Dialogue and Dialogue Theatre: Processes Toward Decolonial Praxis

Considering dialogue theatre as a form of decolonial praxis, four authors reflect on their own knowings and practices through unpacking their inherent cognitive frameworks of colonization, freedom and their practices. The authors demonstrate the ways in which decolonial praxis should start with themselves, and using critical reflections and dialogue as tools to engage in deeper understandings of themselves, their relationships to colonisation, their search for freedom, and the tensions therein. In doing so, the authors explored the relationships between their being and doing transitioning in Australia, and how they navigate and negotiate spaces to achieve an egalitarian potential. They examined the ways in which their encounters, through initiating a dialogue theatre project, evoked conscientization as a result of the critical collaborative processes brought up through cultural, systemic, structural and epistemological inequalities that both stimulated and constrained the enactment of a decolonial initiative in Melbourne, Australia.