Insights in Applied Theatre

Peter O'Connor

Description

Much more than an archive, these are the vivid, still pertinent voices and messages of the pioneers worldwide.

The nineteen articles chosen by the editors of Applied Theatre Research represent key themes and elements from the early days of applied theatre that are still – and indeed now more than ever – relevant. They are all high-quality articles, some of which were highly influential in their own time. All of them still have plenty to say to today’s applied theatre, both in their own terms and sometimes in terms of how their publication influenced the development at the time of this still-expanding field, or refracted it in ways that give us new insights with hindsight.

They have been arranged in sections according to some of the key themes – and problematic issues – that were discovered, thought out and sometimes stumbled across by the pioneer writers in the collection. Each section is preceded by a critical editorial commentary on those themes, besides thorough introductions to all the articles and in some cases re-evaluations. The editors have added substantial additional new material to the collection and in doing so, bring their own applied theatre experience to bear on these themes, as they raise general questions that are wide-ranging, contemporary and urgent: from the vital and contested issues of power, partnerships and the giving of voice through theatre to applied theatre’s proactive response to COVID-19, to the need to identify, take account of and address the needs of all stakeholders in any applied theatre project. 

The articles are grouped in six sections, covering areas such as diversity of geography, community contexts, forms of applied theatre and organizational factors that characterize applied theatre; the definition and nature of applied theatre; how the best intentioned projects could be compromised by any of the many opportunities for applied theatre to go wrong; opportunities for change it can offer and the incorporation of new media technologies, and ethnographic performance, two factors that have now become major preoccupations for our field, particularly in the years since the articles were written. The final section recognizes that applied theatre has been around not for 30 years, but for thousands, and in countless cultures.

The editorial chapters have strong connections with the rest of the book, but are written with the editors’ deep insights into the field, and are sharp in their focus and context. The book offers useful insights into the start of applied theatre and its development as an area of practice and research. The chapter collection is relevant and includes influential names in the field who have contributed significantly to the development of applied theatre over time.

The primary market will be academics and advanced practitioners in applied theatre, drama education and theatre studies – including the expanding fields of drama therapy, theatre and health etc. It will also be useful for educators exploring creative pedagogy and drama in education strategies across the curriculum. 

It will be valuable introductory background reading for advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students in drama, theatre studies and theatre arts, performance studies and community theatre.

 

Introduction: Then and now 

John O’Toole 

PART 1: INSPIRING STORIES

1. Life drama Papua New Guinea: Contextualising practice  

Andrea Baldwin 

2. Audience participation, aesthetic distance and change: Reflections on Fifty Square Feet, a theatre in education programme on urban poverty 

Chan Yuk-Lan (Phoebe) 

3. Converging worlds: Fostering co-facilitation and relationships for health promotion through drama at the grassroots 

Christine Sinclair and Andrea Grindrod 

4. Shakespeare in Nicaragua

Els van Poppel 

PART 2: WHAT IS APPLIED THEATRE? 

5. Applied theatre: Problems and possibilities 

Judith Ackroyd 

6. Applied theatre and the power play: An international viewpoint 

Bjørn Rasmussen 

7. Conversations with the devil

Tim Prentki 

8. Applied theatre: An exclusionary discourse?

Judith Ackroyd 

PART 3: RISKY BUSINESS: GOOD INTENTIONS AND THE ROAD TO HELL 

9. Ethical tensions in drama teachers’ behaviour

Shifra Schonmann 

10. Community theatre in a South Samic community: The challenges of working with theatre in small communities

Tordis Landvik 

11. Spectacular violence and the Kachahari theatre of Sindhuli, Nepal

Alberto Guevara 

PART 4: THE DESIRE FOR CHANGE: VOICE, POWER AND PARTNERSHIP 

12. Tabula rasa: Starting afresh with classroom drama

Kathleen Gallagher 

13. Making a break for it: Discourse and theatre in prisons

James Thompson 

14. Evaluating the efficacy of community theatre intervention in/as performance: A South African case study

Kennedy Chinyowa 

15. ‘We like good disco!’: The ‘public sphere of children’ and its implications for practice

Nora Roozemond and Karola Wenzel 

PART 5: THEATRE OF INNOVATIONS 

16. Theatrical reflections of health: Physically impacting health-based research

Julia Gray 

17. Playing the game, role distance and digital performance

John Carroll and David Cameron 

PART 6: A NOD TO THE ANCESTORS 

18. Educational and critical dimensions in Turkish shadow theatre: The Karagöz Theatre of Anatolia

Mehmet Takkaç and A. Kerin Dinç 

19. Christmas traditions and performance rituals: A look at Christmas celebrations in a Nordic context

Stig A. Eriksson 

Sujets

• Performing Arts
• EDUCATION
• Expressive therapy
• General officer
• Art
• General
• Performance

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 30 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789385267
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights in Applied Theatre
Insights in Applied Theatre
The Early Days and Onwards

Edited by
John O’Toole, Penny Bundy and Peter O’Connor
First published in the UK in 2022 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Copy editor: Susan Jarvis
Production manager: Jessica Lovett
Typesetting: Newgen
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-524-3
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-525-0
ePub ISBN 978-1-78938-526-7
Printed and bound by Lightning Source.
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
This book is dedicated to those pioneers of applied theatre who are no longer with us, and in particular to four contributors to this book, John Carroll (d. 2011), Christine Sinclair (d. 2020), Philip Taylor (d. 2020) and Kennedy Chinyowa (d. 2021).
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Then and now
John O’Toole
Part 1: Inspiring stories
Introduction to Part 1
John O’Toole
1. Life Drama Papua New Guinea: Contextualising practice
Andrea Baldwin
2. Audience participation, aesthetic distance and change: Reflections on Fifty Square Feet , a theatre in education programme on urban poverty
Chan Yuk-Lan (Phoebe)
3. Converging worlds: Fostering co-facilitation and relationships for health promotion through drama at the grassroots
Christine Sinclair and Andrea Grindrod
4. Shakespeare in Nicaragua
Els van Poppel
Part 2: What is applied theatre?
Introduction to Part 2
Peter O’Connor
5. Applied theatre: Problems and possibilities
Judith Ackroyd
6. Applied theatre and the power play: An international viewpoint
Bjørn Rasmussen
7. Conversations with the devil
Tim Prentki
8. Applied theatre: An exclusionary discourse?
Judith Ackroyd
Part 3: Risky business: Good intentions and the road to hell
Introduction to Part 3
Penny Bundy
9. Ethical tensions in drama teachers’ behaviour
Shifra Schonmann
10. Community theatre in a South Samic community: The challenges of working with theatre in small communities
Tordis Landvik
11. Spectacular violence and the Kachahari theatre of Sindhuli, Nepal
Alberto Guevara
Part 4: The desire for change: Voice, power and partnership
Introduction to Part 4
Penny Bundy
12. Tabula rasa: Starting afresh with classroom drama
Kathleen Gallagher
13. Making a break for it: Discourse and theatre in prisons
James Thompson
14. Evaluating the efficacy of community theatre intervention in/as performance: A South African case study
Kennedy Chinyowa
15. ‘We like good disco!’: The ‘public sphere of children’ and its implications for practice
Nora Roozemond and Karola Wenzel
Part 5: Theatre of innovations
Introduction to Part 5
Peter O’Connor
16. Theatrical reflections of health: Physically impacting health-based research
Julia Gray
17. Playing the game, role distance and digital performance
John Carroll and David Cameron
Part 6: A nod to the ancestors
Introduction to Part 6
John O’Toole
18. Educational and critical dimensions in Turkish shadow theatre: The Karagöz Theatre of Anatolia
Mehmet Takkaç and A. Kerin Dinç
19. Christmas traditions and performance rituals: A look at Christmas celebrations in a Nordic context
Stig A. Eriksson
Editors’ biographies
Contributors’ biographies – original and updated
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to acknowledge with thanks the assistance to Applied Theatre Researcher and to this book of Griffith University, the University of Auckland, Intellect Books Ltd, our ever-encouraging commissioning editor Jessica Lovett, our administrative assistant Alex Harvey and our indefatigable copy editor Susan Jarvis, who was with us at the beginning and is still getting it right for us two decades on.
Introduction: Then and now
John O’Toole
This book is both old knowledge and new knowledge: a rediscovery and a reconfiguration; a restoration – salvage, even – and an archive; a recent revelation to its editors; and, above all, an entirely contemporary handbook of applied theatre for today’s practitioners and scholars.
Put simply, the book is the editors’ pick of the best and most important articles from the world’s first journal of applied theatre, Applied Theatre Researcher (2000–11), together with our commentaries and re-evaluation. It is a critical anthology of the cream of early scholarship in applied theatre, chosen by three old hands who have ourselves been centrally involved in applied theatre since the term emerged (see below), and are still up to our necks in it.
The nascence of applied theatre
The earliest usage (more or less) of the term ‘applied theatre’ that we can identify was by Norwegian drama scholar and contributor to this volume Bjørn Rasmussen, who used the phrase ‘applied theatre science’ in the mid-1980s. Helen Nicholson ( 2011 : 241), among the keenest and most conscientious chroniclers of the field, suggests that ‘applied theatre’ was not a term coined by a particular individual to describe a very precise set of practices, but that it emerged haphazardly and spread like a rhizome to fill a gap in the lexicon. We prefer to see it as a phrase whose time had come, which serendipitously emerged in a finite number of places, quite precisely to create the rhizome to fill that gap in the lexicon. That is not uncommon in this strongly collaborative field. There are quite a few specialist drama coinages that have sprung up synchronously in several places just when a name for a concept was needed – ‘process drama’, ‘actor-teacher’, ‘hot-seating’ and ‘teaching artist’, to name a few. (This is rather like those children’s rhymes and jokes that pop up spontaneously in half a dozen locations and are collected at the far ends of the earth within 24 hours).
Since one identifiable node in the rhizome that is particularly relevant to this anthology was Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, we can quite precisely identify the timing too, because two of us ‘were there’, playing our part in the genesis. A group of Griffith University drama lecturers were sitting in a Gold Coast waterfront café one day in 1991, speculating – as we all do – on the changing, broadening scene in drama and theatre. We were trying to find a new term (as we endlessly do too) that was broad enough to bring together the common and converging elements of drama education, community, fringe and experimental theatre, Theatre for Development … and those other manifestations of drama for purposes beyond just entertainment that were taking place outside formal theatre contexts and buildings. There was an element of tension in this discussion, as we were considering overdue changes to our tertiary course offerings; moreover, one of our number had an abiding and deep distrust of all things educational, especially those labelled as such. It was he who suddenly came up with the suggestion ‘How about “applied theatre”?’ There was a rare moment of agreement among us as we embraced the term, not too critically.
Over the next two years, we started to put together plans for a degree course in applied theatre, and we founded the Griffith Centre for Applied Theatre Research. Just a few years later, in 2000, the centre’s director, the late Philip Taylor, started the Applied Theatre Researcher (ATR) , the journal upon which this book is based. In the interim, we had stumbled across the visionary work of James Thompson’s centre at Manchester University in the United Kingdom, synchronous with ours or possibly starting even earlier, the work of which shared most of our own emerging definitions and principles. (There was one significant difference, which will be discussed below.) We also began to hear the phrase, independently, from other colleagues in Canada and Africa. The rhizome was certainly taking root.
The story of the Applied Theatre Researcher
From the start, the journal attracted submissions from distinguished scholars and practitioners, and over its twelve years we published over 90 articles with a progressively broader and deeper geographical reach and breadth of context as the field developed its expertise and expanded worldwide. Philip Taylor edited the first three volumes, followed by John O’Toole for the next three, then John in co-editorship with Penny Bundy for the last six. Several of those issues were simultaneously branded as the IDEA Journal , resulting from a bargain with the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA), which was looking for a journal outlet for its elite Congress papers. That further broadened the ATR ’s global reach and credibility.
By 2011, the editors were finding the production in our spare time of an expanding and increasingly influential online journal without technical or administrative support too onerous, and with perfect timing, international publishers Intellect UK contacted us with a proposal for a professionally produced journal, to be available both online and in hard copy. So, ‘ATR2 – The Next Gen’ was born, better known as Applied Theatre Research , with the same editorship as the first issue in 2013. While that journal has gone from strength to strength with international academic recognition, the next part of the old ATR ’s story is sad and wasteful. Its original sponsors, Griffith University, were no longer able to either promote it or support