Dr. Songsiri Putthongchai & Dr. Garry Fry
(Thammasat University & Australian National University)

Our action research using replay, a participatory theatre application, focuses on what teenagers consider to be the ‘worst’ of teenage life in rapidly diversifying social environments.  The plays are a tool by which young people, using critical thought, suggest strategies to improve outcomes and so experiment with social relations.  They test these strategies by replaying the actions of the play attempting to avert the characters’ dangerous actions and life-threatening anxieties. 

The play, Wairun Woonak, was derived from workshops with Thai teens at high schools in Rangsit district, Bangkok.  During the play-building stages, other students confirmed that in their experience the behaviour and situations depicted in the play were accurate.  The play toured high schools in Bangkok, Thailand and then in Canberra and South East NSW, Australia. * 

The play-building process meant that the characters of the plays embodied the life environments of a stratum of young people in the Rangsit district.  The play’s audiences in Australia share the corresponding life moment: school students in mid-teenage.  The two characters with disaffected lives in Thailand resonate in the lives of mid-teenagers at Australian high schools. Each audience understands despair leading to dangerous biking and anxiety about personal appearance.  Yet in the replay, when they, the audiences, can contribute to effective actions to reverse the tragedies they see unfold, they realise the discontinuity between the life environments they each inhabit.  Thus, in devising strategies within diversified societies, the immediate element of cultural difference tests their thought.

* This exchange was enabled by a grant from the Australia Thai Institute of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Altitude850, the Australian consultancy firm that devised and underwrote the project and the Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Thailand, that encouraged the use of the replay technique in their classes and supported the exchange.

This seminar will be held in the Jean Martin Room, Level 3, Beryl Rawson Building #13

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