School of Culture & Creative Arts

Applied Theatre: Contextual Practices and Critical Pedagogies

Applied Theatre is often created outside of conventional theatre spaces, collaborating with communities with shared experiences and passions to make performance work meaningful to them. It is often concerned with social issues and provoking positive change.

Taught by Participate Director, Dr Catrin Evans, with guest practitioners and contributions from the wider Participate team at the Citizens Theatre, Applied Theatre: Contextual Practices and Critical Pedagogies offers introductory insights into the critical and theoretical frameworks and the wide-ranging practices and outputs associated with Applied Theatre. Through a range of participatory learning methods combining lecture style presentation with facilitated workshops and task-based working, students are invited to combine an exploration of the ethical and representational issues at play within this area of theatre-practice, through Case Study analysis of local and international contemporary practices that straddle a range of social settings. In doing so, the course provides a unique learning experience that expands each student’s experience of participatory methods in practice and nurtures the skills required to consider a professional journey into the socially engaged, justice-orientated arts sector.