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London's Clean Break Theatre Company was founded in 1979 by two incarcerated women as an issue-based company devoted to "touring plays that revealed the struggles faced by women in prison" ("Our Story"). Over the past forty-five years, Clean Break has expanded the scope of its dramatic inquiry to focus not exclusively on women's incarceration but also more broadly on women's enmeshment in the carceral state. I argue that two Clean Break commissions translate the hard-to-conceptualize relationship between prison and the larger carceral state into a theatrical idiom that audiences can see, sense, and feel. In these plays – Winsome Pinnock's Mules (1996) and Lucy Kirkwood's it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (2009) – I discover four specific, shared dramaturgical strategies. These elements, which I term carceral dramaturgy, cooperate to stage the dramatic protagonists as trapped within a punitive network of sites and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes to a forum that discusses how publics can be studied within a global framework, specifically staging done by content creator Kedar Nath Das Gupta to present Indian culture to British and American audiences between 1907 to 1942, and how this helped to foster interculturalism.

While co-authorship was common practice in early modern drama, poetological treatises remain silent about it. They speak about the poet but not about collaboration. It is, hence, one of the aims of this article to arrive at conceptualisations of co-authorship through immanent reflections of co-creativity and authorial interaction. In particular, we will show that stylistic practices form an essential part of such reflections, which also helps us dissociate style from the identification of individual authorship. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, or Love Lies A-Bleeding have been chosen to show how juxtapositions and adaptations of style in both single-authored and co-authored works reveal practices of collaboration in early modern theatre. As a result of our investigation, elements of a poetics of collaborative playwriting will emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enrich characterisation and bond with audiences, Jacobethan playwrights included Classical tags, Bible verses and vernacular quotations in their work. Borrowings from other plays were particularly effective: a line of dialogue could 'go viral' straight from the stage. This verbal network, linking hundreds of early modern plays by one-liners, names and catchphrases, can now be investigated through the WordWeb-IDEM database, which contains over ten thousand text extracts that quote each other. The part of John Marston in this dramatic intertextuality is as yet under-researched. He saturated his writing with others' words extensively and idiosyncratically; tracing these overlaps with Marston's unwitting 'collaborators' richly illustrates the research potential offered by the WordWeb-IDEM corpus and its search options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the creation and reception of The Stream You Step In, a digital series co-produced by Outside the March for University of Windsor students and performed live over Zoom in 2020. While Zoom is assumed to be a care-less medium, we argue that it offers new, altered modes of caring through its disruption of boundaries and de-hierarchisation of many theatrical and training norms. Combining reflections on dramaturgy, directing, and pedagogy with empirical data on audience reception, we suggest how the lessons of pandemic performances might benefit our in-person classrooms and stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From roughly 1930 to 1950, newsreel theaters played important roles in urban and film cultures. These small (200- to 600-seat) theaters showed hour-long loops of news that patrons could drop into from morning to midnight. Some aspects of the newsreel theater experience extended the rituals of nickelodeon spectatorship of earlier decades, and others predated the post–World War II development of television news consumption. Newsreel theaters allowed patrons to pass the time watching motion picture news, and they became politically charged spaces offering ways for people to watch and react vocally to the news in public as members of groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives a brief account of the two-hundred-year-old performance history of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle; this is followed by a discussion of Gertrude as portrayed in nine English or English-speaking Hamlets at Elsinore, beginning with Olivier and the Old Vic in 1937 and concluding with Cape Town Theatre Company eighty-five years later, in 2022. The article discusses different aspects of how Gertrude (as seen through the prism of these particular Hamlet productions) has been portrayed on stage, drawing attention to the fact that, particularly in productions with a star actor in the title role, Gertrude has often been neglected, ignored or marginalised by the director, or else objectified and sexualised for the benefit of the audience: aged down, dumbed down or otherwise commodified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a close reading of audience member reflections of A Simpl Twist of Faith, a Canadian play that uses community-engaged theatre practices and site-specific dramaturgy. What can we as scholars, researchers, and artists learn from long-form audience responses? How does site, time, identity, and community infiltrate and overlap in this play? By centering audience reflections, this article offers a critical case-study in ethnographic audience research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses netnographic research methods, as a form of olfactory sensory mining, to investigate the smell-based experiences of audience members at Punchdrunk's Sleep No More (2011). In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the field of theatre audience research, as well as intervening in archival questions surrounding the documentation of ephemeral, olfactory, experiences. It problematizes the supposedly ephemeral nature of scents in relation to the supposed ephemerality of the live performance experience and, thus, also extends research on Punchdrunk's works by suggesting the potential the olfactory has for triggering the re-immersive experience. This article lays new groundwork for how theatre researchers can study the relationship between the live-performance experience and smell, as well as signalling the need for further olfactory sensory mining in the field of audience studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theater collectives address different topics and have unique ways of creating theater. They also have a role of "playing according to the field" approach that contrasts with traditional approaches like "theater for the people" and "theater for art." These characteristics challenge the old, established examples of theater and are commonly referred to as 'autonomous theater'. The subsidized or unsubsidized theaters usually perform in large, crowded halls for general theater audiences, also known as the audience of the masses. In contrast, these new avant-garde artistic collectives are restricted to performing in their own small venues for specific audiences. They evoke a struggle between the old and established on one hand, and the new and seeking to find a place for themselves on the other, on their stages. The new theater scene is emerging, in small venues with audiences ranging from 30-70 people. These theaters aim to present diverse narratives on topics such as "fringe, new political, LGBT, immigrant issues, disadvantaged groups". Despite being a semi-professional feminist theater group established in 2000, Theatre Boyalı Kuş does not describe itself as a direct "women's theater". Theatre Boyalı Kuş was founded by Jale Karabekir and Zeynep Kaçar, graduates of the Istanbul University Department of Theater Criticism and Dramaturgy. The company took serious steps towards institutionalization with the later addition of Burçak Karaboğa and Duygu Erdoğan. Contrary to what is claimed, Theatre Boyalı Kuş is not a structure that only houses women. It is a group that aims to change the perception of male dominance in theater, by also involving men in their performances but prioritizing female voices in the decision-making mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article casts a spotlight on Khashabi Theatre, one of several independent Palestinian venues in Haifa. It explores Khashabi's dramaturgical–performative discourse with ghosts, and thereby examines how it produces a 'dual presence' of Palestinian urbanism: the ghostly presence of victims of history who were uprooted from the city, and the presence of the contemporary community that, by converging at the theatre, plays a key part in the revival of urban leisure culture. The article discusses the particular location of the theatre in the city and the dramaturgical characteristics of the two plays staged in the first season. It also examines the objects and the actors' bodies as elements that evoke and conjure up ghosts, and shows how artistic practice, which allows alternative places to be established, plays a key role in the struggle for the 'right to the city', which is also the struggle for the 'right of return'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his writings on aesthetics, Jacques Rancière argues that Rousseau’s criticism of the theater in The Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theater is significant because it calls into question the possibility of the uniform transmission of the artist’s knowledge to the spectator. Despite this important point, Rancière largely adopts the commonly accepted reading of the Letter that Rousseau finds the theater politically pernicious because it separates and isolates audience members, turning them into passive spectators. According to this reading, Rousseau proposes to replace the theater with the ethical immediacy of the festival. Situating the Letter in its historical context and reading it with Rancière to argue against his own reading, I challenge this interpretation. I argue that for Rousseau the theater is problematic because as a spectacle that calls attention to its difference from what it represents, it invites the spectators to actively engage with the performance, preventing the uniform transmission of the artist’s ideas to the spectators. For Rousseau, this democratic potential of the theatrical spectacle transforms it from a possible means of moral instruction to a risk to the existing social order, which relies on a distinction between those who should instruct and those who should be instructed. Insofar as the spectators refuse to act as passive recipients of knowledge and do something they are not supposed to do, including taking part in the idle pleasures of the rich and judging the quality of the plays, they reconfigure the distribution of the sensible. Rousseau’s alternatives to the theater, the marriage ball and the public festival, seek to close off this possibility by carefully concealing their representational status. By presenting the representations of an “ideal” community as the immediate expressions of the community’s truth, these spectacles achieve, or so Rousseau hopes, what the theater fails to do, the effective delivery of moral instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the hardest things to convey to present-day readers of modernist drama is the power it had to shock turn-of-the-century audiences. Defining shock as a "structure of feeling" (Raymond Williams) that was pursued in especially teachable ways by the modernist "play of ideas," this essay shares a set of pedagogical strategies for helping students to feel this shock while also reflecting on the political implications of an art committed to shock. Among these teaching strategies are two attempts to set this "terrible art" (G. B. Shaw) in new, revealing contexts: (1) comparing the modernist theater to non-theatrical practices that attach ideas to structures of feeling besides shock, and (2) pairing modernist plays that "shock" their audience in pursuit of a feminist politics with contemporary plays that "destroy the audience" (Young Jean Lee) in pursuit of an anti-racist politics. The result is not to lionize shock as a universal ideal, but to explore it as a tactic—useful in some settings, harmful in others; always distributing its benefits and its costs unevenly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most authorship disputes are between rival authors, between two or more writers for whom there is conflicting evidence within the works themselves, or conflicting testimony from others about who exactly composed what. The Shakespeare Authorship Question, however, is quite different. It is based on assumptions about the supposed author’s life, on a stunning absence of testimony by people who actually knew him, as well as silence by the author himself. That is, the traditional attribution is based on a lack of direct knowledge. Despite centuries of intense research and investigation, no credible evidence from his actual lifetime has emerged linking Will Shakspere of Stratford to the illustrious dramatic canon of the author who wrote under the pseudonym William Shakespeare. One major aspect of this search has been attempts by scholars to find individuals among Shakspere’s family, friends, and co-workers who spoke of him as a writer. It turns out that no one who lived and worked during the Stratford man’s dates ever did. Nor did he or any member of his family or his descendants ever claim that he was a writer. There is simply no contemporary record of anyone mentioning him in connection with playwriting. Even among the few literary men who were personally acquainted with him – poet and playwright Michael Drayton and historian William Camden to name two -- neither ever mentioned him as a writer in their accounts of prominent men from the county of Warwickshire. Other residents of the Stratford area -- some of whom were quite familiar with the London theatrical scene -- never referred to him at all, much less as a dramatist. This included the theatergoer Edward Pudsey and the poet and playwright Fulke Greville, also Warwickshire residents. Dr. John Hall, who married Shakspere’s daughter Susanna in 1607, practiced medicine in Stratford for 30 years and wrote about his most interesting patients, never mentioned his father-inlaw as a writer. This absence of direct knowledge and this absence of living testimony is unique in the history of authorship disputes. This article looks in detail at the silences of those around the Stratford man, people who should have mentioned his writing but didn’t, and ask what part such silence should play in knowledge formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the use of modern technology for teaching about the theater experience. She mentions the availability of livestreamed productions of William Shakespeare's plays, the use of online chat as a modern equivalent to audience response to the performance, and includes a group of resources for starting online discussions.

This paper analyses the use of proximal deixis in Mercury's prologue to Plautus' Amphitruo. The study revolves around the referential ambiguity that characterizes proximal deictics such as here and this city , arguing that it contributes significantly to the blurred distinction between reality and fiction that is typical for Plautine theatre, and for his prologues in particular. The paper shows (1) that proximal deictics play a crucial role in Mercury's creation of and transition into the fictional world; (2) that their unique referential features during audience address enable Mercury to transform the spectators' surroundings in addition to his own; and (3) that their use underlines the similarity between Rome and fictional Thebes, which is subsequently connected to the Greek setting of Plautus' plays and their performance during Roman festivals. Moreover, the paper claims that Mercury partly relies on proximal deixis for the inductive effect of his prologue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research-based Theater (RbT) is shaped by both the form of theater, as an embodied, gestural, spatial, imaginative multi-dimensional art form, and traditions of research surrounding knowledge production, specifically qualitative research. When ethical tensions and questions arise in RbT they are often framed as a dichotomy, such as the ways aesthetic or artistic interests of creating a compelling piece of theater for audiences contrast with responsibilities to research. By drawing on the frame of an aesthetic of relationality, and an example from my work as an RbT playwright from the project Cracked: new light on dementia, I consider the ways both theater and research might be more clearly aligned. This includes how relational and aesthetic accountabilities can offer an important foundation for considering how RbT might be rooted in caring practices and might influence theater-making and the traditions of scientific research more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychodrama conducted under a traditional face-to-face setting relies heavily on the presence of a physical stage and an audience. However, despite this need, psychodrama conducted through teletherapy is possible but must find methods to complement standard psychodrama techniques so that the therapy may be conducted virtually. This paper explores these techniques and how they are adapted through visualization, a virtual safe space, and guidance from the therapist who helps adapt the techniques in an online individual therapeutic setting. Moreover, immigrants may suffer at greater rates of mental distress as they try to adjust to their new target culture, finding it difficult to adapt. They may need therapy, but the linguistic hurdle of performing it in a foreign language may also discourage them. Therein, this paper explores how individual psychodrama conducted through therapy may be applied to immigrant communities and explores such teletherapy through study cases applied to immigrants who have moved to English-speaking countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research aimed at finding out the psycho dramatic issues and its effect on he production in theater show. The sample of the study is The hope rising by the director Sameer khawaldeh. The study dealt with issues of anxiety, fear, deprivation and isolation, in addition to other therapeutic issues in theatrical directing. The research also used descriptive analytical method for the shot scenes in the play which was presented in The eleventh festival for Jordanian Children's Theater. The outcomes of the study showed a positive influence of these issues on theatrical directing and its development as essential ones in theater show. It also showed that these issues had influential power over theatrical directing methods as an effective therapeutic style. The researcher recommended theatrical directors to follow the psychodrama issues and to employ them in their artistic and dramatic works on the local and Arabian level alltogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on H.G. Pélissier, a theatrical satirist, composer, and impresario active in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It highlights Pélissier's pioneering role in challenging theatrical censorship and his contributions to the concert party and burlesque forms. The article explores his career as an impresario and the impact of his innovative productions on breaking down social and critical barriers in the theater audience of that time.

This essay reads John Cage's early, pre-'chance' compositions, along with the music of Morton Feldman, through Gertrude Stein's landscape theatre poetics. Stein's account in her 1934 'Plays' lecture of the demands traditional theatre makes on audience members and her interest in a different, looser relation between audience and onstage action informs my discussion of Cage and Feldman. 'Landscape', in Stein's sense, identifies the continuing thread throughout this music: compositional time as a container for loosely related musical material, permitting multiple kinds of continuity and attention. Yet there is a significant tension between Stein's emphasis on the primacy of relation within a staged landscape and Cage's own writing about his music. I argue that listening to the music of these composers through Stein can usefully call into question an enduring reading of Cage 'at his word': namely, that his project (and that of his New York School contemporaries) was to free individual sounds of associations, meaning, and expressivity, allowing them to 'be themselves'. Listening to Feldman and early Cage alongside Stein's writing offers a different perspective, one that points towards subsequent experimental music practices explicitly engaged with the social and relational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines public performances of official national day celebrations in Ankara during the early period of the Republic. As studying only one actor within a single conceptual framework of national day celebrations would be insufficient to depict the complex nature of social practices, this study argues that national day celebrations inherently incorporate simultaneously and reciprocally performed layers within the public sphere. This study considers the celebration spaces, which are the physical theater of events, as being a part of a network of material and spiritual tools that are utilized to improve the celebration performance and increase the enjoyment of the audience, while also considering the socio-spatial codes that control the masses and the celebration of mise-en-scene. This article uses three intertwined themes: the mobilization of the masses; the promotion of technological development and technical exhibition; and the circulation of the founding images and narratives, to introduce and discuss public performance in Ankara. The study concludes by suggesting that the interaction of these themes with each other explains the consent culture, nation-building strategies, and performative forms of publicity, that occurred during national day performances of the early period of the Republic of Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Going to drive-ins became a popular pastime in Cape Town during the 1960s and 1970s, although most were restricted to white audiences. Towards the end of this period, however, the arrival of television and emerging cinemas in 'Coloured' areas pushed white cinema owners throughout the city to apply for permits for mixed-race audiences and to transform the white-only status of their venues. This article focuses on drive-ins, an overlooked dimension of South African cinema history, and proposes that these venues are an important lens through which to examine the racial politics of cinema during apartheid, particularly from the late 1970s. As spaces that contrasted with the homogeneity of walled cinemas and their urban audiences, the drive-in became both a symbol of segregation in the city and a placeholder for transition. The opening-up of all Cape Town's drive-ins in 1980 signalled new commercial horizons of non-racial audiences, making desegregation a popular buzzword and revealing the complex dynamics of racial integration before the end of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For left cultural activism, 'theatre' forms an important 'worksite of democracy' which allows theatre activists to provide creative intervention within the existing 'field of forces'. Cultural organizations and theatre groups of the Left – like the Delhi-based Jana Natya Manch (People's Theatre Forum) offer a critique of neo-liberalism through theatre. First performed in the year 2000, the street play Nahi Qubool (Unacceptable) was designed to expose neo-liberal policies undertaken by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. The play continued to be performed even after a change of government with suitable modifications for changed circumstances. This genealogy of performance demonstrates the contours of politics and activist performances in contemporary India. It reveals that theatre as a 'laboratory for democracy' can also perform a diagnostic role to enhance the effectiveness of political strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, drawing on the case study of Kolkata-based blind theatre groups Blind Opera (est. 1995) and Anyadesh (lit. 'a different country', est. 2006), I argue that performance can effectively provide embodied care to oppressed individuals and their communities in the Global South— united by poverty, lack of state support, infrastructural inaccessibility and other intersectional factors. Blind Opera, and Anyadesh have done pioneering work in exploring theatre as medium for care for the visually impaired. The essay looks at the work of these two groups as one instance among many in the Indian context, where in recent years, theatre or performance has emerged as a major site for dispensing care in marginal communities afflicted by systemic neglect, exploitation, oppression or conflict. Focusing particularly on the practice that has evolved at Blind Opera and Anyadesh, I try to untangle some of the core principles. I identify and explore two key vernacular conceptual categories Ashray and Shushrusha (care/willingness to listen) that have been central to embodied care-practice in the two groups. Discussing Blind Opera and Anyadesh's work as an instance of marginal embodied care practice in the Global South, I argue, provides a critical counter weight to prevalent Eurocentric and universalist discourse around applied theatre or performative care practices. It is an equally important intervention within discourse around disability and performance which has hitherto focused mostly on examples from Anglo-American or European context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth-century Broadway stages and US vaudeville circuits boasted numerous successful performers, costumiers, producers and directors who understood that their luxurious costumes were crucial to a production's success because they supported the show's narrative and the performer's personal brand. Costumes were themselves "actors" that performed via an actress's body to reflect the social, cultural and economic landscapes they inhabited, spinning tales of notoriety, extravagance and celebrity that proved potent to audiences. In some cases, however, Broadway and vaudeville costumes were unruly, behaving in unintended ways and telling audiences stories that differed from a show's narrative and highlighting social anxieties that audiences had come to the theater to escape. Drawing on theories of agency in costume and textile semantics, this article analyses early twentieth-century accounts of costumes behaving badly to argue that those reviled as disgusting by theater critics and audiences reflected classed fears of poverty and disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gateshead International Festival of Theatre (GIFT) has been running since 2011. It is an annual opportunity for audiences and artists to gather and share experimental work with a strong focus on collaboration and conversation. As noted in my interview with the Festival's Director, Kate Craddock (which is also published in this special issue of CTR), it went online for 2020 and 2021. 2022 marked its return to in-person activity. I attended almost all of the events in the programme, which stretched across three days from Friday 30 April to Sunday 2 May 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geddy Aniksdal has been a core member of Grenland Friteater, Norway, since the early 1980s. She is an actress, director, and writer and runs the annual Stedsans (Sense of Place) Festival and, along with other company members, the Porsgrunn International Theater Festival. She is also a founder member of the Magdalena Project. In this contemplative essay, Aniksdal reflects poetically on what COVID-induced theatre and festival closure has meant for her as an artist and curator, whose everyday practice normally involves working on the international festival circuit, making performances, and running her own festival in Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Canadian plays which are diverse in terms of topics, theatrical styles, and intended audience. It mentions that Jordi Mand's "Brontë: The World Without", a play about the three Brontë sisters, whose father was a curate in Haworth in West Yorkshire. It also mentions "Amaryllis" and "Little Witch" two contemporary fairy tales for young audiences written by Pascal Brullemans and translated from French by Alexis Diamond.

By pairing roughly contemporary comedies by two of the Irish Revival's leading playwrights, this article sets up a case study for comparison, demonstrating how various forms of comedy were received by Dublin audiences during the Revival, and illustrating the ways in which comedy produced, and unsettled, political myths in the context of the nascent Irish theatre. Attending to plays by J. M. Synge and Lady Gregory, alongside the manifestos and political manoeuvring of the directors of the Abbey Theatre and its earlier iterations, the article suggests that, through comedic misrule, the comedies of the Revival challenged the 'misrule' of forms of imperialism, capitalism and modernization, clearing the way for new narratives and myths to take shape. In the fraught conditions of the opening decade of the twentieth century, comedy is the genre through which we can most acutely see the parameters of Irishness being tested on stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extended belief of gay people being more creative and showing higher interest toward arts lacks robust empirical support. The pioneer study on this issue highlighted that LGB´s arts participation was mostly explained by demographic factors such as level of studies, residence and family situation, which suggests that differences due to sexual orientation tend to fade. In this paper, we put forward the hypothesis that sexual orientation influences motivations to participate, which emphasizes their role and heterogeneity. To do so, we conducted a survey on participants at an alternative performing arts festival collecting information on socio-demographics, including sexual orientation, motivations and other variables. Results show that being LGB increases the likelihood of attendance for emotional, social or political motives, and emphasize the heterogeneity that sexual orientation plays on cultural audiences. Particularly, we find evidence of gender differences in attendance goals within LGB performing arts consumers, supporting gender nonconformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camera as a technological tool, establishes a modern relationship with the world; transforms and visualizes every space and object by recording. First of all, in this article, what kind of a world camera creates and its relationship with modernity is discussed. Then, the development of camera movement abilities is examined and it is seen that it has a fixed point of view that overlapped with theater audience in the early stages of cinema history. However, over time, different points of view were obtained by moving the camera. Elimination of the Italian-style scene and perspective is also addressed in connection with the movement of the camera. Throughout this article, an object/means centered perspective is used, and camera is examined as a historical phenomenon, regardless of content. In response to object centered approach, mechanical eye seems to record every corner of physical world. Accompanied by these discussions, in the last part of the article, "Man with a Movie Camera" is examined in terms of the connection of cinematographic elements with the world. In film analysis, it is shown that different cinematographic elements such as close-up and long shots, camera's involvement in everyday life, the increase of point of views transform physical world. Throughout the article, technological determinism forms the conceptual and theoretical framework; historical and sociological analysis methods are also used together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prologue of Thomas Heywood's tragicomedy The English Traveller, which was first performed around 1627 and first printed in 1633, seeks to focus the minds of its audience on what is to follow on stage: A Strange Play you are like to haue, for know, We use no Drum, nor Trumpet, nor Dumbe shew; No Combate, Marriage, not so much to day, As Song, Dance, Masque, to bumbaste out a play: [...] (The English Traveller, n.p.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, theatre art has distinguished itself as a very effective medium of communication in diverse spheres of life. Traditionally, the theatre situation requires the audience to come to the theatre, sit and see a performance. However, as time progressed, theatre practitioners saw the need to take the theatre to the people and use it as a tool for development, especially in rural African communities. This dimension of theatre practice is known as “Applied Theatre”, as it refers to the use of theatrical forms in unconventional theatre spaces to address issues of concern to communities. In such settings, theatre is often used as an interventionist tool to address the perceived needs of such communities. Theatre for Development projects have been undertaken on a number of subjects around Nsukka communities, but none has been devoted to addressing the issue of water hygiene in any of such communities. It is, therefore, the aim of this paper to examine the steps employed in the Theatre for Development (TfD) workshop by the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, towards addressing the precarious water situation of Itchi-Agu community of Enugu State, as well as to recommend it as essential and ideal for TfD projects. The theoretical framework shall be based on the “Bottom-Up” Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings together the perspective of theatre history studies and fan studies in order to ask what it meant to be a celebrity fangirl in the late nineteenth century and thus to historicize fandom and recover forsaken aspects of nineteenth-century theatre culture. By invoking the unique traces of fan experience and fan practices such as recollections left by a self-declared "theatre maniac" or fan letters written to Helena Modrzejewska, this essay investigates Polish female, middle-class fandom of this theatre superstar. Despite emigrating to the United States in the mid-1870s, during the following decades Modrzejewska, known to American audience as Modjeska, guest-performed in Polish lands on a regular basis to great enthusiasm of local audiences. Even though no organizations like the US Modjeska Club ever emerged among Polish spectators, there were equally devoted circles of Modrzejewska's fangirls. They can be compared to other female theatre fans at the turn of the twentieth century, such as the matinée girl in the United States and the psikhopatka in Tsarist Russia. Fangirls shared hierarchies of values, which often collided with social expectations, and together they tended to explore and test alternatives to roles prescribed to them by society. The essay proposes to imagine these women as social and theatre "pirates" who both challenged accepted gender norms of behavior and questioned their own alleged female limitations, as well as advanced forms of reception that were abolished in the process of the "embourgeoisement of theatre." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English word 'mountebank', borrowed from the Italian montimbanco to describe a performing quack doctor, crucially defines its subject in terms of motion in space: the motion of ascending a stage. In fact, the early modern mountebank in London was a player known for many kinds of motion—geographical itinerancy, rhetorical circumlocution, and even appropriative journeys from bank to theatre to print. This article articulates the mountebank's license to roam physically and representationally across London as a kind of theatrical vagrancy, one that begs the question not only of where theatre can exist in urban space, but how—how a physically and rhetorically unfixed performance can still be recognised by an audience as a performance. Playing with and across space, as this article argues, is perhaps one of the most crucial of the mountebank's many 'impossible' feats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which two years of increased isolation due to COVID affected a cohort of applied theatre students and how their instructors addressed students' elevated anxiety and disconnection from community. In the spring semester of 2022, I was working as the teaching intern for the course Applied Theatre Praxis taught by Professor Joe Salvatore at New York University. The students—who ranged from undergraduate upperclassmen majoring in Educational Theatre to doctoral students in various arts disciplines—were required to facilitate an applied theatre residency project with a community to which they were connected in some way. Students responded to having to work with one of their own communities with acute anxiety: many claimed they were not part of a community. This group response was due to a complex web of factors stemming from two years of increased isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, I will describe the teaching strategies Professor Salvatore and I used to help students overcome this anxiety by creating opportunities to rehearse and reflect on their facilitation practices and grounding student-facilitators in their values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]