Applied Theatre Research: Socially Engaged Performance - Current Issue

This editorial marks the first co-edited issue of Applied Theatre Research (ATR): Socially Engaged Performance. In retitling the journal and reframing its editorial vision, we foreground socially engaged performance as an inclusive term that invites radical and interdisciplinary praxes from new ecologies and centres. Guided by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to ‘move the centre’, we point to the continued dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies and highlight the need for multiple, interconnected centres for cultures, knowledges and practices. Our reflections introduce inequities in academic publishing and access and new possibilities for mentorship and support for practitioners. By recommitting to mentorship and sponsorship as integral modes of moving the centre, this editorial situates ATR: Socially Engaged Performance as a platform for global dialogue and generosity, while sustaining applied theatre and socially engaged performance as critical, creative and politically urgent fields.

Drama education in Hong Kong has predominantly adopted western pedagogies, emphasizing improvisation and emotional authenticity. However, these approaches often lack a systematic framework for teaching non-verbal expressivity, leaving novice students struggling to develop these essential skills. This study addresses this gap by introducing the Non-Verbal Expressivity (NVE) Unit, a structured pedagogy inspired by the codified movements of traditional Chinese opera. Codified gestures, spatial awareness and repetitive practice from Chinese opera were adapted into four progressive lessons designed to improve students’ non-verbal expressivity. The effectiveness of the NVE Unit was evaluated through a pre-experimental study involving 33 Secondary One students in Hong Kong. Using the NVE Rubric, alongside lesson observations, teacher interviews and student feedback, the study revealed significant improvements in students’ non-verbal expressivity. Quantitative results demonstrated medium to large effect sizes across all thirteen evaluation items, with students progressing from basic gestures to creating dynamic stage pictures. Teachers observed increased confidence and motivation among weaker students, while stronger students refined their performances and explored advanced techniques. This study highlights the potential of bridging eastern and western pedagogies to enrich drama education. By integrating the structured and disciplined training methods of Chinese opera with the improvisational creativity of western approaches, the NVE Unit provides a culturally meaningful and practical method for teaching non-verbal expressivity. While the findings are promising, further research is needed to validate the unit’s effectiveness in diverse cultural contexts and refine its application in varying educational settings.

Voluntary-assisted dying (VAD) promises what many of us quietly long for: control over the end of life. It offers a way to make death neat, even bearable. However, in our applied theatre workshops with VAD staff and families, we discovered something else entirely: not control but messiness. This messiness held space for the unspoken, unruly truths of love, surrender and the cathartic grief that exceeds what scripted procedures can contain. Applied theatre became both our methodology and our mode of analysis: a practice that foregrounds embodied knowledge, aesthetic distance and collective meaning-making. It enabled space for contradiction without resolution, inviting forms of knowledge that emerge not through rational explanation but through encounter, improvisation and affective resonance. Central to this was deferring judgement: a deliberate methodological stance that resists premature closure and allows complexity to remain present, holding space for meaning to arise through the process of making, witnessing and reflecting. What surfaced were lessons in a different kind of control, one grounded in surrender, care and the fragile beauty of letting go.

Review of: Assessment in the Drama Classroom: A Culturally Responsive and Student-Centered Approach, Jonathan P. Jones (2023)

Abingdon: Routledge, 146 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03254-968-2, h/bk, GBP 145

ISBN 978-1-03254-969-9, p/bk, GBP 51.99

ISBN 978-1-00342-833-6, e-book, GBP 51.99