SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Bring your stories and perspectives to the stage.
Southern Exposure is a community outreach program through Obvious Dad
With a mission to enhance the community by cultivating and mentoring diverse artists, presenters, and audiences in an eclectic, creative environment, we generate inclusive experiences and challenging conversations to connect audiences and artists.
Southern Exposure’s work is driven by the transformative power of oral history and storytelling and by a strong belief that social justice cannot be achieved without deep listening and learning from those marginalized, silenced, and ignored. We are dedicated to making space for ethics-based oral history stories that might not otherwise be heard by creating a platform for individuals and communities to speak up and share their personal experiences. Through our programming, we work with communities to ensure that:
Voices of marginalized and silenced communities are centered in narrative contexts.
Practitioners use ethics-driven methodologies to gather, document, and perform narratives.
We use a participatory process to transform narratives into poetic monologues that are performed on stage.
UnMasking Theatrical Series
We believe that oral history and storytelling performance are disciplines that enjoy a unique synergy based on shared and complementary investments in orality, life stories, and community building. Staging oral histories increases the visibility of the narratives, moving them out of the archives and presenting them to a broader audience in a dynamic form. Creating a public performance from an oral history interview squares the memory circle by inscribing a private memory into the public consciousness.
Liberatory Education Program
We bring our ethical oral history methodology to classrooms and organizations across Chattanooga, connecting students, educators, and advocates with training and tools for collecting oral histories, creative writing and storytelling performance in order to advance social change. Through our partnerships and consulting, Southern Exposure offers expert storytelling and program support to nonprofits, schools, businesses, and more. These customized projects and workshops use Southern Exposure’s pedagogy to promote empathy, build relationships, and amplify community voices.
Who We Are
Peggy Douglas
Oral History Director
Dr. Peggy Douglas (she/her) received the 2022 Tennessee Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Fellowship Award for playwrighting. She conducts workshops on persona and ekphrastic poetry and artful storytelling. She has written and produced eight rhythm-driven plays of poetic monologues with musical interludes where the sheer thrill of language is the dominant force behind the performance.
Peggy’s work focuses on the common theme of her Tennessee roots—struggle and survival. Likewise, she is drawn to the strength and hope of our ancestors, as evidenced by the cultural connections of Southern music, food, family, and relationships. To celebrate these connections, Peggy gives a voice to her people—a voice of truth, beauty, and hope.
In 2020 and 2021, she collaborated with WUTC public radio to bring her poetic monologue plays, Southern Exposure and Steel Toes and Hired Hands, to radio audiences. Here is a response from one of the listeners, “When I heard Southern Exposure on WUTC, the hair shot up on the back of my neck; how it hit me– the change in tone and pace, and the way that language can become, for a moment, more like music; something rich and resonant rather than a means of reciting information.”
Anne Swedberg
Performance Director
Dr. Anne K. Swedberg (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Theatre (M.F.A. University of Louisville, Ph.D. the University of Wisconsin-Madison) teaches classes in acting, voice, Shakespeare, and Introduction to Theatre. She is a Designated Linklater Teacher and is a member of the final cohort of teachers to train with Kristin Linklater in Scotland. Her research interests include practices and history of community-based theatre; actor training and theory; voice and speech technique, training, and theory; and trauma-informed somatic practices.
She delights in coaching and directing actors and to see words blossom into performance. She is especially passionate about community-based performance and the co-creation of new work.