Social Theatre Research Articles

Why “Social Theatre”?

Deploying social theatre in TDR is performative—as likely to bring about as it is to describe. Social theatre is not a meeting of two distinct unrelated wholes. It is the dynamic meeting of theatre and social work, an interaction that can change both disciplines.

Social Theatre in Bangladesh

Using improvisation based on the Bengali popular indigenous performance forms of jatra and khaner gan, the theatre group LOSAUK of Bangladesh raises social awareness and advocates change.

Playing in the War Zone

Finding himself in the midst of political upheaval surrounding Jean-Bertrand Aristide's fall from power in Haiti, Bailey saw in the violence a great need for the kind of healing and empowering that social theatre can bring.

Social Issues-Based Theatre Workshops

Social Issues-Based Theatre Workshops

The Play's the Thing: How Social Group Work and Theatre Transformed a Group into a Community

ABSTRACT This paper explores the potential of the purposeful use of activity in cultivating community in a life review and performance group with bilingual elders in a community based organization. Activity used to promote community among group members enables a diverse group separated by language and cultural barriers to find commonality, accept differences, take risks as acts of self-determination, and find a strengthened identity in the pursuit of a shared goal. Examples are given that detail the ways in which expressive activity develops the group's ability to exercise self-determination.

Forum theatre with carers: The use of forum theatre in specific community settings

Turning Point Theatre Company has been developing Theatre of the Oppressed techniques in Devon using Forum Theatre in social settings. The company work with older people, using a specific social theatre process to investigate issues that affect their lives. Forum is used to explore and challenge oppressions experienced by Carers, teaching the method to groups of Carers and Health Workers to enable them to use Forum independently as a way to view the injustices they identify in their own lives and in the communities in which they live and work.

A bridging of faiths: religion and politics in a New England city

Homelessness, black neighbourhood development, problems of abortion and sex education - how does religion affect the politics of an American city confronting these and other concerns? And what differences have and issues made in these struggles? In answering such questions, A Bridging of Faiths conveys a feeling of the urgent social theatre of Springfield, Massachusetts, and provides both a contemporary and historical sense of how power shapes and is shaped by the civic culture. Recalling the immediacy and provocativeness of classic community studies like Middletown and Yankee City, the work draws on the voices of Spring-fielders themselves, while it exposes tendencies that prevail through out contemporary America. This is a tale of two establishments: Protestant for three centuries, Springfield has been for the last fifty years a Catholic city. In looking at its emerging demographic, political, and economic patterns, the book shows how church and state interact at the local level, where lives are actually lived, as opposed to how the law and public opinion say they ought to interact at the more abstract federal level. While religion is more politically influential than some social scientists might have expected, it does not possess the kind of power feared by many constitutionalists. Politicians are seeking to redefine themselves in relation and in other ways, and religion as a whole faces subtle crises of mobility, authority, and secularization. From these complexities, new patterns of cultural and political authority have emerged in Springfield, similar to those now affecting other American communities and the nation.

Book Review: Social Studies Readers Theatre for Children: Scripts and Script Development

Book Review: Social Studies Readers Theatre for Children: Scripts and Script Development

Armand Gatti's Theatre of Social Experiment, 1989–1991

In TQ31 (1978), Christophe Campos described an earlier experiment in social theatre by the French playwright-director Armand Gatti – an attempt to politicize through theatre the depressed yet conservative town of Saint-Nazaire. Since that time, Gatti has continued to battle against (and when necessary within) ‘the system’ for his own, unorthodox kinds of theatrical endeavours. His work until the late ‘eighties formed the subject of Dorothy Knowles's pioneering full-length study, Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck against the Wind (Athlone Press, 1988), and in the following article she supplements this book with a description and explication of Gatti's latest work, in which he has involved not actors, but ‘actors’ – those exclus or rejects who have been marginalized by society, but whose histories need both to be reclaimed and, in the process, given back to them, together with the dignity of which they have so often been stripped. Whether working within the close confines of a prison, or accommodating the constraints of ‘the system’ at the Avignon Festival, Gatti's voice and theatre is entirely distinctive – as also, paradoxically, is his ability to speak with and for the unheard voices of others. In a long career which has embraced both practical and academic theatre, Dr. Knowles is perhaps best known for her directing and writing in the field of French theatre, and is also the author of French Drama of the Inter-War Years (Harrap, 1967).

"Treason doth never Prosper": "The Tempest" and the Discourse of Treason

IN A RECENT COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, THE TEMPEST is twice deemed a bad, even a boring, play. Perhaps the reason for this condemnation lies not in the play itself but in our failure to imagine the conditions of Renaissance theatrical production. If recontextualized within one aspect of English history, The Tempest, I suggest, is a politically radical intervention in a dominant contemporary discourse. The play is constructed as a series of conspiracies, and as such it can be inserted into a vast discourse of treason that became an increasingly central response to difficult social problems in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean London. Shakespeare casts Prospero as stage manager of conspiracy in episodes that directly resemble contemporary treason cases and documents. Nearly all the characters inside the play are physically and psychologically subjected by Prospero in his bid for political rehabilitation through mystification of his power as a divinely protected figure. But the audience exists outside Prospero's manipulation of characters and situations and is thereby enabled to perceive Shakespeare's clever demystification of various official strategies within the discourse of treason. The audience is allowed to see that conspiracy is often a fiction, or a construct, or a real yet wholly containable piece of social theatre. The play can thus be viewed within a sphere of oppositional discourse that arose against official discourse in this period.2

Social Space and Aesthetic Time East Asian Theatre: Transcultural Challenge

After successfully eliminating the British motorcycle, Japan now threatens the European car industry; it is also rapidly developing advanced industrial techniques that will make much Western plant look like a blacksmith's forge. Is the theatre next? When is East Asian art going to undermine a culturally obsolescent Western aesthetic which is the counterpart, perhaps, of a one-dimensional voluntarist technology?

Social Realism and Imaginative Theatre: Avant-Garde Stage Production in the American Social Theatre of the Nineteen-thirties

It has long been customary to deal with the social theatre of the 1930's in terms of explicit content; I shall deal with it in terms of theatrical style.The first point that needs to be made is that realism was not a discovery of the social theatre of the 1930's. Both as an ideal and as a practice, realism was strongly in evidence in the 1920's, if not indeed in the successful Belascoism of earlier decades. The producer-director Arthur Hopkins, whose Shakespearian productions in association with his distinguished designer Robert Edmond Jones were notably symbolistic, had perhaps his greatest success with his naturalistic production of What Price Glory? in 1924. The nascent Theatre Guild, which was about to collapse after its initial production in 1919 of Benavente's symbolist commedia dell'arte, The Bonds of Interest, was launched upon a successful career with its next, ultra-realistic, production of St. John Ervine's John Ferguson.