Introduction

This is a book about an inter-continental community theatre project. It is an attempt to gain a better understanding of this increasingly popular cultural practice that operates on the cutting edge between performing arts and sociocultural intervention. The main emphasis in this book, and in the accompanying video, has been placed on the diverse mechanics and inspirations of community theatre as an artistic process that always evolves under very particular local sociocultural conditions. Through written word and moving image, this package thus documents, contextualizes, and theorizes the methods that were used to create six community performances in distinct locations around the world in the course of 1997. Both in the video and in the book I have opted to tell these six tales as relatively independent narratives. I recommend watching the appropriate video segments before reading each book chapter, which provides the background about (community) theatre in each particular region, the facilitators, the organizations they work in, the evolution of their method, and a more technically oriented case study of the distinctive approach they used to create one specific community theatre performance in 1997.