Community-based Theatre Research Articles

(Re)Discovering Story and Voice: The Adaptive Community Theatre Project

The Adaptive Community Theatre Project (ACTP) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) served to honor the voices and stories of community members with aphasia and other acquired neurocognitive disabilities, while combatting the isolation and depression often felt by this demographic. This paper will explore the ways in which the pilot year programming of ACTP evolved over time, due in part to the primary author’s perceived disinterest of the neuroatypical participants. Though initially the neuroatypical participants expressed interest in the project, erratic rehearsal attendance, transportation issues, cognitive fatigue, and stage fright presented challenges for the participants and created obstacles to the theatre process. This led to multiple modifications, including shifting from an ensemble-based mixed-ability devising model to an ethnographic model, and shifting from a full performance to a staged reading and community discussion.
 This paper offers an overview of the ACTP and the challenges that led to multiple structural revisions throughout the development of the project. Written from the perspective of the ACTP artistic director, a reflection and analysis on the project’s pilot year concludes with a proposed model for successful community-based theatre work with participants with acquired neurocognitive disabilities and neurotypical volunteers. This paper asks: What are the best practices for creating theatre with/for participants with neurological/neurocognitive deficits? What tensions in objectives, communication, and access arise when a team of neurotypical individuals creates artistic and extracurricular programing for neuroatypical individuals? And how can neurotypical theatre-makers interested in accessibility and inclusion adapt their approach to rise to the challenges presented by these tensions?

Inevitability; or, What about Jo Bonney?

In this personal essay, Luis Alfaro relates his own circuitous journey to playwrighting. He reflects on how his experiences as a queer and Chicano artist—a journey filled with risks, failures, and experiments—inspired and informed his thirty-year career in poetry, performance art, and community-based theater. Drawing on anecdotes, ruminations, and meditations, Alfaro narrates the story of his convergence with the larger Latinx theater community, and his account considers how artists past and present are paving the way for the potential future of Latinx theater.

Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek Brittany Murray Emine Fişek. Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 2017. 240 Pp. $99.95 Emine Fişek's book is an incisive account of how theater practitioners navigated the contested terrain of twenty-first-century French debates about immigration, citizenship, and national identity. Defining theater as "not merely a representational medium but an embodied social practice," the author does not shy away from the contradictions and imperfect compromises that arise when theater is asked to negotiate such politically fraught categories (7). Over the five chapters following the introduction, Fişek investigates the interlocking, and often conflicting, concepts of theater, collective identity, and bodily life in contemporary France. Ethnographic and archival research grounds the book's argument, providing examples of how Paris-based organizations used theater to address immigrant rights. Chapter 1 serves as a prehistory to the other chapters, focusing on the 1970s, when France introduced its first laws inhibiting labor migration. The chapter focuses on Al Assifa and La Kahina, two organizations that performed plays representing the impact of immigration policy on workers and women, respectively. Chapter 2 turns to the first decade of the twenty-first century, chronicling the tension between a republican ideal of universalism and racialized, gendered forms of particularity. Fişek highlights the role of personal narrative performance in negotiating this tension, with case studies drawn from Accueil Goutte d'or, a civic association based in Paris' eighteenth arrondissement, and the Festival au Féminin, an annual women's arts festival that takes place in the same neighborhood. Chapter 3 documents how conceptions of immigrant integration inform two nongovernmental organizations that engage with theatrical "aid" work. Research is drawn from Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières, which staged a 2007 show featuring undocumented performers. The chapter also draws on material from the annual theater workshop at La Cimade, an organization providing juridical and social aid to asylum seekers in France. Chapter 4 attends to the challenge of negotiating notions like "culture" and "community" in France's heterogenous, and often ideologically fractured, suburbs. To illustrate these difficulties, Fişek cites the work of Quelques unes d'entre nous, a women's collective. Their play, Le bruit du monde m'est rentré dans l'oreille (The Sounds of the Crowd Entered My Ear), captured women's reactions to the 2005 revolts, which affected their own Parisian suburb of Blanc-Mesnil along with so many other struggling neighborhoods across France. Chapter 5 identifies the points of intersection between theater, medical humanitarianism, legal aid, and immigrant social movements. Enriched by conversations with a broad spectrum of theater practitioners, the chapter traces how humanitarian discourse influenced their aesthetic choices. Without sacrificing an exquisite attention to nuance, Aesthetic Citizenship persuasively argues its case, recasting categories like "national participation, belonging and citizenship" as "spheres of experience that require rehearsal" (5). The book's fine-tuned analysis, enhanced by an impressively interdisciplinary frame of reference, will attract a wide range of scholars interested in theater and performance, contemporary French and Francophone culture, gender, community-based theater activism, and migration studies. [End Page 154] Brittany Murray Vassar College Copyright © 2019 L'Esprit Créateur

Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom

Research Article| October 01 2018 Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Shulamith Lev-Aladgem Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, PhD, is an associate professor of theater studies and former chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University. She is a community-based theater practitioner and researcher, as well as a trained actress who uses her acting experience in her research and teaching. Lev-Aladgem’s main interests incorporate play theory, performance studies, and cultural studies and their relation to community-based theater, political theater, alternative theater, educational drama, drama therapy, and feminist theater. Her research on these subjects has been published in numerous leading periodicals in the United States, Europe, and Israel. She has published two books: Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration and Subversion in Community-Based Theatre (2010), published in Hebrew. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Aesthetic Education (2018) 52 (3): 72–86. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.3.0072 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shulamith Lev-Aladgem; Models of Alternative Theater in the Classroom. Journal of Aesthetic Education 1 January 2018; 52 (3): 72–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.52.3.0072 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Aesthetic Education Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care

June 01 2018 The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care. Edited by AnneBasting, MaureenTowey, and EllieRose. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016, 230 pp.; illustrations. $24.95 paper, e-book available. Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Sonja Arsham Kuftinec is Professor of Theatre at the University of Minnesota. She has created and published widely on community-based theatre, public scholarship, and theatre as a technique of conflict transformation, including Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Palgrave, 2009). Her current research focuses on infused pedagogy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and teaching critical literacy through creative drama with K–12 students. kufti001@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Sonja Arsham Kuftinec is Professor of Theatre at the University of Minnesota. She has created and published widely on community-based theatre, public scholarship, and theatre as a technique of conflict transformation, including Theatre, Facilitation and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Palgrave, 2009). Her current research focuses on infused pedagogy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and teaching critical literacy through creative drama with K–12 students. kufti001@umn.edu Online Issn: 1531-4715 Print Issn: 1054-2043 ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology TDR/The Drama Review (2018) 62 (2 (238)): 153–155. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_r_00756 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Sonja Arsham Kuftinec; The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care. TDR/The Drama Review 2018; 62: 2 (238), 153–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_r_00756 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsTDR/The Drama Review Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. ©2018 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2018New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean by Emily Sahakian

Reviewed by: Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean by Emily Sahakian Jodie Barker Sahakian, Emily. Staging Creolization: Women's Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean. University of Virginia Press, 2017. Pp [i]-xiii; 274. ISBN 978-0-8139-4007-6. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8139-4008-3. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8139-4009-0. $75.00 (eBook). Motion, contradiction, ambiguity, tension…these concepts comprise the multi-faceted lens through which Emily Sahakian's Staging Creolization investigates women's theatre and performance from the French Caribbean, as its subtitle suggests. The work's five chapters study seven theatrical texts from the [End Page 182] pens of Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, yet its most valuable contribution to the genre lies in its documentation and analysis of the theatrical works' original productions in the Caribbean or in France, as well as their U.S. premieres, notably at Ubu Repertory Theater in New York City. Sahakian's unique perspective as both a community-based theatre artist and a scholar on theatre and French and Francophone literature privileges the interaction between text and performance. This dynamic becomes the microscope under which she employs close readings, analyses, and evaluations of the texts, their gestures, staging choices and dramatizations, and even interviews and analysis of data on audience reception. All of these elements lead her to the book's primary premise that staging creolization "is akin to theatrical syncretism, which, according to Christopher Balme, "utilizes the performance forms of both European and indigenous cultures in a creative recombination of their respective elements, without slavish adherence to one tradition or the other" (4-5). The performances are crucial because, as Sahakian postulates, they act as "a space of creativity and transformation" that "embody, carry forth, and materialize the process of creolization" (5). Chapters one through three, which the author considers "the first half" of her book, analyzes the plays according to the themes of "Unsettling the Gendered Stereotypes of Plantation Culture," "Remixing Unity and Difference," and "Syncretizing Performance and Moral Codes." The second half of the work focuses on the performances at Ubu Repertory Theater through the lenses of diaspora performances, and recasting the Francophone Caribbean couple. In a vein similar to the French Caribbean women playwrights whom she designates as "bricoleurs who work […] from cultural, historical, and epistemological fragments" (14), Sahakian builds a text based on multiplicities that dissects and questions performance practices of the Caribbean that ultimately, according to the author, "carry out cultural reinvention" (15). Theorizing both the concept and practice of creolization as a process of uncertainty, tension and constant becomings certainly challenges the conventional tenets of Créolité. The term, Créolité, is known for its inward-looking, homemaking gesture via an unconditional acceptance of Creoleness as outlined in the canonical work "In Praise of Creoleness" where Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant describe it as "the cement of our culture…[which] ought to rule the foundations of our Caribbeanness" (Bernabé et al. 1990; 891). Some of Staging Creolization's most animated moments break up the historical cement upon which Creoleness has been rooted over the last three decades and takes its canon to task not only for its failure to incorporate women's voices in its theory, but especially for its characterization of Créolité as fixed and stable. Instead of relying upon the traditional Caribbean theoretical canon, Sahakian assembles diverse literary and performance theorists that include Christopher Balme, Stéphanie Bérard, Édouard Glissant, Christiane Makward, Judith Miller and Joseph Roach as part of the theoretical foundation of Staging Creolization. It is surprising that neither Henri [End Page 183] Bergson nor Gilles Deleuze are cited considering the text's insistence on multiplicity and active and dynamic "becomings" that are inherent in the staging of creolization itself. Yet even in spite of this, the theoretical assemblage of Sahakian's book is fascinating and strong. It is thrilling to read a work that transparently engages with the more thorny issues of its genre. Staging Creolization does this throughout its study and ultimately calls its own name into question, further destabilizing any last concrete footing to which text and...

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Preventing suicide in Montana: a community-based theatre intervention

PurposeThis study aims to examine whether a community-based suicide prevention project could increase willingness to seek professional help for suicidal ideation among young people.Design/methodology/approachOnline surveys were administered at baseline (n = 224) and six months post-test (n = 217), consisting of the Risk Behavior Diagnosis scale; self-report questions on suicidality; willingness to engage with suicide prevention resources; and willingness to communicate with peers, family members, teachers or counselors about suicide.FindingsA comparison of means within groups from pre- to post-test showed increases in self-efficacy for communicating about suicidal concerns with a teacher, school counselor or social worker; increases in self-efficacy for helping others; and increases in response-efficacy of interpersonal communication about suicide with a teacher, school counselor or social worker.Practical implicationsYoung adults need to be willing and able to intervene in life-threatening situations affecting their peers. In step with narrative empowerment education, personal experiences can be used to communicatively reduce peer resistance to behavior change.Originality/valueHealth communicators tend to rely on overly didactic education and awareness-raising when addressing suicide prevention. This research shows the importance of direct and personal forms of influence advocated by social marketing professionals.

Rehabilitation from the Critical Perspective of Israeli Community-Based Theater

The growing diverse scholarship on community-based theater has broadly explored the aesthetics and politics of practice aspects of the field. Focusing here retrospectively on two Israeli theater pr...

Intergenerational dialogue: Connecting youth and older adults in urban spaces through community-based forum theatre

Abstract Understanding generational diversity has important implications for building capacities for developing healthy intergenerational relations and social cohesion, and for challenging oppression. Preparing young people in urban communities to understand and empathize with older adults could have lasting benefits for engaging community members and families to come together to transform culturally divided urban spaces. This qualitative research project drew on arts-based approaches to examine how dialogue between youth and older adults in a community-based theatre education program sought to lessen intergenerational and intercultural divides. While forum theatre is widely used to challenge oppression, this article considers how it could also lead to further exclusion of marginalized voices if both facilitators and participants are inadequately prepared to engage in dialogue. It offers practical suggestions for community educators in diverse urban settings, particularly in the use and application of the arts.

A theater intervention to promote communication and disclosure of suicidal ideation

ABSTRACTYoung adults from Montana have a higher rate of suicide than their national counterparts. There is a clear need for targeted interventions to address this disparity. The authors evaluate a community-based, narrative theater project designed to increase awareness and use of suicide-prevention resources among eastern Montana youth. As a first step, seven group interviews with Montana young adults (n = 27) were conducted to identify current perceptions about suicide and suicide prevention. Interviews were conducted before and after subjects were exposed to a community-based theater production about suicide. Emergent thematic categories were organized using the four main constructs of the extended parallel process model. After the performance, participants expressed increased awareness of prevention resources; perceived susceptibility to the threat of suicide and depression; and self-efficacy for accessing help and assisting others. There were mixed results for perceived response efficacy. Implications and recommendations for intervention development are discussed.

Bare Theatre of a Bare Life: a Community-Based Project in Jaffa

In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem focuses on The Bride from the Sea, a community performance by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers, presented in a sand box in a multi-functional kindergarten in Jaffa in 2008. From the beginning of the creative process, the Jewish facilitator and the performers had to struggle to overcome the various barriers erected by the intricate, oppressive daily life of the young Palestinian women. They eventually managed to perform a ‘short, thin performance’, which, despite resembling a misperformance, had an emotional and even exceptional effect on the audience. This performance is examined as a special kind of women-based community theatre, termed here ‘the bare theatre’, to indicate a form that articulates the bare daily life of women trapped between internal and external oppressive power regimes. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, a trained actress, and a community-based theatre practitioner. Her recent publications include Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration, and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (2010), as well as articles in Research in Drama Education and Israeli Sociology.

At the intersection of Deaf and Asian American performativity in Los Angeles: Deaf West Theatre’s and East West Players’ adaptations of Pippin

Abstract Among the multitude of community-based theatre groups in Los Angeles, two wellknown theatres continually transgress traditional boundaries of race, culture, and identity: East West Players, which places the Asian American front and centre, and Deaf West Theatre, which features both deaf and hearing actors onstage together. Functioning together within the larger national theatre movement towards diversity, both theatres foregrounded counter-narratives to the prevailing national discourse in 2008 and 2009, staging stark versions of the same show – Pippin – and turning a Broadway production originally set in the Middle Ages into very modern, relevant re-appropriations. Although the choice of source material seems coincidental, a closer examination reveals that Asian American and Deaf communities share similar struggles and experiences, and Pippin echoes this same search for belonging; after all, not until the mid-twenty-first century did both communities begin to find their voice in society. This article explores how Deaf West’s and East West Players’ adaptations of Pippin reflect LA’s cultural diversity and the challenges that the Deaf and Asian American communities still face today. Furthermore, this article provides an understanding of how musical adaptations intentionally disrupt and subvert current notions of national privilege and identity in America.

Performing Moretonhampstead: rurality, participation and cultural value

ABSTRACTThis paper is based on a multi-sited ethnography of subjects engaged in performance-based participation – amateur theatre, community-based theatre and Carnival – in the market town of Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor in the South West of England. Given its setting, the case study examines the rural dimensions of participation and cultural value. In addition to understanding the meaning and value of performance-based participation taking place in shared communal spaces, including the parish hall and the high street, this article seeks to understand everyday participation as a fundamentally embodied and emplaced practice. Place is not simply a venue or site for performance (or any other type of) participation. Drawing on the place theory of Edward Casey, who follows the European school of phenomenology, it is argued that place is, rather, the fundamental ground of human experience: embodied subjects and places co-evolve in a dialogic process of inter-animation. The main question we ask is how rurality shapes participation and how participation re-produces material and imaginary rural spaces. A key characteristic of government funding of arts and culture in the UK is extreme inequality in the distribution of funds to the City of London compared to the rest of the UK. While the cultural ecosystems of all UK regions outside London are equally disadvantaged in this respect, economic and cultural development in the South West region exacerbates this unequal situation by focussing investment and service provision in urban hubs, leaving contrasting rural areas doubly disadvantaged. This case study argues that an idyll-ised rural imaginary re-produced in and through everyday participation is only compounded by government deficits. Furthermore, it asserts that cultural policy making concerned with the value of equality must adopt a co-ordinated approach that takes into account complex interdependencies of national, regional and local registers of place.

“Do you need help?”: Dialogics of Change in Community-Based Theatre

It was a hot, sweaty day in Newport News, Virginia, in 1986. Cornerstone Theater's designer, Lynn Jeffries, was building a set for the company's first community-based production, Our Town, cast in part with local participants. Three kids rode up on bikes and drawled, “What y'all doin’?” Jeffries responded that they were building a set for a play, noting that she felt like she was “speaking Chinese.” The boys sat for several more minutes. “Do you need help?” And that, according to Jeffries, was “where it all kicked in.”

Personal stories in applied theatre contexts: redefining the blurred lines

ABSTRACTPersonal stories have been utilised in a variety of ways in Applied Theatre practices. The author problematises their use when the teller's safety is at stake within a given context. Inspired by neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte-Taylor's process of enlightenment through observing her stroke from the inside out, the author uses her personal experience of sharing and staging her narrative to ask questions of ethics, representation, autonomy, and agency for the teller; all of which are intrinsic elements necessary to an ethical approach to community-based theatre practices. A number of other projects and reflections by various practitioners are mentioned in this article to examine the different progressive stages inherent in relaying and staging personal narratives. This paper concludes with proposing protocols to help the teller glean the benefits of empowerment through sharing and staging their personal narrative.

Farms and Fables: Cultivating Difference in Community-based Theatre

Farms and Fables:Cultivating Difference in Community-based Theatre Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (bio) “I followed behind the shovel pulling hard red tubers out of loose soil and tried to explain this project. Farmers, actors, giant puppets. You know, community-based theater.” —Jennie Hahn1 Created in collaboration with family farmers and farmworkers, Farms and Fables (2011) was a community-based theatre project about local agriculture, developed through a process of embodied research. The project, produced by Open Waters Theater Company of Portland, Maine, put artists to work on farms and engaged farmworkers in storytelling and acting. Throughout its process, Open Waters wrestled with the challenge of representing a local Maine farming community while also negotiating difference, both as occupational outsiders and within the local farming community. Drawing from what company members learned during their time working on the farms and in dialogue with farmers and farmworkers, the theatre company set out to address issues relevant to small farmers who are dealing with the struggle to hold onto their farms in the face of an uncertain future for farming in Maine. The play tells the story of two farms, one belonging to a family who has been farming in the state for generations, and the other to a family that is new to both farming and Maine. One farmer grapples with questions of how to sustain his family farm in the face of rising debt, as his new neighbors struggle to adapt to a new way of life. Throughout, two farmworkers represent the repetitive, enduring labor of a farm, as well as some of the issues faced by Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers in Maine. The farmers’ storylines are interspersed with group movement pieces that depict the labor of the farm (planting seeds and harvesting vegetables). Staged in Camp Ketcha’s historic barn in Scarborough, Maine, the group of performers was a mix of professional actors and members of the local farming community (fig. 1). A twelfth-generation Mainer, Jennie Hahn (the artistic director of Open Waters) set out to create a community-based performance rooted in her “relationship to place and to the state of Maine” (Hahn 2010a). Hahn’s objective echoes Jan Cohen-Cruz’s definition of community-based performance: “theater that stays close to its origins in terms of place, ethnicity or circumstances” (2006, 3). Drawing on the ecological implications of the term grassroots theater, Cohen-Cruz calls on farmer, author, and cultural critic Wendell Berry’s linkage of culture and agriculture: “The traditions, new ideas and interactions that generate systems of human meaning-making are like the particular soil, amount of rainfall and growing season that determine the particularities of plant life” (ibid.). In essence, Cohen-Cruz argues that community-based theatre must be as committed to the particular ecology of place as a farmer. Indeed, community-based performances are often collaboratively created, process-based, and committed to localism and/or site-specificity. Farms and Fables extends and makes literal Cohen-Cruz’s metaphor by siting the project on farms and emphasizing localism as central to its project. Due to this emphasis on localism, community-engaged artists like Open Waters Theater Company struggle with definitions of community that rely upon commonalties and universalities. [End Page 283] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Farms and Fables performance poster. Poster design by Nashbox. (Photo: John Bliss.) In Lucy Lippard’s seminal text The Lure of the Local, she identifies the importance of a deep sense of place for all people, and especially for artists creating site-specific or community-engaged work. For Lippard, a sense of place is an essential component for all human interaction, and especially so for community-engaged art practice. However, this focus on the local also has its critics. Applied theatre scholar Helen Nicholson writes that “drama projects that focus on straightforward constructions of local identity, shared histories and ideological unity to the exclusion of difference and diversity, are likely to reinforce the more conservative images of ‘otherness’ sometimes associated with localism” (84). Given these concerns about the problematic aspects of the local, how might artists create work with and about communities that stays true to the community’s particular ecology...

A Note from the Editor

A Note from the Editor Gwendolyn Alker Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about the proverbial claim of academia as an “ivory tower”—supposedly free from the turbulence of the outside world. To a certain extent there are economic, social, and political buffers between academia and other milieus, at least in the United States. And certainly some universities are more buttressed from the economic realities of this moment than others. But what my editing of this current issue reminded me of is how we academics, and particularly those who deal with theatre and performance, are intertwined with and have certain responsibilities to our local communities. Indeed, as art-makers and as theorists of our art form, we not only interact with and comment on that which goes on around us, but are also engaged with the creation, and re-creation, of our cultural moment. Scholarship that moves gracefully between theory and practice must also move ethically and intelligently among the communities that create the ideas and the work. I have come to think of Theatre Topics as a place to support strategies and create insights on such movement. Put into disciplinary terms, I see this through our commitment to pedagogy, devising, and dramaturgy, but also in our engagement with applied and community-based theatre. The definition and purview of such terms are complex. I invoke one recently offered in Theatre for Change by Robert Landy and David Montgomery: “Applied Theatre is a simple idea—this is a theatre for change that exists to question and challenge the given order” (130). Perhaps we can then say that what TT as a whole does is to ask what changes for whom, and why. As theatre artists and scholars (including those who identify as both, and those who look toward the other half of this duality for inspiration and support), theatre can become a bridge among higher education, the professional performance world, and the many other worlds that surround us. In this issue of TT such exchanges take place within communities as specific as one prison or one farm, or in more widespread communities based around a racial or ethnic identity in a certain geographic region. Thus it is with considerable pride that I offer the following essays and notes from the field, almost all of which question how theatre creates ethical change within specific communities. This issue begins with a timely look back at the way that theatre has engaged with the overwhelmingly theatrical event that was and is 9/11. Facing the fifteenth anniversary of this tragedy, authors Elliot Leffler and Michael Mellas ask how theatre can be a place for maintaining complex and divergent views. Their reflection offers a hopeful engagement on how theatre can spatially, compositionally, and politically allow for a “dramaturgy of divergence,” while maintaining a culture of respect for those present in the theatre. With the hindsight that we now have regarding 9/11 and the subsequent turn in the mediation of news and its reception, the multiplicity of such theatrical experiences seems relevant and timely. Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly continues the issue with “Farms and Fables: Cultivating Difference in Community-based Theatre.” Taking an applied theatre project in which members of the Open Waters Theater Company worked with various farmers in Maine, she points out the difficulties of bringing community-based theatre to those who may or may not be willing or able to participate. Such honest challenges for theatre professionals working with divergent communities is revisited in three brief, but powerful notes later in this volume: Monica Prendergast’s description of her project with the William Head on Stage company in British Columbia; Paul Maunder’s far-reaching experiences as a “journeyman writer” in New Zealand/Aotearoa; and Fadi Fayad Skeiker’s interview [End Page ix] with Alexander Schroeder as he seeks to bring therapeutic theatre experiences to the Syrian refugee populations who are, as we go to press, still fleeing a devastating civil war in their home country. Other fascinating convergences arise with our next essay, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta’s “Worlds of More Than One,” and the final peer-reviewed essay in the print version of this issue, Lisa Quoresimo...

Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age by John Fletcher

Reviewed by: Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age by John Fletcher Jay Ball Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age. By John Fletcher. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. 412 pp. $44.00 cloth. Part ethnography, part polemic, John Fletcher’s new book provides a landmark survey of contemporary American evangelicalism’s vibrant culture of performance. It is also a provocation addressed to “secular Left” scholars who might (falsely) believe they have cornered the market in theatre for social change. These two themes—the range and sophistication of evangelical performance versus the smug hypocrisy and dismissiveness of antitheistic critics—form the double helix of Fletcher’s well-researched and closely observed study. It deserves to be widely read and debated. As the lengthy introduction explains, Fletcher sets out to identify and categorize the array of performance strategies that “evangelicals in the United States use to change their world, to win converts to their faith and worldview” (5). Fletcher places particular emphasis on “the challenges they face, and the solutions, innovations, or compromises they create” in the context of a society whose norms are regarded as increasingly antireligious and tolerant of difference, that is, the “secular age” of his title, which he takes from the Canadian philosopher of identity Charles Taylor (5). Structured as eight lengthy chapters, Fletcher covers everything from traditional door-to-door “soul winning” (or “kerygmatic” performatives) to alternative Halloween immersive theatres known as “Hell Houses,” from Ken Ham’s Kentucky-based Creation Museum to “seeker-sensitive [Church] services” pioneered by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. Fletcher also discusses evangelical debates about “sexual orientation change efforts,” also known as “conversion therapy,” in the penultimate chapter of the book. In most of these case studies, Fletcher’s rhetorical criticism is grounded in firsthand “thick descriptions” based on his wide-ranging fieldwork. But Fletcher is no disinterested observer on these travels. Eschewing “paranoid criticism,” which he defines as the reflexive ascription of “hegemonic ideologies” to anything but the most politically radical practices, he instead adopts the perspective of “critical generosity,” or the “good faith” approach (29). Drawing on scholars of activist performance such as Jan Cohen-Cruz and David Roman, Fletcher seeks to employs “deep empathy” with American evangelicals in order to render their aims and methods with greater nuance and complexity. (For a work that engages so many theorists so well, it may seem ungenerous to wish Fletcher had employed others. However, one cannot help but wonder how [End Page 323] he might have engaged with Michael Walzer’s notion of “connected criticism.”) Further, this challenge to the values of left-progressive theatre historiography is intended to lift “significant limitations on the critical and political imaginations of theatre and performance activist-scholars” (29). Fletcher demonstrates that evangelicals are social-change innovators whose practices are worthy of admiration and possibly even theft. The chapter “Hell and Judgment: House of Distinction” may be the strongest application of this method for the way in which it complicates the premise that all evangelical performance is “preaching to convert.” Originally devised by Colorado pastor Keenan Roberts during the 1990s and now circulated nationally through so-called Outreach Kits (sold for $299), the typical “Hell House” stages a procession of harrowing tableaux depicting the wages of sin, especially teenage forms of moral misadventure: fatal drunk-driving accidents, drug overdoses, rape, abortion, and demonic possessions brought on by dabbling in the occult, all of which consign the victims to the just torments of hell. As Fletcher records, Roberts’s original has inspired numerous variants, including Judgment House, Revelation Walk, and Rapture House. According to Fletcher, all of these productions create what he memorably terms “interactive eschatological theatre” (160). However, in one of the more important takeaways from this study, Fletcher problematizes the notion that Hell Houses are designed to interpellate the unconverted. Drawing on Baz Kershaw’s theory of “authentication” in community-based theatre, Fletcher writes, “In order to ‘work,’ Hell House relies on an audience of people willing to buy into (authenticate) the picture of reality that Hell House presents. For those who do not already believe in demons or God or the...

Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed

Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed