Professor Brent Blair hopes to foster community healing amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“Devising Transformation: The Peace and Freedom Project” will be taught during Spring 2024. Those interested must interview for D-clearance. (Photo Courtesy of USC Thornton School of Music / Wikimedia Commons)
When Brent Blair saw his religious, political and university communities divided by the Israel-Hamas war, he was spurred into action.
Blair, a professor of theater practice in voice and movement and founder of the Institute for Theater and Social Change in the School of Dramatic Arts, said he has been a longtime advocate for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In the weeks following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, Blair proposed a new iteration of THTR 455, formerly known as “Devised Theater,” for Spring 2024. The new version of the course, “Devising Transformation: The Peace and Freedom Project,” will allow students to explore narratives from bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents to seek justice and healing.
At SDA, Blair has brought social justice work to the stage to foster dialogue about complex narratives.
“I’m mindful of the significance of these difficult narratives,” Blair said. “Theater may be the only place where you can hold these really difficult, challenging conversations, and you can sit and you can sustain complexity.”
The success of another of his courses, “Performing Politics: The Justice Project,” partially inspired the development of “Devising Transformation.” The former discusses restorative justice in partnership with the organization Healing Dialogue and Action and students from the Price School of Public Policy.
Gry Nystrom, a senior majoring in theatre with an emphasis in acting, took “Performing Politics: The Justice Project” in Spring 2023. She said feeling comfortable with her peers made conversations less polarizing.
“[Theater] opens the floor for finding solutions to different problems or just finding space for different problems,” Nystrom said. “That’s very important for this class.”
Nystrom said the course was an opportunity to learn about a social issue she had limited prior knowledge about. In Spring 2024, she will be a student in THTR 455.
In a statement to the Daily Trojan, SDA Dean Emily Roxworthy wrote that the dramatic arts provide powerful tools for bringing about positive social change.
“Since storytelling and roleplay distill complex issues down to the human scale by staging the collision of characters with often conflicting perspectives and backgrounds, this art form elicits empathy and strengthens our ability to understand ourselves, understand others, and thus move through conflict to solve intractable problems,” Roxworthy wrote.
To develop and facilitate the new course, Blair is partnering with the Parents Circle Familiesy Forum, an organization founded in 1995 that brings together bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Blair said he hopes to bring narratives from parents together in his course like the organization has.
“My hope is to weave in students on campus from both sides of this conversation, to have real community conversation dialogue,” Blair said. “How do we move forward together in peace?”
Students who enroll in the course will work toward a live performance at the end of the semester. To enroll, students must obtain D-clearance by interviewing with Blair.
Blair said he invites students close to the Israel-Hamas war to consider joining the course, but the class is open to all students who are “interested in looking for peaceful solutions to social injustice.”
“The under-told story about this conflict since Oct. 7 is that there is this huge space in the middle where people want to shed a lot of the identity politics which is fueling both sides,” Blair said. “We want a restoration of humanity, and the only way to do this is through the soft lens of grief. We want to tell a story of grief on all sides.”
