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…

There has been a longstanding concern about the relationships between policy, funding and theatre practice in educational and community settings. Past scholarship has made evident the varied ways a relationship with policy can manifest and play out in the political, pedagogic, aesthetic and ethical values, approaches and outcomes of applied…

Through this paper, I consider how we might be aesthetically and relationally accountable in creating research-informed theatre through the conceptual frame of an aesthetic of relationality, and in-depth considerations of the theoretical notions embodiment, imagination and foolishness (as vulnerability-bravery). Through the example of…

Through this reflection on ageing and occupationally damaged bodies in performance, I argue that a probody aesthetics is fundamental to generating and sustaining care in community-engaged theatre projects. Such aesthetics is concerned with adopting a body-centric approach to making community-engaged theatre and arts, which insists artistic…

Commissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Kaite O'Reilly's play "In Water I'm Weightless" uses access aesthetics as well as content to interrogate the relationship between wholeness and disability. Featuring an entirely d/Deaf and disabled cast, the play provides a multitude of ways through which the performance can be…

This article argues that in a society transformed by an increasing bureaucratic nexus of migration, artistic responses to political crises are particularly effective when working with institutions. To probe the prevalent discourse on the efficacy of performance art, the article interrogates "Grandhotel Cosmopolis" through a lens of…

Focusing on examples from theatre ("On the Move" festival, London International Festival of Theatre/Royal Court Theatre, London 2016), film (Gianfranco Rosi's "Fuoccoamare," 2016) and the visual arts (Ai Weiwei's "Safe Passage," Berlin 2016), this article proposes that in order to think through questions of efficacy…

This paper analyses the theatre experiments of Badungduppa theatre (Assam, India). This theatre group is made up of tribal 'Rabha' community actors, a director, and theatre workers, and it incorporates the forgotten aesthetics of the community into its theatre practice and actor training. Over time, the Rabha community has been exploited by the…

This article interrogates access through the lens of public autobiographical performances by people living with dementia who, not generally construed as subjects in Western cultures, rarely appear on public stages. This scarcity underscores a strong connection between access and subjectivity, as well as between access, political distributions of…

In Kashmir, where the act of performing a script-based play on a proscenium stage is still seen by many as a controversial gesture, "Cages" involved the devised creation of a site responsive and immersive performance that placed two spectators, literally, in the shoes of an(Other). The potential of these forms of spectatorship, as…

"Training the peer facilitator: using participatory theatre to promote engagement in peer education" examines the role of participatory theatre in a peer education setting in relation to the goal of young people engaging and empowering their peers to create new knowledge together. Extending research about the use of applied theatre…

This article explores the aesthetics and ethics of participatory performance through "The Oh Fuck Moment" by Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe, a performance that aesthetically explores ethically troubling material and manipulation. Ethical criticism of participatory art in recent years has focused on the way the audience member is…

Could targeted inclusion initiatives press Canada's professional theatre community to tap the vast reserve of disabled people disenfranchised by its current practices? In 2015/2016, several long-standing professional institutions dedicated to fostering Canadian theatre joined with Canadian disability theatre artists in order to mark and understand…

This article is an enquiry into the possible shape of "an aesthetics of care" drawn from the experience of looking after a Congolese colleague after he was injured in a massacre in the DR Congo. The mix of different professional and personal circumstances directs the writing towards concerns with the ethics and aesthetics of caring for…

This paper analyses "Bharatanatyam on Wheels" by Ability Unlimited Foundation, Delhi. It interrogates the possibilities and challenges that disability performance presents to codifications in the form and grammar of "Bharatanatyam," a "classical" dance form of India. The Indian classical scriptures of performance…