Research in Drama Education

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Drama for change? Prove it! Impact assessment in

applied theatre

Michael Etherton & Tim Prentki

To cite this article: Michael Etherton & Tim Prentki (2006) Drama for change? Prove it!
Impact assessment in applied theatre, Research in Drama Education, 11:2, 139-155, DOI:
10.1080/13569780600670718

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569780600670718

Published online: 23 Jan 2007.

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Research in Drama Education
Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 139155

EDITORIAL

Drama for change? Prove it! Impact

assessment in applied theatre
Introduction
The purpose of this special issue is to raise some critical questions about measuring
the impact of applied drama and theatre. The editors have attempted to bring
together case studies and essays that indicate the range of situations in which the
impact in the short, medium and long term is already being assessed. How might the
impact of an initiative involving drama be measured over time? Can a longer term
impact assessment transform the creative methodologies and contribute to global
knowledge? In attempting to answer these and related questions we invited a range of
contributions that would encompass a diverse set of contexts in terms of geography,
participants and funding structures, as well as a wide spectrum of methods in terms
of the ways in which theatre is being used, styles of facilitation and the intended
outcomes of the work. We wished to explore, both from the perspective of the NGO
(non-government organisation) and of the academy, the effects of cultural interven-
tion on behaviour related to some of the most intimate areas of human experience
such as sexual relations and family dysfunction. Contributors were asked to reflect
upon the impact, both intended and unintended, of the projects in terms of changing
lives and on how they might assess whether there had been any impact. Through our
invitations, we deliberately sought to transgress the territorial boundaries between
the various branches of applied theatre which we generally take to be unhelpful.
Instead we were interested in the relationships between context, method and
outcome, regardless of the label that might be affixed to the process.
As the two editors who proposed this Special Issue, we combine a shared
perspective from theatre, applied theatre and those international development
agencies that now recognise the need for creativity and imagination in development
objectives. This shared perspective determined the range of contributions we sought
from practitioners. We aim to introduce a positive attitude towards the analyses that
are now informing development practice both amongst the poorest and most
oppressed people, and amongst young, disaffected but materially comfortable people
in the world today. These analyses show a contradiction between an intention to
promote rights*equity, fairness and justice*and the economic realities of what is
/ /

now referred to as globalisation.

As editors we need to explain the context of the key terms we use in this special
issue: impact and impact assessment.
A number of development agencies perceive a difference between what they refer
to as monitoring and evaluation (M&E), which has to be included in project design
ISSN 1356-9783 (print)/ISSN 1470-112X (online)/06/020139-17
# 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780600670718
140 Editorial

right from the start, and assessing the impact of those agencies’ funding and
interventions months and years after the ending of the project. Development
agencies use the concept of sustainability to indicate a purpose of social and
economic change beyond the time-frame of the project; but they do not have any
mechanism for measuring this sustainability. This is because the long-term impact
raises the most important fault-line in development strategies: ultimately these
strategies, which rely on substantial funding from governments, must support the
political and economic status quo. We analyse this process below in the section titled
‘Impact of Development’.
Agencies like Oxfam GB (the original Oxfam established in the UK and Ireland)
recognised this fault-line, and saw the need to have a parallel strategy of advocacy at
all levels of national and international politics for economic and political changes.
They intended to ensure that meeting the basic needs of people in extremis did more
than provide a short-term fix, which might be subsequently overturned by the
prevailing political and economic systems of national and global economic interests
of the powerful. The various Oxfams around the world established Oxfam
International in the mid-1990s. It was based in Washington and grounded not in a
received left-wing ideology but in the most thorough economic and social research;
so much so that their research methodology now rivals, for example, that of the
World Bank, and so commands respect within the wider debate on globalisation.
This global advocacy about ending poverty has extended so far that it has drawn in
celebrities and pop stars. Oxfam International is now based in New York; and the
Save the Children Alliance, a similar advocacy apex organisation of the Save
the Children organisations around the world, is also based in New York. The Save
the Children Alliance advocacy programmes are specifically intended to advance the
basic rights of all children and young people around the world. This, again, is a
political as well as a social agenda, discussed in two of the case studies here.
Assessing impact in applied theatre initiatives and projects might also encompass
the wider political and economic results of the interventions of this work for
individuals and communities. The immediate impact of a project of applied theatre
may be measurable and may be included within M&E. But are there also alterations
in attitude and behaviour that are registered in the long term, sometimes over years
and generations? Assessing this longer term impact of applied theatre differs from
concepts of monitoring and evaluation, which are an immediate assessment of
achievement; and to some extent the case studies and essays collected here deal, in
the first instance, with that difference whilst also showing up the need for more
sophisticated tools of measurement at different stages in a prolonged intervention
into human development. We are not advocating a single methodology for impact
assessment but rather seeking to promote a debate through these pages about what
may constitute impact in particular contexts and what might be the most effective
ways of assessing it. It is already evident from these few examples that impact may
manifest itself in many forms including the material, the physiological, the
psychological, the social and the cultural. The relation of the participant or audience
member to the project is likely to be crucial in determining impact. The subject
 Editorial 141

position of the persons or agencies making the assessment will also have a significant
bearing on both what is assessed and how it is assessed. As ever with all branches of
applied theatre, context is the key determinant.
It seems there is always a centre/periphery or colonial paradigm operating. NGOs,
theatre facilitators, community resource persons are often from the centre, the
developed world. They are working to make the world a fairer and more equitable
place. But, within globalisation, can drama contribute significantly to that process of
change? If practitioners cannot answer that question, how can they start to assess the
impact of their contribution to any change? The very notion of impact is not free of
judgements concerning political systems and values. This may be an unavoidable
fault-line in applied theatre practice. There is a contradiction at the heart of the
process. On the one hand, many practitioners of applied theatre see themselves as the
facilitators or supporters of the self-development of communities, groups and
individuals. On the other hand, they are frequently motivated by a powerful desire
to use their art to effect social and personal change; change that may not coincide
with the desires of the community in which their process is located. Globalisation
lends a further dimension to the contradiction; the tension between the local and the
global. In the case of facilitators external to the community, they may be felt by that
community to be emissaries of international or global values and practices at odds
with local responses. They may therefore come to represent a threat to cultural
diversity as agents of development’s monoculture. To borrow an example from
current geopolitics, it could be the equivalent of the imposition of the neoliberal
model of democracy upon all the nations on earth. Yet practitioners cannot escape
into a postmodern fog of contingency since so many parts of the lives of those with
whom they work are governed by the contending master narratives of neoliberal
economics and human rights. Those who apply theatre in contemporary cultures are
jugglers of contradictions whose practices may impact in many more ways than those
that they foresee.
The reasons why the process of assessing and measuring impact is becoming so
important in what may be summarised as culture and rights are wide-ranging and
overwhelming. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948 there has been slow raising of global consciousness around
issues of human rights together with a developing understanding of how colonialism
and, more recently, neoliberal economics impact upon attempts to achieve these
rights. As long as the focus of intervention was on basic human needs, it was a
relatively straightforward business to assess whether needs had been met and what
the impact of meeting them had been. For instance, food is either provided or not
with the consequence that there is or is not starvation. However, where the
interventions fall within the focus of rights and culture, as is the case with the
processes of applied theatre, the assessment and measurement of impact is much less
clear-cut. Rights-based development organisations are under increasing pressure to
demonstrate long-term impact (Baños Smith, in this volume); so are creative
departments in universities and other cultural organisations and networks. For
instance, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) funded
142 Editorial

Creative Exchange to carry out a pilot research into how some major development
agencies in the UK are exploring cultural approaches to development. One of the key
findings was how little impact assessment there was for any of the work.1
Reasons for this increasing concern to assess impact include, on the one hand, the
context of globalisation*in terms of global macroeconomics, global politics and
/

global communications*and, on the other hand, the structure of knowledge in a

/

new age of a socially transformative science. Furthermore, for many who work in
drama education*teachers, lecturers, facilitators*environmental concerns over-
/ /

shadow both globalisation and the new sciences.

Those involved in advancing knowledge, through creative or scientific methodol-
ogies, either within the universities or through development agencies or in grassroots
theatre and drama groups, are increasingly confronted with social imperatives* /

widening material inequalities, climate change, access to communication, migra-

tion*that call into question what we think we are doing vis-à-vis society in the
/

long term. An inadequate analysis of the long-term impact of what is proposed is

likely to result in limited impact or, worse, a harmful impact on the intended
beneficiaries.
We don’t wish to discuss here the West’s cultural mainstream of performance art,
such as formal theatre, opera and ballet, but we need to underline that our concern
with measuring the impact of what is referred to as applied drama and theatre does not
need to undermine our enjoyment of the ‘high’ art of the ‘great tradition’ in drama in
the cultural context of the West. Great plays within that Western tradition continue
to make an impact on paying audiences in new productions, while new drama
challenges the critical framework that assesses excellence and determines relevance.
Applied drama and performance beyond the West’s developed cultural economies
seeks to make an impact outside of this tradition. What that impact might be is what
is problematic, and how it might eventually be measured is something new and quite
difficult.

Development education
In considering impact assessment, a good place to start is in the area of what is
referred to in developed economies such as the UK as ‘Development Education’.
The eight key concepts in the UK for a ‘global dimension’ to development education,
as agreed by the British Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the
Department for International Development (DfID) and the Development Education
Association (DEA) are listed as: (1) global citizenship; (2) sustainable development; (3)
conflict resolution; (4) values and perceptions; (5) diversity; (6) human rights; (7) social
justice; and (8) interdependence. Under these categories are a number of bullet points
about the role of the arts that claim, amongst others, that the arts
. can bring about positive social change;
. build relationships and help to develop sustainable communities;
. can help to heal the psychological scars of conflict;
 Editorial 143

. can be a powerful voice for change; and

. can be used in striving for social justice.

Those who practise or research in drama education are, no doubt, delighted to know
that these official bodies set such store by the arts as a means of educating young
people in the processes of ‘building a better tomorrow’.
All these areas are concerned with values and ethics to which the overwhelming
majority of people subscribe. What is missing is precisely that contemporary global
context in which powerful forces within nation states subordinate these values and
ethics to the perceived interests of their particular nation state. For example, the
current UK Government has laid claim to the pursuit of an ‘ethical foreign policy’
whilst denying the legal claims of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia for a return to their
homeland because such a return would contradict the wishes of its most powerful
ally, the USA, to maintain its military base on the island in the Indian Ocean. This
subordination of ethics has been traditionally the role of government and now is
increasingly the role of the transnational corporation (TNC) or of powerful corporate
interests. This context is summed up in the term globalisation, meaning here
macroeconomics (the neoliberal world economic order), global communications
(mainly the Internet and digital broadcast) and inequitable power relations.
That drama and theatre are invested with a strong ethical potential is the credo that
determines most of the activities conducted under the banners that carry inscriptions
such as Theatre/Drama in Education (TIE), Applied Theatre, Community Theatre/
Drama, Interventionist Theatre, and Theatre for Development (TfD). Helen
Nicholson comments more generally that
. . . for those of us engaged in research and dramatic practice which take place in
community, educational and institutional settings, there is a need to submit our work to
critical questioning as part of a continual process of negotiating and renegotiating our
ethical positioning. (Nicholson, 2005b, p. 124)

An ethical potential is probably best summed up by concepts of equality and

fairness, both at an individual level and at the level of national identities. But how can
these values be assessed and measured over a sustainable period, when the
undermining global economic context in which they have to operate counteracts
all the good intentions? How can we detect whether ‘positive social change’ involving
greater equality has taken place? Or ‘social justice’ involving a fairer distribution of
resources has been achieved? What are the indicators for a better world in these
terms? In order to contribute to a more equitable world, we, as applied theatre
practitioners need to have ideas of how to reform our praxis in order to contribute to
long-term solutions. We certainly don’t want to continue to be ineffectual while we
try to persuade ourselves we are ‘doing some good’.
The recent upsurge in academic interest in the field of Applied Theatre is
producing a body of literature (Thompson, 2003; Taylor, 2003; Nicholson, 2005a)
that explores philosophical and practical questions around what Applied Theatre is
and what appropriate methodologies might be. In addition, a number of develop-
144 Editorial

ment agencies are now seeking to appropriate those methodologies in their

development initiatives and projects (Munier, in this volume; Etherton, in Boone
& Plastow, 2004). However, both in the universities and in the NGOs that have a
commitment to this area of work*such as East Anglia, Manchester, Queen Mary &
/

Westfield, Action Aid, Oxfam and Save the Children*the issue of impact assessment
/

is addressed tangentially or not at all. Perhaps, as people who make their living more
or less from the field, we are all understandably loath to peer too hard at the goose
which lays at least silver, if not golden, eggs. There is also a disciplinary inheritance at
work here: arts workers are notoriously suspicious (often with good reason) of the
mechanisms of monitoring and evaluation imported from the social sciences while
being reluctant to develop their own. They are even more suspicious of the NGOs
and their approach to monitoring and evaluation. At the same time, the development
agencies are wary of a perceived lack of social purpose in university theatre and
drama courses. These suspicions appear justified in relation to the perspective on
applied theatre practice articulated by James Thompson:
We are only ever visitors within the disciplines into which we apply our theatre. This is in
the same way that we are only ever invited by the prison governor, the development
agency or the refugee group into their setting. We may be familiar with the theoretical
debates that inform the practices in these places but we exercise that knowledge from a
particular position. We are not expert in these areas nor should we seek to be. One of
applied theatre’s strengths is in its status as the outsider, the visitor and the guest.
(Thompson, 2003, p. 20)

One of the problems with visitors, however, is that they rarely stay around long
enough to make an assessment of the impact of their (brief) visit. The benefits of
critical distance and innovative vision have to be set against the disadvantages of
restricted knowledge and limited time. Such fears may be countered by building an
element of sustainability into our practices in the form of training the fieldworkers,
teachers and the participants themselves to become their own facilitators in order to
continue to apply theatre to their lives without external intervention. But who follows
up to find out whether this sustainability has really taken place? Even if it has, who
knows whether these practices have made any impact upon the lives of those who
now engage in them?
Yet, in the present economic climate, it is almost second nature to arts workers to
write proposals to potential funders*including the NGOs*for projects that build in
/ /

measurable outcomes in order that they can prove that the project was a success.
There is a risk that this process can become one of seeking the lowest common
denominator amongst the quantitative data, such as number of participants or
incidence of condom usage before and after the event. This ‘raw’ quantitative data
can then be spiced up by a few judiciously selected quotations*the qualitative /

assessment*about how a person’s understanding of an issue has been altered by the

/

process. This type of methodology is caught up entirely in the moment of the process
and any notion of assessing the impact upon an individual, group or community in
terms of permanent changes in behaviour and attitude is absent. Yet without such an
 Editorial 145

impact assessment how can the ‘big claims’ made for the importance of the work by
governments, NGOs, academic programmes or practitioners be sustained?

Theatrical genres and ‘feel good’ factors

One of the commonest aims and stated outcomes of using a drama process is to
increase the confidence of participants who frequently assert that their confidence
was indeed boosted by being engaged in a process which enabled them to explore
aspects of themselves through the mask of the other. Even those processes which are
not explicitly therapeutic often embed into their practice the assumption that all
those involved will enjoy themselves and have higher self esteem as a result. There is
a clear connection between the aim of increasing confidence and the nature of the
groups with whom non-formal theatre practitioners commonly work. By seeking out
groups who may be vulnerable to low self-esteem and lack of confidence, these
projects greatly increase their chances of succeeding. Many more theatre projects are
applied to drug abusers, prisoners and rape victims than to politicians, consultants
and rapists. Careful selection of a marginalised ‘target’ is likely to yield immediate
results in terms of instant impact upon the psyches of participants.
One of the most eagerly sought-after placements when negotiating community
drama projects with students on undergraduate courses in the UK is prison. It carries
a frisson of danger, of challenge, of pitting the self against the other; whereas, in
reality, it can often turn out to be an ‘easier’ option than work in schools or with a
middle-class, professional group. Prisoners are both up for something different
(anything to relieve the boredom), and strictly policed as to their behaviour during
the workshop. Under powerful institutional pressures prisoners can be quick to form
strong bonds with the facilitators, especially if these are cross-gender. The result is an
electric charge of ‘feel-good’ which may have absolutely no long-term impact in
relation to issues around re-offending or other aspects of behaviour change or the
oppressive prison regime. There are, however, notable exceptions where practitioners
have developed a long-term association not only with particular prisoners and
prisons but with the whole prison system and those capable of bringing about change
within it. One such that merits mention in this context is the work of Paul Heritage
and People’s Palace Theatre with the State Prison Administration in São Paulo,
Brazil. Here, by working in conjunction with those in a position to make a change,
the theatre process became instrumental in achieving an impact in terms of altered
behaviour and changed social conditions (Heritage, 2004). Another is that
represented by the Theatre in Prisons and Probation (TIPP) Centre at Manchester
University which has developed successful long-term relations with prisons in its
region that transcend the temporary ‘highs’ of one-off student projects, as is the
successful long-term relationship between David Bromley (at Bretton Hall) and the
West Yorkshire Police and Prisons. The fertile ground of prison theatre projects
exemplifies the issues that must be addressed by the whole applied theatre field,
146 Editorial

particularly the notion of developing sustainable programmes with the prison service
as opposed to single workshop events.
The drama process itself contains enormous potential for supporting participants
in feeling better about themselves but impact assessment has to do with whether such
feelings outlive the duration of the process and, even if they do, whether these
changed feelings lead to changed lives and fairer social systems. Impact also implies,
at least in development initiatives, influence and a measurable change beyond the
immediate beneficiaries of a project and beyond geographical boundaries, initially
defined by that project. In applied drama and theatre we might need to define impact
differently, in order to recognise the particular collective creative methodologies:
The theatre becomes a medium for action, for reflection but, most important, for
transformation*/a theatre in which new modes of being can be encountered and new
possibilities for humankind can be imagined. (Taylor, 2003, p. xxx)

The cornerstone of theatrical communication is empathy. In the Western tradition

it was described by Aristotle as the core element of Athenian tragedy and in the
twentieth century Brecht developed a poetics designed to channel the inevitable
empathetic feelings of the audience into socially productive ends [see for example
Grusha’s abduction of the baby in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht, 1994)].
Empathy is the force that drives Boal’s spect-actor to intervene to alter the outcome
of a scene through the emotional investment in the situation of the character. It can
exert a powerful influence over the emotional condition of an audience. Examples
abound of viewers responding to characters from soap-operas as if they were actual
people and of the boundary between actor and character becoming hopelessly
confused. Even in the case of radio where the bond is confined to the aural and the
imagined, there are numerous instances of listeners being reduced to tears by the fate
of characters with whom they identify so strongly. It is, indeed, a commonplace of
contemporary experience that this information-saturated age often induces a state of
profound alienation as a response to the endless catalogue of disasters, both man-
made and natural, whereas the manipulations of fictions processed through theatrical
forms press those emotional buttons that too much reality leaves untested.
Any assessment of the impact of activities involving theatre and drama must take
account of a poetics that has such a powerful potential to alter the emotional states of
those who participate and those who spectate. Should it further take account of how
affected spectators influence those who did not see the performance or were not
directly involved in the process? The NGOs are keen to work out how the impact of
TfD, for example, might directly feed into effective advocacy. Whether such
alteration leads to any sort of behavioural or attitudinal change, stimulating social
action, or merely gives rise to the kind of passive, vicarious living, condemned by
Brecht and Boal as consumerist, is a vital piece of research for any project claiming to
engage in personal and social change. However, neither Boal nor Brecht could quite
work out how individual personal change fed into a wider social change, affecting
those who had not even seen the transformative performance or been part of that
enriching experience. Brecht is reaching towards that goal at the end of A Short
 Editorial 147

Organum for the Theatre: ‘. . . the theatre leaves its spectators productively disposed
even after the spectacle is over’ (Willett, 1964) but cannot articulate how the process
might occur within either capitalism or state socialism, while Boal created the form
he labelled Legislative Theatre (Boal, 1999), to exploit the particular circumstances of
his election as a Deputy on Rio’s legislative council, rather than as a more widely
applicable transformative method.

Intended and unintended impacts

A creative devising process that deals in human relationships is always prone to
communicate more or something different than is intended. Monitoring and
evaluation tends to be constructed to measure what is intended by the initiative or
project activity. Impact assessment, on the other hand, must take account of any
result which provokes change, regardless of the stated aims of the project or
programme.
There is a paradox around this question of intention. Applied theatre in all its
various manifestations has recently entered a phase where the emphasis is upon
participation, with the target community influencing the agenda, telling the story.
This has come about in part as a reaction against the cruder use of the medium to
deliver the messages of external agencies. With applied theatre as a message delivery
service, it is far easier to evaluate the outcome: the message is either understood or
not. But impact occurs only at the point where the message changes attitudes and
behaviour and is acted upon. These results are a measurable impact for which
appropriate indicators can be devised. Where there is no message or issue at the heart
of the process but rather the encouragement to the community to develop self-
confidence and assume control over their own lives, to transform themselves, in other
words, from the objects into the subjects of their development, it is much more
difficult to assess whether such a personal transformation has led, in the long term, to
the wider social impact envisaged. Some applied theatre activists maintain that
personal transformation is all that they should properly aim for; and that social
impact is for other kinds of agency.
Another aspect of the problem of impact measurement is that a great deal of
creative work within development agencies is increasingly associated with a human
rights agenda, particularly in the area of child rights. The UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC), in Articles 12, 13 and 15,2 spells out children’s and
young people’s right to their own opinions, to express themselves in any medium,
and to association. These Articles sum up young people’s independent and active
participation in civil society as an inalienable right. They form the basis of a great
deal of recent experimental work in using drama and theatre to advocate for
children’s and young people’s positive role in civil society. The impact of the CRC
upon theatre work with young people in ‘developed’ countries has, thus far, been
minimal but the potential for applied theatre practices such as TIE is enormous, once
the implications of the CRC for compulsory schooling have been digested.
148 Editorial

Paradoxically, it is much easier to monitor the extent to which awareness of rights has
been raised than it is to make a short-term judgement about the ways*if any*in
/ /

which such awareness has led to material changes, such as access to education, in the
organisation of individual and community existence. In reality, the process of self-
empowerment is not bound to a time-line but, like change itself, is without a
beginning, middle and end.
These kinds of rights-based approaches, grandly aimed at both behaviour change
and shifting power relations, are also prey to all manner of unintended impacts that
range far beyond the scope of project evaluation. In a worst case scenario the impact
may be the opposite of that intended by the project workers. For instance, a project
aimed at raising women’s consciousness of their rights in relation to domestic
violence that does not attempt to include men within its processes, may return those
women to the company of their abusive partners, more exposed to assault as a
consequence of the attitudes they have inculcated from the workshop.
Unintended impact, properly measured and based on cause and effect, can
indicate a much more appropriate way of using TfD, and other drama and theatre
methodologies in development initiatives. These are often ways that are less ‘sexy’,
less glamorous and much more difficult. However, they are more likely to lead to
positive changes in the long run, and to a greater impact. The reason for this is, as we
indicated above, that TfD and other kinds of interventionist drama is often done with
victims, rather than with the aggressive and powerful agents who turn them into
victims. Immediately successful though the work is, it has been puzzling why it has
led nowhere, and in some instances even worsened the situation of the victim-
participants. The following example will illustrate this:
. Munier (Munier, 1999, unpublished Save the Children UK Reports), like many
others using drama methodologies in HIV/AIDS awareness programmes, dis-
covered that drama with young adolescents in initiatives around sexual health and
sex education was much less effective than doing the same kind of TfD drama
work with the adult male field-workers who were supposed to help those
adolescents. These men, it transpired, were themselves deeply inhibited and
trapped in ignorance of the nature of their own sexuality and in negative male
stereotypes. They were, therefore, not much help to boys who were much more
informed and sensible about sex and HIV/AIDS.

The impact of social inclusion

Today, much of the applied theatre work with vulnerable or marginalised sectors of
UK society carries with it the overt or covert aim of social inclusion. There is a
danger that ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ become the categories which supersede
‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ within the orthodoxies of social development.
Facilitators working within this paradigm will judge the success or impact of their
work according to whether a previously excluded group now considers itself to be
included. It is much rarer for any assessment to be made about whether the marginal
 Editorial 149

group has made any impact upon attitudes or behaviour in so-called mainstream
society.
This is a version of the therapeutic model where participants who are socially
excluded in one way or another are put through a process aimed at making them
more able*and willing*to resume a place in ‘normal’ society, rather than society
/ /

being offered the chance to reassess ‘normality’ in the light of the experience of the
excluded, who may not wish to be included on the terms currently on offer. In these
instances what impact is being measured? Individual and social impacts may point in
opposite directions as indicators of the ‘success’ of the intervention.
NGOs increasingly deal with the issue of changes by enabling those who are
powerless to begin to define strategies for long term political transformations through
strengthened civil society structures. Facilitators in this process are not necessarily in
the best position to judge what would constitute ‘better’ for those whose rights are
infringed or denied by the existing political and economic order. What they are in a
position to do is to find effective strategies for making the voices of those who are
economically or socially excluded heard, and also listened to. A good example is the
NGO Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Gujarat, India, which
enabled non-unionised market women to make short films of instances of violence
and aggression towards their persons and their livelihoods by officialdom, and to
show their five-minute advocacy videos to these officials who were part and parcel of
the system of their oppression. SEWA has subsequently grown into an India-wide
women’s movement, so effective was their process in tackling their mistreatment.
The impact of their creativity was eventually recorded beyond Ahmadebad and
Gujarat to other parts of India.
As researchers or facilitators of applied drama, working, in situations of
discrimination and exclusion, towards a set of aims related to social transformation,
we are more likely to recognise impact in relation to what we are expecting to find or
trying to achieve. We therefore need to be honest with ourselves and certainly with
the target communities about our intentions. Some of us involved in this work are
Marxists, former Marxists or neo-Marxists, trying to find spaces in which to operate
within the totalising frames of neoliberal capitalism. Our ideas of an impact are likely
to be framed in terms of a possible counter-narrative to the dominant ideology.
However, those among whom we work may be operating on quite a different political
agenda. Participation in the projects and programmes we launch may be seen as a
gateway to a better life where ‘better’ is made manifest through designer clothes,
mobile phones and other consumer items of the ‘developed’ world. A recent
collection of social anthropological case studies on youth in Africa today shows in the
analysis just how complicated identities, values and ethics are among oppressed
young people whose societies are falling apart (Honwana & De Boeck, 2005).3
Inclusion in such a context may not mean the opportunity to climb out of poverty
and victimhood. Instead, young combatants, child witches, street children, young
sex-workers, young urban thugs, drawn into the political fray, and so on, may have
already transposed themselves out of the extraordinary and destructive experiences
of their young lives into some kind of agency which seeks inclusion in the consumer
150 Editorial

society. There is always the possibility that those struggling out of poverty might be
right about how to go about evolving ‘better’ society; and the facilitators might
be wrong. However, if both parties are at least contained within one frame of
co-intentionality, this raises the opportunity for potentially productive dialogue.
Impact cannot be detached from the aims or desires of the facilitator but these can
often be masked by the determination to enable the community to set its own
agenda, at least until the point where that agenda clashes with the ideology of the
facilitator. If facilitators are transparent about their intentions, about the ‘baggage’
they bring with them into the work, there is a chance that any contradictions which
may emerge between the aspirations of the participants and those of the facilitator
can be used as part of a developing analysis which may itself be a prelude to a
discernable, sustained impact. But if the facilitator attempts to manipulate the
process or elide contradiction, it is likely that ownership of the process will become
confused, the purpose fudged and the impact dissipated. It is our view that applied
theatre is by definition a political activity because it is about interventions that
attempt to make changes in power relations among individuals and within societies.
The politics of those who engage in it, both facilitators and beneficiaries, are not
incidental to the process but rather lie at the centre of that process and form a key
element in any assessment of impact.

The impact of development

Nonetheless, precisely because applied theatre or TfD is a political activity, it has to
take account of the economic context of people’s lives. Today that context, at the
global level, is bound to be shaped by neoliberal economics and the injustices and
inequalities which are an integral part of that system. Many people to whom these
theatre processes are ‘applied’ are in some shape or form the victims of neoliberalism
who have been ‘structurally adjusted’ to suit an economic system that denies them
the possibility of achieving their rights as human beings. We make this statement in
the light of what we said above and add the proviso that we from the developed world
see these denied possibilities, but do the participants see the world in the same way
from the periphery? If our creative processes are devised to support their attempts to
employ creativity, imagination and criticality, it is more than likely that they will have
to confront the contradictions of the prevailing structures. Some part of a notion of
impact will be concerned with how these micro-projects might ultimately affect
macro-economic policy and the operations of transnational corporations. Any use of
these processes in support of a human rights agenda immediately faces the major
contradiction that the nations who are signatories of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are also the
perpetrators of rights abuses born of their economic policies, either as top economic
dog or underdog.
Beyond even the concerns about justice and equity is the present reality that the
economies and life-styles of ‘developed’ countries to which the ‘underdeveloped’
 Editorial 151

urgently aspire, are consuming the finite resources of the planet, altering its climate
and eliminating biodiversity at a rate which throws into jeopardy the chances of
mankind’s survival beyond the present century. In the face of the terminal impact
that humans are exerting upon the globe itself, what are the means by which we can
measure the impact that theatre processes might have in slowing or even altering this
progress towards the abyss?
Impact measurement is now being addressed by most major international NGOs,
mainly through advocacy programmes that contextualise their project work. Oxfam
International was cited earlier as an example. Save the Children UK, in its world-
wide programme, wants to improve the ways in which disadvantaged and
impoverished children around the world will be empowered into their adult lives
to struggle effectively for change at all levels. As an extended example of this, the
article by Helen Baños Smith describes the Global Impact Monitoring system (GIM)
that Save the Children UK introduced in its global programme four years ago. We
have begun this Special Issue with her contribution because it sets out an interesting
paradigm for assessing the impact of extended advocacy programmes concerned with
children’s rights. The author is an integral part of GIM through Save the Children’s
Policy and Learning Unit. Her article critically explores the ways in which she hopes
this process will become consolidated within the organisation world-wide whilst
alerting both Save the Children and its local partners to the need to alter basic
assumptions about monitoring and evaluation in order to accommodate the new
paradigms of GIM.
The need for this organisational transformation in Save the Children UK is shown
in the article by Asif Munier, a Bangladeshi development manager and international
TfD facilitator, who gets into the detail of drama-based development work. He is
particularly concerned with making a distinction between ‘follow-up’*an on-going
/

and open-ended continuation of the initial TfD work in a community*and /

measuring the impact. These, he argues, are often confused. Follow-up facilitation
with groups of impoverished and disadvantaged young people is often needed to
achieve the impact promised and consolidate even small gains within communities;
but, all too often, the organisation reneges on its promises to follow up initially
successful work. If follow-up happens, it may make an impact subsequently on the
adult lives of the young people. On the other hand, Munier maintains, follow-up by
adult facilitators may exclude ownership of these processes for change, and may
actually undermine the impact of the initial workshop which released unexpected
energies.
Most INGOs and their client local NGOs are not organisationally able to deal with
measuring long-term impact*a point also made by Baños Smith. In these
/

circumstances, Munier explores the use, if any, of assessing the impact on the
children of the initial TfD experience. Even if the development organisation,
government department or university department, at the official level, are none of
them interested any longer in the beneficiaries, there may be nothing to stop an
individual facilitator revisiting the communities in their personal and private
capacity. Five or more years down the line, when the children he worked with
152 Editorial

have become adults, he wanted to find out what they still remember of that
experience and how it might have changed anything in the ways they are living their
impoverished adult lives.
A very different kind of learning journey is reflected upon by Anthony Haddon in
the years of his work with Blah, Blah, Blah. Rather than even risking an impact
assessment of the various groups with whom he has worked, Haddon applies his skills
as artist/facilitator to reverse the polarities and ponders the impact of those groups
upon the Blahs. Although in a very different context, like Pompeo, Haddon has
exploited the benefits of long-term contact to build up relationships that have
allowed him to hand over the facilitation of vital areas of the process, in this case
empowering teachers to overcome the de-skilling experience of being outshone by
the ‘artists’. This is another echo of the concerns of Munier. For Haddon impact is
again implicitly connected to sustainability. That, in turn, is partly about the skills,
knowledge and attitudes left behind after the applied theatre ‘expert’ has finished
her/his ‘visit’. Haddon eschews the notion of the facilitator as catalyst in the sense
used by chemists*the agent that causes a reaction without itself being affected by
/

it*in favour of a dialogical view of the process where learner and teacher are
/

interchangeable categories.
Lynn Dalrymple created her own NGO, DramAidE (Drama for AIDS Education),
in order to work with a single focus to bring drama processes to bear upon the
dominant social issue of the context in which she operates: the spread of HIV/AIDS.
This singleness of purpose has enabled her to discover which theatrical and other
performance forms have been the most effective in raising awareness and encoura-
ging the prevention of the disease. Many TfD companies are working on this topic,
not least because this is where much of the available funding is directed in the belief
that approaches that tackle behaviour modification are more likely to be sustainable
than ones which only address the clinical dimensions of the epidemic. Interventions
to change behaviour are highly contentious and research into when and how
behaviour changes is fraught with subjective bias but Dalrymple poses some
important questions about measuring impact and long-term effectiveness where
getting it ‘right’ might, indeed, be a matter of life and death.
As several of the contributors to this issue attest, one of the major barriers to the
achievement of impact is the shortness of the exposure between the facilitating
agency and the community from which the participants are drawn. In asking Marcia
Pompeo to contribute her case study the editors were mindful that she has been
working intermittently with the same community in her home region in Brazil for the
last 15 years. She has used the longevity of her experience with one community to
reflect on aspects of impact which hardly register in assessments made within the
usual timescales of projects. In this instance there is a manifest advantage in working
outside the NGO sector since it is her situation as a university lecturer that has
enabled her to maintain this engagement. A key element in her process has been the
devolution of facilitation skills away from herself onto members of the community.
This answers the concerns of Munier. This is one of the most significant indicators of
impact: the redundancy of the external facilitator. In noting this, however, Pompeo
 Editorial 153

has also looked at some of the ways in which this specific context renders notions of
‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ problematic. Social relations are always in process and the
15 years have, in many instances, exposed the instability of the positions from which
members began. In creating the theatre group in Ratones, to what extent has it been
responsible for promoting and preserving an ideal of community and, on the other
hand, to what extent has it been an exclusive group within an already fragmented
community? Here thoughts about impact impinge on notions of community in ways
which highlight its heterogeneous nature.
Peter O’Connor is another practitioner and researcher who has taken the route of
setting up his own NGO, Applied Theatre Consultants Ltd, using the principles and
practices of TIE in the service of communities and individuals in New Zealand who
fall within the category of ‘at risk’. For O’Connor also, questions of form cannot be
separated from considerations of impact and the programme he assesses in his article
made innovative use of the video game concept to enable the young people to access
intimate and sensitive areas of their lives on their own terms. He is cautious of
overstating what drama processes can achieve in an area such as child abuse but clear
that the kinds of negotiation and reflection made possible by these processes are an
invaluable part of supporting young people in coming to terms with issues of
dysfunction in their everyday lives. A vital element in the achievement of any impact
in the project was the early agreement on co-intentionality between the funder and
the agency, thereby removing one potential obstacle to transformation*mismatch of
/

covert agendas leaving participants confused. The question of permanent impact

remains to be addressed in relation to the project. Does the provision of a safe space
in which to talk out experiences of domestic dysfunction necessarily produce a
reduction in abusive behaviour?
If international development agencies and other large institutions like government
departments are finding it important but very difficult to transform their organisation
in order to incorporate a much more significant process of measuring the long-term
impact, it is equally important to try to understand the significance of impact
measurement within academic courses and departments, given that applied theatre
courses are proliferating in many countries. We therefore asked Martin Banham,
Emeritus Professor of Theatre at Leeds University, and Jane Plastow, Senior
Lecturer in the Workshop Theatre there, if they would consider the ways the
undoubted impact on African Theatre of the programmes of the Workshop Theatre
in the School of English at Leeds University might be further assessed. They ended
their essay with questioning how the impact of the past 40 years could be further
defined and how it might be measured; and subsequently suggested that Etherton, as
both an ‘insider’ (involved in African Theatre) and an ‘outsider’ (now working in
development for NGOs) might, in a postscript, explore the parameters of that
question in the broader context of measuring the impact of applied theatre. As with
the NGO example of Save the Children UK, this academic example of the Workshop
Theatre explores to what extent the larger organisations within which these initiatives
emerge are able to assess a long-term impact of their work, even though their senior
154 Editorial

people*their activists, researchers and managers*might see the need and be keen
/ /

to do this.
Each of our contributors has offered their own interpretation of the idea of impact
assessment and each has grounded their reflections in the specifics of the social
contexts in which they operate. Despite the differing contexts of these studies some
common denominators have emerged. Perhaps the clearest of these has been the
shared experience of the size of the gap between project evaluation*proving what /

was claimed to be done was actually done*and real impact in terms of changes of
/

attitudes and transformed lives. But severally and collectively it is still not proven that
applied theatre can today work towards those more substantial changes that many of
its practitioners seek to make.
Presently, applied theatre practices seem to be uncoordinated and competitive
rather than collaborative. Those NGOs like Oxfam who have realised the need for a
global advocacy capability to achieve radical political and social changes have been
forced to collaborate in order to make a significant impact on the lives of the most
disadvantaged. This experience might indicate the need to explore more formal
collaboration among applied theatre activists around the world. As the editors of this
special issue of RIDE we hope that the sum of these contributions here will indicate
that this work can be taken seriously in terms of realisable social and political
objectives. Through imagination and creativity, thoroughness of analysis, and
participatory methodologies, applied theatre practitioners can contribute signifi-
cantly to making lasting social change.

Notes
1. See the work by Marsh and Gould (2003), Routemapping Culture & Development , which is a
report on a pilot research project exploring the use of cultural approaches to development
within five UK development agencies.
2. These Articles of the CRC have been summarised thus:
Article 12: The child’s opinion : the child has the right to express his or her opinion
freely and to have that opinion taken into account in any matter or procedure affecting
the child.
Article 13: Freedom of expression : the child has the right to express his or her views,
obtain information, make ideas or information known, regardless of frontiers.
Article 15: Freedom of association : children have a right to meet with others, and to join
or form associations. (Source: It’s Only Rights , Susan Fountain, UNICEF, 1993).
3. Honwana and De Boeck (2005), contains a number of significant case studies that
collectively demonstrate how youth in Africa have rejected both pre-colonial traditions
and postcolonial political and ethical paradigms, to try to retrieve agency within an
economically disintegrating continent.

References
Boal, A. (1999) Legislative theatre (London, Routledge).
Boon, R. & Plastow, J. (2004) Theatre and empowerment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
Brecht, B. (1994) Collected plays: seven (London, Methuen).
 Editorial 155

Heritage, P. (2004) Taking hostages: staging human rights, The Drama Review, 48(3), Fall, T183.
Honwana, A. & De Boeck (2005) Makers & breakers (Oxford, James Currey).
Marsh, M. & Gould, H. (2003) Routemapping culture & development (London, Creative Exchange).
Munier, A. (1999) Report for Save the Children (unpublished).
Nicholson, H. (2005a) Applied drama (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan).
Nicholson, H. (2005b) Editorial, Research in Drama Education, 10(2).
Taylor, P. (2003) Applied theatre (New York, Heinemann).
Thompson, J. (2003) Applied theatre: bewilderment and beyond (Oxford, Peter Lang).
Willett, J. (Ed.) (1964) Brecht on theatre (London, Methuen).

MICHAEL ETHERTON & TIM PRENTKI

Consultant/Trainer in Child Rights, Development and Theatre, Devon, UK &
University of Winchester, UK