Remapping Performance is the third book by scholar and advocate of the community arts Jan Cohen-Cruz, which investigates contemporary community-based performance projects in the US. The book analyses a series of case studies by focusing on the contexts in which they are embedded, and which they in turn seek to influence. Whereas Cohen-Cruz's 2005 publication Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States charts the overarching principles of community-based performance and offers a genealogy of seminal historical moments in the twentieth century in the US, and Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response (2010) emphasizes the web of relations of performance practices with local environments in terms of calls and responses to social issues, Remapping Performance specifically investigates the ways in which theatrical activities and practitioners engage with what is broadly termed ‘the social’, asking what kind of expertise and learning process are required in addition to theatrical or performance skills, and how a dual commitment to the arts as well as a social or political cause is practised and nurtured.

Cohen-Cruz pays attention to the political economy of community performance in the US by examining not just funding policies and structural parameters, but also the emergence of diverse local support bases for performance activities, such as churches, ecological initiatives, or universities, and the concomitant shifts in the social classes to which audiences belong. The study belongs to the domain of theatre sociology; however, instead of adopting an empirical approach, Cohen-Cruz explores some difficult questions that continue to challenge the scholarship of community performance, pertaining to the assessment and evaluation of impact, the scale of outreach, the democratic running of a theatre project or institutional partnership, and the straddling of worlds with very different parameters of quality, such as professional versus amateur theatre, university-led versus community-based initiatives, and the dilemma of being artists and citizens in situations of crisis or upheaval. ‘What does art offer in terms of facing social challenges?’ the book repeatedly asks.

The answers Cohen-Cruz offers lie in the imaginative possibilities of performance, in the emphasis it gives to designing processes of working, to a culture of listening and sensitivity to human and non-human worlds, and in cultivating a keen sense of lived meaning and deep affective connection to social issues. These insights are drawn from an examination of projects featuring ‘uncommon partnerships’ between theatres and social initiatives: in the realms of racial justice and the US American civil rights movement (focusing on Free Southern Theatre in Mississippi and their ties with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), anti-poverty campaigns led by a Catholic charity in 2011 in cooperation with the Sojourn Theatre company, or the post-Katrina sensitization to ecology in New Orleans (in site-specific collaborations between ensemble theatre companies ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro in 2006). The study is complemented by interviews with professionals whose practice and/or research are located at the intersection of the arts and social action; by additional short contributions by UK-based applied-arts researcher Helen Nicholson; and by a refreshing social-science perspective on what Julie Thompson-Klein, a scholar in the interdisciplinary field known as integrative studies, calls ‘boundary work’ – that is, activities and investigations that reformulate boundaries between domains of knowledge.

A specific focus of the book is on the growing number of collaborations between universities and theatres, in terms of both enriching academic programmes and expanding the outreach of public scholarship. The author's experience as director of the Imagining America – Artists and Scholars in Public Life network feeds into a discussion of how the ‘public good’ is served through theatre-based outreach projects, critically examining well-intended but ill-prepared cultural-diplomacy efforts to repair the negative image of the US across the world. The book takes the reader through a panoply of contemporary community performance practices in the US, valuing the ‘common grounds’ and ‘uncommon partnerships’ of community performance and social or civic initiatives.