Applied Theatre Research - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016

This article interrogates the contributions made to cross-cultural verbatim theatre play by performers, as the text progressed towards publication. The play’s content concerns an Aboriginal massacre and the building of a memorial to commemorate that atrocity. The article begins with a discussion on the evolution of the play, Today We’re Alive, from a focal point in a doctoral thesis to its second-draft development as a touring show for schools located in the region from which the play’s content emerged. The success of this version suggested that the inclusion of more divisive material might not compromise the play’s reconciliatory intent. Particular choices made by the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal actors during the different performances demonstrate the potential for verbatim theatre in the decolonizing space to illuminate emotional and relational undertones that may be too inchoate or too suppressed to articulate.

Playback Theatre is the spontaneous, instantaneous and unscripted presentation of vignettes, performed in conventional and unconventional venues. It functions under the premise that the telling of oral stories, when presented with specifically delineated elements and performed in interactive ways, is, in fact, an art form. Studies of Playback Theatre have focused on its use and effects in different scenarios: education, social intervention, health, psychotherapy and other similar organizations. However, there has been little concentration on the emotional and intellectual processes of audience members. The aim of this study is to use quantitative methodology to establish the level of satisfaction of an audience after a session of Playback Theatre, the benefits perceived, reflections on the methods used, feelings provoked by the narration of the stories, and the substantiate quality of the participation and experiences during the performances.

El teatro playback es una forma original de teatro sin texto previo, improvisado, en la que algunos espectadores voluntariamente relatan sus historias personales, que filtradas a través del ritual y la estética del teatro, son inmediatamente dramatizados por los actores y los músicos. Ya desde sus inicios, la intención de los fundadores de esta modalidad teatral fue la de generar comunidad. Los estudios sobre el teatro playback se han centrado en su uso y efectos en diferentes escenarios (educación, ciencias de la salud, intervención social, psicoterapia y organizaciones). Pero no se ha puesto el énfasis en conocer el pensamiento de los asistentes a este teatro tan peculiar. Por ello la finalidad de la presente investigación ha sido: conocer el nivel de satisfacción e interés de los espectadores tras las sesiones de teatro playback, qué piensan sobre los usos que puede tener, identificar los sentimientos provocados por las historias relatadas y conocer la calidad de la participación y la experiencia vivida durante las representaciones. Para ello se ha utilizado una metodología de corte cuantitativo a través de un cuestionario que se ha pasado a una muestra ocasional formada por 279 personas.

With the rise of mainland China in the twenty-first century, Hong Kong and Taiwan have endeavoured to sustain and reassert their own cultural identities to resist Chinese hegemony, and political and economic dominance. The community theatre praxes devised and performed by community members and applied theatre practitioners in Hong Kong and Taiwan in recent years have created an alternative public sphere, and negotiated identities and differences in various communities. They have presented the shifting and dynamic relationship of settlement and mobility in our glocalized cities. This article aims to employ two case studies to investigate how these community theatre praxes present diverse local people’s histories, concerns and issues, and thus negotiate the constantly changing identities of Hong Kong and Taiwan through re-presenting different local voices. This research will employ theories of public sphere, cultural geography, and participatory and engaging community art to explore the social and cultural implications as well as the various aesthetic strategies adopted.

This article is about facilitating university undergraduate groups to create and present Theatre of the Oppressed as a component of a compulsory drama course. Each small group created a dramatic piece about an issue of oppression, to be shared in a presentation session using techniques that included enhanced forum theatre. Themes of love, sex and gender (the gay teacher, the lesbian couple, the transsexual man, the transvestite man) emerged. Students’ reflections on prejudice and the cop in the head that led to this oppression are analyzed and states of metaxis are examined as part of my reflection on teaching. The concepts of image of reality and reality of image are explored and used to argue for appropriate theatrical treatments in Forum Theatre. The article concludes that students’ reflections were encouraged when realistic images were created appropriately, but were diminished when these images were wrongly focused or unable to convince theatrically.

The teacher-in-role (TIR) strategy is used in process drama to strengthen the dramatic experience and promote learning among the participants. In this study, one TIR construct is examined through the lens of Erving Goffman’s concept of facework in order to deepen the understanding of the subtle and vulnerable processes of interaction in process drama. TIR is considered to be an interactive construct in which both artistry and pedagogy are embodied. Face-work is applied in the fictive context of process drama to uncover the interactional potential for learning and creating drama. In addition, the teacher’s reflections on his or her actions as they relate to face-work in process drama are explored. The data of this case study are analysed using applied conversation analysis (CA) and thematic narrative analysis. According to the findings, face-work seems to provide an explicit frame for understanding the interactional procedures and moves in the artistic-pedagogic construct of TIR.

Applied Theatre Research: Radical Departures by Peter O’Connor and Michael Anderson (2015) Bloomsbury, London ISBN 9 7814 7251 3854 (ebook), US$24.99.

Critical Plays: Embodied Research for Social Change, by Anne Harris and Christine Sinclair (2014) Sense, Rotterdam ISBN 9 7894 6209 7537 (pb), 9789462097544 (hb), 9789462097551 (ebook), $36.00 (pb).