Community, Performance, & Commemoration:

Performing Arts projects stood as one of the most productive and successful forms of community engagement activity in Phase 1 of the ARHC First World War Engagement Centres, with significant work undertaken by CIs Maunder (Everyday Lives), Brooks (Gateways), and Taroff (Living Legacies). Each of these Centres intend to maintain some level of Performing Arts activity in Phase 2, work that will be enhanced through this cross-centre project. Each of the three centres featured a unique approach to engaging communities with the First World War through performing arts: for Living Legacies this was done through working with community groups to develop their own responses to the war through family memory and interaction with commemoration as it is currently carried out in Northern Ireland; for Everyday Lives in War, through working with community groups to see and perform revivals of plays originally performed during the First World War period; and for Gateways it was through hosting and facilitating public workshops, study days and conferences on wartime theatre, as well as through staging rehearsed readings of wartime plays and supporting theatre companies using wartime plays to create new work. In Phase 2 we seek to capitalise on the diverse expertise of the centres to disseminate models of community engagement through the performing arts that can be productive in the work of each centre (who will work together to identify and utilise best practise from all three centres) over the three years of Phase 2.