More than a production
Using theatre to help people surviving domestic abuse reclaim their stories
In 2025, Annika Speer and Bella Merlin (both professors in Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside) created BODY-WORD-VOICE: Theatre’s role in facilitating Human Development by offering language and structure for the complex experiences of domestic violence.
They were granted an OASIS SoCal award from the Research and Economic Development Office at the University of California, Riverside, to initiate this project.
BODY-WORD-VOICE
Traumatic human encounters can manifest as emotional inner chaos. This occurs markedly with experiences of domestic violence. The privacy of the home, the frequent invisibility of injuries, and the complex contradictions of love, loyalty, emotional and financial codependency, all render the chaos particularly overwhelming. Silence is often a key survival strategy. Indeed, right across the globe, the silencing of women's voices is disturbingly strong.
But what happens when we dare to find our voices? When we discover language and structure to express our interior landscape? And what 'gifts' are shared when those stories are heard? (Weiss: 9) These prompts are the foundation of theatrical storytelling and the crux of the actor-audience relationship.
Body-Word-Voice is a practice-as-research initiative, reaching across the UCR campus, out into the Riverside/SoCal community and across the globe. It offers individuals creative frameworks and mindful practices for navigating complex emotions. It creates vibrant dialog between SoCal and a global community. It uses theatrical performance, actor-training skills, and public-speaking techniques as a means of listening to the body, finding words for the embodied information, and giving voice to those words. It comprises skills-based workshops and professional performance. It explores the actor-audience relationship in terms of overcoming silence and sharing stories, alongside witnessing/listening and being witnessed/being heard. Curricular, pedagogical and professionalization skills for communication and empowerment thread throughout the project.
Deep-listening to each other enhances our feeling of well-being and community
What do we want to do?
The narrative and linguistic structures of storytelling can powerfully help shape our inner chaos. Healthcare professionals have long endorsed the healing power of sharing personal stories and the psychological and biological effects of high-quality listening on well-being. Less acknowledged -- or, indeed, funded -- is the impact of the actor-audience relationship in live theatre.
Why do we want to do it?
We know firsthand the power of theatrical storytelling and the actor-audience relationship. We have long been involved in social-justice-based, activist theatre and docudrama.
Annika’s directing has included Paula Kamen's docudrama, Jane: Abortion and the Underground ("Jane" being the code word for an underground abortion referral network in the early 1970s pre-Roe v Wade) and her writing includes Missing: A Musical Dramedy (2019) (examining the "missing white woman syndrome" and racial and societal inequalities in missing person's investigations). Missing was a semifinalist in the prestigious National Musical Theatre Awards at the Eugene O'Neill Center.
Bella was an actor-researcher in the world-premiere of David Hare's The Permanent Way (2004) at the Royal National Theatre, London (examining the fatal train crashes in Britain following the privatization of the railways, a play which subsequently influenced governmental policymakers). She also starred as one of the first female judges on the International Criminal Court in Lightwork's Sarajevo Story (2008) at London's Hammersmith Theatre (examining the 1990's Bosnian war).
Together we have collaborated on Begoña Echeverria's Picasso Presents Gernika, which has been shown across the world, including a staged reading at the United Nations Headquarters on World Refugee Day and streamed internationally on UN Web TV (2022).
Annika has been a co-PI on the NIH-funded "Embodied Performance as a Means of Mitigating Mental Health Disparities", integrating theatre and psychology, as well as NSF grants integrating communication and science.
We have led workshops across the UCR campus and internationally, from Australia to Zimbabwe.
As performance-makers, we share "feminist pedagogies", which are "relational, situational, communal, focused on the particularity of the person (their gender, race, class, sexuality, culture, age, ableism), resistant to structures, somatic" (Lisa Peck, Act as a Feminist).
How do we want to do it?
The Department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production (TFDP) at UCR houses women faculty internationally renowned for using embodied performance and fact-based storytelling to empower and enrich audiences and performers alike. We are also among the leaders in practice-as-research.
Practice-as-research is based in action rather than theory to solve a problem. In the arts, it is "motivated by emotional, personal and subjective concerns" (Barrett & Bolt: 4). Few experiences could be more emotional, personal and subjective than domestic abuse.
As performance-makers and educators, we care deeply about an individual's human development, including physical, mental and emotional sustainability.
This artistic mission underpins our practice and scholarship.