“ENTRE PURAS MUJERES” / “ONLY AMONG WOMEN”: APPLIED THEATER, COMMUNITY BUILDING & WOMEN’S WATER KNOWLEDGES IN CHIAPAS, MÉXICO

Abstract

Operationalizing critical pedagogy and Applied Theater to gain understandings of women’s collaborative knowledge sharing and co-creating through story-based theater workshops, and utilizing narrative storytelling, transcriptions and analysis from recordings of firsthand accounts and interviews, as well as photography, this thesis tells the story of what essentially amounted to two days of theater workshops with women in rural communities in the lowlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Through story-based collaborative theater making, the mujeres (women) described herein, with virtually no prior theater experience, were able to share their own water knowledges and experiences, listen to each other’s water stories, and co-create collaborative art / theater works, leading to co-imagined possibilities. This paper explores the possibilities for story-based theater as a liberatory tool for accessing co-constructed and co-performed knowledges of water, with real implications for global development concerns such as water health, water access, and water governance in these communities.