Applied Theatre Projects Research Articles

‘Your luxury loft, my daily misery!’ University theatre, neighbours, and schools combat gentrification through applied theatre practices in a marginal district of Majorca, Spain

ABSTRACT This article focuses on three applied theatre projects, framed within the Theatre of the Oppressed: Neighbourhood Herstories (2018), West Majorca Story (2019), and My Life in the Borough (2019). We explore how theatre students from the University of the Balearic Islands and neighbours in the marginal district of Nou Llevant, Palma, came together to combat gentrification and recover the hitherto unvoiced history of their borough through Forum Theatre practices. We argue that the collaboration between the university theatre company and Nou Llevant school and neighbours through these three applied theatre projects resulted in community self-empowerment.

The French Play: An Ethnodrama About Applied Theatre for Social Justice Education in Middle School

In this study, I investigate the use of applied theatre with French Immersion Grade 8 students to better understand social justice issues. Through unstructured interviews, four participants were asked to recall their past experiences participating in applied theatre projects as a learning experience and as a process to better understand social justice issues. Participants’ words and feedback were then used to create an ethnodrama script, performed by the participants and me via video conference. Findings are grouped under five categories; Doll’s (2013) 4Rs: Richness, Rigor, Recursion, and Relations and Freire’s (2000) concept of conscientization. Participants in applied theatre reported they had a space to tell authentic stories in their own words, became more self-confident, and work towards being catalysts for change. The purpose of this article is to inform educators of the possibilities in using applied theatre and problem-posing education for social justice education and to share the process of ethnodrama as a methodology in arts-based research.
 Keywords: applied theatre; ethnodrama; problem-posing education; social justice education

The tyranny of emotional distance?: Emotion/al work and emotional labour in applied theatre projects

Taking as its theoretical starting point Sheila Preston’s (2013) discussion of emotional labour and the applied theatre facilitator, we examine how emotional labour in the applied theatre space might manifest through the experiences of not only the facilitator, but the participants as well. Our investigation is based on the work of The Community Theatre (TCT) project, a drama-based group in Singapore that enlists youth volunteers from low- and middle-income backgrounds to co-create shows that reflect on the social challenges faced by children and families from low socio-economic backgrounds. Drawing on interviews, reflective journals and workshop notes, we identify two significant moments that emerged out of TCT’s work, where the practice of emotional labour by the facilitator and participants became evident. We suggest that the implications of participants managing their emotions during the applied theatre process can offer some insight into the need for facilitators to create opportunities for suppressed feelings experienced by both facilitators and participants to be critically engaged with. We begin to articulate the importance of a critical emotional praxis (Chubbuck and Zembylas 2006) to navigate what we have termed the ‘tyranny of emotional distance’ in applied theatre work – the perceived negative effects caused by constant emotional management.

Towards docuvention: the multiplicities of documentary practices in Practice as Research (PaR) Applied Theatre

ABSTRACTKnowledge production exists through documentation. However, for Practice as Research (PaR) Applied Theatre to operate as a site of knowledge production, I argue for the necessity of implementing docuvention. Docuvention is the endeavour to document as a form of care practice, which seeks to concurrently document and intervene. Through the documentation practices of ‘A Home on the Island’, a series of transnational PaR Applied Theatre projects, I propose multimodality, multifocality and multipresence as ways of formulating strategies to advance docuvention. Through these strategies, practitioners of PaR Applied Theatre are able to chart subjectivity, shift perspectives and sustain care.

Traditional games and child-centred development: affirming disabled and female bodies in applied theatre projects in Zimbabwe

Traditional/indigenous children’s games are yet to be appreciated as sites of critical engagement. The limited available literature on traditional children’s games is mainly focused on the deployment of traditional games in the teaching of conventional curriculum subjects. On the other hand, applied theatre projects appear to mainly rely on ‘foreign’ games. Curiously, there seems to be bias towards theatre games from North America, South America and Western Europe. We concede that, to an extent, the deployment of foreign games has revolutionized and radicalized applied theatre practice in Zimbabwe. However, there is hardly any serious scholarship that examines implications of infusing traditional children’s games within gender and disability discourse for child-centred development. This article addresses the extent to which applied theatre practitioners may appropriate traditional children’s games in the quest to deploy theatre as a site of critical engagement against pervasive hegemonies such as masculinity, neo-colonialism and ableism that may impede on human-/child-centred development. Drawing from Africana Womanism and Critical Disability Theory, we argue that although currently few applied theatre practitioners are deploying traditional children’s games, there is scope for appropriating and contextualizing traditional games in subverting imposed ableist and gendered hegemonies. Applied theatre projects can offer space to recover the rich intangible heritage that is embodied in traditional games. Having established that indigenous African children’s games affirm the material body in general, we recognize the potential of applied theatre contexts to act as sites of taping from the wisdom of the past in order to invent the future in which Africa/Zimbabwean children are proud of their bodily realities as centres of human growth and self-construction.

Who is Responsible? Neoliberal Discourses of Well-Being in Australia and New Zealand

ABSTRACTPolicy proposals about social change and well-being shape the implementation of applied theatre projects through technologies such as evaluation practices and funding applications. Representations of projects can, in turn, effect public discourse about who participants are and why they are or are not ‘being well’. Like public policy, applied theatre for social change has to establish a problem that needs to be solved. Drawing on debates about change in applied theatre literature, we consider how funders, governments, and communities call on applied theatre practitioners to frame particular issues and/or people as problematic. We then examine discourses of well-being in Australia and New Zealand, drawing on policy documents and funding schemes to discuss the politics of change in applied theatre in each country. We consider how the field might navigate policies, technologies and public understandings of well-being, change and social good to produce work with and for participants in neoliberalised contexts.

Streets, bridges, cul-de-sacs, and dreams: does inviting shelter dwelling youth to work with culture industry professionals engender a sense of ‘cruel optimism’?

ABSTRACTThis paper examines a New York-based project, Crossing Bridges, that brings together 15 sex-trafficked and homeless young people and 15 award winning Broadway artists to create theatre together. These two participant extremes offer a unique opportunity to contribute considerably to new iterations of both communal practice and the aspirational aims that underpin applied theatre projects. Drawing on Henry Giroux’s concept of the culture of cruelty, the paper will consider if this project displaces the impact of cultural capital and elitism and whether it has the potential to enhance accessibility, or if there is something inherently ‘cruel’ in this offer.

The ‘Not Knowns’: memory, narrative and applied theatre

ABSTRACTThis is an attempt to articulate and explore the relationship between the science of memory and the applied theatre project, The Not Knowns. The project was a collaboration between theatre practitioners and a psychologist who worked together with a group of young people known, problematically, as the ‘not knowns’ throughout 2014. For applied theatre practitioners, notions of veracity are crucial, if complex, and go far beyond the practice of ‘giving voice’ to marginalised groups and people. Applied Theatre projects which work with participant autobiographies take on the responsibility of articulating the perspective as one of many possible truths, observing conventions which sustain a truth claim, but leaving this open for questioning. In this essay, the project collaborators examine the implications of the notion of memory as adaptable and malleable, as a factor in stasis or change, and as a story that may and must be re-told and re-remembered in an act of self-sustaining performativity.

Negotiating Narrative Identity in Intercultural Contexts - the Role of Applied Theatre

The purpose of this study has been to investigate whether applied drama and theatre can facilitate arenas and methods to support identity-construction, particularly favorable to an intercultural context, investigated through the concept of narrative identity. Identity and identity processes may be extra challenging to people with intercultural backgrounds. Research underpin that how you master your identity affects how you master your life. A participatory action research design, emphasizing the negotiation between theoretical and practical perspectives and different stakeholders was used to address the research question within the setting of intercultural applied theatre projects and aesthetic teacher education. The interpretations and analysis show that aesthetic processes of staging life stories (narratives), facilitate exploring, constructing, re-constructing and meta-reflecting on one's own identity, suggesting that a flexible identity may be an essential tool, a life skill, for people that live in an intercultural context so that they can participate in society in a meaningful and autonomous way.(Published: 13 January, 2017)Citiation: H.M. Haraldsen and S. Ingul. Negotiating Narrative Identity in Intercultural Contexts - the Role of Applied Theatre. Journal for Research in Arts and Sports Education, Vol 1, 2017, pp 69-82. http://dx.doi.org/10.23865/jased.v1.536

Applied Theatre: Aesthetics ed. by Gareth White

Reviewed by: Applied Theatre: Aesthetics ed. by Gareth White Aaron Zilbermann Applied Theatre: Aesthetics. Edited by Gareth White. Applied Theatre series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. 320. Applied theatre is in a precarious situation. Its sustaining institutions, which provide funding for applied theatre projects around the globe, demand a preoccupation with practical efficacy that can be measured in quantitative data. These institutions largely ignore the fact that theatre, as a broad discipline and a specific model for social justice, is a fine art that cannot be separated from aesthetics, regardless of its purpose. There is a place for beauty in applied theatre, although it has not been well-articulated. In his book Applied Theatre: Aesthetics Gareth White confronts this conflict in the social construction of applied theatre. Part theory and part case studies in practical application, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics offers a valuable perspective on the significance of beauty within the context of theatre engaged in social change. In this collaborative work, White enters into a dialogue with various theorists and practitioners on a number of different artistic attitudes within the context of applied theatre. White uses Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment as the basis for a theoretical approach and argues the case for revolutionary thought and practice in aesthetics. White’s edited book is a well-written, well-formatted collection of essays offering conflicting, yet complementary views on these diverging notions of what a revolutionary aesthetic must resemble. Applied Theatre: Aesthetics is organized into four sections: an introduction, parts 1 and 2, and an epilogue. In the introduction White identifies the problem: a lack of concern with aesthetics in applied theatre. He offers a glance at a few conflicting definitions of the term applied theatre and discourages any attempt to create a dominant or governing aesthetic. This is a discourse, not a consistent collection of procedures and methods to be implemented in the creation of art. Most significantly, the introduction offers a potential for beauty within interventionist art. In part 1 (consisting of chapters 1 and 2) White provides an illuminating inquiry into the philosophical concepts of aesthetics, and attempts to develop them within the context of a case study: the development and performance of Eye Queue Hear, a “performative audio walk” created and performed in 2013 by Access All Areas, a theatre company located in London’s East End, working with individuals struggling with learning disabilities. Using this case, White is better able to characterize and clarify his contention maintained throughout chapter 2: “beauty, as a prime example of the aesthetic in its exceptional form,” should be “viewed as a social, progressive or even radical good” (62). He denounces aesthetic autonomy and advocates for a theory that accepts heteronomy. Ultimately, White concludes that the worth of beauty is interrelated to the artistic products of the participants, and in the diversity of their interpretation of each experience. Part 2 consists of six chapters, each written by a different applied theatre practitioner. Each case study is vastly different regarding context, methodology, scope, purpose, [End Page 271] and space, yet each in its own unique way addresses the issue of aesthetics within applied theatre. White includes essays written by Nicola Shaughnessy, Mojisola Adebayo, Kirsten Sadeghi-Yekta, Ananda Breed, Anna Hickey-Moody, and Brian Heap. Some of the essays challenge the efficacy of applied theatre aesthetics in educational institutions and other social settings, especially when placed in the hands of inadequate educators and facilitators. Others advocate for a new aesthetic that embraces process and participation. There are a number of different conceptions presented throughout part 2 of Applied Theatre: Aesthetics, but one consistency seems to be that a heightened experience of the senses can encourage change. In one of the essays, Adebayo brilliantly explains her creative process, walking us through the development of I Stand Corrected (ISC) with South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza. ISC is a performance that uses rape as the impetus to raise questions and debate about homophobia, particularly in postcolonial societies. Through audience surveys, post-performance conversations, and critics, Adebayo discovered that her work was overwhelmingly described as “beautiful” and “powerful.” She uses this case study to argue that the pursuit of aesthetic beauty found in ISC exemplifies...

Privileging Aboriginal voices: Applied theatre as a transformative process for Aboriginal Australian youth

Abstract Poor rates of school completion combined with high rates of imprisonment mean that at least half the Indigenous young people in Australia are under-achieving, and are at risk of a future characterized by extreme disadvantage and disconnection from the mainstream. This research stemmed from an invitation from Indigenous elders to a non-Indigenous teaching artist experienced in intercultural drama and theatre, and began with a broad concern about how to reconnect disaffected Indigenous youth with education. Immersed in a new and unfamiliar cultural, social, political and environmental context, I developed a deeper understanding of Indigenous perspectives on partnerships, relationships and cultural safety, facilitated by the young people’s participation and the involvement of elders in three applied theatre projects. I found it necessary to adapt my approach to incorporate the making of short films as a medium of storytelling and as an initiative of the young people.

Power dynamics in applied theatre: interrogating the power of the university-based TfD facilitator – the UZ theatre and CARE Zimbabwe's Zvishavane/Mberengwa NICA project and SSFP as case study

One of the central tenets in applied theatre is the ability to confront issues of ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’. Indeed, success or lack thereof in applied theatre projects is often adjudged against the ability or the extent to which these projects are, or have been able to ‘empower’ the ‘powerless’. In this paper we seek to examine the extent to which, in spite of the traditional tensions between ‘power’ and ‘powerlessness’, the power of the facilitator can be a positive force that ought to be celebrated and harnessed towards resisting and subverting larger forces of manipulation and power in given rural contexts, especially when the facilitator works with the ‘less privileged’. We also seek to demonstrate that even though grass-roots participants in Theatre for Development (TfD) projects may appear as passive objects of power, project participants in apparently ‘non-political’ and paternalistic projects also enjoy a complex relational subjectivity in terms of the power dynamics of applied theatre projects. The paper is inspired by the recognition that all power can be overtly or covertly resisted. Thus Foucault's discourses on power and resistance and Scott's theorisation of public and hidden transcripts provide the theoretical foundations to this paper. Foucault and Scott's theorisation of power is consistent with postcolonial African views on power which conceptualise power in relational terms. Postcolonial theorists such as bell hooks, Mangeni and Mbembe all suggest that the ‘weak’ have their own forms of power which are often ignored by the powerful in their pursuit of the grand narratives of normative power relations. We draw on our personal experience as university-based facilitators in a TfD project which took place in the two rural districts of Zvishavane and Mberengwa in southern Zimbabwe between 2001 and 2004.

The collaborative theatre-making project: a space to challenge, explore and re-imagine accepted mythologies

This short case study gives insight into a theatre-making project with young lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-identified people. The author reflects on the capacity of collaborative arts practice to open discussion around identity and allow space to re-imagine lived experience through metaphor and mythology. She focuses on the central role of the participant and the value of applied theatre projects for young people who disassociate themselves from heterocentric discourse.

New imaginings and actions of Drama Education and Applied Theatre in NIE4 in Asia

Since the end of the 1980s in the NIE4 – Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore – in Asia, progressive cultural and educational policies have developed along with tremendous economic growth, and a belief in the value of cultivating excellent human resources has provided the fertile ground to plant the seeds for Drama Education and Applied Theatre in schools and community settings. Drama Education and Applied Theatre projects have therefore been implemented in different ways and manners in different policy contexts and funding systems in the NIE4 either through government programmes or Non-governmental Organization (NGO) and civil organisations. They have developed in different directions as well as encountering different problems over 20 years. This essay aims to give a brief survey and investigation into these innovative imaginings and actions in the NIE4 and it ventures to present the issues and concerns that practitioners are seeking to ponder and solve. It also aims to explore the relationship between these praxes and the respective social, cultural and political changes in these areas and investigate the various responses and efficacy these praxes in Drama Education and Applied Theatre have done to their respective societies as well as investigate the challenges they posed to the existing social and educational orthodox ideologies.

A Global Perspective on Theatre for Social Change

A mask workshop with incarcerated offenders. An AIDS education play in rural Zimbabwe. An interactive drama about racism and refugees in northern England. What do these performances have in common? All are examples of applied theatre, a vibrant and expanding field that blends theory and practice in efforts to use theatre for social and political change. The Applied Theatre Reader adds a global perspective to the growing library of academic works investigating how theatre workers put into practice the theories of Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal and educator Paulo Freire. This anthology of short articles by academics, artists and facilitators presents a wide variety of recent applied theatre projects around the world. The breadth of the book demonstrates the diversity of the field, while at the same time revealing that questions of efficacy and ethics remain crucial issues for any theatre concerned with social transformation.

Theatre: A Cultural Tool for the Propagation of Peace in Africa

In many parts of the world, theatre has been used to educate, socialise, indoctrinate and raise consciousness. In contemporary Africa, theatre practitioners have lamented the fragmentation of human life and the erosion of peace as a result of human rights abuses, income inequality, poverty, lack of access to services, crime and wars. The aim of this paper is to examine how African theatre practitioners have used theatre as a cultural tool to create awareness and educate their audiences about the need for peaceful co-existence in their communities. The discussions examine selected plays and applied theatre projects from West and southern Africa. They conclude in the finding that the applied theatre form is more effective than conventional literary theatre in promoting peace education and local development initiatives in Africa.

Making the everyday extraordinary: a theatre in education project to prevent child abuse, neglect and family violence

This article examines a national applied theatre programme coordinated through the Department of Child, Youth and Family in New Zealand. The programme uses dramatic processes to create opportunities for communities to discuss and find their own answers to the issues of child abuse and family violence. The programme utilises a sophisticated in-role use of a video game about a dysfunctional family to provide the necessary distance and protection to create a safe forum for participants. The game provides an opportunity to double frame participants so that there are multiple layers of ‘protection into emotion’. This article discusses the importance of establishing a close alignment of purpose between funder and client. It stresses the importance of the initial negotiation process. It argues that an agreement at this stage on the limitations of what applied theatre projects can add to wider government social change programmes is vital for establishing evaluation processes. This article is jointly written by a member of the government funding agency and the directors of the applied theatre programme. It describes the processes by which they agreed on success criteria for the project, as well as outlining the programme itself.