Street Theatre Research Articles

“Be Mine in Politics”: Charlotte Corday and Anti-Union Allegory in Matthew West’s Female Heroism, A Tragedy in Five Acts (1803)

Abstract This essay draws attention to Irish playwright Matthew West’s rarely studied drama Female Heroism, A Tragedy in Five Acts (1803), performed at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin, in 1804. The tragedy dramatizes republican woman Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, committed in July 1793. My paper contends that West’s tragedy blends an explicitly anti-Jacobin narrative, with a covertly embedded strain of Irish oppositional politics. Focusing centrally on West’s incorporation of a fabricated rape scene, which alludes strongly to contemporary allegories of the Act of Union, I hypothesize the possibility for Female Heroism to be interpreted by its Dublin theatre audience as a subtle rebuke of the union, which positions Corday as the personification of Irish independence, and Marat as the unlikely embodiment of tyrannical British rule.

Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process by Gay McAuley (review)

Reviewed by: Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process by Gay McAuley D. Ohlandt Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process. By Gay McAuley. Theatre: Theory–Practice–Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012; pp. 256. Riffing on Tolstoy’s famous opening line, a colleague once quipped that rehearsals with mediocre directors were all alike, but rehearsals with extraordinary directors were each extraordinary in their own way. At the time, I could not help but wonder: How would we even know? Rehearsals—mediocre or extraordinary—are notoriously closed to “outsiders,” so the only comparisons that most theatre artists, students, and scholars can make are among rehearsal processes in which they have participated, which is an extremely limited sample set for even the most prolific artists. Not Magic but Work is the capstone on more than three decades of Gay McAuley’s efforts to answer the question of how theatre scholars, students, and artists could know what happens in rehearsals they are not attending. For three months in 2007, McAuley was granted nearly unrestricted access to observe, document, analyze, and write about the rehearsal and production process for Company B at Belvoir Street Theatre’s production of Michael Gow’s play Toy Symphony, a new Australian play being premiered by one of Sydney’s major professional theatre companies, directed by Neil Armfield and starring Richard Roxburgh. Her having that kind of access to rehearsals with this company speaks not only to her career of building relationships and trust with theatre artists in Australia, but also to the integrity of the process, and the ethics, of rehearsal ethnography that McAuley has pioneered. Not Magic but Work is subtitled an “ethnographic account,” and McAuley does not use the term lightly, positioning herself as a participant observer and frequently referencing ethnographic and anthropological theory to frame her analysis. The book is not, however, a primer on rehearsal ethnography; only the first half of the introduction introduces ethnographic theory (in particular, Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description”) or the history of rehearsal studies. It is also not a big-picture survey of rehearsal or even a case study used to support broad assertions of how rehearsal works or how theatre is made; it is, rather, a study of rehearsal as a culturally embedded and frequently ritualized set of social interactions by which meaning is negotiated and significance is assigned. McAuley divides her account into two sections, the better “to achieve an appropriate balance between detailed description of the daily work processes and commentary on the larger social and cultural processes within which they are located and to which they contribute” (28). The first, longer section is a chronological description of one company’s rehearsal process of one play from the first read through to opening night, presenting McAuley’s detached, yet sophisticated observations about the participants, the processes, and the physical and ideological context of the work that the artists are doing at various stages of rehearsal. Her own academic training in languages and literature (French and German) grounds the literary-analytic approach of her analysis. Semiotics is a clear influence in many of McAuley’s previous articles, as well as in her 2000 book Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre in which she uses data from rehearsal observations to track and analyze how gestures, objects, and spaces in theatre become meaningful. Her fluency with semiotics strongly influences which incidents she highlights and how she organizes the details in this book. She titles her chapter on days 15–19 of rehearsal “The Sign Systems Come Together” and departs from a day-by-day account to discuss instead how the props, costumes, entrance and exit points, and sound and music cues were incorporated during these days. Her use of thick description often transforms what could become a tedious amount of detail into analysis that can offer new insight to even a seasoned rehearsal participant. In her chapter titled “Runs and Notes (Days 20–27),” for example, McAuley muses on the many different uses of the word run—“both a verb and a noun”—in theatre rehearsals. A run done during scene work is “qualitatively different...

The Ostentatious Crowd: Public protest as mass-political street theatre in Mumbai1

An ethnographic study of two public protests in Mumbai presents an account of crowd action in contemporary Mumbai as mass political street theater. The narrative is organized around two tit-for-tat rasta-rokos (road blocks) that despite having a nearly identical form and an indistinguishable cast of characters, unfolded in strikingly divergent ways. The article demonstrates the theatrical register within which mass politics operates, with Mumbai crowds revealed neither as spontaneous hordes nor as aggregations of strategic actors, but rather as a participant-audience of discerning voters assembled as a politically mediated ‘ostentatious display.’

“I'll Show You the Bowery from Chatham Square to the Cooper Institute”: The Entertainment and Ethics of Slumming in the Theatre

In 1894, Robert Neilson Stephens's playOn the Bowerydebuted at Haverly's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, with Steve Brodie, who had won fame for purportedly jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge years earlier, playing himself. Although Brodie's entrance is delayed until the second act, he rather quickly commandeers the plot and leads the rest of the characters through the Bowery and across the Brooklyn Bridge (where he reenacts his jump to enthusiastic audiences) to an East River pier, where he leaps into a burning building to rescue one of those perpetually distressed damsels from the 1890s. Naturally, mainstream newspapers were rather critical ofOn the Bowery’s literary merits. TheNew York Heraldclaimed that the play made “no dramatic pretensions,” and thePhiladelphia Inquireremphasized that it left the critic not “overly impressed with the play as a play.” TheNew York Timestook an especially harsh line. Lamenting the play's “threadbare plot” and “no originality,” and overreliance on Brodie's celebrity, its critic used the production as an opportunity to advance rigid delineations of highbrow and lowbrow, upper class and lower class, and literature and leisure. For what this reviewer described as the “Brodie audience,” the working-class spectators who crowded the gallery and boisterously cheered Brodie's every feat,On the Bowerygratified a yearning for escapism and entertainment.On the Bowerywas not, according to theTimes, geared to what the reviewer described as the “Booth audience,” the middle- and upper-class spectators who normally prized Edwin Booth's Shakespearean performances: “even the management does not take [Brodie] seriously.” If box office success is any measure, however, many from both the Booth and Brodie audiences did takeOn the Boweryseriously. Productions of the play toured for nearly three years, and a number of plays emulatedOn the Boweryduring the next five years. If Bruce McConachie is right that what is relevant is not “whether . . . melodramas were any good” but what audiences were watching and what meanings they were constructing from these plays, then theatre history should takeOn the Boweryseriously too.

Arizona Is Everywhere

Arizona Is Everywhere Tamara Underiner (bio) When I first learned that ATHE would be here in Arizona I felt my heart rise, then plummet, then rise again. Rising: My favorite people in the world, coming to be here with us, after so many years of political struggle! Plummeting: Oh, Lord, what they must think of us, given how all our dirty laundry has been hung on the clotheslines of media and social networks. Rising: I know we are more, much more than what you may have heard, and this is a chance to share some of that. You are here, and that is the important thing. You are the smartest, most creative people I know. We are so grateful you have joined the smart and creative people who live here to dream together these next few days. I know that it perhaps was not the easiest choice for many of you to make, and I want to start by thanking you for making it. And I hope that when you leave us, your time here in this complicated place will enrich your work at home in ways that only Arizona could have given you. What does it mean for ATHE to dream together in this place, at this time? Here, in Scottsdale, originally home to the Hohokam people, who lived here from more than 2,000 years ago up until about 1450. It is likely that they traveled here to southern Arizona from what is now Mexico, and maintained ties to their original homeland. Many contemporary Pima, Tohon Chul, and Tohono Oodam peoples, three of some twenty Arizona tribes, consider the Hohokam to be their ancestors. So when we hold an event in this space that was theirs, it is appropriate to acknowledge their contributions to our future. To give just one example: without their irrigation canals, which are the basis of the ones we still use, it is unlikely that Tempe or Phoenix or Scottsdale or Mesa would ever have been settled by anyone else. And it is useful to recall that, when this land was first occupied, the notion of geopolitical borders as we understand them today simply did not exist. Thus, Native communities to the south are divided by what to them is an artificial border; some are activist in denying its existence or calling for its transcendence; others defend it against crossers for a variety of reasons—some ecological, some territorial, some idiosyncratic. There is no unified Indigenous front here, but there is, as Patricia Ybarra will point out later in this issue, a chance to learn from perspectives that do not often receive national media attention. We also acknowledge the ongoing and deep ties to Mexico that this growing urban area continues to have. After the big land-grab that resulted in this area becoming US territory, about half of the residents of this area were Hispanic families. During the Mexican Revolution, they identified themselves as Latin or Spanish Americans, to distinguish themselves from the new immigrants, because even though they had been here for generations, by now they faced significant discrimination from the Anglo settlers seeking their fortunes on Hohokam land. And yet, the Latino presence remains strong here: when, during the second half of the last decade, law after law after law was passed restricting access to higher education, Latina/o youth—documented and undocumented alike—were at the forefront of the public critique against it, putting their bodies on the line in street protests and theatre performances on the lawn of the capitol—in one case, literally chaining themselves to the steps of that capitol in support of the DREAM Act. We have one such DREAM activist with us today, Dulce Juarez. More recently, with the passage of Arizona law HB 2281, we have been made newly aware of the importance of public schools in creating an “imagined community” of Americans. A hundred [End Page 3] years ago in Tempe, where I work, half of its young people could not attend public school with the other half. Today in Tucson, history seems to be repeating itself, as many young people are prohibited from learning their own history in their own public schools...

The Street Theatre of State: The Ceremonial Opening of Parliament, 1603–60

This article revisits a fairly familiar topic – early modern ceremonial relating to the state opening of parliament – in order to analyse both new evidence and neglected themes. Thus, while it examines the projection of political authority, and the grandeur of state, it also addresses the audiences for, and popular reactions to, such events, and supplements treatment of James I and Charles I with observations regarding Oliver Cromwell and Richard Cromwell during the protectorate. This involves challenging claims that have repeatedly been made about the ‘monarchical’ style of Cromwellian regimes, but it also involves emphasizing that different rulers and regimes thought carefully about how best to ensure that their approach to ceremonial accurately reflected their governmental style, and about how to take account of audiences and the political mood on the streets of London. Indeed, the article emphasizes the degree to which Charles I sought to balance the desire to project regal authority with concerns about decorum and disorder, while Cromwellian protectors were more preoccupied with the need to balance grandeur with a civic plain‐style.

Kindergarten truck: participatory play in public

As a licensed dramatherapist, experienced teacher, applied theatre artist and doctoral candidate in educational theatre, the centre of my research and practice has revolved around the intersection of activism, education, healing and performance aesthetics for the last 20 years. My latest street theatre project, Kindergarten Truck (KT), blended these arenas when I encouraged audiences to participate through role-playing as children. I describe how dramatherapy directly informed my design and facilitation of KT and articulate how a clinical approach to applied theatre helped me consciously veer away from therapy. Interspersed with personal reflection, I also speculate on the impacts and the meanings of these playful engagements with adults in a public setting.

Why Silence isn’t ‘Doing Nothing’, and Why it Might be All Right to do Nothing: Spiritual Challenges from Silent Worship to Contemporary Culture

Silence is the starting point of Quaker worship. ‘Keeping silence’ is the conscious acceptance of, and the alignment of one’s activity with, what is already there. Spoken prayers and lists of concerns will always be incomplete; communal silence is inclusive. Silent worship is time-wasting, rather as the anointing of Jesus was ointment-wasting: extravagant acts of devotion, paying attention wholly to another. Silent worship, like street theatre and public vigils, creates a new awareness simply by being there.

Dramatic Protests, Creative Communities: VVAW and the Expressive Politics of the Sixties Counterculture

This article locates the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) within the context of the sixties counterculture. More specifically, it explores how VVAW's membership adopted an expansive definition of politics that relied on cultural forms such as guerrilla theater and community activism to convey their antiwar message. In the past, scholars have subdivided sixties protest into the categories of “expressive” and “instrumental” activism. This essay adds to the growing scholarship of the “long sixties” and challenges the division of protest into these two categories using VVAW to reveal the porous nature of cultural/expressive and political/instrumental activism. It illustrates how activists took advantage of this cross‐pollinating tendency to cultivate creative forms of protest that transcended the narrow boundaries separating hippies from politicos, and how VVAW's cultural politics gave rise to a unique antiwar veterans' culture premised on dramatic street theater, experimental self‐healing, and a deep suspicion of centralized authority.

The Problem of ‘Place’ and ‘Placeness’ in Site-Specific Theatre

Works that advocate site-specific theater are highly active in the recent Korean theater scene. Site-specific theater focuses on the historical, political and socio-cultural context of the location in which the performance is held and it shows interest in the ``now-present`` life that is conducted on a daily basis at the corresponding location, as well as issues on the features and identities of the community it is under. Therefore, site-specific theater sometimes shows socio-political criticism and participation, and sometimes act as critical commentary work for theaters in the existing system, while at other times, it is a formative experiment outside of the realm of traditional theatrical practices. But compared to such active practices, there is a relative lack of theoretical and critical work on site-specific theater. The reason why theoretical research is needed in Korea``s site-specific theater is because declarations by theater practitioners and producers or superficial newness alone cannot define it. This is because what may superficially look new may just be a rediscovery of forgotten theater or long traditions from a performing artist or theater history context. In particular, the challenge of performing arts against system and genre practices, socio-cultural criticism, political progressiveness, and dissolution of borders of life and theater that are represented in such work is similar to the 1960s theater experiments and particularly environmental theatre. Therefore, in order to accurately identify the meaning of site-specific theater, it is necessary to compare with environmental theatre and street theatre, which are previous works with similar mottos and formats. As site-specific theaters have been actively underway, there were also records and criticisms on individual theater. Critics first put attention on ``new expansion of space`` and ``active participation of audience`` among such work. But these are not features unique only to site-specific theater. What we must first pay attention to is not ``space`` but ``place`` that is the starting point of site-specific theater, and the meaning of ``placeness`` in performing arts. In site-specific theater, ``site`` is not just simply a space or environment. In site-specific theater, ``placeness``, or the uniqueness and exclusiveness of place and historical and social features of the site, are preemptive over all else and the contents and format of works also result from this. In site-specific theater, site is ``format`` and ``contents``, and the place itself is the ``storyteller``. Therefore, in order to properly understand the meaning of site-specific theater, which has rapidly been spreading in the performing arts world in the 21st century, we must examine the meaning of ``site`` in relation to medium-specificity of theater, which is both a site art and performing art. This study examines the meaning of site-specific theaters that have been performed recently in Korean theater focusing on issues of ``site`` and ``placeness``. For this, the concepts of ``space``, ``place`` and ``site`` must be arranged first. After examining the concepts discussed in a broad range in philosophical, sociological and geographic fields, their implications in the performing arts field will be examined. Also, the meaning of site-specificity in other art sectors will be summed up focusing on the arts sector that first practiced site-specific arts. Second, environmental theatre and street theatre that shows similar formative experiments with site-specific theater will be comparatively studied. Third, based on this, the question on what site is in today``s site-specific theater will be discussed focusing on Korea``s site-specific theater that has been showing progress through urban experience and personal experience projects. Through such studies, the features of site-specific theater that has becoming another trend in Korean theater in the 21st century, its contemporaneous meaning, and theater historical meaning will be put into order.

CHALLENGES IN EVALUATING DEVELOPMENT COMMUNICATIONS: THE CASE OF A STREET THEATRE PROGRAMME TO ADDRESS RACISM

AbstractAn evaluation of a pilot street theatre programme presented challenges and stimulated reflections on how evaluation can better contribute to build knowledge on communication for development. The programme addressed racism in Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda and Dominican Republic. It engaged communities effectively. The evaluation faced challenges in dealing with this sensitive subject, dealing with local partners limited monitoring capacity and methodological challenges to assess attitudes and change. It suggests the need for greater collaboration across evaluation and research and among different specialisms to address the evidence and methodological challenges, as well as more resourcing of impact evaluation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Political conscientisation through street theatre: a study with reference to Kalyanasaugadhikam

Theatre occupies a significant place in any revolutionary political strategy that has as its objective a radical transformation of society. This paper attempts to make a thematic and structural analysis of the Malayalam street play Kalyanasaugadhikam written by Anil Nadakavu in 2009 and performed by Manisha Theatres, Thadiyankovil, Kasaragod, Kerala, India. It is also an exploration into the politics behind the production and consumption of every cultural product in our society, with a special reference to the political implications and aesthetics offered by the street play Kalyanasaugadhikam.

Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement

For decades, social movements have vied for attention from the mainstream mass media -- newspapers, radio, and television. Today, many argue that social media power social movements, from the Egyptian revolution to Occupy Wall Street. Yet, as Sasha Costanza-Chock reports, community organizers know that social media enhance, rather than replace, face-to-face organizing. The revolution will be tweeted, but tweets alone do not the revolution make. In Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Costanza-Chock traces a much broader social movement media ecology. Through a richly detailed account of daily media practices in the immigrant rights movement, he argues that there is a new paradigm of social movement media making: transmedia organizing. Despite the current spotlight on digital media, he finds, social movement media practices tend to be cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, even as they create media ranging from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television. Drawing on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects, Costanza-Chock presents case studies of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement over the last decade. Chapters focus on the historic mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful activists; efforts to widen access to digital media tools and skills for low-wage immigrant workers; paths to participation in DREAM activism; and the implications of professionalism for transmedia organizing. These cases show us how savvy transmedia organizers work to strengthen movement identity, win political and economic victories, and transform public consciousness forever.

From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law

From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran:Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law Catherine Sameh (bio) The One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law began in Iran in 2006, after two years of crackdowns by hard-liners within the government.1 As public protests for changes in women’s rights vis-à-vis family law became less possible, activists began a new strategy to raise awareness about women’s compromised legal status and to bring about reforms in family law. The goals of the campaign were initially to collect one million signatures through door-to-door direct contact, gatherings, and the Internet “in support of changes to discriminatory laws against women” and to promote dialogue and discussion among women and men in meetings and public seminars and conferences (Change for Equality 2006). The collection of signatures was the first phase of the campaign; in the second phase, campaign activists hope to work with supportive legal experts to draft new legislation to replace unjust laws. The laws they seek to challenge are mostly family laws pertaining to custody, marriage, inheritance, and divorce, among other issues. While the campaign uses novel tactics, like street theater and door-to-door petitioning, women’s political participation in Iran has a long history. As scholars (Afary 1996; Paidar 1995) have argued, women were key players in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, shaping a national struggle to reform the corrupt Qajar dynasty (1796–1925) and organizing a women’s movement with more long-term goals of emancipation. The Pahlavi era (1925–79) saw the state-building project as intertwined with questions of gender and women’s status (Najmabadi 1998; Paidar 1995). As Paidar asserts, the project of modern statehood was a coercive one, and [End Page 166] many reforms for women, such as compulsory unveiling, in 1936, were instituted violently. Moreover, as Najmabadi (1998) argues, the constitutional period and the era of the Pahlavis each enabled and constrained women’s possibilities, through the regulation of women’s bodies and gendered ideologies. The shah’s top-down implementation of political change included limited reforms in health, fertility, and education that benefited primarily middle- and upper-class women. By 1976, the literacy rate among rural women was only 16.5 percent, a mere 15 percent increase over twenty years (Paidar 1995, 162). Even for middle- and upper-class women, ideas about the patriarchal control of women in the family remained dominant. By the late 1970s, deep resentment of the shah’s modernizing program, which was not only coercive but also shut out vast sectors of society, had infiltrated many corners of Iran. The 1979 revolution was a broad-based oppositional movement against the corrupt dictatorship of the shah, and its ideological theorists mobilized a discourse of gender equality that gave women a key role in the revolution and postrevolutionary society. Ali Shari’ati, the popular leftist Islamic theorist of the revolution, gave frequent lectures based on his book Fatima Is Fatima. Drawing on the founding period of Islam, Shari’ati argued that women should emulate Fatima, the prophet Muhammad’s daughter, who was “the center of a family of fighters. She took on responsibilities and became socially engaged, equally to men but in a different way” (quoted in Keddie 2003, 205). As Keddie argues, Shari’ati formulated this “separate but equal” doctrine as an antidote to the West’s notion of a liberated woman, hyperindividualistic and sexually objectified, but also in response to women’s seclusion within patriarchal notions of Islam. In this sense, he appealed to national anti-imperialist sentiments that ran deep during the reign of the shah (205). Like Shari’ati, but from a conservative or traditionalist perspective, Ayatollah Khomeini argued for women’s freedom within Islam. He asserted, “As for women, Islam has never been against their freedom. It is, to the contrary, opposed to the idea of woman-as-object and it gives her back her dignity” (qtd. in Sanasarian 1982, 117). Khomeini, too, drew on a growing critique of “Westoxification,” the consumerist, sexually exploitative, and individualist trends thought to be promoted by the West. But as the revolutionary regime began repealing some of women...

Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and ‘The Charing-Cross Revolution’, 1848

In March 1848, the radical writer and editor G. W. M. Reynolds came face-to-face with some of the very people he hoped were his readers, when he took a step out of the editor’s office and onto the speaker’s platform. Reynolds stood up in front of a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, and turned the issue of the day away from taxation and towards revolution. In that critical year of Europe-wide revolutions, Reynolds praised the recent French uprising and declared solidarity with the French republicans. Reynolds’s actions on that spring afternoon earned him immediate prominence in the Chartist movement, a place on the platform at the ‘monster meeting’ at Kennington Common on 10 April, the status of a radical celebrity, and a government file. The disorder after the meeting continued on and off over several days. This article considers Reynolds’s accounts of his own speech as printed in the pages of his best-selling serial narrative, <em>The Mysteries of London</em> (1844–48). Reynolds’s sprawling tale mixed melodrama with radical polemics in the belief that fiction was a legitimate means of promoting radical politics. This article argues that the insertions of his 1848 speeches attempted to connect imagined readers of urban fiction to real protestors on London’s streets, by linking the printed page of urban fiction to oratory within urban space. Reynolds’s speech-making on that March afternoon projected his outbursts in his London fiction out onto the London streets; he hoped that the combined work of both would push forward his political agenda. His experience of writing <em>The Mysteries of London</em> gave melodramatic wings to his oratory on the platform. Setting Reynolds’s speech within the context of his debt to popular melodrama and its roots in oral culture, and the oral effects within <em>The Mysteries of London</em> as a whole, this article argues that Reynolds’s actions declared printed matter to be indelibly linked with the street theatre of political demonstrations. Trafalgar Square offered Reynolds the possibility that urban space could present the continuation and implementation of radical demands made in print, and could bring radical print vocally to life.

Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Contexts, Subversive Meanings

Bearing Witness and Taking Action: Audiences and Morality in Renaissance Tragedy and Activist Street Theater

The first time I realized I was an actor in an interactive drama was during a Palm Sunday Mass the year I was preparing for my First Communion. My fellow parishioners and I were instructed to participate in the reading of the Gospel by reciting the lines of the crowd that called for Barabbas's freedom and condemned Jesus to death by crucifixion. The guilt I experienced in this performance, however briefly it lasted, was profound. I realized how Mass had the potential to be a transformative event rather than just an hour of contemplation. Although the Gospel readings can be uneventful, when imbued with such an interactive element, the Church manages to make parishioners, their voluntarily captive audience, bear to the ethical and spiritual elements of the Passion and its central characters. By blurring the lines between actor and audience, the performance becomes visceral, intimate, and personal in a way that compels the audience to be active agents in the moral drama in which they are now participants. I begin with this childhood memory to underscore the thrust of my argument about how drama that ruptures the symbolic and physical distance between actor and audience can make viewers agents for positive moral change in their lives and those of others. By focusing on the didactic ethical, social, and political elements of plays in both Renaissance tragedy and postmodern street theater, we can understand how the interactive elements of street theater from political groups such as ACT UP are indebted to and follow the same ideological drive of the more understated interactive elements of Renaissance-era English plays such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and William Shakespeare's Hamlet in calling audience members to bear and respond to the themes explored in the spectacles before them. While the writers and performers of both eras take different approaches to metadramatic moments and breaking the fourth wall, their underlying purpose revolves around an ethical charge to provide provocative, uplifting, and life-changing inspiration to an audience that can be disinterested, uninformed, jaded, and/or reluctant about the issue at hand. In her study of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Meg Pearson asserts that to term a spectator a is to draw attention to the moments in a play when the viewer engages not only with the play before them but with the contemporary discourses surrounding the judicial practices of the period and the lively debates surrounding the significance and credibility of vision and watching. (1) I am utilizing this interpretation of witness as both a noun and a verb. After all, without an audience a play is in some vegetative state bereft of its revolutionary power to transform the lives of its viewers. The performances discussed in this essay ask the audience to bear to the human condition through metatheatrical tools both subtle and explicit, depending on the historical moment and limits imposed on the social negotiations with which the playwright can invite the audience to respond. After all, drama, perhaps out of all forms of literature, is the epitome of a communication structure that ruptures a sender-receiver binary that posits the latter as passive. Live theater is corporeal. Whether the audience laughs, boos, cheers, claps, or remains silent, the presence and absence of sound is a form of dialogic, symbiotic communication. The actors and playwright, if present, can detect whether audience members sympathize, empathize, or recoil from the characters and the emotions played before them. All such interactions, auditory or not, are dependent on a shared set of experiences, values, and beliefs. When the audience is asked to bear witness, they must contemplate. When they become involved, they must make decisions. Drama that includes explicitly interactive elements may sound like a relatively recent invention to many people. But its genesis in Western theater is far older. …

Playbill for George Lippard's The Quaker City

On 11 november 1844, a Mob gathered outside philadelphia's chesnut street theatre for, in the words of the theater's manager, Francis Wemyss, the purpose “of a grand row” (395). The crowd intended to prevent the opening of The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a play George Lippard had adapted from the work he was simultaneously publishing serially; it would become the best-selling novel of the first half of the nineteenth century. Capitalizing on a sensational 1843 murder case that fascinated Philadelphians, the novel retold the story of Singleton Mercer, a Philadelphia clerk acquitted of killing his sister's seducer. Infuriated by the playbill, Mercer attempted to purchase two hundred tickets for his supporters, who threatened to destroy the theater (Durang 247). Wemyss wanted Mercer jailed, but the mayor, wary of “riot and bloodshed,” countered, “I really think you have struck the first blow in your playbill” and called for the play's cancellation (qtd. in Wemyss 319-20). As the crowd of irate Philadelphians gathered, Lippard strode through it draped in an “ample cloak and carrying a sword-cane to repel assaults” (Bouton 20). Facing the very real prospect of violence, Wemyss reluctantly canceled the production.

Nightingallery: theatrical framing and orchestration in participatory performance

The Nightingallery project encouraged participants to converse, sing, and perform with a musically responsive animatronic bird, playfully interacting with the character while members of the public could look on and observe. We used Nightingallery to frame an HCI investigation into how people would engage with one another when confronted with unfamiliar technologies in conspicuously public, social spaces. Structuring performances as improvisational street theatre, we styled our method of exhibiting the bird character. We cast ourselves in supporting roles as carnival barkers and minders of the bird, presenting him as if he were a fantastical creature in a fairground sideshow display, allowing him the agency to shape and maintain dialogues with participants, and positioning him as the focal character upon which the encounter was centred. We explored how the anthropomorphic nature of the bird itself, along with the cultural connotations associated with the carnival/sideshow tradition helped signpost and entice participants through the trajectory of their encounters with the exhibit. Situating ourselves as secondary characters within the narrative defining the performance/use context, our methods of mediation, observation, and evaluation were integrated into the performance frame. In this paper, we explore recent HCI theories in mixed reality performance to reflect upon how genre-based cultural connotations can be used to frame trajectories of experience, and how manipulation of roles and agency in participatory performance can facilitate HCI investigation of social encounters with playful technologies.

Theatre as Tool for Development in Nigeria

Among the many communication tools available, theatrical representation is a favorite in many subSaharan African countries. Because of its festive, communal, realistic and concrete nature, it is almost impossible to avoid if you have a message to transmit to local communities – whether rural or urban. When we talk about theatre in the development context, we are obviously not talking about classical theatre, but rather about popular forms of theatre also known as street theatre, intervention theatre, or theatre for development. The most popular forms of theatre for development are forum theatre, interactive theatre, and the theatre debate – all of which use similar techniques. One of the distinguishing characteristics of popular theatre is its social content. The troupes of actors are often local or regional. The villagers do not have to travel to see the performances, as the troupes come to the villages to perform. Within development, there is an increasing recognition of the need to hear the opinion of the people who are most affected by development. One response to this is ‘Theatre for Development’, which is a technique of performance and drama-building. It rests on an interaction between people who are in the flight path of development projects and those agencies who initiate them. This paper will examine theatre as a powerful tool of communication which enables people to contribute in the development of their society and thereby get involved in the search for solutions.