ABSTRACT
Joining the effort toward decolonizing applied theatre curricular spaces, Cotton & Collards: Unearthing Stories of Home through Kitchens & Closets (2015–2016) was a local and global community multi-event project involving artists and educators eliciting stories of home catalyzed by clothing and food histories. The project’s ten community sites all served youth inside and outside schools. Each used art/s in response to the question: “What’s the relationship between our food, our clothes and our earth?” Michael Balfour highlights inherent contradictions in arts-based work trained on a politics of intention. He pushes for tiny change.
In resisting the bait of social change, rehabilitation, behavioral objectives and outcomes, perhaps (and it is a small perhaps), applied practice might more readily encounter the accidental, and acknowledge that what applied theatre does is not always linear, rational and conclusive in its outcomes, but is more often messy, incomplete, complex and tentative.
On this richly troubled terrain, the Cotton & Collards project embraced Balfour’s promise of “tiny” and aimed to focus local through the idea of home.
