical research and street art creation. Various terrains were explored across Grenoble (residencies at Chorier-Berriat, Europole, or Presqu’île) as well as with student groups (with final-year undergraduate students, reinterpreting Goffman’s sociological theories, or with Masters level students on the concept of Violent Peace in sustainable urbanism). But the analytical richness of the term triggering theater extends beyond borders, since it is also the term that I adopted to qualify my field practices in the rural environments of Nepal, with actor Pariksha Lamichhane. As such, the triggering theater that I practiced between 2017 and 2021 has given rise to workshops with Nepalese teenagers of mixed social cast, with marginalized women’s groups, with international Masters students, or, of course, with researchers from Pacte.
From my point of view as a researcher, triggering theater provides many elements for analysis. In fact, before even studying whatever plays out on stage or performed in the street, theater brings up the critical question of participation: who is authorized to make theater, in what conditions and what social constraints? These questions are the driving force of demonstrating that the right to space as well as the right to artistic expression are unequally distributed.
Triggering theater subsequently refers to both a creative practice as well as to a research method that explores the potential of a collective to create its proper research data. As such, it refreshes geographical field techniques and, more generally, human and social sciences as a whole, with the goal of including emotion, poetic language, and sensory approaches, as well as traditional knowledge.
Finally, the term “triggering” also allows researchers and artists to face the ethical and deontological question of their practice. In effect, this immersive method, grounded in self-exploration, succeeds in provoking unfiltered speech and action, which is undoubtedly very stimulating, yet also extremely risky. Research, much like artistic intervention of this type, cannot go without posing the following question: who does the action, research, or artistic act benefit?
Triggering theater believes in the power of the arts and sciences to reduce the unequal distribution of knowledge in a logic of collective emancipation. However, I raise the question of the irreversible danger of reproducing epistemic violence or of engendering psycho-emotional risks through this practice. That is precisely the reason for which the term “triggering” is so precious: it allows us to address the paradoxes that the logics of emancipation, participation, and action entail.
Cite this item: Lise Landrin, “Triggering theater”, translated by Caroline Schlenker, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2022, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177571
