Playing in the Margins of Meaning: The Ritual Aesthetic in Community Performance (original) (raw)
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As an emerging Australian community-engaged artist, scholar and teacher in the 1990s, I used to struggle to find resources to help me critically contextualise community performance. I found theory in this area dominated by texts like Ann Jellicoe’s’ The Community Play (source of the overtly celebratory “Colway method” of community theatre making); or by the psycho-political writings of Augusto Boal, and/or related theatre-in-development models, tied to Marxist political models and forum theatre methods (Boal, 1985; Jellicoe, 1987). In Australia, writing in this area seemed focused closely on local issues, sociological frameworks, and governmental funding rhetoric, rather than on analysis of this particular form of art-making (Hawkins, 1993). None of these texts helped me to frame the socially engaged, interdisciplinary, polyphonic and increasingly site-specific performance events I was observing, and taking part in creating. Of course, the field of Performance Studies has always bee...
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