Partners: Dr. Monica Mottin, Dr. Stefanie Lotter, Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts (London)

Yearly, in January

In January 2022, HaP researchers Dr. Monica Mottin and Dr. Stefanie Lotter established new community ties with Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, London, by leading a workshop on theater and social change for MA Applied Theater students there. This workshop was expanded and adapted in January 2023, when Monica Mottin returned to teach a new group of students, using her research on community and folk theater in Janakpur and Patan, Nepal. This now-yearly workshop is popular with students—Monica delivered it again in 2024. This initiative seeks to broaden ideas about the embeddedness of theatre in society and guide students toward understanding the political and developmental framing in the Nepali context.

Below, Monica Mottin shares her experience and explains how outreach such as this can connect the research of Heritage as Placemaking to new audiences, often in rewarding and surprising ways.

“The Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts is one of UK’s leading drama schools, located in Peckham, London. I was invited by the Course Leader Maria Askew to deliver a lecture/workshop for students of the MA Theatre for Community and Education on January 25th, 2023. Titled “Theatre in Nepal: between Heritage, Politics and Development,” the session aimed to broaden the students’ ideas on how theatre is embedded in society, with specific focus on Nepal. It was also an opportunity to make exemplify the connections between my previous research on social and political theatre with my Heritage as Placemaking project on heritage performance. All in all, political theatre, social theatre and folk dance-dramas take all place in the streets that in different ways become places for collective reflection and sharing.

“For me, outreach is a really important and enjoyable moment; it’s an opportunity to share academic research with audiences that are usually interested in a topic and experts in their own right. In this instance, the students were thrilled to know the way in which the Kartik Naach is preserved and how the changes introduced by the organizing committee in the name of preserving the dance may affect the relationship between the dance and the local community that is the original target audience. At the same time, some students had practical experience of doing community theatre, and were very familiar with the challenges involved. They raised interesting critical questions about how forum theatre is practiced by some groups in Nepal; in particular, they pointed out potential effects of doing long street theatre tours on sensitive issues like gender violence without any follow-ups to provide a safe space for audience members who may have been triggered by the topic.”

— Monica Mottin