The Pink Transcripts: Expanding Spaces for LGBT Southeast Asians and their Narratives Through Documentary Theatre and Drama Therapy (360G-ThriveLDN-349)

14. What is your project? (400 words) The Pink Transcripts combines Documentary Theatre and Drama Therapy as a hybrid strategy through regular and sustained ten rehearsal-therapy sessions for transgender and cross-dresser members of the Southeast Asian LGBT migrant communities. The workshop sessions will lead to a public performance as a form of engagement and conversation with the Southeast Asian migrant communities and with the British public as a whole and as documentation of the narratives of the struggle faced by transgenders and cross-dressers within the already-marginalized Southeast Asian LGBT migrants communities in London. The project addresses the lack of spaces for transgender and cross-dressers within the Southeast Asian LGBT communities in London to express themselves, on how to integrate into the Southeast Asian migrant communities and in British society as a whole, and the anxieties due to experiences of violence, exclusion, racism, and discrimination. These experiences are push factors that lead a member of this community to social isolation that usually leads to acute mental health problems frequently leading to suicides. The struggle of the groups within the Southeast Asian LGBT communities is usually unheard - and The Pink Transcripts will utilize theatre as a platform to raise awareness within the Southeast Asian communities in London. The Pink Transcript is a pioneering project in the United Kingdom that provides Drama Therapy to transgender and cross-dressers within the Southeast Asian migrant communities. Also, the project goes beyond therapy by documenting the struggles of this marginalized group within the Southeast Asian migrant LGBT communities and then performing these documented struggles to the public. The Pink Transcripts is a ten rehearsal-therapy session of Drama Therapy as performative transcriptions of personal stories of the participants that will culminate in a two-day public performance also by the participants and their collaborators. The rehearsal-therapy sessions will produce written and performed narratives of the participants (transcriptions) that will be put into a script for a public performance targeting an audience of 200. The project's documentation and performance through Documentary Theatre will be a viable resource for future endeavors from scholars, community workers, artists, and policymakers that impact the welfare of transgender and cross-dresser members of the Southeast Asian migrant communities in London. The Drama Therapy aspect of the project will address the anxieties brought by social exclusion experienced by the participants. This is a pilot project that SEAC with its partner organization, Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, that we envisions to replicate in the future.