Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response presents a combined analysis and workbook to examine "socially engaged performance." It offers a range of key practical approaches, exercises, and principles for using performance to engage in a variety of social and artistic projects. Author

Jan Cohen-Cruz draws on a career of groundbreaking research and work within the fields of political, applied, and community theatre to explore the impact of how differing genres of theatre respond to social "calls."

Areas highlighted include:

playwrighting and the engaged artist

theatre of the oppressed

performance as testimonial

the place of engaged art in cultural organizing

the use of local resources in engaged art

revitalizing cities and neighborhoods through engaged performance

training of the engaged artist.

Cohen-Cruz also draws on the work of major theoreticians, including Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Doreen Massey, as well as analyzing in-depth case studies of the work of US practitioners today to illustrate engaged performance in action.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is the author of Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US; the editor of Radical Street Performance; co-editor, with Mady Schutzman, of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion; and a University Professor at Syracuse University.

Reviews

'Cohen-Cruz has been a dominant force in the field and her diverse experience is threaded through as examples throughout this book… It is difficult to think of someone more embedded in all aspects of community performance scholarship and practice.' - Rebecca Caines, Performance Paradigm

‘Jan Cohen-Cruz’s latest book offers an approach to community art that is distinguished not by its technique or amateurism, but by the level of its engagement with the people most affected by the subject matter ork. Cohen-Cruz argues that organizational skill and activist competence are a crucial, though undervalued, component of community art. The cases presented in the book, all from the US, interestingly tell the reader about the processes that led to the final production, and discuss problems that were encountered by the performance groups.’ – Sruti Bala, Theatre Research International

Contents

Introduction Kinship among Engaged Performance Practices Purposes for Writing this Book Book Organization: Centers of Gravity of Engaged Performance Chapter 1. Playwrighting: Putting Plays to Use 1.1 Brecht’s Intellectually Active Spectator 1.2Kushner’s Magical Epic Theatre Angels in the Context of a Social Movement The Post-Social Movement Life of Angels 1.3 Community-Informed Adaptations 1.4 The Unfaithful Disciple 1.5 Workbook: Situating Plays for Social Engagement Chapter 2. Specta(c)ting: Theatre of the Oppressed, Orthodoxy and Adaptation 2.1 The System of Theatre of t...