Community-engaged Theatre Audiences

Community-Engaged Theatre Audiences is an intervention into the reception of politically motivated, community-centered plays. This thesis aims to understand how individuals make meaning or sense out of these complicated sites of performance. It asks “what can scholars and artists learn about community-engaged theatre by asking audience members about their experiences?” Community-engaged theatre is an umbrella term that contains a multitude of theatrical practices, where theatre artists work with members of a community to create performance texts that in some way depict the community, taking up the community’s concerns and grappling with the community’s future. These plays are social justice initiatives, working within dynamic communities to foster social change. This study is predicated on the understanding that communities are neither fixed nor stable, but are rather emerging and constructed. Community-Engaged Theatre Audiences offers empirical audience data to scholars and artists of community-engaged theatre in an effort to understand more fully this performance genre as it is practiced now, both in contemporary southern Ontario specifically, and in Western, English theatre more broadly. This thesis presents three case studies of new Canadian plays, each one employing a contrasting set of dramaturgical practices: verbatim theatre, physical comedy, and site-specific theatre. The plays are Stories from the Generation Gap, by Cameron Crookston,Common Boots Theatre’s The Public Servant by Jennifer Brewin, Haley McGee, Sarah McVie, ii and Amy Rutherford, and finally, A Simple Twist of Faith by Evan and Rafe Malach. Each case study presents an analytical review of audience reflections in order to offer a rich, local understanding of each play, while revealing the fluidity of belonging and the gap between the communities hailed through the performance and the lived realities of the audience members in attendance. This study investigates multiple perspectives from audience members, bringing their language and reflection to the analysis of each play. Community-engaged theatre as a genre is more deeply understood through an analysis of audience member’s responses to specific exemplars. Audiences are so often erased or simply absent from archives and theatre scholarship. This thesis centers their voices in order to understand better community-engaged theatre as an advocacy project.

Department dc:contributor.department

Drama

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Salisbury, Jennifer

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Freeman, Barry

• Audience
• Community
• Community-Engagement
• Drama
• Theatre

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/128390

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/128390