# Näkkitär -partner-in-role
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# Information summarized from the research article
Wolff, A., Pässilä, A., Owens, A. Kantola, (forthcoming 2022). Designing Data Dramas to build empathy to nature through collective acts, in: L. Heitlinger, S. (ed.) Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities –Beyond Sustainability, Towards Cohabitation, Oxfrod: Oxford University Press

Summary
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**Art-form**^1^: Applied drama and theater, Data Drama.

“Drama conventions are ways of organizing time, space and action to create meaning. They allow all members of the group to participate in the drama in an organized and hopefully challenging way. Different conventions can allow for different levels of participation which often means that at one end of the scale individuals can contribute and participate without feeling that they have to do anything embarrassing.” Owens and Barber, 2000


Photo: By Lasse Kantola

*Näkkitär -partner-in-role*

**Requirements**
* Time: several weeks to prepare costuming, make up, role character building, rehearsing of the role, framing into the context, relationship with the pedagogue in the room (partner)
* Bridging with the data set which in this case is the water quality data of the lake (from 1970 to 2000)
* Difficulty^2^: 5 stars
* What you'll need: A skilled actor, a skilled applied drama and theater practitioner as a pedagogue to facilitate the process, resources for theater scenery and props as well as data literature skills to make-sense of water quality data and to curate it to fit to a drama.
* Participants: Any age group but needs to be tailored to a context.

Description
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Näkkitär provides the focus for the Data Drama. Information is let out very slowly by the role who carefully listens to contributions by participants and responds to signals from them and the applied drama and theatre pedagogue by using improvisation theater skills. Participants are aware of the person playing the Näkkitär-role and may well know them, but that person does not come out of role. The applied drama and theatre pedagogue collaborating with Näkkitär-character who uses the dynamic of the space between the participants and the role to create tension as implications are carefully explored.

**Steps**
1. Facilitator framing dramatic challenge; Näkkitär needs help to make sense of the data, she cannot understand numbersand does not speak
2. Näkkitär-as partner-in-role is on stage, she slowly wakes up, points out the challenge to the participants, supports and develops the drama, and individuals in it, from within the drama.
3. Involves Näkkitär acting, requires conviction and the adoption of an attitude that can be shown in action .

**Which stage to use it in**
* generating questions
* making-sense and questioning data
* making meaningful links to data

**Why it is useful**
* to provide motivation for engagement with the data i.e. participants are ‘helping’ this character in her life, to solve a problem that she has no chance of solving on her own
* to encourage critical reflection about the human dimensions of the data
* to imagine what data is and for what purposes

**How to document**
Focus group intervention documented either by audio or video and participatory observation

**Analysis**
Etnodrama and ethnotheater

**Further Reading**
Owens, A. and Barber, K. (2000) Mapping Drama: Teaching and Assessing Drama, Carslisle: Carel Press

**Footnotes**

^1^ Categories are based on Sara Coemans and Karin Hannes. 2017. Researchers under the spell of the arts: Two decades of using arts-based methods in community-based inquiry with vulnerable populations. Educational Research Review 22 (2017), 34–49.
^2^ 1-5 stars, I star being easy to facilitate and do not require deep artistic skills and 5 stars requiring deep level artistic skills.

###### tags: `art-based methods guide` `book` `method`