Abstract
John Murrell has said that the role of all art is to ask the difficult questions (1). This is as true for the questions that the work of art poses for its audience, as it is for the questions artists must continually ask themselves about their creative practice. For popular theatre, the difficult questions remain stalled in a binary, either/or conception of art and social action. This is a road well travelled; yet, when we attempt to discuss our work with our mainstream colleagues, we get bogged down in muddy debates, in which aesthetic accomplishment and social efficacy are characterized as competing, or mutually exclusive. Sociocultural intervention is, in essence, the inspiring story or content of the work we wish to produce. As popular theatre workers, we are engaged in popular education. I believe we must revisit the question of primacy, to ask, How does our aesthetic expression realize both artistic and social goals? This leads to two additional questions: How do we want artistic accomplishment in popular theatre to be evaluated? And who is defining “art” and social action?
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