Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings: Art or Instrument? | BooksOnTheMove

Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings: Art or Instrument? | BooksOnTheMove

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Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings: Art or Instrument?

Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings: Art or Instrument?

Offer Price $22.28

ISBN:0719065437

Authors Anthony Jackson

List Price : $26.00

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Publisher : Manchester University Press

This
book is a study of theatre’s educational role during the 20th and the
first years of the 21st centuries. It examines the variety of ways the
theatre’s educational potential has been harnessed and theorised, the
claims made for its value and the tension bettween theatre as education
and theatre as ‘art': between theatre’s aesthetic dimenstion and the
‘utilitarian’ or ‘instrumental’ role for which it has so often been
pressed into service.

Following a preliminary discussion of some
key theoretical approaches to aesthetics, dramatic art and learning and,
above all, the relationships between them, the study is organised into
two broad chronological periods: early developments in European and
American theatre up to the end of World War II, and participatory
theatre and education since World War II. Within each period, a cluster
of key themes is introduced and then re-visited and examined through a
number of specific examples – seen within their cultural contexts – in
subsequent chapters. Topics covered include an early use of theatre to
campaign for prison reform; workers’ theatre, agit-prop and American
living newspapers in the 1930s; theatre’s response to the dropping of
the atom bomb in 1945; post-war theatre in education; theatre in
prisons; and the use of performance in historic sites.