What is the impact of theatre and performance?

What are the ways in which we can think through theatre’s impact on the world? The question itself contains several assumptions that deserve to be examined: claims around usefulness, applicability, causality and measurability, or the nature of the relationship and interdependence between artistic and socio-political domains. Different traditions of performance practice entail different understandings of impact. How, if at all, can such impact be traced, measured and assessed? This question raises a vast number of thorny issues and debates in theatre and performance scholarship, pertaining to methods of research, organizational modes of justification and ethical motivations of theatrical practices. Using an example of a community based production by lesbian feminist theatre collective Siluetas from Guatemala/El Salvador, the chapter points to the difficulties around impact assessment and suggests ways of expanding these criteria to include qualitative and interpretive aspects, in order to avoid restricting the question of impact to the tyranny of evidence and numbers. This implies re-shaping concepts such as participation or empowerment, unburdening them from the pressures of policy, governance and hollow trickle-down promises, and imbuing them with the unorthodox potentials offered by performance practice.