Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power by Shulamith Lev-Aladgem (review)

Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, who has published numerous articles about participatory theatre projects, has now contributed to the scholarly literature in the fields of applied and community-based theatre with this monograph about theatre projects in Israel. Lev-Aladgem argues that participatory theatre projects can be a vehicle for marginalized communities (which she calls co-communities) to articulate their concerns, identities, political protest, and ambivalent feelings vis-à-vis the mainstream, even when the authorities and funders sanction the projects with more conservative intentions. In each of the nine chapters, Lev-Aladgem describes and analyzes another project, and with the exception of the first three chapters (which all consider projects at a single site), each chapter foregrounds a separate co-community. Four of the chapters consider projects that she herself facilitated, and five others are on projects facilitated by other theatre artists.

As Lev-Aladgem describes these projects with vivid detail, she leverages several theoretical constructs to analyze their power dynamics and advance her argument. First, and most extensively, she mobilizes Michel de Certau’s notion of making do. In almost every case study, she addresses how participants of theatre projects make do with theatre—how they use the tools and resources available to them—to pursue particular objectives, which may differ from the objectives of the sponsors and authorities. For instance, in a chapter detailing some of the community-based theatre projects in Israel’s Mizrahi communities (communities of Jewish citizens who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries), Lev-Aladgem describes how participants made do with theatre to vocalize their angry feelings of marginalization, despite the fact that these projects were funded and supervised by the government, who hoped that theatre would “calm [them] down” (81). She describes the most controversial scenes of these plays, the heated negotiations with authorities, the compromises that the ensembles agreed to make, and the “red lines” that they drew to preserve the integrity of their critiques. In a chapter that describes a theatre project at a boarding school for Ethiopian immigrants, Lev-Aladgem tells how a facilitator made do with theatre to nurture a space for critical reflection about their education, although the funding came from an organization that was interested primarily in keeping children “more occupied” (122). Based on interviews with the facilitator and her own firsthand account of watching the production, she shows how the performance choices (including a bilingual script, costuming choices, comedy, and Ethiopian ritual) enabled the cast to explore and express the ways that they navigated the tension of existing between two worlds.

Second, in many of the case studies, Lev-Aladgem analyzes participatory theatre programs as a form of play (based on scholarship by Richard Schechner, Johann Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, and others). In an array of examples that range from elderly members of a day-care center, to children in a hospital, to survivors of domestic abuse, she analyzes how the act of playing a character—of assuming an identity that is simultaneously not-me and not-not-me (terms borrowed from Schechner)—provides the safety to articulate concerns that one might otherwise self-censor. For instance, in a chapter about elderly people who dramatically enact the story of Purim (a Jewish holiday), Lev-Aladgem depicts participants who voice their concerns about aging within the context of an improvisation. By speaking these concerns while in-role, they are able to do so without being labeled as depressed or disengaged. “I am not so young anymore, I have nothing to lose,” one of the participants says while in-role as an old woman and beside two of her peers, who are enacting younger characters (38). Lev-Aladgem argues that statements such as these, through which participants express their alienation from mainstream society, are normally taboo though become speakable within the context of play.

Lev-Aladgem’s examples further contribute to the fields of applied and community-based theatre by adding nuance to its vocabulary through expanding the meaning of articulation. First and most conventionally, she uses articulation as a...