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The Life You Save May Be Your Own
No full textWhen I worked as a Jesuit in my early years at Santa Clara University, I published an essay entitled “A Ratio Studiorum for the Postcolonialist’s Classroom.” I asserted that Ignatius, founder of that religious order, “saw education as a tool for social change, not merely as an opportunity for a value-free and objective exposure to Truth. . . . Education, much like the religious retreat described in his Spiritual Exercises, was to bring about a metanoia, a change of heart, in students.”1 This internal development was then meant to motivate action in the world. As I continued, “if there is some historical truth in the charge that Jesuit schools in the past produced clever casuists who invested little of themselves in their arguments, it is clear in today’s multicultural world, a world of conflicting hermeneutic structures, that making debating points will not equip a graduate for anyone’s reality.”
More on Soaps
Get PDFTrends\u27 treatment of soap operas has reflected their \u27serial\u27 character by continuing our discussion from the previous issue (Vol. 10, No. 1) to this issue. A more serious justification for this extended treatment lies in the degree to which soap operas, telenovelas and comparable productions pervade the television screens of many nations and the extraordinary degree to which they are able to attract and hold audiences. In this issue, aspects of soap opera production are discussed, then the reasons for the ability of the genre to successfully cross national and cultural boundaries is explored. Finally, we consider the contribution soap operas might make to education and development
Popular Theatre
Get PDFThe editors of this research review have focussed mainly on the mass media of radio and TV, neglecting theatre. All of us may forget that most genres of popular performative arts - our soap operas, comedy and variety shows - have had their origins in the live audience experience of vaudeville and romantic melodramas. We forget, too, that many stars ofTV and film feel the need, at least occasionally, to get back to the live stage and nourish their acting with the magic unity of actors and audience. And much of the creativity of dramatic performance today begins with more exploratory theatre \u27off Broadway\u27 or away from other sites of conventional, professional theatre.
Theatre is always entertainment, but in its most creative moments it is also an imaginative space in which to explore the human, social and political questions of the day. When theatre becomes too much ofa trivial fashion of a leisure class, new forms of theatre spring up around the fringes to revitalise the dramatic experience and bring it back closer to the life of the community. It is not surprising that some of the most interesting th.eatre in recent years are forms of experimental theatre. Noris it surprising that in countries or places where conventional, professional theatre dominates less - Pinochet\u27s Chile, Calcutta in the 1950s & 1960s, the West Bank of Palestine or the black, \u27apartheid\u27 communities of South Africa - theatre becomes an arena for vital cultural debate. Significantly, these new forms of theatre have come to be called \u27popular\u27, or, in better English, \u27people\u27s theatre\u27.
A recent issue of Communication Research Trends, \u27New Perspectives on Media and Culture\u27 (Vol8/2) reported some of the current debates on communication and culture, but largely from an Anglo-American view. In many parts of the world, notably in Africa, India and Asia, similar questions emerge more pointedly in discussions about the role of theatre in society. This issue focusses on popular theatre in the light of communication and culture especially in non-Western cultures