Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change PDF
Preview Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change
Theatre of Good Intentions Theatre of Good Intentions Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change Dani Snyder-Young © Dani S nyder-Y oung 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-29302-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-45104-3 ISBN 978-1-137-29303-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137293039 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. For Dan Contents List of Illustrations x Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Why Do We Want to Use Theatre to Make Social Change? 1 Theatre as a tactic 3 Applied theatre 4 Efficacy versus affect 5 Unintended byproducts 8 Applied theatre and the Left 9 Change is hard to make 10 Theatre has unique properties 11 Methodology 12 Limitations 14 What are the limitations of theatre in making social change? 15 Part I Impacting Participants 1 Theatre of Good Intentions 21 Privilege: an acknowledged challenge 21 The desire to change the world through theatre 23 Guilt 25 Good intentions or altruism 26 Global Poverty 28 The silent witness 31 Trouble understanding the constraints of those without privilege 33 Collaboration with insiders 34 Value laden structures 37 2 Participatory Theatre and the Problem of Dominant Discourse 40 Popular versus progressive 41 The drama classroom as institutional space 44 Why Boal in school? 47 Facilitation tensions in the drama classroom 48 vii viii Contents Perfect 52 Dominant discourses, facilitation possibilities 56 3 Embedded in Institutions, Beholden to Institutional Forces 59 Negotiating spaces for radical freedom within prison institutional structures 62 Storycatchers Theatre’s ‘Fabulous Females’ at IYC Warrenville 64 Real authority, ideal authority 68 Prison authority as ideal authority 71 Narrative frameworks and fields of social power 75 Part II Impacting Audiences Introduction to Part II: theatre’s impact on audiences 79 4 Catharsis, Critical Distance, and Change 81 Catharsis 82 Critiques of empathy and catharsis: Brecht and Boal 83 Authenticity and empathy 85 Distance, framing, and affect 87 Wasting pity 88 Emotion and empathy as ‘technologies for social transformation’ 89 Limitation and balance 91 Assessing change 92 5 Spectatorship, Community, and ‘Otherness’ 95 Communitas 97 Audience research 98 Theatrical events and community building 99 ‘Reality’ and ‘truth’ 100 The limits of community 102 Communal cynicism 105 Getting closer? 106 ‘From the very same cup’ 107 6 Responding to Contemporary Events in an Era of Instant Gratification 110 A poetic of public events or the dramaturgy of Katrina 113 Mass media’s construction of Katrina 116 UNIVERSAS’ Ameriville 118 Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans 124 Limits and opportunities in a m arket- driven world 129 Contents ix Conclusion: Real Change in the Real World 132 Revolutionary change 132 How much change do we actually want? 134 The limits of agency 135 Performance as a tactic 137 So what are we doing? 138 Notes 140 References 145 Index 154 List of Illustrations 1 Photo from Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), 2009. Photo: St Stephen’s Human Services 97 x Acknowledgments Thank you to Paula Kennedy, Commissioning Editor of Literature and Performance at Palgrave Macmillan for publishing the book and for her support during my writing process. I would also like to thank Sacha Lake, Benjamin Doyle and Nick Sheerin at Palgrave for their prompt responses and assistance throughout the process, as well as Penny Simmons for her thoughtful copyediting. The author and the publishers wish to thank the following for permis- sion to reproduce copyright materials: An earlier version of Chapter 2,‘Participatory Theatre and the Problem of Dominant Discourse’, has been published in ‘Rehearsals for Revolution? Theatre of the Oppressed, Dominant Siscourses, and Democratic Tensions’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16.1 (February 2011), 29–46. I am grateful to Taylor & Francis for their permission to use this work. An earlier version of Chapter 5, ‘Spectatorship, Community, and “Otherness”’, has been published in ‘Stop Staring, Start Seeing: Housed Spectatorship of Homeless Performers’, Theatre Research International 36.2 (July 2011), 163–73. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for their permission to use this work. I would not have been able to complete this book without a generous Junior Faculty Leave semester from Illinois Wesleyan University, and my work on Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 were both funded by Illinois Wesleyan University Artistic and Scholarly Development grants. I am indebted to my colleagues in the School of Theatre Arts for their unflagging support through the period in which I was working on this book. Thank you to Curt Trout, Jean Kerr, Nancy Loitz, Marcia McDonald, Tom Quinn, Scott Susong, Stephen Sakowski, Armie Thompson, Jeanne Oost, Sheri Marley, Kelly Ullom, and Sandra Linberg, as well as to Christopher Connelly and Jared Brown for covering my classes while I took Junior Faculty Leave to finish this book. I have been fortunate to encounter a number of students who, in asking hard questions about theatre and social change I couldn’t easily answer, led me to need to write this book: Gwen Robinson, Allison Sutton, Sam Patel, Raven Stubbs, and Mary Holm. xi
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