About the Book
Acting Together, Volume ll, continues from where the first volume ends documenting exemplary peacebuilding performances in regions marked by social exclusion structural violence and dislocation.
Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Volume I, Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, while Volume II: Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion. Volume I: Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence focuses on the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of violence. The performances highlighted in this volume nourish and restore capacities for expression, communication, and transformative action, and creatively support communities in grappling with conflicting moral imperatives surrounding questions of justice, memory, resistance, and identity. The individual chapters, written by scholars, conflict resolution practitioners, and artists who work directly with the communities involved, offer vivid firsthand accounts and analyses of traditional and nontraditional performances in Serbia, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Israel, Argentina, Peru, India, Cambodia, Australia, and the United States. Complemented by a website of related materials, a documentary film, Acting Together on the World Stage, that features clips and interviews with the curators and artists, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," that is included with the documentary as a second disc, this book will inform and inspire socially engaged artists, cultural workers, peacebuilding scholars and practitioners, human rights activists, students of peace and justice studies, and whoever wishes to better understand conflict and the power of art to bring about social change. The Acting Together project is born of a collaboration between Theatre Without Borders and the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. The two volumes are edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, director of the aforementioned program and a leading figure in creative approaches to coexistence and reconciliation; Roberto Gutierrez Varea, an award-winning director and associate professor at the University of San Francisco; and Polly O. Walker, director of Partners in Peace, an NGO based in Brisbane, Australia.
About the Author:
Cynthia E. Cohen is director of the program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University. In that role, she leads research and action partnerships, teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and leads professional development workshops and institutes for practitioners. She is principal investigator in an on-going inquiry into Creative Approaches to Coexistence and Reconciliation and writes on the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of reconciliation. Since 2005, Cohen has worked in collaboration with Theatre Without Borders on
Acting Together on the World Stage, a project that is culminating in this original anthology, a documentary film, a website and a toolkit for practitioners. Cohen was the founding director of the Oral History Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she has facilitated coexistence efforts involving participants from the Middle East, the U.S., Central America, and Sri Lanka. She holds a doctorate in Education from the University of New Hampshire, a masters degree in City Planning from MIT, and a bachelors degree in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University.
Roberto Gutierrez Varea began his career in theater in his native city of Cordoba, Argentina. His research and creative work focuses on live performance as a means of resistance and peacebuilding in the context of social conflict and state violence. Varea's stage work in the United States has focused on Latin@/Chican@ theatre, directing world or West-Coast premieres of works by Migdalia Cruz, Ariel Dorfman, Cherrie Moraga, and Jose Rivera (among others). He is the founding artistic director of community-based performance groups Soapstone Theatre Company, and El Teatro Jornalero!, and cofounder of the San Francisco-based collective
Secos & Mojados. He is an associate editor of
Peace Review (Routledge) and guest-edited the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics'
e-misferica. Varea is a founding faculty of the Performing Arts and Social Justice Program, and director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas (CELASA), at the University of San Francisco.
Polly O. Walker is assistant professor of peace and conflict studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. She is director of Partners in Peacebuilding, a private consulting organization based in Brisbane, Australia, and lectures widely on intercultural conflict resolution. Previously awarded the University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for Women, she conducted research on the role of memorial ceremonies in transforming conflict involving Indigenous and Settler peoples in the United States and Australia. She has published articles in a broad range of international journals, and contributed chapters to several texts on conflict transformation. She is vice-chair of the Indigenous Education Institute, a research and practice institute created for the preservation and contemporary application of Indigenous traditional knowledge. Walker is of Cherokee and Settler descent and grew up in the traditional country of the Mescalero Apache.
