Sarah Hart

Areas of Specialization

Applied theatre, performance studies, human rights, practice as research, Latin American theatre, devising, testimonial performance, embodiment, affect, trauma, memory, witnessing, migration, carceral studies, decolonial thought.

Courses Taught

Theatre for Social Change, Introduction to Theatre, Latin American Theatre & Performance, Practice as Research: Performance Activism

Background

Dr. Sarah Ashford Hart is a socially-engaged performance practitioner/scholar from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American background. She employs participatory performance techniques to encourage freedom of expression and promote equity, amplifying voices not usually heard in society and inviting active listening from the body. The focus of her practice/research (developed in the US, Russia, the UK, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia) has been unsettling self/other divisions and crossing sociocultural, linguistic and geographical barriers, in an effort to facilitate experiences of human connection.

Sarah completed her BA in Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University, her MA in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies with designated emphases in Human Rights and Practice-as-Research at the University of California, Davis. Her Ph.D. dissertation focused on methods of expressing/witnessing experiences of violence, displacement, and enclosure among incarcerated, migrant and victimized women and children in California, Chile and Colombia. She conducted fieldwork in Bogotá, Colombia, as a Fulbright US Student Researcher.

Her recent publications, written in both English and Spanish, address contemporary performance in Latin America and specifically in the context of Colombia’s armed conflict, devised theatre methodology, the importance of affect to applied theatre in contexts of dehumanization (such as prison and immigrant incarceration), and her embodied practice of witnessing testimonial narratives of deportation and state violence. Her current book project, “Affective Facilitation”, rethinks applied theatre from a hemispheric perspective to revalue its impact, showing how facilitation can work against dehumanization, in a decolonial sense, by centralizing affect and embodiment in a way that potentiates life-affirming relationalities, especially in Latin American spaces.

Before coming to William & Mary, Sarah taught theatre at the Pontificia Javeriana University, in Bogotá, and collaborated as a co-researcher on interdisciplinary projects in the fields of migration, gender and performance, as well as arts, health, and community engagement. She recently collaborated on a theatre research project funded by the Colombian Ministry of Culture about the history of community-based and popular theatre in Colombia. She is currently the principal investigator for “Moving-With Climate Change”, an interdisciplinary performance practice-as-research project at W&M, aimed at understanding how to enhance active listening through embodied movement, engaging Williamsburg audiences in somatically responding to testimonies about climate migration.