Community Engaged Theatre and Performance ed. by Julie Salverson (review)

Community-engaged theatre, in Salverson’s neat and inclusive definition, ‘throws professional artists together with people who have stories to tell and something to say and who … choose performance as the best way to say it.’ The act of being ‘thrown together’ produces unpredictable, daring, energetic, hugely imaginative theatre and raises profound questions. This collection of essays is a welcome addition to a small but growing library of reflective and reflexive writing focused on an important and under-reported field.

The book is part of a series designed to ‘facilitate the teaching of drama and theatre in schools and universities.’ As I teach something near to this topic, I examine this collection with my students in mind. Undergraduate students have (usually) never heard of or seen any theatre that would fall into this category and they have a lot of questions. What is this? What is a community anyway? Who are the artists? What do they do? Why? Social change? Seriously? They think theatre can do that? Where is the proof? What happens to the community members? What gives them the right to mess around in other people’s lives? Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Is it art? Is it good? Can you get paid to do this? Where does the money come from? There are no formulaic answers here, the field is allergic to formula, but the writers tell the truth and integrity illuminates. Practitioners of community-engaged theatre ask these questions too; I know I do, and it was a pleasure to read the variety of answers others found. For students, having an all-Canadian book establishes that this kind of work has a long, complex history right here at home. Home, as is often the case, means mostly Ontario but everyone outside the centre knows by now what to do about that.

Verba volant, scripta manent is the sad but true situation for all theatre but is particularly acute for community-engaged theatre. In the last thirty years, hundreds, perhaps thousands of community-engaged theatre projects were born, lived, and disappeared with no written trace. Scripts were and are created but they are almost never reproducible or published. Thankfully, some academics and practitioners not only wrote about what they did or saw or thought, but also got it published. Without books like this one there would be nothing to study but the stories practitioners tell, late at night over beer. Publication, obviously, is the gold standard for legitimization and the dissemination of critical thought. The study and practice of community-engaged theatre is much in need of both these things, and this book addresses the need.

The most volant of the verba always belongs to the community participant (as Salverson points out) and I would particularly direct students/readers to pieces that capture that voice. The letter by former inmate Patrick Keating in Richard Panyn’s article is perhaps the most important thing in the book. Ruth Howard’s article also includes many participant voices, and we get a little flavour of the ‘excluded community’ voice in Kristy Johnson’s description of the contradictions in a Workman Theatre project, La Pazzia. A collection of only participants’ views and words would be brilliant but alas, that voice tends to blow away first and fast.

Another strength of the book is the examination of some of the many fraught issues of aesthetics and ethics. Perhaps no other branch of theatre has so many ethical pitfalls, and students, practitioners, and academics must always ask: is it ethical to yell theatre in the middle of a fire? Savannah Walling considers the costs to artists and the community of immersing in a complex, long-term theatre project in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver. Sherene H. Razack’s article about the ethics and dangers of storytelling, over, around, and through difference, should be required reading for everyone. On the aesthetics question(s), Salverson’s addition to the book, a thoughtful and personal argument for art, is...