Performance and Communities Socially Engaged Creative Practice

This collection is the second in the Performance and Communities series. Contributions from academics and artists engage with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances (textual/ embodied/ visual/ communal). 31 b&w illus. Socially Engaged Creative Practice engages with both identity and specific time-limited notions in performance: textual, embodied, visual, and communal. Each chapter of this edited collection focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines, and media, from community opera to online queer performance; from anti-racist classroom pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs; from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges. The performers, writers, and creators represented here engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problem. The personal perspective of each performer—as directors, librettists, producers, and writers—is explicitly located in a community, and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community. Jess Moriarty is principal lecturer in creative writing at the University of Brighton, UK where she is also co-director for the Centre of Arts and Wellbeing. Kate Aughterson is an independent scholar with over 30 years experience of teaching in UK universities. This is the second book in the Performance and Communities series. An edited collection from academics and artists engages with both these notions of performance – that of identities in and through time and space - and of more formal instances of specific time-limited performances; textual, embodied, visual and communal. Each chapter focuses on an individual or group’s mode of working and methodological practice of performance across a range of modes, disciplines and media – from community opera to online queer performance, from anti-racist class-room pedagogy to 1980s cabaret in nightclubs, from community art projects in schools to community writing projects in transport interchanges, the performers, writers and creators represented here all engage and grapple with contemporary performance as a situated practice and as a problematic. The personal perspective of each performer – directors, librettists, producers, writers, performers – is explicitly located in a community and the book offers a series of case studies detailing socially engaged work that aligns with concepts of performance and community.