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…

Recent proliferation of participatory performance forms has prompted debate on the agency of participants. Consideration of agential potential must go beyond the enactment of the work, however, to assess how participatory experiences can be self-documented and how such records may inform artistic pedagogy. Through discussion of a creative learning…

Out Of Character Theatre Company's Fresh Visions project pursued an innovative theatre-based research methodology which enabled sustained, in-depth, polyphonic and dialogic engagement around the future shape of local mental health services. Since our previous research (Heinemeyer, Catherine and Nick Rowe. 2019. 'Being Known, Branching Out:…

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…

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…

This response to COVID-19 introduces a Hong Kong drama education project that aims to support teachers' and children's return to school after the easing of COVID-19 pandemic. A pilot workshop has been conducted to explore and evaluate the approach of the project and to identify the needs of the teachers under the pandemic. Preliminary observations…

Using iconic images created by students in Belfast and Sarajevo of their respective cities, this paper will explore how emerging ideas in the field of cognitive science (e.g. Gallagher, S. 2005. "How the Body Shapes the Mind." Oxford: Clarendon Press) can help explain the making and understanding of Augusto Boal's "Image…

This article details key findings from a longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with Kids Company, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The focus of this article is the role of the "teacher as witness" to the impact of a participatory theatre project with vulnerable young people. This research argues that the…

Personal stories have been utilised in a variety of ways in Applied Theatre practices. The author problematises their use when the teller's safety is at stake within a given context. Inspired by neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte-Taylor's process of enlightenment through observing her stroke from the inside out, the author uses her personal experience of…

During the second half of 2014 in Seoul, South Korea, the author participated in the "Integrated Culture & Arts Education Workshop," which was held for local teachers and theatre practitioners. During the workshop, a group of participants designed a programme based on theatre conventions and dealing with social issues for youth.…

Collaborating with "Project: Humanity," an acclaimed socially engaged theatre company, we mobilized, over 16 weeks, an applied theatre methodology of drama workshops and traditional qualitative research methods to explore issues of spatialized inequality and localized poverty with a youth shelter community in Toronto, Canada.…

In 1975 a new definition of disability, challenging the conventional medical model, was proposed by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and the Disability Alliance. Subsequently extended to cover all impairments, this definition considers disability to be the "disadvantage or restriction caused by a contemporary…

This article summarises the ways in which Image Theatre, a practice originally developed by Augusto Boal which continues to be developed in the hands of applied theatre practitioners and critical arts educators worldwide, can be used as a pedagogical and dramaturgical system of decolonisation at the level of communities and individuals. Through…

In 2005-2009, the author researched the theatre-making practices of young people in selected black townships near Cape Town, South Africa. Township theatre groups comprised secondary school learners and out-of-school youth who join together to learn about and make theatre, perform and watch each other. These theatre practitioners do not describe…

This paper explores the design of virtual and physical learning spaces developed for students of drama and theatre studies. What can we learn from the traditional drama workshop that will inform the design of drama and theatre spaces created in technology-mediated learning environments? The authors examine four examples of spaces created for…