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From Issue #13, Summer
2006
Editor's
Notes
Readers
Theatre is alive and well in academia. Most college and university theatre
departments include some form of RT in its curriculum. K12 Teachers,
too, have discovered the potential of RT in the classroom and hundreds
of RT scripts for children are available on the Internet at little or
no cost. Just enter the key words "readers theatre", quotes
and all, into your favorite search engine (ours is Google) and plan
to spend some time browsing through the thousands of results.
One
would expect that the greatest users of Readers Theatre would be community
(amateur)theatres. Such is not the case. Most community theatres don't
seem to get it. We're in regular contact with dozens of CTs and most
seem to lack any functional understanding of this powerful theatre genre.
Multiply our experience by the thousands of such theatres in Canada,
Australia, the UK and the US and we have a mystery and a challenge.
The
mystery is, why do so many serious theatre folk, amateur and professional,
disregard and sometimes overtly 'dis' this flexible and compelling theatre
form?
The challenge is two-fold: first, to make clear what RT isn't and second,
to educate community theatre interests about what RT is.
There
are many print and Internet resources on the subject, and a good place
to start is with a careful perusal of our archives
where expert essays range all the way from the classroom perspective
to thoughtful dissertations by highly qualified RT practitioners, professional
theatre people and educators.
Our
goal is to help promote Readers Thatre in all its dimensons. We will
continue to do this by printing articles and essays by those who are
regularly engaged in some form of this exciting theatre style.
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