Collaborative Performance for Social Justice

This engaging book offers a broad spectrum of collaborative and accessible performance-based practices that promote social justice within college classrooms, rehearsal spaces, campus stages, and local communities.

Performance is an inherently collective and embodied endeavor. As a form of communication activism, performance also serves as a powerful mode of teaching and learning that demands equitable relationships and mutually established group norms that offer all a seat at the table. Informed by intersectional feminist and antiracist theories, the authors present collaborative performance case studies ranging from interventions into local histories of oppression, to creative protests of campus and cultural practices, to staged interruptions of social discourses and representational systems that perpetuate structural inequities. Illustrating the multiple possibilities of performance, the book offers adaptable tools, evocative stories, and vivid examples from diverse bodies of work.  This engaged scholarship is committed to honoring multiple forms of knowledge, acknowledging and building the capacities of individuals and organizations, identifying and developing more spaces for critical dialogue, and envisioning and performing a more socially just world.

This book is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of communication, theater, performance studies, arts-based education, and social justice activism.