Community Theatre: Carnival or Camp?

Playscript development programmes have been a significant breeding ground for new American drama since the mid'sixties, and in 1986 the Chicano playwright and director José Cruz González started a playwright development workshop specifically for the Latino community. Here, Eugene van Erven provides a bipolar view of the current Latino theatre scene in southern California by documenting the tenth anniversary session of González' Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Rep, and at the same takes a wider look at grassroots community theatre initiatives in the Chicano neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Eugene van Erven teaches in the American Studies programme at Utrecht University. Author of The Playful Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1992) and Radical People's Theatre (Indiana UP, 1988), he also designs and produces intercultural theatre projects.

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Navigating New Approaches for Grassroot Community Theatre in a (Post-)Covid World

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses ◽

10.14198/raei.2021.35.08 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 163

Author(s):

Kerrie Reading

Keyword(s):

Welfare State ◽

Cultural Revolution ◽

Cultural Shift ◽

Community Theatre ◽

New Approaches ◽

Theatre Companies ◽

The Future ◽

The Way ◽

The Cultural Revolution

The cultural revolution of 1968 paved the way for many artists to reconsider how and where theatre was made. Community theatre gained currency and one company who became prominent during this cultural shift was Welfare State, later Welfare State International. They were one of the theatre companies who focused not only on a community theatre aesthetic but a grassroot one. I examine the radicality of community theatre and consider the efficacy of the historical approaches to engaging with communities in a (Post-)Covid world. I acknowledge and explore the shifting understanding of communities and assert that a deeper engagement is needed to foster collectivity (Tannahill 2016; Fişek 2019; Weston 2020; Bartley 2021). To reconsider the role that theatre may play in the future, I focus on a grassroot approach to community-led work and posit that location will be a key component to how theatre is made as we emerge from a pandemic.

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