From 2004 to 2019, within a program specialized in repairing the damage of children and adolescents victims of commercial sexual exploitation (depending on the National Service for Minors and managed by the NGO Raíces), a theatre workshop was developed whose purpose was to contribute to the process of restoring the rights of adolescents. Initiated intuitively, with a methodology that was discovering the paths of dialogue with the participants, a series of decisions were made that make up what we now call Reparatory Theatre, as a specific methodological proposal for working with vulnerable populations. Despite the therapeutic echoes evoked by the name and the theme, the Reparatory Theatre methodology is based on a pedagogical premise, highlighting the effects of learning a group art – a highly symbolic one, essentially experiential, where the body is directly involved in all its integrity – on a population that, due to their personal histories and the marginality of their contexts, has had few opportunities to experience total aesthetic experiences, the kind that capture the senses, the thoughts, the emotions and produce that astonishment so necessary to want to be alive.
Keywords:
Reparatory theatre, marginality, vulnerable youth, commercial sexual exploitation, aesthetic experience
Retuerto, I. (2022). Teatro reparatorio: la incidencia pedagógica de una experiencia estética. Teatro, (7), pp. 113–119. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-6490.2022.68008
