Los Angeles County is the "epicenter of gang activity nationwide," with an estimated 175,000 gang members and more than 1,400 gangs. 2 Although crime has been on the decline, gang membership continues to rise, largely due to increasing participation by minors. The total number of youth on probation in the Los Angeles probation system in 2009 is 18,285; in 2007 alone, 4,398 youths were admitted into residential probation-camp facilities, which provide structured treatment and programming for juvenile offenders. 3 These statistics of high youth involvement in gangs, along with corresponding criminal activity and arrests, have resulted in an aggressive, multi-pronged gang-reduction and-prevention approach that includes strict gang injunctions, as well as increased educational and extracurricular programming designed to reduce youths' gang membership and activity (Dunworth, Hayeslip, Lyons, and Denver 15-26). Like the youths' gang affiliations themselves, which can be seen as actively performing resistance to existing sociodemographic structures and societal norms, these gang-reduction and-prevention strategies can be read as performative-performing the power dynamics of the state over perceived abhorrent behavior. Gang injunctions, which have become prevalent in Los Angeles County since the first one was filed in 1987, bar behavior (particularly behavior rich in semiotics) that would otherwise be legal, such as "wearing certain clothes, making certain hand signs, going to certain parks" (Gold). And some injunctions include provisions that outlaw two or more alleged gang members from associating in public, even when no illegal activity is underway. Like these injunctions, gang-reduction and-prevention programs also can be read in Foucauldian terms, as an official attempt to normalize disruptive or defiant behavior; through education, modeling, and positive reinforcement, these programs aim to mold the rebellious juveniles into productive "docile" bodies (Foucault 136). Despite some of the more conservative aspects of the methods and goals employed to address youth criminal behavior, certain gang-reduction and-prevention performing arts programs have the potential to empower youth by increasing their sense of agency and creative autonomy. This essay explores the praxis of Unusual Suspects Theatre Company (US), a nonprofit educational organization based in Los Angeles, as one model of how performing arts programming can change the power dynamics in spaces designed to "normalize" and "recidivate" by supporting the imaginative authority of participants who are often rendered powerless and marginalized by the institutions that "serve" them.

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valuable in discussing pertinent issues. At the same time, he challenges contemporary theatre and performance studies scholarship, be it in his reference, also in the book title, to Phelan and Lane's 1997 Ends of Performance (pp. 5-6) or in a critical reading of Schechner's braid of entertainment and efficacy (pp. 129-30). Thompson makes a consistent, sincere and timely argument. While the study has not in fact established a fully fledged vocabulary and set of tools for third parties to affectively and effectively understand and practise theatre in war-torn societies, it is an important first step in this direction.