Jeremy Weller has devoted his life to social action and investigation through performance. He is perhaps best known as the Artistic Director of the innovative and influential GrassMarket Project (GMP) theatre company. Weller’s vision integrates issues of social exclusion and social justice into the artistic process and seeks to improve peoples lives through engaging them in their own potential for creativity.
For more than 20 years Jeremy the GMP have used Radical Drama as a social intervention process. Jeremy is at the heart of GMP’s drama-based art and social-healing methods, and recognizes that so-called ordinary lives can have the power of Greek tragedy.
Jeremy is also in the 2nd year of his Practiced based PhD research wirh QMUL (London). Some of the research questions he is exploring in his reading and practice are:
- How can a socially engaged theatre practice work with non-actors to produce a socially productive emotional experience for an audience?
- How can a socially engaged theatre practice produce audience empathy without essentialising or sentimentalising social experience?
- How can a socially engaged theatre practice challenge the socially prescribed roles played by its participants?
- How can a socially engaged theatre practice work with marginalised communities without re-stigmatizing or re-victimizing them?
- How can we define the expertise of the socially engaged theatre practitioner? How does this expertise work with or against the other kinds of expertise with which marginalized communities are obliged to engage (doctors, social workers, judicial system etc)?
Jeremy Weller 