This edited collection engages with both identity and specific time-limited notions in performance: textual, embodied, visual, and communal.
Each chapter of Socially Engaged Creative Practice focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem.
The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.
Each chapter of Socially Engaged Creative Practice focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem.
The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.
Table of Contents
List of figures
Abstracts
Introduction
Kate Aughterson and Jess Moriarty
SECTION ONE: CHANGING THEATRES
1. In Our Sites: A Personal View of the Writer’s Role in Place-Making Theatre with, by, and for Communities
Sara Clifford
2. Dramatizing Recent History: The Bombing of the Grand Hotel
Julie Everton
3. Thoughts on Appropriation – Collaboration for Silkmoth
Eleanor Knight
4. Disremembered Cabaret Histories
Al Meggs
5. Representation and Collective Creation: The Work of Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Arts UK
Laura Hanna
SECTION TWO: TAKING TO THE STREETS
6. Disorientation, Creativity, and Performance in Liminal Spaces: A Case Study of a Writer in Residence at Heathrow Airport and Oval Underground Station
Dawn Hart
7. Conversations between Borders: Cyclical Thinking and Alternative Worlds
Emily Orley
8. Extinction Rebellion and Performance Activism on the Streets of London
Marisa Carnesky
9. Making Community from Mess: Mapping the Santiago de Cuba Carnival and the Carnivalesque of My Research Journey Through Poetry
Yvonne Canham-Spence
SECTION THREE: TRANSFORMING SPACES AND STORIES
10. Holding Queer Space/Holding Space Queerly: Lockdown Reflections on Queer Performance and Community
Ess Grange and Mal Parry
11. You’ll Never Forget, I’ll Never Remember. You’ll Never Remember, I’ll Never Forget
Rachel Dean, Marie Hallager Andersen, and Daliah Touré
12. Preserving Fruit: Using Oral History to Preserve Stories of Black British History and the Transatlantic Journeys from Which Our Traditions Have Emerged
Veneta Roberts
SECTION FOUR: OPENING UP INSTITUTIONS
13. Beyond The Room
Marina Castledine
14. Monsters and Campfires: Using Storytelling to Humanize Institutional Spaces
Finlay McInally and Jess Moriarty
15. The Clothes on Our Backs: Diversifying the Curriculum
Tony Kalume and Jess Moriarty
Notes on Contributors
Abstracts
Introduction
Kate Aughterson and Jess Moriarty
SECTION ONE: CHANGING THEATRES
1. In Our Sites: A Personal View of the Writer’s Role in Place-Making Theatre with, by, and for Communities
Sara Clifford
2. Dramatizing Recent History: The Bombing of the Grand Hotel
Julie Everton
3. Thoughts on Appropriation – Collaboration for Silkmoth
Eleanor Knight
4. Disremembered Cabaret Histories
Al Meggs
5. Representation and Collective Creation: The Work of Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Arts UK
Laura Hanna
SECTION TWO: TAKING TO THE STREETS
6. Disorientation, Creativity, and Performance in Liminal Spaces: A Case Study of a Writer in Residence at Heathrow Airport and Oval Underground Station
Dawn Hart
7. Conversations between Borders: Cyclical Thinking and Alternative Worlds
Emily Orley
8. Extinction Rebellion and Performance Activism on the Streets of London
Marisa Carnesky
9. Making Community from Mess: Mapping the Santiago de Cuba Carnival and the Carnivalesque of My Research Journey Through Poetry
Yvonne Canham-Spence
SECTION THREE: TRANSFORMING SPACES AND STORIES
10. Holding Queer Space/Holding Space Queerly: Lockdown Reflections on Queer Performance and Community
Ess Grange and Mal Parry
11. You’ll Never Forget, I’ll Never Remember. You’ll Never Remember, I’ll Never Forget
Rachel Dean, Marie Hallager Andersen, and Daliah Touré
12. Preserving Fruit: Using Oral History to Preserve Stories of Black British History and the Transatlantic Journeys from Which Our Traditions Have Emerged
Veneta Roberts
SECTION FOUR: OPENING UP INSTITUTIONS
13. Beyond The Room
Marina Castledine
14. Monsters and Campfires: Using Storytelling to Humanize Institutional Spaces
Finlay McInally and Jess Moriarty
15. The Clothes on Our Backs: Diversifying the Curriculum
Tony Kalume and Jess Moriarty
Notes on Contributors