scholarly journals Transforming the Community through Community Theatre - In the Cases of Columbia College Chicago & its Center for Community Arts Partnerships and Their Applications to Korea

2017 ◽  
Vol null (18) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Meewon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Community Arts ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Arts Partnerships

Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre

1993 ◽  
Vol 9 (34) ◽  
pp. 121-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baz Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Small Scale ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Cultural Intervention ◽  
East Midlands ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Many ◽  
Radical Theatre ◽  
Community Projects

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

Community, Class, and Control: a View of Community Plays

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (20) ◽  
pp. 370-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Woodruff
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Common Interests ◽  
The Common ◽  
The University ◽  
And Control

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.

‘You can’t just take bits of my story and put them into some play’: Ethical dramaturgy in the contemporary Australian performance climate

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Pike ◽  
Sasha Mackay ◽  
Michael Whelan ◽  
Bree Hadley ◽  
Kathryn Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Life Stories ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Relational Aesthetics ◽  
Community Arts ◽  
Operating Environment ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
Current State ◽  
Effective Community ◽  
Time Resource

In Australia a vibrant tradition of participatory and often politically motivated performance work developed under the term ‘community arts and cultural development’ across the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. In this body of practice, considerations of ethics are articulated through process, practices and representation rather than content. Though effective, community arts as it developed in Australia is often time, resource and emotionally intensive for artists, community participants and audiences. In recent years, retraction of funding, as well as shifts in practice towards live art, performance art and relational aesthetics have reduced the resources available for these once prominent practices. Practitioners are confronting challenges and needing to develop new ways of working in an operating environment where long-term consultation is not necessarily possible or preferred by stakeholders. In this article, we reflect on the current state of play for practitioners seeking to develop ethical dramaturgy in performance works that collaborate with communities to tell life stories or represent participants’ lived experiences in Australia. Through examples from our own practice, as practice-led researchers, we consider how work in this sector is under strain and experiencing scarcity, precarity and an increasing lack of access to institutional resources that have historically enabled ethically rigorous dramaturgical practices. We aim, through this process, to rediscover and rearticulate an ethical dramaturgy for deployment in the Australian environment as it exists today.

scholarly journals Flat Out! Dancing the city at a time of austerity

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 797-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Noxolo
Keyword(s):  
Community Arts ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The City

This paper reflects on and challenges existing paradigms around movement and mobilisation in and with the city. This focus is provoked by a community arts project called ‘Flat Out’, in which the researcher collaborated with the Drum Intercultural Arts Centre and Birmingham Royal Ballet, on a dance project with members of the community in the Lozells and Newtown areas of the city. The paper pushes for more deeply embodied and more highly politicised versions of place ballet and urban vortex, introducing a concept of choreography that comes from dance practice, and working through decolonial and postcolonial theories. A brief auto-ethnography of the author’s Birmingham childhood illustrates that movement repertoires are diverse, historically and spatially conditioned, and, in the case of Birmingham, located within an ongoing ‘decolonial churn’.

When José Met Sally: Chicano Theatre in L.A. at Grassroots and Mainstream

1996 ◽  
Vol 12 (48) ◽  
pp. 356-366
Author(s):  
Eugene van Erven
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Southern California ◽  
American Studies ◽  
South Coast ◽  
Breeding Ground ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
Community Theatre ◽  
American Drama ◽  
Latino Community

Playscript development programmes have been a significant breeding ground for new American drama since the mid'sixties, and in 1986 the Chicano playwright and director José Cruz González started a playwright development workshop specifically for the Latino community. Here, Eugene van Erven provides a bipolar view of the current Latino theatre scene in southern California by documenting the tenth anniversary session of González' Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep, and at the same takes a wider look at grassroots community theatre initiatives in the Chicano neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Eugene van Erven teaches in the American Studies programme at Utrecht University. Author of The Playful Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Radical People's Theatre (Indiana UP, 1988), he also designs and produces intercultural theatre projects.

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