Verbatim Theatre and a Dramaturgy of Belonging

The process of creating verbatim theatre often involves interviewing a community of storytellers, documenting these conversations and using the stories to inform the creative development of a play. These practices prompt the act of personal storytelling, and the material generated in a verbatim theatre process often includes the core features of belonging, such as identity narratives, people making sense of their experiences and discursively identifying their sense of self and how they belong in their community. I suggest that these features, in combination with the common verbatim conventions of direct address and diegetic theatricality, form a dramaturgy of belonging. I propose a dramaturgy of belonging and suggest that the sense of community belonging experienced by audiences is a direct result of the practice of community immersion and interviewing in a verbatim theatre process.