Performing Transformation in the Community University of the Rivers

Abstract

In this two-part article, I seek to present our emerging Community University of the Rivers through the languages of storytelling (poetry, song, image and theatre) to bring to life the context and pedagogy of Transformance in action, in the Afro-Indigenous community of Cabelo Seco (Portuguese: Dry Hair), founding community of Marabá city, Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. I use this strategy to ensure that you meet and might identify with my collaborators in our Community University of the Rivers, as living subjects. By privileging human narration, I do not mean to the privilege action over reaction, as our dramatic performance and our actors are highly analytical. I am simply embedding theoretical concepts and analyses in our lived experience, valuing oratory, in the search for an aesthetics of transformation. This polyphonic, narrative-based (and less-logocentric) methodology is how all our projects develop, and might be more familiar to practitioners-theoreticians in the ‘global south.’