ABSTRACT

Community Performance: A Reader is the first book to provide comprehensive teaching materials for this significant part of the theatre studies curriculum. It brings together core writings and critical approaches to community performance work, presenting practices in the UK, USA, Australia and beyond.



Offering a comprehensive anthology of key writings in the vibrant field of community performance, spanning dance, theatre and visual practices, this Reader uniquely combines classic writings from major theorists and practitioners such as Augusto Boal, Paolo Freire, Dwight Conquergood and Jan Cohen Cruz, with newly commissioned essays that bring the anthology right up to date with current practice.



This book can be used as a stand-alone text, or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: An Introduction, to offer an accessible and classroom-friendly introduction to the field of community performance.

chapter |8 pages

General introduction

part One|88 pages

Pedagogical communities

chapter Chapter 1|11 pages

Poetics of the oppressed

chapter Chapter 2|4 pages

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the oppressed

chapter Chapter 3|6 pages

Critiques of community

Habermas, Touraine and Bauman

chapter Chapter 4|14 pages

Community arts practices

Improvising being-together

chapter Chapter 6|14 pages

Performing as a Moral Act 1

Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance

chapter Chapter 7|6 pages

Mass movement

Laban’s movement choirs and community dance

chapter Chapter 8|20 pages

Performance, community, culture

part Two|52 pages

Relations

chapter Chapter 9|9 pages

Relational form

chapter Chapter 10|14 pages

An art encounter

Rethinking, renaming, redefining

chapter Chapter 11|8 pages

‘The Generosity Project’

chapter Chapter 12|10 pages

‘Empire Project’

chapter Chapter 13|7 pages

Home is Where the Walls Speak in Familiar Ways

Listening to the demands of ethics and witness in community performance 1

part Three|50 pages

Environments

chapter Chapter 14|12 pages

Toward communicative democracy

Developing Salmon Is Everything

chapter Chapter 15|12 pages

Preferring a drama-based model for sustainable development advocacy

The Ikot Ayan Itam Theatre for Development experience

chapter Chapter 16|12 pages

Puppets doing time in the age of AIDS

chapter Chapter 17|6 pages

reLOCATED

Project: A tribute to tenants; Location: Kensington Housing Estate

chapter Chapter 18|4 pages

AIDS narrative murals*

part Four|36 pages

Rituals, embodiment, challenge

chapter Chapter 21|5 pages

Straitjackets of representation

chapter Chapter 22|2 pages

My body trusts the unknown

chapter Chapter 23|3 pages

Contact improvisation

An introduction

part Five|46 pages

Practices

chapter Chapter 25|6 pages

At My Age

An intergenerational dance project

chapter Chapter 26|8 pages

Compositions

The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange

chapter Chapter 27|11 pages

Haunted voices in everyday spaces

The community-based hip-hop of Australian ‘guerrilla’ artist Morganics

chapter Chapter 28|11 pages

Festivities and jubilations on the graves of the dead

Sanctifying sullied space

chapter Chapter 29|7 pages

Philippine community theatre in the 1990s*