Troubling aesthetics: mapping vulnerability as a generative force in community theatre

Abstract

This article explores the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in community theatre with teenage girls. By drawing on postconstructionist and spatial theories, the article elaborates on how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force, the article debates tensions produced in the process in terms of potentia and potestas. It examines the embeddedness of the drama practice as it both challenges and merges with the local context and the participants’ everyday. The article argues that this embeddedness is a prerequisite to turn vulnerability into potentia.