Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict is a two-volume work describing peacebuilding performances in regions beset by violence and internal conflicts. Whereas Volume I, Resistance and Reconciliation in Regions of Violence, emphasizes the role theatre and ritual play both in the midst and in the aftermath of direct violence, Volume II, Building Just and Inclusive Communities, focuses on the transformative power of performance in regions fractured by "subtler" forms of structural violence and social exclusion. The case studies in this volume document examples from Afghanistan, Australia, Ghana, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States. This volume also offers resources, tools, and recommendations to help educators, artists, students, policymakers, and funders alike to become involved with, and contribute to, the emerging field of peacebuilding performance.

The Acting Together project documents how divided communities in conflict regions across the globe draw on the power of performance to express silenced truths, rebuild severed relationships, and work toward justice. Born in 2005 of a partnership between the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University and Theatre Without Borders, the project grew to include the two-volume anthology Acting Together, the feature-length documentary film Acting Together on the World Stage, a website of related materials, and a toolkit, or "Tools for Continuing the Conversation," included with the documentary as a second disc and featuring practical guidelines and templates for further action. Taken together, these resources yield rich case studies, theoretical frameworks, and recommendations to help practitioners, educators, students, and policymakers understand and strengthen the emerging field of peacebuilding performance.

Contributing authors: Daniel Banks, Eugene van Erven, Kate Gardner, Mary Ann Hunter, John O'Neal, Jo Salas. Foreword by Salomón Lerner Febres. Preface by Pauline Ross. Afterword by Tatsushi Arai.

Editors (also contributing authors): Cynthia E. Cohen is director of the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University. Cohen has worked in collaboration with Theatre Without Borders on this project since 2005, and has facilitated coexistence efforts involving participants from the Middle East, the US, Central America, and Sri Lanka. Roberto Gutiérrez Varea is a dramaturg, producer, and director, and the founder of several community-based performance collectives. His research and creative work focuses on live performance as a means of resistance and peacebuilding in the context of social conflict and state violence. He is Associate Professor of Performing Arts and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco. Polly O. Walker is an assistant professor of peace and conflict studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Previously awarded the University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for Women, she conducted research on the role of memorial ceremonies in transforming conflict involving Indigenous and Settler peoples in the US and Australia.

Advance Praise:

"Humanity [has the] capacity to inflict great suffering and unfathomable misfortune. Yet art and, as we see in this work, theatre in particular, can show us that there is a greater force in creativity and a greater power in solidarity. It is in instances like these that art is not just contemplation and transcendence, but also a form of justice that cleanses and vindicates our species in a universal way."
—Dr. Salomón Lerner Febres, former President, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru

"Political and social failures begin and end in failures of imagination. Acting Together invites a major renewal of the dramatic imagination—for the sake of social healing and understanding. The project is itself an exemplar of the engaged imagination set free, a celebration and a challenge at once."
—James Carroll, columnist and author, Jerusalem, Jerusalem

"This book gives Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" new meaning. Experts in foreign policy and diplomacy, conflict resolution and peacemaking, as well as theatre and performance professionals, can learn from these extraordinary examples what theatre and performance can do to heal the wounds of violent conflict."
—Ambassador Cynthia Schneider, PhD, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University