Engaging Performance

Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response presents a combined analysis and workbook to examine "socially engaged performance." It offers a range of key practical approaches, exercises, and principles for using performance to engage in a variety of social and artistic projects. Author_x000D_ Jan Cohen-Cruz draws on a career of groundbreaking research and work within the fields of political, applied, and community theatre to explore the impact of how differing genres of theatre respond to social "calls."_x000D_ _x000D_ Areas highlighted include:_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ playwrighting and the engaged artist_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ theatre of the oppressed_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ performance as testimonial_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ the place of engaged art in cultural organizing_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ the use of local resources in engaged art_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ revitalizing cities and neighborhoods through engaged performance_x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ training of the engaged artist._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Cohen-Cruz also draws on the work of major theoreticians, including Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Doreen Massey, as well as analyzing in-depth case studies of the work of US practitioners today to illustrate engaged performance in action._x000D_ _x000D_ Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is the author of Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US; the editor of Radical Street Performance; co-editor, with Mady Schutzman, of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion; and a University Professor at Syracuse University.