Amanda Rose Villarreal is a third-year Devaney Fellow pursuing her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies. She studies the intersection of immersive theatre and applied theatre, with a focus on consent and agency. Villarreal has spent 12 years creating immersive performances that hinge upon crafting interactive experiences that invite audience participants to engage with the performance in various ways, impacting the storyline along with the performers. She has used immersive theatre to teach police officers, formerly incarcerated individuals, educational administrators and others to use empathy, communication, and de-escalation techniques. She is currently interested in using the consent and intimacy practices from immersive theatre to create safer spaces for young and early career performers; she co-founded the Rocky Mountain Artists’ Safety Alliance for this purpose. She hopes to saturate Colorado’s performance community with best practices regarding consent and intimacy choreography, and to continue using performance to facilitate dialogue within communities.
Students in the Engaged Arts and Humanities Graduate Student Scholars program participate in the development of a community-engaged scholarship "partner" project. Below, please read about Villareal's project and her approach to this work.
title="How are you framing this work through your own experience, commitments and current and future goals?" style="regular"
As an actress, educator, and director, Villareal is keenly aware of power imbalances that permeate the realms of education and theatre. In her own experience, well-meaning individuals in positions of power have, due to their own discomfort, avoided discussions of consent, which has led to harmful misunderstandings and miscommunications. She hopes to help educators feel comfortable teaching the topic of consent to their students, and to support this learning in multiple disciplines in order to reinforce this messaging for students. By preparing theatre teachers to use best practices of intimacy choreography in all onstage contact, students are exposed to the concept of consent in a nonsexual use, which Villareal hopes will help today’s youth become more familiar with and comfortable with this concept in all contexts.
[/expand