Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response

✍ Scribed by Jan Cohen-Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 241
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response presents a combined analysis and workbook to examine "socially engaged performance." It offers a range of key practical approaches, exercises, and principles for using performance to engage in a variety of social and artistic projects. Author

Jan Cohen-Cruz draws on a career of groundbreaking research and work within the fields of political, applied, and community theatre to explore the impact of how differing genres of theatre respond to social "calls."

Areas highlighted include:

playwrighting and the engaged artist
theatre of the oppressed
performance as testimonial
the place of engaged art in cultural organizing
the use of local resources in engaged art
revitalizing cities and neighborhoods through engaged performance
training of the engaged artist.
Cohen-Cruz also draws on the work of major theoreticians, including Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Doreen Massey, as well as analyzing in-depth case studies of the work of US practitioners today to illustrate engaged performance in action.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is the author of Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US; the editor of Radical Street Performance; co-editor, with Mady Schutzman, of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion; and a University Professor at Syracuse University.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kinship among engaged performance practices
Purposes of writing this book
Book organization: centers of gravity of engaged performance
1 Playwrighting: putting plays to use
Brecht’s intellectually active spectator
Kushner’s magical epic theatre
Angels in the context of a social movement
The post-social movement life of Angels
Community-informed adaptations
The unfaithful disciple
Workbook
2 Specta(c)ting: theatre of the oppressed, orthodoxy and adaptation
The system of theatre of the oppressed
Adapting Boal
Semi-invisible theatre: magic that mystifies and reveals
The Joker System as Pedagogy and Performance
The Spirit of Boal in the Bronx
Activating the specta(c)tor
Workbook
3 Self-representing: testimonial performance
Social call, cultural response
The testimonial process
Cultural democracy and self-representation
home land security as a testimonial performance
From self-representation to community action
Workbook
4 Cultural organizing: multiple modes of communication
Creating cultural organizing tools
Theorizing culture as political strategy
Integrating artists and activists
Workbook
5 Gathering assets: the art of local resources
The choice: top-down or bottom-up
Social capital and asset-based community organizing
The youth theatre workshop: adapting method to context
The art of cultural resources
Workbook
6 Particularizing place: revitalizing cities and neighborhoods
Revitalizing downtowns
The Urban Video Project
Towards a participatory performance spectacle
Revitalizing urban neighborhoods
Efforts to create an arts district
Art and community-building
The arts’ contribution to urban development
Workbook
7 Training: an engaged artist prepares
The dynamic triangle of a socially-engaged arts curriculum
Craft training
Scholarship in an engaged art education
Community engagement as a component of learning
Values and principles underlying training
Higher education as the site of engaged art pedagogy
Advantages of learning engaged art in higher education
Obstacles to situating engaged art training in higher education
Assessing engaged art education
The curriculum project interviewees
Workbook
Afterword: the centrality of relationships in engaging performance
Appendix
1 Selected Adaptations, Cornerstone Theater
2 Roadside Theater’s Story Circle Methodology
3 Values and Mission Statement, Community Arts and Higher Education Partnership
4 Criteria, Syracuse Public Art Commission
5 Resources from The Curriculum Project Research
Notes
Bibliography
Index

✦ Subjects

Performance Studies, Theatre