Staging Social Justice

Staging Social Justice

Author: Norma Bowles

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2013-06-03

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0809332396

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Fringe Benefits, an award-winning theatre company, collaborates with schools and communities to create plays that promote constructive dialogue about diversity and discrimination issues. Staging Social Justice is a groundbreaking collection of essays about Fringe Benefits’ script-devising methodology and their collaborations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The anthology also vividly describes the transformative impact of these creative initiatives on participants and audiences. By reflecting on their experiences working on these projects, the contributing writers—artists, activists and scholars—provide the readerwith tools and inspiration to create their own theatre for social change. “Contributors to this big-hearted collection share Fringe Benefits’ play devising process, and a compelling array of methods for measuring impact, approaches to aesthetics (with humor high on the list), coalition and community building, reflections on safe space, and acknowledgement of the diverse roles needed to apply theatre to social justice goals. The book beautifully bears witness to both how generative Fringe Benefits’ collaborations have been for participants and to the potential of engaged art in multidisciplinary ecosystems more broadly.”—Jan Cohen-Cruz, editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America


Personal Stories in Public Spaces

Personal Stories in Public Spaces

Author: Jonathan Fox

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03-26

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781734225006

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PERSONAL STORIES IN PUBLIC SPACES gathers together some of the essays, articles, talks, and contributions to other anthologies that founders Fox and Salas have written since the earliest days of Playback Theatre, an original theatre form where audience members' stories are enacted on the spot. As well as previously published material, PSPS includes several essays written for this volume.


Theatre in Search of Social Change

Theatre in Search of Social Change

Author: C. P. Epskamp

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13:

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This book investigates the educative role of theater in processes of social change and development, and considers how to evaluate the use of theater as a small-scale medium in realizing development projects based on a participatory or interventionist model. The book is in three major parts. Following an introduction and an introductory chapter, the first part (The Historical Antecedents of 'Theater for Development) is concerned with the formation of theories which form the basis of the book's approach. Part 2 (From Traditional to Popular Theater: Historical Case Studies from Asia, Latin America and Africa) consists of a description of the historical development of theater as an educative medium in development processes in the Third World. Part 3 (Theater for Development: Performing Arts as Instruments of Intervention) presents a number of descriptions of theater used in clearly defined development projects. The book's 12 chapters are as follows: (1) Introduction; (2) Development and Change: People's Participation in Adult Education; (3) Popular Theater from a Social Scientific Point of View; (4) Popular Theater from an Educative Point of View; (5) Popular Theater from a Theater Historical Point of View; (6) Traditional Media for Publicity and Information Campaigns: Wayang Theater on Java and Bali; (7) Adult Education and 'Teatro Campesino' in Latin America: Mexico as an Example; (8) African Universities Hit the Road: From Travelling Theater to Theater for Development; (9) Theatrical Forms: Puppeteers and Crooners Participating in Mass Campaigns; (10) Learning Approaches: Shifting from Sector Policy in National Campaigns to Target Group Policy in Local Development Projects; (11) Target Groups: NGOs and the Marginalized Rural and Urban Poor; and (12) Conclusions. Thirteen pages of notes and a 23-page bibliography are attached. (SR)


Performing Communities

Performing Communities

Author: Robert H. Leonard

Publisher: New Village Press

Published: 2006-04

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0976605449

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Ensemble Theater is the hottest American performance medium today. It's more than art - it's a movement.


Occupying the Stage

Occupying the Stage

Author: Kate Bredeson

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0810138174

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Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original translations, close readings of plays and historical documents, and a rigorous assessment of avant-garde theater history and theory, Occupying the Stage proposes that the French theater of 1959–71 forms a standalone paradigm called "The Theater of May '68." The book shows how French theater artists during this period used a strategy of occupation-occupying buildings, streets, language, words, traditions, and artistic processes-as their central tactic of protest and transformation. It further proposes that the Theater of May '68 has left imprints on contemporary artists and activists, and that this theater offers a scaffolding on which to build a meaningful analysis of contemporary protest and performance in France, North America, and beyond. At the book's heart is an inquiry into how artists of the period used theater as a way to engage in political work and, concurrently, questioned and overhauled traditional theater practices so their art would better reflect the way they wanted the world to be. Occupying the Stage embraces the utopic vision of May '68 while probing the period's many contradictions. It thus affirms the vital role theater can play in the ongoing work of social change.


Pittsburgh in Stages

Pittsburgh in Stages

Author: Lynne Conner

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780822943303

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The first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh is offered in this volume that relates the significant influence and interpretation of urban socioeconomic trends in the theatrical arts and the role of the theater as an agent of social change.


Theatre and Empowerment

Theatre and Empowerment

Author: Richard Boon

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-08-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1139453513

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Theatre and Empowerment examines the ability of drama, theatre, dance and performance to empower communities of very different kinds, and it does so from a multi-cultural perspective. The communities involved include poverty-stricken children in Ethiopia and the Indian sub-continent, disenfranchised Native Americans in the USA and young black men in Britain, victims of violence in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and a threatened agricultural town in Italy. The book asserts the value of performance as a vital agent of necessary social change, and makes its arguments through the close examination, from 'inside' practice, of the success - not always complete - of specific projects in their practical and cultural contexts. Practitioners and commentators ask how performance in its widest sense can play a part in community activism on a scale larger than the individual, 'one-off' project by helping communities find their own liberating and creative voices.


Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia

Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia

Author: E. Anthony Swift

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-12-30

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0520925874

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This is the most comprehensive study available of the popular theater that developed during the last decades of tsarist Russia. Swift examines the origins and significance of the new "people's theaters" that were created for the lower classes in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1861 and 1917. His extensively researched study, full of anecdotes from the theater world of the day, shows how these people's theaters became a major arena in which the cultural contests of late imperial Russia were played out and how they contributed to the emergence of an urban consumer culture during this period of rapid social and political change. Swift illuminates many aspects of the story of these popular theaters—the cultural politics and aesthetic ambitions of theater directors and actors, state censorship politics and their role in shaping the theatrical repertoire, and the theater as a vehicle for social and political reform. He looks at roots of the theaters, discusses specific theaters and performances, and explores in particular how popular audiences responded to the plays.


The Exonerated

The Exonerated

Author: Jessica Blank

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 0571211836

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Based on interviews with exonerated former death-row inmates.