Ralph Yarrow

Ralph Yarrow is a teacher, theatre director, performer, actor trainer, writer, editor, translator and project leader. Emeritus professor of drama and comparative literature, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. Previously head of Frnch and chair of drama programmes. His career spans an engagement with language and cultural production from Europe to India, from comparative criticism to postcolonial theory, from teaching innovations to directing practice; theatre and performance in France, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, India and Asia, South Africa. He made a founding international contribution to research into consciousness and the arts; developed further specializations in improvisation, Indian and Asian theatre; and in theatre in and as development, which comes out of theatre practice as training for personal and communal creativity, but also opens out into democracy as practice. I work currently in many of these areas as well as on performance and ecology; including close cooperation with India’s leading Forum Theatre/Theatre of the Oppressed organization, Jana Sanskriti. Books include Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance (with Anthony Frost, third edition, 2015), Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of Freedom and the co-written Sacred Theatre (with Carl Lavery et al.); translations (from German) of Birgit Fritz’s InExactArt: the Autopoietic Theatre of Augusto Boal and her The Courage to Be: Augusto Boal’s Revolutionary Politics of the Body (2016).