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This article examines youth theatre as a mode of promoting public dialogue within situations of political tension or conflict. It reflects on the author's own experience of trying unsuccessfully to find a framework to evaluate an European Union supported theatre project, youth/art/peace/network, which took place in Austria, Israel and Palestine in the late 1990s. In the context of this reflection and the author's attempts to address the challenge of finding an evaluative framework and mode of analysis, the article combines a critical account of Habermas' notion of communicative reason inspired by Iris Marion Young with Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis. It argues that understanding drama practices in rhythmic terms provides potential for evaluating the complex spatio-temporal relationships the practices might have with everyday life. Through focusing on the presences and absences of particular people and things, such evaluation shows up the risks of performing a misleading or coerced state of health. The article suggests that the problem in this case was underpinned by a restrictive or exclusionary understanding of constructive dialogue at odds with participants' daily experience. However, the analysis also points more optimistically towards the potential of monologue and particular proxemics of co-presence in finding modes of performance to represent such experience.

How do you stage the world? This article reviews how a series of performance installations by the theatre company Stan's Cafe have approached global space. It examines the way "Plague Nation" and "Of All the People in All the World" tackle national and global scale through the representation of populations. Drawing on a discussion of cosmopolitanism by the geographer, David Harvey, the paper argues that the school versions of "Plague Nation" point towards a geographically rooted drama pedagogy for global citizenship. This pedagogy displays political and aesthetic features in common with Baz Kershaw's theorisation of "spectacles of deconstruction". The article concludes by exploring how the installations' own global travels might be understood as a practice of global citizenship. (Contains 2 figures.)

This article examines youth theatre as a mode of promoting public dialogue within situations of political tension or conflict. It reflects on the author's own experience of trying unsuccessfully to find a framework to evaluate an European Union supported theatre project, youth/art/peace/network, which took place in Austria, Israel and Palestine in the late 1990s. In the context of this reflection and the author's attempts to address the challenge of finding an evaluative framework and mode of analysis, the article combines a critical account of Habermas' notion of communicative reason inspired by Iris Marion Young with Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis. It argues that understanding drama practices in rhythmic terms provides potential for evaluating the complex spatio-temporal relationships the practices might have with everyday life. Through focusing on the presences and absences of particular people and things, such evaluation shows up the risks of performing a misleading or coerced state of health. The article suggests that the problem in this case was underpinned by a restrictive or exclusionary understanding of constructive dialogue at odds with participants' daily experience. However, the analysis also points more optimistically towards the potential of monologue and particular proxemics of co-presence in finding modes of performance to represent such experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do you stage the world? This article reviews how a series of performance installations by the theatre company Stan's Cafe have approached global space. It examines the way Plague Nation and Of All the People in All the World tackle national and global scale through the representation of populations. Drawing on a discussion of cosmopolitanism by the geographer, David Harvey, the paper argues that the school versions of Plague Nation point towards a geographically rooted drama pedagogy for global citizenship. This pedagogy displays political and aesthetic features in common with Baz Kershaw's theorisation of 'spectacles of deconstruction'. The article concludes by exploring how the installations' own global travels might be understood as a practice of global citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]