Acting Together on the World Stage: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence ed. by Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker (review)

Acting Together marks one node in a network of interdisciplinary relationships and projects designed to explore the intersections of conflict transformation and performance. The two volumes (the second of which was just recently published) focus respectively on direct violence and systemic oppressions and are linked to a documentary, website, and several symposia. The broader project additionally has associations with academic institutions (Brandeis’s Center for Peacebuilding and the Arts) and artistic groups (Theatre Without Borders). Contributors include theatremakers, ritual facilitators, and peacebuilding experts writing about their own and others’ work from a range of sites including Palestine, Israel, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Argentina, the United States, Australia, and Cambodia. The editors masterfully frame and curate the chapters to provide a sense of cohesion across a range of practices with a focus on storytelling, context setting, and ways that performance (with theatrical emphasis) relates to theories of conflict transformation. In a work of great care and enormous value to those of us working at the intersections of performance and peacebuilding, there are numerous accomplishments to mark — particularly of aporias made visible — as well as a few puzzling hiccups.

While the work celebrates collaboration and pays due homage to the fields of applied theatre, Playback, Theatre for Development, and Theatre of the Oppressed, there is still a tendency in the publication world to mark out the project’s “uniqueness” as “the first ever documentation” (xvii) of global performance practices viewed through the lens of peacebuilding. This kind of statement problematically downplays a number of key studies in the field, such as James Thompson’s prolific work, as well as previous anthologies on theatrical facilitation and on performance, violence, and conflict transformation. The language of “first” also belies this anthology’s care to emphasize hybrid artistic forms that both acknowledge and critique traditional practices alongside “new” aesthetics. Additionally, while John Lederach’s vital work on the moral imagination undergirds much of the book, his foreword indicates an odd misapprehension of the foundational theories of Theatre of the Oppressed. Describing an interactive production in Nepal attended by mainly middle- and upper-class teenagers, Lederach celebrates their proposed solutions to the problems of the protagonist, an abused servant. Yet, TO specifically works against the notion that a middle- and upper-class audience could provide solutions to someone experiencing oppression or that the servant’s experience can be “universalized.”

Lederach’s sensitive understanding of conflict transformation in other contexts, however, provides a useful framework that threads together disparate chapters. The editors additionally work to ensure that the chapters are reflexive, grounded in the historical material conditions that structure violence, and hold multiple perspectives on conflict and its potential transformation.

Volume I offers several prefatory framings from Lederach, Theatre Without Borders cofounder Roberta Levitow, and an introductory essay by the editors. The editors also introduce each of two sections focused on direct violence and its aftermath. A Sri Lankan peace-building specialist’s afterword reflects on the nine case studies presented before the editors conclude by previewing Volume II. Black-and-white photo illustrations of starkly lit indoor and blended-into-the-world outdoor performances signal the volume’s attention to the differential aesthetics of artist-driven and community-based theatrical practices as well as to structured rituals. Each chapter is thoroughly sourced and efficiently endnoted.

The editors and authors also take great care to mark not only intragroup conflicts, but also the challenge of building alliances within arenas of asymmetrical power. The most compelling studies illuminate the challenges that complicate conflict’s “resolution,” rendering visible related tensions of narrative control. Closing the book’s first section, “Weaving Dialogues and Confronting Harsh Realities,” composed...