Applied Theatre, Third Edition: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice

By Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton

Applied Theatre was the first collection to assist practitioners and students in developing critical frameworks for their own community-based theatrical projects. The editors draw on thirty case studies in applied theatre from fifteen countries—covering a wide range of disciplines, from theatre studies to education, medicine, and law—and collect essential readings to provide a comprehensive survey of the field.

Infused with a historical and theoretical overview of practical theatre, Applied Theatre offers clear developmental approaches and models for practical application.

This third edition offers refreshed case studies from many countries worldwide that provide exemplars for the practice of applied theatre. The book will be useful to both instructors and students, in its focus on providing clear introductory chapters that lay out the scope of the field, dozens of case studies in all areas of the field, and a new chapter on responses to the global pandemic of 2020.

Also includes a new section on representation in its final chapter, looking at the issues of how we represent ourselves and others on stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781789389234

Book preview

PART 1

THEORIES, HISTORY AND PRACTICES OF APPLIED THEATRE

1

Theories and History of Applied Theatre

1.1 What does applied theatre look like?

Popular theatre: Five performers, each dressed in a solid colour (red, blue, green, yellow, black and white), parade the streets of a modest area of Cairo. Each holds a musical instrument, chanting in unison, calling on the crowds to gather. The Popular Imagination Theatre Group was formed shortly after the 2011 Egyptian Revolution with a mandate to bring theatre to more remote areas of Egypt. Their performances have a playful element to them, with a political undertone, using parody to invite audiences to question political and social norms. The small crowd often draws the attention of others of all ages, children, youth and adults. By the end of the performance, people are laughing, shouting out connections from real life to what they are seeing performed and clapping enthusiastically in favour of the performance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EfGjd5iC-A).

Documentary theatre: A South African community-based documentary theatre project, Soil & Ash, gathers stories from those affected by a proposed coal mine being built in their community (Dennill, 2014). The mine owners are allegedly conducting bribes and other tactics that are fracturing the community's sense of solidarity. The theatre projectre tells actual lived experiences and verbatim accounts of how the mine is affecting people, and how they feel it may effect them in the future. To do this, we cannot rely on the traditional theatre process in which stories are imagined or interpreted by a few separate people outside of the situation, and then merely dramatized on stage (Dennill, 2014, n.p.).

After each performance, held in community centres, local schools, churches and also at sports events, audiences engage with performers in a facilitated dialogue in which the actors may stay in character or speak as themselves.

Theatre in Education: IROKO Theatre in London, UK, has the mandate to bring African culture and storytelling to schools. In one of their theatre in education projects, The Old Man and His Three Sons, the performance for students unfolds as follows:

The Old Man and His Three Sons is an intergenerational encounter between a dying father and his three sons. The story explores issues about the challenges of growing up, adulthood, taking up responsibilities, cultivating work ethics, self-discovery, independence, and making hard choices. These are issues facing young people today and it is often amazing and insightful to hear young people's analysis of the story and how it resonates with their own personal behaviour and/or experiences. In this story, the father gives each of his three sons a broomstick pulled out from an ‘African broom’ (a bundle of straws from the leaves of palm fronds tied together), and then asks the three brothers to sweep the floor with it. Stunned, the three sons in unison ask their father how they should do this, at which their father replies: ‘That's the question I have been asking myself. You are now 13, 15 and 17 years of age respectively, yet I feel like a broomstick amongst you, my sons, unable to sweep the floor. Why?’. As an African saying goes, ‘the child that one cannot speak to with parables, is not one's child’. The three brothers understand their father and immediately take the action necessary to appease him – and end his sense of uneasiness.

(Oma-Pius, 2018, n.p.)

Theatre of the Oppressed: A group of actors performs narratives of patriarchy and domestic abuse before an audience of villagers in West Bengal, India. They replay parts of the performance where a woman might be able to speak back to the patriarchs in her life. The ‘joker’ [facilitator] asks the audience ‘Who can come forward and take this woman's place and speak for her?’ A teenage girl comes forward and begins, with hesitation, but picks up momentum as the scene progresses; she says to the male actor playing the father: ‘You can't treat me like that. You can't just marry me off without asking me! I'm not a goat or an animal that you can just sell me off!’ The young girl receives applause from the audience, and a seed is planted. Jana Sanskriti, a theatre company founded by Sanjoy Ganguly, is about actors living in the rural villages of India, interacting with villagers and understanding their life struggles. Their theatre performances are a direct means of creating social change, through Forum Theatre. In this context, theatre becomes a way to empower the oppressed and give them platforms to rehearse ‘speaking back to power’ (www.janasanskriti.org.in).

Theatre for Health Education: Theater of War Productions offers dramatic readings of Greek tragedies, translated and adapted by the artistic founder and director, Bryan Doerries, as a means of generating conversations focused, originally, on the effects of combat trauma. The first event, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, was staged in 2008, in a Hyatt Hotel ballroom before an audience of Marines, their families and therapists. In the discussion that followed, a wife spoke of how her husband returned from war-like Ajax, ‘dragging invisible bodies into our house’; an Army chaplain spoke of how Ajax's line, "Witness how the generals have destroyed me’ was something she had heard from many soldiers. The intensity of the experience freed people who ordinarily would not speak of such things and certainly not to those of senior ranks, to respond with passion and directness. The Pentagon awarded the company a three-plus million dollar contract to continue its work for military audiences at bases around the world. Today, Theater of War Productions continues to use Greek tragedies as stimuli for audiences suffering other kinds of traumas: Theatre of War for Frontline Medical Providers addresses the present pandemic and aims to lift these essential workers out of their isolation to bear witness together the truth of their struggles (Batuman, 2020; Glatter, 2020).

Theatre for development: The story was a simple narrative which revolved around a clan member who went missing while on a fishing expedition. This development threw the entire community into disarray and created deep fear in the environment which affected the economic life of the community for weeks as fishermen refused to go on a fishing expedition for fear of meeting the fate of their kinsman. As was usual with such development in the community, soothsayers and witchdoctors were consulted to find out the cause of the man's disappearance and all of them were unanimous in declaring that the man's boat was capsized by an angry water goddess who felt maligned and disrespected by the community by denying her of regular sacrifice. This narrative was popular with the community as they considered it an age-old practice tied to the very foundation of the community. The community offered the needed sacrifice as directed by the local priests, but a surprising development took place two days after the communal feast in that the purportedly drowned man returned to the village to disclose that he was not taken by the water spirits but rather that he was arrested and detained in a distant island by patrolling naval officers who caught him harvesting fish with harmful substances in addition to defecating into the water. This created some confusion in the community as some people believed the man was released by the marine powers while others believed he was truly detained by naval officers and so they should desist from polluting the river. This open-ended structure of the story offered a good template for discussion in a community meeting-styled arrangement (Chukwu-Okoronkwo, 2020, p. 63).

Prison theatre: Journey Woman is a week-long programme of theatre and drama-based work facilitated by England's Geese Theatre Company for female offenders and their caretakers. The week begins with a performance that follows the story of Ellie, a woman who has broken out of the cycle of hardship, offending and prison. Looking back on her life, Ellie revisits key episodes and moments of change: leaving home for the first time, her first involvement with offending, becoming a mother and her first prison sentence. Throughout the piece, the audience is invited to consider the different masks she has worn throughout her life, the different roles she has played and her different life stories. The audience members are enrolled as experts in Ellie's life, analyzing the crucial moments, exploring her inner feelings and emotions and contemplating how moments from her past have impacted her present and future. Geese Theatre, based in Birmingham, carries out its mask-based work in prisons, youth detention centres and with those on probation (www.geese.co.uk).

Community-based theatre: Vancouver Moving Theatre (VMT) has carried out many community-based projects since 1983 in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, an area too well known for its high rates of drug addiction, crime, prostitution and poverty. Storyweaver is a project addressing Indigenous community members’ histories, struggles and resiliencies:

A cast of Indigenous artists, elders, dancers and Downtown Eastside community members help an old man – The Old One – open up to his life's journey, his regrets and hopes, through the teachings of the medicine wheel. His journey home gives voice to experiences of the urban aboriginal community, to voices not heard, to lives left behind.

VMT productions most often have dozens of cast members of many ages and cultural backgrounds (http://www.vancouvermovingtheatre.com).

Museum theatre: In the present day, tourists arrive at Barkerville Historic Town and Park in British Columbia and are taken on a town tour through the streets of this historic site. Immediately, through the façade of the buildings in that town, and the actors that move around these various settings, the ‘audience’ of tourists are transported to Barkerville in 1863. One of the characters there is Miss Florence Wilson, an English lady who came to Victoria in the first ‘Bride Ship’ societies, where Charles Dickens was a patron. Florence Wilson talks to the audience about the Great Fire of Barkerville in 1860, which destroyed her saloon. She tells them about how the fire started, and how it ravaged the town. Florence Wilson is only one of several characters present during this 75-minute street tour, which is enacted by what are called ‘interpreters’ who are named as such because they interpret history before they enact it for their audiences (personal communication with Danette Boucher, 23 December 2020) https://www.barkerville.ca.

Reminiscence theatre: This research project involved older people in a small Greek community exploring the ‘deeper relationship’ of linking Reminiscence theatre with the enjoyment of life (‘ego-integrity’) as a well-being parameter for people in the third age. During the fourteen weekly drama sessions, participants started with simple stories of the past, moving through school memories and marriage to deeper life experiences. These stories, often repeated, were welcomed by the group as opportunities to deal creatively with the past. Two months after the end of the project, the facilitator was asked by its participants if she could make a play of their stories based on the themes of love and marriage and told as a folktale. The final text was then inspected by them for improvements on structure and content, at which time traditional songs and dances were added. The project took on an intergenerational look as age-appropriate community members were cast, while the original elders remained deeply engaged by taking on minor roles and overseeing all rehearsals. The performance at the local open-air theatre was enormously successful – ‘I feel like an actor on the stage; I'm so proud of myself’, said a participant of 81+ years. And while the participants enjoyed ‘re-appropriating their lives’ and did so with ‘a refreshing courage’, for the community, this performance opened up a very different view of their senior citizens, their capabilities and the significance of their lives (Kosti, 2019, n.p.).

Audiodrama and hybrid forms of applied theatre: Hi, I'm Mattie (HIM) is a verbatim (word for word) audiotheatre piece created in Northern Ireland in 2016. ‘I don't know if it's because we're positive that people think they can say whatever they want’ (Matthew Cavan). Born and raised in Northern Ireland, performer and drag artist Matthew Cavan has lived with HIV for seven years. As one of the first public faces associated with HIV from Northern Ireland in the twenty-first century, Matthew has experienced harsh harassment from both within and outside the gay community. Most of this harassment has come through the gay social app Grindr. From interviews with Matthew, [the researchers] pieced together what those Grindr conversations and profiles would have sounded like, recorded them with actors and played them back for Matthew. The interviews within the piece were conducted after Matthew heard each of the dramatized interactions. Hi, I'm Mattie (or HIM) is the blend of this verbatim and surmised text (http://smashcutthepodcast.com/original-content/him).

1.2 What is applied theatre?

Alternative theatre practices, including those described above, have historically been labelled with a number of diverse terms, such as grass-roots theatre, social theatre, political theatre, radical theatre and many other variations, but since 2000, ‘applied theatre’ is the term that has emerged as the canopy under which all of these prior terms and practices are embraced. In our view, this ‘very capacious portmanteau term’ (Giesekam, 2006, p. 91) is inclusive and does not carry any limiting fixed agendas. Instead, ‘the applied theatre label [is] a useful umbrella term [...] for finding links and connections for all of us committed to the power of theatre in making a difference in the human lifespan’ (Taylor, 2006, p. 93). All of the above thumbnail narratives offer examples of a web of performance practices (Schechner, 1988/2003, pp. xvi–xix) that fall outside mainstream theatre performance and take place ‘in non-traditional settings and/or with marginalized communities’ (Thompson & Jackson, 2006, p. 92). That is to say, these approaches to theatre most often are played in indoor and outdoor spaces that are not usually defined as theatre venues. The work is facilitated by one or more applied theatre artists with participants who may or may not be skilled in theatre arts and to audiences who have a vested interest in the issue taken up by the performance or are members of the community addressed by the performance.

One example of how applied theatre can be different lies in the area of scripting. Whereas traditional mainstream theatre is most often centred on the interpretation of a pre-written script, applied theatre, in contrast, involves both the collective creation and the interpretation of a theatre piece that in performance may or may not be scripted in the traditional manner. In those cases where an applied theatre performance takes the form of a polished improvisation, a formally written script may never be recorded. There are very few complete examples of scripts, although the case studies that follow will often quote excerpts. As you read through these case studies, you will note the many ways in which applied theatre differs from ‘theatre’ as most people would think of it.

1.3 Why ‘applied’ theatre?

Dictionaries define the word ‘applied’ as ‘to put to use’. Applied theatre, as with all other activities that use the word ‘applied’ as a descriptor (engineering, mathematics, building arts and so on), is about using theatre to solve problems regarding human activities. ‘Pure’ theatre, on the other hand, is a theatre that is made for its own purposes and may be ethically neutral, having been created to increase one's understanding of the world. Since the word ‘applied’ came into use in universities and colleges around the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been accompanied by a sense that subjects of study that are applied are somehow lesser than subjects that are purely academic because they generally involve physical labour and are involved with practical matters in which there is the possibility of ethically troubling concerns arising. While there remain wisps of this discreditation, education now values academic and applied subjects equally.

Catharsis (katharsis: purgation) is a Greek medical term that Aristotle uses to argue that tragedy does not encourage the passions but in fact rids (or purges) the spectator of them. Catharsis is a ‘beneficial, uplifting experience whether psychological, moral, intellectual or some combination of these’.

(Marvin Carlson, 1993, pp. 18–19)

The next section outlines the moves over the following 150 years towards a theatre that can be ‘pure’ as an art in itself as a representation of the world, and ‘applied’ as a means by which we can engage in community with the world as it is and as it could be.

1.4 How did applied theatre emerge?

Marvin Carlson (2014) sums up the worldwide development of theatre through the ages by writing that human activities (such as imitation, representation, storytelling and spectatorship) ‘combined and developed in countless different ways in different communities and cultures, resulting in the modern world in a vast array of theatre and theatre-related forms’ (p. 1). Today, as we in the West are learning to de-colonize our understanding of theatre's origins, we have become aware of the extraordinary contributions made to western theatre by other traditions and cultures. Religious practices and performance expressions such as dance; puppets; shadow plays; theatre forms like Kabuki, Bunraku, Noh; texts such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; and multinational translations of scripts have provided new and different perceptions that continue to enlarge our understanding of the human condition. At the same time, we are also made aware of how war and conquest enabled western theatre to influence and, in some cases, suffocate many Indigenous performance traditions.

All drama is … a political event: it either reasserts or undermines the code of conduct of a given society.

(Martin Esslin, 1976, p. 29)

Jonothan Neelands (2019) calls theatre the ‘first invention of democracy’ (p. v) and, indeed, the origins of western theatre may be seen to lie in the relationships between the creation of democracy as a means of managing the government of the Greek city-state system in the fifth-century BCE and, in the same period, the performances of festivals in honour of the God, Dionysus. Both these events took place in the deme theatres (meeting places) that dotted the countryside. It was here at what today we would call ‘community event centres’ that the public also met to conduct civic and political functions, commerce, justice, and to celebrate religious rites and rituals.

Paga (2010) describes the significance of these theatrical areas as nodes of communication through their connections to ‘the elaborate matrix of Athenian ritual, society, and democracy’ (p. 352). At the simplest level, the demes, the name for a political sub-group of local people who came together to manage the business of their particular area through discussion, serves as an example for the most direct form of democracy. It does not take a great act of the imagination to see in the mind's eye, the demes at work: those speaking for, those speaking against, watched and encouraged and interrupted by others in the group as matters of mutual concern were played out. Here, surely, we might find the impetus from which Thespis drew his inspiration when he stepped out from the chorus to perform the role or series of roles as a protagonist to the chorus. His invention of the actor expanded the work of the chorus from religious lyrics, dance and songs (dithyrambs) to that of observer/participants weaving their shared stories into unfolding mythic narratives that still have meaning for us in our modern world. Some 2500 years later, our newest field of theatre study, applied theatre, reflects that ancient relationship with democracy through its focus on issues of social justice, education, celebration and communication at the local community level.

Theatre has had a historic role in society as providing a relatively safe way of talking back to power. Across many cultures and traditions over time, we can trace patterns and instances of groups of people using the stage as a space and place to share their stories and their lives. This aesthetic and emotional outlet allows for potential catharsis, a safe way for citizens to express their concerns, criticisms and frustrations to each other and society at large. And often that opportunity has been enough. Some examples of this kind of theatrical expression are to be found around the world in the social dramas of rituals such as carnivals, Feast of Fools, initiation rites and through trickster figures in myths and legends – the servant figure in drama traditionally has had more power in the world of a play than his or her masters. Theatre, wherever it has happened, has always been fed by this power reversal that is sanctioned and accepted within the protected space of the fictional world of the stage.

To like the theatre you have to like its transience and its immediacy: it happens in the present tense and it's fallible. There's a sense of occasion in any theatre performance and of participation in a communal act: you go into a theatre as an individual and you emerge as an audience.

(Richard Eyre & Nicholas Wright, 2001, p. 11)

In modern western theatre history, playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen and Bertholt Brecht offer a theatre of social criticism, debate and, in Brecht's case, potential revolutionary action. More international playwrights, such as Dario Fo, Ngugi wa Thiong'O, Antoinetta Nwandu, Ariel Dorfman, Tony Kushner, Wole Soyinka, Sara Kane and many others, have focused much of their theatre on exposing and exploring social and political issues in their plays. Applied theatre is informed by these plays and playwrights to the extent that they offer clear models of how effective theatre can tackle a range of topical provocations and provide an aesthetic site for their considered examination.

1.5 Further history of the field

While the previous section discussed how theatre makers gravitated towards more interactive and immediate forms of theatre practice through applied theatre, this section focuses on different parts of the world where the practice of applied theatre started to take shape. In the 1960s, Ross Kidd and David Kerr were experimenting with forms of theatre that engaged Zambian communities in discussions around issues as determined by non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the use of contraception and prevention of HIV. Although this work started out as a top-down method of disseminating information from NGOs to communities, it began to evolve and morph into methods of collaboration with communities. These interactions began not only to shape the applied theatre initiatives taking place, but as groups participated in performances and workshops, they moved from being observers of such events to becoming active agents of the work. Michael Etherton (1979) was one of the lead practitioners in seeing this evolution take shape, and he began to explore this approach with communities in Bangladesh, determining that for the applied theatre work to be truly effective, a rights-based approach (people's rights as determined by communities) needed to be taken as opposed to a needs-based approach (one determined by an outsider as what a community needs).

In the 1970s, Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1979) began experimenting with how to make theatre more accessible to audiences as a vehicle for social change. He developed the practice of ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ as a means of using theatre to empower communities who felt powerless in the face of oppression. Government corruption, greed and the exploitation of workers were some of the topics he explored in his performances. Audiences could stop the action of the play and intervene with different propositions in order to shape the outcome for the protagonist. This was seen as a ‘rehearsal’ for change, and a way for people to come together to actively change their response to oppressive dynamics. More of Boal's work and its evolution will be explored in the chapter titled ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’.

In the 1980s, Jana Sanskriti, a theatre company established by Sanjoy Ganguly in rural India, began to form. Ganguly was an advocate for the power of theatre to raise awareness amongst communities where patriarchy, exploitation of women and government corruption were rampant. At first, he would perform his work in rural villages with the hope that people would impart change in their lives out of inspiration from watching these performances. Eventually, he discovered Theatre of the Oppressed, and began to utilize its various functions to make theatre that was more immediate to and intuitive of the people's needs. His theatre company would move into the village and live and work with the people of that community for some time while they developed their theatre performances. The work would centre on the struggles faced by people of that village and, because it was shaped after Boal's method of audience interaction, it would have more potential for imparting a change in attitude amongst the community. For example, in one village, where the troupe lived and worked, violence against women was prevalent. Here, the company created a performance that explored this issue, and invited audience members to take the role of the woman who is abused by her husband. In one of the audience interventions, a man took on the role of the woman, and made one attempt after another to explore how the protagonist could stop the abuse. When the performance was over, that audience member approached the company as they were leaving, and confided in them that he beats his wife and that the performance he saw made him think about his actions differently. Today, Jana Sanskriti is a well-known theatre company internationally, and its work is performed in various parts of the world.

A final example of an applied theatre initiative that sprung up amongst non-theatre participants is in Jamaica, with what later would be known as Sistren Theatre Collective. This group was formed in the 1980s by women who wanted to take an active role in creating change in their lives. They would meet regularly to discuss how they could raise the status of women in their work environments and at home. Eventually, they decided that staging their narratives would be a more effective way to heighten awareness and to hopefully create the kind of far-reaching impact for women and young girls that they desired. This group's work grew and evolved, and began to garner international attention. Sistren Theatre Collective has taken their work to theatre conferences and events internationally, to share with others how a grassroots theatre company was able to make a difference in their community.

In all of the examples given, lay people with little experience in the art form of theatre gravitated towards socially engaged methods of practice not only as a means of claiming a space in their community but also as a means to demonstrate the power of theatre to change attitudes and beliefs. As the practice grew and different parts of the world began to notice a similar pull towards this type of work, the term ‘applied theatre’ began to form in order to offer practitioners and participants a platform from which to share ideas, develop collaborations and see the work grow.

Carlson pointed out in 1993 that ‘[t]he continuing point of debate in modern theatre theory has been over whether the theatre should be viewed primarily as an engaged social phenomenon or as a politically indifferent aesthetic artefact’ (p. 454). That debate continues. Herbert Blau criticizes theatre as an aesthetic artefact (isolated and elitist), ‘a stronghold of non-ideas’ (1965, p. 7). Theatre for Blau is a public art and one that should function at the ‘dead center of community’ (p. 309). Like Brecht before him, Blau sees that the function of theatre lies with waking up the audience to its obligations and responsibilities through its collective imagination.

The relationship between the actor and the audience is the only theatre reality.

(Brook in Croyden, 2003, p. 28)

Using Bertolt Brecht's lehrstücke (short, severe and instructive works performed for audiences of students, workers and children [see Eyre & Wright, 2001, p. 204]) as the first indication in the twentieth century of a ‘new aesthetic’ for western theatre, we can begin to trace the threads of change through the work of Kirby (1965) and Grotowski (1968). Kirby wanted to rid theatre of the constraints of its conventional structure of plot (rising action, climax and dénouement) and replace it with something he called ‘compartmental structure’ akin to collage (Carlson, 1993, p. 457). Compartmental structure foreshadows the often episodic nature of applied theatre presentations where scenes are linked by theme rather than plot development.

As Carole Tarlington and Wendy Michaels (1995) explain, an applied theatre piece can be ‘linked logically, rather than temporally, to those [scenes] before and after it’.

(p. 20)

Grotowski sought to create ‘archetypical images and actions that would force the spectator into an emotional involvement’ (p. 455). He was interested in his highly trained actors addressing the needs of a small group of individuals in a totally open way (p. 457). Even such a theatrical anchor as intention or purpose was questioned by French theorist practitioners such as Fernando Arrabel (1973). Arrabel and his circle prefigured chaos theory by their abandonment of structure and the invitation to include ‘the widest possible elements’ that embraced such opposites as ‘the sacred and the profane, executions and celebrations of life, the sordid and the sublime’ (Arrabel, 1973, p. 98). Kostelanetz in 1968 drew attention to other significant shifts, of which two are important for our study here. ‘Staged performances’ were much like traditional theatre but without the reliance on words. They were strongly movement-oriented and the actors performed without masks as themselves or as a kind of ‘neutral sign’, the emphasis being on the experience itself and the process of creation rather than the product of creative acts (Carlson, 1993, p. 461, emphasis added). Audiences, too, began to be recognized by theatre makers as integral to the wholeness of a performance. But after a couple of centuries of being quiet and in the dark, audiences did not always take kindly to this new attention; even today, being ‘recognized by the stage’ can make people embarrassed or uneasy. The playwright Peter Handke attempted to revitalize the audience by making them conscious that ‘they are there, that they exist’ (cited in Carlson, 1993, p. 462). Richard Foreman (1976) took on this idea by creating theatre pieces that were deliberately intended to lead the audience to become more self-aware and self-reflexive. Many of these ‘new’ ideas came together in the work of Peter Brook (1968), whose theatre-making was designed to join spectators, actors and performance in a ‘communal celebration of experience’ (Carlson, 1993, p. 464).

It was clear by the middle of the twentieth century, notable for the dazzling pace of its change, that the relationship between actors, audiences and performance structures was undergoing significant shifts in aesthetic understanding. Indeed, 1968 has become for theatre historians, theorists and practitioners the dividing line between the traditional and the new theatre. The Avignon Manifesto, an open letter from young theatre radicals inspired by the student and worker uprising in Paris in 1968, makes the shift clear. It called for a theatre of ‘collective creation’ with no schism between artistic activities and ‘political, social, and everyday events’, a theatre of ‘political and psychological liberation’ of ‘direct rather than represented action’, which would place the spectator no longer in an ‘alienated and underdeveloped situation’ (Copferman, 1972 cited in Carlson, 1993, p. 471).

There are three writers whose theory and practice are of particular interest as we explore the antecedents of applied theatre: Armand Gatti, John O'Toole and Augusto Boal. French director Armand Gatti, like Kirby, was intent on freeing theatre from its reliance on sequential time: theatrical action for Gatti was most generative when it allowed spectators/participants to see the same thing from a number of different viewpoints, where endings remained open and available to questions. He was a forerunner of the popular theatre movement – a people's theatre, a theatre engaged with the popular culture of post-Second World War society and belonging to it (Prentki & Selman, 2000). For this revolutionary theatre artist, the function of theatre was to enable ‘the disinherited classes’ to create a theatre that reflected their concerns – not through performances for them but with them. He did this through a series of what he called mini-pièces – short scenes encouraging reflection, which might lead later to further action that could perhaps alleviate those concerns to some degree. Gatti saw himself not as a playwright but as a ‘catalyst of the creative powers of the people of the community’ (Knowles, 1989, p. 202), and he saw the theatre as the means of giving language to those who lacked the words to describe their social situations.

The second practitioner/theorist was John O'Toole, whose 1976 text, Theatre in education: New objectives for theatre – New techniques for education, describes and analyzes a number of UK-based case studies of school performances. In this seminal text, O'Toole lays the foundations that resulted in a vigorous two decades of TIE practice in England that still informs effective applied theatre practice today. In Chapter 5, ‘The perils and pleasure of participation’, O'Toole draws our attention to a number of strategies and techniques used by various teams of actors to engage the audiences through what he calls ‘integral’ participation in which the audience ‘acts as well as being acted upon’ (p. 88). One of the most effective ways, he notes, is when:

[O]ne or two brave teams have taken [the technique of hot seating] further and stopped the action for the children to discuss the situation with the characters, who then carried on the play according to the advice the children gave them.

(p. 97)

This is, he suggests, a ‘technique worth exploring in more depth and more frequently’ (p. 97).

This responsive, improvisatory strategy was taken up by Brazilian director Augusto Boal – founder of TO – and became a key concept in his Forum Theatre. Boal himself was deeply influenced by Pablo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/2000) that aims to empower learners as active agents in their own education. Similarly, Boal empowered theatre spectators to step into the action and change the outcome of a dramatic situation related to their lives. He called this process ‘rehearsal for the revolution’ (Boal, 1979, p. 122). Indeed, the practice of engaging the audience interactively with the performance (before, during or after the performance – and sometimes all three), as seen in the work of Gatti, O'Toole and Boal, is a consistent characteristic of all forms of applied theatre.

This brief historical overview enables us to identify the strands that are integral to the fabric of applied theatre as an engaged, social, artistic phenomenon, and some of the characteristics of its practices:

focus on multiple perspectives

disregard for sequence as fundamental to effective structure

endings that remain open for questioning

less reliance on words; more exploration of movement and image as theatre language

greater reliance on polished improvisation rather than a set text

theatre as a close, direct reflection of actual life with an overt political intent to raise awareness and to generate change

a collective approach to creating theatre pieces in which the makers themselves become aware and capable of change

issues of local importance that may or may not be transferable to other communities

audience as an important and active participant in the creation of understanding and, often, of the action.

The final part of an applied theatre performance is the reflective discussion in which actors, production personnel and audience engage with each other. Sometimes invited professionals make their contributions either as first response reflective panel or as equal contributors to the conversations.

All of