Welcome to Dramatic Action:
Community Engaged Theatre in Canada & Beyond,
a website exploring the connections between theatre, performance, community development and civic engagement. This site offers researchers, academics, students, practitioners and community activists  (not to mention the many wild and wonderful varieties of thespians and theatre-lovers) an overview of the community-engaged theatre “movement” over the past 20 years, along side the most recent reflections and new directions of some of the foremost practioners in the field.

The offerings on this website cross several disciplines – the arts, social sciences, community development, political activism, etc. They also cross several provincial and national borders, with contributions from urban and rural based theatre professionals, primarily from Canada, but also from the U.S. and the U.K.

If you add up the combined years of experience of all the contributors it comes to more than 3,000 years.  We hope that some of our decades of experience, and our re-visioning of the future, may prove useful to you, whatever your pursuit.

We would like to sincerely thank the Laidlaw Foundation, based in Toronto, Ontario for their generosity and forward-thinking ways. We wish a “Laidlaw-foundation-like-experience” upon every community-engaged theatre artist in the world!

I would also like to thank our editor-extraordinaire, Jenny Kitson, whose gentle word-smithing and good-natured patience has made this project a pleasure. And thanks also to our on-fire web designer, Mackenzie Kristjon.

And, last-but-never-least, I’d like to extend a hearty thanks to the contributors for their passion and commitment to this “movement”, which has moved many to create and re-create beyond what they thought possible.

Dale Hamilton,
Dramatic Action Website Coordinator
Artistic Director, Everybody’s Theatre Company
Consultant, Lateral Strategies