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Each chapter of this book presents a different marginalized community and explores how it appropriates theatre for its own needs, which are often at odds with those of the powerful sponsoring organisations. This fresh approach to the topic provides the reader with an innovative, critical way of studying community theatre.

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Acknowledgements Introduction Dramatic Playing as a Tactic for the Confrontation of the Mask of Aging Performing the Scroll of Esther: Articulating Power through Symbolic Inversion The Three Elderly Musketeers and their Invention of Play Playing the World-Upside-Down as Part of the Therapeutic Policy of a Children´s Medical Center ´Theatre of the People´: Rhetoric versus an Apparatus for Supervision and Control in the Mizrahi Co-Community Battered Women on the Stage: From Spoken Objects to Speaking Subjects Between Home and Homeland: Ethiopian Youth Making Do with Theatre Undoing the Conflict: Israeli Jews and Palestinians Co-Creating a Theatrical Event The National Festival of the Co-Communities: The Meta-Theatrical Event Bibliography Index

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DR SHULMITH LEV-ALADGEM is Senior Lecturer in the Theatre Department at Tel-Aviv University, Israel. She is a researcher, practitioner and actress whose main interests include play theory, performance studies and cultural studies and their relation to community theatre, educational drama and feminist theatre. She has published in a range of journals, including Theatre Research International and New Theatre Quarterly.

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