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Book: Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue
Author: David Diamond, foreword by Fritjof Capra
Congratulations to David Diamond for landing this interview - click on http://headlinestheatre.com/audio/DavidDiamond_CBCRadio_64kbps.mp3 to listen.
David is also the proud recipient of an American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Book Award. The acceptance speech, given by proxy in Atlanta, is as below…
My apologies for not being in Atlanta in person to accept the AATE Distinguished Book Award – the news of the award came to me days ago, and the travel is impossible.
Thanks first to Diane Conrad, AATE Member and Assistant Professor, Drama/Theatre Education at the University of Alberta, as I am aware she made the nomination. Thanks also to the AATE Committee. It is indeed an honour to accept the award.
This is important to me for many reasons. Writing Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue was not as challenging as getting it published. All of the publishers one would think would have been interested, turned it down – many of them saying how much they appreciated the book, and if I would only “take the science sections out, they would love to publish”. The book is about the connections between the theatre and the science, with a foreword by the world renowned physicist and systems theorist, Fritjof Capra. “But what do we do with it – how do we market it?” they all asked.
At it’s heart, the book details how a community is a living entity, with a living consciousness. The way living communities used to express themselves was through song, dance, drama…not by telling “his story”, or “her story”, but “our story”. In the same way that an individual needs to express her or himself in order to remain healthy, so does a living community. In this age of consumerism, in which everything has become commodified, we now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we get together, as “living communities” to use this primal language – the theatre – to tell our collective stories? The answer is we don’t. And so, just like an individual becomes ill, keeping it all bottled up inside, living communities become ill. The proof of this is, I believe, everywhere we look.
And so, Theatre for Living is self-published, through a Victoria BC-based company called Trafford. Print on demand. No piles of books in a warehouse. Recycled paper. A solar-powered print-shop. The wave of the future.
Theatre for Living is, I believe a revolutionary book, because of what it asks of all of us – myself included – and for the very reason the mainstream publishers didn’t know how to say ‘yes’.
The book spans disciplines and insists that we investigate what links us together. It recognizes that in an energetically interconnected universe, the separation between oppressor and oppressed, is, like every other human concept, an artificial construction. It suggests that the way forward is to burst out of our “silos” and recognize the links between art and health, between authentic, broad-based community dialogue and effective activism. If we are to deal with the pressing issues of global warming, global violence, hunger, poverty…we must find a way, whether on the so-called left or the so-called right to stop perpetuating the concept of “the other”. There is no “them”. There is only “us.”
Thank you for this wonderful recognition of the book.
Please click book cover to view more information
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