Responding to the global state of permacrisis, this book explores the relationship between applied theatre and disaster.

For millennia communities have learnt to live alongside disaster through their arts making. Building on the basis of this ancestral knowledge this book explores the current uses of applied theatre in times of constant crisis. Using a critical disaster studies lens, the authors recognise the role of governments and multinational businesses in profiteering from and manipulating for their own advantage the misery caused by disasters. Case studies of different stages of disaster, from risk reduction and disaster preparedness through to the almost inevitable resistance to failed government intervention, illustrate the possibilities and limitations of applied theatre and other art forms to navigate these times. Applied theatre is seen as a vital act of aesthetic and political hope.

At a time of never-ending, overlapping disasters, this book will be important to researchers and postgraduate students working in applied theatre and disaster research in the social sciences. It will also appeal to applied arts practitioners who work in disaster zones and with relief organisations.

Peter O’Connor FRSNZ is the Director of the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Peter has been making and researching applied theatre for over thirty years. He has worked in multiple disaster areas including earthquakes in Mexico City and Christchurch, the fires on Maui and in Australia and in flood areas in New Zealand.

Katy Pérez works at the University of Auckland’s Centre for the Arts and Social Transformation. She has worked using applied theatre in national and international disaster zones, youth justice centres, teen-pregnancy units, anger management courses, and spent 8 years delivering family violence prevention workshops in schools across Aotearoa New Zealand. Katy currently specialises in both research and facilitation of arts post-disaster practice and believes the arts are a perfect way to restore hope and inspire revolution.