ArtsPraxis: Volume 7, Issue 2a

Abstract

In Issue 2a, the articles focus on educational theatre in the time of COVID-19 and cover the scope of classroom-based educational theatre practice in urban and rural K-12 settings, colleges and universities, and on implementing research-based theatre online. Roxane E. Reynolds describes her experience transitioning to remote instruction in a secondary school in Dallas, Texas. Jessica Harris illuminates the ways in which the digital divide (lack of access to high speed internet to rural areas and/or folks from low-socioeconomic backgrounds) in rural Fluvanna County, Virginia challenges theatre educators to re-think their approach to distanced learning. On the college front, Alexis Jemal, Brennan O’Rourke, Tabatha R. Lopez, and Jenny Hipscher were tasked with devising a theatre in education (TIE) program for a course at CUNY School of Professional Studies in New York. Their liberation-based social work practice required a new approach as they transitioned online. Cletus Moyo and Nkululeko Sibanda document transitioning practical theatre courses to distance learning at Lupane State University in Zimbabwe, echoing the challenges related to equity and access that Harris experienced. Chris Cook, Tetsuro Shigematsu, and George Belliveau at the University of British Columbia in Canada query: What teaching practices endure in the online research-based theatre classroom, and what new ways practices were fostered through their emerging partnership with technology? For the final article in this issue, Saharra L. Dixon, Anna Gundersen, and Mary Holiman take us out of the classroom and into the field with their reflection on creating and presenting The #StayHome Project, a devised ethnodrama. Their article explores theatre’s ability to help communities process collective trauma, build resiliency, and facilitate dialogue around politics and what it means to return to a “new normal”.