Catherine Graham and Jennifer Taylor: Creating the Environment for Social Change

In Canada as elsewhere, training for activist popular theatre tends to concentrate on the art of the actor, who is often expected to play a key role in writing and directing performance texts. This is understandable, given that the actor plays a key role in demonstrating the kind of agency necessary to create the social change this type of theatre promotes. But any real work on social change must take into account the way the individual bodies interact within specific environments, material and ideological, that encourage certain kinds of interactions and discourages others.  Recent work on the sociology of the body offers some insights that may be useful to our thinking about theatre. Sociologist Arthur Frank, for instance, argues that in everyday life, as in theatre: "people construct and use their bodies, though they do not use them in conditions of their own choosing” (Frank 47-49).  Activist popular theatre companies like Québec’s Théâtre Parminou and HeadlinesTheatre make extensive use of visual design and music in creating environments in which characters evolve.  We are looking at the work of these Canadian theatres in relation to work by troupes like Kentucky’s Roadside Theatre, for whom music and a sense of place are central elements in the creation of cross-cultural performances, and commercial events like Lilith Fair, where choices around the physical design of the performance space reinforced dominant cultural notions about social mobility.  By comparing design and musical choices in a range of cultures and socioeconomic circumstances, we hope to present two interlocking papers that will explore ways of performing the conditions that make real social change possible and to suggest a methodology for analyzing design choices in theatre for social change.