Community Theatre as Active Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between theatre and citizenship as framed by the Taskforce on Active Citizenship’s campaign from 2006–2009 and the broader rhetoric of Irish social interculturalism. The Taskforce on Active Citizenship was set up in in 2006 by then-Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and aimed to ‘review the evidence regarding trends in citizen participation across the main areas of civic, community, cultural, occupational and recreational life in Ireland’ as described by a follow-up government report published in 2007. This chapter tests the performative theory of ‘active citizenship’ through two community theatre projects. These include: Upstate Theatre Project’s 2009 The Journey from Babel, devised through the Louth International Theatre Project (LITP), and Document, another devised theatre work resulting from the 2013 collaboration between members of the activist group Justice for the Undocumented (operating out of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland), the Abbey Theatre, and artists Aoife Spillane-Hinks and Mirjana Rendulic. This is one of two chapters (also including Chap. 7) that makes use of my direct participation in projects that I am writing about, as I worked with both LITP’s The Journey from Babel and the St. Patrick’s Festival’s City Fusion in 2009. I adopt this participant-observer methodology to more fully track the relationship between process and product in this chapter and Chap. 7, which engage not only the process of making but the funding and infrastructural support that made these projects possible at a state and local level.