In February 2012, London-based theatre company Collective Artistes previewed "ZHE: [noun] Undefined," a new play created by director Chuck Mike and performers Tonderai Munyevu and Antonia Kemi Coker. The play follows the true life stories of the two performers, both British Africans, living at the intersections of culture, nationality, gender and…

In this article, we consider the aesthetic, political and pedagogical strengths of a verbatim theatre performance, "The Middle Place" by Project: Humanity, a play that explores the experiences of shelter youth in Toronto, Canada. This ethnographic study moved from drama classrooms into theatres and charted audience responses to the production, its…

This article is based upon research into a participatory Theatre in Education (TiE) programme that toured the West Midlands in 2009, funded by the UK's PREVENT initiative intended to counter the radicalisation of young British nationals by extremist political groups. The article provides a summary of the TiE programme and then presents…

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 their…

In July 1999, the Wedding Community Play was performed in Belfast. A much-celebrated event at the time, the Wedding Play took audiences into private houses inside Loyalist and Republican estates, then on to a public venue for the performance of a cross-community wedding. Gerri Moriarty has already written about some of the difficulties encountered…

This article juxtaposes the recent work of Peter Brook with a Bristol-based mental health service-user collective--Stepping Out Theatre Company. Informed by field-work with the company, this chapter explores the aesthetic and political relationship between professional, experimental theatre work and community-based performance practice. Drawing…

In the autumn of 2007 and spring of 2008 the author performed an adapted version of Dario Fo and Franca Rame's one-woman play "Peace Mom" (retitled for Canadian audiences as "Peace Mum") about American mother and peace activist Cindy Sheehan. The play was performed for University of Victoria Applied Theatre students and also in a number of…

The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah (the Blahs) have been working in youth centres since 1985 and over that time the Blahs have experimented with ways to make theatre for young people in this environment. A youth centre can be a hostile place to take a piece of theatre. Many of the youth centres the Blahs have visited have been in areas of social…

In September 2008 the author created an encounter between herself and Rick Walker, the Director of Cartwheel Arts, a small community arts company in Rochdale, in the North West of England. As one of the three founding workers of what was then Cartwheel Community Arts in 1984, she hoped to create a conversation which recollected or traced some of…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

The Moving On project is an initiative of Griffith University and the Aftercare Resource Centre, a service agency established to meet the ongoing needs of ex-residents of institutional childhood care in Queensland. This collaborative action research project is funded by a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Grant to explore the…

This paper outlines research which examined the relationship between drama and writing, detailing the method of enquiry, theoretical foundations and emergent findings. The study sought to understand the nature of the support that drama offers children as writers and to identify features of writing which regularly surfaced in drama-related writing.…

Related to aspects of drama and theatre education, I search beyond the findings about symbolic play set forth by Dr Howard Gardner in "Frames of mind. The theory of multiple intelligences". Despite the inspiration for and solidarity with arts educators that emanate from his theory, I sensed that it did not provide a full picture of the complex…