Applied Theatre Second Edition

International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice

Monica Prendergast, Juliana Saxton, Monica Prendergast

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783206278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Six years after its initial publication, Applied Theatre returns with a second edition. As the first book to assist practitioners and students to develop critical frameworks for implementing their own theatrical projects, it served as a vital addition to this area of growing interest, winning the Distinguished Book of the Year award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. Editors Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton have updated the book to reflect shifts in practice over the last few years in the world of applied theatre. Drawing on their backgrounds in drama education and pedagogy, the co-editors offer introductory chapters and dozens of case studies on applied theatre projects around the globe. This new edition of Applied Theatre will encourage students and practitioners to acquire a deeper understanding of the field and its best practices.

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?

Popular Theatre: Fashionable Immigration is a University of Exeter popular theatre project that “attempt[s] to address the many misperceptions about immigration” (Price, 2011, p. 85). The play deals with a Polish girl named Anya who moves to Britain in search of work. She is exploited by an employer who confiscates her passport and forces her to work long hours under threat of being deported. Two laid-off local workers come to Anya’s aid and help to rescue her from this situation. This show is performed in three different ways: as seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte, as a puppet show with giant 12-foot-high puppets and as a musical. Each of these popular theatre versions is assessed for its impact on audiences (Price, 2011).

Documentary Theatre: A South African community-based documentary theatre project, Soil & Ash, gathers stories from those affected by a proposed coal mine being built in their community (Dennill, 2014). The mine owners are allegedly conducting bribes and other tactics that are fracturing the community’s sense of solidarity. The theatre project retells actual lived experiences and verbatim accounts of how the mine is affecting people, and how they feel it may effect them in the future. To do this, we cannot rely on the traditional theatre process in which stories are imagined or interpreted by a few separate people outside of the situation, and then merely dramatised on stage (Dennill, 2014, n.p.).

After each performance – held in community centres, local schools, churches and also at sports events – audiences engage with performers in a facilitated dialogue in which the actors may stay in character or speak as themselves.

Theatre in Education (TIE): Cardboard Citizen theatre company presents a TIE 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.

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO): Vancouver’s Theatre for Living (formerly Headlines Theatre) creates a play in 2013 about mental health with six actors, one of whom is a former psychiatrist, and based on stories gathered widely from the community. The play, Maladjusted: The Mental Health System. The People. The Play., presents the stories of a young girl struggling with depression and self-harm and a young man who is homeless and dealing with mental illness and addiction. The play examines the Canadian health system, which is viewed as mechanized in favour of the system over its clients. Audiences are challenged to change the play’s outcomes to offer a more humanized health care system that places patients at the centre of care. Following the 30-minute play, scenes are re-played and stopped by audience members who replace actors and improvise in-role to try to alter the outcome (www.headlinestheatre.com).

Theatre for Health Education (THE): Health Action Theatre by Seniors, or HATS, is an applied theatre programme featuring senior volunteers who perform mimed scenarios on health topics for a diverse ethnic community. One production, “A Visit to the Doctor,” has three scenes in which senior patients check-in and wait at a doctor’s office, go through an appointment with the doctor and go for lunch at a cafeteria next door where one of them falls ill. Each scene involves frustrations, miscommunications and other challenges often experienced by senior immigrants trying to navigate the Canadian health care system. After the show, audience members are invited to stop the action as it is re-played to offer some solutions to the situations. HATS programs have successfully reached many senior immigrants in the lower income community of Parkdale, Toronto, in collaboration with St. Christopher House, a local community centre (www.hatstheatre.org).

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. (Afzal-Khan, 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 slavery and prostitution by pimps who keep the women powerless and without hope. Ajoka Theatre, a 30-year-old company based in Lahore, continues to create and perform plays about development and peace issues and tours extensively (www.ajoka.org.pk).

Prison Theatre: Journey Woman is a week-long programme 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, analysing the crucial moments, exploring her inner feelings and emotions and contemplating how moments from her past have impacted on her present and future. Geese Theatre, based in Birmingham, carries out its mask-based work in prisons, youth detention centres and with those on probation (www.geese.co.uk).

Community-based Theatre: Vancouver Moving Theatre (VMT) has carried out many community-based projects since 1983 in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, an area too well known for its high rates of drug addiction, crime, prostitution and poverty. Storyweaver is a project addressing Aboriginal community members’ histories, struggles and resiliencies:

A cast of aboriginal artists, elders, dancers and Downtown Eastside community members help an old man – The Old One – open up to his life’s journey, his regrets and hopes, through the teachings of the medicine wheel. His journey home gives voice to experiences of the urban aboriginal community, to voices not heard, to lives left behind.

VMT productions most often have dozens of cast members of many ages and cultural backgrounds (www.vancouvermovingtheatre.com).

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: Toronto’s Mixed Theatre Company performs Old Age Ain’t for Sissies in 2013. Based on consultations with over 150 seniors in the Toronto area, playwright Rex Deverell’s play takes place at a retirement party:

For some the party heralds a glorious new era of freedom and adventure. For others it sounds a peal of doom. The drama is punctuated with songs resonating with the determination of seniors who want neither to be dismissed nor forgotten. ... The production stars older actors with an array of backgrounds and experiences. ... This interactive play invites the audience to come on stage, take on the role of one of the characters and explore possible options to the issues presented.

Mixed Theatre has been operating in Toronto for over 30 years and is committed to theatre as a tool for positive social change (www.mixedcompanytheatre.com).

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, these approaches to theatre most often are played in indoor and outdoor spaces that are not usually defined as theatre venues, 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 labelled with a number of diverse terms, such as grass-roots theatre, social theatre, political theatre, radical theatre and many other variations. However, since 2000, “applied theatre” is the term that has emerged as the umbrella under which all of these prior terms and practices are embraced.

Applied theatre defies any one definition and includes a multitude of intentions, aesthetic processes and transactions with its participants.

Tim Prentki & Sheila Preston, 2009, p. 11

One example of how applied theatre can be different lies in the area of scripting. Whereas traditional mainstream theatre is most often centred 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 share 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 dell’arte, Molière, Shakespeare and, closer to our own time, the comedies of George Bernard Shaw and Noël 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.

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

In modern western theatre history, playwrights such as Shaw, Henrik Ibsen 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, Tony Kushner, Sarah Kane 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.

Applied theatre works overtly either to reassert or to undermine sociopolitical 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 and Documentary Theatre may fall within either depending on intention or 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 its obligations and responsibilities through its collective imagination.

Using Bertolt Brecht’s lehrstücke (short, severe and instructive works performed for audiences of students...