This thesis project explores the evolving relationship between Applied Theatre and youth-led environmental activism in Canada. It uses Ottawa-based 100 Watt Productions as its primary case-study, locating the company's performance history, creation methodologies, and pedagogy within English Canada's recent Applied Theatre and Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) landscapes. This analysis is accomplished through a mixture of textual analysis, performance analysis, and interviews with the company's founder, Kristina Watt Villegas. Particular focus is placed on Watt's approach to collaborating with young people on 12, the company's most recent theatrical production and most urgent call for climate action to date, having toured theatres, schools, board rooms, and government offices across Canada’s capital region. 12 is composed of a mixture of brief vignettes, poetic compositions, and verbatim excerpts regarding climate crises, described as a "cross-generation love story - a playful theatrical invitation [...] to stop, listen, and to consider what it actually means to take action at this point" (Watt, "Creations: 12"). This thesis project proposes that productions such as these demand a new subcategorization of Applied Theatre, formulated here as Youth Theatre for Adult Audiences (YTAA). This YTAA terminology describes Applied Theatre that has been specifically created by young people for adults, a performance dynamic that has proven to be particularly well suited to the unprecedented political challenges faced by our youngest generations, not only in its compatibility with the platforming of climate appeals, but also in its unique capacity to elevate those young voices through a reframing of the aesthetic experience, often incorporating the participants' own creation process into the audience's overall consideration of aesthetic experience. In this sense, 12 acts as a microcosm for YTAA's escalating significance as an Applied Theatre subcategory, pointing towards an urgent need for increased attention, both in Canadian theatre criticism and scholarship more broadly.

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This thesis is a theoretical-empirical study divided into nine chapters. After the introduction, the second chapter focuses on the theoretical basis, defines the terms applied theatre (drama) and social theatre, which relates to the empirical part, and presents them in a broader context. The third chapter then provides an overview of projects implemented in the Czech Republic. The fourth chapter defines the immigrant experience and the psychosocial events connected with immigration. The fifth chapter provides a brief overview of the practical use of applied drama in the Czech conditions, in the Archa Theatre. The sixth chapter contains qualitative research on the theme of formative influences of theatre-music projects at the Archa Theatre and on several immigrants who participate in them. The seventh chapter is an empirical survey that profiles the audiences of these performances and describes their motivation for attending theatre projects with social outreach. The final, eighth chapter, provides a concluding overview of the whole work. The ninth chapter contains a bibliography and list of sources. KEY WORDS Applied drama, applied theatre, formative influences, immigration, immigrant, social theatre.

As an academic working in the field of applied theatre with undergraduate students, I became increasingly interested in how their skills, techniques, knowledge and understanding are developed to work in applied theatre settings, particularly those that were unfamiliar to them. I was particularly interested in investigating how important, if at all, are the concepts of empathy and sympathy in the preparation of students to work in applied theatre settings and with different client groups. Research of relevant literature revealed pedagogical parallels with social work, particularly in relation to the client-facilitator relationship. There appeared to be synergy between the work undertaken in applied theatre settings and in social work. The interdisciplinary nature of this research contributes to new professional knowledge and practice. A qualitative case study was undertaken, adopting a constructivist and interpretative approach, to understand the way meanings of empathy and sympathy were constructed and interpreted by the students when working in applied theatre settings. The research took place as part of normal professional practice and consisted of a questionnaire (n=14), two semi-structured interviews (n=4) and a focus group (n=4) with third year students studying a BA(Hons) Drama in the Community degree at a small UK Higher Education Institute (HEI). The findings indicated that the participants found it difficult to define, or describe, the concepts of empathy and sympathy with any clarity. They also found it difficult to distinguish between the concepts. However, there was a consensus of opinion that the ability to distinguish between them was important because of the client-facilitator relationship when working in applied theatre settings. The data highlighted that the concepts had only been taught or considered on the programme of study in an implicit way. From this, I concluded that teaching the students the concepts in a more explicit way would help develop their knowledge and understanding of those concepts, thus enabling them to become more informed applied theatre graduates.

As the number of non-native English speakers in US schools continues to rise, there is growing need to find a way to teach English while still engaging with students’ fluid identities around citizenship and national identity. This MFA thesis document explores the impact of an autobiographical playbuilding project with refugee and immigrant youth. The mixed-methods study uses a quantitative performance assessment scale and grounded theory analysis of playscript and performance to examine how students’ definition and understanding of citizenship is activated through the pedagogy and practice of theatre. Throughout, this document argues that arts-based research practices can support both qualitative and quantitative research goals. However the findings suggest that qualitative research offers a more complex understanding of potential program impacts. The document concludes with a discussion of the tensions between research and practice when applied theatre is facilitated in an educational context. / text

In this dissertation, I advance the question of what it means for applied theatre artists to give voice to the community members with whom they work. The study engages with some of the ethical and aesthetic tensions that emerge when one group of people (artists) is entrusted with giving dramatic form to the lived experience of another group (community members). The central premise of the dissertation is that when community participants increase their independent capacity to devise dynamic and compelling theatre, they achieve greater agency. Using a grounded theory analysis, I theorize qualities and characteristics that contribute to the staging of aesthetically arresting theatre, organized into a conceptual lexicon. This praxis-based study is intended to enable applied theatre practitioners to more directly give voice to their community partners. The dissertation presents a vocabulary that offers community participants and professional artists a mutually understood language with which to engage the power of the theatrical event. / Graduate

This thesis portfolio presents an autoethnographic account of a prison educator engaged in a research project that explores creative approaches to arts, prison education, work and training in custodial settings. The position of the researcher is located in-between and across professional practices including arts in prisons, prison education, work and training environments, which have conflicting agendas that, nevertheless, share the same institutional space. Policymakers and management bodies regulating these professional practices expect education and training to contribute to reducing reoffending. Procedurally, the research process was precariously balanced between, on the one hand, performing to measures of quality based on the requirement to reduce recidivism, and on the other, crude outcome measures driven by a utilitarian marketization of prison education that includes course completion rates calculated on the basis of minimum contact time. This broader context created an uncertain and constantly shifting context for the research, which began with my search for an effective creative practice in a Performing Arts Department (PAD) and ends in a Functional English classroom (FEC). Conceptually, the research draws on the What Works debate (McGuire, 1995; Brayford et al. 2010), which continues to create a disjuncture between policy and implementation resulting from unrealistic assumptions that arts and education programmes in prison might prevent reoffending, with evidence relying solely upon randomisation, reductive causation and numerical calculation. It also draws on desistance theory (Maruna, 2001; McNeil, 2006), which argues that desistance from crime can be understood as an indirect process, rather than an event. From an examination of my efforts to implement and develop creative approaches to education via autoethnographic tools, including fictional performative writing, I argue two main points. Firstly, the autonomy required by the creative prison educator engaged in an advanced research project re-positions the professional in a particular relationship with the bewildering processes of power, protectionism and performance management in the criminal justice system. Secondly, and as demonstrated through fictional performative writing, I argue that research methods engaging voices from the frontline of educational environments, can reveal seemingly small details relating to the challenges and possibilities of creative education in prisons that, nonetheless, have significant implications for developing productive and innovative approaches to desistance from crime. Moreover, from this grounded, yet restricted position, I speculate how such approaches might extend both creativity and creatively beyond the validation of this doctorate qualification.

This thesis presents a comparative study of the aesthetics of three theatre initiatives from development settings: theatre company Nós do Morro in Brazil, multi-disciplinary arts centre Phare Ponleu Selpak in Cambodia, and non-profit organisation Movimiento Teatro Popular Sin Fronteras in Nicaragua. By focussing on how different judgements within the landscape of aesthetic and social worth meet, conflict or interact within the programmes, processes and outcomes of the three theatre organisations, this research articulates the different kinds of ‘values’ attached to the (at times) competing aesthetic criteria for practitioners, government bodies and national and international non-governmental organisations that have stakes in this work. The majority of the data in this research is qualitative, generated by interviews, stories about theatre practitioners’ experiences and my own observations of performances, workshops and rehearsals. After exploring the landscape of aesthetic and social worth across the three case studies, this research points out the many ways in which international economics and global governance – manifest in tax-reduced sponsorships by global corporations, funding decisions of international interveners and cultural policies of national governments – participate and intrude into both the aesthetic and social constructions of applied theatre’s artistic value, therefore framing its aesthetic sphere. The global pressure coming from the United Nations and the international humanitarian community seeking to shape applied theatre companies and make them respond to certain dynamics serves neither art nor community. This also makes it very difficult to locate an aesthetic of applied theatre in a way that is ‘traditional’ in discussions of aesthetics (through definition of the art ‘product’ alone, via reference to ideas of beauty, affect and the senses). This study therefore found a way of understanding the impact of economic and international actors on applied theatre using Appadurai’s concept of the ethnoscape (1991), which offers a theoretical and analytical framework for investigating the determining factors of the aesthetics of applied theatre, and the aesthetic discourses surrounding applied theatre in development settings. I argue that applied theatre practices globally are becoming too uniform: global forms taken by transnational institutions are starting to evolve in new directions. We need to attentively investigate what the level of resistance of applied theatre companies can be. Although each art organisation is trying to find a place for applied theatre in the ‘new’ world, the theatre companies can hopefully resist the pressure to become the same kind of company, living in a state partially organised according to international agendas. As a result, this research proposes a more politicised, historicised kind of practice, teaching and mentoring around these questions. This will support applied theatre practitioners in finding their way in the new global world.

In this dissertation, I foreground local elders’ epistemology and ontology embedded in sea rituals and traditional fishing methods in a typhoon-battered community in the Philippines. I do this through the practice of applied theatre to explore agency, relationality, and creativity in the aftermath of a disaster. By locating this dissertation within the intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intersectional applied theatre, I mobilize local disaster narratives by using auto-ethnography, Practice-as-Research, and Participatory Action Research towards the co-creation of local/transnational community-based-theatre performances. These applied theatre performances underscore the solidarity and collective creativity of community members, elders, local government officials, local artists in the Philippines and diasporic Filipinos in Canada. The dissertation engages in personal narrative inquiry, reflective memoir, oral stories, ritual performances, collective creations, archives, and in reclaimed objects to address the existing colonial mode of theorizing theatre and organized post-disaster recovery programs in a local island community decimated by Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan). Cognizant of the complex networks of post-disaster reconstruction, recovery, and planning in local and international spheres of development work, I formulate an applied theatre performance method as a post-disaster mitigative approach stemming from the specter of Super Typhoon Yolanda and other disastrous events wrought by climate crises. This collective and emancipative method emerges from an affective, hybrid, and cross-cultural mode of inquiry to tackle climate change and bring Indigenous ways of knowing into the center of the climate change conversation. I use this method in co-creating performances on local climate crises that critically examines coloniality and cultural misappropriation in an intercultural milieu. I discuss Indigenous ecological epistemology against the backdrop of climate change processes through autoethnographic inquiry and multi-narrative discourse on agentic, performative, and collective performance creations. I argue that Indigenizing the performance method mobilizes a decolonial theatre that broadens, equalizes, and diversifies the climate change dialogue. Informed by the vernacular concepts of affective and intersubjective criticality (Abat), relational collaboration (Pakiki-pagpulso, Pakiki-pagkapwa, Pagmamalasakit), and shared improvisation (Pintigan), this performance method deploys emancipative subjectivities and considers possible futures. By using applied theatre as a practice of post-disaster recovery, I channel its artistic practice and tools in engaging the local and transnational communities in collective acts of re-centering marginalized narratives and peripheralized bodies of knowledge. Stemming from the wounding memories of disasters, traumatic stories of a super typhoon, and political disjuncture, my collaborators and I mobilized communities, deployed diverse voices, and engaged with non-human subjectivities in sites with histories of environmental destruction and colonization both in local and diasporic communities. Driven by principles of decolonial theatre and emancipated dramaturgy, I aim to offer an ethical inquiry and practice of applied theatre that tackles climate crises in sites with a long history of disasters. These performance principles valorize the Indigenization of theatre’s capacity for social, political, and cultural intervention to re-future climate crises. Finally, this dissertation emphasizes the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, social relationality, and local creativity beyond the incursion of modernity and colonialism. / Graduate

An emphasis in political debates and much print media in the United Kingdom (UK) on perceived issues with ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity has contributed to a narrative of worry and fear. Despite such hostile discourse, people find ways of living together with diversity every day.  The encounters which I am concerned with in the following degree project are taking place through community theatre with Mafwa Theatre in Leeds where women from asylum seeker, refugee, and wider communities are socialising and cooperating over fun and simple drama activities. The purpose of this thesis is to better understand the different participants’ lived experiences of the theatre space, how they view their role in the group, and how they perceive diversity in the group. The research questions are explored with qualitative research methods of individual interviews with Mafwa members, the facilitators, and a volunteer, participant observation during the weekly drama sessions, and document analysis of printed, online, and audio materials. With this degree project, I aim to contribute to the discussion about everyday multiculturalism and living with diversity in the UK. The theoretical framework consists of the concept of hospitality which helps me explore how hospitable spaces are shaped and negotiated by different contributors, and conviviality which embraces the complexity of social relations without romanticising them and can help us reach a better understanding of how to live together without a fear for each other’s differences.  The findings show that the different participants view the drama group as a hospitable community of acceptance and respect within a hostile environment for asylum seekers and refugees at the national level. The space offers a well-needed opportunity for the women to have fun, develop their creative skills, and escape day-to-day concerns. Moreover, the study shows that besides being proud co-producers of artistic practice, all participants are also active co-creators of shaping the hospitable space and a ‘convivial culture’. Finally, despite misunderstandings and disagreements in the group, the participants express having bonded over similarities and learned from differences rather than describing diversity as something to fear.