Training in the Community investigates pedagogic approaches outside of professional practice, exploring how performance training is utilised in community and applied theatre settings as well as how practitioners train and prepare for those settings.

Training in the Community investigates the role of training in applied and community theatre. We are looking for contributions from practitioners, scholars, teachers and others interested in exploring the intersection between training and community for instance, how training might be used in relation to theatre for social change, the relationship between training and some of the prominent themes of applied practice, or how we train for working in the community.

Through the blog we want to explore the complicated relationship that training has to practice in non-professional settings, considering the broader questions that this practice raises in terms of representation, cultural recognition, power and domination and social change. On the one hand, training can be an act of consciousness raising, re-distributing skills and resources and accordingly giving participants the means of the production (bodily and vocal production). On the other, training can be a homogenising practice, eliminating cultural difference and perpetuating certain dominant ideas of ‘correctness’. The blog will explore the complexity of training, neither dismissing it as culturally domineering, nor fetishizing its value or social good.

We are interested in investigating where practices of performer training are still used in community and applied contexts. Is performer training used as a practice of social change? Can we understand training as a tool of transformation, resistance or political intervention? Furthermore, we are interested in how community and applied practitioners are trained. With a growth in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in applied theatre it seems especially important now to explore what constitutes “training” in this regard. Are applied programmes training theatre craft that is then “applied” to community contexts? Or are they training practices of how to work in the community, how to be a “facilitator”? Finally, we are interested in the politics of training itself, and how training practices relate to broader questions of community identity and representation, particularly with relation to social class, gender, race and sexuality.