Socially Engaged Creative Practice: Contemporary Case Studies(Performance and Communities)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of figures  Abstracts  Introduction Kate Aughterson and Jess Moriarty   SECTION ONE: CHANGING THEATRES  1. In Our Sites: A Personal View of the Writer’s Role in Place-Making Theatre with, by, and for Communities Sara Clifford  2. Dramatizing Recent History: The Bombing of the Grand Hotel Julie Everton 3. Thoughts on Appropriation – Collaboration for Silkmoth Eleanor Knight 4. Disremembered Cabaret Histories Al Meggs  5. Representation and Collective Creation: The Work of Middle East/North Africa (MENA) Arts UK Laura Hanna   SECTION TWO: TAKING TO THE STREETS  6. Disorientation, Creativity, and Performance in Liminal Spaces: A Case Study of a Writer in Residence at Heathrow Airport and Oval Underground Station Dawn Hart 7. Conversations between Borders: Cyclical Thinking and Alternative Worlds Emily Orley 8. Extinction Rebellion and Performance Activism on the Streets of London Marisa Carnesky 9. Making Community from Mess: Mapping the Santiago de Cuba Carnival and the Carnivalesque of My Research Journey Through Poetry Yvonne Canham-Spence   SECTION THREE: TRANSFORMING SPACES AND STORIES  10. Holding Queer Space/Holding Space Queerly: Lockdown Reflections on Queer Performance and Community Ess Grange and Mal Parry 11. You’ll Never Forget, I’ll Never Remember. You’ll Never Remember, I’ll Never Forget Rachel Dean, Marie Hallager Andersen, and Daliah Touré 12. Preserving Fruit: Using Oral History to Preserve Stories of Black British History and the Transatlantic Journeys from Which Our Traditions Have Emerged Veneta Roberts   SECTION FOUR: OPENING UP INSTITUTIONS  13. Beyond The Room Marina Castledine 14. Monsters and Campfires: Using Storytelling to Humanize Institutional Spaces Finlay McInally and Jess Moriarty 15. The Clothes on Our Backs: Diversifying the Curriculum Tony Kalume and Jess Moriarty   Notes on Contributors

About the Author :
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.