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This Autoethnographic article reflects on the author's experiences of being a leading facilitator in the field of Applied Theatre with older adults. Through analysis of their autoethnographic journals, which document a ten-year period, the author presents the most prominent trope, which is death and grief. This article creates an access point for the reader to understand how the presence of death and grief manifests within participatory practices with older people and examines themes such as participant grief, the facilitator's professional relationship with death/grief, anticipatory grief, death and grief resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief account of my journey to implement applied theater in an elective social work education course in New York City, encouraging creativity, risk-taking, and methods for challenging oppression. The experience described supported my process of becoming a creative educator and my pedagogy for teaching critical-radical social work. Critical social work incorporates dialogue and self-reflection to excavate the roots of dehumanization. Radical social work uproots dehumanizing (internal and external) ideologies and practices of dominance (e.g. racism, transphobia, colonialism, white supremacy). Theatre in social work education (TIS WE) an active experiential learning process sets the stage for bringing critical-radical social work education to life by incorporating aesthetic distance, liminal space, intersectionality and embodied practice, scaffolding, and radical imagination. These components develop awareness of micro to macro processes and consequences; and demand holistic problem solving of bio-psycho-social-cultural conundrums, epitomizing critical-radical social work pedagogy. After earning my PhD and becoming a professor, I felt competent as a scholar-activist. However, I developed my identity, designed my practice, and honed my skills as a creative educator while simultaneously playing the roles of student in the Master of Arts in Applied Theatre (MAAT) program and social work educator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African grade 10 history curriculum as outlined in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) requires learners to develop historical thinking skills that promote interpretation, analysis, and critical thinking competencies. One way of developing these skills is through revisiting historical events through reenactments to explore untold stories and develop historical empathy. However, reenactments can become sensational, one-sided events that lack the transformative power to offer varied versions of the events such as the Battle at Egazini and its key historical figures. The paper proposes reenactment for learning as an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on art exhibitions, history literature, and applied theatre techniques. The paper shows how these teaching tools actively and creatively engaged the learner-audiences in the reenactment of the 1819 Battle at Egazini between the amaXhosa and the British in Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown. The facilitators moved learner-audiences from four local schools beyond passive reenactment modes of engagement using games, pantsula dancing, facilitator-in-role, enrolling participants, and reflection exercises in one-hour workshops. The activities helped learners explore the relevance of colonial expansion and conquest themes within the Battle at Egazini context. The art-based interpretation framework also helped address misconceptions and cultivated an interest in wanting to know more about Makhanda, the war hero that the town is now named after. The paper argues for a creative and engaging pedagogy that helps learners make sense of broad topics. It contributes to current literature advocating for creative historical interpretation and teaching approaches in and outside the classroom space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts a day at Mexican writer, activist, educator, and performance artist Lia García's "elementary school": a "school" that takes the form of invited performances in other teachers' classrooms. It studies García's staging of an applied theatre workshop at an elementary school in November 2020 with her children's story Pan de Mia as its script. In an analysis of García's practice as a transfeminist artist and educator, I argue that García's emphasis on an affective education of culinary preparation in which children's capacity for consent is central offers a transfeminist lesson about children's right to bodily autonomy and consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay urges the field of applied theatre to extend its critical focus to examine how whiteness differentially shapes our institutional homes, scholarship, and creative practice. Drawing from Sara Ahmed's (2012) notion of 'institutional life', the essay takes readers into my academic home at the University of Missouri, a predominantly white public institution in the middle of the US, to examine my direction of a critical performance effort, The Revolutionists Project. Throughout the essay, I show how a wall of whiteness shaped the design of the performance project and, as such, worked to obstruct critical conversations about racism and institutional life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing evidence highlights the benefits and importance of discussing End-of-Life (EoL), yet many people struggle to talk openly about death and dying. This practice-based report details the development of Dying Matters, an applied theatre performance designed to encourage EoL conversations with loved ones. The combination of lived experience monologues and reflection activities appeared to provide an inspiring and supportive experience. The team observed many attendees actively taking moments during the performance to ponder and write their response to EoL preferences prompts. Further application of this work is recommended to engage a broader community and to enhance healthcare professional training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a profession committed to social change, social workers must engage in practices that encourage clients and communities to reflect on oppressive conditions to later envision and create new equitable and inclusive possibilities. Applied theatre, such as theatre of the oppressed, is an interactive theatrical approach that engages in ‘world-building’ across space, time, issues, and emotions. The embodied nature of applied theatre allows social workers, clients, and communities to imagine, dream, and practise new possibilities for social change. This paper offers a review of existing literature on applied theatre and theatre of the oppressed that promotes social justice and liberation in social work education and practice in the United States and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Latvian Song and Dance Celebration's 150th Anniversary (2023) offers a unique case study of community performance's capacity to express solidarity on a spectacular scale. This article argues that the choral concerts may be viewed as applied theatre given their historical and continuing expressions of political resistance, cultural resilience and community renewal. In 2023, the UNESCO listed Celebration incorporated 40,560 performers, around 500,000 in-person spectators and the world's largest choir of 16,500 singers. The mega-event invokes solidarity and spectacle's nested paradoxes amidst historic and continuing socio-political tensions and the Russo-Ukraine War (2014-) while simultaneously highlighting their powerfully affective impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores, based on hands‐on experience, how applied theatre may serve as a co‐creative mutually and actively negotiated—convivial—method of knowledge production in refugee‐receiving societies. In this article, we argue that it only makes sense to conceptually understand relational processes of how we manage to live together, and interrogate structural mechanisms of exclusion, if we also embrace a move towards relational and mutually and actively negotiated—in short, convivial—methods of knowledge production (cf. Merlín‐Escorza, 2024). However, despite increased interest, examples of methodological innovations and instructions on the how of co‐creative knowledge production “are more difficult to locate” (Shea, 2024, p. 2). Based on an applied theatre and research project, we discuss three distinct processes through which we think applied theatre can serve as a convivial co‐creative method. We make a case for creating and holding space for embodied, relational, negotiated knowledges to emerge and discuss conditions that can facilitate this.

Scholarship on African women has progressed from mainly focusing on royal women, political struggle heroines, and activists to include more stories of domestic workers, farmers, mothers, and daughters. Over time, feminist oral historians gradually moved from research with rigid traditional approaches to update their approaches to include creative methodologies that can enhance and extend interlocutor participation. Through a feminist lens, the paper articulates how a creative and alternative methodology extended interlocutor participation in the Umzi ka mama oral history project. The project explored unreported stories of seven African women who have owned family property in Fingo Village, Makhanda since pre-1994. The article explores how a multidisciplinary methodology spanning over three disciplines, history, drama and film, helped gather data using interviews, video, forum, play-back and image theatre inspired techniques. The results revealed how extended participation beyond oral history interviews presented more opportunities for shared authority and negotiations throughout the process. Additionally, the results show how accessible dissemination can be achieved. Although history, film and drama methods pair well together as cross-cutting approaches, there are disciplinary tensions that are embedded in multidisciplinary studies. The paper highlights these tensions to show why negotiation is a necessary part of multidisciplinary research.

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During the second half of the 2012–13 theatre season, we mapped all then-existing educational theatre practices in Hungary against a standardized set of criteria. We contacted a total of 298 institutions and observed 118 programmes in person. We aimed to map the complete picture, so we involved every programme that fitted our low-threshold criteria and responded to our inquiry. Presumably, we covered the entire Hungarian educational theatre sphere. For each programme, we collected data from six sources: children or youth participating in the programmes; teachers accompanying the participants; organizational contact persons; creators/performers of the programmes; observing of the programmes by independent observers; and secondary research on the internet. In 2023, we repeated part of this data collection. In this article, we present the methodology used for the mapping in detail since we believe it can serve as a model for similar mappings in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2022 Oberammergau Passion Play – a giant applied theatre project with almost 2000 participants, running for 110 performances over five months with a run time of over 5 hours – provides an opportunity to study how community participants use applied theatre's 'dead time': the unstructured, unfacilitated time between onstage appearances. This study argues that in the tight spaces backstage, participants talk, play and engage in acts of care and mentorship, imbuing the dead time with tremendous social value. In fact, much to the initial surprise of the authors, most participants described their interest in the project as being primarily anchored in this dead time, rather than the staged action. These findings leave us with many salient questions for the field of applied theatre, and more research will be needed across varying contexts to better understand how to mitigate the social risks of dead time while invigorating its community-building potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second half of the 2012–13 theatre season, we mapped all then-existing educational theatre practices in Hungary against a standardized set of criteria. We contacted a total of 298 institutions and observed 118 programmes in person. For each programme, we collected data from six sources: children or youth participating in the programmes; teachers accompanying the participants; organizational contact persons; creators/performers of the programmes; observing of the programmes by independent observers; and secondary research on the internet. In this article, we present an interpretative qualitative analysis of the findings. Covered areas include whether a programme could alter prejudice and bias, whether post-show workshops can find solutions to issues raised by theatre performances and whether participant children and youth can link performances and programmes to current Hungarian events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the final editorial of the current editors, Peter O'Connor and Kelly Freebody. In this editorial we introduce the articles in this edition which are an eclectic mix of articles representing the diversity and breadth of applied theatre practice globally. The articles draw on practice from India, Hungary, Australia, Germany, Sri Lanka and Türkiye. We also introduce the new editorial team, who will be editing the journal from 2025 and reflect on our time as editors, and the privilege it has been to work on the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the second half of the 2012–13 theatre season, we mapped all then-existing educational theatre practices in Hungary against a standardized set of criteria. We contacted a total of 298 institutions and observed 118 programmes in person. For each programme, we collected data from six sources: children or youth participating in the programmes; teachers accompanying the participants; organizational contact persons; creators/performers of the programmes; observing of the programmes by independent observers; and secondary research on the internet. In this article, we present the descriptive statistical analysis of the findings. Areas covered include the role and significance of educational theatre; programme financing; participants and programme admission; number and length of sessions; programme venues; strategies and interactivity; aims and objectives; impacts; opinions; and relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the Urban Drama Lab as a new manifestation of Urban Living Labs. We expand current debates concerning Urban Living Labs by contrasting and comparing them with knowledge and practices developed in the field of theatre and performance. This enables us to scrutinise the ways in which stakeholders, issues and interests are represented and, in extension, performed in Urban Living Labs. We argue that this is important for two reasons: (1) because the current focus of Urban Living Labs on offering a real-world testing ground for urban experimentation constitutes a specific way of representing and performing stakeholders, issues, and interests, but that (2) questions of representation are seldom explicitly addressed because Urban Living Labs are seen to offer direct access to the real-world in a presumably 'neutral' setting. The Urban Drama Lab foregrounds that Urban Living Labs can never be neutral and free from structures of power but that they can set up a frame in which these structures can be scrutinised, assessed and possibly remodelled and rearranged. We conclude that the Urban Drama Lab might enable a fuller understanding of how the Urban Living Lab may address not only complex urban challenges, but also how it might also engage better with the power relations, contestations, conflicts and politics that are often at the core of these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an examination of In-Common Sites, conducted with young people to investigate their relationship with Mousehold Heath in Norwich, this article considers the possibilities of performance to not UK, only represent a spatially defined urban common but also to enact a commons. It is argued that performance is a generative social practice: the ecological potential of both performance and commoning practices lies in their shared commitments to participation, collaboration, and interaction among people and their environments. Starting from the sensory and affective encounters between body and environment, I reflect on contested and entangled acts of human and more-than-human interconnection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes how Applied Theatre in creative workshops for persons with learning disabilities came to facilitate the development of a method for promoting self-determination through actualisation of empowerment. The study explores the lived experiences of self-determination in residents living in group homes, through co-creative processes of method development. The presented experiences are bi-findings to the original intent, resulting from an occurring process when urged to interview the institutionalised bearer of everyday oppression—The House—by using roleplay. This activity converted into a game, which when analysed, shed light upon fundamental elements underpinning a method for promoting self-determination. Self-determination is a human right, which allows all to make own decisions and live in line with own taste. Persons with learning disabilities in group homes often experience low self-determination. In the study the participant's tended to speak about the group-home as if the House itself was alive, and had power to decide over the residents. We used roleplay to interview the House and co-created a game to enhance empowerment. The game contributed in changing the participant's attitudes, from holding back to standing up for oneself. Working with theatre provided possibilities to experiment on alternative forms of action. Since we were just playing, the participants could allow themselves more. They could take lead of their own processes, and develop their own path at their own pace. Such creative group-work can thereby be a method to promote self-determination for persons with learning disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on a twenty-year relationship of short-term interventions with Dalit communities living in informal settlements, sub-cities and urban villages in Mumbai, that have sought to create public theatre events based on research by and with communities that celebrate, problematise and interrogate sustainable urban living. In looking back over the developments and changes to our working methods in Mumbai, I explore how the projects priorities the roles of the community as both researchers and artists. I consider where a specific applied theatre project, which focuses on site specific storytelling with Dalit communities in Worli Koliwada and Dharavi, functions on a continuum of interactive, participatory, and emancipatory practice, research and performance. Applied Theatre practices should not and cannot remain static, they need to be constantly reformed and as practitioners and researchers we need to constantly re-examine the ways in which we work. This chapter poses two central questions: firstly, can this long-term partnership between practitioners, researchers and artists from the UK and India working with community members genuinely be a space for co-creating knowledge and theatre? And secondly, if so, is this Theatre-based Research or Research Based Theatre? I interrogate Applied Theatre's potential to create a space of cognitive justice, which must be the next step for applied theatre, along-side its more widely accepted aims of searching for social and spatial justice and which places the community as both artists and researchers. The Dalit social reality is one of oppression, based on three axes: social, economic and gender. The chapter explores how working as co-researchers and the public performance of their stories has been a form of 'active citizenship' for these participants and is a key part of their strategy in their demand for policy changes. In looking forward I ask how working in international partnerships with community members can promote cognitive justice and go beyond a merely participatory practice. I consider why it is vital for the field that applied theatre practice includes partners from both the global south and north working together to co-create knowledge, new methods of practice to ensure an applied theatre knowledge democracy. In doing so I will discuss if and how this work might be considered to be Theatre-based Research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health crisis is on the rise for young people, while suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people worldwide. Theatre-based approaches have been used to encourage social connection and emotional support. This scoping review seeks to map the current landscape of theatre-based suicide prevention programmes for young people, explore programme implementations and youth involvement and examine how evidence is shared. Twelve articles detailed theatre-based suicide prevention programmes delivered to youth. Practitioners and researchers have an optimistic view of the positive impact of immersive experiences created by theatre-based approaches for reducing suicide risk. To optimize theatre-based programmes to promote mental well-being among youth, further research is needed to evaluate effectiveness at promoting help-seeking and reducing social stigma related to mental health. Interdisciplinary teams can collaborate on findings, innovate solutions to challenges and share best practices in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from a research project that sought to map knowledge exchange movements in student led projects delivered as part of a final year module of the Applied Theatre and Community Drama BA Hons course, Theatre for Democracy and Advocacy, at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). As a practice, Theatre for Democracy attempts to create cultural spaces and activities that engender and promote dialogue between decision makers and the people they represent, with a view to influencing change, and since 2011 over 50 of these student led projects have been delivered at LIPA. This research sought to understand the ways in which knowledge is produced and shared through this process of practitioner training. The research mobilised a facet methodology, a mixed methods approach that allows different lenses or frames to speak to a central question, specifically engaging with the projects through observation, conversation, and documentation. This article narrates a unique model of applied theatre training that creatively brings together students, communities, and the decision makers in the public sector that act on behalf of those communities, naming some of the ways in which knowledge(s) can be created and shared through such student led projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text presents a novel experience in a university in the University of Granada (Andalusia, Spain) aimed at facilitating learning from the potential of the arts and applied theatre through the creation of a space open to the university and non-university community. The description and analysis of this experience as a case study shows us that the arts in Higher Education are presented as a disruptive element that can challenge the rules and logics of time, space, relationship, and learning established in universities. In dialogue with Foucault's or Santos' ideas, in this text we propose this experience as one in which art subverts the logics of neoliberal production of knowledge, presenting pedagogical actions and solutions that are more committed to social justice and to the value of the arts as a way of knowing our closest reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the often-crucial roles played by music within theatre-based public health promotion strategies, theoretical explorations regarding music within applied theatre literatures remain largely underdeveloped. This article highlights musicking – a reconceptualization of music from an object to a participatory act that can profoundly influence relationships and spaces – as an approach to understanding the various roles that music can play within applied theatre programmes. The article draws from ethnographic accounts of an HIV/AIDS applied theatre group in South Africa to advocate for increased recognition of musicking as a robust theoretical and methodological component within applied theatre praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances transdisciplinarity as a potentially useful applied theatre theory and method. It maps the ways transdisciplinary research principles informed and framed an applied theatre project and suggests that making applied theatre explicit rather than implicit as a transdisciplinary research process may help practitioners conceptualise and manage projects. In our case, it also increased our ability to contribute to second-order (systemic) change. I argue that applied theatre was always-already transdisciplinary research but articulating this alignment may be helpful to both practice and analysis. The project presented here implemented applied theatre in a university-community partnership addressing youth justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applied theatre extends beyond traditional performance and entertainment, using theatrical techniques to address social issues and engage communities. In this paper, we emphasise the importance of a socially and politically engaged approach to Applied Theatre (AT) using Paulo Freire's and Augusto Boal's works as primary references to support transformational change and bring about social resistance. A small-scale case study was carried out with participants and collaborators of Estopô Balaio, a collective theatre group in Brazil that has worked for over a decade with a community in a deprived peripheral neighbourhood, Jardim Romano, in São Paulo. Key findings highlight the concept of feasibility in AT, where the collective's efforts overflowed with possibilities for change and empowerment by embracing its residents as collaborators and agents of change in their realities, being thinkers, makers, and citizens through continuous work instead of isolated actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article analyses the implementation of a theatrical performance for the prevention of micro-chauvinism violence and the promotion of equality created by vocational training students and aimed at secondary school students. Using a qualitative research methodology based on case studies and the use of narratological and semiotic models of theatrical reception, this work focuses on analysing the acting roles of the characters who represent situations of micro-chauvinism in adolescence, and understanding the theatrical performative characteristics of the artistic work. The results allow us to draw conclusions about the advantages of theatre applied to education to diagnose the current situation of youth micro-chauvinism; the orchestration of teaching with a gender perspective through the dramatization of micro-chauvinism among young adolescents; and the choreographies of learning for the promotion of gender equality through theatre applied to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life of an actor is an unpredictable one. For all the exhilarating highs – securing an agent, landing a role, a friendly house on opening night – there are countless lows, with fierce competition, limited opportunities, and frequent rejection a constant reality. New scholarship has emerged suggesting the cumulative effect of these lows is taking its toll on actors to a degree that can no longer be ignored, and that more must be done to prepare and support them throughout their careers. This article explores existing tensions surrounding the training and practice of actors, before considering the example of the Starlight Children's Foundation, an Australian not-for-profit organisation that employs and trains actors to perform in an unorthodox environment, with compelling results. In doing so, this article invites a re-examination of prevailing tensions and prejudices concerning the work of actors and argues for a consideration of the contribution that extratheatrical employment might make to future training models, in order to aid actors in achieving greater balance in their working lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular body hair removal. The analysis shows how playfulness is an ambiguous feature enacted together with bodies, affects and materialities. Moreover, playfulness became both a restricting and a transformative force reproducing the already known while also opening up a critical approach of playing with the violent aspects of hair removal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Due to the scarcity of research on the benefits of theatresports for youth, this study examined the outcomes of theatresports as a means to implement positive education in youth work settings. Methods To this end, qualitative research was conducted with 92 participants in a theatresports program. Thematic analysis was applied to analyze the participants’ experiences of the program, using the framework of positive education. Results Results showed that the processes and practices of the theatresports program helped the participants achieved well-being in terms of various domains namely positive emotions, positive health, positive relationships, positive engagement, positive accomplishment, and positive meaning. These capabilities and qualities acquired helped them achieve well-being, and the learning acquired from the program could even be applied to daily life situations and deal with the challenges. Conclusions This shows that the theatresports program manifests the benefits of positive education. Corresponding implications were discussed.

We offer a case study of a long-running Aotearoa New Zealand-based applied theatre programme, Everyday Theatre. As both academics and Everyday Theatre practitioners, we explore how the programme addresses the aspirations of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.2, which is centred on eliminating violence towards children. Our reflections are informed by the qualitative data collected in our ongoing discussions as facilitators, our reflective journals, teacher evaluations of the programme, and a series of collaborative research workshops. We investigate the role and place of the drama conventions of teacher-in-role, pre-text, aesthetics, and framing. They are potent constituents of participatory theatre practice that can provoke both students and teachers to collaboratively conceptualise themselves and each other as active, responsible, critical, and empathetic agents for social change. These explorations throw light on how applied theatre practice can form small but significant contributions to engendering opportunities for students and teachers to consider how they could change their own future narratives, creating more socially cohesive local communities, and, in this way, addressing SDG 16.2. Cover image: photo by WOKANDAPIX on Pixabay

Shimella ('stork' in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella's performances, and the political aspect of Shimella's performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community's desired future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]