Communities, Performance and Practice

Community performance practice has long been shaped by a largely pessimistic view of community, and this book looks at how that view has complicated critical study of the field. Two intellectual currents have weakened the older idea of community as a bond of class-based solidarity: postmodern scepticism toward overarching explanatory frameworks, and poststructuralist attention to difference.

The author turns to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work recasts community as a shared condition of existing together rather than a shared essence. Feminist geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham extends these questions into a post-capitalist model of community-based development. These ideas frame the book's analysis of several researched case studies of community performance practice.

The book also revisits the central theoretical debates that have shaped community theatre and performance as a field. It considers how this renewed understanding of community fits with those debates, and how it might open fresh ways of critically analysing community theatre and performance practice.