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ABSTRACT
This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's (1988, 2003. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.) notion of gathering and dispersing to illustrate how an ‘agile’ research methodology acts as both inquiry and social intervention. This dual focus provides theatre artists and practitioners with novel ways to become more intentional about building engaged, intergenerational audiences.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The demographics of this classroom might be considered more complex and challenging than some other Toronto public school classrooms because it is a school that offers technical programmes and other specialised programmes for students with special needs. It is also a school with a largely socio-economically disadvantaged population.
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Notes on contributors
Kathleen Gallagher
Dr. Kathleen Gallagher is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Distinguished Professor in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, cross-appointed to the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on questions of pedagogy, the social contexts and relations of schooling, and theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. She is especially interested in questions of youth civic engagement and artistic practice, and the pedagogical and methodological possibilities of theatre. Dr. Gallagher is the author of many award-winning books, including Why theatre matters: Urban youth, engagement, and a pedagogy of the real. (2014); The theatre of urban: Youth and schooling in dangerous times (2007); Drama education in the lives of girls: Imagining possibilities (2000); edited collections, including Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies (2020 with D. Rodricks and K. Jacobson); The methodological dilemma revisited: Creative, critical and collaborative approaches to qualitative research for a new era (2018); In defence of theatre: Aesthetic practices and social interventions (2016 with B. Freeman); How theatre educates: Convergences and counterpoints with artists, scholars and advocates. (2003 with David Booth) and numerous articles and chapters.
Lindsay Valve
Lindsay Valve is a doctoral student in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include differential understandings of validity, social impact evaluation, relational frameworks for measuring the societal impact of research and the assessment of research ‘quality’. Her current research examines the impacts of social science and humanities research by mobilising the experiences of community members and participants to interrogate the ‘curriculum’ conferred by the research process.
Christine Balt
Christine Balt is a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include interdisciplinary applications of applied theatre, performance, audience research and drama education in studies of ecologies, place and urban environments. Her current research engages with site-specific and place-based performance as tools for examining how young people find and make ‘place’ in sites of rapid urban development.