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Theatre Journal 54.2 (2002) 329-330



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Book Review

Popular Theatre in Political Culture:
Britain and Canada in Focus

The Stuff of Dreams:
Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater

Community Theatre:
Global Perspectives


Popular Theatre in Political Culture: Britain and Canada in Focus. By Tim Prentki and Jan Selman. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2000; pp. 203. $34.95 cloth.
The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater. By Leah Hager Cohen. New York: Viking Penguin, 2001; pp. xix + 234. $24.95 cloth.
Community Theatre: Global Perspectives. By Eugene van Erven. London: Routledge, 2001; pp. xiii + 269. $24.95 paper.

Every emerging field of study seems to go through a period of growing pains in which attempts are made to discover collectively shared language and disciplinary boundaries. Recent discussions and publications related to community-based or grassroots theatre reveal the extent to which this type of exchange is taking place in this fertile area of theatre and performance studies. Theorists and practitioners such as Sonja Kuftinec, Richard Owen Geer, Bruce McConachie, Jan Cohen-Cruz, and Richard Schechner have all worked to define, describe, and theorize a wide array of performance practices associated with grassroots theatre. Each of the three books reviewed here contributes to this disciplinary development in unique ways.

Of these books' authors, Tim Prentki and Jan Selman seem to be the most conscious of their involvement in this dialogue, and they are careful to carve out a space for the specific focus of their analysis in Popular Theatre in Political Culture. Prentki and Selman concentrate on what they define as popular theatre as it is currently practiced in Britain and Canada: "Popular theatre is a process of theatre which deeply involves specific communities in identifying issues of concern, analysing current conditions and causes of a situation, identifying points of change, and analysing how change could happen and/or contributing to the actions implied" (8). The authors keenly clarify that they see popular theatre as somewhat of a subset of community-based theatre, which they believe "refers to the broadest spectrum of theatre which embraces community, education, and social concerns and which is located within 'community,' be it a community of interest or one of geography," but which lacks a necessary emphasis on the extensive level of community involvement and ownership of the performance process that popular theatre embraces (13).

Despite the problematic nature of the conflicting connotations associated with the word "popular," the term "popular theatre" is far more commonly used to describe community-based theatre in Canada and the U.K. than it is elsewhere. Prentki (UK) and Selman (Canada), who are both practitioners and educators, seem quite comfortable invoking this concept and clarifying the field in this way. As the authors explain, they base their understanding of popular theatre on the theories of the Brazilian community educator Paulo Freire, whose critique of the complicity of liberal education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a direct influence on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Popular theatre forms an arena in which Boal's concept of a "rehearsal for revolution" can take place in a relatively safe environment.

With this established, Prentki and Selman proceed to document and theorize popular theatre in Canada and Britain by focusing on four major topics that are relevant to almost any analysis of grassroots theatre: intentions, contexts, forms, and processes. They particularly point out how theatre for development in regions of the southern hemisphere has influenced the practice of popular theatre. Interspersed in each chapter are interviews with British and Canadian popular theatre practitioners and descriptions of various aspects of their work. These sections clarify concepts and issues discussed in the book and also provide practical ideas for artists venturing into the realm of community-based theatre. Although the authors claim that the book is aimed at both scholars and practitioners, its precise target is unclear. At times it reads like an introductory undergraduate textbook, at other...

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