Between 1989 and 2020 Jonathan Petherbridge worked as the Artistic Director of a community-based theatre company - London Bubble. This longer than average tenure allowed him time to forge a close working relationship with the community and develop new ways to involve people of all ages in theatre-making.



Out of a slew of projects emerged a particular methodology to make work that was researched, curated and performed by citizens between the ages of 8 and 80. The process that emerged was called Foraging – a methodology carefully divided into five phases, which attempts to bring the best out of both voluntary and specialist artists – making time and space for them to create theatre that has a striking beauty and an ingrained aesthetic of care. Vernacular Theatre describes the result – the aesthetic.



The case studies - based on work with citizens of London and Hiroshima - examine how this theatre has valued key moments of communal history, contemporary issues and everyday institutions. The book suggests reasons and techniques for others to make similar work. Concluding with a reflection on the pre-classical Chorus of Greek Theatre where original work was produced to celebrate events with and for the community, this book proposes a new genre – a social and intergenerational art form that invites people to gather and share their life experience, concerns and creativity.

The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in Place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose, and image.



Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.

Transformative Professional Learning in Arts Integration invites educators and artists to name and center dilemma, discovery, and learning at the core of their collaborative efforts to improve the learning culture of classrooms through the arts. A dilemma comes in many forms.



Personal and programmatic dilemmas are often the result of a rupture between personal belief and the requirements of a system. The rupture - or dilemma - seeds a desire for something new, something better. However, as Queensland Aboriginal activists remind us, we must address our own bias and power in relationship to those we presume to support: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time; but if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” This text, therefore, shares the stories of individuals working towards collective educational improvement and change.



It is a story of failure and possibility, about individuals “bound up with” with each other, harnessing the power of the arts, in the common effort to make education more just and equitable for all.

Drama for Schools and Beyond: Transformative Learning Through the Arts, tells the story of twenty years of research and practice grounded in the Drama for Schools (DFS) professional development learning model based at The University of Texas at Austin, USA.



This book offers a critical look at the evolution of Drama for Schools through the learnings of its leaders and participants. It also gathers stories from partners across the globe who have adapted and built upon this model at their own sites. It is a primer for how to centre teacher and student inquiry and learning at the core of educational improvement. It is an invitation for teachers, administrators, and researchers to address their own bias and power in relation to those they aim to support.



Throughout, the authors show that by integrating the arts across education, new networks of possibility can be grown, to create a more just and equitable education for all.

A tactical guide for nonprofit arts leaders, revealing the entrepreneurial traits that turn creative passion into sustainable success.

Entrepreneurial Arts and Cultural Leadership focuses on real-world strategies to developing the entrepreneurial mindset necessary for leading and sustaining nonprofit arts organizations. Bonnie Fogel and Brett Ashley Crawford examine the leadership traits that drive innovation, adaptability, and long-term viability in the ever-evolving arts sector.

Through the case study of Imagination Stage, one of the top theatre companies for young people, they highlight how successful nonprofit theater leaders can navigate financial instability, advocate for equity and inclusion, and implement sustainable business models in a landscape forever impacted by national and global events. With practical insights, tools, and a resource-rich appendix, this book offers arts managers, educators, and nonprofit leaders a roadmap for resilience and growth. Whether you are an advanced student, a researcher, or an arts executive seeking inspiration, this book provides an essential framework for building the future of nonprofit theatre.

Imagination Stage was founded as BAPA (Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts) in 1979 in response to the urgent need for arts education for young people. The company was renamed Imagination Stage in 2001 in anticipation of its move to its downtown Bethesda theatre arts centre in 2003. Imagination Stage has grown from a handful of children in a single classroom to a full-spectrum theatre arts organization, with theatre productions by professional actors and artists. Unlike most children’s theatre companies, Imagination Stage commissions new works for children every year. These productions have been recognized with awards and productions by other companies around the world.

Bonnie Fogel is the founder and longtime leader of Imagination Stage, one of the top theatres for young audiences in the United States. Brett Ashley Crawford is a teaching professor and faculty chair of the arts & entertainment management programs at Carnegie Mellon University, USA.

Leigh Bowery: Performative Costuming and Live Art is a critical exploration of the creative practice, social-historical context, and cultural impact of the late London-based artist Leigh Bowery. The diversity of Bowery’s work and his marginality as an artist who emerged during the 1980s from a subcultural milieu complicated and thwarted his cultural value, hindering his incorporation into art institutions and performance art narratives for some time. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou seeks to historicize Bowery’s multifaceted body of work and critically situate it within the expanded fields of visual culture and performance studies.

Through close analysis of Bowery’s key looks and non-theatrical performances, the book investigates the implications of his work in dominant histories of performance art and urgent discourses surrounding normativity, representations of illness, and identity politics. Thought-provoking and engaging, it focuses on Bowery’s costuming as a performative strategy that effectively blurs the boundaries between art and life; delves into his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire, reflects on his involvement with BDSM practices and the performance of extremity, and unpacks the posttranssexual ethos behind his hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language.



Foreword by Boy George.

This article offers an art-based exploration of the author’s therapeutic work in contexts of pregnancy loss, focusing on the experience of those who make the profoundly difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons (TFMR). The existing literature points to high levels of psychological distress in this group, against a backdrop of polarized debates on abortion care. There are gaps in cultural representations of the TFMR experience across the arts, as well as a dearth of exploration in the psychotherapeutic domain. The author sets out to represent these complex experiences and to delineate key therapeutic tasks using art-based self-inquiry. The methodology incorporates image-making and reflections on clinical practice, taking as a starting point the word ‘vessel’, which evokes associations to pregnancy and the therapeutic process. The incorporation of hand-stitching within the image-making process echoes the endeavour of textile artists in other contexts to capture marginalized experiences.

In mainstream Malayalam films, the portrayal of Muslims and their lifestyles has a significant and contemporary parallel in Kerala’s home video films. Home videos, popular since 2000, especially in northern Kerala, continue to attract a large audience. The Malabar region was the focal point of twentieth-century migration to the Gulf. Therefore, it is unexpected that the cultural influence of home video films has not been extensively studied in Kerala, particularly within the Muslim community. Central to the narratives are the social and ideological issues affecting Kerala’s Muslim residents and migrants. Therefore, understanding how identities form among Gulf migrants requires studying cultural expatriation in spatio-temporal settings, across different times and places. This article examines how home video films interrogate sociocultural Muslim norms of sexuality and religion through the silver screen.

Review of: Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics and Authorship in the Art of the 1970s and 1980s, Sydney Stutterheim (2024)

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 280 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47803-069-0, p/bk, $89.95

This article explores the use of proverbs in the discography of punk rock band NOFX to assess how the perceived old-fashioned character of proverbs mixes with the reformist nature of punk. After surveying the lyrics for proverbial references, it can be confirmed that, despite the different inclinations of proverbs and punk rock, they interact frequently and effectively in the lyrics of this band, demonstrating the versatility and adaptability of proverbs, which allow the songwriter to express his message in an ingenious and pithy manner and to achieve different communicative purposes. Whether this abundance of proverbial references is accidental or deliberate, the fact is they appear in extraordinary numbers.

What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.

For centuries, folds and folding have captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origami, amid the simplest acts of pedestrian life, within the philosophical turnings of the mind, and in art, design, architecture, performing arts, and linguistics around the world. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold figures into embodiment, into our very impulse to create.

This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for inter/trans/postdisciplinary artistic research, whether for the performative, for product realization, or simply to enliven body, mind, and spirit. Destined for artmaking—for making any art—the f/old practice etches into the very fabric of embodiment. As such, the f/old reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into nice areas that embrace the unknown, with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities. In conceiving of art made differently, two seasoned facilitators Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their insights, they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute, each a veteran artist of a diverse genre.

Featuring a wide variety of practice samples and images, this book reflects on a current and unique somatic-oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and practice.

This chapter invites readers to learn about wayfolding – our manner of navigating in and through the f/old as somatic/artistic practice. We prefer to the word ‘wayfolding’ to the word ‘process’, one that takes its precedent from the word/concept of wayfinding. For simplicity, the authors have parsed out a few signposts, formatting them as a list, one following another. Taken together, they function more like a wave collage – a collaging in operation at any one moment. These under/overtaking ripples are blended modalities of observation, orientation and sourcing. We invite you to read about them with this spirit.

This chapter explores the compulsion of presence as a gateway into altered states of perception, creativity, and connection. Through rhythm, repetition, and deep focus, trance emerges as a conduit to expanded awareness, suspending habitual thought patterns and opening new ways of seeing. Drawing from cultural traditions and embodied experience, the text considers how language, movement, and sensory engagement act as catalysts for transformation. Curiosity is framed as both an incantation and a method, dissolving the familiar to reveal latent potential. The invitation is to engage with materiality whether a book, a body, or a moment as an active site of discovery, where the mundane becomes extraordinary through attuned participation.

The chapter is a revisitation of the written component of Susan Sentler's contribution to bulanujung: Against Disimagination, 2020/21. bulanujung was a project initiative and thought experiment for a digital presentation of moving images online created and curated by artist Jeremy Sharma, collaborating with twelve invited artists. It was partly motivated by his previous endeavours into time-based media and his personal research. Sentler's contribution fold.fall.nest. was part of the curatorial theme titled ‘choreography and language’.

Daniela Monasterios-Tan's chapter delves into the transformative potential of the fold, or f/ol\d, at the intersection of fashion pedagogy and practice. Focused on a dance and fashion cross-disciplinary project, she examines challenges in merging movement and fashion design. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's fold theories, Monasterios-Tan highlights the dynamic nature of folds, moving away from static garment-making. Her participation in Dr. Tsai-Chun Huang's Plica Ex Plica workshop expands her insight into pleats, emphasizing their role in liberating bodily movement, with references to avant-garde designers like Mariano Fortuny and Issey Miyake.

Shifting to a free-form origami approach, Monasterios-Tan encourages students to disrupt traditional garment functions. Exploring folds as an interface, she challenges established norms by examining internal body folds. Case studies of fashion photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis and designer Karoline Vitto illustrate the representation of internal folds in visual art and fashion. Ultimately, the chapter reflects on the fold's multifaceted nature, revealing its malleability when released from structural constraints—a dynamic force in contemporary fashion, disrupting traditional boundaries for a more fluid and expansive design approach.

In this article the authors outline a design and delivery of a participatory performance project, which took place in a Kilmarnock care home for people living with dementia (PLWD). In designing the project, the researchers aimed to improve the quality of lives of PLWD through a focus on the active agency of the participants and the co-creation of performance material. Over a period of five weeks in autumn 2023, the care home residents engaged in weekly performance workshops, which offered them opportunities to become ‘performers’. As we demonstrate, their participation in this innovative project enhanced their agency, confidence and overall well-being. In concluding, the authors present a positive case for participant agency being central to project design and make some recommendations for best practices when working with PLWD in care home settings, therefore enhancing their overall quality of life.

Investigation of the learning practices of popular musicians can glean benefits for the field of music education by helping stakeholders connect music practice with the music classroom. The purpose of this case study is to examine the learning processes of professional-level music producers in the United States. Three music producers identified as such by professionals in the field completed interviews regarding how they began and continued acquiring music production skills and knowledge. Resulting themes included learning through experimentation and matching, seeking out information, learning from others and learning in context. Based on the results of this study, internships and opportunities for collaboration during formal music production training might better prepare music production students for their future careers. Institutional learning can be compatible with ways music producers learn, and the expansion of music production education in college and K-12 settings could open the field of music production to more individuals.

In this interview with art historian Maria Elena Buszek, American photographer Kate Simon (b. 1953) discusses her work as a photojournalist documenting the nascent punk and reggae scenes of the 1970s. Simon shares the ‘punky-reggae’, art and literary connections in her long and storied career, and her perspectives on the gender politics that met the growing numbers of women photojournalists and writers who came out of the 1970s music scene.

“Can I Get A Witness: Thoughts on a Writing Life” by Max S. Gordon is an examination on the importance of bearing witness as a writer, and how, through sharing our authentic experience, we empower others with our work. Using the author James Baldwin as an inspiration, Max S. Gordon discusses the importance of writing as both legacy and resistance, that no matter how the medium of publishing may evolve, the need for us to tell our stories remains intact. Gordon also explores the role of identity in writing and how “testifying” to our experience as writers - particularly as writers of color and queer writers - sustains and inspires others.

A career change late in life helped Kealey Boyd find her voice only to lose her footing while navigating the bewildering world of art criticism. Her incisive and hilarious inquiries about writing, motherhood, regionality and art deconstruct our understanding of creative success and the lives behind the page.

Delany declined to summarize his essay. He is 82 years young.

The author describes his origins of becoming a writer and the inspirations that sustained his career over many years. He will also describe his approach to being a nimble writer in the technological era in which the world currently finds itself.

Formative experiences that shaped Hrag Vartanian career as a writer, including a meeting with Armenian-Canadian writer Ara Baliozian, and the legacy of his grandfather who survived the Armenian Genocide.

Part of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, edited by Sharon Louden, Artists as Writers offers first-person narratives that explore the day-to-day lives of individuals who use writing as both a creative practice and a means of sustaining their daily lives.

This collection features thirty-two chapters where writers share their insights, offering pathways for others to follow. They delve into how they balance multiple roles, the choices they made, the challenges they faced, and the successes they achieved.

Contributors include writers from Ethiopia, Jamaica, Guatemala, Nigeria, Palestine, Poland, Sweden, and the United States , who vividly recount the circuitous journeys that brought them to where they are today. Through richly detailed stories, they reveal how writing became a central force in their lives and how it continues to sustain them emotionally, creatively, and financially.

“There once was a popular soap opera called The Village Headmaster. It aired weekly on television sets all over Nigeria in the late 1970s. It made millions howl with laughter. It was appointment viewing in those heady days just before and after FESTAC '77, before Nigerian movies made in Nollywood exploded and sucked up all the onscreen entertainment in Africa. I quite recall sitting on the floor to watch a small black and white television in our living room at 27 Lugard Avenue, in Ikoyi. Back then Ikoyi was mostly residential. And bucolic. And, compared to now, it seemed sparse. There was little traffic on its narrow streets and the large trees provided shade to pedestrians.”

It was only after receiving my Master of Arts in jazz that I stumbled upon an opportunity to write about Black history. In 1999, a consortium of New York professionals working on a project called the Strivers Center Project—to revitalize 135th Street in Harlem—invited me to conduct secondary research on Harlem's rich Black history. I was longing for this opportunity! I dived in with complete abandon, reading every book on the subject that I could get my hands on. I knew that this opportunity could possibly open doors for me beyond being a singer and musician, to become an historian and a writer, something I privately longed for. I produced a paper titled “What Made Harlem Famous” and the finalized Strivers Center Project resulted in a Harlem Walk of Fame, installed on West 135th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues.”

This is an essay about memory and time as it relates to the creative process. In it, Maaza Mengiste shares her thoughts on how a writer grapples with time both on the page and in life.

Poet/Writer/Lawyer Travis Montez discusses how creativity and creating are essential parts of his mental health and trauma healing.

“What is professional writing?” As a professional writer, a qualitative researcher, and a teacher of professional writing, Dr. Kristine Rodriguez Kerr explores 20 years of answering this question and the importance of recognizing and supporting the writing that individuals are contributing to the modern, working world.

Dreams Come Away is a personal immigrant story presented in fragmented language and a broken time structure, reflecting the protagonist's state of being—suspended in a limbo without a sense of belonging, yet constrained by borders, stereotypes, and political rules. Despite the individual's good intentions and relentless hard work, including a PhD and an extensive list of publications, the story underscores the impossibility of escaping defining social structures such as poverty, class, ethnicity, and especially language. Language here serves a particularly ambiguous function; it is both the writer's identity marker—a means of escape, a shield, and a last resort—and, at the same time, as it is always a foreign language, not a mother tongue, it is an alienating and harmful tool that reinforces the feeling of never being good enough, of never truly being at home even in the language.

This essay invites readers into my Odu Adamu's brain in a most difficult moment. As he contemplates ending his life, there's a rapid-fire happening in his head of all that is wrong. But there's a breakthrough that redirects Odu and helps him get to the heart of some things that need to be healed.

Angharad Coates discusses her background in writing and communications/media relations in the arts and culture sector. The essay covers her personal career journey and her philosophy on writing and writers.

A Tejaño writer reflects on his ambivalence to writing, a writing career, his upbringing, and his heritage.

It tells the story of how I became a writer, all the formal training I had and the mentors that were key to my development. It begins in Jamaica, the country of my birth and continues through to my coming of age in the US and my living in London while I pursued my doctorate. It also includes my time at the Hyperallergic arts magazine as a writer and editor.

In this interview with Los Angeles performance artist Johanna Went, the artist talks with art historian Maria Elena Buszek about her path towards both performance art and the punk scene in the 1970s. They discuss the genesis of Went’s often gruesome, largely improvisational performances and lovingly crafted, sculptural costumes that were exhibited in the 2020 exhibition Passion Container at LA gallery The Box, feminist politics and what Went calls the ‘bloodlines’ of the LA punk scene.

This study explored the impact of a fifteen-week course in modern band practice on developing music teachers’ identities as creative music-makers. Modern band is a growing area of the research literature in music education. Composition, improvisation and popular music-making experiences constitute current band activity. The creative identity measure (CIM-measure) evaluates self-perceptions of abilities in these areas. The measure has been used and adopted in various research studies over the past decade. For this study, twelve pre-service music teachers enrolled in the course ‘Creative Performance Chamber Ensemble I’ at School of Music, University of South Florida, USA were assessed on their perceptions of their abilities associated with various creative musical activities. The CIM-in music was used as a pre-and post-assessment of modern band experiences at the beginning and the end of the fifteen-week class. There were significant positive changes between the pre- and post-assessments. Open-ended response items were also collected. Findings suggest that pre-service music teachers increased their confidence levels associated with their abilities to compose, improvise, be involved in ‘new’ music ensembles, and be involved with popular music ensembles as a result of taking this course. They are more likely to plan on teaching their students to do these musical activities in the future as a result of these experiences.

This study explored why runners have joined an online running group called the Running Punks that was set up in 2020. Running Punks espouses running for pleasure and repudiates the ‘rules’ of running groups which are mainly concerned with speed and performance. This research aimed to discover, through semi-structured interviews, why people joined a group that differs so significantly from others. In total 44 semi-structured interviews were undertaken, and the data was analysed using thematic analysis. The results constructed three broad themes: belonging; connected; and catalyst for change which are discussed by applying two theoretical strands: community of practice (CoP) and self-determination theory (SDT). The results discovered that while individuals benefited enormously from being connected and related as part of a community, they identified as ‘Running Punks’ as they valued their autonomy as individuals.

Review of: If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education, C. Cayari, J. D. Thompson and R. S. Rajan (eds) (2025)

Bristol: Intellect, 288 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-83595-167-5, h/bk, $124.95

This article addresses the concept of performance opera by artist duo VestAndPage, aiming to investigate how the corporeal and sonic can generate space–time alternatives through unconventional modes of performance-making. They describe performance operas as collaborative, site-specific works that are unrepeatable. To produce them, VestAndPage organized experiential co-creation artist-in-residences to encourage community-building among the performers they invite to collaborate on an opera. During production, body-based performance actions and the sounds of various elements (from everyday noises to sophisticated electronic experimentation) allow aesthetic pitfalls and ruptures to emerge, shaping a performance opera’s immediate experience and contributing to reshaping what might otherwise be considered ‘normal’ reality.

The goal of this article is to provide an account of the difficulty, in the present, of reconstructing a punk event that took place 40 years ago. I will use this undertaking as the basis for reflecting on the larger conceptual stakes (ideas and concepts) that are illustrated by this specific event from the past, the Brockwell Park Festival, London. I played bass at this event in Strawberry Switchblade, a female-led cult post-punk band. A cold case is used here as a metaphor for this reconstruction; the larger conceptual stakes are the ‘mystery’ to be investigated. This in turn enables me to frame my account of that day from the past in terms of how it functions within punk and post-punk culture and scholarship. There was a lot of fun, energy and some ‘aggro’ (i.e. violent or threatening behaviour) at this event. I present an autoethnography, reviews from the time and various first-hand accounts of this particularly tense punk and post-punk event, i.e. my cold case, so that I can examine the significance and the importance of returning to the past and unpicking the memories and myths of subcultural experience. This is followed by a discussion of the larger conceptual stakes: memory, subcultural memory and myth; ‘tribes’; discomfort and uncertainty.

Contextualizing the process behind the making of Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective as a dramaturgy of “curating in the continuous present,” exhibition curator Emelie Chhangur discusses the innovations and stagings of this project as both a performative exhibition and an exhibition that performed the work of the artist. The paper includes curatorial texts, an exhibition walkthrough and a personal account of the almost 4 year journey, what the writer also refers as a durational 1:1 performance with the artist, Jess Dobkin.

In contributing to the audio descriptions for Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective, I approached each artwork with a deep sense of intimacy and creative exploration. Rather than adhering strictly to visual accuracy, I chose to interpret and describe the pieces through the impressions they left on me—emphasizing mood, emotion, and the sensory experience of encountering the works. Inspired by creative writing and poetic practices, this experimental approach allowed me to provide affect-based, intuitive narrations that invite listeners to engage with the artwork on a deeper, more personal level.

This essay examines a drawing by performance artist Jess Dobkin. Created for her 2021 Wetrospective at the Art Gallery of York University, the drawing depicts a female-body-shaped Venn Diagram that contains all the names of the people, artists, places, and groups that Jess has collaborated with in her art practice since 1991. The drawing has a notable crossover of two circles that form a bright pink, pointy-ended oval. This is the vaginal portal of the “Venn woman” at the center of the drawing. Through an analysis of this drawing, this essay considers the nature of collaboration and community-building in both art-making practices, and in life.

The entrance lobby of Jess Dobkin's Wetrospective is riddled with clues to the magical and performative world on the other side. This essay discusses these clues in an attempt to exploring the hospitality and generosity of the artist's practice.