Shots Fired: Meditations on Policing, performed Dec. 7, 2020 by the undergraduate students in the University of Michigan course “Latina/o Theater for Social Change.”
In the Fall 2020 semester the students in Dr. Ashley Lucas’s “Latina/o Theatre for Social Change” class at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, chose to write and perform a play about policing. This online course follows the history of a select number of U.S. Latina/o and Latin American paradigms of using theatre for social change. Students in this class learn about Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, the actors of the Chicana/o Movement, guerilla theatre in forms used throughout Latin America, and activist U.S. Latina/o plays in mainstream theatres. Students develop their own original play at the end of the class and hold a performance at the end of the semester. The students decided in the wake of the activism surrounding the murder of George Floyd that they wanted to research various aspects of policing and write a play that would encourage audience members to think complexly about what policing is and how it affects people from different walks of life. Their play, entitled Shots Fired: Meditations on Policing, was performed on Zoom on December 7, 2020 at the online Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) community workshop—a virtual space where formerly incarcerated people, students, university staff, and other community members gather each week to engage in collaborative arts activities. This video includes a full recording of this performance and the discussion that followed. Watch it here.
