Insights and Inspiration from Explorative Research into the Impacts of a Community Arts Project

In today’s society, the resilience of communities is in the spotlight. How can communities shape and respond to the challenges they face in order to achieve a better future? For researchers focusing on this question, researching artistic practices can provide valuable insights and inspiration. From a resilience perspective that seeks to incorporate people’s everyday lifeworld and local knowledge, community arts in particular hold much potential, being an art form that actively engages people in the creative process. Evidencing the impact of community arts projects has become more important over the years. However, as this chapter discusses, there are several tensions and concerns around evaluating the impact of the arts. The chapter takes as its empirical focus one such project in particular: the multi-year theatre-trilogy Grutte Pier, which took place in the Dutch village Kimswerd between 2014 and 2018. In this village, the site-specific theatre company PeerGrouP worked together with the inhabitants to create a trilogy around the village’s historical figure Grutte Pier. The chapter reflects on an explorative research project into the impact of this community arts project on the village. Hereby, it contributes to the understanding of how meaningful change can be achieved in communities, preparing them for a more sustainable future. The reflections on the explorative research support the need to adopt a critical perspective with regard to assessing the value of artistic practices. The experiences in Kimswerd show that community arts projects can be an evocative way of engaging a community and can result in a variety of effects. The chapter discusses both personal effects, relating to personal growth, people’s social life and feelings of pride, as well as effects at the village level, such as the creation and strengthening of bonds between the inhabitants. Effects are expected to go a long way and be a great boost for a community’s organizational capacity and future activities. In light of these findings, it appears to be a successful formula to have artists coming to a community as ‘outsiders’, actively engaging inhabitants in a large community arts project that is both locally grounded and offers the inhabitants various ways of participating themselves.

Towards a New Popular Theatre (?). Reflections After the Completion of UBUmaterial Performative Archive on Instagram

The article describes the building of UBUmaterial performative archive on Instagram during the COVID-19 lockdown by Papalangki Theatre Company in Greece (2020–2021). Through an innovative format, UBUmaterial started as the attempt of three actors-narrators isolated due to pandemic to rehearse and somehow present Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry. However, exploring the Instagram and play’s potentialities, the three actors soon would be transformed into narrators of their own effort, using their households and adopting a commenting stance on their everyday situation. Thus, the dramaturgy of UBUmaterial’s posts (videos) integrated most of the traditional popular theatre’s features and strategies. After a reflection on the contemporary meaning of “popularity” in theatre/performance, the article suggests that UBUmaterial (as well as other digital forms of theatre) may be considered a form of modern popular theatre.

Raising the Bar in Disability Arts

This article discusses my pedagogical approach towards teaching dance, movement, and theatre to artists with cognitive disabilities. I have developed a training method for artists participating in my classes and productions that invites individual creative exploration and professional rigour. My inclusive dance-theatre company, Les Productions des pieds des mains, creates productions that are presented on professional artistic platforms and not limited to the context of disabled art presentations. Our productions are regularly subject to the same selection criteria as would be a non-inclusive company. With this in mind, I aim for excellence. I work towards creating high quality shows while helping artists with a disability push past their perceived limits and surpass themselves. In this article I will share my findings and strategies, perfected throughout my many years of experimentation, explaining how to reach a high-level of quality in inclusive productions, as well as how I help artists with a disability reach a level of quality in their performances which allows them to find gainful employment within the artistic domain.

Presenting: Michael Nimbley

The following is the working script from Montreal-based artist Michael Nimbley’s presentation about his professional career. The script was co-created with his creative ally Catherine Bourgeois, the founder and artistic director of Montreal-based theatre group, Joe Jack & John. Joe Jack & John is a theatre company that produces original, bilingual, multidisciplinary shows combining video, dance, and the spoken word. Their artistic approach is deeply humanistic and inclusive; their creations represent a social microcosm by integrating professional actors with an intellectual disability or from diverse cultural backgrounds. During the time of VIBE, Nimbley was an artist-in-residence with the company. In establishing artistic residencies, Joe Jack & John are fulfilling their mission in a new way by inviting an artist living with a disability to initiate and direct a creation of their own. These residencies demonstrate a unique political stance. By handing power to an artist with an intellectual disability, they are furthering their research on marginalized aesthetics and voices. Their goal is to develop interdependent creative models and practices, promoting the emergence of underrepresented voices that have not been part of the dominant artistic trends. In doing so, they are disrupting aesthetic hierarchies and continuing to dismantle biases against artists who evolve outside the artistic establishment.

Oily Cart's Space to Be: Exploring the Carer's Role in Sensory Theatre for Neurodiverse Audiences during COVID-19

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers and audience members results in highly flexible performances that respond to physical and auditory input from individual audience members, through which performers curate customized multisensory experiences that communicate the production's theatrical world to its audience. Given this reliance on close-up interaction, the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have posed a particular challenge for sensory theatre makers. In in-person sensory theatre, performers focus on neurodivergent audience members, with parents and paid carers often taking a (literal) back seat, but remotely delivered sensory theatre during COVID-19 hinges on the carer's facilitation of sensory engagement curated by sensory theatre practitioners. Oily Cart, a pioneering London-based sensory theatre company, responded to COVID-19 restrictions with a season of work presented in various formats in audiences’ homes, and their production Space to Be marked a shift in the company's audience engagement to include an emphasis on the carer's experience.1 Using this production as a case study, I argue that the pivotal role adopted by carers during the pandemic has the potential to shape future in-person productions, moving practitioners toward a more holistic, neurodiverse audience experience that challenges a disabled–nondisabled binary by embracing carers’ experiences alongside those of neurodivergent audience members.2

Ideals of ‘Britishness’ reproduced in the musical adaptation of David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress at the Royal Shakespeare Company

This article examines the use and purpose of the nostalgic interventions in the latest Royal Shakespeare musical, The Boy in the Dress, and considers the implications of utilizing a mythologized, rose-tinted past on the creative production of national identity. It questions the meanings which are produced when a government subsidized, national theatre company with an international reputation eliminates the female voice from the stage and represents the United Kingdom as English, predominantly white and middle class. In addition, this article deconstructs the performances of gender fluidity depicted in the show and widens the acknowledged interpretation of cultural appropriation, when applied to race, to include gender.

Professor Mieczysław Limanowski on Vilnius and the cultural heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

This text deals with the depiction of Vilnius in the work of Mieczysław Limanowski, geologist, co-founder of the Reduta Theatre Company, art and theatre critic, and professor at the Stefan Batory University. The author, drawing on the work of specialists from various fields, presents a semiotics of Vilnius in Limanowski’s writing. In his depiction of the city and the larger region, reflections on nature and culture and interwoven, and thus his work is an outstanding early example of modern cultural geography. In his vision of Lithuania and Vilnius we can identify such interdisciplinary traits as the motive of the road and the theme of transcendence, along with spirituality recorded in the cultural code of the city. In Limanowski’s writing on Vilnius his reflections on the Gates of Dawn and on the Church of Saint Nicolas are particularly noteworthy.

Actants and Fault Lines: Janakaraliya and Theatre for Peace Building in Sri Lanka

This article provides a contextual analysis of Janakaraliya (‘Theatre of the People’), a theatre company acclaimed for its excellence in theatre for social justice and peace building in Sri Lanka. It discusses the governing conditions that enable its practice and evaluates its impact, whether this be the biopower of the state and non-state actors during periods of political violence, donor funding frameworks, or the Janakaraliya archive itself as an actant shaped by donor rationalities. Drawing on a recent research project entitled The Theatre of Reconciliation, the article builds an argument for changing the terms on which the arts in peace building are evaluated, and for a shift in the dominant narrative on Janakaraliya which collapses its sophisticated aesthetics to a binary of Sinhala–Tamil ethnic relations. The logic of this revision would be fuller acknowledgement of the troupe's aesthetic forms and styles as a more robust signifier of the pluralities that constitute Sri Lankan society today and therefore of post-war reconciliation itself.