Submitted by Stephen Dunne on November 1, 2023 - 12:58pm
This course explores a range of performance practices, styles, and forms through which theatre has been uniquely successful in advocating, envisioning, and staging political and social change. It is not so much a course on social issues themselves, but on the genres of social change that contain them. It is about the ‘how’ of change.
Rallies, protests, ‘actions’ all speak to individuals with a proclivity toward change. Participants are there because there is already a will. How to speak to those without the will is the challenge of theatre for social change. Socially engaged, activist theatre is not a contemporary invention. For hundreds of years theatre in many forms has been reaching out across constituencies with a variety of approaches. We will consider some of the more successful forms.