Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response (review)

103 Book Reviews Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. Jan Cohen-Cruz. London: Routledge, 2010; pp. 228. In Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response, Jan Cohen-Cruz offers a new way to look at the field of applied theatre. Too often, socially and politically engaged performance is bracketed as activist or categorized as centered on process rather than product. Cohen-Cruz refutes these old and tired definitions with the concept of “engaged performance”—collaboratively created art that is based on lived experiences, responds to social debates, demonstrates professional aesthetics, and is interactive in creation and/or performance. This innovative classification focuses on the theatre artist as active—and activist— interdisciplinary collaborator with the community. CohenCruz herself typifies the engaged artist: she has created collaborative performances in New York City, Syracuse, and New Orleans; she is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; and she is editor of Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998) and coeditor, with Mady Schutzman, of Playing Boal (1993) and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics (2005). With clear explanations of performance theory, step-by-step instructions for devising exercises and workshop activities, and a solid background of performance and social science scholarship, Engaging Performance models the interdisciplinary engaged art it advocates, serving as its own example of how a committed artist can create compelling interdisciplinary work that matters. The concept of reciprocity, what Cohen-Cruz calls “an aesthetics of call and response” (1), is central to the notion of engaged performance. In her introduction, she describes the engaged artist as a skilled craftsperson, a community organizer, one who is both politically and socially aware. Because engaged art is interdisciplinary, the engaged artist must enjoy an active relationship with the community and its social and political debates. In the reciprocal relationship, the creative process and performance are experiences shared between artist and community, with both benefiting from the artistic and political give-and-take. Cohen-Cruz describes instances of engaged art like Brecht’s Epic Theatre, which demands thoughtful audience response, and the Thousand Kites project about the modern prison system created by Appalshop, the Eastern Kentucky arts and activist organization.These examples demonstrate that the aesthetics of call and response can be found in performances both urban and rural, historical and contemporary, commercial and nonprofit. Engaged performance is, therefore, broader in concept than applied theatre, which too often is defined by its focus on the unconventional and experimental, and its distance from mainstream and commercial work. CohenCruz argues that engaged performance does not necessarily have to be marginalized, but can include both free playreadings and commercial work like Kushner’s Angels in America. By using examples as diverse as successful Broadway productions and invisible theatre on the subway, she argues for “a softening of false boundaries that over-polarize theatre as being use-driven on the one end, aesthetically driven on the other” (8). “It’s time to get over the bias that art must be one or another,” she asserts (99), arguing throughout this volume that engaged performance can be both aesthetically complex and artistically compelling while still doing activist work. While Cohen-Cruz is clearly passionate about breaking down the stereotype that activist performance is “dull and programmatic” (13), she fails to provide specific examples of this assumption in action. Aesthetically weak applied theatre exists here as a straw man, which sometimes results in a defensive tone. This is a pity, as the artworks she describes can ably stand on their own as illustrations of strong work that is both activist and artistically strong. Cohen-Cruz balances art and activism by including descriptions of different training methods for the engaged artist, alongside her discussions of engaged artworks. Each chapter begins with a theoretical reflection, in which concepts like EpicTheatre or Cultural Democracy are deftly explained. Cases of engaged performance that exemplify the theory follow. In addition to Cohen-Cruz herself, engaged artists discussed include Appalshop, Arthur Aviles, Augusto Boal, Bertolt Brecht, Cornerstone Theater, Tony Kushner, Marty Pottenger, Roadside Theater, Mady Schutzman, and Steve Wangh. Finally, each chapter ends with a workbook section that provides tools for artists willing to try the techniques themselves. The workbook...