Purpose of Theatre - 3 Articles

New organization uses theatre to help the hungry

Dallas  - Local author and businessman Tim Whitney is launching A Play for Food, a new matchmaking organization for theaters, playwrights... and food pantries.

“When I begin any project, I ask myself over and over...what if,” says Whitney in an email. The Dallas-based entrepreneur came with the idea for A Play for Food two years ago, after the release of his first novel, Thanksgiving at the Inn (Bancroft Press).

“I was amazed and humbled by the impact the eclectic characters had on people’s lives. They are larger-than-life figures that each teach an important life lesson. I asked myself... what if these amazing characters could be on stage? Once the play was done, I began realizing it is a story of family and forgiveness. There was no way I could charge a royalty for the use,” he continues.

Whitney decided to use theatre to create what he hopes will become the largest food drive in America. A Play for Food would serve as a ‘clearing house’ for playwrights and theatres willing to donate all ticket proceeds from plays to local food pantries. “This is a grassroots effort to unite communities in a time of need,” he says.

Since October 2011, A Play for Food has already put seven plays, including a musical from a retired Canadian broadcaster and an adaptation of Whitney’s novel. Thanksgiving at the Inn will make its worldwide debut on Sunday, November 20, 2011 , at Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine. Cash and food donations will be accepted.

How to make a drama out of a crisis

Chris Arnot meets James Thompson, a professor who uses theatre to resolve conflict, from prisons to war zones

Professor James Thompson went to San Quentin prison nearly 30 years after Johnny Cash. It's fair to say that his visit made rather less of an impact than that of the rumbustious country and western singer. But then he was not there to perform. He was simply observing a screen-writing course for inmates in his capacity as a Harkness fellow.

"I was attached to the University of Texas for a year, but looking at prison arts projects all over the United States," Thompson says. "One of the guards leant into the car as we were on our way in and said: 'Do you understand the state of California policy on kidnapping, sir? We don't negotiate'." Does that mean he was on his own if a homicidal prisoner decided to use him as a bargaining counter? "Yes, except that I wasn't entirely on my own. I was with the arts coordinator. Every state penitentiary had one in those days [1997] as part of a scheme called Arts-in-Corrections. It was scrapped in 2003."

By that time, Thompson had moved on from prisons to war zones. His speciality has always been using drama to explore and, hopefully, to resolve conflict. Initially, he did that in his capacity as co-founder of Theatre in Prisons and Probation (Tipp). More recently, he has used similar techniques to explore issues of reconciliation and justice with those caught up in tribal, ethnic or religious violence. Participants could be students or school children, refugees or non-governmental organisations (NGOs). From his base at Manchester University, where he is professor of applied and social theatre, he sallies forth to places even more dangerous for visitors than San Quentin - although he tends to play down the personal risk involved. "When you travel with outside agencies, like Unicef and the Red Cross, they tend to be very security-savvy," he assures me.

The second of two books he is publishing this year is called Performance In Place of War, which cites examples of the work done by a network he runs with colleagues in Manchester and Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. "We've just had our contract extended by the Leverhulme Trust so that we can carry on working in Kosovo, the Palestinian territories, Sri Lanka, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo," he says. The first book is published next month [May] under the title Performance Affects.

Note the A rather than the E at the beginning of the second word. "Applied theatre tends to explain itself through impacts," Thompson explains. "In other words, it's all about effects. My argument is that this has led to a failure to appreciate the affects - the emotional, sensory and aesthetic side of the work.

"For instance, it might be said that a certain project has increased the self-esteem of the teenagers involved and decreased the likelihood that they'll take drugs. What's forgotten is that this is theatre. It's beautiful, sometimes scary, and aesthetically interesting in its own right. We need to learn a language that can talk about these sorts of things in order fully to appreciate what the work is about.”

Simon Callow: The purpose of theatre is to melt the ice within

From a speech by the actor and director at the launch of London's University of the Arts, in the Banqueting Hall.

Nearly 35 years ago, I arrived at the Drama Centre, then a tiny fledgling independent school, now part of Central Saint Martins and thus the new University of the Arts London. One of the many challenges flung at us new students was the question: "Why? Why did we want to be actors?" What was the point of the theatre? Of film? Of any art?

Most of us had only thought of the idea of becoming actors from our own point of view - what we could get out of the theatre, why we needed to be actors, what kind of actors we'd like to be. If we thought of the audience at all, it was in terms of making them cry, or making them laugh, being released somehow and then applauding us a great deal afterwards.

This view of the theatre as a sort of relief massage did not go down well with those two terrifying and brilliant firebrands, Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, co-founders of the Drama Centre. To them, theatre was a crucial mechanism within human society. A ritual re-enactment of the lessons mankind had learnt about itself, a way of restoring the spectators to their full human experience after the routine alienations of daily life, and a celebration of desire.

Of course, art can be many things - playful, challenging, funny, frightening, romantic, classical, for five minutes' amusement or a lifetime's enrichment. But it seems to me that all the disciplines that now form University of the Arts London have within them the possibility of unlocking the closed chambers of our hearts, in Kafka's wonderful phrase, of "Melting the ice within, of awakening dormant cells, of making us more fully alive, more fully human, at once more individual and more connected to each other".