The following is an excerpt from the book “Ethnotheatre Research from Page to Stage, Johnny Saldana, pg. 69
“Everyday life can be quite mundane, but it is also peppered with occasional moments of excitement, tension and conflict. An adage among theatre practitioners goes, “Theatre is life…with all the boring parts taken out.” It is not just a clever saying, it is actually one way of approaching what we do with the empirical materials we collect (or refer to) as we transform them for theatrical presentation: take the boring parts out. One of the goals of an ethnodramatist is to take the actual words of a participant and adapt them into an economic form that has aesthetic shape. …..the worst sin an artist can commit is to bore the audience. Theatre and performance events are bound by time. Thus the “boring parts” and what is sometimes called verbal debris need to be taken out of verbatim…”
(perhaps the most challenging job for the ethnodramatist as artist …is to, at times, negotiate with well intentioned science and data in access… working beyond a proliferation of “necessary” data in favour of “the big but tightly edited essential message”, which, for those who seek to tell… is the essence of the story itself…or purpose of the ethnodrama, a telling that is usually, far beyond the practical goal to simply inform but rather to move an audience emotionally and untimately inspire change Cheryl L. McLean)
Johnny Saldana is professor of theatre at Arizona State University School of Theatre, Cheryl McLean is publisher of The International Journal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP, http://www.ijcaip.com, editor of books Creative Arts in Humane Medicine, Creative Arts for Community and Cultural Change and Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice and writer/director of the ethnodrama “Who Cares” staged for the public September 23, 2015 at Acadia University, Nova Scotia. info http://www.cherylmclean.com
