{"id":261,"date":"2026-04-05T11:45:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T11:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/33\/?p=261"},"modified":"2026-06-20T05:58:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T05:58:55","slug":"the-poetics-of-parrhesia-dramaturgies-of-testimony-at-the-intersection-of-the-intimate-and-the-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/33\/the-poetics-of-parrhesia-dramaturgies-of-testimony-at-the-intersection-of-the-intimate-and-the-political\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poetics of Parrhesia: Dramaturgies of Testimony at the Intersection of the Intimate and the Political"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This article reflects on a performance-creation methodology developed through The Poetics of Testimony<\/font>, a laboratory first conducted in October 2024 with students and alumni from the Theatre Program at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).The workshop investigates how autobiographical material\u2014cultural, familial, or identity-based\u2014can serve as a dramaturgical foundation for performance, foregrounding the intersection of the intimate and the political within the act of artistic testimony. Rooted in Michel Foucault\u2019s concept of parrh\u00easia<\/font>(the courage to speak the truth) and the parrhesiastic pact<\/font> (the civic right to express or hear a frank discourse in the public sphere), the project proposes theatre as a privileged space for the manifestation of \u201ctruth-telling.\u201d The process encourages participants to transform their lived experiences into performative writing that traverses personal memory and collective history, engaging with the performative and the spectacular without losing ethical intimacy. In doing so, it challenges the dichotomy between the personal and the political, affirming their interdependence within creative practice. By proposing to adapt and replicate the workshop across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts, this research-creation aims to examine how parrhesiastic<\/font> truth might operate within intercultural, multicultural, transcultural, and hypercultural realities. In an era defined by post-truth and polarization, The Poetics of Testimony<\/font> asserts that theatre can reclaim its role as a civic and humanizing space, one where the courage of fearless and frank speech remains a radical and necessary act.

Keywords:<\/strong> parrhesia, testimonial dramaturgy, intercultural dialogue, artistic citizenship, testimonial poetics<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, testimonial practices have occupied an increasingly central place in contemporary theatre and performance studies, particularly in contexts marked by migration, displacement, and intercultural encounter. Autobiographical narratives, life stories, and first-person testimony have become crucial dramaturgical materials through which artists articulate personal and collective experiences of vulnerability, violence, and resistance. In Europe, the collective Rimini Protokoll foregrounds the experiences of \u201cexperts of the everyday,\u201d staging testimony as a public, relational act that exposes speakers to ethical and aesthetic risk. In Latin America, Argentine artist Lola Arias integrates autobiographical and collective narratives to explore histories of migration, dictatorship, and social trauma, often negotiating intercultural and intergenerational encounters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While testimonial practices are often understood in terms of authenticity, representation, or political visibility, less attention has been paid to the ethical conditions under which testimonial speech is produced, shared, and transformed within theatrical processes. This paper addresses that gap by proposing parrhesia\u2014frank, risky truth-telling\u2014as a critical lens through which to examine testimonial dramaturgy in intercultural artistic contexts. Drawing on Michel Foucault\u2019s later work, particularly his 1984 lecture course Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II<\/em> at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, this study understands parrhesia not simply as freedom of expression, but as an ethical practice of truth-telling that entails risk, responsibility, and exposure. Parrhesia is defined by the willingness of the speaking subject to tell a truth that may place them in a position of vulnerability vis-\u00e0-vis others or existing power structures.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Event: Intensive workshop: Po\u00e9tica del Testimonio<\/em> by Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz. Location: Centro Cultural Universitario Paco Urondo, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz with the participants (from left to right): Claudia Quiroga (theatre performer and director, playwright), Marcela Arza (playwright, theatre director, and performer), Ivanna Otero (archivist, social and political activist), Lucas Santa Ana (visual artist, director, and playwright), Jorge (dramaturge).Moment:<\/em> Body and mental warm-up before starting. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Within artistic contexts, and especially within autobiographical performance, such truth-telling raises critical questions: What kinds of truths are at stake in testimonial theatre? Under what conditions can speaking in one\u2019s own name become an ethical and political act rather than a confessional or extractive gesture? How can personal testimony be aesthetically transformed without neutralizing its risk or urgency? This paper situates these questions at the intersection of testimonial dramaturgy, parrhesia, and intercultural artistic practice. It argues that theatre constitutes a privileged site for the enactment of parrhesia, insofar as it stages truth as a relational, embodied, and publicly exposed act. Rather than treating autobiography as a transparent transmission of lived experience, I propose the concept of poetic testimony<\/em> to describe a dramaturgical process through which testimony is reworked, displaced, and shared, allowing it to circulate beyond individual experience toward collective reflection and ethical engagement. In this framework, testimonial speech is not valued for its immediacy or authenticity alone, but for its capacity to generate critical encounters across differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Methodologically, the paper is grounded in practice-based research and qualitative analysis. Its primary case study is a three-day intensive workshop conducted in Buenos Aires in 2024 with local artists, some of them from immigrant backgrounds, in which autobiographical narratives were explored as performative material. The workshop functioned both as an artistic laboratory and as a research site, generating practices, reflections, and dramaturgical strategies that inform the theoretical discussion. Drawing on observations, participants\u2019 creative processes, and the performative outcomes developed during the workshop, the analysis examines how parrhesia operates in concrete theatrical situations\u2014as a risk-taking gesture, a collective negotiation, and an ethical stance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper is structured as follows. The first section outlines the theoretical foundations of parrhesia, tracing its implications for contemporary performance and testimonial practices. The second section presents the foundational principles of the poetics of testimony, informed by my experience as an immigrant artist in Montreal and formalized through the Buenos Aires workshop methodology. Finally, the conclusion reflects on the broader implications of parrhesia for intercultural creation, proposing testimonial theatre as a space for ethical encounter, political articulation, and shared responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By articulating parrhesia as both an ethical practice and a dramaturgical force, this paper contributes to ongoing debates in performance studies, autobiographical theatre, and intercultural arts practice, while offering a framework for artists and researchers engaged with testimonial creation as a site of aesthetic, political, and ethical inquiry. This paper focuses on Foucault\u2019s formulation of parrhesia because it offers a clear framework for understanding truth-telling as an ethical, risk-laden practice. Anchoring the discussion in Foucault allows me, as an artist, to explore parrhesia as a living, practice-based phenomenon, drawing on my artistic and pedagogical work\u2014such as the Buenos Aires workshop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parrhesia : The Truth-Telling of Citizens<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Before turning to the possibility of contemporary performance and testimonial practices through the poetics of testimony it is necessary to establish the conceptual foundation that underpins my: parrhesia, as theorized by Michel Foucault. In his 1984 lecture course Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II<\/em> at the Coll\u00e8ge de France, Foucault defines parrhesia as \u201cfrank speech\u201d (le franc-parler<\/em>), a mode of truth-telling grounded in ethical commitment and personal risk. Far from denoting unrestricted freedom of expression, \u201cparrhesia\u201d<\/em> <\/em>refers to an act of truth-telling that commits the speaker to their utterance and exposes them to potential risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rooted in an ethics of truth-telling, parrhesia offers a productive framework for understanding autobiographical and testimonial practices in theatre as acts of vulnerability, resistance, and ethical engagement. In this study, parrhesia is approached not only as a philosophical notion, but as a dramaturgical force\u2014one that enables performers to engage in a poetic and political unveiling of the self within a public and relational space. From this perspective, testimonial performance becomes a space where truth is neither confessional nor purely representational but enacted through an embodied pact of courage between performers and audience, in which vulnerability and ethical responsibility are shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foucault characterizes parrhesia as a specific mode of veridiction<\/em> (modalit\u00e9 du dire-vrai<\/em>) in Antiquity, inseparable from the right\u2014and the duty\u2014of citizens to speak publicly and truthfully about matters of personal conviction or collective concern. Parrhesiastic speech is distinguished by the speaker\u2019s direct relation to truth, their willingness to expose themselves to danger, and their ethical responsibility toward others. As Foucault writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A form of criticism, addressed by a citizen to his city, in which the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism, and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. (Herm\u00e9neutique 19<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foucault\u2019s description underscores that parrhesia hinges on the speaker\u2019s courage to articulate truths that may challenge existing norms and power structures. In this sense, parrhesia is inseparable from critique: it interrogates established orders, disrupts consensus (doxa<\/em>), and exposes the often-invisible mechanisms of power. Although historically functioning as a civic right within democratic contexts, Foucault emphasizes its persistent fragility and its inherent tension with authority (Fearless Speech<\/em> 15).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Intensive workshop: Po\u00e9tica del Testimonio<\/em> by Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz. Location: Centro Cultural Universitario Paco Urondo, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina. From left to right: Lucas, Marcela, and Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz.Moment:<\/em> Observing a personal presentation. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Risk, Courage, and the Limits of Democratic Speech<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Risk lies at the heart of parrhesia. Speaking truthfully, about oneself or one\u2019s social and political conditions, is never without consequence. Historically, parrhesiastic speech has invited persecution, exile, or even death, as exemplified by Socrates in ancient Athens. His unwavering ethical questioning rendered him a threat to democratic power, leading to his condemnation: \u201cof the 501 judges, 280 voted for condemnation, 221 for acquittal\u201d (Fearless <\/em>30). Parrhesia, therefore, remains perilous not only under overtly authoritarian regimes but also within societies that claim to protect free speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In authoritarian regimes, contemporary theatre offers particularly vivid examples of this tension. In Russia, director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petrichuk were sentenced to six years in prison after their play Finist the Brave Falcon<\/em>\u2014which explored the stories of Russian women recruited online to join conflict zones\u2014was deemed to \u201cjustify terrorism,\u201d a charge widely denounced as politically motivated censorship. Similarly, theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov has faced sustained judicial pressure and travel restrictions for producing work critical of state policies. In Iran, all public artistic production, including theatre, requires approval from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and unapproved performances or socially critical content may result in arrest, professional bans, or imprisonment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists ranging from historical figures such as Saeed Soltanpour to contemporary filmmakers like Jafar Panahi have faced persecution, detention, or exile for producing work that challenges state authority. These examples demonstrate that parrhesia, understood as the citizen\u2019s right to speak truthfully or to articulate an honest account of lived realities, is not merely a conceptual principle but a lived and often dangerous practice, one that demands courage, responsibility, and ethical commitment from those who speak through their art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In democratic contexts, and perhaps even more visibly today, the difficulty identified by Michel Foucault persists: the recognition of parrhesia has always been unstable. This instability is not simply a feature of contemporary political discourse but a structural condition of democracy itself, where the freedom that enables truth-telling also enables its simulation. Parrhesia thus marks a persistent tension between ethical truth-speaking and strategic rhetoric. Unlike the rhetorician, who aims to persuade or captivate, the parrhesiast accepts personal risk in order to speak plainly. The problem, then, is not only how truth is spoken, but how it is recognised: by what criteria can one distinguish a genuine truth-speaker from a performer of authenticity? In this sense, parrhesia occupies a marginal and potentially transgressive position, challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions that sustain power and destabilising dominant ideological formations.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Claudia. Moment:<\/em> Final presentation. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Parrhesia, Theatre, and Testimonial Practices<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This marginality resonates profoundly in theatre. Can the stage enable the genuine exercise of parrhesia? Theatre mediates truth through embodiment, aesthetic form, and collective reception, creating both possibilities and constraints for frank speech. While artists today may not always face literal death, depending on the political context in which they live, silencing, marginalization, or erasure\u2014especially of minoritized or immigrant voices\u2014represents a form of symbolic violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experiences of theatre artists in Russia and Iran exemplify these stakes. Performing socially or politically critical work can lead to imprisonment, professional bans, or exile, highlighting the real dangers faced by those who challenge authority through art. These realities reflect the ethical demands of parrhesiastic testimony: speaking plainly entails personal risk and relational responsibility between speaker and audience. Within this framework, theatre becomes more than a representational space; it functions as a site of ethical and political engagement, where embodied truth-telling contests silence, challenges hierarchies of visibility, and affirms the creative and civic potential of marginal voices\u2014even under the most repressive conditions. These reflections underpin my artistic methodology, in which parrhesia shapes testimonial dramaturgy. Here, testimony is inherently relational and courageous; it requires both speaker and listener to assume responsibility, negotiating risk while confronting truth. In this sense, theatre operates simultaneously as a laboratory and a refuge for parrhesia, where courage, risk, and the pursuit of truth converge in the act of performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parrhesiastic Game and Theatrical Pact<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Foucault\u2019s concept of the parrhesiastic game<\/em> offers a productive methodological framework for engaging with testimonial dramaturgy. I draw on the parrhesiastic<\/em> game<\/em> as a methodological framework to engage with testimonial dramaturgical, scenic, and performative materials. This approach allows me to explore the potential pathways for the poetization of \u201cfrank speech,\u201d understood not merely as discursive content but as an embodied, aesthetic, and political act, conceived as an ethically charged civic engagement or as the political dimension of art, in line with Hans-Thies Lehmann\u2019s reflections on theatre and the political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Foucault argue in Le Courage de la V\u00e9rit\u00e9;<\/em> parrhesia always unfolds within a relational structure, a pact between speaker and listener, whether sovereign, friend, or public. This game, structured around a pact, requires courage on both sides: from the speaker, who risks exposure, and from the listener, who accepts the ethical demand of receiving an uncomfortable truth. The parrhesiastic game intertwines sincerity (eilikrineia<\/em>), political courage, and care of the self (epimeleia heautou<\/em>). In theatrical terms, this dynamic can be understood as a performative pact that governs testimonial exchange on stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parrhesia as an Immigrant Methodology Approach<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This section traces the emergence of a poetics of testimony grounded in my lived experience as an immigrant artist in Montr\u00e9al and examines its methodological articulation within the Buenos Aires workshop. Parrhesia, understood here as a practice of truth-telling that is ethical, political, and embodied, functions as both a conceptual framework and a scenic methodology through which testimonial material is transformed into performative dramaturgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrived in Montr\u00e9al in 2010 from Lima, Peru. In 2013, I began a master\u2019s degree in Theatre at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al, developing a research-creation project on cultural diversity in contemporary Francophone theatre. Grounded in the testimonies of artists from diverse communities, this work examined how immigrant and racialized artists navigate visibility, legitimacy, and belonging within Montr\u00e9al\u2019s theatrical landscape. Two dimensions of parrhesia guided this process. First, public speech was conceived as civic expression: a citizen\u2019s voice asserting presence, visibility, and truth in the public sphere. This voice was embodied by Montr\u00e9al-based intercultural artists, whose creative practices rendered parrhesia tangible as both ethical stance and poetic gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Testimonies functioned not merely as personal narratives but as civic acts, that is, interventions within broader social discourse. Second, drawing on Michel Foucault\u2019s definition of parrhesia, I approached it as a mental and corporeal disposition rather than a purely discursive act. This disposition allows performers to articulate intimate narratives while remaining emotionally, politically, and aesthetically exposed to the risks inherent in truth-telling. I term this the state of deliverance, a moment of vulnerability, lucidity, and embodied presence through which testimony becomes performative. This state does not seek confession or catharsis but clarity, precision, and ethical exposure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This public and political dimension led me to work with testimony as the primary material for scenic writing. I assembled twelve Montr\u00e9al-based performers\u2014immigrant and non-immigrant\u2014representing diverse origins, generations, and experiences. This artistic choice decentered my own experience and foregrounded a plurality of perspectives, generating a constellation of testimonies that transcended individual narratives and engaged with Montr\u00e9al\u2019s social fabric. These explorations formed the creative and research foundation of my Master\u2019s project on cultural diversity in theatre, directly informing the development of the performance Sans \u00e9tiquette (Without Label).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this work, performers\u2019 voices carried both force and legitimacy, challenging preconceived notions of the \u201cOther\u201d and dominant frameworks of cultural diversity. Testimonies positioned themselves in counterpoint to prevailing discourses on diversity in the arts. For instance, a Chilean actor noted that political conflicts shaped the reception of their work: upon arriving in Montr\u00e9al, discussions about the Chilean dictatorship created opportunities, but when other global events gained attention, these same roles became limited, revealing how artistic possibilities are tied to politically salient identities. Similarly, a Belgian actress of Congolese origin recalled feeling instrumentalized early in her career: she was asked to speak Lingala not to perform the role herself, but to provide a linguistic reference for a locally born actrice who would ultimately play it. These narratives illuminate structural tensions in intercultural dialogue, particularly the reduction of immigrant artists to representatives of difference. This project responds to a context in which \u201ccultural diversity\u201d often functions as a reductive label that undermines genuine intercultural dialogue. By cultivating a dialogical theatrical space, my work transforms difference into a generative engine for connection, productive friction, and shared meaning rather than fragmentation, proposing parrhesia as both method and ethic for intercultural artistic practice.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Ivanna. Moment:<\/em> Final presentation. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
From Research-Creation to Methodology<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

After completing the coursework for my master\u2019s degree in 2015, I have developed a poetics of testimony as the foundation for a distinct form of scenic writing. Moving away from text-driven dramaturgy, this approach aligns with the French concept of \u00e9criture de plateau<\/em>, where writing emerges from rehearsal rather than preceding it. Seen in collective processes such as Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Soleil, and in the devised works of Robert Lepage, the stage becomes a space of composition rather than execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the field of new dramaturgies and the postdramatic shift identified by Hans-Thies Lehmann, this practice privileges montage, embodiment, and scenographic thinking over linear plot, framing dramaturgy as forged in performance. Within this framework, I construct what I define as a parrhesiastic space: a performative environment in which personal testimony is revealed as narrative, image, or embodied language endowed with theatrical potential. This space allows me to explore core questions: how does lived experience become dramaturgical material? How does intimate and social reality intensify the political dimension of performance? What tensions arise between intimacy and spectacle when immigrant artists generate intercultural dialogue?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018, I founded Parr\u00easia compagnie de cr\u00e9ation in Montr\u00e9al to develop a methodology for scenic creation. The company fosters a collaborative space where immigrant and local artists work on equal footing, regardless of immigration status. Citizenship, especially in relation to immigrant experience, is central to this approach. In ancient Greece, parrhesia was reserved for citizens, while enslaved and marginalized groups were excluded. This historical exclusion resonates with contemporary hierarchies I have frequently observed as an immigrant artist, where local voices are often privileged over those of immigrant artists in Montr\u00e9al theatre. In my practice, these dynamics are consciously interrogated: all participants are recognized as possessing equal creative agency. This reconfiguration of power is foundational to the poetics of testimony and parrhesia, shaping collaborative processes that are both artistically and ethically accountable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After creating Parr\u00easia in situ<\/em> (2016) and Happy Hour<\/em> (2020\u20132021), I developed Laboratoire des Sorci\u00e8res: No Kings<\/em>, in which a Qu\u00e9becoise actress and two immigrant actresses, including myself, reimagined Lady Macbeth and the Three Witches through testimony, languages, and accents. This creative process within my theatre company inspired a theatre-pedagogical approach, transforming artistic research into workshops for methodological exploration and the refinement of the poetics of testimony and parrhesia. In 2024, this methodological approach was realized in a Spanish-language workshop at the Centro Cultural Paco Urondo, Universidad de Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Returning to my mother tongue reactivated the immigrant dimension of my practice, highlighting language as a site of memory, displacement, and creative re-rooting. Navigating between native and non-native languages, memory, and embodied testimony opened new avenues for intercultural and scenic exploration, enacting parrhesiastic truth-telling that gives voice to immigrant artists and positions the stage as a space where language, identity, and memory converge in performance.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jorge. Moment:<\/em> Final presentation. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Poetizaci\u00f3n del testimonio \/ Poetization of Testimony: Parrhesia stic Articulations Between Creation and Transmission in a Buenos Aires Workshop (2024)<\/strong><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

This three-day intensive workshop (October 23, 24, and 26, 2024) functioned as a laboratory for scenic and dramaturgical inquiry, grounded in the poetics of testimony and guided by the ethical principle of parrhesia. Situated at the intersection of artistic research and pedagogy, the workshop approached testimony not as raw confession but as material to be explored, disclosed, and articulated through aesthetic and ethical processes. Personal experiences, beliefs, and situated perspectives served as threads through which scenic narratives were woven, moving fluidly between intimacy and performative form, generating a political resonance that emerged from this very interplay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than positioning pedagogy and creation as separate domains, the workshop unfolded within their zone of friction and reciprocity, where methodological transmission itself became a creative act. In this sense, the process activated a double movement: the emergence of singular artistic propositions and the shared articulation of a parrhesiastic methodological framework. At its core was a collective inquiry into how lived experience may be articulated and poetized into theatrical language. Participants were invited to consider the following question: How can material drawn from lived experience activate and intensify the political dimension of a performative proposition without reducing it to confession or illustrative discourse? This question guided the collective exploration, positioning testimony as a practice that is simultaneously aesthetic, ethical, and political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Autobiographical dramaturgy, as approached in this context, resisted forms of egocentric introspection detached from social realities. Instead, testimony was understood as relational and situated\u2014always inscribed within networks of cultural memory, power relations, and collective histories. The workshop brought together theatre students nearing the completion of their studies, alumni, professional artists, and professors, forming a heterogeneous group in terms of age, experience, and artistic perspective. This diversity generated a plurality of truth discourses and poetic strategies, enriching the collective articulation of testimonial dramaturgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Establishing the Parrhesiastic Pact<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Parrhesia constituted the guiding axis of the workshop, both ethically and methodologically. Drawing on Michel Foucault\u2019s conceptualization of parrhesia as courageous truth-telling that entails risk, participants were invited to engage with lived experiences capable of interrogating their social, familial, or professional contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This engagement required careful ethical attention and personal care to avoid traumatization, fostering a space of trust and mutual responsibility. Emotional states\u2014shame, anger, guilt, fear\u2014were approached not as psychological endpoints but as vectors through which the political and ethical charge of testimony could emerge, revealing tensions between individual experience and dominant social norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Central to this inquiry was the somatic dimension of parrhesiastic speech. Testimonies were explored not only through spoken language, but also through attention to the corporeal memories and actions that accompany them. Participants examined how the body carries and negotiates truth in relation to its imagined addressee\u2014whether oneself, a family member, a community, or the public\u2014observing how shifts in address transformed posture, rhythm, and presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To structure this exploration, participants engaged with three interrelated prompts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Event:<\/strong> Selection of a life-altering experience (e.g., migration, grief, birth, rupture, family secrets), approached with ethical responsibility.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Affective State:<\/strong> Identification of the emotional constellation linked to the event, considered for its political potency and capacity to reveal resistance, critique, or dissent.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Somatic Anchor:<\/strong> Localization of the bodily site through which the experience resonates, grounding the testimony in embodied memory.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Performative exercises further articulated the parrhesiastic pact, inviting participants to explore questions of address and audience. From the outset, they were encouraged to choose a form of frank speech for which they felt emotionally prepared and accountable, recognizing that parrhesia is not about saying everything, but about speaking truthfully while attending to its relational and political implications. Shifts in intended recipients\u2014from self to others, from intimate to public\u2014produced observable transformations in gesture, rhythm, and spatial presence, revealing the body as a site of ethical and political negotiation. Participants also experimented with non-verbal articulation, using gesture, movement, and corporeal memory as primary vehicles of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Throughout this process, my role was to accompany participants in discerning the \u201cpearl of frankness,\u201d the irreducible core of truth embedded in each testimony. This nucleus, often hidden beneath narrative conventions or rhetorical strategies, required careful guidance toward clarity and necessity, privileging ethical responsibility over performative display. Rather than directing participants toward specific content, I supported them in identifying what needed to be spoken, why, and for whom. Participants were encouraged to reflect on the stakes of their testimony\u2014what was at risk in sharing it, for whom it was intended, and what responsibility accompanied its articulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The workshop emphasized horizontality, mutual care, and trust, recognizing vulnerability and courage as constitutive elements of parrhesiastic practice while actively resisting hierarchies of expertise or legitimacy. My role as facilitator was therefore less to authorize speech than to sustain the conditions under which it could emerge responsibly, ethically, and meaningfully. Material objects and archives\u2014photographs, documents, costumes, sounds, and tools\u2014played a key role in extending testimony beyond language. These mnemonic and evidentiary traces were treated as integral to the poetic and scenic transformation of lived experience, bridging memory, narrative, and presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Poetizing Testimony: From Experience to Scenic Form<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

    The second phase of the workshop centered on the poetic development and refinement of testimonial material, approached simultaneously as an artistic resource and an ethical practice. Participants worked with three interrelated modalities of testimonial dramaturgy. Embodied Word facilitated dialogue with the self, the Other, and the public, allowing testimony to emerge as both intimate and civic. Archive Dramaturgy engaged mnemonic objects\u2014photographs, recordings, garments, and tools\u2014as catalysts for memory and testimony, linking personal experience to tangible traces. Unveiling the Spectacular Form explored the construction of scenic space as a site where lived reality and theatrical expression intersect, transforming individual experiences into collective, performative articulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Short monologues provided provisional articulations of participants\u2019 testimonies, which were subsequently reflected upon through collective, dialogic exchange. This horizontal process fostered methodological insight while deepening individual creative explorations, revealing how personal narratives resonate beyond the self. Through these encounters, intimate testimonies surfaced tensions with Argentine social realities: gender-based violence, normative corporealities, class hierarchies, and sociopolitical polarization emerged as critical contexts for ethical and artistic engagement. A monologue reflecting on the communal right to age and die with dignity illustrated how personal experience can extend into collective, political discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    While ethical considerations preclude disclosing participants\u2019 testimonies in detail, the outcomes of the workshop can be understood through thematic patterns emerging from exercises in parrhesiastic speech. These acts of frank speech spanned intimate and political registers, revealing how personal narratives intersect with broader historical and social tensions. Some participants addressed conflicts arising from contemporary political polarization in Argentina, including tension between siblings divided over support for Milei and the left-wing, against the backdrop of a profound economic crisis. Others engaged intergenerational memory and migration, such as a reflection on a mother who migrated from Italy to Argentina after the Second World War, situating family memory within broader European migratory histories shaping Buenos Aires. Parrhesiastic speech also confronted state violence and ethical complexity: one participant imagined a symbolic \u201ctribunal\u201d to examine parental decisions during the Argentine military dictatorship, while others explored transformations in family relationships, identity destabilized by a father with senile dementia, questions about parental love, and ambivalent emotions toward an aging parent whose past violence contrasted with present vulnerability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Methodologically, the workshop produced three key outcomes: participants discerned what needed to be spoken publicly, situated their testimony within ethical responsibility, and engaged the collective as a listening community, transforming private memory into socially and politically situated speech. Iterative scenic experimentation and dialogic feedback allowed participants to explore how lived experience could be articulated into theatrical form, revealing points of tension, resistance, and critique embedded in intimate narratives. Anchored in memory, affect, and corporeal presence, these testimonies generated collective insight, enacting a poetics of testimony that is simultaneously creative, pedagogical, and parrhesiastic, a space in which experience is traced, disclosed, and articulated with ethical care, aesthetic rigor, and political attentiveness, while resonating with migration, memory, and intergenerational questions across transnational contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    From Testimony to Collective Ritual<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

    The final session opened with a collective physical warm-up, led in turn by each participant, reinforcing shared authorship, attentiveness, and mutual care. Scenic installations were collaboratively assembled, emphasizing process over product and reaffirming the collective dimension of parrhesiastic creation. The public presentation invited reflection on two interwoven qualities: intimacy and courage. The aesthetic force of these works did not reside in virtuosity but in their capacity to unsettle established familial, social, and professional norms through acts of scenic truth-telling. In this unveiling, a form of artistic ritual emerged\u2014not as therapeutic catharsis but as a collective exercise of lucidity and dignity, where testimony functioned as a sincere, relational gesture, akin to a Foucauldian parrhesiastic pact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Ultimately, this workshop reaffirmed the porous boundary between the real and the poetic. Through processes of aesthetic transposition, lived experience was neither reproduced nor fictionalized, but reconfigured into a non-linear, non-Aristotelian theatrical language\u2014a \u201cparrhesiastic dramaturgy weave\u201d\u2014in which scenes, gestures, and testimonies intertwine without privileging traditional plot or causality. In this sense, the workshop operated as a parrhesiastic articulation between creation and transmission, where pedagogy itself became a site of artistic research, and testimony emerged as a shared, relational, and politically resonant practice, capable of holding complexity, contradiction, critical questions, and collective imaginaries of the future.<\/p>\n\n\n

    \n
    \"\"
    Lucas. Moment:<\/em> Final presentation. Photo: Bernard Roach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
    Conclusion: Parrhesia, Testimony, and the Decolonial Stage<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

    This article has explored parrhesia as a practice-based methodology that reconfigures testimonial theatre as a space where artistic creation, pedagogy, and political responsibility converge. Drawing on Foucault\u2019s concept of parrhesia the three-day intensive workshop in Buenos Aires was approached as a lived-performance praxis, enacted through rehearsal, scenic composition, and shared exposure. Testimony was treated as performative material, tracing a dramaturgical passage from lived experience to scenic form, where memory became matter and matter became presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Autobiographical narratives were neither confessed nor displayed; they were carefully composed along a fragile threshold between experience and theatrical articulation. Resisting spectacularizing and therapeutic framing, this methodology proposed an embodied dramaturgy of truth-telling grounded in care, rigor, and collective responsibility. The poetization of testimony functioned simultaneously as an artistic gesture and a political act, unsettling dominant regimes of visibility, legitimacy, and authority, particularly regarding immigrant bodies, gendered narratives, and historically marginalized memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Applied to immigrant and marginalized artists, parrhesia opens dramaturgical lines of inquiry that continue to shape my theatrical and pedagogical practices. I read this approach through a decolonial lens precisely because it engages voices historically marginalized or silenced within institutional hierarchies. In this light, parrhesia resonates with Mignolo and Walsh\u2019s concept of epistemic disobedience: \u201cthinking and doing otherwise\u201d by unsettling modern\/colonial regimes of knowledge and centering embodied, situated perspectives (148). Quijano\u2019s analysis of the coloniality of power further underscores how modern systems continue to classify and hierarchize subjects, shaping whose voices are heard. Within this framework, testimony operates less as evidence than as a living archive of memory, affect, and presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Finally, this article itself enacts a parrhesiastic gesture. Writing from my position as an immigrant artist from Peru working within Montr\u00e9al\u2019s francophone theatre milieu, I acknowledge that research is inseparable from lived experience. Engaging with decolonial thought has enabled me to consider how parrhesia may function as both a dramaturgical and ethical practice, capable of unsettling inherited hierarchies of voice, knowledge, and cultural authority, while remaining an open, exploratory terrain for future research and creative experimentation. It raises provisional questions rather than offering definitive answers: How can theatre support relational accountability? How can testimonial performance unsettle entrenched epistemic hierarchies while sustaining poetic and political resonance? These reflections point toward a decolonial poetics of testimonial performance, where ethical, artistic, and political concerns converge to imagine more equitable, attentive, and relational futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n\n\n\n
    Bibliography<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

    Barrett, Estelle, and Barbara Bolt. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances<\/em>. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself<\/em>. Fordham UP, 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Croisille, Jean-Marc. \u201cS\u00e9n\u00e8que et N\u00e9ron.\u201d Vita Latina<\/em>, vol. 140, no. 1, 1995, pp. 2\u201312.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Theatre of Testimony: Performance, Politics, and the Ethics of Witnessing<\/em>. 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Foucault, Michel. La volont\u00e9 de savoir<\/em>. Gallimard, 1976.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2014\u2014\u2014. Fearless Speech<\/em>. Translated by Joseph Pearson, Semiotext(e), 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2014\u2014\u2014. L\u2019herm\u00e9neutique du sujet: Cours au Coll\u00e8ge de France (1981\u20131982)<\/em>. Gallimard\/Seuil, 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2014\u2014\u2014. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Coll\u00e8ge de France. 1984<\/em>. Edited by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, Seuil\/Gallimars, 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Hamidi-Kim, B\u00e9atrice. \u201cTh\u00e9\u00e2tre identitaire ou th\u00e9\u00e2tre universaliste : Quelle critique de la \u00ab situation postcoloniale \u00bb dans le th\u00e9\u00e2tre documentaire aujourd’hui ? \u201d Mouvements<\/em>, no. 65, 2011, pp. 91\u2013105.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Hays, Sharon. Autobiographical Performance: Critical Concepts in Theatre and Performance<\/em>. Routledge, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Kaegi, Simon, and Rimini Protokoll. Rimini Protokoll: Theatre, Reality, and Social Engagement<\/em>. 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre<\/em>. Translated by Karen J\u00fcrs-Munby, Routledge, 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis<\/em>. Duke UP, 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Mumford, Michael. \u201cRimini Protokoll\u2019s Reality Theatre and Intercultural Encounter: Towards an Ethical Art of Partial Proximity<\/a>.\u201d Contemporary Theatre Review<\/em>, vol. 23, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153\u201365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Pizzinat, Bruno. \u201cPippo Delbono et le Courage de la V\u00e9rit\u00e9<\/a>.\u201d Jeu: Revue de Th\u00e9\u00e2tre<\/em>, vol. 143, no. 2, 2012, pp. 154\u201358.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Quijano, An\u00edbal. \u201cColoniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.\u201d Nepantla: Views from South<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533\u201380. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    *<\/a>Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz<\/strong> is an actress, producer, theatre director, and part-time professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa. She is pursuing a PhD in \u00c9tudes et pratiques des arts<\/em> at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al (UQAM). Originally from Peru, she holds a master\u2019s degree in interdisciplinary theatre from UQAM and a bachelor\u2019s degree in acting and theatre pedagogy from the Escuela Superior de Arte Dram\u00e1tico in Lima. Her research and artistic work focus on diversity, intercultural dialogue, and the intersection of intimacy and politics in testimonial theatre. She co-founded Parr\u00easia Compagnie de Cr\u00e9ation in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2026 Ana Pfeiffer Quiroz
    Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em>, #33, June 2026
    e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n

    \n
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