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Performance Type

In this inquiry, performances are grouped in three broad categories:

• Ritual
• Community-based performance
• Artist-based performance

Each type has distinct aesthetic assumptions, requirements for expertise and knowledge, and relationships between performer and audience.

In rituals, community leaders supervise performances in which community members participate actively; no one is a mere spectator. Rituals in the here and now can transport participants to the timeless domain of the sacred, thereby creating space for transformation.

• Creating a New Story: Ritual, Ceremony and Conflict Transformation between Indigenous and Settler Peoples, Polly Walker
• Fire in the Memory: Theatre, Truth and Justice in Argentina and Peru, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea
• The Created Space: Peacebuilding and Performance in Sri Lanka, Madhawa Palihapitiya
• Theatre as a Way of Knowing, Dijana Milošević

Community-based performances balance artistic product with the aesthetic, ethical, and cultural dimensions of the process. Under the direction of professional artists, performances by community members are shaped by identity, history, culture, and values. The process aims at relationship-building, learning, and transformation.

• Change the World As We Know It: Peace, Youth and Performance, Mary Ann Hunter
• Do You Smell Something Stinky? Notes from Conversations About Making Art While Working for Peace in Racist, Imperial America in the 21st Century, John O'Neal
• Fire in The Memory: Theatre, Truth and Justice in Argentina and Peru, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea
• Performing Cross-Cultural Conversations: Creating New Kinships Through Community Theatre, Kate Gardner and Eugene van Erven
• Theatre, Resistance, and Peacebuilding in Palestine, Abeer Musleh
• Youth Leading Youth: Hip Hop and Hiplife Theatre in Ghana and South Africa, Daniel Banks

Artist-based performances by professional artists focus on the experience that the audience will have with the artistic work and the “meaning” that resides in this transaction. The aim is a transcendent experience that reaches beneath the viewers’ defenses to new feelings, insights, and questions.

• Alive on Stage: Storms, Histories, and Bodies, Catherine Filloux
• Do You Smell Something Stinky? Notes from Conversations About Making Art While Working for Peace in Racist, Imperial America in the 21st Century, John O'Neal
• Fire in the Memory: Theatre, Truth and Justice in Argentina and Peru, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea
• Hidden Fire: PeaceWorks' Invocation as Žižekian response to the Gujarat massacres of 2002, Ruth Margraff
• The Created Space: Peacebuilding and Performance in Sri Lanka, Madhawa Palihapitiya
• Theatre as a Way of  Knowing, Dijana Milošević
• Theatre, Resistance, and Peacebuilding in Palestine, Abeer Musleh
• Theatre, War and Peace in Uganda, Charles Mulekwa
• Weaving Dialogues and Confronting Harsh Realities: Engendering Social Change in Israel through Performance, Aida Nasrallah and Lee Perlman