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  • Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage
  • Kirsty Johnston
Richard Boon and Jane plastow, eds. Theatre and Empowerment: Community Drama on the World Stage. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 267. $75.00/£45 (Hb).

The concept of empowerment as it relates to theatre, dance, and performance flows throughout this important collection, uniting different cases and giving shape to a diverse set of voices and visions. Boon and Plastow suggest in their introduction that "just what may be meant by 'empowerment' is a – perhaps the – key question in this book. Who is being empowered by whom, and to what end? How can practitioners in the area prove that what they do is empowering?"(5). Defining and measuring empowerment in and from theatre may seem like mercurial tasks but, as Boon and Plastow make clear, they are the constant work of practitioners whose projects depend variously on the support of funding bodies, community participants, government authorities, and [End Page 861] perhaps most importantly, a personal sense of purpose. Asked to describe and discuss their experiences in the field, the collection's contributors explore initiatives in places as disparate as Ethiopia, India, Ireland, Italy, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This range of perspectives supports the editors' contention that "the kinds of performance often referred to as 'Theatre for Development' (TfD) are by no means relevant only to the political South" (1). The selections represent, in the editors' view, some of the most compelling and important work of its kind internationally.

The collection's strengths are threefold. First, each essay presents a richly textured account of how, in particular contexts, theatre, dance, or performance has facilitated community dialogue, self-expression, and in a number of instances, significant social change. Second, combined together, the heterogeneity of these case studies alerts the reader to the myriad ways in which these forms have been used to respond to specific social problems as well as reinvigorate or reorient ideas about development, activism, and dogma. Finally, perhaps the most striking and generative feature of the collection is its inclusion of a number of critical self-reflections, offered by those contributors whose essays describe their own evolving theatre practices and struggles.

Some of the most interesting essays in the collection reflect seriously on the difficulties and ethical questions faced by practitioners. Gerri Moriarty, for example, offers a nuanced account of her work with the Wedding Community Play Project, a critically acclaimed 1999 project in Belfast about a marriage between a young Protestant and a young Catholic, which involved "a metaphoric and literal journey undertaken by 150 community participants (ranging in age from ten to sixty-five), a number of professional arts workers, an audience of 700 and a very much wider audience who read about the project in their newspapers, saw extracts on television programmes and at conferences, and heard about it from their friends" (14). Moriarty identifies a fundamental clash between two models of community theatre at play in the project's development. These clashes lead her to re-evaluate her own practices and standards for collaborative theatre making. Ultimately, she explains why she would avoid such a project in the future. Similarly, Sanjoy Ganguly's "Theatre – A Space for Empowerment: Celebrating Jana Sanskriti's Experience in India" charts changes in theatre practice wrought by conflict and critical self-reflec-tion. Ganguly considers the development of Jana Sanskriti, the independent organization of more than thirty active Indian theatre groups "committed to the use of theatre to conscientise and empower the communities it serves"(x). Insisting that Jana Sanskriti cannot be understood independently of its sources, his account chronicles his eighteen years of experience with a South Kolkata slum and highlights the ways in which critical encounters with community members as well as study with Augusto Boal have informed and reshaped his views of theatre and empowerment. [End Page 862]

Several debates emerge from the essays. Some turn around binaries which practitioners find reductive and misleading. Stephanie Marlin-Curiel, for example, in her essay "Wielding the Cultural Weapon after Apartheid: Bongani Linda's Victory Sonqoba Theatre Company, South Africa," describes Linda...

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