<P><EM>Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response</EM> presents a combined analysis and workbook to examine "socially engaged performance." It offers a range of key practical approaches, exercises, and principles for using performance to engage in a variety of social and artistic projects. Author</P> <P>Jan Cohen-Cruz draws on a career of groundbreaking research and work within the fields of political, applied, and community theatre to explore the impact of how differing genres of theatre respond to social "calls."</P> <P></P> <P>Areas highlighted include:</P> <P></P> <UL> <P> <LI>playwrighting and the engaged artist</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>theatre of the oppressed</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>performance as testimonial</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>the place of engaged art in cultural organizing</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>the use of local resources in engaged art</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>revitalizing cities and neighborhoods through engaged performance</LI> <P></P> <P> <LI>training of the engaged artist.</LI> <P></P></UL> <P></P> <P>Cohen-Cruz also draws on the work of major theoreticians, including Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, and Doreen Massey, as well as analyzing in-depth case studies of the work of US practitioners today to illustrate engaged performance in action.</P> <P></P> <P>Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is the author of Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US; the editor of Radical Street Performance; co-editor, with Mady Schutzman, of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion; and a University Professor at Syracuse University.</P>