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…

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…

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…

This field report from The Asylum Project, an Olimpias disability culture experiment, centres non-mainstream experiences of space in two Michigan performances, accessing extrasensory experiences as a creative form. How can we witness and amplify histories of intersected violence and emergent forms of healing? How can we invite hauntings? In…

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.…

This article explores the way gender resonates in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" through an active study of live performance. Combining pedagogy with performance as an interpretive methodology, this research focuses upon using my unique classroom situation, teaching ultra-Orthodox Jewish adolescent females, as a platform for analysis.…

Through applied theatre, Navajo women can participate in authoring a new story for how energy is mined, produced, developed, disseminated and used in the Navajo Nation. This article is an analysis of a creative process that was utilised with primarily Navajo women to create a Navajo Women's Energy Project (NWEP). The framework for this creative…

This paper is a study of a Malayalam documentary play "Not Just the Victims" staged by Abhinaya Theatre Research Centre Trivandrum. Along with analyzing the documentary method of the play this study looks at how the theatre group employed the play for "re-educating" the people regarding certain existing norms. The play…

This article examines some of the performance outcomes from a practised-based research project that took place with adolescent girls attending an after-school drama club. Participants experimented with slapstick humour in a series of workshops, before presenting their own devised physical comedy performance for a live audience. Comic performances…

Incarcerated women at Westville Female Correctional Centre in Durban, South Africa have been using popular participatory theatre (PPT) to create a space to generate debate about aspects of prison life for over 10 years. This article explores how these women engaged the issue of lesbianism in the Correctional Centre and how the process and form was…

This essay considers the performance context and aesthetics of "Journey Woman", a play devised to initiate a week-long rehabilitative groupwork programme for female prisoners. Although Geese Theatre UK are one of the country's longest-established companies specialising in drama work within the criminal justice sector, this 2006 piece is…

This paper examines a community theatre project in Kaohsiung County, Taiwan that aimed to tackle domestic violence through a collaboration between local community female elders and the facilitator. The paper investigates how an outside facilitator could unfix the assumed community identities which tend to exclude outsiders or sub-groups, in this…

The article explores the limitations of applied drama interventions promising integration and inclusion against the material realities of urban disenfranchisement and misrecognition. Through reflection on a participatory theatre project facilitated with young women in an urban secondary school in London, social and moral agendas emerge which…

This article focuses on aspects of devising and staging a play written for a group of women prisoners. The project raised issues concerning the nature of community theatre in secure institutions. Arts work in a community context is often predicated on notions of intervention and transformation. A central question underpinning the project concerned…

Founded in 1995, the Taiwanese Uhan Shii Theatre Group has created 12 distinctive reminiscence theatre productions and has performed locally in Taiwan as well as globally around the world. The company has developed its own theatrical aesthetics of memory, and their work not only represents the traditions of Taiwanese culture and habitus, but it…