Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism. She is an associate professor at NYU where she teaches in the Drama and the Art and Public Policy Departments.

Mady Schutzman is author of The Real Thing: Performance, hysteria, and advertising, and co-editor, with Jan Cohen-Cruz, of Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts and is an advisory board member of L.A. Center for Theatre of the Oppressed.

Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman hosted Boal at NYU in 1987-88, brought a group of 20 cultural practitioners to Rio de Janeiro for 3 weeks to study with Boal in 1989, and co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism in 1994.

Introduction Politics and Performance(s) of Identity: Twenty-five Years of Brazilian Theatre (1954-79) Section 1: Sites Political Theatre: Staging the Political: Boal and the Horizons of Theatrical Commitment Pedagogy: Critical Interventions: The Meaning of Praxis Activism: Tactical Carnival: Social Movement, Demonstrations, and Dialogical Performance Therapy: Social Healing and Liberatory Politics: A Roundtable Discussion Legislating: Performing Democracy in the Streets: Participatory Budgeting and Legislative Theatre in Brazil Section 2: Tropes Art and Everyday Life: Action in Feminist Performance Art Storytelling: Redefining the Private: From Personal Storytelling to Political Act Metaxis: Metaxis: Dancing (in) the In-Between Aesthetic Space: Aesthetics Space/Imaginative Geographies Jok(er)ing: Joker Runs Wild Witnessing: Witnessing Subjects: A Fool's Help Section 3: Ideologies Postcolonial Theory: Re-envisioning Theatre, Activism, and Citizenship in Neocolonial Contexts Feminist Theory: Negotiating Feminist Identities and Theatre of the Oppressed RaceTheory: Unperforming "Race": Strategies for Re-Imagining Identity Notes on Contributors Index