Jenny Hughes

Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre

As the twenty-first century moves towards its third decade, applied theatre is being shaped by contemporary economic and environmental concerns and is contributing to new conceptual paradigms that influence the ways in which socially engaged art is produced and understood. This collection offers fresh perspectives on the aesthetics, politics and histories of applied theatre. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book illuminates theatre in a diverse range of global contexts and regions. Divided into three sections - histories and cultural memories; place, community and environment; and poetics and participation - the chapters interweave cutting-edge theoretical insights with examples of innovative creative practice that traverse different places, spaces and times. Essential reading for researchers and artists working within applied theatre, this collection will also be of interest to those in theatre and performance studies, education, cultural policy, social history and cultural geography.As the twenty-first century moves towards its third decade, applied theatre is being shaped by contemporary economic and environmental concerns and is contributing to new conceptual paradigms that influence the ways in which socially engaged art is produced and understood. This collection offers fresh perspectives on the aesthetics, politics and histories of applied theatre. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book illuminates theatre in a diverse range of global contexts and regions. Divided into three sections - histories and cultural memories; place, community and environment; and poetics and participation - the chapters interweave cutting-edge theoretical insights with examples of innovative creative practice that traverse different places, spaces and times. Essential reading for researchers and artists working within applied theatre, this collection will also be of interest to those in theatre and performance studies, education, cultural policy, social history and cultural geography.

Applied theatre: ecology of practices

At high tide on the Thames on 13 June 2015 at 11.53 am a group of art activists began an unsanctioned twenty-five hour durational performance in the expansive Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, a large art gallery on the gentrified South Bank in London. Entitled Time Piece , this was the latest in a series of interventions by Liberate Tate, an art collective who stage performative protests against the oil industrys sponsorship of cultural organisations. Described as a ‘textual intervention’, seventy-five performers used charcoal to inscribe the concrete floor with passages and quotations from dystopian novels, environmental reports, slogans and non-fictional works about art, climate change and fossil fuel. Each performer scribbled silently, veiled and dressed in black, and when the gallery closed at 10 pm, twenty activists continued their carefully choreographed work through the night, unimpeded by security guards or the police. By morning, when Tate Modern re-opened its doors, the Turbine Hall remained closed to visitors. When the tide turned at 12.55 pm on 14 June, the performers left and the cleaning staff moved in. We begin with this performative protest not because it is representative of all applied theatre, but because its concerns resonate with many of the ideas explored in this book. As a piece of activist art, Time Piece both invokes a long history of performative protest and also captures contemporary anxieties about the relationship between climate change, global capitalism, neoliberalism and the arts, all of which are debated by authors in this book. Beyond the substance of its environmental message, the performance illuminates deeper cultural responses to the contemporary landscape that are also articulated in this collection of essays. Time Piece re-imagined synergies between time and the material world, recognising that temporality is experienced in multiple ways. Liberate Tate capture this impulse on their website, describing how Time Piece draws attention to the different temporal registers that affect lives as ‘lunar time, tidal time, ecological time, geological time and all the ways in which we are running out of time’. The hunched figures dressed in black veils, quietly creating a rising tide of words on the floor, were like mourners marking a space by inscribing its relationship to lost time, a performative memorialisation of material life destroyed by practices of industrial excavation and economic exploitation driven by fossil fuel economies.

Applied theatre and cultural memory in East and Southeast Asia

A person standing in the downtown urban streets of Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan is surrounded by similar globally branded stores and coffee shops, and distinguishing locations can be difficult. A sense of placelessness overwhelms and bewilders both local inhabitants and travellers. Local inhabitants search for traces of sites that they have lost while growing up in their cities, whereas travellers seek the ‘authentic’ places of the city. Applied theatre practitioners in East and Southeast Asian global cities have responded sensitively to this sense of placelessness in their communities and have used it as a source when devising performances. They have attempted to rediscover invisible cultural memories by interviewing community elders, socially excluded individuals and marginalised indigenous people, compiling the stories and concerns attached to the places in which they lived into plays. In these performances, applied theatre practitioners have attempted to reconstruct communal memories of places, recovering a sense of connection between the specific sites of the city and those who inhabit them. Performances have questioned who has the right to ‘authenticate’ places and have sought to locate invisible cultural memories in the cities that people are yearning to grasp and re-experience. As part of these theatre projects, practitioners and communities have begun a journey through what Italo Calvino described poetically in Invisible Cities (1972) as cities made of memories, desires and imagination, often unseen and hidden by kaleidoscopic metaphors and the metamorphoses of signs and architecture. In the process of devising plays, applied theatre practitioners raise questions about the ownership of cities as well as of the relationship between cultural memories that are preserved and transmitted in processes of remembering and those that are discarded. They explore the remembering and forgetting mechanisms working in their societies and the power struggles behind those complex mechanisms. The tremendous social and cultural changes brought about by globalisation in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan since the 1990s, then, have stimulated a process of seeking local cultural and historical identities and reconstructing collective cultural memories. This process has been facilitated by numerous local cultural movements, and applied theatre is one such movement. David Harvey and Sharon Zukin have both demonstrated that global cities in Asia have been threatened by cultural commodification, gentrification, the imitation of supposedly fashionable and progressive Western cultures and erosion of local cultures by the entertainment industry and cultural tourism (see Harvey 2003, 2006; Zukin 2010: 9–15).