abstract: In May 2014, The Encyclopedia Show: Chicago performed its last volume. Like all others before, the Show was a collection of performances devised by artists, musicians, poets and playwrights all performing various subtopics surrounding a central theme, taken from “an actual Encyclopedia.” The final show was Volume 56 for Chicago; the founding city ended their six year run with an amassed body of work exploring topics ranging from Wyoming to Alan Turing, Serial Killers to Vice Presidents. Perhaps more impressive than the monthly performance event in Chicago is the fact that the show has been “franchised” to organizers and performers in at least seventeen cities. Franchise agreements mandated that for at least the first year of performance, topics were to follow Chicago’s schedule, thus creating an archive of Shows around the world, each that started with Bears, moved to The Moon, onto Visible Spectrum of Color, and so on. Now that the Chicago show has ended, I wonder what will happen to the innovative format for community performance that has reached thousands of audience members and inspired hundreds of individual performances across the globe in a six-year period. This project, like much of my own work, has two aims: first, to provide the first substantive history of The Encyclopedia Show for archival purposes; and second, to explore whether this format can be used to achieve the goals of “interdisciplinarity” in the classroom. In an effort to honor my own interests in multiple academic disciplines and in an attempt to capture the structural and performative “feel” of an Encyclopedia Show, this dissertation takes the shape of an actual Encyclopedia Show. The overarching topic of this “show” is: Michelle Hill: The Doctoral Process. In an actual Encyclopedia Show, subtopics would work to explore multiple perspectives and narratives encompassed by the central topic. As such, my “subtopics” are devoted to the roles I have played throughout my doctoral process: historian, academic, teacher. A fourth role, performer, works to transition between the sections and further create the feel of a “breakage” from a more traditional dissertation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Theatre 2017

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Since March 2020, community-based performance social groups have shifted drastically. With COVID-19, quarantining and social distance protocols, the ongoing pandemic has altered in-person social work and the way communities interact. The information shared in this thesis is drawn from 4 semi-structured qualitative interviews. The data showcases folks who are community leaders, teachers and social workers who use performance techniques with their clients. My study asked the Participants about their history using theatre arts within their practice and investigated how COVID-19 impacted their endeavours. The data collected implies that community work using theatre has an ongoing potential to support social change efforts toward rebuilding and sustaining connection. Yet, the data also discovered a growing divide that is further affecting marginalized folks who can not access community within a digital world. Inspired by the works of Lisbeth Berbary (2011) and Jonathan Gross (2021) this thesis artistically re-imagines the collected data as a social performance amongst the Participants involved. With permission from the Participants, an ethnographic screenplay using a creative analytical approach (Berbary, 2011), transformed the semi-structured qualitative interview findings to highlight key discoveries. These key discoveries outline a nuanced understanding of how performance for social change has been transformed and the tensions that arose, particularly the growing social divide for access (the divide between those who can access online community performance groups and those who lose out from a lack of technological accessibility). Analyzing these conflicting advantages and disadvantages can help build toward an inclusive and equitable approach for theatre as a vehicle for social justice. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

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