Building peaceful communities: collaboration and co-creation through theatre

While theatre is a widely-used approach in community development, there are limited studies that seek to understand how varying theatre forms are used to build community and peace in contexts characterised by violence and war. Documenting and exploring such empirical examples contributes to further the scholarship on using the arts to engage with politics at community level. This chapter examines two theatre groups that use different theatre approaches for building community and peace in two contexts: Jana Sanskriti from India and Jana Karaliya from Sri Lanka. Jana Sanskriti uses Theatre of the Oppressed in a context of structural violence in West Bengal while Jana Karaliya, as a multiethnic, bilingual mobile theatre group, works in the context of the Sri Lankan conflict, and addresses ethno-linguistic divisions in the country. The chapter argues that, despite these differences, their contributions to building peaceful communities are affected through respective processes of artistic collaboration and co-creation at community level. Artistic collaboration and co-creation in Jana Sanskriti unsettles the present by challenging everyday narratives of structural violence, while artistic collaboration and co-creation through Jana Karaliya encourages envisioning an alternative future by producing narratives of interethnic cohesion.