Where Stories Meet Action

What can theatre make possible that a lecture or report cannot?

For Amir Al-Azraki, Associate Professor at Renison, and Janna Martin, sessional lecturer at Renison and a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Community Based Research, it can invite people into the story itself.

As the 2025–26 Artists-in-Residence at Brubacher House, Al-Azraki and Martin are working together on a forum theatre project exploring present-day Indigenous–Mennonite relations in Waterloo Region, which is a knowledge mobilization activity based on Janna’s doctoral research.

The project invites participants to step into the conversation — contributing ideas, asking questions and imagining new possibilities together. In doing so, it models a different way of learning: one that is participatory, reflective and grounded in real-world experience.

Two perspectives, one shared purpose

For Al-Azraki, theatre has long been a way to explore identity, belonging and displacement. Growing up in Iraq during war and hardship, then later moving across borders before settling in Canada, he found that Arab voices and stories were often missing from many of the spaces he entered.

“Theatre became my response to that question,” he says. “It gave me a way to bring together lived experience and creative expression.”

That perspective continues to shape his work today, where theatre becomes not only an artistic practice, but a way of preserving memory, reclaiming voice and creating space for dialogue.

For Martin, the work is also deeply personal. Raised Mennonite in Waterloo Region, she chose to focus her doctoral research on a community closely connected to her own lived experience. She has observed growing interest among Mennonite organizations and churches seeking to deepen their work on truth, reconciliation and allyship with local Indigenous communities.

“I felt like it was a great time in this social context to deepen the work of allyship,” she says.

Selecting forum theatre as a storytelling modality

Their shared interests made forum theatre a natural fit.

Developed through Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, forum theatre is an interactive performance style where audiences are invited to step into a scene, replace characters and test new responses to conflict or injustice.

“It transforms theatre from a classic viewing experience into a space for dialogue, experimentation and problem-solving,” says Al-Azraki.

Storytelling without easy answers

The forum theatre story is based on a real-life experience shared by a local Indigenous leader who participated in Janna’s doctoral research. In it, a Mennonite church invites an Indigenous educator to lead a reconciliation workshop, only to discover smudging is not permitted on church property. Participants are then invited to step in, ask questions and imagine different ways the situation could unfold.

For Martin, that open-ended process matters.

“We didn’t want to present it as a resolved story,” she says. “It depicts an ongoing issue, best told through an iterative approach.”  

She hopes participants leave with a stronger understanding of power imbalances and increased capacity to intervene as an ally, but also with a sense of joy.

“There’s been laughter and humour,” she says. “These are difficult topics, but there’s also so much joy in the deepening of our relationships.”

A reflection of Renison values

Al-Azraki’s work as a professor at Renison University College also shapes the project. He sees both teaching and theatre as collaborative spaces where knowledge is created together and students are encouraged to think critically about the world around them.

The residency offers a meaningful example of how Renison continues to live its values — fostering compassion, equity and dialogue in ways that extend beyond campus and into the wider community.

Together, Al-Azraki and Martin are showing how storytelling can help communities confront difficult histories and imagine decolonization as it pertains to interpersonal relationships and organizational practices.

Martin’s doctoral research activities were funded by grants from the Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario and the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation. She holds a Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The forum theatre project is funded by a Waterloo Region arts grant and supported by Brubacher House through its Artist-in-Residence program.