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Data now plays a central role in civic life and community practices. This has created a pressing need for new forms of translation and sense-making that can engage diverse publics. Research-based Theatre (RbT) has proven to be an effective approach to delivering qualitative data to community stakeholders. We extend this tradition by proposing "community-engaged data theatre". This approach translates quantitative data into theatrical language to engage communities in deliberative conversations on relevant issues. Community-engaged data theatre requires bridging multiple disciplines and involves creating new definitions and shared vocabularies in discourses that formerly have had little overlap in meaning. In this article, we share key insights from our initial experiments in which we adapted quantitative and qualitative data to devise a pilot piece in collaboration with a local community partner. In this essay, we communicate our collaborative process in polyvocal, artistic form. We edit and adapt materials from our conversations and creative practices into scenes illustrating how we taught and learned from each other about data science, participatory modeling, material deliberation and Composition to pilot our lab's first community-engaged data theatre prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vice president for Conference 2023 welcomes attendees to the ATHE 2023 conference in Austin, TX. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer support groups have become widely utilized among those in recovery from problematic substance use. Yet, these peer-based programs vary and research examining their effectiveness has yielded mixed results. Relatively less is known about the impacts of arts-based peer recovery programs. Some research suggests that theatre may offer a powerful tool to address biopsychosocial changes among individuals in recovery. To explore the role of arts-based peer support programs, we draw on qualitative interviews with performers in two arts-based recovery programs. Our findings suggest that arts-based peer recovery programs may aid individuals in recovery in four main ways. Performing allowed participants to build relationships with others in recovery, channel experiences creatively while challenging stigma, foster confidence and recovery-identity formation, aiding participants in working through emotional impacts of prior substance use. These findings support emerging scholarship examining the role of performance in challenging stereotypes about substance use to aid those in recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relaxation, when produced by participating in a theatre-for-one piece, requires work. From March to May 2020, with much of the world under a stay-at-home advisory to mitigate the spread of Covid-19, three performances carved out restorative spaces. These theatre-for-one pieces give participants rules to follow to ostensibly resist the neoliberal drive to productivity; yet those same rules structure acts of rest as productive under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital performances forwarding discourses of "we're all in it together" proliferated in the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic, performing the social legibility of pain and loss within the public sphere. The body takes on an indexical force in such performances, constructing a symbolic community defined by the shared experience of sheltering-in-place. This performs social distancing, culturally acclimating audiences to a world in which we connect virtually but remain apart in our bodies. This has a legitimate public-health utility. That said, such performances can inadvertently construct the "we" in "we are all in it together" in a way that centers the stay-at-home experience while flattening racial and economic divisions. This essay examines two digital performances focusing on the experiences of diverse artists in quarantined isolation: Mike Sears and Lisa Berger's Ancient and Emily Mast and Yehuda Duenyas's How Are We. Both performances situate the act of sheltering-in-place as the shared facet of community belonging, utilizing aesthetic strategies that either obscure or amplify the ways that hierarchical systems of power influenced inequitable lived experiences of quarantined isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improbable Players (IP) has been creating applied theatre for substance use disorder prevention since 1984, training more than 200 sober actor/teaching artists to perform plays and facilitate workshops addressing addiction, alcoholism, and the opioid crisis. The company operates, for its actors, as a long-term arts- integrated peer recovery support service and mutual support group for recovery from substance addiction, increasing their recovery capital. This essay examines the ways Improbable Player's applied theatre programme operates to build recovery capital and support individual behavioural changes in its artistic staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine a Playback Theatre performance in which audience members perform their appreciation for living in a diverse community, engaging with the performativity of happy talk surrounding diversity. Happy talk is largely considered to support the status quo of White supremacy, letting those who benefit from dominant systems of power off the hook. However, in this event it appeared to operate instead as a utopian performative. The racially and ethnically diverse storytellers in the workshop narrate positive stories about the diversity in their community, and they do so for a reason. This article looks at the hope animating the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audience members sit at tables and desks in an interactive classroom, an immersive performance space designed to evoke a K–12 classroom. Blackboards are covered with homework assignments and test reminders, posters with test-taking tips and motivational quotes such as “For success, attitude is as important as ability.” Collaboraction's production of Forgotten Future: The Education Project begins as an interracial, intergenerational ensemble of actors enters the space chanting and waving signs reading “Support our Schools: Don't Close Them” and “Save our Schools” in protest of Chicago's dysfunctional public school system. They wear red T-shirts, and several are clad in the real-life protest T-shirts worn during the school closure protests and the teachers' strike during the 2012–13 school year. The audience soon claps and chants along: “There's no power like the power of the people and the power of the people don't stop” (clap, clap). Adult actors playing parents and teachers give speeches in between the chants. The kids in the ensemble try to speak, but the adults run right over them. By the end of the rally, the kids are standing off in a corner of the space, forlorn and ignored, while the adults yell on their behalf without ever asking for their perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The article focuses on two digital performances, "Ancient" and "How Are We," commissioned during the quarantined isolation in April and May 2020. Topics include the examination of these performances as repositories of feelings and emotions in response to the onset of social distancing due to COVID-19, the distinct approaches of "Ancient" and "How Are We" in representing collective coping, and the critical analysis of how these performances address ongoing traumas of racial injustice.

This article focuses explicitly on live theatrical performances as cultural products, using Every Single Day as a case study of the ways in which teenagers represent social antagonism in high school social systems. I will begin by establishing youth theatre performance products as cultural artifacts and vital sites for critical inquiry. Next, I will define social antagonism and use it as a theoretical lens through which to analyze Every Single Day and use it to deconstruct the ways teens construct their relationships to adult and institutional authority. I will then go on to examine adolescents' powers to regulate their immediate social norms and the ways in which Every Single Day represents bullying as a weapon of social antagonism in a larger class struggle. Finally, I will examine the play's happy ending as both an affirmation of the status quo and an animation of hopes for a more peaceful world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the debate between honoring the agency of the teller of personal stories and honoring the stories themselves as legitimate objects of critical inquiry. It takes an autoethnographic monologue of a woman who has recently experienced homelessness from zAmya Theatre Project’s community-based play Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup) as an extended case study and employs multiple existing models of analyzing autoethnographic performance, critiquing each model in turn, and assessing these methods in relationship to the desire to ethically analyze autoethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theatre of the Oppressed was conceived by Brazilian theatre director and theorist Augusto Boal as a 'rehearsal for revolution'; it hinges on participants' power to select material for inquiry and frame, shape, script, and perform stories of problems/oppressions in their own lives and communities. In a 12-week-long study I co-facilitated in the drama classroom of an urban charter school in the Autumn of 2007, six girls and two boys framed problems from their lives and communities, scripted and staged anti-model scenes, and performed a wide range of Forum interventions. As a facilitator, I struggled with the tension between my own desire to intervene in discourses in embedded assumptions I found problematic and my fears that by doing so, I would be colonising the workshop with my own privileged agenda. This article is about that struggle, and about the problem that popular positions and ideas are not necessarily progressive, and while Theatre of the Oppressed is usually utilised in support of politically progressive agendas, the work participants initiate and the choices they make do not automatically orient towards social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the ways in which a dominant “aesthetic of objectivity” (Denzin, 2003, p. 73) pervades much contemporary performance ethnography and scholarly performance text, subverting many scholars’ stated desires to use aesthetic forms to critique hegemonic discourses and democratize scholarship. First, I will define the dominant “aesthetic of objectivity” as it applies to performance ethnography and performance texts and trace its origins to mainstream documentary theatre performances. I will then examine how these conventions play out in an example of an explicitly scholarly performance project, and argue the significance of liveness in the scholarly performance act. Finally, I will offer a few examples of arts-based research performance projects operating in alternate aesthetic paradigms rupturing the “aesthetic of objectivity” and offer recommendations and further questions for arts-based researchers and scholars interested in experimenting with performance forms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]