Inspirations
The PhD’s giving me an incredible opportunity to read and re-read some of the most interesting thinkers of our time, and share the ideas of people who have inspired and led the development of theatre for social change over the past seventy years. Every now and and again I stumble across a particular quote that seems to me to say it all, on this page I’ll share these. Hope you enjoy.
On Mass Produced Culture
“Consumer culture canibalizes public culture and reproduces us all as consumers, duped into imagining we exercise the free choice of individuals”
Jill Lane (The Drama Review)
On Quality
“Good politics don’t redeem bad art. What really changes the world is thinking about the world.”
Tony Kushner (How do you make social change)
On Tragedy
“A carnival is not a revolution. After the carnival, after the removal of the masks, you are precisely who you were before. After the tragedy, you are not certain who you are.”
Howard Barker (Arguments for a Theatre)
The end of effect?
“Participatory theatre should focus on affect rather than effect…working with affect awakens individuals to possibilities beyond themselves without an insistence on what the experience is – what meanings should be attached”
James Thompson (Performance Affects)
Why Theatre
“Theatre does not tease people out of their everyday lives like other expreessions of wish fulfillment but reminds them who they are and what is worth living and changing in their lives everyday.”
Alan Read (Theatre and Everyday Life: An ethics of performance)
On unethical community-based arts
“…often white artists ship into so-called fourth-world pockets of entrenched poverty within the first world. And what do the artists do? – mine the raw material, all that experience and all those stories. Then they leave with the natural resources and make their own art out of them….In that respect, ‘community-based art’ is worse than colonialism.”
Jan Cohen-Cruz (Community-Based Performance in the United States)
On challenging the status quo
“The principal responsibility of a progressive drama [is] the legitimate and necessary task of challenging dominance, by showing that the existing order is not ‘natural’ but politically constructed and fundamentally unjust.”
Graham Holderness (The Politics of Theatre and Drama)
On change
Theatre for Social Change “is about ways of employing the force of art in the service of change, about ways of putting the levers of change in the hands of those who would otherwise be its victims.”
Tim Prentki (Popular Theatre in Political Culture)
