The Applied Theatre Artist

This book analyses the work of applied theatre practitioners using a new framework of ‘responsivity’ to make visible their unique expertise. In-depth investigation of practice combines with theorisation to provide a fresh view of the work of artists and facilitators. Case studies are drawn from community contexts: with women, mental health service users, refugees, adults with a learning disability, older people in care, and young people in school. Common skills and qualities are given a vocabulary to help define applied theatre work, such as awareness, anticipation, adaptation, attunement, and responsiveness. The Applied Theatre Artist is of scholarly, practical, and educational interest. The book offers detailed analysis of how skilled theatre artists make in-action decisions within socially engaged participatory projects. Rich description of in-session activity reveals what workshop facilitators actually do and how they think, offering a rare focus in applied theatre.

This accessible book outlines the key ideas that define the global phenomenon of applied theatre, examining not only its theoretical underpinning, its origins and practice, but also providing eight real-life examples drawn from a diversity of forms and settings. The clearly arranged topic sections entitled When, What, Who, Why and Where emphasise the responsive nature of applied theatre, its social context and the importance of a beneficial outcome for participants, which can connect fields as disparate as health, criminal justice, education and migration. Labels and terms are explained, along with applied theatre's core values, motivations and objectives, allowing the reader to build a coherent understanding of its distinguishing features. Applied Theatre: The Key Concepts is aimed at students, academics, artists and practitioners of applied theatre as well as those with an interest in this vital blend of social and creative practice.

Philip Taylor offers strategies for using theatre to raise awareness, propose alternatives, provide healing, and implement community change.

Digital Storytelling, Applied Theatre, & Youth argues that theatre artists must re-imagine how and why they facilitate performance practices with young people. Rapid globalization and advances in media and technology continue to change the ways that people engage with and understand the world around them. Drawing on pedagogical, aesthetic, and theoretical threads of applied theatre and media practices, this book presents practitioners, scholars, and educators with innovative approaches to devising and performing digital stories. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of digital storytelling as an applied theatre practice. Alrutz explores how participatory and mediated performance practices can engage the wisdom and experience of youth; build knowledge about self, others and society; and invite dialogue and deliberation with audiences. In doing so, she theorizes digital storytelling as a site of possibility for critical and relational practices, feminist performance pedagogies, and alliance building with young people.

This collection offers fresh perspectives on the aesthetics, politics and histories of applied theatre in a range of global contexts.

As early as Plato, theorists acknowledged the power of theatre as a way of teaching young minds. Similarly, starting with Plato, philosophers occasionally adopted an anti-theatrical stance, worried by the “dangers” theatre posed to society. The relationships between learning and theatre have never been seen as straightforward, obvious, or without contradictions. This volume investigates the complexity of the intersection of theatre and learning, addressing both the theoretical and practical aspects of it. In three sections—Reflecting, Risking, and Re-imagining—theatre researchers, education scholars, theatre practitioners consider the tensions, frictions and failures that make learning through theatre, in theatre and about theatre interesting, engaging, and challenging. Loosely based on the proceedings from the 20th Festival of Original Theatre (F.O.O.T.), which took place in February 2012 at the University of Toronto, this book contains academic articles and interviews, as well as position, reflection and provocation papers from both established researchers in the field of Applied Theatre, such as Professor Helen Nicholson and Professor Kathleen Gallagher, as well as experienced and emergent scholars in Education, Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. It also introduces the unorthodox work of the pre-eminent Swedish director and inventor of Babydrama, Suzanne Osten, to the academic audience. Theatre and Learning will be interesting to a wide range of audiences, such as theatre artists and students, theatre researchers and educators, and will be particularly useful for those teaching Theatre Theory and Practice, including Applied Theatre, in higher education.

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.

This book draws upon cognitive and affect theory to examine applications of contemporary performance practices in educational, social and community contexts. The writing is situated in the spaces between making and performance, exploring the processes of creating work defined variously as collaborative, participatory and socially engaged.