Setting the Stage for Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre

Fringe Benefits, an award-winning theatre company, collaborates with schools and communities to create plays that promote constructive dialogue about diversity and discrimination issues. Staging Social Justice is a groundbreaking collection of essays about Fringe Benefits’ script-devising methodology and their collaborations in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The anthology also vividly describes the transformative impact of these creative initiatives on participants and audiences.  By reflecting on their experiences working on these projects, the contributing writers—artists, activists and scholars—provide the readerwith tools and inspiration to create their own theatre for social change.  

“Contributors to this big-hearted collection share Fringe Benefits’ play devising process, and a compelling array of methods for measuring impact, approaches to aesthetics (with humor high on the list), coalition and community building, reflections on safe space, and acknowledgement of the diverse roles needed to apply theatre to social justice goals. The book beautifully bears witness to both how generative Fringe Benefits’ collaborations have been for participants and to the potential of engaged art in multidisciplinary ecosystems more broadly.”—Jan Cohen-Cruz, editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America

Norma Bowles is the artistic director of Fringe Benefits and the first recipient of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s award for leadership in community-based arts and civic Engagement.

 

Daniel-Raymond Nadon is an associate professor of theatre and LGBT studies at Kent State University and U.S./Canada Fulbright and Theatre for Social Justice scholar.