Transforming Stories, Driving Change free online workbook!
Transforming Stories, Driving Change (TSDC) is a research and performance initiative under the leadership of researchers from the McMaster University School of Social Work and the School of the Arts, the Good Shepherd Centres, and the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton, with the collaboration from the Hamilton Community Foundation and funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development grant. Led by Principal Investigators Chris Sinding (School of Social Work) and Catherine Graham (School of the Arts), TSDC uses performance to explore, and then show, how social exclusion affects particular communities in Hamilton, and how these communities are responding.
Since 2015, the TSDC team has worked alongside community partners and performer-advocates to make plays designed to draw attention to the voices and visions of people whose opinions are not often represented in discussions of the future of the City. Through our performances, we have tried to contribute to building the movements that can make public leaders more accountable to people who are affected by their decisions. Five years and four plays later, we are launching a free online TSDC workbook, Transforming Stories, Driving Change: Bringing new voices into public debate through performance, as a practical guide to TSDC’s creative approach.
“In this age of populism, when too many media and political figures try to exploit the dissatisfaction of people who are feeling unheard, it is crucially important to create forums where marginalized voices can take their rightful place in public discussion. We are working to create events where people from different social locations can speak to, not for or at, each other, and where nobody feels like they’ve been written out of the discussion before it even starts.”
— Catherine Graham, Principal Investigator & Artistic Director, Transforming Stories Driving Change
Catherine Graham
Retired Associate Professor of Theatre & Film Studies | School of the Arts, McMaster University
“One of the things that’s striking to me about the work is how it plays with questions of standpoint or perspective. There are many different ways that the performance opens up a new way of seeing or knowing, or disrupts an established way of seeing or knowing.”
— Chris Sinding, Principal Investigator, Transforming Stories Driving Change
Christina Sinding
Professor | Director of the School of Social Work, McMaster University
A community-based performance creation process
Over the past five years the Transforming Stories, Driving Change has worked with a team of what performance studies scholar Jan Cohen-Cruz calls “uncommon partners” (theatre makers, arts and social science educators and scholars, community self-advocates, social service providers and social planners) to create stories and make theatre about how Hamilton can become a better and more inviting place to live. TSDC productions have included performances about living in inhospitable and precarious housing (When My Home Is Your Business), dealing with the narrow mandates and inflexibility of social services (All Of Us Together & We Need To Talk), and navigating life as a young person under surveillance in Hamilton (Choose Your Destination). Produced using performance as a research strategy, and in collaboration with our community partners, TSDC performances work to:
- Offer community members (community and self-advocates who have lived experience of social marginalization) a platform and method through which to address a broader public.
- Interrupt usual patterns of public discussion by prompting an encounter between the plays’ performer-advocates and members of the audience.
- Shed light on the social expectations that shape our interactions, and the tensions and contradictions in them.
Transforming Stories, Driving Change is generously funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council Partnership Development Grant.