There is something special about the power of live, embodied performance. In a world that is increasingly mediatized, theater scholars and practitioners insist that body-to-body communication—performers and audiences sharing a physical space together—holds the potential to create social change. Performance demands of its participants, both performers and spectators, a being-present together, constituting a world-making exercise like the one Jill Dolan describes, through which “live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world.”1 Dolan writes about solo performances and theater performed in proscenium spaces for an audience that participates in the performance primarily by watching. Analyzing how theater can be used expressly as a tool for education, therapy, and social justice, the field of applied theater imagines a more active audience—an audience that frequently participates directly in the...
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