This article, understanding populism as an essentially undemocratic ideology, argues that the pro-social theatre education approach of ensemble pedagogy can offer a model of educational practice which counters these anti-democratic rhetorics by creating a shared space for the enactment of empathetic discourse. Via an ethnography of the UK…

This article addresses the question of how theatre interventions as elements of a participatory and action-oriented research design can contribute to justice-oriented Caring Community processes. Caring Communities are local initiatives that strengthen everyday solidarity through civic engagement and neighbourhood support, link informal and formal…

Co-authors Lee and Peters collaborated across 2019-2021 on a community-engaged project with Carclew's ExpressWay Arts. They ask, when your creative practice is premised on relationship building, belonging and care, how do you step away from projects responsibly, meaningfully and carefully? This article explores how establishing rituals of closure…

This article brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from three artist-scholars. More specifically, we examine the impact of performances of listening and care in works addressing connections to personal identity, trauma, and violence and the anxieties that these can provoke in our roles as artists, researchers, and pedagogues. We ask: how…

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…

This article recounts a day at Mexican writer, activist, educator, and performance artist Lia García's "elementary school": a "school" that takes the form of invited performances in other teachers' classrooms. It studies García's staging of an applied theatre workshop at an elementary school in November 2020 with her children's…

Brighton People's Theatre and Slung Low are at the forefront of the contemporary people's theatre movement in the United Kingdom. I examine these companies and the broader utility of a people's theatre, historically concerned with working class representation and/or performances of civic unity, in the context of economic austerity and inequality.…

In the midst of directing a production of Linda Daugherty's EAT (it's not about food), a play about eating disorders, the author of this paper found herself simultaneously reckoning with and receiving treatment for her own eating disorder. In this intersection of art and life, the author had to choose how this recent personal development would…

Since 1994, the London-based queer performance collective Duckie has produced thousands of events, from its regular Saturday club night to larger-scale immersive themed productions and, more recently, long-running projects working with specific underserved groups. In this edited interview, Duckie's three full-time employees, Simon Casson, Dicky…

Shakespeare's elite cultural status bolsters the sense of achievement and empowerment experienced by participants in prison performance programmes; and yet, such engagements paradoxically risk further marginalising participants by reinforcing a colonial mentality in which Shakespeare represents an offering from a morally superior white culture.…