Engaging Performance

<p><em>Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response</em> presents a combined analysis and workbook to examine socially engaged performance. It offers a range of key practical approaches exercises and principles for using performance to engage in a variety of social and artistic projects. Author</p><p>Jan Cohen-Cruz draws on a career of groundbreaking research and work within the fields of political applied and community theatre to explore the impact of how differing genres of theatre respond to social calls.</p><p>Areas highlighted include:</p><ul> <p> </p> <li>playwrighting and the engaged artist</li> <p> </p> <li>theatre of the oppressed</li> <p> </p> <li>performance as testimonial</li> <p> </p> <li>the place of engaged art in cultural organizing</li> <p> </p> <li>the use of local resources in engaged art</li> <p> </p> <li>revitalizing cities and neighborhoods through engaged performance</li> <p> </p> <li>training of the engaged artist.</li> </ul><p>Cohen-Cruz also draws on the work of major theoreticians including Bertolt Brecht Augusto Boal and Doreen Massey as well as analyzing in-depth case studies of the work of US practitioners today to illustrate engaged performance in action.</p><p>Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is the author of Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US; the editor of Radical Street Performance; co-editor with Mady Schutzman of Playing Boal: Theatre Therapy Activism and A Boal Companion; and a University Professor at Syracuse University.</p>