Society, theatre and Social Work: beauty will save us

Three different worlds, sometimes concentric and often intersecting —society, theatre and the art of performance— and social work. Diverse worlds that live, reflect and self-reflect and interact, and can also afford an opportunity for meeting, misunderstanding and confrontation, and above all offer the possibility of profound change.This article considers the experience of a theatre company that has spent more than three years moving at the limits of these three universes. To these three worlds can be added an infinite number of words that fill them with meaning and significance: territory, meeting, diversity and search. An artistic experience that has chosen to focus on creating scenarios for debate and to examine the difficulties, the human contradictions and the constant and inexhaustible confrontation with human experience. At the heart of this theatrical activity is all of this, seeking the balance between narration, meeting, investigation and the artistic dimension. This meeting between society, theatre and social work also contains the search for sustainability of this cultural business, in an Italy that has been destroyed by a crisis that is not merely economic, but also of values and, above all, of role models. The guiding theme, though not always made explicit, is always present and essential: the search for beauty.

Developing Creative Solutions to the Problems of Children and their Families: Communicative Reason and the use fo Forum Theatre

Building on Habermas’s conceptualisation of modes of reasoning, the authors proposed that an application of critical theory to the present bureaucratised nature of communication between state representatives and welfare recipients (Howe 1992) might open up ways in which social workers could reconceptualise their practice. In a subsequent edition of this journal, three of the present authors introduced the radical theatre of Augusto Boal as a methodology which might provide an expressive route for social workers seeking to build a practice combining the intellectual analysis of critical theory with new ways of working (Spratt et al. 2000). Boal’s method recognises the oppressed status of groups who come to the attention of agents of the state and, through the use of a range of theatrical techniques, introduces strategies to facilitate the conscious recognition of such collective oppressions and develop dialogical ways to address them. In the last paper, the authors presented one such technique, ‘image theatre’, and demonstrated its use with social workers in consciousness raising and developing strategies for collective action.