This paper focuses on a group of young people in Singapore connected by the love for their communities and their desire to use drama for social change. In particular, we investigate how a participatory arts-based approach can enable young people to reflect on the importance of solidarity. We draw on Freire's pedagogy of solidarity, arguing for the…

This article considers how new materialist, Indigenous and posthuman feminist theories might be applied to drama pedagogy and research to empower young people to play "within" the trouble of colonial legacies and heightened climate crises. It references an Australian school project that used Heathcote's Rolling Role system of teaching…

This paper examines the work of Kashmiri theatre-maker Arshad Mushtaq in the context of the political turmoil in Kashmir. It argues that Mushtaq's theatre practice challenges the India's attempt to assimilate Kashmir into its national cultural framework. Focusing on three of Mushtaq's plays rooted in collective memory, the paper examines how his…

Sara Baartman (Venus Hottentot) was an African teenager lured to Europe to perform for audiences in 1810; her genitals and brain were posthumously dissected, pickled and museumized. In 2016, 'Venus Hottentot: A Short Play' was staged at The University of MA, Amherst, and the audience participated in free writing at the end of the performance. The…

Women and revolutions have always had a thorny relationship. Women's mere presence in the revolutionary public sphere and within protest culture has been the site of much controversy. More recently, from the Occupy Movement to the Women's Marches, from Black Lives Matter to Femen, women protests have turned to performative practices to bring to…

The Latvian Song and Dance Celebration's 150th Anniversary (2023) offers a unique case study of community performance's capacity to express solidarity on a spectacular scale. This article argues that the choral concerts may be viewed as applied theatre given their historical and continuing expressions of political resistance, cultural resilience…

In living history museums, where young people work and volunteer as historically dressed interpreters, participate in field trips, and attend summer camps, young people can simultaneously represent the past, the present and the future. In these spaces, they also shape the past through their questions, their retellings, and their reimaginings based…

This paper presents the provocation that 'unmediatised liveness', or experiences not filtered through digital technology, is vital to performances that promote recovery, resistance, and survival among young people in response to the climate crisis. Our provocation draws from interviews conducted with youth theatre and performance practitioners in…

This article focuses on the community play, as conceived by Ann Jellicoe, as a form of political theatre-making. Examining two community play productions: "Drummer Hodge" (2014) and "Love on the Dole" (2016), I explore how the form's theatrical conventions combine with the play's content to generate political action. Discussing…

The annual ethnographic performance "SJS-Who?" is an example of how theatre may survive or even thrive in an educational/institutional environment that seems increasingly indifferent to the arts and humanities. In addition to being a meaningful educational experience for many students, "SJS-Who?" has successfully increased the…

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a Florida-based human rights organisation, has significantly improved working conditions for migrant farmworkers on large-scale produce farms in the United States, in part, through its adaptation of applied theatre strategies used in its worker-to-worker popular education programme. The farmworker-devised…

This article looks at the meaning of solidarity as related to the Egyptian uprising of January 2011. Through participant interviews, field notes, and observations, the author examines the role of grassroots theatre in enabling the aspirations of the revolution to live on amongst its players, and despite more stringent state control over the arts…

Role-play was a popular educational strategy within the American civil rights movement. Many civil rights activists performed the movement in private before performing it again in public. Compared to the scholarship on the role of music in the civil rights movement, the importance of drama has been understudied. The history of role-play as an…

In 2019, Artist Inc. and the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project presented "Snow White and the Apple's Revenge" at the Likhandula Festival in Los Baños, the Philippines. Adapting the original Grimm version of the fairytale to challenge the validity of GM crops, it was presented in the town where the International Rice Research Institute…

This provocation discusses two post-2008 cases of resilience discourse in applied performance contexts. The discussion of the first case focuses on how a variant of resilience discourse legitimises the restructuring of local public services and welfare by naturalising this process. This first discourse will be contrasted to an instance of…