Applied & Interactive Theatre Blog

The truth will set you free

Toni Sant — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:30:00 +0000

April 21, 2008

CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Edmund Cardoni: (716) 854-1694
Lucia Sommer: (716) 359-3061

JUDGE DISMISSES MAIL FRAUD CASE AGAINST BIO-ARTIST KURTZ

Buffalo, NY—A process that has taken nearly four years may be coming to an end. On Monday, April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment against University at Buffalo Professor of Visual Studies Dr. Steven Kurtz.

In June 2004, Professor Kurtz was charged with two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud stemming from an exchange of $256 worth of harmless bacteria with Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Dr. Kurtz planned to use the bacteria in an educational art exhibit about biotechnology with his award-winning art and theater collective, Critical Art Ensemble.

Professor Kurtz' lawyer, Paul Cambria, said that his client was "pleased and relieved that this ordeal may be coming to an end."

The prosecution has the right to appeal this dismissal. How the prosecution will proceed is unknown at this time. If an appeal were undertaken the case would move to the New York Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.

Lucia Sommer, Coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, which raises funds for Kurtz' legal defense, said, “We are all grateful that after reviewing this case, Judge Arcara took appropriate action.” She added that "this decision is further testament to our original statements that Dr. Kurtz is completely innocent and never should have been charged in the first place."

BACKGROUND ON DR. STEVEN KURTZ AND CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE

Critical Art Ensemble (which Kurtz co-founded in 1987 with Steven Barnes) has won numerous awards for its bio-art, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, honoring more than two decades of distinguished work. The group has been commissioned to exhibit and perform in many of the world's cultural institutions—including the London Museum of Natural History; The ICA, London; the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; der Volksbüne, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; El Matadero, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Museo de Arte Carrilo Gil, Mexico City and many more.

For more information about the case, please visit: caedefensefund.org

Interactive and Improvisational Drama book

Toni Sant — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:32:00 +0000

Announcing the publication of the new book Interactive and Improvisational Drama: Varieties of Applied Theatre and Performance edited by Adam Blatner (with Daniel J Wiener).

In this unique anthology, thirty-two innovators share their approaches ways people can use nonscripted and interactive drama in community-building, education, personal and social empowerment, therapy, and recreation.

For drama students, their teachers, educators, actors, community workers, therapists, and even those in general population who like theatre. This may be the most dynamic cutting edge of the theatre arts today! In this book, drama can be discerned as a medium that expands the nature of discourse beyond the linear transmission of information, to include also imagination, spontaneity, vitality, involvement, emotional sensitivity and amplification, empathy, the power of group dynamics, and emotional supportiveness.

In addition, this book has a website that contains many supplementary papers, further references, anecdotes, and resources, and as such, you get twice as much for your money! You can also look over the table of contents of the book.

Order it for your college or university library, local public library, and for yourself, too! Please pass this along to other colleagues who may share an interest - teachers, educators, theatre artists, improv actors, drama therapists, and many others.

Playback in the Academy

Toni Sant — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:30:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

PLAYBACK IN THE ACADEMY CONFERENCE
FRIDAY JUNE 8 TO SUNDAY JUNE 10TH

at the School of Dramatic Art
University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario

Playback Practitioners and Drama Researchers
are invited to make a submission
to be part of a cutting edge conference

The focus is the investigation of Playback Theatre
in Education, its scope, its relation to community
practice, its future, and research models to assess
the effectiveness of Playback Theatre

Proposal deadline April 1, 2007

Use the following link to submit proposals:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=26723278558

On-line registration will be available shortly.
For further information, contact:

Gail Campbell
Drama in Education and Community
School of Dramatic Art
University of Windsor
ofc: (519) 253-3000 x4623
fax: (519) 971-3629
gailc@uwindsor.ca

Vacancy: Applied Theatre Practitioner, Reading (UK)

Toni Sant — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:49:00 +0000

Are you a drama practitioner passionate about the potential of applied theatre?

Do you think that drama can be used as a learning medium, for young people and adults alike?

Would you relish a long term opportunity to expand your practice with a professional theatre company?

C&T Theatre Company has a growing national network of schools, each hosting a resident drama practitioner who works across the local and school community. We are currently recruiting for a practitioner to be based in a Reading performing arts school, joining existing centres in Worcester, Walsall, York and London.

The network is facilitated by C&T’s innovative new media technologies – practitioners are collaborating on the development of an entirely new medium: meshed applied theatre.

The successful applicant will have experience of using drama in a wide range of contexts including schools, a confidence to work independently and be looking for new creative challenges. Appointment is conditional on a satisfactory enhanced CRB check.

For further information visit www.candt.org

For an application pack e-mail jill.francis@candt.org or phone +44 (0)1905 855436.

Application deadline: Monday 6 November

C&T is an Equal Opportunities Employer.
Reg. Charity No. 1085653

C&T is a funded client of Arts Council England.

Stop the G8+5, Defend Oaxaca

Toni Sant — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 10:13:00 +0000

The borderlands Hacklab [http://sdhacklab.org], Electronic Disturbance Theater [http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html] and Rising Tide North America call for a virtual sit-in against the websites of the G8+5 and the Mexican government during the G8+5 meetings on October 3-4th, 2006 in Mexico.

To join the action, click here: http://sdhacklab.org/oaxaca

While the Mexican government tries to play host to the G8+5 Gleneagles Dialogue on Climate Change, it is mounting a massive violent attack on the people of Oaxaca. Apparently the Mexican government thinks it can cleanse the country of its growing pro-democracy rebellion while laying out a red carpet to world politicians including the G8 Energy Ministers. The neoliberal project of corporate globalization and fossil-fuel-based "energy security" that causes global warming is built on massive violence, from armies to riot police to militarized borders, to turn the global south into its sweatshop and repress the uprisings for justice, democracy, and sustainable livelihood of the people in Mexico and other countries.

While the neoliberal model of industrial "development" sees the remaining indigenous and "undeveloped" lands of the Earth as territories for capitalist exploitation of natural resources and human labor, the schoolteachers leading Oaxaca's popular pro-democracy strike have a different vision. By taking direct action to shut down the tyrannical rule of their state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the people of Oaxaca are teaching that another world is possible.

On Sunday, October 1, 2006, a headline in the Mexico City daily Milenio proclaimed, "Preparations for war in Oaxaca," while Mexico City's El Universal newspaper reported that helicopters, planes and 15 troop trucks had assembled in Huatulco, a Pacific tourist getaway and military hub a short flight, but a long and difficult drive from Oaxaca city." According to the independent news website Narconews.com, which has been covering the Other Campaign of the Zapatistas, on Sunday, October1, 2006:

"The Mexican Navy carried out a reconnaissance operation over the buildings and public spaces occupied by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO in its Spanish initials). Two MI-17 helicopters and one CASA C212 Navy airplane with registration number AMP-118 flew over the streets of the city“ where opponents of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz have maintained several encampments over the past 130 days “for about 40 minutes."

"The zocalo, or central city square, the Oro and La Ley radio stations, the state government building, the Brenamiel and El Rosario radio antennas, as well as the Department of Finance building" all places where the rebels have installed protest camps “were reconnoitered by low-level flights of military aircraft. As they passed over the Radio Oro facilities, the two helicopters were fruitlessly "attacked" with fireworks that teachers of the National Education Workers' Union local Section 22 launched from Conzatti Garden. The airplane then made four more passes over the areas around the zocalo and returned to the airport, where five other military aircraft were stationed. At 5:30 that afternoon, the naval surveillance plane and two AMHT-202 and AMHT-205 helicopters landed on a city airstrip and let out 18 soldiers in black-and-grey camouflage, bulletproof vests, helmets and firearms."

"Lino Celaya Lura, state secretary of Citizen Protection, confirmed that the objective of the military flights was to "reconnoiter" the scene of the conflict, but claimed not to know if this was the prelude to an eventual federal operation to remove the protesters. The state official limited himself to saying: "We were informed that a flight would occur over the areas where the dissidents are present. We believe this is to obtain field information on the situation."

"Meanwhile, from the occupied radio stations, the rebels again declared a maximum alert in the face of what they imagine could be the beginning of a removal/eviction operation against the popular and teachers' movement."

Over half of the Oaxaca's 3.2 million people, most of whom are indigenous, live in poverty, and 21.5 percent of those over 15 are illiterate, while the average number of years of schooling is 5.6 years -- almost two less than Mexico's national average. Many students in Oaxaca's rural schools lack books and desks. In May, tens of thousands of teachers seized the capital's leafy central plaza to demand wage increases and improved school conditions. The following month, Governor Ulises Ruiz sent police to attempt to retake the heart of the city. Since then, radical social movements of workers, peasants, students, women and others have joined the striking teachers, building street barricades and taking over radio and television stations. They demand that Ruiz resign, alleging that he rigged the 2004 election and uses paramilitary gangs to attack dissidents. A total of five "megamarches were organized with the largest reaching the astonishing number of around 300,000 people, or one out of ten people who live in the state.

During the protests, as many as six people have been killed in violent incidents which apparently involved irregular armed groups linked to the Ruiz administration and the police, according to human rights organisations. A number of demonstrators have also been arrested and injured, and further assaults perpetrated against them by organized, unidentified gangs of thugs have been reported.

One example of neoliberal "development" in Mexico with major implications for Oaxaca is Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), a transnational "mega-infrastructure" project that would transform the region's geography and economy if implemented. While claiming that one of its main goals is to improve the conditions for the people of the region, PPP is stealing land from indigenous people for infrastructure projects to move resources more quickly into the hands of multinational corporations and commodifying their culture for the tourist industry. One of the projects affecting Oaxaca is the creation of a super highway at Mexico's skinniest point, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in order to move resources more readily across the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This transportation corridor will be surrounded with sweatshops, maquiladoras, operating without labor and environmental protections. For all of these objectives, neoliberal control over the government of Oaxaca is key to the realization of the PPP project.

Mexico has an ugly history of military repression that coincides with major world gatherings occurring inside the country. 38 years ago today, October 2nd, the Mexican military massacred hundreds of student protesters at Tlatelolco, just days before the 1968 Olympic Games began in Mexico City. If military violence against the pro-democracy protesters of Oaxaca occurs before, during or after the G8 meeting in Mexico, the G8 leaders as well as the Mexican military must be held accountable for the injuries and death. To prevent this, we demand that the G8 officials who are meeting this week in Mexico must publicly speak out to condemn the possibility of another Mexican massacre at Oaxaca.

We demand that the G8 end its support of destructive "carbon trading." The G8 is composed of the leaders of the richest 8 countries in the world, who are responsible for the policies of war, criminalization of cross-border human migration, and massive environmental destruction. While they claim to be meeting to solve the climate change crisis, they are in fact discussing carbon trading agreements that will allow corporations to profit while exporting their pollution to the global south. Carbon trading threatens to turn countries like Brazil into a "carbon sink" for the global north while ignoring the underlying capitalist ideology of endless growth and boundless consumption that is creating massive climate change.

Help us stop the G8 by slowing the propaganda systems that the G8+5 and the Mexican Government will be using during the meetings and the attacks to spread disinformation about their actions. As in our previous actions, people from all around the world will make their virtual presence manifest on the doorstep of the G8+5 and the Mexican Government.

To join the action, click here: http://sdhacklab.org/oaxaca

Reginald Ernest Bolton (1945-2006)

Toni Sant — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 06:59:00 +0000

Reginald Ernest Bolton 13 Nov '45 - 14 July '06
Alive in our hearts forever, words cannot express our loss.

A message arrived from Reg Bolton's family...

Family & Friends,

It is with overwhelming sadness, we wish to inform you that our dearest Reginald Ernest Bolton passed away suddenly in his sleep on the night of the 14th of July 2006.

He was working up north with the kids at the Kununurra Agricultural show doing what he loved and what he did best.

Funeral arrangements are being made all will be welcome. We will let you know as things unfold. Please check Reg's website for information as it comes to hand.

Thank you for all the support and love that is already pouring in.

Floral tributes are lovely, but taking inspiration from Reg and living your life to the full is better. We'd love to know what you get up to.

You can help by forwarding this onto those who knew and loved our Reginald.

Love
Annie, Jo & Sophie

Creative Arts Development Worker, Youth Justice

Toni Sant — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 17:08:00 +0000

WANTED: Creative Arts Development Worker, Youth Justice

Location: Oxfordshire YOS
Salary: Grade 9-11 SCP 29-40 - £23,175 £31,653pa pro rata
Hours: 18.5 / week

Oxfordshire & West Berkshire Youth Offending Services are seeking an innovative and committed Arts Worker to develop arts-related practice in the youth justice field in both areas. You will be highly creative, able to work in partnership with a wide range of agencies and understand the needs of young offenders.

The post is funded and supported by the Arts Council, Thames Valley Partnership, Creative Partnerships and the two Youth Offending Services.

The post is for one year only.

To receive an Application pack, please contact Rachelle Lyon
on 01865 268184
or yot.enquiries@oxfordshire.gov.uk
or rachelle.lyon@oxfordshire.gov.uk

For an informal discussion please contact Tan Lea on 01865 268176 or Davy Pearson on 01635 553600.

Closing Date: 10th July 2006 @ 9.00 am
Interview Date: 11th August 2006

Poetry in Motion

Toni Sant — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 07:25:00 +0000

THIS POEM IS SPONSORED BY...
POEMS IN THE FACE OF CORPORATE POWER

Deadline for submissions: 1st July 2006

Calling all writers and worriers, lyricists and layabouts, radicals and revolutionaries, thinkers and storytellers, performers and poets...

Corporations are the dominant institution of our time. They are omnipresent in our lives, from the branding posted on every street corner and bus stop, to our clocking on and clocking off for the company that pays our bills, to the TV we turn to to numb our minds after the daily grind. But the impact of corporations on our lives, societies, ecosystems and economies is strangely absent from mainstream cultural debate.

'This poem is sponsored by...' will be a world changing collection of poetry: a rich source of inspiration and insight to help us to take action.

The collection will be launched in Autumn 2006 to celebrate 10 years of Corporate Watch, the leading anti-corporate research group.

Submissions

We welcome writing from anyone in any creative form: poetry, prose, songs, lyrics.

Deadline for submissions: 1st July 2006

Please send your work to:

Poetry submissions,
Corporate Watch,
16b Cherwell Street,
Oxford, OX4 1BG
United Kingdom

or

submissions@corporatewatch.org

You cannot have 'art for art's sake'. Art must do something.
- Ken Saro Wiwa

"We won!"

Toni Sant — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:54:00 +0000

Dear friends,

thanks to all of you - the President of the Amnesty Comission has received more than 1.500 emails from all over the world! -, after NINE years my process was finally analised by the Comission, which accepted:

1º) to declare officially that I have been banned from the country, in 1971, by the military dictatorship, so I have the status of someone entitled to have the benefits of the Amnesty, which means that all those years that I have worked abroad must count as though I were working here in my country;

2º) to declare that I am entitled to have a pension just like everybody else; the ammount proposed is not as much as we think it should be but, considering the Brazilian situation of international economic slavery, it is not so bad either.

To all of you, my friends, I have to declare very emphatically that I have no intention whatsoever to retire at all, never!!! I still have lots of work to do and I know that many people still need me.

All I was fighting for was my legal right to have a pension, which had been denied by the reactionary dictators who banned me. I was fighting for justice, not only for a certain ammount of money. Now, I am happy: we won. We did, together, what I could not have done alone.

Happy also because my health is slowly coming back. My doctors swear that on my next birthday the 16th of March I will be again 57 and not 75. I am not Molière: I believe in doctors...

Now, my thoughts go to all those people around the world who have not 1.500 friends and have their rights disrespected by their governments. I will never hesitate to give them my support.

Once again, thank you very much. And... please, inform our friends.

AUGUSTO BOAL

Irony

Toni Sant — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 17:38:00 +0000

Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2005 10:45:07 -0300 From: Augusto Boal Subject: process To: Richard Schechner Dear Richard, in our bureaucracy everything is very obscure but we know that my process has moved to a step higher where it will be analysed again and eventually be prepared for voting, if nothing else unexpectedly appears. It is a small step, but in my opinion the direction of the path is more important than the length of the step.... so, in a few weeks more we will see. Paralel to that, - and maybe it has not any relation to that, maybe it has! - the Executive Power (which is separated from the Judiciary, where my process lies) decided to give me a Medal of Artistic Excellence, on the 8th of November, together with other Brazilian artists. ... Does it mean anything? I don´t know... I will keep you informed. Fraternally, Augusto

Augusto Boal Update

Toni Sant — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 15:44:00 +0000

Date: Wed, 07 Sep 2005 16:15:14 -0300 From: Augusto Boal Subject: Re: your pension To: richard schechner Dear Richard, in all, from all over the world, I have up to now received almost 700 emails. They keep coming. From your friends came many many - some of them wrote me a second email to tell me that you had contacted them and expressing their solidarity. The effect is still unknown - my lawyer has not yet received an invitation from the President of Amnesty Commission to go to Brasília to deffend my case, as she had asked for. She says she will wait until next week and then try again. In her opinion, this enormous ammount of emails will produce a strong impression, but things in Brasília are slow, very slow. I will certainly write you as soon as something new happens. Once again, thanks a lot, fraternally, Augusto

Augusto Boal in dire need

Toni Sant — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 19:40:00 +0000

Dear Friends,

Augusto Boal -- now 74 and in poor health -- has his pension "on hold" in Brazil. He needs emails sent IMMEDIATELY to the authorities in Brasilia so that they will act positively and give Augusto his pension. The pension has been held up for nine years (!). I am attaching a letter that Augsto's lawyer says should be emailed. Because the government will take final action next week, it is urgent that this email letter be sent asap.

And please distribute this appeal to as many persons as you can.

The time is NOW. Please ACT at once.

Best,

Richard Schechner
University Professor/Performance Studies/TSOA/NYU
Editor, TDR
Artistic Director, East Coast Artists

************************

TO: ANISTIA@MJ.GOV.BR
anistia@mj.gov.br

With Cco (blind copies) to:
Enimoreira@aol.com and augustoboal@terra.com.br

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMNESTY COMMISSION
DR. MARCELO LAVENERE
MINISTRY OF JUSTICE - Brasilia, DF

Reference Process n° 2002.01.12897

Dr. Marcelo Lavenere,

We are well aware of the great importance that Mr. Augusto Boal has, as a writer and as an man of the theatre, both in his own country and even more on the international scene. Mr. Boal is the creator of the Method of the Theatre of the Oppressed, which is now used in more than seventy countries around the world, in fields as different as Pedagogy, Psychiatric Hospitals, Prisons, Social Work, etc.

Rarely has a theatrical Method been so useful in so
many regions of the five continents.

We are also aware of Mr. Boal´s age (74 years old) and of the special health conditions that prevent him from continuing his important work around the world in the same pace as he did before.

We have learned with distress and astonishment, that his process to obtain his highly deserved legal Retirement has not yet been concluded after NINE YEARS since it was first presented. We do not ask for any special privilege, but we want to be assured that you will very soon determine the immediate analysis of his demand, as it is his legitimate right and our most sincere hope.

Yours Sincerely,

Your Full Name
Your Profession, City and Country
Place and date

Why do we have a blog?

Toni Sant — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 10:29:00 +0000

When we created the AITG blog a few months ago it was used primarily by AITG founder Joel Plotkin to post reports about the Playback Theater Network conference held between Feb. 25-27, 2005. He chose to remove those reports from the blog a few weeks after the conference because he felt there was no real interest in them beyond that time, especially from people who did not attend the PTN conference.

So why do we have a blog? What do you, the AITG users and visitors, want to see on this blog? Musings about applied and interactive theatre? Guest bloggers from the various fields pertinent to the AITG? Book and video reviews/recommendations? Conference announcements/reports?

Please feel free to comment directly on this blog by clicking on the comments link below. You can also send me a personal message via the online form here.

Insight and Change

Joel Plotkin — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:30:00 +0000

Anagnoresis and Peripeteia
(Note) I've removed the descriptions of the International Playback Theater Network conference Feb. 25-27, 2005. They seemed time-limited and relevant for people who wanted to follow the conference in a concurrent way.

This is a much-abbreviated version of an article I wrote in 1995 for the then-new Applied and Interactive Theater Guide, revised to focus on Playback Theater. I had been visiting workshops and conferences of several action methods: drama therapy, psychodrama, theater of the oppressed, and I had been working with a company that used structured improvisation for workplace training. I was excited by the commonalities I found among the different practitioners, and concerned about the lack of interaction among practitioners of the different modalities.

I looked for a way to show that these forms were, in fact, theater as I had known, practiced, and defined it since college. I found in the classic by Aristotle, The Poetics, elements and terms that were useful. Free yourself from prejudices about Aristotle, largely engendered by the Renaissance and Neo-classical theorists who used him as a club to punish innovation, but also echoed by Brecht and Boal, who associate him with dreadful and drippy well-made plays.

See him simply as an amazingly perceptive communication theorist who, as one of the 15,000 audience members in the Theater of Dionysus, managed to get many things right in trying to understand the power of the most influential communications medium of his time. Here are some of his observations:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each type of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in several parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions
Aristotle, The Poetics, Book VI, ll.2-3 (tr. S. H. Butcher)

Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality: namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.
Book VI, l.7

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.
Book VI, l. 9

the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy, i.e.,Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes, are part of the plot.
Book VI, l. 13

Here is my effort at rewriting these to account for contemporary action methods:

Theater, whether in its several literary genres(1) or its non-scripted, improvisational forms(2), is both an imitation of human interaction(3) and an exemplar(4) of human interaction--between and among characters, performers, audience, and community. Its grammar is language, movement, spectacle, relationship, and emotion, configured through empathy(5) and suspense(6) to both depict and to create a powerful experience(7) of Awareness or Insight(8) , and a subsequent Reversal or Change(9), potentiated by the group mass and its sharings(10). Emotion in theater is transformed from its experiential rawness, distanced and rendered a safer savor(11) of the original, so that audience and performers can balance between complete involvement(12)and aesthetic distance (13), dipping now one way, then the other.

(1) Tragedy, comedy, tragico-comical-historical-pastoral, etc.
(2) Playback, TO, Improv, psychodrama, etc.
(3) On stage
(4) i.e., theater is REAL, not a mirror
(5) Pity
(6) Fear
(7) Catharsis
(8) Anagnoresis
(9) Peripeteia
(10) Crowd effect, pheromones, knowledge of current events or context
(11) rasa, in Sanskrit
(12) Rapture, loss of self, emotional transport
(13) Critical awareness, Brechtian alienation, judgment

With that as my starting point, I could reconcile my academic training and my fascination with the new forms. The emphasis is on Insight and Change. Catharsis, the arguable point for many theorists throughout history, is the name given to the mental gasp that accompanies insight and change. Freed from having to wonder whether the C-word meant Purgation, Rectification, or Healthy Exercise, I had no difficulty seeing the essence of theater both on stage and in DT or TO workshops.

I concluded my article in 1995 by saying that scripted theater was at a point of major paradigm change, devolving into Broadway theme park spectacles and elitist regional theater menus on the one hand, and esoteric and precious experimental performance and conceptual art on the other. The commitment to personal and social change I saw in the new action methods gave me more hope for the future of theater than any other work that I saw. Committed to emotion, safety, creativity, and movement, applied and interactive theater artists were creating a theater that would survive the aggrandizement of drama by the sensory-rich media of film and TV, and would, indeed, surpass anything that virtual reality could offer (In 1995, Howard Rheingold and other futurists were telling us that VR would be a commonplace in 5 years).

When I began this work ten years ago, it seemed critical to me that people be aware of one another's work. I think that has been accomplished, although rigidity and rejection still characterizes many practitioners. Today, in 2005, I feel no further interest in helping to create a dialogue among practitioners of Action methods. Those who are interested in shared approaches, enriching one another's outcomes, creating new awarenesses and community uses, are doing so; others remain hidebound in their turf rings or simply devoted to perfecting their technique before moving outward. I've stopped using the term Applied Theater, partly because of the objections of one of the most practiced and knowledgeable theorists in the field. For myself, I've chosen to explore Playback Theater, which I feel most suited to my abilities and temperament.

I'll continue to survey the field, and particularly wish to hear from people who are blending and blurring "disciplinary" and ideological lines. I'd also like to hear from folks who want to expand the AITG to include other disciplines or categories. Write me here at the blog or my old e-ddress: joel at sunyit.edu

Welcome to the AITG Blog!

Toni Sant — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 13:02:00 +0000

The Applied and Interactive Theatre Guide appeared online 10 years ago. Joel Plotkin, the website's founding editor, recommended the creation of a blog for the AITG in an email he sent me yesterday. So, here we are.

Within the next few days, Joel will be blogging here regularly, and we have other plans for this blog. More about that once we settle the preliminary technical requirements of setting up a multi-user blog.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact me directly.