Applied Theatre

International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice

Connolly Maeve, Monica Prendergast

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781841503530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

Theatre practice and applied theatre are areas of growing international interest. Applied Theatre is the first study to assist practitioners and students to develop critical frameworks for planning and implementing their own theatrical projects. This reader-friendly text considers an international range of case studies in applied theatre through discussion questions, practical activities and detailed analysis of specific theatre projects globally. In addition, the collection gathers together essential readings from many different sources to provide a comprehensive international survey of the field. Saxton and Prendergast infuse the text with a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre and conclude each case study with useful suggestions for hands-on activities and additional readings. Compiled across five continents, the case studies cover a wide range of disciplines from theatre studies to education, medicine and law. Key issues explored are the balance of artistry and aesthetics, participation, ethics, as well as safety and assessment in theatre. With their background in drama education and pedagogy, the authors offer clear developmental approaches that transfer directly into practice and a critical model of audience education, applicable to both mainstream and applied theatre contexts. The book encourages students and practitioners to acquire a deeper, more concrete understanding of applied theatre.

PART ONE

Theories, History and Practices of Applied Theatre

CHAPTER ONE
THEORIES AND HISTORY OF APPLIED THEATRE

1.1 Where do we find applied theatre?

Theatre in Education (TIE): Britain’s Cardboard Citizens theatre company presents a theatre in education production in schools called Home and Away that addresses “an issue that has been thrust to the top of the political agenda in Britain in recent years, that of refugees and asylum seekers” (Jackson, 2005, p. 114). The play weaves together a traditional Ethiopian folk tale with the story of a young Ethiopian refugee living in England. The narrator, Teri, moves from ignorance to understanding as she encounters this young man and his culture; however, her empathy comes too late and he commits suicide. Following the performance, the audience is split into four groups, each actor working with a group to seek more positive endings. The company then moves into a forum theatre session where the actors and volunteer students test these “endings” out as the scenes are re-interpreted.

Popular Theatre: A popular theatre production, facilitated by Julie Salverson and commissioned by the Canadian Red Cross, tackles the topic of land mines. The script is written as a clown show and focuses on “what it is for Canadian youth to encounter land mines” (Salverson, 2000, p. 27). “For many in the cast, tackling the problem of performing the clowns engaged the students in the conscious work of sorting out and recognizing their many and sometimes contradictory responses to the story they were telling” (pp. 70–71). The resulting play, BOOM, is rehearsed and performed by a group of thirteen high school students in consultation with a Toronto-based director originally from Sarajevo. At the heart of the play lies the question, “What does it mean to be a witness?” The production plays to multiple community and school audiences and is published in the Canadian Theatre Review.

Teacher:“What would you do if I told you something you don’t want to hear?”

Clown 1:“Is this about what happened in the news yesterday?”

Clown 2: “Which things? The horrible made up ones, or the ones that are true?”

Julie Salverson, 1999, p. 64

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO): Vancouver’s Headlines Theatre production of Corporation in our Heads is performed in 2000. Using Augusto Boal’s (1995) Cops in the Head—a Theatre of the Oppressed strategy that dramatizes the internal voices that oppress—the audience selects a personal story told by a woman activist who was tempted to buy her jeans at The Gap. The facilitator freezes the scene at the moment of temptation and the audience takes on the corporate voices playing in the protagonist’s head. In this strategy, volunteer audience members are invited onto the stage by “The Joker” (Boal’s term for facilitator) and enter into the action. After many interventions by audience members, new understandings were expressed about how corporations use various tactics to engage consumers and how gaining that knowledge disarms the power of these corporate voices to oppress (see www.headlinestheatre.com/pastwork/corpreport1.html).

Theatre for Health Education (THE): Nobody Wants My Old Organs is a play designed by Target Theatre to encourage organ donation. The “playwright” is the company and its director. The process first involves interviews with organ donors, transplant hopefuls, families and medical personnel. These interviews are transcribed, checked for accuracy and then shaped through improvisation into a series of scenes that address the major concerns of the topic. The company’s work received major funding from the Canadian Kidney Foundation, which had asked them to take on the issue. The purpose, although expressly didactic, is mediated with a great deal of humor as the audience identifies with the variety of characters. The post performance talkback is facilitated by an organ transplant recipient who uses his own experience as an element in the discussion while the actors offer their experiences in building the play (Saxton & Miller, 2006, pp. 132–133).

Theatre for Development (TfD): A play entitled Dukhini (Suffering Woman) by Pakistan’s Ajoka Theatre group exposes and explores:

…the trafficking of women who are smuggled from poverty-stricken Bangladesh across India and into Pakistan under the false promise of a “better life,” only to find themselves sold into prostitution to the highest bidder. Under such an ideology, it is never the rapist/buyer of sex who is blamed but the woman who is raped or forced into prostitution—she has to bear the burden of having “dishonoured” her family, who will never accept her back because of the “shame” she has brought them (AfzalKhan, 2001, p. 67).

There are no happy endings for the women characters portrayed; they dream of returning home to their families but are trapped into forced slavery and prostitution by pimps who keep the women powerless and without hope. In 2000, the production was performed in Pakistan, India and Nepal to some 10, 000 people.

Prison Theatre: Journey Woman is a week-long program of theatre and drama-based work facilitated by England’s Geese Theatre Company for female offenders and their caretakers. The week begins with a performance that follows the story of Ellie, a woman who has broken out of the cycle of hardship, offending and prison. Looking back on her life, Ellie revisits key episodes and moments of change: leaving home for the first time, her first involvement with offending, becoming a mother and her first prison sentence. Throughout the piece, the audience is invited to consider the different masks she has worn throughout her life, the different roles she has played and her different life stories. The audience members are enrolled as experts in Ellie’s life, analyzing the crucial moments, exploring her inner feelings and emotions and contemplating how moments from her past have impacted on her present and future. This performance acts as the catalyst for the following four-and-a-half day residency: www.geese.co.uk/HTML/projects/journey-woman.html.

Community-based Theatre: The community play, Loricum, was written by nine teenagers in collaboration with MED Theatre’s playwright/artistic director. It involves nineteen young actors working alongside adults in a cast of thirty-two, with professional input from a composer, choreographer, costume designer and visual artists. In the program, a student participant describes how the play was built:

As a starting point…we were given the phrase: “While there is still dance and time,” and were introduced to the characters of Tom and Amy…. We devised, improvised, scripted and discussed until we knew these characters as if they were old friends.

Loricum is a play that contrasts the experiences of two generations growing up on Dartmoor. The building of a reservoir divides the community and covers up a secret. Using the convention of creating a documentary film about the reservoir, the “director” begins to uncover the history that lies beneath its dark surface. This celebration of local history is performed in Dartmoor village halls throughout the month of March 2006 (see www.medtheatre.co.uk/Loricum.htm).

Museum Theatre: At Washington’s Smithsonian Institute in the summer of 2006, as part of an exhibit on transportation, a pretty young blonde girl dressed in 1950s fashion is found among the cars, buses and trucks of the period. She notices an audience gathering and tells them how excited she is because her boyfriend is coming and she hopes he is going to purchase a car. The boyfriend arrives and we discover that it is his parents who are buying the car and that they are already in the manager’s office signing the papers. While the two young people are waiting, their conversation gives us a picture of how transportation played a major part of life in small-town America in the 1950s. Following this historical interpretation performance, the actors come out of role and engage the audience, many of whom are anxious to share their own experiences from that period, in a talkback discussion (Saxton, 2006).

Reminiscence Theatre: A collaboration between five New York University undergraduate acting students and eight members of the JASA (Jewish Association for Services for the Aged) theatre ensemble resulted in a reminiscence piece called I Am Acting My Age. The project explores the relationship between two generations: “old-young, grandparent-grandchild, sage-student . . . Winter-Spring” (Pflanzer, 1992, p. 122). Some of the scenes created by this intergenerational ensemble involve rites of passage (leaving home, choosing to die), including “an elderly couple discovering their grandson has AIDS . . . [and] an elderly mother fight[ing] her two middle-aged children for the right to lead her own life” (p. 122). The learning that occurs in this playbuilding process is the realization that young and old alike share a need and “a hunger to be connected to each other” (p. 122).

1.2 What is applied theatre?

In our view, this “very capacious portmanteau term” (Giesekam, 2006, p. 91) is inclusive and does not carry any limiting fixed agendas. Instead, “the applied theatre label [is] a useful umbrella term . . . for finding links and connections for all of us committed to the power of theatre in making a difference in the human life span” (Taylor, 2006, p. 93). All of the above thumbnail narratives offer examples of a web of performance practices (Schechner, 1988/2003, pp. xvi–xix) that fall outside mainstream theatre performance and take place “in non-traditional settings and/or with marginalized communities” (Thompson & Jackson, 2006, p. 92). That is to say, they most often are played in spaces that are not usually defined as theatre buildings, with participants who may or may not be skilled in theatre arts and to audiences who have a vested interest in the issue taken up by the performance or are members of the community addressed by the performance. Alternative theatre practices, including those described above, have historically been labeled with a number of diverse terms, such as grassroots theatre, social theatre, political theatre, radical theatre and many other variations, but over the course of the last decade, “applied theatre” is the term that has emerged as the umbrella under which all of these prior terms and practices are embraced.

I have come to distrust the definitions of disciplines that we invent as our knowledge grows. These definitions are useful for the experts but can be confusing to others. And they may imply divisions and differences that don’t really exist.

James Zull, 2002, pp. xiv, xv

One example of how applied theatre can be different lies in the area of scripting. Whereas traditional mainstream theatre is most often centered in the interpretation of a pre-written script, applied theatre, in contrast, involves both the generation and the interpretation of a theatre piece that in performance may or may not be scripted in the traditional manner. In those cases where an applied theatre performance takes the form of a polished improvisation, a formally written script may never be recorded. There are very few complete examples of scripts although the case studies that follow will often quote excerpts. As you read through these case studies, you will note the many ways in which applied theatre differs from “theatre” as most people would think of it.

1.3 Why applied theatre? How did it emerge?

Theatre has had an historic role in society as providing a relatively safe way of talking back to power. Across many cultures and traditions over time we can trace patterns and instances of groups of people using the stage as a space and place to tell their stories and their lives. This aesthetic and emotional outlet allows for potential catharsis, a safe way for citizens to express their concerns, criticisms and frustration to each other and to society at large. And often that opportunity has been enough. Some examples of this kind of theatrical expression are to be found around the world in the social dramas of rituals such as carnivals, Feast of Fools, initiation rites, and through trickster figures in myths and legends—the servant figure in drama traditionally has had more power in the world of a play than his or her masters. The roots of Greek chorus, commedia del arte, Moliere, Shakespeare and, closer to our own time, the comedies of Shaw and Coward, for example, have always been fed by this power reversal that is sanctioned and accepted within the protected space of the fictional world of the stage.

In modern Western theatre history, playwrights like Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht offer a theatre of social criticism, debate and, in Brecht’s case, potential revolutionary action. More contemporary playwrights, such as Caryl Churchill, Dario Fo, Wole Soyinka, Ariel Dorfman, and many others, have focused much of their theatre on exposing and exploring social and political issues in their plays. Applied theatre is informed by these plays and playwrights to the extent that they offer clear models of how effective theatre can tackle a range of topical provocations and provide an aesthetic site for their considered examination.

Catharsis (katharsis: purgation) is a Greek medical term that Aristotle uses to argue that tragedy does not encourage the passions but in fact rids (or purges) the spectator of them. Catharsis is a “beneficial, uplifting experience whether psychological, moral, intellectual or some combination of these.”

Marvin Carlson, 1993, pp. 18–19

Applied theatre works overtly either to reassert or to undermine socio-political norms, as its intent is to reveal more clearly the way the world is working. For example, reminiscence theatre, community-based theatre and museum theatre are most often reassertions and celebrations of memory and history. On the other hand, theatre of the oppressed, popular theatre, theatre in education, theatre for health education and theatre for development are most often focused on undermining the status quo in order to promote positive social change. Prison theatre may fall within either depending upon intention and context. Reassertions or undermining intentions are both ways by which we can re-examine the world to discover how it works and our place in it; they hold within them the potential to be educational, reflective and/or rehabilitative.

All drama is…a political event: it either reasserts or undermines the code of conduct of a given society.

Martin Esslin, 1976, p. 29

Marvin Carlson pointed out in 1993 that “[t]he continuing point of debate in modern theatre theory has been over whether the theatre should be viewed primarily as an engaged social phenomenon or as a politically indifferent aesthetic artefact” (p. 454). That debate continues. Herbert Blau criticizes theatre as aesthetic artefact (isolated and elitist), “a stronghold of non-ideas” (1965, p. 7). Theatre for Blau is a public art and one that should function at the “dead center of community” (p. 309). Like Brecht before him, Blau sees that the function of theatre lies with waking up the audience to ...