Ananda Breed

Performance and Civic Engagement

relation to how institutions engage with the public and around considerations of impact. In this volume, we use the term to emphasise a politically active encounter between institutions, individuals and art practices as they are used to effectively engage with the public sphere on a civic level across physical and virtual spaces. Benjamin Stokes states, ‘the field of political science is beginning to question its traditional definitions of civic engagement to account for more “global citizens” and transnational activism’ (Delwiche and Henderson 2013, 143). This multidisciplinary volume tracks across the fields and overlapping practices of political science, cultural geography, and performance studies. It seeks to address how and why physical and digital spaces can be analysed and utilised for new artistic practices that challenge traditional notions of how performance is political and how politics are performative.

Introduction to Applying Digital Agency

This section, Applying Digital Agency , explores how technology has been used within performances of civic engagement through cyberformance, soundwalks and social media.

Introduction to Performing Landscapes

This section contextualises how location relates to local power structures, systems and infrastructures and brings these nuances to the fore in our understanding of performance and civic engagement.

Performance, Place and Culture for Civic Engagement in Kyrgyzstan

This chapter will explore the Youth Theatre for Peace (YTP) project in relation to environmental aesthetics and socially engaged participatory practices towards tolerance building in Kyrgyzstan. Cultural histories of storytelling, manas (an oral and now literary Kyrgyz epic) and trickster tales incorporate ideas and narratives that are useful in negotiating the ambiguities between differing moral, political and social agendas and can be drawn on in conflict negotiation contexts. The YTP project was developed in response to USAID’s call for people-to-people approaches to provide opportunities for exchange and contact between people from adversarial groups and illustrates civic engagement through partnerships with NGOs and international development partners alongside local and state decision-making bodies, religious groups and community organisations. The framework of the YTP project could potentially be used as an example of performance and civic engagement that could be applied more generally to impact and influence cultural practices at a local level, to stimulate public debate and to improve social welfare.

Introduction to Politicising Communities

The title of this section announces its central tension: the potentially contradictory strains of political and community theatre which historically have pursued different trajectories.

Interview with Roland Muldoon

Roland Muldoon, born 1941 in Weybridge Surrey, left school at 15 worked as city clerk to building labourer took a technical course Bristol Old Vic school and became stage director at Unity Theatre where he also made his acting debut, joined Management Committee and was expelled 1964. With Claire Burnley (later Muldoon), Red Saunders and Ray Levine he formed one of the first political underground theatre groups: CAST, Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre, as a socialist collective celebrated for its fast moving direct style, “combined like Jazz”. The plays usually featured an anti-hero Muggins a working class ‘clown’. CAST played in halls, pubs and colleges but rarely in theatres. CAST split in 1971 with Claire & Roland Muldoon reforming the group and receiving an annual Arts Council grant in 1976 enabling the group to tour Britain for ten years. The one-man play ‘Confessions of a Socialist’ won a Village Voice OBIE New York. CAST lost its ACGB grant in 1985. The group received support from the GLC for its New Variety project and staged a circuit: eight one night venues in the capital helping to give birth to the live comedy boom. In 1986 the group took over the Hackney Empire and ran it for twenty years. Nowadays, CAST as New-Variety-Lives presents comedy shows and the annual New Acts of the Year Final at the Bloomsbury Theatre (25 January 2015).

Interview with Nurlan Asanbekov

Nurlan Asanbekov was the director of Kyrgyz State Theatre and trained at the Russian Theatre Academy of Arts in Moscow. Asanbekov founded Sakhna Theatre in 2002. The artists work and experiment with traditional material, creating contemporary experimental versions of the great Kyrgyz epics. They study the oral folk traditions of their nomadic culture in order to help them revive these epics through ritual theatre. The universal theme of man’s relationship with nature is at the heart of their productions. The epic stories are accompanied by traditional songs and instruments, further preserving this 1000 year old culture. To date they have created three productions: “Kerez” (The Testament) which won the main prize in Bishkek’s “Art-Ordo” International Theatre Festival, “Kurmanbek” and “Maktym-Dastan,” which were created with support from the Swiss Agency for Development.

Interview with Christian Cherene

BeAnotherLab is an interdisciplinary multinational group dedicated to understanding, communicating and expanding subjective experience; focusing on understanding the relationship between identity and empathy from an embodied perspective.

Environmental aesthetics, social engagement and aesthetic experiences in Central Asia

In this essay, I explore the Youth Theatre for Peace (YTP) project in relation to environmental aesthetics and engaged participatory practices towards tolerance building in Central Asia. My main argument is that cultural histories of storytelling, manas (an oral and now literary Kyrgyz epic) and trickster tales incorporate ideas and narratives that are useful in negotiating the ambiguities between differing moral, political and social agendas and can be drawn on in conflict negotiation contexts. I argue that environmental aesthetics offers a useful theoretical framework for analysing the YTP project due to the nomadic eco-spirituality and eco-consciousness of the region. Further, specific (embodied and emplaced) performing arts activities provide opportunities for communities to build longer-term strategies for engaging with and intervening in the political realities in which they live.

Gender-based Violence and Human Rights: Participatory Theatre in Post-Genocide Rwanda

During the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda over one million Tutsi and Hutu moderates were massacred, and an estimated 350,000 women and girls were raped, often in public locations.1 Anti-Tutsi propaganda demonized Tutsi women as traitors and prompted a sexual and gendered form of genocide involving, as Usta Kaitesi reports, ‘[r]ape, gang rape, being raped with objects, sexual mutilation, forced sexual intercourse with dead animals, sexual captivity, forced public nudity, intentional transmission of HIV/AIDS, the mutilation of breasts, the cutting open of wombs and removal of the foetus, and forced intercourse between victims’.2 The public dimensions of sexual violence and rape and the correlation between an increase in gender-based violence and the 1994 genocide have attracted close scrutiny.3 In this chapter, I contextualize some of the challenges facing applied theatre practitioners in relation to human rights issues and the navigation of the agendas between international donor relations and domestic justice. I will focus on Ukuri Mubinyoma (Truth in Lies), a participatory theatre project designed to encourage the debate on gender-based violence that toured Rwanda in 2006. I contributed as co-writer of the grant and also functioned as a consultant and artistic collaborator.4 My perspective on gender-based violence in Rwanda is indebted to Article 2 of Law N◦59/2008 of 10 September 2008 relating to the prevention and punishment of gender-based violence, and defining it as ‘any act that results in bodily, psychological, sexual and economic harm to somebody just because they are female or male’.5