Chapter 11 - Applied theatre

Summary

The old didactic theatre must be replaced by, let us say, pedagogical theatre.

(Augusto Boal, Theater der Unterdrückten)

A true image of necessary theatre-going I know is a psychodrama session in an asylum.

(Peter Brook 1968: 148)

Examples of applied theatre

Scene 1: Berlin, Germany

In January 2003, 250 young people, mostly aged between eleven and seventeen, performed Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic, which was conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. The performance took place in the huge 2,000-seat Treptow Arena by Berlin's industrial harbour. The performers had been drawn from a number of Berlin schools and dance studios, a third of whom had a non-German background, and included twenty-five different nationalities. They had been trained over a three-month rehearsal period by a team led by UK-based choreographer Royston Maldoom, who has undertaken similar dance projects all over the world. The project has been documented in a remarkable film entitled Rhythm Is It! (2004), directed by Thomas Grube and Enrique Sánchez Lansch. The film profiles three protagonists: fourteen-year-old Marie, a Berlin-born teenager with learning problems; Martin, a nineteen-year-old middle-class boy from a small provincial town with severe inhibitions; and sixteen-year-old Olayinka, a war-orphan from Nigeria, living in a hostel. The focus is not on the performance – the film only shows brief scenes from the actual ‘final product’ – but on the changes the three teenagers undergo in the three-month project.