Using an eclectic mix of classic and contemporary drama texts from Australia and around the world, Drama Reloaded draws students into the world of drama with a particular focus on plays and the theatrical production process.

Towards an Ecocritical Theatre investigates contemporary theatre through the lens of Anthropocene-oriented ecocriticism. It assesses how Anthropocene thinking engages different modes of theatrical representation, as well as how the theatrical apparatus can rise to the representational challenges of changing interactions between humans and the nonhuman world. To explore these problems, the book investigates international Anglophone plays and performances by Caryl Churchill, Stephen Sewell, Andrew Bovell, E.M. Lewis, Chantal Bilodeau, Jordan Hall, and Miwa Matreyek, who have taken significant steps towards re-orienting theatre from its traditional focus on humans to an ecocritical attention to nonhumans and the environment in the Anthropocene. Their theatrical works show how an engagement with the problem of scale disrupts the humanist bias of theatre, provoking new modes of theatrical inquiry that envision a scale beyond the human and realign our ecological culture, art, and intimacy with geological time. Moreover, the plays and performances studied here, through their liveness, immediacy, physicality, and communality, examine such scalar shifts via the problem of agency in order to give expression to the stories of nonhuman actants. These theatrical works provoke reflections on the flourishing of multispecies responsibilities and sensitivities in aesthetic and ethical terms, providing a platform for research in the environmental humanities through imaginative conversations on the world’s iterative performativity in which all bodies, human and nonhuman, are cast horizontally as agential forces on the theatrical world stage. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre studies, environmental humanities, and ecocritical studies.

"This text offers a cohesive framework for exploring social justice through drama and drama from a social justice perspective. Research based examples of practice from a range of international contexts link theory and practice. Connecting chapters raise key critical questions in an engaging dialogue format. An important addition to the literature on social justice education." - Lee Anne Bell, author Storytelling for Social Justice (2010) and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (Routledge, 2007) Much has been written within the tradition of drama education and applied theatre around the premise that drama can be a force for change within both individual lives and society more broadly. However, little has been published in terms of charting the nature of this relationship. By combining theoretical, historical and practical perspectives, this book unpacks and explores drama’s intrinsically entwined relationship with society more comprehensively and critically. Chapters gather together and develop a range of theoretical understandings of social justice in applied drama in the first part of the book, which are then used to frame and inform more focused discussions of drama research and practice in the second. Contributors move beyond practical understandings of drama for empowerment or development in order to engage with the philosophy of praxis – the interconnected and symbiotic nature of theory derived from practice, and practice derived from theory. Including concrete examples from current research and practice in the field, the book opens up a conversation on and counter-narrative to perceptions of the nature and impact of applied theatre and drama education on social justice. Drama and Social Justice will be key reading for postgraduate students, academics, researchers and field-based practitioners in the areas of applied drama and theatre, education and youth work, and social justice and the social sciences.

This book, based on components of Drama for Life, addresses the subject of “innovative methods for applied drama and theatre practice in African contexts”. It does so by providing chapters that share the rich, multilayered, and reflexive work that has taken place at Drama for Life from 2008 to the present day. It invites the reader to learn from the experiences of Drama for Life as shared by the authors, understand the role it has played and continues to play in advocating for, and extending the work of, Applied Drama and Theatre practice, and engage in critical, dialogical spaces to examine and interrogate current debates and practices in the field of Applied Drama and Theatre. The volume is invaluable for anyone interested in the extensive body of work generated by Drama for Life and its innovative approaches to learning and teaching, as well as performing arts practitioners, artists, teachers, people in community development and service work, and anyone involved in researching Applied Drama and Theatre practice, particularly in an African context, but also globally.