Theatre-based methods for transdisciplinary learning in staging urban politics

In the project-based module Act Up! at UCG, part of the Erasmus+ project Active Citizenship through Theatre for Urban Politics, we engage students in theatre-based learning, providing them with tools and techniques for increased civic engagement and participation. In collaboration with theatre professionals, students experiment with the potential of performing arts in the urban context, empowering them as active citizens who can create constructive dialogue in public space. We develop performances in the urban setting, designed to address the crisis of (knowledge) representation in responding to the climate emergency and other urgent questions that emerge in the public sphere. We analyse how this contributes to new forms of (embodied) knowledge production and communication, bringing new perspectives and ways of knowing into urban (climate) politics. Students thus explore the urban as a key arena for the ‘politics of representation’ in which contestation is played out over the creation and imposition of certain identities and interests, over who and what is made present or not, in- or excluded. By moving educational approaches from the academy into the streets, we aim to develop student capacity for navigating the many different interests, perspectives and values that constitute urban (climate) politics ‘on the ground’.