Applied Theatre Research: Socially Engaged Performance - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2016

The city of Rio de Janeiro, stage for the 2014 World Football Cup Final and the 2016 Olympic Games, is a city that, like many others in the world’s urban centres, lays bare the deformities and contradictions of the globalized capitalist world. This article considers the situation of Rio de Janeiro as both the host to mega-sports events and a territory of struggle for equality of rights in the city. In recent years, theatrical productions by groups from popular communities, or from the periphery, have been gaining space in the cultural programming of the cultural centres. This reveals aspects of new social networks now forming in the city. Taking as its main source experiences from the extension programme Teatro em Comunidades, the article deals with the potential of art to remake the city, opening up paths of circulation for artistic productions and citizens throughout all of its environments.

Theatre is one of the artistic tools most often employed in Sweden to promote social integration. The aim of this article is to illustrate recurrent paradoxes concerning representation in multicultural theatre projects in the Swedish context. The productions discussed were studied ethnographically over an extended period of time, 2002 to 2007, with additional interviews undertaken in 2008–10 and 2016. The first production is a community theatre production. It was performed in a suburb of the university town of Uppsala with the explicit purpose of preventing teenage boys from falling into a criminal lifestyle. The second is a multiculturally inspired version of Hamlet (Mohamlet), produced by the Malmö city theatre, the major theatre ensemble in southern Sweden. Both productions are characterized by unresolved tensions. In particular, dialogue and representation express an intrinsic valuation of them as artistic acts while decisions about funding and production are based on notions of instrumental usefulness. Thus, even if theatre productions manifest expressive power, these manifestations are assessed in terms of their potential value relative

Theatre for peace as a practice has been used in post-war and other situations of violence in East Africa. However, it has not received as much scholarly attention as other applied theatre forms that target health issues such as HIV and AIDS, malaria, civic education and human rights and ‘development’. An international theatre for peace workshop that took place in Kisumu in 2011, organized by Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Entwicklungshilfe (AGEH) from Germany, spurred me to begin thinking seriously about the manifestation(s) of theatre for peace in East Africa. This article is part of that thinking, and sets out to map out some activities in the region.

This article addresses the issues involved in the practice of applied puppetry in relation to immigration detention. Its reflections and assertions are situated within recent debates about the practice of the puppeteer with groups in workshops. This scholarly praxis has evolved from ideas drawn from the practice of a research project conducted in an immigration removal centre in the United Kingdom. The article explores making puppets and performing puppet shows in this traumatic detention environment, and reflects on the knowledge gained through subsequent lecture performances. The author has used puppetry previously in a number of unusual settings to engage groups, and these inform the discussion here. The article explores personal accounts of practice, experiences of workshops and questions about power and ethics.

The global organization supporting puppetry, Union Internationale de la Marionette (UNIMA), has been reflecting on the use of puppetry in education and continues to be a vital source in the development of these debates. For example, the publication The Power of the Puppet is a good introduction to the issues around using puppets with groups.

Despite educational research ‘steerage’ that directs funding and energy towards positivist approaches to research, the influences of twenty-first-century research and philosophy have supported the germination of narrative and arts-informed processes in educational research, both of which have increased exponentially over the last twenty years. Against this landscape, I discuss an academic audience’s evaluation of the use of non-traditional forms of communication to present academic research. In particular, I explore the audience’s preference for non-traditional discursive forms, their engagement with verbatim theatre as a medium for academic scholarship and their identification that specific elements of a mise-en-scène supported their cognitive and emotional experience of dramatized data. The findings further suggest that the form of academic communication – including theatre – should align with the focus and methodological approach adopted, and that an academic audience can be theatrically literate and sensitive to the impact of aesthetic communication. Therefore, an audience of scholars can be highly receptive to non-traditional forms of academic communication, including theatre, as long as they align with the focus and methodology of the research re-presented, and are presented with aesthetic dexterity.

Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement and A Pedagogy of The Real by Kathleen Gallagher (2014) University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ISBN 9 7814 4262 6942, US$29.95.