Applied Theatre: Facilitation: Pedagogies, Practices, Resilience

by Sheila Preston

Overview

Applied Theatre: Facilitation is the first publication that directly explores the facilitator's role within a range of socially engaged theatre and community theatre settings. The book offers a new theoretical framework for understanding critical facilitation in contemporary dilemmatic spaces and features a range of writings and provocations by international practitioners and experienced facilitators working in the field.

Part One offers an introduction to the concept, role and practice of facilitation and its applications in different contexts and cultural locations. It offers a conceptual framework through which to understand the idea of critical facilitation: a political practice that that involves a critical (and self-critical) approach to pedagogies, practices (doing and performing), and resilience in dilemmatic spaces. Part Two illuminates the diversity in the field of facilitation in applied theatre through offering multiple voices, case studies, theoretical positions and contexts. These are drawn from Australia, Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel/Palestine, Rwanda, the United Kingdom and North America, and they apply a range of aesthetic forms: performance, process drama, forum, clowning and playmaking. Each chapter presents the challenge of facilitation in a range of cultural contexts with communities whose complex histories and experiences have led them to be disenfranchised socially, culturally and/or economically.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472576941
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/20/2016
Series:	Applied Theatre
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	801 KB

About the Author

Sheila Preston is Head of Performing Arts at the University of East London, UK. She is a practising mediator and drama facilitator and has worked in a range of settings locally and internationally, including work with young people, with adults in mental health settings, and in development contexts. She co-edited with Tim Prentki The Applied Theatre Reader (2009) and is co-editor, with Micheal Balfour, of Bloomsbury Methuen Drama's Applied Theatre series.
Sheila Preston is Head of Performing Arts at the University of East London, UK. Previously she was a senior lecturer in Applied Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She co-edited with Tim Prentki The Applied Theatre Reader (Routledge, 2009).

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors
Introduction to Facilitation
Part 1: A Conceptual Framework

1 Pedagogies: Critical Facilitation
2 Practices: Doing and Performing
3 Resilience in Dilemmatic Spaces

Part 2: Case Studies: Pedagogies, Practices&Contexts,

4 Send in the Clowns (Paul Murray, University of East London, UK)
5 All Our Stress Goes in the River: The Drama Workshop as a (Playful) Space for Reconciliation (Sarah Woodland, Griffith University, Australia)
6 Re-Positioning The Learning-Disabled Performing Arts Student as Critical Facilitator (Liselle Terret, University of East London, UK)
7 The Art of Facilitation: 'Tain't what you do (it's the way that you do it).' (Michael Balfour, Griffith University, Australia)
8 More than a Sum of Parts? Responsivity and Respond-ability in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise (Kay Hepplewhite, Northumbria University, UK)
9 The Artist as Questioner: Why We Do What We Do (Ananda Breed, University of East London, UK)

10 'Ain't you got a right to the tree of life': Facilitators' Intentions Toward Community, Integrity and Justice (Cynthia Cohen, Brandeis University, USA)

Afterword

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

An excellent text for introducing undergraduate students to the principles and complexities of applied theatre facilitation. Highly recommended for anyone interested in how to practice and think about educational drama.
Matt Jennings, University of Ulster, UK

From the Publisher