Michael St Clair Balfour

The politics of intention: looking for a theatre of little changes

The paper provides a review of some of the terminologies and definitions of applied theatre, critiques the ‘transformative principle’ argued for by some applied researchers, and extends this to a discussion on the complex relationship between donor agendas and the politics of intention that contribute to the shaping of applied discourse (Taylor 2003, 1). The paper goes on to propose a theatre of ‘little changes’ which eschews big claims of social efficacy, and suggests the need for a discourse which can better articulate an interdependence between the aesthetic imperatives and the possibilities of social engagement.

Drama, Masculinity, and Violence.

The theatre in prisons and probation (TIPP) field has developed in response to a growing recognition within the criminal justice system that the arts can play a directly functional role in the ‘primary task of reducing offending, through education and challenging behaviour, offering new ways of thinking, and redirecting energies’ {Community Sentences Committee (1994) Probation and the Arts: a briefing paper (Wakefield, Association of Chief Officers of Probation)}. In particular, criminal justice agencies have acknowledged that imaginative and engaging styles of education are crucial to rehabilitative work with offenders. In the UK there are currently half a dozen theatre organisations working exclusively with offenders on probation or in prison, and over a 150 artists and/or companies who work regularly in a criminal justice setting. There is a British Network of Prison Theatre which exists to influence and inform Home Office policies and a European Network which was formed after the 2nd European Conference on Theatre and Prison, held in Manchester in 1996. Academically, the theory and practice of prison theatre is being taught in half a dozen UK universities at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The TIPP field is both complex and diverse in its approaches to working with offenders. A precise definition of TIPP practice is difficult, partly due to the complex interaction between drama and educational method, but also because the work is constantly changing and evolving in response to practical experience. Underlying the different approaches, whether implicitly or explicitly stated, is a crucial orientation to a rehabilitative goal. (The arts organisations currently practising exclusively in prisons and probation were all founded under very different circumstances. Geese Theatre Company, for example, was a franchise of an American company, and imported its methods and ideas from the US, while Clean Break Theatre Company was established by two women ex-offenders, and set out a belief that the arts should be used as a method for empowering and developing skills with offenders. The TIPP Centre was created after a conference for theatre and probation practitioners interested in working together on projects.) This article investigates the ways in which a drama-based cognitive‐behaviourial programme for violent offenders can construct and review its theoretical approach through practice. The TIPP Centre’s Pump Challenging Violence programme serves as an example of a creative educational project which sought to provide a positive model of practice; and it is through the analysis of this practical example that the model may be tested and its efficacy assessed.

Playfully engaging people living with dementia: searching for Yum Cha moments

In the absence of a cure for dementia, there is an increasing recognition of the need to develop approaches that address its key impacts of social isolation, depressed mood, and quality of life. In response to these issues, a three-year research project entitled Playful Engagement and Dementia: assessing the efficacy of applied theatre practices for people with dementia in residential aged care facilities was developed in partnership with Wesley Mission Brisbane. The paper reports on data collected within the pilot phase of this project, offering an analysis of the play vocabularies used by two applied theatre artists who interacted, using a relational clowning approach, with 17 residents with mid- to late-stage dementia. The analysis, based on two complementary frameworks, reveals useful insights into the key features of the approach, noting those that were effective in generating ‘moments’ of engagement and mutual recognition. How the applied theatre artists spontaneously, reflexively, and sensitively applied these vocabularies, tailoring them to each individuals play preferences, interests, and stage of dementia is also examined.

Performing Desistance How Might Theories of Desistance From Crime Help Us Understand the Possibilities of Prison Theatre

Despite the ubiquity of theatre projects in prisons there has been little (published) discussion of the application of theatre to the theories of criminology or rehabilitation of offenders, and scant examination of the potential for criminological theories to inform theatre practice in criminal justice settings. This article seeks to address this deficit and argues that positioning prison theatre within the discipline of positive criminology, specifically contemporary theories of desistance from crime, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the contribution that prison theatre might be making in the correctional setting. Through a review of related literature, the article explores how prison theatre may be motivating offenders toward the construction of a more adaptive narrative identity and toward the acquisition of capabilities that might usefully assist them in the process of desisting from crime.

Protecting into emotion: therapeutic enactments with military veterans transitioning back into civilian life

Over 18.5% of military personnel returning from war zones to civilian life suffer mental health issues, which can lead to family breakdown, homelessness and other problems. Almost 4000 Australian soldiers have returned home from active service in the last decade suffering from combat stress and mental health conditions. A 2009 Australian independent government review warned that a new generation of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe mental health disorders will emerge in the next five years, with as many as one in four likely to need mental health treatment. The Difficult Return: arts-based approaches to mental health literacy and building resilience with recently returned military personnel and their families is a three-year Australian Research Council funded arts project aimed at supporting the mental health and well-being of recently returned veterans in Australia, USA and Canada. The project combines a range of arts-based strategies to help returning veterans, including online digital films to improve awareness and help seeking motivation, a performance project with ex-soldiers and actors, and a process-based group work programme. The paper will focus specifically on the development of the Veterans Transition Programme (VTP) a partnership between Griffith University and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The VTP leverages the resilience and resources of veterans, providing help to participants attempting to better understand the impact of military experience on their lives. It draws on a range of psycho-educational and action-based approaches, including life review and drama enactments to engage participants in ways of dealing with disturbing events from their lives. The paper will describe and reflect on a number of the strategies used in the VTP, for example, how the drama enactments help to integrate emotion, cognition and embodied awareness, the significance of contact when working with trauma, and the importance of a therapeutic milieu in constructing ‘units’ of support for the veterans.

Perspectives and contexts of arts, social health and the military

The paper outlines and introduces the context for the Special Edition on the arts, social health and the military. The social imperative of arts work in this area is founded on current statistics of between 18% and 30% of those returning from war zones to civilian life can be expected to suffer mental health issues, which can lead to family breakdown, homelessness and other social problems. In the USA for example, there have been 103,792 cases of post-traumatic stress (PTS) diagnosed in returned service personnel (in the period from 2000 to 2012). The paper provides a brief overview of the history of PTS and the ways in which arts-based strategies have been integrated into this history. The paper discusses the contemporary context of arts and health with military personnel, arguing that considerable work has grown out of alliances with small veteran support organisations interested in finding new and complimentary approaches to supporting ex-service personnel on their transition from military to civilian life.

Theories of Change: Cultural Value and Applied Theatre

This chapter provides a context and history to the relationships between applied theatre practice, scholarship, evaluation and theories of change. To this end, we aim to attend to the long intellectual legacy of the concept that the arts have an impact socially on communities and audiences. Despite the breadth and growth of applied theatre practice in the last two decades, Kershaw notes that “applied theatre, community performance and related forms apparently have attracted few historians” (Kershaw, B., Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016, p. 16). This chapter will draw on work that established historical considerations of the role of applied theatre, and the arts more generally in society, its relationship to theories of change, social policy, and the sovereignty of doing good. After a general discussion, this chapter explores the politics and history of change in relation to one area of practice – prison theatre –which has grown up in an era of managerialism and measurement. The chapter tracks the scope and diversity of prison theatre discourse and explores the need for greater precision in articulating theories of change.

What Is Applied Theatre Good for? Exploring the Notions of Success, Intent and Impact

This chapter aims to be both critical and provocative. It set the scene for the a volume concerned with how applied theatre practitioners, researchers and advocates understand change. The main purpose of the chapter is to give a sense of where applied theatre is located with regard to its definitions, contexts and relationship to social change. A key goal of this book, introduced in this chapter, is to provide a critical perspective on the field of applied theatre; to raise concerns, problematize representations, question conceptualisations of theory and practice, and to try to begin a detailed discussion about the effect of different perspectives and practices. This chapter also outlines the purpose, methodological approach and informing principles of the research from which the first half of this book has emerged and previews the diverse perspectives presented in chapters throughout the book.

Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism by Emma Cox

Ostermeier ever since, Ostermeier turned the Baracke into the hippest, most in-your-face theatre in Germany, with productions of plays by Sarah Kane, among others. When the Schaubühne needed new leadership in 1999, Ostermeier and his Baracke team were a natural fit. Although the Schaubühne under Ostermeier has not garnered heaps of awards within Germany, it has devoted audiences, and it would be fair to say that it has become the most recognized German theatre internationally, with its productions touring around the globe. While Boenisch and others insist throughout the book that Ostermeier does not have a particular style, one of the services of this study is to articulate his vision. Of course it is true that Ostermeier is not like Frank Castorf, whose multi-hour postdramatic productions bear a clear directorial signature. Ostermeier has little tolerance for postdramatic theatre, which he calls ‘capitalist realism’ (p. 29), but he clearly respects Castorf, praising him several times in the book. Still, I have found Ostermeier’s work to be just as recognizable as Castorf’s, even if it displays handwriting rather than a signature. Ostermeier sees his productions as ‘Trojan horses’ to attack ‘our bourgeois class’ (p. 234). ‘My own huge fondness for Ibsen’, Ostermeier writes, ‘results from the pure fact that our own society has retreated to fundamental bourgeois values’ (p. 235). While Richard III may on the surface little resemble Enemy of the People, both productions speak directly to bourgeois Europe about power, class, money, and maintaining status in unsettled times. Boenisch describes Ostermeier’s style as ‘materialist realism’ (p. 3). Pappelbaumwrites: ‘it points to the society, and links theatre to the world outside, instead of replicating and representing it’ (p. 29). This is a legacy of Ernst Busch; rather than seeing himself as an heir to Peter Stein, the influential West German director who ran the Schaubühne for 15 years, Ostermeier writes that he is ‘entirely inspired by the tradition of the Berliner Ensemble: byMatthias Langhoff andManfred Karge, or even Benno Besson’ (p. 12). Ostermeier uses Shakespeare and Ibsen to reimagine Brecht’s analysis of social circumstances for present-day Kurfürstendamm, the tiny West Berlin street that is home to the Schaubühne. The heart of this volume is ‘The Art of Communicating’, the long essay by Boenisch and Ostermeier on directing. Ostermeier describes himself as working in the Brechtian ‘inductive’ method (as against the ‘deductive’ method of Castorf): ‘the production’s form is entirely developed on the basis of the playtext. The play provides the Stoff (material)’ (p. 133). For Ostermeier, ‘Regie [directing] is the communication with the playtext, with the Stoff, with the space, and with the actors and their possibilities’ (p. 134). This does not mean that Ostermeier follows a psychological approach, though he does describe his use of Sanford Meisner’s repetition exercises; he sees characters as always part of a social context, and he believes that actors ‘should not play a character at all’, but ‘should primarily play a process’ (p. 147). Boenisch approaches the case studies of Enemy of the People and Richard III from two different angles. In the first, we learn about the production from Ostermeier’s collaborators; dramaturge Borchmeyer describes their approach to translating and adapting Ibsen’s text, while actor Moritz Gottwald writes about how he developed his character. For Richard III, Boenisch and Ostermeier walk us through the entire process, from casting, through the Bauprobe (design rehearsal), and to the opening. The latter section is especially useful for learning about the German theatre-making process. Unfortunately, Boenisch does not give his readers a contextual essay, such as a clear, concise introduction to Regietheater and Ostermeier’s place in the contemporaryGerman theatre; some background is included, but it is often relegated to endnotes. In exchange for some of the extraneous material (in particular an extended digression on Enemy of the People on tour), I also would have appreciated an essay about Ostermeier as Intendant and curator; his leadership at the Schaubühne in selecting and facilitating other directors is as important as his own directorial work. Boenisch and Ostermeier have done artistic and scholarly communities a service with this volume. Too little has been published in English on German theatre, one of the most dynamic scenes of the past 25 years, and this book introduces us to a key player in that scene, while serving as inspiration and handbook for emerging and established artists.

The Difficult Return: Supporting Returning Veterans Through an Arts-Based Social Leadership Program

Over 18.5 % of military personnel returning from war zones to civilian life suffer mental health issues that can lead to family breakdown, homelessness, and other problems. Almost 4000 Australian soldiers have returned home from active service in the last decade suffering from combat stress and mental health conditions. A 2009 Australian independent government review warned a new generation of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe mental health disorders will emerge in the next 5 years, with as many as one in four likely to need mental health treatment.