Applied Drama/Theatre/Performance

Abstract

I first heard the term ‘applied theatre’ sometime in the mid1990s from a colleague who had heard it used at an academic conference. At the time I didn’t ask which conference he had attended, although of course now I wish that I could locate the history of this keyword more precisely. There is, however, a general vagueness that accompanies all accounts of the derivation of the term, suggesting that it is not a phrase that was coined by a particular individual to describe a very precise set of practices or concept, but that the term that emerged haphazardly and spread like a rhizome to fill a gap in the lexicon. Locating the ways in which this keyword is used, therefore, is not a search for the authentic roots or the essential meaning of applied drama, theatre and performance, but in recognising its pliability and porousness. Inevitably there are ways of thinking about this field that I find more persuasive than others, but my entry marks an attempt to reflect some of the different ways in which the term has been understood rather than to insist on a particular derivation or single meaning. As the theatre historian Joseph Roach points out, ‘improvised narratives of authenticity and priority may congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’ (1996, p. 3).