Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013

This article examines Playback Theatre (PBT) as a contemporary form of performance where theatre and learning combine. In PBT actors and a musician animate or playback stories from the audience in generative ways – this form being rich with potential for learning, healing and community building. Conducted over a twelve-month period with Sydney PBT 47 participants who were audience members shared their experiences of the form and revealed three essential practices of PBT, the enablers of modelling, witnessing and telling, and five dimensions of learning that flow from them. An emergent model of PBT is described as a tool for understanding this cultural ecology, and the form is foregrounded as a site for arts-based enquiry and relational forms of knowing with the benefits that flow from these productive practices.

This article outlines the health and well-being impacts of a specific community reading programme, ‘Get into Reading’, pioneered by The Reader Organisation, as demonstrated in a specific health context, Mersey Care NHS Mental Health Trust. The discussion broadly considers the historical positioning of this reading and health experiment, in terms of both mental health and arts-in-health developments and trends. The article also highlights some of the challenges and excitements of seeking to capture the health benefits of reading currently experienced by the Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems (CRILS) at University of Liverpool.

In the context of a university community, this article presents a visual and textual first-hand reflection by the co-authors (participating faculty and student) on public performance as an art intervention challenging alienation. Making Eye Contact, led by internationally known feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, offered students and community members a way to connect with unknown ‘others’, and cross barriers of race, gender, class and the busyness of life in a digital age. The authors will situate the performance art of Making Eye Contact as a significant art event that became a form of public pedagogy. This article offers a generic template for others to create a Making Eye Contact performance. It also attempts to articulate the learning rendered possible through public performances, offering a case for introducing arts-based interventions into classroom and campus environments as learning opportunities.

This study is about developing novel ideas for packaging and branding of locally bottled tomatoes, which is a traditional food preparation craft of women in western Turkey. In this region preparing fresh tomato preserve for private consumption is an annual and seasonal practice made in summer as a preparation for winter. One of the towns famous for this craft is Salihli where approximately 155,000 people live. Located in the western Aegean region of Turkey, Mediterranean climate prevails in Salihli making it an agriculture town. A group of women in Salihli requested our assistance as product designers to prepare their products for selling in contemporary markets. The participants of our research had entrepreneurial motivation. Adopting a bottom-up approach, we explored how new design ideas emerged in a group when working with professional designers in two workshops. The research emphasizes co-creation and learning self-innovation as a sociocultural practice defined as situated learning.

The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music, Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.) (2013) New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 414 pp., ISBN: 9780415509527, h/bk, £140.00