Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence. and Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities ed. by Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker (review)

Abstract

Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutierrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker, eds. Acting Together: Performance and Creative Transformation of Conflict. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence. Oakland: New Village Press, 2011. Pp. xxv + 310. $21.95. Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities. Oakland: New Village Press, 2011. Pp. xxiii + 280. $21.95. An artist/scholar/producer native to Uganda and studying in United States reflects on Ugandan National Theatre as both an agent of colonial domination and host to anti-colonial artistic resistance. A US-based artist/professor from Argentina narrates moving use of theater to remember disappeared and (in some cases) locate loved ones following state-sponsored violence and terror in Argentina and Peru. A US-based playwright/professor recalls a peacebuilding project responding to Gujarat massacres in India, discussing performance that implicates many of its own participants and audience in acts of violence. A legend of US civil rights movement speaks to spirit and efficacy of story circles as activist method, sharing his own stories of frank dialogues (and evaded dialogues) on racial, gender, and economic privilege. These are just a few of compelling case studies and historical/theoretical explorations offered by two-volume anthology Acting Together: Performance and Creative Transformation of Conflict, a valuable contribution to fields of peace studies, performance studies, and performance and social change. The anthology constellates a variety of artists working toward (differing notions of) peace, but more specifically it focuses on work that editors believe exhibits what peacebuilding scholar John Paul Lederach calls (3). The editors describe moral imagination as the ability to stay grounded in here and now, with all its violence and injustice, while still imagining and working toward a more life-affirming world (3). Both volumes arise from a larger network of affiliations and events, including Theatre Without Borders working group (which began in 2004) and symposia, conferences, anthology, website, and documentary on peacebuilding performance that working group has inspired in years since. Supported by a collaboration with Brandeis University, those outgrowths of Theatre Without Borders--conferences, anthology, documentary, and website--have come to constitute collectively Acting Together project, which connects artists creating in myriad locations around globe. As editors themselves acknowledge, anthology is heavy on US voices, due to origins of initial Theatre Without Borders working group and project's Brandeis affiliation, but collection does largely avoid familiar trap of representing United States as somehow outside or above devastating violence. The editors have organized types of violence addressed by anthology into three categories, while recognizing that lines dividing those categories occasionally blur. Volume I, section one describes case studies of performances happening in context of direct, ongoing, largely physicalized violence and destruction. Volume I, section two documents performances responding to violence and human rights violations after fact. Volume II, section one takes on forms of structural violence: poverty, racism, sexism, ageism, capitalism, colonialism, to name just a few. In this respect, anthology wisely maintains a capacious sense of what counts as violence, also attending to forms of injury and oppression that do not necessarily leave tangible or visible scars on flesh. Epistemological violence matters deeply in this collection; editors and many of contributors note that to attack culturally specific or age-specific ways of knowing is to attack (or even sometimes to annihilate) actual people. The remaining sections of Volume II contain recommendations for practitioners, sample discussion questions, and meta-reflections about connections across chapters. …