The Talking Theatre project (2004–06) was an audience development initiative implemented in
regional Queensland and the Northern Territory in Australia. The project sought to assist
performing arts centres to better engage with their local communities and to build new audiences
for the future. The research aimed to understand non-theatregoers — their reasons for nonattendance,
their perspectives about theatregoing culture and their reactions to a range of live
performances they experienced under study conditions. A series of questionnaires and postperformance
discussion groups generated extensive quantitative and qualitative data pertaining to
non-theatregoers and their reception of theatregoing. Findings indicated that key deterrents to
attendance (ticket price, parenting responsibilities, low-quality performances and work
commitments) were outcomes of a larger barrier to theatregoing: fear of the unknown.
Participation in the research resulted in return patronage of participants and their families/friends,
confirming that social interaction and peer recommendations are vital to becoming a theatregoer.

Traditional forms of rustic folk theatre offer rich opportunities for enabling contemporary theatremakers
to devise performances that use the satiric aesthetic of the carnivalesque to explore the
social themes that animate the conversations of ordinary citizens in their local pubs. Paulo
Freire’s conceptualisation of the conscientização process provides a new model for guiding
dramaturgical research that is conducted with the intention of creating and presenting original
entertainments amongst site-specific popular audiences. This paper demonstrates how the
processual phases of the conscientização process encourage the same ‘points of process’ that Baz
Kershaw identifies as the ‘four main characteristics of the radical in performance’.

The evaluation of African community theatre for development has largely been premised on
product rather than process. While evaluation focuses on audience reception, consumption
remains the major concern. The primary goal (to transform the lives of the target audience) tends
to be ignored, as most critics are still preoccupied with viewing it as a ‘showy spectacle’. This
article examines community theatre practice in, as and through the medium of performance. If the
efficacy of such theatre is to be found in the process of performance, I also question the
ambiguous nature of identities emerging from the live interventions.

This personal narrative describes the author’s early career experiences of directing high school
theatre, with the aim of uncovering constraints affecting teacher choices of material for student
actors. The story reveals that teachers’ decisions are affected by six teacher roles and four
persistent tensions within the context of the school environment.

The Communication and Conflict Solution in Working Life project aims to develop
communication strategies to protect the self-esteem and identity of both parties in a dialogue.
Employees of five industrial enterprises were given communication courses developed around the
Forum Theatre method. State self-esteem (SSE) was measured before and after the plays and
20 per cent of the participants were asked to evaluate their own communicative competence.
State self-esteem was raised after the plays in Course 1 and stabilised after the plays in Course 2.
The self-evaluations of communicative competence contributed new insight into how learning is
influenced by participants’ original attitudes.

The paper reads Bole Butake’s play Family Saga as a conscious artistic intervention, written to
mediate the conflict between the English-speaking Cameroonians and their French-speaking
counterparts. It identifies and analyses the strategies of applied theatre, especially the techniques
of forum theatre deployed by Butake to catalyse the process of expiation and amelioration that
are a requisite for meaningful reconciliation. The paper further demonstrates how research is
simulated within the plot of the play to offer opportunities for recollecting information for
reconstructing the myth of origin. It is through the narration of the myth, framed in a play within
a play and techniques of forum theatre, that the past is laid bare and interrogated. This forum
theatre process that involves a backward glance leads to some kind of expiation, which results in
the protagonists’ discovery of their true identities. The paper argues that Butake uses the
possibilities of applied theatre to create dialogue leading to healing of fractured relationships.