Sara Baartman (Venus Hottentot) was an African teenager lured to Europe to perform for audiences in 1810; her genitals and brain were posthumously dissected, pickled and museumized. In 2016, 'Venus Hottentot: A Short Play' was staged at The University of MA, Amherst, and the audience participated in free writing at the end of the performance. The…

Knowledge about embodied creativity is in its infancy. In circus arts, performers are nowadays 'owning' their creativity making this performance domain fruitful to study embodied creativity. Building on socio-cultural creativity perspectives and radical embodied cognitive sciences, the current study aimed at exploring movement creativity by…

This article explores the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in community theatre with teenage girls. By drawing on postconstructionist and spatial theories, the article elaborates on how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force, the…

Commercial dance forms, specifically musical theater dance, remain highly marginalized within higher education research. This article presents the need to establish more scholarly research in musical theater dance and points out the ethnographic identity of the genre in our global society. Ethnographic study can be useful in validating musical…

Our article explores the impact of the global health pandemic on our five-year, multi-sited, collaborative ethnographic study titled "Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists" and "their Publics: Performing for Socio-Ecological Justice" (2019-2024). We illustrate how our arts-led, youth-driven ethnographic…

This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's…

This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular…

Forum theatre is a dialogic method with the potential to bridge the gap between practice-based and academic learning in higher education by enabling postgraduate students to act out and critically reflect on everyday dilemmas. In previous research, little attention is placed on the crucial role of the facilitator and the implications of her…

In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness "the real" in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of "the real" from realism's representational aesthetics. They further…

The article elucidates the theatre-making methodology of Shyambazar Blind Opera House, Kolkata (SBO); a group theatre troupe made up of members of the visually impaired community. The initiative uses theatre as an experimental tool to facilitate personal, social, and cultural development, and is the first of its kind in Bengal. The composite…

This essay considers what viewing performance as an affective encounter--an embodied experience of sensations and intensities--might mean for applied theatre. Using auto-theory, which joins personal narrative with theories of affect, new materialism and post-humanism, we write an affective encounter that catches up people and objects in relations…

"Fracturing and Re-Membering" is a performative mapping combining critical autoethnography and verbatim theatre that re-presents the entanglement of the fragmented and fractured work of teaching, professional development, and research. It draws on data from professional development sessions of a critical literacy and creative drama…

This Hong Kong project features recovering gambling addicts and their family. During the research, devising and performance sessions were observed, and actors, audience members, artists, and social workers were interviewed. The performing gamblers presented stressful and distressing stories in which their partners struggled to maintain the family…

Many youth struggle to determine their role and cope with overwhelming emotions and imaginative dystopias around combatting climate catastrophe and capitalist greed. In this time when many marginalised youth feel assured of immediate and distant threat, it is vital for applied theatre practitioners and educators to nurture critical hope as a means…

This study draws on ethnographic research from three co-ethnic community-based, arts programs serving immigrant youth to examine the ways in which immigrant educators serve as "curriculum texts" for youth. It illustrates the curricular nature of the experiences, being and interactions of immigrant educators who share with youth the same…