Unscripted pedagogies: Practitioner reflections on VAD and applied theatre

Voluntary-assisted dying (VAD) promises what many of us quietly long for: control over the end of life. It offers a way to make death neat, even bearable. However, in our applied theatre workshops with VAD staff and families, we discovered something else entirely: not control but messiness. This messiness held space for the unspoken, unruly truths of love, surrender and the cathartic grief that exceeds what scripted procedures can contain. Applied theatre became both our methodology and our mode of analysis: a practice that foregrounds embodied knowledge, aesthetic distance and collective meaning-making. It enabled space for contradiction without resolution, inviting forms of knowledge that emerge not through rational explanation but through encounter, improvisation and affective resonance. Central to this was deferring judgement: a deliberate methodological stance that resists premature closure and allows complexity to remain present, holding space for meaning to arise through the process of making, witnessing and reflecting. What surfaced were lessons in a different kind of control, one grounded in surrender, care and the fragile beauty of letting go.