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…

As a process for engaging marginalised voices in the social/cultural economy of the media, digital storytelling has garnered much attention from media artists, community organisers and scholars since the early 1990s. The practice of digital storytelling, or the making and sharing of personal narratives through recorded voice-overs, digital…

Since the 1960s and 1970s, theatre artists from around the globe initiated a wave of theatre practice that is commonly known today as People's Theatre or Theatre for Empowerment. Transforming its participants from being mere "spectactors" to "spect-actors" capable of articulating their concerns on-stage, the ultimate goal of such theatre is to…

Julie Salverson, a Canadian scholar-practitioner, has long challenged the assumption that personal storytelling within Community-Based Theatre is necessarily therapeutic. Salverson critiques an "aesthetic of injury," arguing that theatre practitioners have foregrounded personal narratives in a way that reinscribes a "victim discourse" and a sense…

This article examines the performativities of three marginalised "at risk" youth who participated in a longitudinal digital storytelling project undertaken in formal and informal settings in Singapore. Seeking to foster young people's agency, identity and multiple literacies, the three and one half year project developed a range of digital…

Located two miles from Dublin Airport, Ballymun was built (1966-9) to accommodate people displaced from the inner-city slums dramatised in Sean O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy. "The Stage and the City" draws on the author's research project at Trinity College Dublin, on Theatre and Urban Regeneration. Specifically, it situates Dermot Bolger's "The…

This paper aims to explore a range of aesthetic aspects involved in the devising and production processes of oral history performance in a classroom setting. It touches upon the ethical dimension of aesthetics employing the Confucianist Wang Yang Ming's aesthetic philosophy and Buber's theories of relation as the theoretical frames. The devising…

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 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…

Theatre is a dangerous witness, challenged with multiple responsibilities of integrity, imagination, inspiration and craft. I explore the relationship between failure, witnessing, and displacement in a class grappling with their own backgrounds, migrations and interrogations of the idea of place and home. We approach performing testimony as an…

This article proposes a cognitive theory of how drama affects two aspects of language development: narrative comprehension and narrative production. It is a theoretical model that explicitly posits the role of the imagination in drama's potential to enhance the development of both narrative comprehension and narrative production. (Contains 2…

In this article, the authors respond to Jerzy Trzebinski's "Narratives and understanding other people." The first author's viewpoint comes from his work as a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a social psychiatrist preoccupied with rehabilitation and recovery for people with severe mental illness. According to him, Trzebinski's work raised important…

This paper can be conceived as one story embedded in a second story, in which the "outer" narrative, involving the theoretical and methodological framework, is that of my search for a means of defining, articulating and implementing an aesthetic epistemology in both academic research and in teacher education/development (a search that is advanced…

Examines the role and function of theatre rituals for approaching ethics in the curriculum. Discusses the ritual's main traits as a collective experience, constituting performed actions with symbolic status, within a structure of formal qualities and defined relationships. Concludes that theatre rituals: enable children's individual voices to…

Surveys relevant literature on the question of how people learn through doing drama. Proposes a construct to describe this learning process. Concludes that drama, even more than other storytelling and other fictional processes, employs the world-creating and hypothetical processes some have attributed to basic learning processes, which permeate…