Sarah Ashford Hart

During the 2025-2026 academic year, I directed the ethnographic theatre project Balancing Progress and Preservation: Examining the Trade-offs Between Economic Development, Cultural Preservation, and Conservation in Nepal’s Riparian Indigenous & Marginalized Communities. This was an interdisciplinary research pilot funded by the Applied Research and Innovation Initiative at William & Mary, in collaboration with co-researchers Nara Sritharan (AidData) and PI Sapana Lohani (Institute for Integrative Conservation). Our performative explorations drew on ethnographic research by Patton Burchett (Religious Studies) and interview data collected by Sritharan & Lohani. 

We investigated how to translate different perspectives on the need for development versus the need to keep culture and community alive within Nepal’s changing Koshi River ecosystem into expressive vocabularies for performance. Applying the devising technique of Moment Work (Tectonic Theatre), we experimented with how multiple elements of the stage, including light, sound, spatial relationships, objects, embodied movement, and story, could create moments of theatre. These moments were structured into sequences with multiple narrative throughlines, complicating our understanding of the ethnographic material and revealing new possible meanings, in affective, somatic, semiotic, and material terms. 

Our performance at the end of the year (after working together for a total of five weekends with a group of 8 student researchers) invited audience reflection and feedback on how theatre-making can offer a way of feeling-thinking together about the pressing themes of development, cultural preservation, and conservation in the context of Nepal’s riparian (Bhote Koshi and Koshi Tappu) and indigenous (Sunwar & Majhi) communities, whose social, cultural, and economic lives are closely tied to river ecosystems. More information can be found at the Nepal Water Initiative.

Student Co-Researcher-Performers: Delena Markos, Satta Sheriff, Andrew McKee, Jerry Zhou, Maya Sakai-Chen, Sofia Hurlbert, Lauren Nash, Nathan Klintworth (Lighting, Projections and Sound)