Cultivating the art of safe space

Performance-making and peace-building are processes predicated on the production of safe space. But what is ‘safe space’? In performance-making, what is it that makes space safe without losing the creative potential of tension? What role is there for risk? And, once achieved, how does safe space become meaningful beyond its immediate community of participants? This paper examines the value of the concept of ‘safe space’ in performance, suggesting that for applied theatre practitioners it is more than just a precursor for the art-making processes it supports. Here, safe space is considered as a processual act of ever-becoming: a space of messy negotiations that allow individual and group actions of representation to occur, as well as opportunities for ‘utopian performatives’. Contact Inc's Peace Project is profiled as a performance-based program that grounds these issues and offers insight into the ways in which ‘safe space’ might function beyond its conventional connotations of protection and guardedness to be mobilised in a broader grassroots agenda for social change.