Geese Theatre Handbook

Explains the thinking behind the Geese Theatre Company's approach to applied drama with offenders and people at risk of offending, including young people. It also contains over 100 exercises with explanations, instructions, and suggestions to help practitioners develop their own style and approach. The materials can be readily adapted to other settings including conflict resolution, restorative justice and interpersonal skills training.

Explains the thinking behind the company's approach to applied drama with offenders and people at risk of offending, including young people. Contains 100+ exercises with explanations, instructions and suggestions.

Geese Theatre 1st was formed in 1987 and is renowned across the criminal justice field. This book explains the thinking behind the company's approach to applied drama with offenders and people at risk of offending, including young people. It also contains over 100 exercises with explanations, instructions and suggestions to help practitioners.

This book examines the history, ethics, and intentions of staging personal stories and offers theatre makers detailed guidance and a practical model to support safe, ethical practice. Contemporary theatre has crossed boldly into therapeutic terrain and is now the site of radical self-exposure. Performances that would once have seemed shockingly personal and exposing have become commonplace, as people reveal their personal stories to audiences with ever-increasing candor. This has prompted the need for a robust and pragmatic framework for safe, ethical practice in mainstream and applied theatre. In order to promote a wider range of ethical risk-taking where practitioners negotiate blurred boundaries in safe and artistically creative ways, this book draws on relevant theory and practice from theatre and performance studies, psychodrama and attachment narrative therapy and provides detailed guidance supporting best practice in the theatre of personal stories. The guidance is structured within a four-part framework focused on history, ethics, praxis, and intentions. This includes a newly developed model for safe practice, called the Drama Spiral. The book is for theatre makers in mainstream and applied theatre, educators, students, researchers, drama therapists, psychodramatists, autobiographical performers, and the people who support them.

The Applied Theatre Reader is the first book to bring together new case studies of practice by leading practitioners and academics in the field and beyond, with classic source texts from writers such as Noam Chomsky, bell hooks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Augusto Boal, and Chantal Mouffe. This book divides the field into key themes, inviting critical interrogation of issues in applied theatre whilst also acknowledging the multi-disciplinary nature of its subject. It crosses fields such as: theatre in educational settings prison theatre community performance theatre in conflict resolution and reconciliation interventionist theatre theatre for development. This collection of critical thought and practice is essential to those studying or participating in the performing arts as a means for positive change.

Providing a distillation of knowledge in the various disciplines of arts education (dance, drama, music, literature and poetry and visual arts), this essential handbook synthesizes existing research literature, reflects on the past, and contributes to shaping the future of the respective and integrated disciplines of arts education. While research can at times seem distant from practice, the Handbook aims to maintain connection with the live practice of art and of education, capturing the vibrancy and best thinking in the field of theory and practice. The Handbook is organized into 13 sections, each focusing on a major area or issue in arts education research.

A play in two Acts with an Introduction by the author. The story of John 'Babbacombe' Lee is one of the most bizarre in English criminal history. Lee is the only person to have been reprieved by a Home Secretary after standing on a gallows trap which failed to open. This happened at Exeter Prison in 1885 when the notoriously inept public hangman James Berry gave up after three abortive attempts. Lee spent 22 years in prison before being released. On retirement, Berry from Heckmondwike, Yorkshire, who carried out 134 executions, was the first executioner to write about his experiences in My Experiences As An Executioner. His resulting celebrity led to him taking to the boards, spinning gruesome tales of his former trade and showing audiences his dark souvenirs. Michael Crowley's imaginative play is set in a down-at-heel northern music hall where the proprietor is bent on reviving the venue's glory days by persuading the now released Lee to team up with Berry in a double act. Did John Lee commit the murder for which he was due to hang? Did poetic justice intervene on that fateful day in Exeter to prevent a miscarriage of justice? Will Lee stand on the scaffold once again with the noose around his neck, on stage and for the paying public? And will the truth come out or not as Lee begins to confide in the woman designated as leading lady during rehearsals? 'The Man They Couldn't Hang' by prison writer in residence Michael Crowley is an ideal vehicle for raising issues of crime and punishment. It will be particularly useful for drama groups in and out of prison, and tutors or group leaders seeking innovative ways of involving those they work with in issues of criminal justice and crime and punishment. The play is also suitable for full-scale drama productions.

Though development researchers have proven that the participation of women is necessary for effective sustainable development, development practitioners still largely lack culturally appropriate, gender-sensitive tools for including women, especially women living in poverty. Current tools used in the development approach often favour the skill set of the development practitioner and are a mismatch with the traditional, gendered knowledge and skills many women who are living in poverty do have. This study explores three case studies from India, Ethiopia, and the Guatemala that have successfully used applied theatre for women’s participation in sustainable development. This interdisciplinary book has the opportunity to be the first to bring together the theory, scholarship and practice of theatre for women’s participation in sustainable development in an international context. This work will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners in a wide variety of fields who are looking for creative solutions for utilizing the contributions of women for solving our global goals to live in a sustainable way on this one planet in a just and equitable manner.