About this item
Highlights
- Performance Affects, now in paperback and with a new preface, explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice.
- About the Author: JAMES THOMPSON Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester, UK, Director of In Place of War and a Director of the Centre for Applied Theatre Research.
- 205 Pages
- Performing Arts, Theater
Description
Book Synopsis
Performance Affects, now in paperback and with a new preface, explores performance projects in disaster and war zones to argue that joy, beauty and celebration should be the inspiration for the politics of community-based or participatory performance practice. Applied Theatre has traditionally concentrated on effects - impacts, themes communicated or 'truths' revealed. Performance Affects challenges this orientation by suggesting that an affective realm needs to be the focus for a renewed aesthetic, ethical and radical vision of the practice. Performance projects with child soldiers, storytelling programmes in tsunami-affected areas and prison theatre workshops in post-genocide Rwanda are used to demonstrate the limits of a practice reliant solely on effect - and an alternative is suggested: one that encourages a commitment to pleasure, passion and enjoyment as a starting point for a political-aesthetic practice that acknowledges the importance of our affection for others as a stimulus to social change.Review Quotes
'Drawing on his own workshops in Sri Lanka in 2000 and research in Rwandan prisons, Thompson builds a moving and often disturbing picture of how theatre can be used for political ends' - What's On Stage.com
'Performance Affects, focusing on the aesthetics and politics of performance in sites of war, disaster, and crisis, will be of immediate interest to academics writing and working in and around those settings and in the applied theatre field. The book provides a rich, complex, and theoretically aligned set of ideas and contributions to discourses of theatre performance in political contexts.' - Sheila Preston, New Theatre Quarterly
'The strength of the study stems from the sensitive, insightful and extremely self-reflexive observations from Thompson's work as a practitioner and participant in applied theatre projects in Sri Lanka and Rwanda... His study is theoretically eclectic, and yet refreshingly non-presumptuous... Thompson makes a consistent, sincere and timely argument.' - Sruti Bala, Theatre Research International
'This book is bold, admirable, moving, lucid and persuasive, and its argument for an affective turn in the practice and scholarship of applied theatre is already, fundamentally, changing them.' - Jen Harvie, Research in Drama Education
'Performance Affects is a timely, eloquent and urgent call to theatre makers and academics working in the field of applied theatre to interrogate the existing critical discourses and political aspirations of contemporary practices and to develop new practical and theoretical vocabularies to advance the field...Performance Affects offers an original and important contribution to applied theatre by challenging, critiquing and championing the aesthetic and political aspirations of work. This book will be an invaluable addition to the practical and theoretical development of the field.' - Caoimhe McAvinchey, Contemporary Theatre Review
About the Author
JAMES THOMPSON Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester, UK, Director of In Place of War and a Director of the Centre for Applied Theatre Research. He is author of Drama Workshops for Anger Management and Offending Behaviour (1999), Applied Theatre: Bewilderment and Beyond (2003), Digging Up Stories: Applied Theatre, Performance and War and with Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour, Performance In Place of War (2009).