Böcker i Applied Theatre-serien

Applied Theatre: Performing Health and Wellbeing is the first volume in the field to address the role that theatre, drama and performance have in relation to promoting, developing and sustaining health and wellbeing in diverse communities. Challenging concepts and understanding of health, wellbeing and illness, it offers insight into different approaches to major health issues through applied performance. With a strong emphasis on the artistry involved in performance-based health responses, situated within a history of the field of practice, the volume is divided into two sections:Part One examines some of the key questions around research and practice in applied performance in health and wellbeing, specifically addressing the different regional challenges that dominate the provision of health care and influence wellbeing: how the ageing population of the global north creates pressure on lifetime healthcare provision, while the global south is dominated by a higher birth rate and a larger population under 15 years old. Part Two comprises case studies and interviews from international practitioners that reflect the diversity of practices across the world and in particular differences between work in the northern and southern hemispheres. These case studies include a sanitation project in a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in the 1980s, and the sanitation and rural development projects initiated by the travelling theatre troupes of a number of University theatre departments in Africa - Makerere in Kampala, Uganda; Botswana; Lesotho and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania - which began in the 1960s. It considers the emergence of Theatre for Development's use as a health approach, considering the work of Laedza Batanani and the influences of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.

Engaging with a diversity of contexts, locations and arts forms - including theatre, music and fine art - this collection brings together theoretical, political and practice-based perspectives on the question of ''evidence'' in relation to arts practice in social context. Chapters critically interrogate the potential of approaches ranging from narrative case studies to randomised control trials and ethnographic performance. Case studies include, among others, singing in prisons, music and mental health and community theatre in South Africa. For those involved with the arts in social contexts there often exists a powerful sense of the value and impact of the work. First-hand experience provides examples of how the arts can provide new opportunities, change lives and forge community connections across a diversity of contexts from education to hospitals, mental health to prisons. However, while arts in social context projects are frequently able to produce stories of tremendous impacts, in the context of reduced and competitive budgets such evidence is often of the wrong sort or not ''enough''.This collection is a unique contribution to the field, focusing on one of the vital concerns for a growing and developing set of arts and research practices. It asks us to consider evidence not only in terms of methodology but also in the light of the ideological, political and pragmatic implications of that methodology.