This article examines the study pressure and cultural and artistic marginalization faced by ‘small-town swot’ in contemporary China’s education system. Based on an applied theatre project Clouds and Storms: Tiandi Ye in Shangyu, a Chinese third-tier city, the study explores whether applied theatre can offer this community emotional expression and meaning reconstruction. Through workshops and a community performance, twenty students co-created a play about a local historical figure. Findings show that applied theatre not only provided emotional relief but also rebuilt connections to local culture, for example by using old farming tools from local households as props, fostering critical consciousness and collaboration. Despite limitations in scale and sustainability, the project demonstrates how artistic intervention can create a humanistic nearby space, offering empowerment and healing within a test-oriented system.
Review of: Performing Recovery: Addiction, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Representation , Zoe Zontou (2026) Abingdon: Routledge, 174 pp., ISBN 978-0-36769-686-3, h/bk, GBP 160.00
Two drama-based methods operating in different cultural contexts – sociodrama (SD) and community-based theatre (C-BT) – pursue the same goal: to explore issues through stories in order to foster social change. While the two approaches share significant methodological common ground, their practices are shaped not only by the implicit structural conditions of their respective social contexts (Hungary and Canada), but also by differing assumptions about roles stories play within the locus of change. C-BT tends to interrogate the structure and relationships within stories in search of new possibilities, whereas SD directs its inquiry towards the perspectives and positionalities of stakeholders. The article argues that SD may benefit from a more explicit engagement with the transformative capacities of story, while C-BT may be enriched by a stronger emphasis on issue clarification and analysis. Together, these insights suggest productive pathways for methodological cross-fertilization between the two drama-based practices.
Review of: Youth, Power, Performance: Applied Theatre with Systematically Marginalized Youth , Diane Conrad (2025) Bristol: Intellect, 202 pp., ISBN 978-1-83595-079-1, h/bk, GBP 79.95 ISBN 978-1-83595-081-4, ePDF, GBP 63.95 ISBN 978-1-83595-080-7, ePUB, GBP 63.95
This article presents a qualitative, practice-based study of ethical imagination in contemporary actor training. Drawing on two years of intensive studio research with 75 actors at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting and Theatre in Los Angeles, alongside extended professional observation, the study examines how imagination-based approaches guide actors to construct imagined circumstances, relationships and stage actions through collaborative studio exercises in which instructors narrate fictional situations that actors physically and emotionally explore in performance, rather than relying primarily on autobiographical emotional recall. A comparative perspective informed by long-term observation in Kosovo highlights the potential risks associated with trauma-centred methodologies when applied without sufficient ethical safeguards. In this study, ethical practices refer to pedagogical approaches that prioritize actors’ psychological well-being, creative agency, relational collaboration and the maintenance of reflective boundaries between performer and role. The study argues that imagination, when understood as a disciplined, embodied and relational practice, may function not only as an artistic resource but also as a framework for ethical and sustainable actor training
