New Playwriting: Networks of Policy and Practice

Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre chronicles Irish theater and provides fresh cultural perspectives from Europe. Edited by Anne Etienne (University College Cork) and Thierry Dubost (Université de Caen Normandie), the collected essays feature companies like Corcadorca and playwrights like Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, and Tom Mac Intyre. Thomas Kilroy introduces the collected essays by saying that reading the book is like “watching the actual activity of theatre-making” (v)—these words initially triggered my interest and drew me to write this review.Although the book has a scholarly orientation and provides less real-time theater-making than I'd hoped for, the study should be lauded for its scope and the amount of “theater life” it manages to stuff into a single volume. Whereas other studies provide in-depth investigations of the evolution of Irish theater,1 this collection of writings by Irish and foreign contributors provides “snapshots” of the Irish stage (3). The book focuses not on the text-centered tradition of the Irish stage but on reinventions, as the editors signal their purpose: “text-centered tradition, while still iconic, has evolved to reveal new modes of expression around emancipated bodies, multidisciplinary experiment, [and] blurred roles, away from conventional venues” (3). Contemporary theater moves faster and embraces more economically efficient forms, including works in progress, short runs, and site-specific performances.Despite blending various approaches (literary, empirical, theoretical) the essays share what Etienne and Dubost call “an image of Irishness” (4). Irishness encompasses national identity as well as an Irish psyche. Understanding what it means to be Irish is no small feat. For example, Etienne and Dubost describe Martin McDonagh as a peripheral maverick in Ireland whose body of plays, nonetheless, established his reputation internationally. Maria Isabel Seguro's “McDonagh's ‘True, Lonesome West’” finds Irish echoes in a Catalan production directed by Pepa Fluvià. Even so, Seguro casts doubt on the “intrinsic Irishness reproduced on the stage” (5) as she extends the scholarly conversation and elaborates on similarities between McDonagh's Lonesome West and Sam Shepherd's True West. Thierry Dubost's “A Dark Rosebud on the Irish Stage: Ailíis Ní Ríain's Tallest Man in the World” explores how characters are defined by their voices (not Irish embodiment) in a production he calls “in your ears” theater (6). Among the more idiosyncratic contributions of the collected essays, Carmac O'Connor's “Looking Back and Forward on Sound Design: Irish Theatre Transformed” charts the technical revolution in sound design that has occurred in the past thirty years on the Irish stage. Contemporary sonic theater is fast-paced and takes place on stage and in site-specific locations across the globe. One of the best of the troupes working in this milieu is the UK's Theatre Re. Premiered at the Edinburgh Showcase 2017, The Nature of Forgetting, Theatre Re's staging of dementia and memory loss helps audiences perceive the nature of the hippocampus—informed by corporeal mime, close collaboration with neuroscientist Kate Jeffery (University College London), and developed in process with musicians, who score the sound in real time and, in so doing, coauthor the stage production every step of the way.2One of the more unique contributions of Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre focuses in part 2 on “putting it together” (v) and contemporary Irish theater (Practitioners' Voices). This was my favorite part of the book. The editors avoid the trap of synthesizing representative trends in Irish theater and give voice to individual artists, such as Geoff Gould (festival director). The chapter on the BrokenCrow Ensemble (“Lightning in a Bottle”) by practitioner Ronan FitzGibbon focuses on his own work and has an alluring informality, for example, “Someone puts their hands up” (“How We Make Shows,” 135) and includes his assertion that he made up the term “Creative Producer” to fit his role with a shifting group of multidisciplinary theater practitioners (“What I Do,” 139). Interviews feature director Bríd Ó Gallchoir (chap. 11), actor Pat Kinevane (chap. 12), playwright and screenwriter Mark O'Rowe (chap. 13), and writer-educators Enda Walsh and Ger FitzGibbon (chap. 14). I enjoyed reading first-person anecdotes about Irish theater practice, tech innovations, and modes of creation and reception.The last part of the book includes investigations into censorship and status of minority groups on the stage. Anne Etienne focuses on script analysis of Ray Scannell's Losing Steam (pp. 193–211) to highlight aspects of creation and reception. I encourage readers to extend Etienne's critical examination of Corcadorca Theatre Company to the group's original productions, such as Caryl Churchill's promenade performance, Far Away (2000), which included a ferry trip from Cobh to Spike Island and back again. Churchill's critiques of patriarchy, imperialism and capitalism often take shape in the theater of the anthropocene, which dramatizes how “our actions have to be thought of in environmental contexts at all times.”3 Virginie Roche-Tiengo's chapter, “Through A Glass Darkly: Priests on the Contemporary Irish Stage,” has growing relevance given the global crisis of the priesthood. The last two chapters of the book were commissioned in the context of the Marriage Referendum in Ireland.Etienne and Dubost extend the critical reach of their collection by asking questions such as, “Where does contemporary Irish theater begin?” Among Irish plays, Etienne and Dubost make a case for the cultural significance of Tom Mac Intyre's The Great Hunger (Abbey Theatre, 1983). An adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh's poem, the play represents a collaboration between Mac Intyre (playwright), Patrick Mason (director), Tom Hickey (actor), and Bronwen Casson (designer): [The Great Hunger] represented a form of theatre animated by physical movement, sound and image rather than scripted language. As such it was taken to be a breakthrough in the Irish stage tradition that had always been dominated by the writer, in which the word was sovereign, [and has become] all the more striking because based on a major literary work. (91) It makes sense that the Irish would adapt poetry for an Abbey Theatre production that takes on cultural significance as a possible starting point for contemporary Irish theater.Beyond the actual activity of theater-making, Thomas Kilroy observes that in theater work “sometimes, you see possibilities of the future opening before your eyes” (v). I recommend Perspectives on Contemporary Irish Theatre as a good read. Readers will learn about contemporary Irish theater and its history and, through the work of editors Anne Etienne and Thierry Dubost, will see into the future and perhaps come to understand why playwrights, actors, directors, and producers discover in staging plays across the globe that they cannot escape fundamental Irishness.

This article considers research as inquiry and social intervention through the lens of building theatre audiences. Detailing a research and creative collaboration with a Toronto-based theatre company, and their verbatim play Towards Youth: a play on radical hope created from the data of a global ethnographic research project, we extend Schechner's (1988, 2003. Performance Theory. London: Routledge.) notion of gathering and dispersing to illustrate how an ‘agile’ research methodology acts as both inquiry and social intervention. This dual focus provides theatre artists and practitioners with novel ways to become more intentional about building engaged, intergenerational audiences.

Regional identity is a constant construction, in which landscape, human activity and cultural imaginary build a narrative of place. For the Tasmanian Midlands, the interactions between history, ecology and agriculture both define place and present problems in how to recognise, communicate and balance these interactions. In this sense, regionality is defined not so much as a relation of margin to centre, but as a specific accretion of environmental and cultural histories. According weight to more-than-human perspectives, a region can be seen as a constellation of plant, animal and human interactions and demands, where creative art and design can make space and give voice to the dynamics of exchange between the landscape and its inhabitants. Consideration of three recent art and design projects based in the Midlands reveal the potential for cross-disciplinary research, embedded in both environment and community, to create distinctive and specific forms of connectivity that articulate a regional identify.

This chapter expands on the study of what has been called Everyday Creativity (Richards 2007; Glaveanu 2014) to contribute to a creative poetics of the new everyday in which we increasingly live. In the current mix and mash of multiple polycultural interchange, identity plays, ubiquitous media, sweeping migration patterns, and conflictual enactments, it is now crucial to explore how multiple everyday rituals, meanings, social signals and values are created and how we create practices that reciprocally impact both individual and collective psyches and institutional structures. The chapter begins with an exposition of the daily creativity of young children emphasizing their play, wonder, and continual exploration, alone and with others. It emphasizes a “pre-production” stage of experimentation in which the usually thought of background plays with feeling, sensation, movement, and sound are foregrounded as practices of renewal, of both individual and collaborative creativity. The chapter continues by looking at the complex roles of media, books, schooling, games, and contact with people from a multiplicity of cultural backgrounds in creative possibility in the new daily landscapes, and it ends by giving examples of initiatives that employ new practices of everyday creativity, both individual and collective, in a variety of sociocultural settings.

This paper examines the utilisation of digital design and output technologies from the textile educator perspective. Educator approaches to working with digital technologies in own creative practices are described, as are variations in involvement with teaching digital technologies. Connections between educator approaches to digital technology utilisation in creative and teaching practices are highlighted. The impact of educator engagement in creative practice is discussed, given the continually evolving nature of digital technology and factors existent in the contemporary higher education system, which can be counterproductive to educator creative practice. Conclusions are made with regards to different approaches to digital technology utilisation and significance of educator engagement in creative practice activity. The methodology used to undertake the research disseminated through this paper include self case study, survey and case study methods. The paper focuses on textile design higher education in the United Kingdom, printed textiles and surface pattern design; however, the content is intended to be insightful to others who are operating outside of this context.

Action Research can make an important contribution in bringing transformative action to contemporary complex societal problems. Critique upon its limited scope opens the discussion about transferability of outcomes. This paper discusses how facilitative action research enabled transferable and workable breakthroughs to policy practitioners feeling stuck in designed governance networks around complex care and safety problems in the Netherlands. Experiments with facilitated, collaborative conversations of relational inquiry with policy practitioners were conducted in practices in three different cities. Evidence from the three practices suggests that for breakthroughs to be transferable and workable, they need to be able to support a process of reliving and re-experiencing. Reliving and re-experiencing was enhanced when the researcher added a level of abstraction to the conversation by using systems-thinking inspired visuals. This way, policy practitioners were able to grasp the complexity of their situation as well as to see the unintended consequences of their actions. Subsequent naming of the visuals enhanced both the appropriation of the abstracted situation as well as facilitating the broader communication of the experience beyond the group of practitioners involved. Finally, by actively bridging the different practices in three different cities, the researcher was able to connect experiences and so enhance the feeling of reliving and re-experiencing beyond the individual practices. This way, a broader base of knowledge and experience about the problematique, and possible breakthroughs in the complexity of collaboration in designed policy networks, was created.

The current study aimed to expand our knowledge regarding social work students’ willingness to engage in policy practice (EPP). A theoretical model integrating the Big Five personality framework with the ‘Civic Voluntarism Model’ (CVM) was examined, using a sample of 160 social work students in Israel. Findings revealed a moderate level of EPP willingness. Among the CVM predictors, political skills, political knowledge and political interest were significantly positively associated with social work students’ EPP willingness. Among the Big Five traits, extroversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience were significantly associated with EPP willingness. Path analysis showed that political skills were the strongest predictor of EPP willingness and that political skills and extroversion had a direct effect on EPP willingness. The significant mediation paths demonstrated the dynamics by which the study predictors interacted in explaining 49 per cent of the variance in EPP willingness. The study concluded that the examination of a model incorporating the Big Five personality traits and modified CVM predictors provided a comprehensive understanding of EPP willingness and, therefore, should be adopted to explain social workers’ actual engagement in policy practice.

Distant disciplinary interactions between artists, scientists and technologists have been a topic of interest. However, systematic knowledge on how diverse collaborative structures form and function is limited. The current study seeks to address this gap by investigating the social ecology of collaboration between artists, scientists and technologists engaged in inter/transdisciplinary (ITD) creative and cultural practice. The study explores the collaborative experiences of 42 participants with the use of Q-methodology. From the data, five thematic narratives emerge. Three narratives reveal collaborative styles grounded in embodiment and experimentation, fostering cultures and methods suited to co-creating ITD knowledge marked by uncertainty and serendipity. A fourth narrative highlights how artworks critically engage with science and technology, while a fifth, bipolar theme captures conflicting views on the mediated ‘third space’ in art–science–technology collaborations. This research reveals the influence of art on ITD research and science domains through creative collaborations. The findings support the development of transformative structural models for designing and facilitating collaborations across distant disciplinary knowledge cultures.

“If you want to see the sign of the times, watch women. Their evolution is the most important thing in modern life." (Editorial, 1912b). This statement, delivered as part of a speech to the Drama League in Boston in 1912, was made by leading American playwright, Rachel Crothers. Crothers’ statement is representative of a social phenomenon in late nineteenth century America wherein the economic transformation and flourishing industry of the Progressive Era opened the way to previously unattainable educational and professional opportunities for women. The focus of this thesis is on gender equality, business negotiation and creative collaborative working practices on Broadway as viewed from the perspective of the business and writing partnerships of three lyricist/librettists: Anne Caldwell (1867-1936), Rida Johnson Young (1875-1926) and Dorothy Donnelly (1880-1928). They collectively wrote a total of more than forty musical productions, of which twenty were outstanding successes in the twenty-two-year period from 1906-28, for which (during their lifetimes) they received both critical acclaim and significant financial reward. The burgeoning industry in which all three writers were operating was also a fledgling environment with regards to contractual rights for writers, the collective support of Guilds and Unions gaining steady ground through the early years of the twentieth century, their goals often resisted by powerful producers who viewed regulation as a threat to profits. This interdisciplinary research draws on primary source correspondence, interviews and Language Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) analyses to build profiles of male/female collaboration as part of a linguistic-hermeneutic paradigm for observing negotiation, networking and collaboration in business and creative partnerships. The findings contribute further to Caldwell, Johnson Young and Donnelly’s respective profiles within the early musical theatre landscape on Broadway, creating new perspectives around creative collaboration and the importance of networking and highlights a model of non-gender biased commercial equality pertinent to the ongoing gender pay gap dialogue in the present day.

It is increasingly supposed that the world is experiencing a polycrisis (where multiple crises converge). As international organisations (e.g. the World Economic Forum, International Science Council and United Nations Environment Programme) and governments increasingly adopt the polycrisis concept, its use makes problems of uncertainty accessible to foresight-informed solutions. Yet foresight toolkits often foreclose the status of futures knowledge delivered, inadequately address the scalar relations of polycrisis, and sustain a futures industry led by business consultants. Conversely anthropological approaches to polycrisis contest its ontology, the problem–solution narrative it facilitates, and the scales at which it operates. Yet traditional anthropology is constrained as an interventional practice. However, in accordance with the call for a post-conventional anthropology that informs this special issue, I argue further steps are required; futures anthropological foresight, delivered through incisive scholarship, ethnographic knowing creative practice and collaboration with non-academic research partners, invokes diverse futures knowledges. In this article, I unpack this context. I urge colleagues to join me in considering the engaged scholarship of futures anthropology – a non-traditional anthropological practice emerging from academia, but applicable outside – as a key participant in shaping decision-making for possible futures.

This chapter discusses a range of perspectives on ethics that arise from the deployment of artistic and creative practice in heritage contexts. Specifically, these are examined through the lenses of both community collaborations and the use of digital technologies in heritage research. These topics and their ethical implications are explored using a case study drawn from community heritage work on Erromango in Vanuatu undertaken as part of a larger UK government-funded research project: One Ocean Hub. While One Ocean Hub had global ocean governance as its primary research focus, the sub-project in this case study was looking specifically at ocean heritage, indigenous knowledge and intergenerational knowledge sharing. The creative methods adopted by this project, its relationship with UK-based collaborators and funders, logistical issues, licensing and dissemination modes all posed particular challenges that highlight the broader need for long-term consideration of ethical approaches in any heritage- and arts-based project.

Policy networks in energy transitions: The cases of carbon capture and storage and offshore wind in Norway

Capacity is limited in the developing world to conduct cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of health interventions. In Thailand, there have been concerted efforts to promote evidence-based policy making, including the introduction of economic appraisals within health technology assessment (HTA). This paper reviews the experience of this lower middle-income country, with an emphasis on the creation of the Health Intervention and Technology Assessment Program (HITAP), including its mission, management structures and activities. Over the past 3 decades, several HTA programmes were implemented in Thailand but not sustained or developed further into a national institute. As a response to increasing demands for HTA evidence including CEA information, the HITAP was created in 2007 as an affiliate unit of a semi-autonomous research arm of the Ministry of Public Health. An advantage of this HTA programme over previous initiatives was that it was hosted by a research institute with long-term experience in conducting health systems and policy research and capacity building of its research staff, and excellent research and policy networks. To deal with existing impediments to conducting health economics research, the main strategies of the HITAP were carefully devised to include not only capacity strengthening of its researchers and administrative staff, but also the development of essential elements for the country's health economic evaluation methodology. These included, for example, methodological guidelines, standard protocols and benchmarks for resource allocation, many of which have been adopted by national policy-making bodies including the three major public health insurance plans. Networks and collaborations with domestic and foreign institutes have been sought as a means of resource mobilization and exchange. Although the HITAP is well financed by a number of government agencies and international organizations, the programme is vulnerable to shortages of qualified research staff, as most staff work on a part-time or temporary basis. To enhance the utilization of its research findings by policy makers, practitioners and consumers, the HITAP has adopted the principles of technical excellence, policy relevance, transparency, effective communication and participation of key stakeholders. These principles have been translated into good practice at every step of HTA management. In 2007 and 2008, the HITAP carried out assessments of a wide range of health products, medical procedures and public health initiatives. Although CEA and other economic evaluation approaches were employed in these studies, the tools and underlying efficiency goal were considered inadequate to provide complete information for prioritization. As suggested by official stakeholders, some of the projects investigated broader issues of management, feasibility, performance and socio-political implications of interventions. As yet, it is unclear what role HITAP research and associated recommendations have played in policy decisions. It is hoped that the lessons drawn on the creation of the HITAP and its experience during the first 2 years, as well as information on its main strategies and management structures, may be helpful for other resource-constrained countries when considering how best to strengthen their capacity to conduct economic appraisals of health technologies and interventions.

This paper offers some insight into the benefits, impacts and challenges of the ‘creative mentor’ role. It links to a social pedagogy framework, supporting practice, and draws on creative mentors’ work with children and young people living in care. It aims to inform professionals and teams around a child about the transforming nature of working with creativity – beyond the obvious external experiences. Included are descriptions of how feelings of being ‘stuck’ can be shifted through engagement in a creative activity, moving a young person to a place of wellbeing, held within the safety of a trusting relationship. It is hoped that the reader will have a better understanding of the various stages of the creative mentoring process, and will reflect on some of the challenges faced when working with vulnerable children and young people who may have suffered early trauma. This paper describes how beginning work and establishing the relationship can be nerve-wracking for both, and how the skills of creative professionals bring a new dynamic into the work. Vignettes and discussions highlight the similarities in the creative mentor’s practice to that of the social pedagogue, and reflect on concepts and processes. We hope this work will encourage more discussion about the creative mentoring experience, to add to our community of learning around creative practices in care and in education.

L'objectif des auteurs de cet article est double. Il s'agit d'une part de presenter une etude exploratoire sur les tendances actuelles temoignant de l'emergence d'un nouvel activisme non gouvernemental dans le champ de l'education et d'autre part de dresser un cadre analytique afin d'evaluer l'importance de cet activisme, en elaborant des concepts bases sur les recherches ayant porte sur les nouveaux mouvements sociaux et les debats theoriques actuels a propos de la societe civile mondiale.