The project aims to define a standard status of community theatre practices within performing arts as supply for social, health care and education sectors and for social inclusion.
In particular, a plastic educational model is to be established on the following bases:
- Community theatre experimentations currently active;
- Practical field experiences;
- Suitable valuation models necessary for remodelling protocols to be applied according to each experience's requirement, in a mutual integration of top-down and bottom-up approaches.
The research project requires multi-disciplinary skills, and expertise in various fields, both academic and professional, relating to:
- Performing arts disciplines;
- Psychophysics;
- Statistics.
The research purpose lies in the definition of a training model for applied theatre facilitators and conductors, and in a series of publications, video documentaries and documented trials related to transmedia storytelling shapes and aimed at defining drama teaching techniques applied to the social context. Furthermore, the project provides for the establishment of validation protocols of theatrical practices, in order to allow objective and measurable checks of community theatre interventions. At this stage, the research project's external partners have a strategic role.
Those purposes are pursued through experimental educational activities to identify the key competences necessary to qualify applied theatre facilitators, and to pinpoint the variability of the working conditions in which languages and theatre processes need to interact.
A non-secondary project's impact will be the further recognition of the applied theatre practitioner as a profession.
A relevant aspect regarding applied theatre is the lack of validated models for the employment of performative practices in different contexts, especially when soft skills (such as the relational and communication abilities) need to be developed in working environments. Nowadays, assessment is a fundamental (even if critical) aspect when it comes to scientifically defining processes in psycho-social, pedagogical, therapeutic and medical settings.
Our project consists in developing an open and flexible pedagogy aimed at creating professionals and at discovering alternative methods for the assessment and validation of the pedagogical interventions of applied theatre, which are based on core aspects of intercultural interventions such as the relationship between artistic and social value.
Within the realm of the care of people and communities there has been an exponential growth of applied theatre experiences. Nevertheless, assessment issues are still not properly addressed: this is not only negative for the general perception of applied theatre, but especially a major issue on a larger scale (if we think, for example, to the collective efforts aimed at resolving various psychosocial problems). Such a complex issue stems from the difficulty encountered in applying the usual assessment tools to the artistic and creative practices. As a matter of fact, it is of paramount importance to define specific instruments to apply to social dramaturgy at its different stages (e.g.: workshops, performances, events, etc.) in order to evaluate both their impact and the overall intervention process.
One of the main peculiarities of the research is the creation of specific questionnaires, that will be developed together with psycho-physiologists and statisticians, and that will be used to harvest data about the experiences developed within the project. The information, which will be mainly qualitative, will be aggregated and structured so that they can be analysed and synthesized through statistic tools, in order to also obtain quantitative measurement. The statistical analysis of the data aims to an informative synthesis, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of every performative experience on the basis of variations of certain characteristics; these variations should be detected between the beginning and the end of the experience itself.
The results of the project will not derive just from the performing arts area, but also from other disciplines such as socio-psychology, psycho-physiology and statistics. Even if there is a significant growth in the requests of performative practices (workshops, performances, events) by public and private institutions, there is still a dearth in the training of the conductors and facilitators, due to the lack of a rigorous and widely recognised model. As this model should be based on theatre pedagogy and on the heritage of applied theatre, our research will also involve the activities of the Master di Teatro nel Sociale of Sapienza University of Rome (directors: Guido Di Palma and Andrea Porcheddu) that will be the perfect occasion to experiment and test the pedagogical practices aimed at training professionals in the field of applied theatre.
A central outcome of the project, together with the social impact to be obtained through the in-field interventions and the disseminations activities, will be a strong contribution to the professional acknowledgement of these qualified figures, whom, in the last two decades, have been increasingly employed in various contexts.