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ENGAGING PERFORMANCE: THEATRE AS CALL AND RESPONSE. By Jan Cohen-Cruz. London: Routledge, 2010; pp. 228.
Theatre for social change, radical performance, community-based theatre, and applied art are all names that scholars and practitioners have taken up to describe, and at times defend, the broad category of performances seeking to effect changes in society. In her latest book, Engaged Performance: Theatre as Call and Response, Jan Cohen-Cruz makes good use of the term "engaged" to describe this field of performance that is inspired by a desire for social justice and a commitment to exchange and interactivity. She lays out a range of formal and methodological approaches to socially engaged performance practice, grounding her book in numerous US-based case studies, in which she was either a participant or an observer. Throughout the book, Cohen-Cruz invokes the relational model of call and response to emphasize the importance of reciprocal engagement between artist and community; she also sees a call-and-response relationship between theory and practice in this book. In it, theories and specific case studies function as the call, with workbook sections at the end of each chapter serving as the response, inviting the reader to engage those materials in an embodied, active way. A practitioner-scholar who has been writing about and producing this mode of performance for over three decades, Cohen-Cruz offers a deeply empathetic yet resolutely critical approach to the field.
The book is motivated by three key ideas. First, the author wants the work of community-based artists to receive critical respect,...