ABSTRACT
Drama practitioners have long recognised that devised theatre is a good vehicle for shaping communities and challenging social injustice. Collaborations between professional theatre practitioners and community-based participants are often intended to improve the lives of the participants, to extend cultural democracy and contribute to the process of social change. Because devised performance emphasises participatory working methods, it has often been regarded as an effective and flexible way to move from the individualism of autobiographical narratives to more collective forms of community participation and social identification. The community arts movement is indebted to the aesthetic strategies of political activists and theatremakers that were documented in Chapter Four as well as to innovations in educational theatre that encouraged members of diverse communities to explore and represent their collective and personal identities. The efficacy of much community-based theatre is built on the understanding that participating in drama enables participants’ own narratives to be represented, reframed, rewritten and re-interpreted in ways which challenge cultural orthodoxies. It is a way of thinking about social change which relies on two highly contested concepts – community and narrative – both of which are complexly nuanced. This chapter offers an investigation of the role of devised theatre in representing and interrogating narratives of community.
