Ebook: Disobedient Theatre: Alternative Ways to Inspire, Animate and Play

Theatre is at its best when it is disobedient. When it argues back to society. But what enables it to achieve this impact? What makes it a force to be reckoned with? What are the principles and the tools of the trade that shape it to be effective, powerful and resonant? Drawing from both practice and theory, and conversations with recognized practitioners from across the UK, this book provides answers.
This is a book for all those who have an interest in what makes theatre powerful, disturbing or even life-changing. It looks at some key relationships; between theatre and activism and between theatre and social development in particular. Avoiding too much jargon, it offers a way to understand what are the driving ideas that lead to plays, shows and workshops which can change and inform the evolution of society.
Divided into two parts, In The World and In The Room, the book presents a rounded picture of the possibilities of a ‘disobedient’ culture and includes many games and exercises for creative practitioners.
A handbook for the theatrically disaffected; a celebration of the beauty of a smallness rising from the roots rather than trickling down from the increasingly split ends of mainstream culture. Defines and explores a constellation of performance concepts, practices and strategies that could be said to foreground the ethic of disobedience: not all-out full-scale rebellion, but rather a low level cussedness and endless inventiveness forcing productive weeds into cracks into the concrete edifice of mainstream theatre in lieu of an allotment; the guerrilla war of activist performance identified here in a surprisingly wide range of shades and cognate genealogical branches. Expertly traced and delineated by one of its most experienced combatants: It’s not the despair that will get you in the end, but the group of young offenders who thought they were getting a maths lesson – except they wont, not with this wise guidance and conceptual nouse whispering small disreputable facilitations into your ear and offering you a sketch map of the territory
Part one constellates a lifetime of experience beneath a series of illustrated and evidenced watchwords: firstly principles: defiance; provocation; transgression; de-identification; equality; prefiguration; and then secondly tactics: animation; adaptation; responsiveness; immediacy; un-timing; then thirdly transmission mechanisms, involving development of ‘voice’; contrariness and resonance. Finally survival: the necessity of developing affinities allies and agency, while restricting scale and making good use of tactics of occupation and professional hybridity
Part two narrows the focus onto what might actually go on in small rooms seeding performative dissent; specifically through the prism of the making of a piece of disobedient work, balancing intuition and conscious method in the elaboration of deliberately ambiguous primary material and the implementation of practical tips for a dissident dramaturgy and narrative development; involving the tactical and judicious use of performance tension and the optimisation of dramatic development and structure; how to keep yourself creatively and productively uncomfortable, truly disobedient and in the best tradition, foolish.
The book ends with practitioners’ accounts of their formative experiences