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Since the 1990s, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have encountered political, social, economic and cultural challenges. During this period, their community theatres have played distinctive roles in activating their public space to reimagine their communities, form dialogues with their governments and construct learning experiences amongst various communities. Because of the similar historical background of these areas in a postcolonial and postmodern context, a comparative study of these areas can elucidate how they played various roles of alternative modernity in Asian Chinese-speaking communities and demonstrating how community theatre can serve as a learning and communicative process. The aesthetics of these performances can also inspire community theatre practice. Their performance texts include local legends, historical stories, heroes, community narratives and local environmental, political and social issues and concerns. Their performance styles are drawn from local popular theatre traditions that are adapted to form new meanings and occasionally incorporate interactive theatre techniques. Therefore, their unique eclectic aesthetic, political and ethical efficacy must be explored further. Various case studies in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were used to explore their similarities and differences. The community theatre development and performance process in these areas is a learning and implementation process for cultural citizenship at the local and international levels and can counter globalisation and commoditisation of dominant capitalistic cultures from a comparative perspective.

Museums have been employing theatre activities in their educational programmes to outreach youngsters for more than three decades all over the world since the late 1980s; however, it is still quite a new experience for eastern and south-eastern Asian countries. In the past 3 years, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan started to use different forms of museum theatre in educational programmes to represent their multiple histories and cultural identities through various projects and showcases. Among these praxes, process drama have been most widely employed by teacher-facilitators for youngsters to reconstruct their own interpretations of historical events and narratives through chosen and rediscovered historical fragments, often neglected and even forgotten in the past. I argue that these process drama projects help the youngsters to reconstruct their own ever-changing cultural identities of these places which are under enormous change day by day in their current postcolonial and postmodern conditions. I also try to demonstrate how these praxes cross geographical, historical, ethnic and cultural as well as community borders to translate historical narratives buried in their heritage sites, ethnic community histories or aboriginal intangible cultural heritage such as tribal dances, songs and rituals into contemporary dramatic enquiry activities and performances. Why are they interested in these praxes almost at the same time lately? What are their goals in these projects? What cultural and social meanings do these praxes carry and sustain? What are the aesthetic strategies they use in these programmes and why do they choose them and how well do they work to achieve their goals? I would like to apply theories of museum theatre, process drama as well as postmodern aesthetics and educational theories and theories of post-colonialism to re-examine these praxes in their different cultural contexts to explore the above questions.

Since the end of the 1980s in the NIE4--Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore--in Asia, progressive cultural and educational policies have developed along with tremendous economic growth, and a belief in the value of cultivating excellent human resources has provided the fertile ground to plant the seeds for Drama Education and Applied Theatre in schools and community settings. Drama Education and Applied Theatre projects have therefore been implemented in different ways and manners in different policy contexts and funding systems in the NIE4 either through government programmes or Non-governmental Organization (NGO) and civil organisations. They have developed in different directions as well as encountering different problems over 20 years. This essay aims to give a brief survey and investigation into these innovative imaginings and actions in the NIE4 and it ventures to present the issues and concerns that practitioners are seeking to ponder and solve. It also aims to explore the relationship between these praxes and the respective social, cultural and political changes in these areas and investigate the various responses and efficacy these praxes in Drama Education and Applied Theatre have done to their respective societies as well as investigate the challenges they posed to the existing social and educational orthodox ideologies. (Contains 4 notes.)

This paper aims to explore a range of aesthetic aspects involved in the devising and production processes of oral history performance in a classroom setting. It touches upon the ethical dimension of aesthetics employing the Confucianist Wang Yang Ming's aesthetic philosophy and Buber's theories of relation as the theoretical frames. The devising process realises the concept of aestheticisation of ethics by fulfilling the "I-You" relations through the constructed dialogues formulated by the teacher-facilitator. The paper is divided into six parts to illustrate the whole aesthetic system - from aesthetic framework to reception. I apply Ricoeur's narrative theory to analyse the cycle of re-interpretation and reception process of the personal narratives. Deleuze's theories in "Signs and Memory" have been employed to decipher how the signs of art have been distilled from personal memories. Bachelard's poetics of space and Lefebvre's theories of the subversive power of space have been employed to demonstrate the possibility of the presentation and subversion of body and space through performance. In conclusion, I apply Shusterman's pragmatist aesthetics to argue that oral history performances put ethics into action by re-negotiating personal and collective identities through dialogical process and re-interpreting the past. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

This paper examines a community theatre project in Kaohsiung County, Taiwan that aimed to tackle domestic violence through a collaboration between local community female elders and the facilitator. The paper investigates how an outside facilitator could unfix the assumed community identities which tend to exclude outsiders or sub-groups, in this case the outsiders were Vietnamese brides. It also explores how the Boalian techniques such as the joker, forum theatre and "hot-seating" were adapted and changed in the Taiwanese cultural and social context in order to engage the local audience and encourage them to suggest alternative ways to solve the domestic conflict presented in a devised performance. The paper also demonstrates how these local community female elders employed the popular theatre strategies in the performance to tackle domestic violence. With subversive laughter, their performance stimulated the audience to defy the secrecy and horror of domestic violence in the community by their bold transgression of gender, ethnicity, age and profession. Their performance also demonstrates the possibility of extending an ethic of care to the Vietnamese brides in their community. (Contains 2 notes.)

Founded in 1995, the Taiwanese Uhan Shii Theatre Group has created 12 distinctive reminiscence theatre productions and has performed locally in Taiwan as well as globally around the world. The company has developed its own theatrical aesthetics of memory, and their work not only represents the traditions of Taiwanese culture and habitus, but it also subverts its conventions. In this paper I will examine how the aesthetics of production represents Taiwanese cultural habitus and how their representation of female experience subverts orthodox cultural expectations and traditional gender roles associated with them. (Contains 7 notes.)

This paper examines a community theatre project in Kaohsiung County, Taiwan that aimed to tackle domestic violence through a collaboration between local community female elders and the facilitator. The paper investigates how an outside facilitator could unfix the assumed community identities which tend to exclude outsiders or sub-groups, in this case the outsiders were Vietnamese brides. It also explores how the Boalian techniques such as the joker, forum theatre and 'hot-seating' were adapted and changed in the Taiwanese cultural and social context in order to engage the local audience and encourage them to suggest alternative ways to solve the domestic conflict presented in a devised performance. The paper also demonstrates how these local community female elders employed the popular theatre strategies in the performance to tackle domestic violence. With subversive laughter, their performance stimulated the audience to defy the secrecy and horror of domestic violence in the community by their bold transgression of gender, ethnicity, age and profession. Their performance also demonstrates the possibility of extending an ethic of care to the Vietnamese brides in their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]