Nurturing Deaf Flourishing Sustainably 225
benefit of any physical medium such as writing that could make this knowl-
edge stick around. This astounding feat of collective and individual memory
should make us aware how powerful a tool language is for packaging and
transmitting information.... This means that what does get passed on is somehow essential,
important, and not frivolous or tangential to human life. It also means that
there is only received wisdom, and that each person who passes on infor-
mation must modify, embellish, and filter it through their own experience.
Everything is like improv comedy, subject to individual memory and creativity,
[and] nothing is set in stone.
In addition to the transmission of cultural heritage, there is also a strong sense
of engagement in performance. Through the vision of a prosperous deaf commu-
nity, it imagines possible lives, touching on transformative approaches in popular
theater. parallels with people Theater can hardly be overlooked; further research
is needed for an in-depth exploration of influences and overlaps. people Theater
workshops were held throughout Cameroon and gained wide popularity during the
politically tense and socially challenging 1990s (Doho, 2006). Its roots are found in
the works of Bertold Brecht, paulo Freire, and Augusto Boal, and it starts from peo-
ple’s lived experiences and problematizes general themes. participants are trained
to articulate their own views in local languages through performance (Doho, 2006).
In contrast, Western donors’ instrumental use of this art form has often mobi-
lized people for material goals that were never achieved and/or for which financial
resources were not available:The development vision of people Theater can be summarized as follows: it
is easier to allow a people to develop than it is to develop [them]. The agent
of development in the African context—she/he who acts—is the African, not
the European or American. Any development can only be long term when it
takes up the world vision of the developing people; when it is thought by the
people. This is why the primary object of people Theater is the human agent
and not the material project of development. (Doho, 2006, p. 176)As such, people Theater is about “the existential question of the control of space”
(Doho, 2006, p. 27). Creating space for indigenous views and languages and for hy-
brid forms of knowledge can be liberating and transformative. From a performance
psychology perspective, Viljoen, pistorius, and Eskell-Blokland (2007, p. 122) reflect
on “performance as a marker of social interaction” in South Africa: “the implication
of synthesizing theater and psychology is to liberate people from having to subscribe
to certain prescribed canons of knowledge. people are allowed to perform what they
are and who they might become.” The transformative potential of audience partici-
pation can be found in the concept of the “theater of the oppressed,” developed by
Augusto Boal in line with Freire. It facilitates collective action and allows the audience
to change a lived experience of degradation (Boal, cited in Ledwith, 2012, p. 101).
A similar critical pedagogical orientation formed the basis of the Uganda
Deaf Silent Theatre, founded in 2004 by the Ugandan National Deaf Association