Applied Drama And Theatre As An Interdisciplinary Field In The Context Of Hiv Aids In Africa

Drama for Life, University of the Witwatersrand, aims “to enhance the capacity of young people, theatre practitioners and their communities to take responsibility for the quality of their lives in the context of HIV and AIDS in Africa. We achieve this through participatory and experiential drama and theatre that is appropriate to current social realities but draws on the rich indigenous knowledge of African communities.” Collected here is a representative set of research essays written to facilitate dialogue across disciplines on the role of drama and theatre in HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and rehabilitation. Reflections are offered on present praxis and the media, as well as on innovative research approaches in an interdisciplinary paradigm, along with HIV/AIDS education via performance poetry and other experimental methods such as participant-led workshops. Topics include: the call for a move away from the binaries of much critical pedagogy; a project, undertaken in Ghana and Malawi with people living with AIDS, to create and present theatre; the contradictions between global and local expectations of applied drama and theatre methodology, in relation to folk media, participation, and syncretism. Three case studies report on mapping as a creative device for playmaking; the methodology of Themba Interactive Theatre; and applying drama with women living with HIV in the Zandspruit Informal Settlement. The essays validate the importance of play in both energizing those in positions of hopelessness and enabling the distancing essential to observe one’s situation and enable change. The book stimulates the ongoing investigation of current practice and extends an invitation to further develop innovative approaches. Hazel Barnes is a retired Head of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of KwaZulu–Natal, where she is a Senior Research Associate. Her research interests lie in the field of applied drama, including the contexts of interculturalism and post-traumatic stress.

This book, based on components of Drama for Life, addresses the subject of “innovative methods for applied drama and theatre practice in African contexts”. It does so by providing chapters that share the rich, multilayered, and reflexive work that has taken place at Drama for Life from 2008 to the present day. It invites the reader to learn from the experiences of Drama for Life as shared by the authors, understand the role it has played and continues to play in advocating for, and extending the work of, Applied Drama and Theatre practice, and engage in critical, dialogical spaces to examine and interrogate current debates and practices in the field of Applied Drama and Theatre. The volume is invaluable for anyone interested in the extensive body of work generated by Drama for Life and its innovative approaches to learning and teaching, as well as performing arts practitioners, artists, teachers, people in community development and service work, and anyone involved in researching Applied Drama and Theatre practice, particularly in an African context, but also globally.

A scholar's guide for to conducting ethical research with various communities Though the arena of scholarship grows and changes, collaboration and community remain vital aspects of research and public scholarship. Popularizing Scholarly Research: Working with Nonacademic Stakeholders, Teams, and Communities contextualizes research methods and practices for popularizing research involving teams, communities, and nonacademic stakeholders. Patricia Leavy introduces the move toward making scholarship more accessible outside of academic settings. Drawing from the authoritative Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship a diversified list of interdisciplinary contributors cover social movements, ethical issues working with vulnerable populations, outsider-insider issues, citizens' juries, community-based research, participatory action research, community art-making, theatre, cross-cultural research, decolonizing methods, team research and disaster research. Further supplemental materials included at the end of the book make this title an important addition to any modern researcher's bookshelf.

The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship presents the first comprehensive overview of research methods and practices for engaging in public scholarship. Public scholarship, which has been on the rise over the past 25 years, produces knowledge that is available outside of the academy, is useful to relevant stakeholders, and addresses publicly identified needs. By involving stakeholders in the entire process, and making the findings accessible, public scholars contribute to a crucial democratization of research. The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship features a wealth of highly respected interdisciplinary contributors, as well as emerging scholars, and chapters include robust examples from real world research in varied fields and cultures. The volume features ample discussion of working with non-academic stakeholders, coverage of traditional and emergent methods including those that draw from the arts, the internet, social media, and digital technologies, and coverage of key issues such as writing, publicity, and funding.

Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing is the first volume in the field to address the role that theatre, drama and performance have in relation to promoting, developing and sustaining health and wellbeing in diverse communities. Challenging concepts and understanding of health, wellbeing and illness, it offers insight into different approaches to major health issues through applied performance. With a strong emphasis on the artistry involved in performance-based health responses, situated within a history of the field of practice, the volume is divided into two sections: Part One examines some of the key questions around research and practice in applied performance in health and wellbeing, specifically addressing the different regional challenges that dominate the provision of health care and influence wellbeing: how the ageing population of the global north creates pressure on lifetime healthcare provision, while the global south is dominated by a higher birth rate and a larger population under 15 years old. Part Two comprises case studies and interviews from international practitioners that reflect the diversity of practices across the world and in particular differences between work in the northern and southern hemispheres. These case studies include a sanitation project in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and the sanitation and rural development projects initiated by the travelling theatre troupes of a number of University theatre departments in Africa – Makerere in Kampala, Uganda; Botswana; Lesotho and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – which began in the 1960s. It considers the emergence of Theatre for Development's use as a health approach, considering the work of Laedza Batanani and the influences of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.

This second volume of A History of East African Theatre focuses on central East Africa; on Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. The first chapter is concerned with francophone theatres, comparatively studying work coming out of Burundi and Rwanda alongside a focus on French language theatre in Djibouti. The chapter is particularly concerned to explore how French and Belgian cultural policies impacted theatre during the colonial period and how the French ideas of Francafrique and promotion of elite, French language art have continued to resonate in the post-colonial present. Chapters Two and Three look comparatively at the rich theatre histories of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and are divided between a study of British East African colonial impact and an analysis of the post-colonial period illustrating how divergent political thought and societal make-up led to exponential differentiation in national theatres. The final chapter, on Theatre for Development and related social action theatre, covers the whole East African region, offering the first ever historicised analysis of this mode of theatre making which, since the 1980s, has come to dominate funding and opportunity in performance arts.

This book analyses the partnership between applied theatre and sexual health communication in a theatre-making project in Nyanga, a township in South Africa. By examining the bridges and schisms between the two fields as they come together in the project, an alternative way of approaching sexual health communication is advocated. This alternative considers what it is that applied theatre does, and could become, in this context. Moments of value which lie around the margins of the practice emerge as opportunities that can be overlooked. These somewhat ephemeral, intangible moments, which appear on the edges, are described as ‘apertures of possibility’ and occur when one takes a step back and realises something unnoticed in the moment. This book offers an invitation to pause and notice the seemingly insignificant moments that often occurs tangentially to the practice. The book also calls for more outcry about sexual health and sexual violence, arguing for theatre-making as a route to multitudes of voices, nuanced understandings, and diverse spaces in which discussions of sexuality and sexual health are shared, felt, and experienced.

This book analyses the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective. It marks a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia, discrimination and stigmatisation. It sets out a number of challenges and contexts for HIV and AIDS performance in the twenty-first century, including: the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry; the unequal access to treatment and prevention technologies in the Global North and Global South; the problematic division between dominant (white, gay, urban, cis-male) and marginalised narratives of HIV; the tension between a damaging cultural amnesia and a potentially equally damaging partner ‘AIDS nostalgia’; the criminalisation of HIV non-disclosure; and, sustaining and sustained by all of these, the ongoing stigmatisation of people living with HIV. This collection presents work from a vast range of contexts, grouped around four main areas: women’s voices and experiences; generations, memories and temporalities; inter/national narratives; and artistic and personal reflections and interventions.