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Arts Praxis Volume 4

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The journal Arts Praxis provides a platform to discuss important issues related to arts in society and aims to publish scholarly yet accessible contributions on these topics.

Arts Praxis aims to interrogate why the arts matter and how they can be argued for in different domains. It encourages contributions that deconstruct pressing issues facing the arts and are written accessibly for a wide readership but are also informed and scholarly.

The 2016 NYU Forum on Educational Theatre invited global participants to propose workshops, papers, performances around topics related to drama education, applied theatre, theatre for young audiences and play production.

ARTSPRAXIS

ISSN: 1552-5236

EDITOR
Jonathan Jones, New York University, USA

EDITORIAL BOARD
Amy Cordileone, New York University, USA
Norifumi Hida, Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music, Japan
Byoung-joo Kim, Seoul National University of Education, South Korea
Ross Prior, University of Wolverhampton, UK
Nisha Sajnani, New York University, USA
Daphnie Sicre, Borough of Manhattan Community College, USA
Prudence Wales, Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Hong Kong
James Webb, Bronx Community College, USA

ARTSPRAXIS provides a platform for contributors to interrogate why the arts matter and how the
arts can be persuasively argued for in a range of domains. The pressing issues which face the
arts in society will be deconstructed. Contributors are encouraged to write in a friendly and
accessible manner appropriate to a wide readership. Nonetheless, contributions should be
informed and scholarly, and must demonstrate the author’s knowledge of the material being
discussed. Clear compelling arguments are preferred, arguments which are logically and
comprehensively supported by the appropriate literature. Authors are encouraged to articulate
how their research design best fits the question (s) being examined. Research design includes
the full range of quantitative-qualitative methods, including arts-based inquiry; case study,
narrative and ethnography; historical and autobiographical; experimental and quasi-experimental
analysis; survey and correlation research. Articles which push the boundaries of research design
and those which encourage innovative methods of presenting findings are encouraged.

This issue of ARTSPRAXIS builds upon the issues raised during The NYU Forum on Educational
Theatre (2016). This forum was part of an ongoing series NYU is hosting on significant issues that
impact on the broad field of educational and applied theatre. Previous forums have been
dedicated to site-specific theatre (2015), teaching artistry (2014 and 2005), developing new work
for the theatre (2013), theatre for young audiences (2012), theatre for public health (2011),
citizenship and applied theatre (2010), theatre pedagogy (2009), Shakespeare (2008), drama
across the curriculum and beyond (2007), ethnotheatre and theatre for social justice (2006), and
assessment in arts education (2003). The NYU Forum on Educational Theatre invited the global
community to propose workshops, papers, posters, narratives, and performances around one of
the following topics:

 Drama in Education (i.e., studies in drama/theatre curriculum, special education,


integrated arts, assessment and evaluation)

 Applied Theatre (i.e., studies in community-based theatre, theatre of the oppressed, the
teaching artist, diversity and inclusion)

 Theatre for Young Audiences and Play Production (i.e., studies in acting, directing,
dramaturgy, playwriting, dramatic literature, theatre technology, arts-based research
methodologies)

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to Jonathan Jones, New York University, Program
in Educational Theatre, Pless Hall, 82 Washington Square East, Rm 223, New York, NY 10003,
USA. Email: jonathan.jones@nyu.edu
Cover Photo © Jonathan Jones, 2010

Originally published in 2017.

Layout for this 2nd Edition revised and edited by Jonathan Jones, 2018.

2nd Edition © 2018 New York University


ARTSPRAXIS

Volume 4 Number 1 May 2017


Editorial ii

APPLIED THEATRE ARTICLES


Responsivity in applied theatre practitioner expertise: Introducing 1
identifying patterns and names
Kay Hepplewhite

Making theatre in communities: A search for identify, coherence, and 14


cohesion
John Somers

The long game: Progressing the work from thesis to practice 24


Linden Wilkinson

Discovering a planet of inclusion: Drama for life-skills in Nigeria 38


Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

DRAMA IN EDUCATION ARTICLE


The evolution of monologue as an education 54
Scott Welsh

THEATRE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES ARTICLES


Noise as queer dramaturgy: Towards a reflexive dramaturgy-as-research 65
praxis in devised theatre for young audiences
Jessica M. Kaufman

Children’s theatre: A brief pedagogical approach 79


Dennis Eluyefa

YOUTH THEATRE ARTICLES


Feeling Blue: An investigative apparatus 94
Clare Hammoor

Participatory aesthetics: Youth performance as encounter 108


Pamela Baer

From Les Mis to Annie, Jr.: A discussion of dramaturgical adaptation for 124
musical theatre in education and accessibility of musical theatre to youth
Sean Mayes

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Editorial
JONATHAN JONES
jonathan.jones@nyu.edu

I am proud to present this new issue of ArtsPraxis, featuring articles in


response to the guiding questions and themes established for the NYU
Forum on Educational Theatre in April 2016, which included applied
theatre, drama in education, and theatre for young audiences. As a
number of authors submitted articles under the heading of youth
theatre, I curated a stand-alone section for this topic as well as I felt it
wise to highlight the breadth of research in this area at this time.
At this time. At other times, such a phrase might not warrant extra
attention, but these times are different from what many of us have
known before. In light of current leadership in the United States, Brexit
in the United Kingdom, the unprecedented election cycle in France, the
provocations of President Putin, the atrocities committed by Bashar al-
Assad against his own people, Indonesia considering the expansion of
sharia law beyond the Aceh Province, following the Turkish
referendum under President Erdoğan, the instability of the North
Korean regime, the ongoing global refugee crisis, and the devastation
of global climate change—it may seem that the world is on fire. And
faced with what might be perceived as insurmountable challenges, we
theatre artists and educators persist. We create. We inspire. We resist.
A great asset of the 2016 Forum on Educational Theatre was the

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Jonathan Jones

degree to which the NYU Program in Educational Theatre was able to


reconnect with our global community. In large part, this was due to the
efforts of Philip Taylor following his experience at the International
Drama in Education Research Institute in Singapore in 2015. Under
the direction of Prue Wales, it became evident at that event, that even
in this time of inescapable electronic connections, there is nothing that
can take the place of face-to-face fellowship. Just this week, we are
coming off of our latest international conference, the NYU Forum on
Ethnodrama, looking at the intersection between theatre art and arts-
based research paradigms. After many months of political duress, we
communed. We shared art, research, and activism.
In the spirit of maintaining our international dialogue in these
troubled times, this issue of ArtsPraxis continues the conversation. Our
contributors present scholarship from Africa, Australia, Canada, the
United Kingdom, and the United States. I hope that you find this work
as inspirational as I have and that you consider joining us next spring
at the 2018 NYU Forum on Performance as Activism.

IN THIS ISSUE
In the Applied Theatre section, Kay Hepplewhite investigates the
applied theatre artist’s praxis, attending closely to their responsivity to
participants. John Somers identifies the unique features of community
theatre in the UK and the role it plays in fostering community cohesion.
Linden Wilkinson documents her experience developing an
ethnodrama about efforts to create a memorial for the Australian
Aboriginal massacre at Myall Creek focusing on trauma and
reconciliation. Finally, Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski chronicles her experience
utilizing applied theatre practices to teach life skills to adolescents and
young adults in Lagos, Nigeria.
In the Drama in Education section, Scott Welsh reflects on his
experiences teaching monologue workshops and interrogates the
relationship between education and theatre.
In the Theatre for Young Audiences section, Jessica M. Kaufman
unpacks dramaturgy-as-research, specifically looking at her work in
devised theatre for young audiences. Dennis Eluyefa provides a brief
overview of children’s theatre in the UK, navigating both the educative
and entertainment values of the work.
In the final section on Youth Theatre, Clare Hammoor employs

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Editorial

auto-ethnography to investigate what he calls, “the production of


meaning and the possibilities of children’s theatre.” Pamela Baer
illuminates a myriad of ways in which youth can engage in a
participatory aesthetic. And finally, Sean Mays looks at the many
challenges of adapting Broadway musicals for young performers.

LOOKING AHEAD
During the next few months, we will invite Joe Salvatore, Chair of the
2017 NYU Forum on Ethnodrama, to serve as co-editor, looking to
identify highlights of the diverse offerings at the Forum for inclusion in
a special edition of ArtsPraxis (Volume 4 Number 2). Following that
issue, we will again engage members of the Educational Theatre field
who may or may not have been present at the Forum yet want to
contribute to the ongoing dialogue around our three areas of
specialization: applied theatre, drama in education, and theatre for
young audiences. The call for papers will be released concurrently with
the next issue (November 2017) and the submission deadline is
February 1, 2018.

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise:


Introducing Identifying Patterns and Names
KAY HEPPLEWHITE
NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY
kay.hepplewhite@northumbria.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
This article outlines a research project investigating the expertise of
applied theatre practitioners. Summarising some of the research
approaches and findings, a conceptualization of ‘responsivity’ is
proposed to encapsulate the blended expertise of those artists that
work in community, participatory and applied settings. The ‘practice
responsive’ research methodology utilizing ‘reflective dialogues’ with
practitioners is explained and the resulting artists’ commentaries are
embedded throughout. I outline how reflection and response thread
through a conceptualization of applied theatre in literatures, and
discuss how these themes informed both the method and the findings
of my research. Whilst offering namings for patterns found common to
practitioners operating across diverse contexts, the article also
acknowledges how naming can close down understanding of the
complex operations and qualities of the practitioner. I suggest a
theoretical proposition of ‘__’ (underscore) to open up understanding of
the workers and the work of applied theatre, in order to allow further
insight to their expertise. The proposal concludes by arguing how the
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Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

practitioners’ developmental response to the work enhances applied


theatre’s beneficial objectives for participants.

INTRODUCTION
The qualities demanded of a practitioner in applied theatre are
notoriously difficult to describe and can appear daunting. Their
expertise is made up of a combination of qualities and skills that build
on a foundation of art form knowledge, blending the ability to guide
creative performance activity with facilitation of positive engagement
through interactive exchange, which in turn, ethically takes account of
context and objectives. To manage these multiple demands, a
practitioner develops holistic expertise in response to the work.
Building on this premise, my paper will introduce a concept of
'responsivity' as a way to identify patterns within the enigmatic
sensibilities, revealed through analysis of a number of applied theatre
practitioners. Responsivity is a way of discussing how in-the-moment
choices are made and how, whilst acknowledging a focus on the
participants, the practitioners also develop within the practice.
The commentaries included in this article are drawn, with full
agreement, from ‘reflective dialogues’ (see also Hepplewhite, 2016)
undertaken with a number of senior practitioners in the UK, which
contributed to the research for my PhD thesis investigating applied
theatre practitioner expertise. Helen Nicholson (2005) highlights the
important pattern of self-reflection within the field: ‘Applied drama has a
reflexive ethos, a tradition of creative and critical questioning’ (p. 166).
A ‘reflexive ethos’ was a key informant in the structure of my research
methodology and has informed my proposed concept of responsivity.
This paper cites extracts from the 'reflective dialogues' with artists
operating in applied, participatory and community contexts. The
process used video-recordings to capture moments of workshop or
rehearsal, allowing both researcher and artist to co-reflect on the
detailed navigation of practice decisions. The transcribed dialogues
highlighted their concerns and values about the work, aiding analysis
and pointing to a set of patterns that emerged as a fundamentally
responsive expertise.
Responsivity is a route to explaining the expertise of applied
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Kay Hepplewhite

theatre practitioners and thematically reflects analysis of applied


theatre; Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston (2009) discuss how the ‘very
form itself is responsive to the circumstances in which it is used’ (p.
10). My research explores how responsive-ness is evident in the
expertise of the practitioners undertaking the work, investigating in-the-
moment choices and what enables them to operate well. Nicholson
(2005) describes a responsive approach that embraces aesthetic
concerns:

Contemporary theatre practitioners who work in educational and


community contexts are, at best, developing practices that are
both responsive to the narratives and cultural memories of the
participants with whom they are working and artistically
imaginative (p.152).

Although focused on the impact of arts participation, the research also


revealed how the practitioners prioritised their identity as artists; how
this informed their relationships with participants, the processes and
practices within the work.
The researched practitioners worked across a range of sites of
participatory practice within education, health, community and other
social applications of theatre and drama. Informed by a pedagogic
motive, the related terminologies of responsivity that I introduce in this
article aim to support development of student and novice practitioners.
Having worked in community and educational applications of drama
and theatre, and now lecturer involved with students developing their
expertise in applied theatre, I was looking for a way to supplement
practice learning with research analysis and seeking a vocabulary for
what is sometimes hard to name. My concern is with the practitioners’
expertise, an embracing term that includes approaches and qualities,
skills and sensibilities, understandings and ethos, all of which informs
practice choices and enables a responsive way of operating.
Qualities of practitioners are highlighted elsewhere in literatures;
some features are touched on here to establish a context for my own
research findings. Eugene Van Erven (2013) discusses skills of
‘community artists’ who walk ‘the fine line between mainstream arts
and the world of ordinary people’ including ‘temperament, commitment,
stamina and courage’ (p. 140). Prentki and Preston (2009) highlight
humility, sensitivity and adherence to democratic principles (p. 252).

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Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

James Thompson (2015) highlights the importance of ‘attentiveness’


and develops what he names as an ‘aesthetics of care’ about a ‘set of
values realised in a relational process’ (p. 437). Thompson
emphasises a care for the whole experience of the practice, including
audience relationship, within an ‘affective, sensory dynamic’ (p. 439).
Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton (2013) reflect on responsive
qualities to consider issues of implementation and facilitation:

An applied facilitator...will be consistently responsive to all the


contextual factors at play in each session: who are these people?
What do they bring with them? How are they different today from
yesterday? How does this space shape what we do? What is the
social health of the group? (p. 7).

Prendergast and Saxton make links in particular with educational


applications of drama and theatre, highlighting how facilitation is
centred on immediate influences of place, space and participants.
As a result of my research and to aid understanding of the
complexities of practice, I formulated a series of labels for inter-related
patterns that emerged as evident across the range of practitioners.
These proposed facets of responsivity (awareness, anticipation,
adaptation, attunement and respond-ability) are not offered as a
universal catch-all list of ‘how to do it’, but as a way of encapsulating
common approaches and qualities within their expertise:

 anticipation and adaptation – being able both to plan and to


respond well in the work
 awareness – of issues relating to the politics and ethics of the
social context
 attunement – which builds on an awareness- having an
empathetic and informed response to the practitioners
 respond–ability – where practitioners are able to nurture, grow
and develop themselves through the work.

The feature of ‘respond-ability’ explains how practitioners were


themselves receptive to applied theatre’s ethos of change. Rather than
fixing what they do, the practitioners were open to the possibility of
what their work can be. What enriched them was also that which
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Kay Hepplewhite

allowed for the work to be creative for the participants. This trope of
open-ness informed my way of conceptualising the work. The article
returns later to illuminate some of these patterns with material from the
reflective dialogues.

PRACTICE RESPONSIVE RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Naming the practice and the applied theatre practitioner


Recognising that practitioners work across locations and with a
diversity of participant groups using many difference descriptive titles,
the research was seeking to discover whether there were practices
common to different contexts, such as drama in schools, education,
work with the elderly, in health or care contexts and with communities
such as prison or those with disability. Many of those researched move
between locations of practice, adopting concerns and language of the
context whilst maintaining aspects of their own practices and
objectives. The naming of practitioners in applied theatre can provide
both a clue, but also a barrier to the understanding of their expertise.
Names are partially dependant on localised use, but a widely
recognised list can include many labels: teaching artist, facilitator,
animateur (in community arts), community director, participatory artist,
actor/teacher (in Theatre in Education), workshop leader, conductor (in
Playback Theatre), Joker (in Forum Theatre). Naming puts the focus
on the practitioner, centring them at the heart of the practice, but I
queried whether how they name themselves and what they are called
by others fully communicates what they do.
The diversity of names for practitioners reflects the eclectic nature
of applied theatre itself. Acknowledging the gathering of many types of
practice, Michael Balfour (2009) questions any consistency of identity,
describing applied theatre as ‘an ‘umbrella’ title that contains as many
contradictions as it does commonalities’ (p. 348). The proliferation of
labels for practitioners can be evidence of these ‘contradictions’.
However, without proposing a wholly homogenous identity, my
research suggested there are intersections of activity encompassed
within the range of labels. It may be significant to understanding of the
nature of these practitioners to ask why no single name for the
practitioner has evolved as dominant. Those I researched welcomed a

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Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

focussed debate about identity in relation to their expertise.


Interestingly, few used the term applied theatre and there was no
conclusive common name in their own use of labels. I recognise that
concerns about naming may be of greater interest to academics and
researchers. Choice of nomenclature reflects discourses and an
opportunity to deconstruct ideas. Debates around applied theatre,
aesthetics, objectives and politics are tied up in the use of titles for
practitioners.
Reflecting the disputed and diverse identity of applied theatre,
differing titles are adopted in books significant in the initial
establishment and formulation of the term of applied theatre. These
include the following: ‘teaching artist’ (Taylor, 2003), ‘facilitator’
(Thompson and Schechner, 2004), ‘practitioner’ (Nicholson, 2005).
More recent studies of practice use ‘facilitator’ as a default name of
choice (e.g. Prendergast and Saxton, 2013, and Preston, 2016),
although this potentially makes the role as artist less visible, as
discussed further below. The researched practitioners used a range of
self-labelling; some titles were dictated by a job description, for
example, ‘Director of Engagement’. Other names were externally
ascribed by the many contexts within which they operated as free-
lancers: for example, the same youth theatre drama leader was
sometimes facilitating other community groups, also worked as a clown
doctor in children’s hospitals, as well as being a respected director and
writer for professional contexts.
Some hybrid labels attempt to name key features of the role; in
‘teaching artists’, for example, Philip Taylor (2003) brings together two
strong influences in a term that ‘highlights the pedagogical function,
which should drive the leaders’ artistry’ (p. 53). Along with Taylor’s
emphasis on artistry, I propose that a graft rather than hybrid image
roots the practice in the art form. This avoids any dominance of the
more instrumental aspects of the practice that can illicit criticism of
over-emphasis on measurable outcomes and goal-focused artistic
processes. The inclusion of ‘artist’ allows more interpretive leeway for
understanding what the practitioner actually does and reflects an
enduring concern for the aesthetics of practice.
In my research dialogues, knowledge of the art form was seen as
an essential foundation to their successful operation as a practitioner
and, for some, applied practice with communities was only one part of
their working life in theatre. Jan Cohen-Cruz (2010) outlines,
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Kay Hepplewhite

What distinguishes engaged theatre from the mainstream is not


lack of technique, which many performances that fit the engaged
criteria have in abundance, but rather the artists’ actively
committed relationship to the people most affected by their subject
matter (p. 9, my italics).

I argue that practitioners are operating with particular expertise to


distinguish this work from, for example, an artist who chooses to use
participation as a feature of their practice. The applied theatre ‘artist’ is
doing more, is more than just an artist, as Cohen-Cruz suggests in her
discussion of (her preferred term of) engaged theatre. These are
responsive artists; their expertise is specifically focused around the
‘actively committed relationship’ they dialogically nurture with
participants. The quality of responsivity can distinguish definition of this
type of work.
The ability to focus on and respond to the experience of the
participants clearly distinguished the projects and practitioners in my
research as applied theatre, contributing to my formulation of
responsivity. Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton (2013) highlight
participant needs when outlining a series of desirable qualities for an
applied drama facilitator, concluding the list with ‘the kind of person
who… is able to “de – centre”; in other words to see the work as about
and coming from the participants rather than from him/herself’ (p. 5).
This de-centring is a phenomenon that I have been exploring with
evidence from a range of practices, informing my use of the concept of
the underscore: ‘__’.

The practitioner conceptualised as ‘__’


In conceptual terms, the signifier often fails to convey the exact
meaning of what it describes. No single one of the labels outlined
above can alone encapsulate all the skills and activities of the
practitioners and this has led to my substitution of a double underscore
(‘__’) to represent the names of the practitioners in writing. The
underscore, or __, is proposed as an alternative, non-label, and a
replacement for the multiple nomenclature and implications associated
with existing names for the role. This concept of __ is a temporary
strategy to ‘underscore’ and hold in one place the identity of the
practitioner. In using __, I am contesting the fixed or certain meanings

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Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

of the names used for the work of applied theatre practitioners to


further explore their expertise.
Theoretically, __ opens up a potential interrogation of the subject.
Jacques Derrida, within an essay in On The Name (1995), questions
the connection between identity and what one is called, ‘you are not
your name, nor your title’ (p. 12, italics in original). I utilise this notion of
naming as a substitute for the being in my research. The meanings
associated with naming the practitioner are destabilised and opened
up to multiple interpretations and potential features within __ as the
new site of identity. This concept does not petition for one
homogenised perception of practice through the substitute signifier of
__, but encourages a fresh viewing.
My analysis seeks to find detail in the common and draw
interesting observations from evidence of the differences presented by
the work explored. Exploring the nature of performance, Sarah Jane
Bailes (2010) discusses ‘an eradicable duplicity in live art practices,
evidenced through theatre’s materiality and its ambition: that it can at
the same time both be and not be the thing it is portraying’ (p. 10). The
underscore serves as a performative way to allow analysis of the
practitioner; my research hopes to reveal new ways of seeing the work
of the __s through them both being and not-being the thing that they
are named as. The theatre practitioner, when ‘applied’, responds to
each of the participants, is required to answer to the demands of
stakeholders and context, be more than just an artist, all of which
contributes to the role’s performed identity as multiple, unfixed,
responsive.
Proposing the practitioner as __ allows us to interrogate what they
represent when they are practicing. I return here to the voices of
researched __s to fill out notions of responsivity. The research asked
the practitioners to reflect on how they saw themselves in the work, for
example:

As an energy ball, I am giving out energy. That’s my style, I am a


heightened version of myself, [gesture] Ta dah! The way that I
move and the way that I speak, I am performing a different version
of myself and that is different whatever context I am in...
sometimes standing back is the right energy (Amy Golding).

The empty space of the underscore resonates with the responsive


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Kay Hepplewhite

nature that Golding discussed. This image is multi-facetted, ever-


changing and ‘performed’ differently, as required, often making space
for the performance of others by ‘standing back’. Practitioners’
commentaries illustrated facets of responsivity through a theme of
openness, such as this description of:

Practitioners that are very comfortable with having their feet in


many, many different worlds … playing between the boundaries of
providing structure but also areas of openness and being able to
facilitate and negotiate that … you would have to come in to this
work because you believe in it (Deborah Pakar-Hull).

The theme of ‘openness’ was valued here alongside the ability to


structure work, and the work was signalled as attracting committed
practitioners: ‘you believe in it’. Openness was also highlighted within
practitioners’ concerns about planning and responding:

I find it much easier to be in the moment if I know I’ve got quite a


clear plan or a set of activities and sometimes it’s slightly about
buying myself headspace because of course you can completely
re-write a plan and take a totally different direction… I am
interested in sharing my skills but I’m interested in creating
structures for other people to be creative, seeing what journeys
they might go on (Annie Rigby).

Rigby’s comments typically outline how planning (paradoxically)


enabled the practitioners to be more open and responsive, illustrating
the patterns I have highlighted as anticipation, adaptation and respond-
ability. She expressed a responsibility to prepare and lead, but also a
desire to leave space for participants as an ethic for the work. A
satisfaction was gained from not locking down the processes, thereby
allowing for the interests and creativity of the participants. Further
comments reflected on qualities that the work demanded:

An openness, just a complete clean slate. An openness that when


you go into that room you sort of expect the unexpected and
you’re willing to go with that and play with that … I think that’s –
for me – the most exciting thing about my kind of work and the
people I work with. I think it keeps me alive, I think it keeps me

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Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

excited (Pady O’Connor).

The potential for the facilitator also to be enriched and sustained by the
work was evident, illustrating my proposal of a feature of respond-
ability as a motivator for the work. In his commentary Pady O’Connor
valued an ability to be open about qualities needed in the role; he was
open to growth and new knowledge in himself. Tim Wheeler articulated
an important ethos of being open to possibility and the ‘unknown’:

We're made and informed by perspectives and concerns of the


work, but the projects also have an element and feeling from the
unknown. Unpredictability and being open to possibility; that's
maybe an important element, that's part of an ethos of choices
and decisions in the work (Tim Wheeler).

Practitioners were open to applied theatre’s ethos of change and


discussed how they were richly rewarded. The ability to respond was
embedded within their approaches and respond-ability discusses how
their own openness to growth was an essential part of the work, and
also that which provided the greatest rewards:

It re-arranges your insides a little bit and you have to just


negotiate your way through the rest of the world (Laura Lindow).

Actually the reason I’ve been doing it is because it feeds me, I feel
a bit more connected to the world (Annie Rigby).

I am fed (Adrian Jackson).

Respond-ability is a way to conceptualize how a practitioner is


nurtured. They value the experience of art, evidencing a synthesis of
their own response and their artistic concerns. This is seen to increase
purpose in the work and a fruitful experience for all:

I think everyone's developing, I'm developing myself in that


moment, I'm developing them in that moment, ‘cause otherwise
it’s not creative is it? (Juliet Forster).

Forster’s comments here encourage a view of the practitioner as a


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Kay Hepplewhite

blend of both artist and facilitator. There are useful pedagogical


implications arising from my proposal of respond-ability, concerning the
education and training of future applied theatre practitioners who value
the role of art within the work.
Discussing an aesthetic value for applied theatre, Gareth White
(2015) highlights the contribution of layers of experience and a plurality
of interpretation. He concludes, ‘there is art in participation that invites
people to experience themselves differently, reflexively and self-
consciously, and that is shaped both by facilitating artists and by
participants themselves’ (p. 83). Reflective discussion of practitioner
views of their work forms a vital part of this paper, seeking to explore
how this ‘art of participation’ is managed.
Acknowledging the prioritization of participant focus, I suggest,
however, that a facilitator does not have to be a selfless or invisible
part of the creative process. Indeed, omitting the role and motivations
of the artist in the formula for practice risks losing much of the possible
value to the work as a whole. This type of artist, whatever they may be
named, situates their self within the work in the same way they hope
the participants also engage. Respond-ability can promote valuable
outcomes and ensure the practitioner’s own full engagement within a
responsive medium. And the rewards for the practitioner can also lead
to a greater enrichment of the participant experience, which is, after all,
applied theatre’s primary focus.

Drawing on research conversations and reflective dialogues with:


Luke Dickson, TIE actor, Leeds
Amy Golding, Live Youth Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne
Juliet Forster, York Theatre Royal
Adrian Jackson, Cardboard Citizens, London
Catrina McHugh, Open Clasp Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne
Pady O’Connor, The Fool Ensemble, Gateshead
Deborah Pakhar-Hull, Theatre Blah Blah Blah, Leeds
Annie Rigby, Unfolding Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne
Tim Wheeler, Mind The Gap, Bradford

11
Responsivity in Applied Theatre Practitioner Expertise

SUGGESTED CITATION
Hepplewhite, K. (2017). Responsivity in applied theatre practitioner
expertise: Introducing identifying patters and names. Arts Praxis, 4
(1), 1-13.

REFERENCES
Bailes, S. J. (2010). Performance, theatre and the poetics of failure.
London and New York: Routledge.
Balfour, M. (2009). The politics of intention: Looking for a theatre of
little changes. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of
Applied Theatre and Performance, 14 (3), 347-359.
Cohen-Cruz, J. (2010). Engaging performance: Theatre as call and
response. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1995). On the name. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press.
Hepplewhite. K. (2015). The applied theatre practitioner as dialogic
hero. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied
Theatre and Performance, 20 (2), 182-185.
Hepplewhite, K. (2016). More than a sum of parts? Responsivity and
respond-ability in applied theatre practitioner expertise. S. Preston
(Ed.), Applied theatre: Facilitation: Pedagogies, practices,
resilience. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Nicholson, H. (2005). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicholson, H. (2010). The promises of history: pedagogic principles
and processes of change. RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre
and Performance, 15 (2), 147–154.
Prendergast, M. and Saxton, J. (2013). Applied drama: A facilitator’s
handbook for working in community. Bristol and Chicago:
Intellect.
Prentki, T. and Preston, S. (Eds). (2009). The applied theatre reader,
London and New York: Routledge.
Taylor, P. (2003). Applied theatre: Creating transformative encounters
in the community. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.
Thompson, J. (2015). Towards an aesthetics of care. Research in
Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and
Performance, 20 (4), 430-441.
12
Kay Hepplewhite

Thompson, J. and Schechner, R. (2004). Why “social theatre”? TDR:


The Journal of Performance Studies, T181, 11-16.
Van Erven, E. (2013). Community arts dialogues. Utrecht: Treaty of
Utrecht, Community Arts Lab.
White, G. (2015). Applied theatre: Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury
Methuen Drama.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Kay Hepplewhite is a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University,
Newcastle upon Tyne England, teaching undergraduate and
postgraduate programmes in Drama and Applied Theatre. Kay has a
background as performer, theatre maker and facilitator in community
theatre and TIE. She has published in Theatre, Dance and
Performance Training journal (2013) and Research in Drama in
Education: Journal of Applied Theatre (2014 and 2015) and has a
chapter in Applied Theatre Facilitation: Pedagogies, Practices,
Resilience edited by Sheila Preston (2016), published by Bloomsbury
Methuen. Kay is undertaking a PhD at University of Manchester.

13
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Making Theatre in Communities: A Search for Identity,


Coherence, and Cohesion
JOHN SOMERS
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
J.W.Somers@ex.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
Traditionally, theatre was created and performed in communities to
celebrate religious and other significant aspects of shared community
life. Many such customs possessed a quasi-religious identity in which
theatre depictions were thought to appease those spiritual forces which
controlled the lives and fortunes of mere humans. In the UK and the
Western world more generally, the cohesiveness of community life has
lessened as families become more self-sufficient. Until relatively
recently, rural communities in South West England were dominated by
the farming industry. The land of many farms has been merged and
the farmhouses sold to relatively well-off incomers. They often operate
a self-sufficient life, sending their children to private schools outside
the community and engaging in leisure pursuits which take them out of
the community in which they live. Thus, community cohesion is
weakened and the opportunities for cooperative and communal action
lessened. Theatre has the potential to bring disparate members of a
community together in common purpose, providing a forum in which
new and lasting relationships can be formed. If the dramatised stories

14
John Somers

have their roots in the identity and history of the community in which
they are made, long-term residents have ways of sharing their
knowledge with the ‘newcomers’.

Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained


for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities
to which we all belong. Nor can any community long survive
unless its members dedicate some of their attention, energy and
resources to shared projects (Etzioni, 1997).

WHAT IS COMMUNITY THEATRE?


Community Theatre has a variety of roots and functions related to its
cultural, social and political setting and its purpose in those specific
environments. In some cases, it may be that community rituals and
stories, often deeply embedded in cultural and/or religious traditions1,
are performed as an integral part of defining and celebrating a
community’s cultural and spiritual identity. Some of the latter date back
for many centuries but continue to be performed, although the theatre
content has become objects of heritage rather than contemporary life.
Other forms of Community Theatre have political intent, to inform and
energise a community in bringing change or in asserting human rights,
Theatre for Development in Africa for example2 or Purna Chandra
Rao’s work in Hyderabad supporting peasants’ land rights against
rapacious landowners3. It can also be dangerous. Rao’s fellow-
countryman, theatre activist Safdar Hashmi, was beaten to death while
performing a street play Halla Bol during municipal elections in the
Jhandapur Sahibabad area on January 1, 19894 (S. Pai, University of
Delhi, personal communication, April 2008).
Alternatively, the exciting work of ‘Z Divadlo’ in the small town of
Zeleneč, Slovakia, combines amateur community actors with the
expertise of a professional director, Jozef Bednárik. In Brazil, the

1 The Oberammergau Passion play, for example.


2 For example, see: Salhi, K. and Thiong’o, N. W. (Eds.). (1998). African theatre for
development: Art for self-determination. Bristol: Intellect.
3 See Sinha, S. (1995). “Education and the role of NGOs.”. In Deccan Herald.
4 See “Nine convicted in Safdar Hashmi murder case” in Rediff India Abroad (2003)

15
Making Theatre in Communities

theatre-making of Marcia Pompêo Nogueira (2006) and Beatrice


Cabral resonates in communities, some of which are in danger of
losing their cultural identify through the arrival of electricity and
television. I have had the pleasure of working in both places with these
people. The continuum stretches, therefore, from radical activist
theatre to benign celebration. In this article, I focus on Community
Theatre in rural contexts as I now practise mostly in a rural
environment.

THEATRE FOR CHANGE


Radical theatre for change has an extensive history in the UK. Given
the significant international demise of communism, most current
authoritarian governments are of the political extreme right;
consequently, many such theatre initiatives are situated in confirmed
socialist ideology (McDonnell, 2006). John McGrath’s work with 7:84
Theatre Company5 in Scotland is typified by the play ‘The Cheviot, the
Stag, and the Black, Black Oil’ which toured to rural locations in
Scotland broadcasting its protest against the exploitation of that
country, especially its off-shore oil, by the English6. In addition to
triggering societal change, there is also an intention to transform the
nature of theatre itself. Baz Kershaw believes that:

Community Theatre is potentially a radicalising and energising


force for effecting, if not a transformation of society, at least a
model for the transformation of the theatre into a more
genuinely popular and democratic art form (Kershaw, 1992, p.
28).

Such direct political theatre diminished in the UK with the demise of


Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of the 1980s, after
which radical Community Theatre seemed to lose its wellspring, focus
and target.
Whatever the source and form of Community Theatre, it is
generally welcomed as a positive sign that a community is prepared to

5 The company’s name based on the statistic that 7% of the world’s population own
84% of the wealth.
6 See McGrath, J. (1981). A good night out. London: Methuen.

16
John Somers

supplement the generally passive reception of stories available in


multitude from the print and broadcast media with narratives which are
made and performed within, by and to a specific community. In all
cases, these forms of community theatre take account of the particular
histories and concerns of the communities in which they are made and
performed.

COMMUNITY THEATRE IN THE UK


In the UK, 'Community Theatre' now generally refers to a specific
theatre form. Since Ann Jellicoe’s theatre work in the 1970s which led
to the formation of the Colway Theatre Trust in 1979, it has meant the
creation of a theatre event that has relevance for the particular
community in which it is created and performed, predominantly, by
members of that community (Jellicoe, 1987). One objective is to extend
participation beyond those who would normally be expected to engage
in performance events. There is also an element of celebration of what
it is to be part of a community. There are many roles that community
members can take up, especially in the community-based research
and creation of the drama content itself. As such it can be seen to
differ substantially from the USA definition of ‘Community Theatre’,
which can be characterised as the creation of performances, often of
well-known plays, by a group of amateur enthusiasts, usually in a
traditional theatre building and employing long-standing styles. In the
UK, this form of theatre is known as ‘Amateur Theatre’ or ‘Amateur
Drama’ and it is not what is being discussed here – except that a few
amateur theatre companies do have relatively radical policies in
originating and staging theatre.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF COMMUNITIES


In the space of sixty years, the fabric of rural English communities, and
many others throughout Europe, has changed radically. These shifts
have occurred due to several influences, among them:

 the changed nature of farming, leading to fewer people being


employed in agriculture;
 the migration of the working classes to urban environments;

17
Making Theatre in Communities

 ease of transport from rural to urban areas, the move to the


countryside by the middle classes7;
 the decline of many of the rituals of country living which only
made sense in a community of shared experience and
interdependence;
 the impact of global cultural values;
 the impact of television, consumerism and the new
technologies;
 the growth of excessive individualism (Etzioni, op cit). Some of
these influences have had positive effects – young people’s
increased awareness of wider educational and occupational
opportunities and life styles, for example, and the freeing up of
restrictive social conventions which made rural communities
uncomfortable for some who failed to ‘conform’.

The decline of shared work, interdependency and significant, shared


celebrations and rituals has led to the social fragmentation of rural
communities. Physical proximity is not enough; people living in the
same place geographically will not necessarily create the
circumstances which can produce a ‘community’.
A recent UK report shows that the economic and social
background of rural dwellers disadvantages them in comparison with
urban dwellers. For example, in rural areas, wages are 5% below the
national average whilst house prices are 16% higher. The resulting
disadvantage is particularly acute amongst the less prosperous,
indigenous, working class members of the community who tend to
move to urban areas where wages are higher and social; housing
more plentiful (Commission for Rural Communities, 2008, p. 28). My
Community Theatre work is mostly undertaken in South West England,
and the report says:

Outside some parts of London, the most unaffordable areas are


nearly all rural, with the South West showing as the ‘worst’ area
for affordability. There is a consistent pattern...that areas with
poor affordability also tend to have higher levels of inward

7 David Orr, Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation said in a press
release, "Unless we act now, we will create a rural theme park, where only the very
wealthy can live” (National Housing Federation. (July 25, 2006). Rural housing crisis
forces unprecedented alliance.
18
John Somers

migration and high levels of homes that are sold for cash. (Ibid,
p. 37)

Thus, inward migration of a middle-class nature is occurring in my


locality whilst the less well off migrate to the towns. Those of the latter
group who remain are subject to a range of disadvantages:

Disadvantage is likely to be multi-dimensional: not just about


financial resources, but also about a range of factors that
prevent a person from participating fully in society. (Ibid, p. 40)

THE LOSS OF SHARED STORY


One significant loss in current rural communities is the knowledge of
community stories. Residents without access to these, often apparently
inconsequential stories therefore lack a ‘sense of place’, a quality
which is best achieved through absorbing the layered meanings
accreted through centuries of, often oral, storytelling and shared
experience. Such stories have no forum for being shared unless, as
Etzioni says, members of a community ‘dedicate some of their
attention, energy and resources to shared projects.’ In writing about
memory, A. C. Grayling says:

…what makes a person the same person through life is the


accumulating set of memories he carries with him. When these
are lost, he ceases to be that person and becomes someone
else, new and as, yet, unformed (2001).

If we substitute ‘community’ for ‘person’, the statement still holds true,


for if a community’s collective memory is lost, it too must be reformed.
Theatre can be an important approach in building this new community
identity and can, through its research and performances, ensure its
development is based firmly on elements of the past. Such theatre
represents a dynamic exploration and presentation of the defining
narratives of a community. There is evidence that communal activity is
decreasing whilst isolated, individual action increases. This is borne
out by Robert Putnam’s analysis of the changes in community in the
USA:

19
Making Theatre in Communities

… the forms of participation that have withered most noticeably


reflect organised activities at the community level ….
Conversely, the activities … that have declined most slowly are,
for the most part, actions that one can undertake as an
individual …. In other words, the more that my activities depend
on the actions of others, the greater the drop-off in my
participation (2000, p. 44 - 45).

Another metaphor for ‘newcomers’ lack of knowledge of a community’s


past is that, if we regard the long-term history of a community as a
story, unless newcomers make efforts to understand the community’s
past, they will be in possession of pages of a book which stand alone
and do not have the preceding story sections. Thus, for example, it is
difficult to work out if the statements on that page are sincere or simply
intended by the speaker to deceive. Long-term residents who hold
knowledge of the community’s past may see the incomers as ‘more
educated’ and in other ways disconnected from them; yet the ‘locals’
may hold knowledge of a community which is of great value in creating
Community Theatre.

THE CONCEPT OF THEATRE AS COMMUNAL WORK


As previously mentioned, sixty years’ ago, rural English communities
were relatively closed and interdependent. At that time, the parish was
a site for work with perhaps 90% of people employed in the community
and only a small number of professionals venturing outside it.
Currently, in Payhembury Parish where I live in England, it is probable
that 90% of the working section of the population of 470 work outside
the Parish which is seen simply as a place to live. Clubs, societies and
more informal meeting points in the Parish are largely stratified by age
criteria, reducing inter-generational contact.
I believe that theatre-making can be a challenge; not just
dramatically, but in terms of the ‘labour’ needed to make it happen. I
use it to create a communal focus in the Parish, a shared project that
brings the disparate elements of the community together and
generates social capital. This was when I arrived at the concept of
‘theatre as communal work’, a shared activity which counters
‘excessive individualism’ and brings disparate people together to
discover and articulate the stories of the community within vertical
20
John Somers

rather than horizontal age-related groupings.

PERCEIVED IMPACT
I have many testimonies from participants to bear out the positive
outcomes which many experience having taken part in this form of
theatre. More generally, it is clear that individuals who have been
preoccupied with their careers and home life, find involvement in this
theatre form and its creation from scratch, invigorating and enriching.
This is particularly so with women who, having dedicated important
energies to their paid work, domestic life and the creation of a ‘family’,
rediscover their largely dormant creative urge and abilities. Several
women of this nature have written proposals for new projects and in
several cases, complete scripts or scenarios. Over three years, one
retired policewoman who had never written a script before, researched
the history of a local house from the 13th Century onwards and, with
assistance, created scenarios for nine site-specific scenes. In several
cases, those who journeyed to Payhembury to take part in projects
have established theatre companies in their own communities.
Numerous men who regarded drama-making as socially ‘above them’
have become and remain involved as they come to realise that their
local knowledge is valued in such enterprises. Some dip in and out of
projects, others are regular participants in workshops, creative
meetings and productions. Several teenagers have followed drama
degrees and the lead boy in the WW1 production has been accepted
at and will attend RADA. At many levels and ways, Community Theatre
has impacted on the community and individuals and families within it.
Since its inception in 2000, thousands of audience members have
witnessed the outcomes of our work.

Examples of the work referred to in this article can be seen at the Tale
Valley Community Theatre website. For further details of the work,
please contact the author.

21
Making Theatre in Communities

SUGGESTED CITATION
Somers, J. (2017). Making theatre in communities: A search for
identity, coherence, and cohesion. Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 14-23.

REFERENCES
Commission for Rural Communities. (2008). The state of the
countryside. Cheltenham: Commission for Rural Communities.
Etzioni, A. (1997). In Arthur, J. (1998). Communitarianism: what are
the implications for education? Educational Studies, 24 (3), 3352-
368.
Grayling, A. C. (2001). The meaning of things: Applying philosophy to
life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Jellicoe, A. (1992). Community plays and how to make them. London:
Methuen.
Kershaw, B. (1992). The politics of performance. London, Routledge.
McDonnell, B. (2006). Theatre, resistance and community – some
reflections on ‘hard’ interventionary theatre. In M. Balfour & J.
Somers (Eds.), Drama as social intervention. North York: Captus
Press.
Nogueira, M. P. (2006). Taught only by reality, can reality be
changed?. In M. Balfour & J. Somers (Eds.), Drama as social
intervention. North York: Captus Press.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of
American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

22
John Somers

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
An Honorary Fellow at, Exeter University, England, John Somers is
Founding Editor of the journal Research in Drama Education. He
created Exstream Theatre Company which specialised in interactive
theatre in non-theatre sites. His play On the Edge won awards for its
contribution to a better understanding of mental health issues. He has
worked extensively internationally. He won the American Alliance of
Theatre and Education Special Recognition Award in 2003. Books
include Drama in the Curriculum (1995), Drama and Theatre in
Education: Contemporary Research (1996) and Drama as Social
Intervention (2006). His research interests focus on Applied Drama
and the role of narrative theory in drama.

23
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

The Long Game: Progressing the Work from Thesis to


Practice
LINDEN WILKINSON
lindenw@bigpond.net.au

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the evolution of significant findings made within
the context of a doctoral research project and the structures that
developed to share these findings through workshops for students and
teachers. As the research concerned an 1838 Australian Aboriginal
massacre and the construction of a memorial to commemorate this
event one hundred and sixty-two years later, the aim of the project was
to locate a reconciliation narrative. The project failed to do so, because
ultimately in the words of the participants the memorial was seen as a
beginning and not an ending.
Nevertheless this understanding did deliver powerful insights into
the complex nature of reconciliation within a dominant settler culture.
And it was felt that sharing these insights was worth pursuing.
Central to the doctoral research was the creation of a verbatim
theatre play, therefore the workshops relied on drama techniques to
establish through affect new ways of knowing shared history. However
the execution of the content proved challenging. Because of the way
settler history continues to be understood, engagement with the
intellect via political correctness as opposed to the imagination was
24
Linden Wilkinson

problematic. The necessity of prioritizing the imagination became as


much of a learning curve for workshop facilitators as workshop
participants.

INTRODUCTION
This paper begins with a discussion focusing on the development of a
cross-cultural verbatim play about an Australian Aboriginal massacre
at Myall Creek and the building of a memorial one hundred and sixty-
two years later to commemorate the atrocity. As a non-Aboriginal
playwright and researcher I assumed at the outset that the memorial
signified a story about closure. However the play, a doctoral project,
failed to find a reconciliation narrative, as intended, but the research
that contributed to the play’s developmental process revealed there did
exist a reconciliation preposition: the word ‘with’. This discovery, the
importance of the preposition ‘with’, resolved the thesis and arguably
advanced a more accessible and therefore more powerful bridge-
builder in the decolonizing space than the investigation of an existing
story (Aigner et al, 2014; Wilkinson, 2014). Reconciliation cannot be
just one story.
Because this discovery occurred through performance, a
collaborative arts practice, the opportunity arose to construct and
deliver a series of drama workshops for drama teachers and students.
The workshops were designed to explore the reconciliatory possibilities
suggested by the research findings and were to be delivered by myself
in partnership with Drama Educator Hannah Brown. Therefore after
addressing some pivotal moments in the journey towards the
recognition of ‘with’ in the research field, this paper then considers the
content, the intent and the efficacy of the workshops.
Finally this paper concludes with a reflection on those cautionary
responses to the workshop exercises, which, when they did arise, in
effect inhibited collaboration. Passivity fuelled by divergent
interpretations of political correctness proved challenging, particularly
when cognition was allowed to dominate affect and debate diffused the
workshop exercises. The cross-cultural field in the colonizer/colonized
context is undeniably one of confrontation but also one of humour and
hope; it is, I suggest, the very lack of safety in this space that, with
trust, speeds connectivity. The question this paper therefore considers

25
The Long Game

at its conclusion is how, as workshop facilitators, might we have


delivered safety and thus maximised participation and the rewards
from doing so.
But first an elaboration on the possibilities offered by that singular
preposition with companionable intent: the word ‘with’.

ALL THAT ‘WITH’ REVEALS


To work with each other, to be with each other, to learn with, to
imagine a shared future with, to acknowledge a shared past with each
other accentuates the importance of the transformative present and
simplifies the collaborative imperative inherent in undertaking
movement across cultures (Smith, 1999). ‘With’ encapsulates sharing
on all levels and holding the word in conscious regard, I suggest,
creates an equal space for diverse epistemologies. In practice however
experiencing the transformative potential of ‘with’ is elusive and no
doubt because of the way our Australian settler history is taught.
Despite being the oldest living culture on the planet, despite
archaeological evidence estimating Aboriginal occupation to be of
approximately 50,000 years’ duration (Gammage, 2013), there is still
no constitutional recognition in Australia that Aboriginal people were
here prior to British settlement 1788. Proclaimed ‘empty land’ or terra
nullius in 1770, Australia became subsumed by the British Empire as a
bulwark against French expansion in the South Pacific. Critical to the
terra nullius doctrine is an understanding that agriculture equates to
ownership; it was imperative then to support the founding terra nullius
myth by destroying or ignoring what is now recognised as deeply
sophisticated land and fire management practices developed over
millennia by Aboriginal people (Gammage, 2013; Pascoe, 2014).
The “disappearance” of 95% of the Aboriginal population in the
first one hundred years of British occupation once fuelled a belief that
the remaining 5% would similarly become invisible (Milroy, 2011). The
guerrilla warfare that characterized frontier settlement, that challenges
its legality spuriously based on the doctrine of terra nullius, was
ignored in history. There might now be attempts to recognize this
century of violence but there is little political will to address the true
nature of Aboriginal dispossession.
There is still no treaty and although through the judiciary there are
attempts to recognise land rights, as Reynolds (1999) maintains:
26
Linden Wilkinson

It is obvious that the doctrine of terra nullius still holds sway. It


may have been expelled from the courts but it still resides
securely in many hearts and minds. As a nation we find it very
hard to recognise our own distinctive forms of racism. They exist
in … ways of thinking which are often taken as no more than
common sense (1999, p. 222).

Becoming aware of this pervasive ‘common sense’ embedded in


colonizer history was for me the first disruption to the anticipated
narrative flow for the evolving play within my doctoral thesis. I wanted
to focus on the memorial; I was looking for a story about reconciliation,
I assumed that the massacre would be a significant but an inciting
event. What the first draft performed reading of the play, detailed
below, clarified for me as a researcher and as an arts practitioner was
the difference between history as data and history as drama: history as
it is taught and history as it is held in the body. Seeing my six actors,
three Aboriginal and three non-Aboriginal, working with each other,
focusing on text but through their bodies making sense of grief and
guilt, through movement shifting uncomfortably in a relational space
that reflected assumed privilege and profound injustice, changed my
understandings of history and the process of enculturation through the
dominant Western paradigm. And, consequently, changed the play.
Scholarship supports this experience.
Inherent in performance ethnography, the primary research
methodology employed in this study, is precisely this offer of the body
as a research site. Scholar and arts practitioner Jones (2005) confirms
that performance ethnography “rests on the idea that bodies harbour
knowledge about culture, and that performance allows for the
exchange of that knowledge across bodies.” (2005, p.339) It is the
body, according to Alexander (2005), which conveys the relationship
between culture and how it is experienced. It is performance-centred
research, which “takes as both its subject matter and method the
experiencing body situated in time, place and history.” (Conquergood,
1991, p.187)
Having Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal actors together, I
discovered, powerfully symbolised the history of dispossession. The
drama began in the massacre but once introduced it remained
omnipresent; in the play the memorial is a consequence of the

27
The Long Game

massacre but it is not a conclusion to the play’s story; if anything, it is a


call to consciousness.

WAKING UP TO HISTORY
My doctoral play, Today We’re Alive, was first read publicly at Myall
Creek on a Sunday morning in 2011 in an isolated tin shed situated in
north-west NSW, thirty-five kilometres from the tiny township of
Bingara and over six hundred kilometres from Sydney. The tin shed
has great community significance: it is the memorial hall built in 1923
on the banks of Myall Creek and it is dedicated to the local men of
another century, who never returned from World War 1.
Just five hundred metres away from the memorial hall, the
memorial to the Myall Creek massacre of 1838 snakes its way along a
ridge. The massacre, the slaughter of twenty-eight Weraerai old men,
women and children, is said to have taken place on the slopes below.
It is the only Aboriginal massacre in Australian history where some but
not all of the perpetrators were punished. Eleven of the twelve
perpetrators were arrested and seven of those were hanged; the four
who survived custody were released quietly back into society two
months after the hangings, so great was the uproar caused by the
unique judgement that called for white lives for black deaths.
All subsequent massacres went underground and despite the
existence of court records, it took over one hundred and sixty years for
this massacre site to be openly recognised. The committee of
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members, who created this memorial
over an eighteen-months’ period from 1998 to 2000 remain passionate
about its significance and its contribution to the national psyche.
The doctoral play was, and remains, verbatim text derived from
interviews with twenty Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants, most
of whom are still committee members. The play’s story, in this first
draft, arced from first contact in 1788 to the first commemorative
service at the memorial in 2000. The words of the play text faithfully
conveyed different versions of events but through performance it
became clear not all events had equal, linear, causal significance. For
this first reading the performers embodied culture not characters; with
occasional exceptions when documentary tracts were included, the
voices of the actors were the voices of the characters. Despite being
buried in the data the brutal truth of colonization emerged during this
28
Linden Wilkinson

first reading, particularly during the massacre sequence as it was told


from the Aboriginal point of view and through this, the past became
present in the now.

TRAUMA SITES AND LIVING HISTORY


As Edkins (2003) argues we must accept that sites where atrocities
have occurred will always exist in trauma time, where stories are truly
heard and the resonances from the past resound in the present. At
such places there is no resolution, no closure, because the multiple
narratives they evoke challenge inherited identity of both colonizer and
colonized. If we are, as either the colonizers or the colonized, to see
ourselves in new ways (Saul, 2008), to forge new realities, if we are to
remain open to different perspectives, then, as Edkins (2003)
contends, we must resist wanting to resolve the past.
At this first performed reading the actors struggled to find a rhythm
within a confusingly over-written text; the nature of first contact, the
wool boom, the power of the squatters, the arrests of the perpetrators,
the trails of the accused threatened to overwhelm the significant
content distilled from the research field – principally the on-going terror
for Aboriginal people as a result colonizer violence.
And yet the performance also elicited hope. The massacre might
have dominated the play’s story but it was the memorial story that
generated a new momentum. When two of the central players in the
memorial story came together, when “Letitia”8, a descendant of a
massacre perpetrator, met “Sally”, a descendant of a massacre
survivor and the Kamilaroi Elder, who initiated the memorial at Myall
Creek, ‘not one person didn’t cry’. What was true at their first meeting
in 1999, was equally true for its re-enactment at the memorial hall.
Tears of grief came during the massacre sequence and tears recurred,
this time of joy, during “Letitia’s” and “Sally’s” embrace, making this
moment an epiphany for actors and audience alike. In the first draft
Rhonda is reading “Sally” and Anna is reading “Letitia”; Gen, non-
Aboriginal, and Lily, Aboriginal, comment on the embrace. In this first
draft this moment became:

8 “Letitia” and “Sally” are not the research participants’ real names. As an undertaking
for research purposes, their privacy was protected. However in the script extracts
included in this paper the actors’ real names are used, as the script at this early point
did not have characters.

29
The Long Game

Rhonda stands, followed by the rest of the cast. Slowly


Rhonda reaches out to embrace Anna.

Gen: When Letitia met Sally not one person didn’t cry.

Anna: Sally and I, we became very emotional. It was very


emotional.

Rhonda: The families of the perpetrators came and asked


forgiveness.

Anna: Sally told me when we were alone, she said: I’ve never had
a sister but I consider you now my blood sister. So that was
special; that was really special.

Lily: You know, you don’t expect things to be done for Aboriginal
people.

Anna: Somebody said it must have been very cathartic for you,
but not really, no. My family broke up over it. They wouldn’t accept
it. They didn’t want people to know they were descended from a
murderer…My first response was I didn’t want to know, it was
shameful but I knew I couldn’t let it alone. There was something in
me that had to do something about it. I did feel that very, very
strongly.

Rhonda: I think there was a reconciliation there.

Lily: So what I thought when Sally hugged Letitia was like the
occupants of the house, the descendants, the ones who we’d
come in and done a home invasion on actually in that embrace
was like reconnecting with the land. It’s like through that embrace,
it’s like through that, connection and belonging to Australia is
really established. And it can only be done through Aboriginal
people.

Rhonda: And it all just come together.

30
Linden Wilkinson

The embrace is still part of the annual commemorative service held at


the memorial each massacre anniversary on or near June 10th. The
embrace remained through subsequent drafts and is a cathartic
moment in the final version of the play. A short promotional film clip of
the play includes the embrace and can be viewed here.
After a successful tour in 2013 and the play’s publication in 2014
(Playlab, 2014), the idea of developing a three-stage workshop aimed
at introducing workshop participants to a reconciliatory experience
gained momentum.

THE EVOLVING WORKSHOP


Mapping the workshop content reflected my own post-doctorate
understanding of reconciliation as a gradual process of increasing
awareness. This accelerating awareness led to a capacity to adapt, to
transform and could only be achieved by consciously entering the
shared space knowing one’s own inherited perspective, in my case
non-Aboriginal, while simultaneously recognising departure points in
terms of an Aboriginal perspective. Furthermore, as neither culture is
static, both perspectives are subject to change; the pathways along
which change occurs may not be predictable. Therefore to fully
understand another’s culture at any point in time, one first has to
understand one’s own.
Indigenous scholars identify such critical thinking as an essential
requirement for those entering the cross-cultural arena, as in this
space problematizing the dominance of Western epistemology is an
imperative (Smith, 1999; Chilisa, 2013). But to initiate this awareness
of multiple perspectives in a workshop scenario, when participants
could quite easily have never met anyone, who identified as Aboriginal,
was the first challenge. The cross-cultural space, it was decided, would
have to be manufactured through a brief exploration of vulnerability
and resilience, rather than race alone. If we could locate an empathic
response at the outset using drama techniques, we, Hannah, my
workshop collaborator, and I, felt we could continue to use different
sections of the play, Today We’re Alive, to enable individual responses
to a reconciliatory experience through the emotional and relational
opportunities offered by the performative.
The workshop we designed takes ninety minutes and has three
separate modules. The aims of these modules are:

31
The Long Game

 to illuminate the divisive imperative embedded in colonization,


 to nurture a dialogue with the internal critic
 to offer an opportunity to critically pursue a cross-cultural
collaboration in order to commence a shared artistic
endeavour.

It is hoped that through reflection and through feedback the


participants can become sensitized to on-going racism and how they
might potentially create new insights into their own understandings of
emergent reconciliatory initiatives.
We begin with a brief outline of the Myall Creek massacre and
memorial, then referring back to Reynolds’ (1999) observation that we
don’t necessarily recognise our own distinctive forms of racism, we
introduce a personal story about racism through filmed content. The
personal story belongs to a friend and colleague, Aboriginal actor,
singer and songwriter Elaine Crombie, and it concerns a particular
episode in her life, when at sixteen she was ridiculed at a party by an
older non-Aboriginal boy she assumed was her friend. Involving
betrayal, humiliation and racist slurs in regard to alcohol abuse, she
still carries the emotional scars of the sudden and unmotivated attack.
With her consent, we filmed her telling this story and interspersed that
footage with sequences of her performing her own music at a concert.
Her music manifests spirit and joy, her story about the boy
demonstrates chronic pain; in entwining these two aspects of Elaine,
her songs and her story, she offers insight into a universal narrative
about resilience. It is Elaine’s story about racism that we invite the
workshop participants to interpret through a series of three freeze
frames.
We ask our participants in groups to depict the origins of the
young man’s attitudes towards Aboriginal people. Media, family and
history text books are popular choices. Participants are then asked to
create a freeze-frame involving young man himself. Let’s call him
“Damo”. The task is to redeem him; we ask: what might subvert this
racist stereotype? We ask the participants to present a final freeze
frame with a caption. Sporting prowess, achievement and leadership
featured as redeeming agents. Participants therefore complete this
exercise having expressed through the body aspects of dominant
culture, marginalised culture and the possibilities offered by
32
Linden Wilkinson

instruments of inclusion.
The second exercise involves a verbatim speech from Today
We’re Alive, a story about an experience of Aboriginal spirituality from
the perspective of a non-Aboriginal man. It happens to be a beautiful
speech, rich in hesitation, filled with awe. Participants are grouped in
pairs and are invited to re-interpret this speech, filling in the hesitations
with internal dialogue. This exercise reflects those learnings from the
research field, which convey new understandings about the
relationship between the spoken word and silence in mapping cultural
change. Articulating what is unspoken opens participants up to the
possibilities of uncertainty as being a site of transformation; discoveries
made in this exercise, experienced as shifts in body language, in facial
expression, in breathing, flow into the workshop’s conclusion.
The final exercise involves using verbatim text, interwoven as a
dialogue, which has been taken from the play and adapted for the
exercise. “Jayson” is an Aboriginal artist, “Peggy” a non-Aboriginal
activist and both want to build a memorial but at the scene’s opening
neither of them are looking for partnership with each other:

Peggy: So here I am surrounded by memorials to dead white men


but nothing to Aboriginal people… And I thought I can’t get
anywhere with this. I don’t know if I have the energy, the
resources, the time, I don’t know if I should be doing it, I’m not
Aboriginal – so I left it.

Jayson: You walk away. Close the door. But in their absence
you’re glad to get away from those eyes. Eh? Those eyes –
watching.

Peggy: It’s not my place to be doing this.

Jayson: I think a memorial would be great. It’s great. To think that


it might be there to recognize the fact that those people were
massacred, right? But it doesn’t take away the fact that they were.

Peggy: A rock. A boulder. As simple as possible.

Jayson: As simple as possible – with maximum impact.

33
The Long Game

Peggy: With maximum impact.

Jayson: I want the privilege and honour of doing it.

Peggy: And it all just took off from there.

We ask that the participants determine prior to performing the scene


exactly when and why, as characters, they each decide to work with
each other. We then invite the workshop ‘audience’ to comment on the
transformative changes they noticed.
It is with the first and third exercises that we have occasionally met
resistance in the workshop environment. In the first exercise involving
freeze-frames there can be an unwillingness to portray stereotypes in
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures. In the third exercise,
reconciliatory outcomes can be too easily demonstrated rather than
experienced and participants are unable to articulate when the idea of
working together becomes a possibility. A return to respecting the
drama aesthetic and its integral contribution to the transformative
potential of performance, I suggest, could solve both these difficulties.
Theatre-makers in zones of conflict, Cohen, Varea and Walker
(2011), refer to their aesthetic as the resonant interplay between the
expressive forms of culture and those who participate in them. White
(2015) concludes in his discussion of applied theatre aesthetics that
there is an art in participation itself, “which invites people to experience
themselves differently, reflexively and self-consciously.” (2015, p. 83)
If we had introduced Elaine’s antagonist, “Damo”, into all the
freeze-frames, rather than just the fourth one, we would have enabled
workshop participants to create stereotypes through assumed
knowledge of “Damo’s” world and not directly reveal anything of
themselves. And we would have prioritised the collective imagination
through the invention of character.
Similarly, in the third exercise, we did not allow our workshop
participants to actually imagine the world ‘Peggy’ and ‘Jayson’ might
have inhabited. Where did these two disparate characters, both artists,
overlap? What would their memorial have been like? If we had allowed
time for our two characters to physically design their own memorial, we
would have, through their shared imagination, given all workshop
participants greater insight into both the nature of resistance and the
steps they took, as characters, towards acceptance of self and of
34
Linden Wilkinson

other.
Eager to pursue an outcome, we forgot that in trauma time there is
no closure; that reconciliation is a process. And it is through time,
through relationship and through the shared imagination in the cross-
cultural space that we find new ways of knowing.

CONCLUSION
What the workshops reveal is the challenge embedded in initiatives
that have a reconciliatory intent, where judgement, unexpressed anger,
unexamined arrogance and determined detachment can co-exist with
an expressed awareness of injustice and inequality. In terms of
attitudes and behaviours there could well be examined and
unexamined aspects of ourselves operating simultaneously. “Letitia”
might say: ‘There was something in me that had to do something about
it’ but in practice not everyone responds to the call in the same way.
What we discovered in the workshops is that creating a sense of
safety, where participants were free to express themselves through a
commitment to the tasks, does not reside in words. Our instructions as
facilitators, our reassurances, our shared dialogue with participants did
not always guarantee commitment. Safety, like trust, it seems, stems
from being given the freedom to imagine interior and exterior worlds
and the time to create them. On reflection, we recognise that there are
multiple possibilities influencing reconciliatory initiatives; part of the
reconciliatory process might well be a simultaneous reconciliation with
our divided selves. Because no-one starts as neutral.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Wilkinson, L. (2017). The long game: Progressing the work from thesis
to practice. In Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 24-37.

REFERENCES
Aigner, G. et al (2014). Lost conversations – finding new ways for
black and white Australians to lead together. Creative Commons.
Alexander, B. K. (2005). Performing ethnography: the re-enacting and
inciting of culture. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed.) (411-442). Thousand

35
The Long Game

Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc.


Cohen, C., Varea, R., & Walker, P. (2011). Acting together:
performance and the creative transformation of violence. Volume
1: Resistance and reconciliation in regions of violence. New York:
New Village Press.
Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinking Ethnography: towards a critical
cultural politics. Communication Monographs, 58 (2) pp.179-194.
Edkins, J. (2003).Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth – how Aborigines
made Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Jones, J.L. (2005). Performance and ethnography, performing
ethnography, performance ethnography. In D. S. Madison & J. A.
Hamera (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of performance studies
(339-345). Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.
Mienczakowski. J. (2003). The theatre of ethnography: the
reconstruction of ethnography in theatre with emancipatory
potential. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Turning points in
qualitative research, tying knots in the handkerchief (415-432).
Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.
Milroy, J. (2011). Introduction to Indigenous Australia. In L. Nash (Ed.),
An Introduction to Indigenous mental health DRAFT (4-21). NSW
Institute of Psychiatry.
Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu Black Seeds: agriculture or accident?
Broome: Magabala Books.
Reynolds, H. (1999). Why weren’t we told? Camberwell: Penguin
Books.
Saul, J.R. (2008). A fair county – telling truths about Canada. Ontario:
Penguin Group
Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies. London: Zed Books
Ltd.
White, G. (2015). Applied theatre: Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury.
Wilkinson, L. (2014a). Today we’re alive. South Brisbane: Playlab.
Wilkinson, L. (2014b) Today we’re alive – generating performance in a
cross-cultural context. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Faculty of
Education and Social Work, University of Sydney.

36
Linden Wilkinson

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
After a three decade-long career as a performer and television writer
and editor, Linden Wilkinson returned to Sydney University in 2003 to
attain a Drama teaching diploma. She completed her Master’s degree
in 2008 using verbatim theatre as a research modality to investigate
long term trauma and commenced her doctoral study in that same
year. Now published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2016), her
doctoral thesis again uses verbatim theatre to explore cross-cultural
content in the Australian context. She is an independent arts
practitioner and teacher and is currently developing a performance
project about military personnel transitioning out of the Australian
Army.

37
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Discovering a Planet of Inclusion: Drama for Life-Skills


in Nigeria
KAITLIN O. K. JASKOLSKI
UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN
kaitlin.kearns@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
This paper explores the on-going development of a Drama for Life-
Skills project in Lagos, Nigeria, which embraces aspects of applied &
educational theatre practices. Using neurodevelopmental disability
assessments and standards, the project creates a simultaneous
balance of teaching and learning life skills in the disability community.
It focuses on work currently being done with students of the Children’s
Development Centre Lagos, incorporating theatre practices into the
daily living activities of adolescents with disabilities with the goal of
gaining increased life skills. In developing their most recent production,
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion, members of the Centre team up with
teaching artists, therapists and community members to teach, learn,
practice and incorporate life skills with theatrical performances
designed for schools and community centers throughout Nigeria.
Company members with disabilities (including autism, cerebral palsy,
and various genetic disorders) perform with the hope of showcasing
their abilities, ending stigma, and inspiring opportunities for the
disability community throughout the nation. The paper will include

38
Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

anecdotes and analyzation from the performance praxis, development


of advocacy and vocationally-based theatre performances, and ways
to incorporate disability therapies (occupational, physical, multisensory,
communication) into theatrical performances. The paper also
discusses the importance of inclusion in destigmatizing disability and
the cognitive benefits of applied theatre within communities.

The sun stabs through the open windows of a large community center;
the air is stale, humid and filled with scents of petrol, exhaust and the
sweat of the 300 or so people crammed inside its doors. Outside, the
Islamic Call to Prayer beacons from the patch of concrete being used
as a makeshift mosque, while sounds of a sermon are garbled
deafeningly through the amplifier of a Pentecostal church across the
street. The community center is surrounded by traffic “go-slows” (traffic
jams), with buses stuffed to capacity by people and goods to sell at the
nearby market. Hundreds, if not thousands of drivers, honking horns or
yelling out of the windows mix with the sounds of street vendors
hawking their wares in a multitude of languages: English, Igbo, Yoruba,
Hausa and a mix of Pidgin. Children in wheelchairs or homemade
scooters tap on the car windows, begging for food or money; they are
patently ignored or worse, berated. There are people everywhere. This
is Lagos. This is Nigeria.
The crowd inside the community center sweats patiently as a
father pontificates on the stigma of disability and lists all the things his
son cannot do. Suddenly, a blur of cell phones are raised and aimed at
5 Nigerian astronauts, donned in green and white papier-mâché
helmets, as they take the stage. The crowd goes wild: cheering and
yelling as the astronauts begin to train using physical therapy
exercises. The audience stands and sings along with the national
anthem before the astronauts ready for their first countdown to blast-
off. Three galaxies, dressed in black capes decked with stars, dance
and parade planet-lanterns as the astronauts leave earth and discover
a new planet: the Planet of Inclusion. The crowd cheers as the
Nigerian flag is wedged into the sand, and screams with laughter as
mysterious space creatures surprise the brave astronauts. The space
creatures are familiar, dressed in colorful Nigerian ankara fabric but
have a surplus of extra arms, legs, mouths and eyes. The astronauts

39
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

are afraid at first, but show compassion to the space creatures and
soon the whole group is drumming, dancing, teaching each other to
cook, paint, clean or make beads. The audience is shocked; not
because of the extraterrestrial experience in front of them, but because
they have not seen an astronaut with Autism Spectrum Disorder teach
someone how to cook. Nor has a space creature with Down Syndrome
graced the stage with such incredible dance moves while an astronaut,
whose family believes she cannot speak, sings with heart and soul
over the cacophony of noise surrounding the community center. The
first performance of the Children’s Developmental Centre’s Planet of
Inclusion ends with a standing ovation.
The response of families, teachers and advocates after the first
performance is not typical in Nigeria. People with disabilities are
stigmatized, feared, and often kept separate from mainstream society.
The stigma of disability in Nigeria creates fear and misunderstanding
due to cultural and religious beliefs of sin, witchcraft and shame.
Therapist Maureen Chubamachie explains Nigerian stigma
surrounding disability: “To the elite, it is biological, genetic, but to the
common Nigerians, the masses, it is a curse, it is evil, it is punishment
for the sins of the parents or ancestors. It is believed that they bring
bad luck” (2016). In the commotion following the first performance, a
mother asks, “what juju [witchcraft] have you used to cure my child?”

WHAT IS DRAMA FOR LIFE-SKILLS?


Drama for Life-Skills is an arts-based program that uses task-
assessment and drama to teach and reinforce life skills while
promoting advocacy, vocational training and independent living for
adolescents and young adults with neurodevelopmental disabilities. It
began with a focus on how to teach specific skills for living (such as
cooking a meal, brushing your teeth, or asking for help), and follows
Boal concepts of solidary multiplication, or “one only learns when one
teaches” (Boal, 2006, p. 51). Students first learn life skills tasks
structured around cognitive assessment tools; upon mastery of each
task, the student then uses drama to model and teach other students
the task. The company of performers with disabilities then works
through the dramatic process to create a theatre performance around
the set of skills being learned, and creates a drama incorporating each
task. The performance of such a task-guided theatre performance is
40
Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

then used to teach peers, families, and communities about the abilities
of the performance company.
Drama for Life-Skills overlaps methods of teaching life skills to
special needs populations, including applied and educational theatre
praxis and disability arts performance, without specifically fitting into
any precise category. Though the foundation of Drama for Life-Skills is
heavily weighted in Boal, there are many influences from Applied
Theatre and the Disability Arts Movement. It is important to
acknowledge areas of resonance and divergence within each method.
With this in mind, it is essential to stipulate three critical aspects of
Drama for Life-Skills: neurodevelopmental disorders, a definition of life
skills, and task analysis.

ASTRONAUT TRAINING: SPECIAL EDUCATION, LIFE-SKILLS,


AND TASK ANALYSIS
The five brave Nigerian astronauts are members of the adolescent and
adult unit at the Children’s Development Centre (CDC), founded by Dr.
Yinka Akindadayomi. It is a one of just a handful of Nigerian institutions
where children and young people with neurodevelopmental disabilities
have a sense of belonging, as the Nigerian culture often shuns those
with disabilities. The adult and adolescent unit of the CDC currently
consists of 35 members between the ages of 16-48, all with varying
degrees and spectrums of disabilities, most falling within the realm of
neurodevelopmental disorders. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) groups neurodevelopmental
disorders as those that “manifest early in development…characterized
by developmental deficits that produce impairments of personal, social,
academic or occupational functioning.” Disabilities that fall into this
category include but are not limited to: Autism Spectrum Disorder,
Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Attention Deficit Disorder, genetic
disorders, intellectual disabilities and motor disorders (Porter 2016).
Neurodevelopmental disorders are spectrum disorders, wherein what
applies to one learner, may (but usually will not) apply to another with
the same diagnosis. For the purpose of this paper, the term
neurodevelopmental disorders/disabilities and special needs are used
interchangeably. The CDC, as one of few special education centers,
has a vision focused on the creation of centers in more local
government areas and other states within Nigeria. Due to the huge

41
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

gaps identified in providing appropriate services to children and young


people with neurodevelopmental disabilities in Nigerian communities,
the CDC also trains teachers and therapists in special education
methodology and assessments (Akindayomi, 2016).
The CDC uses a life skills curriculum, in addition to a variety of
physical and occupational therapies to train and teach learners at the
center. Life skills evaluation is used to benchmark and determine skills
needed to live inclusively, ideally independently, in mainstream society.
Skills include the activities of daily living such as eating, grooming,
community engagement, vocational skills, social skills, self-advocacy
and communication. Life skills curriculums have proven successful in
developing positive skills proficiencies for learners with
neurodevelopmental disorders (Meyers, 2011; Benz & Linstrom, 2003).
In order to structure educational outcomes, the CDC engages with
theories of task-analysis, as defined by Szidon (2010), and Partington
and Muller (2012) as the process of breaking a skill down into smaller,
more manageable components. Task-analysis has been shown to
effectively aid learners with neurodevelopmental disorders in acquiring
life skills (Szidon, 2010; Autism Speaks, 2013). In order to track
progress, guide and document the mastery of life skills through task
analysis for learners with neurodevelopmental disabilities, the CDC
uses the Assessment for Functional Life Skills created by Partington
and Muller (2012).
The Assessment for Functional Living Skills, referred as AFLS, is
an “assessment tool based on a criterion-referenced set of skills that
can demonstrate a learner’s current functional skill repertoire and
provide tracking information for the progressive development of these
skills” (Partington & Muller, 2012). It was developed by psychologists
and applied behavior analysists in order to efficiently document and
streamline life skills development. Each learner works individually with
a teacher or therapist to master these tasks using physical, imitative,
and verbal prompts with the goal of independent comprehension.
Task-Analysis is used to break each skill into a series of steps and
behaviors tracked by the teacher/therapist. Therapists and/or teachers
use task analysis checklists to breakdown and document each skill,
and how they are prompted or achieved. To clarify, the AFLS below is
an example of a task analysis of taking a bath from the AFLS
(Partington & Muller, 2012, p. 20):

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Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

Task Analysis of Taking a Bath


+= independent
Student: ____________________ Task Analysis Skill:___________________
V=verbal prompt

I=Imitative prompt
Objective: Able to independently take a bath
G= Gesture

PP= Partial physical prompt

FP= Full physical prompt

Step Behavior Date:

1 Take pajamas to bathroom

2 Close the drain

3 Turn on water

4 Adjust water to reasonable temperature

5 Fill water to appropriate height

6 Remove clothing

7 Get into tub

8 Wet entire body

9 Pour shampoo into hand

10 Apply shampoo to hair

11 Rinse shampoo from hair

12 Apply soap to washcloth

13 Rub body with soapy washcloth

14 Rinse soap off entire body

15 Open drain

16 Get out of tub

17 Dry entire body with towel

18 Hang up towel

19 Put on pajamas

20 Put dirty clothes in hamper

SUM of Independent responses

% Independent

Assessment for Functional Living Skills (Partington & Muller, pg. 50, 2012)

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Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

Training teachers and therapists at the CDC in life skills curriculums,


task analysis and implementing documentation and assessments
through AFLS led to the creation of a drama intervention process:
Drama for Life-Skills.

COUNTDOWN TO BLAST OFF: ASSESSMENTS AND THEORY


LEAD TO DRAMA FOR LIFE-SKILLS
With great anticipation, the brave Nigerian astronauts build a space
craft to support their adventure, then countdown to blast off into a
world of the unknown. This metaphor could also be applied to the
CDC’s implementation of the AFLS curriculum with the Adult and
Adolescent unit: teachers and therapists count down steps of a task
analysis, with hopes of blasting off into the unknown world of
independence and life skill mastery. Unfortunately, unlike the success
of the astronauts, the repetition of behaviors and steps during task
analysis soon proved to be frustrating for both learners and facilitators.
Learners were bored, teachers were bored and instead of blasting off,
the repetitive process of learning led to burnout. Therapists and
teachers continued to slog through task analysis, documenting by
using Partington & Muller’s prompting guidelines with physical,
imitative and verbal prompts and gestures. The burnout and the
repetitive scenes of prompting students through skills development
sparked the idea of incorporating drama process into the educational
praxis.
Educational drama researchers and theorists have observed ways
to teach through drama with special needs learners that align with
Drama for Life-Skills task assessment approach. Ann Cattanach
describes a drama process with special needs learners as a “tasks and
skills model” (1996, p. 76) for general social skills and particular tasks.
McCurrach & Darnley discuss how drama games and activities used in
repetition can be used to develop a performance. They also observe
that some actors with learning or neurodevelopmental disabilities “find
focusing on a task much easier than others, so clear explanations,
patience and repetition are always of paramount importance in tackling
any game, or indeed rehearsal” (1999, p. 37). Sheratt & Peter
encourage teachers to use drama with special needs students by
incorporating existing knowledge and drawing upon practical skills in
tasks that are directly within their experience and capabilities (2002).
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Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

To keep each task analysis fresh, we began to incorporate


imagination and play into our repetitive practice. A student completing
vocational task analysis of baking a cake might complete the steps
alone with some prompting. Then repeat the task, guided by teachers
and therapists, pretending to be on a boat with friends, or baking a
cake for her sister’s wedding. The idea of incorporating play and role-
play into learning is critical in educational drama-in-education praxis for
learners with special needs (Kempe, 1996; Cattanach, 1996; Jennings,
1990; Ramamoorthi & Nelson, 2011; Sherrat & Peter, 2002; Peter,
1995). We began to “differentiate instruction,” as described by Carol
Ann Tomlinson (2014), modifying the ways we taught task steps and
behaviors and teaching each chore in a variety of ways. We wrote
songs about each step of a task; we created dance moves for each
step; we drew or took pictures of each step; we made each task into
game. Ideologies of educational drama (such as the work of
Heathcote, O’Neill, and Neelands) outline a variety of exercises and
techniques to enhance learning through dramatic process, but for the
sake of brevity, this paper will focus on theorists that specifically focus
on disability and special needs. It is with the differentiated instruction—
the addition of roles, games, songs, and movement—students and
facilitators began enjoying the lessons more when the focus wasn’t
only on checking the boxes but on applying the experience to real or
imagined scenarios.
Individuals began collaborating on their task analysis: once
mastery of a task was completed individually, groups would form to
complete the task together. Students who required additional
assistance worked within their group to find success. This peer-
mentoring allowed for all students to be independent of teachers and
therapists (Kempe & Tissot, 2012). Additional support systems were
included to allow all students access to the dramatic process including
modifications, visual cues, side-coaching, prompting, group work,
imitation, multisensory exercises and addition of props and costumes
(Kempe, 1996; Cattanach, 1996; McCurrach & Darnley, 1999; Bailey,
2010; Sheratt & Peter, 2002; O’Sullivan, 2016; Peter, 1995;
Ramamoorthi & Nelson, 2011). Each groups’ task analysis
performance became more complex; they began to reflect the
strengths and abilities of each individual.
Eventually, for positive reinforcement, we began to take groups
into the school and preschool units of the Centre to perform their task

45
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

analysis scenes. In these instances, we were able to establish our


interpretation of Boal’s concept of solidary multiplication, “each group
will have to organize other small groups to which they can transmit the
learning, following the notion that one only learns when one teaches, in
the quest of the Multiplicatory Effect” (Boal, 2006, p. 51). A group of
adolescents combined their task analysis of baking a cake; they
learned a song of the steps, created a dance, a pantomime of selling
and eating the cake and developed a storyline around the birthday
celebration of a favored cartoon character. This scene was then
performed for the school unit; post-performance, the school age
children were excitedly included in the imaginary cake baking process.
Each member of the adolescent group then began teaching a school
child, one-on-one, the steps and behaviors in the task analysis of
baking a cake, just as their teachers and therapists had done for them.

LANDING ON THE PLANET OF INCLUSION AND THE ON-GOING


WORK IN DRAMA FOR LIFE-SKILLS
Task analysis scenes became more and more performance-based,
and with the rehearsal of the dramatic interpretation of each AFLS
task, members of the adult unit became encouraged to complete more
tasks. The first opportunity to share our learning and teaching abilities
with the community culminated with the creation and performance of
The Planet of Inclusion. Educational drama theorists emphasize
repetition of exercises and building performances slowly, broken into
small achievable steps, to structure and reinforce skill mastery
(Cattanach, 1996; McCurrach & Darnley, 1999; Bailey, 2010; Sheratt &
Peter, 2002; O’Sullivan, 2016; Peter, 1995; Ramamoorthi & Nelson,
2011).
The task-based theatre performance, devised through the drama
process, focuses on the talents and abilities of each individual
performer (see Tomlinson, 1982; Kempe, 2010; Bailey, 2010;
McCurrach & Darnley, 1999) and emphasizes “possibilities, rather than
limitations” (Lipkin & Fox, 2001, p. 129). This subsequently creates a
“multidisciplinary piece” (Lipkin & Fox, 2001, p. 124) served by a “rich
eclecticism” (Hargraves, 2015, p. 229). The “episodic nature of the
piece, and its reliance on movement, music, and constant shifts
between the types of dialogue and teamwork occurring has Brechtian
underpinnings, with a similar bow towards the audience” (Lipkin & Fox,
46
Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

2001, p. 131). The performance is created to involve the community at


large (McCurrach & Darnley, 1999; Lipkin & Fox, 2001) and with each
performance and post-performance student-teaching-student
experience, confidence and task mastery began to increase in all units
of the CDC.

SPACE CREATURES & ASTRONAUTS: DIFFERING CONTEXTS


WORKING TOGETHER
The brave Nigerian astronauts first were afraid of the space creatures
because they came from different contexts; they looked and acted
differently from them. When they began to work together, teaching
each other, they realized they enjoyed many of the same things. The
skills the space creatures and astronauts teach each other in the
performance are indicative of Drama for Life-Skills focus on tangible
tasks for vocational and independent living. An increasing number of
studies are examining theatre intervention for the development of
social-emotional skills for autism and neurodevelopmental disorders
(Lipkin & Fox, 2015; O’Sullivan, 2016; Corbett et. al., 2010;
Ramamoorthi & Nelson, 2011; Jindal-Snape & Verttraino, 2007).
These studies correlate similar findings in the increased development
of intangible life skills such as communication, confidence, and social
interaction. Specific studies also detail enhanced social skills, such as
vocational training (Ramamorrthi & Nelson, 2001), problem-solving,
risk taking (O’Sullivan, 2016). The findings and theories, generated by
drama intervention, are based in western perspectives; the theorists
and researchers only conducting work in North America and western
Europe. In these cultures, schools and programs based on theory are
conducted in inclusive settings, combining mainstream students with
students with disabilities, and supported by government mandated
laws and special needs curriculums. Play is the instigating force for
western drama in education processes (Cattanach, 1996; Kempe,
1996; Jennings, 1990), but in the Nigerian context, the tangible life
skills tasks initiate the drama process and the ability to play. The
context for Drama for Life-Skills differs due to stigma, non-inclusive
education practices (students are isolated in special needs only
schools), and underdeveloped disability laws and protections. Though
skills are developed in both areas (tangible & intangible), it is the task
development that teaches drama as opposed to the drama that

47
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

teaches tasks for Drama for Life-Skills.


Another set of contexts Drama for Life-Skills negotiates is
between the arts-based drama process and the clinical implementation
and documentation of the AFLS. The assessment allows structure and
goalsetting to guide the drama process, and elicits the scientific data to
substantiate claims of increased life skill mastery. Jindial-Snape &
Verttraino recognize a number of studies in drama process for social-
emotional development with special needs, but find that though most
studies “add to the body of knowledge around this and the strategies
that can be used, most author/s have not provided enough evidence to
substantiate their claims” (2007, p. 115). Using AFLS assessment,
Drama for Life-Skills is navigating ways to document evidence to
support these claims, as well as the success and challenges for each
individual participant.
A third set of contexts negotiated by Drama for Life-Skills is the
drama-based process versus the culminating theatre performance.
Currently, the work focuses on the process of drama as a combination
of applied theatre, educational theatre and special education teaching
methodology. But we are on the cusp of developing full-fledge theatre
performance productions. The future work of Drama for Life-Skills will
need to investigate how the drama process could lead to the creation
of disability theatre, described by Johnson as “artists with disabilities
who pursue an activist perspective, dismantling stereotypes,
challenging stigma, and reimagining disability as a valued human
condition” (2012, p. 5).

DISCOVERING A PLANET OF INCLUSION: CONCLUSIONS AND


NEED FOR CONTINUED RESEARCH
In the commotion following the first community performance, a mother
asks, “what juju [witchcraft] have you used to cure my child?” Teachers
and therapists respond with attempts to explain how the passions and
interests of each student creates the performance. They explain how
her daughter is one of the best teachers in the class, an amazingly
passionate performer, and how grateful they are that she shares her
talents and abilities. “Ah-ah, no, my daughter has no speech,” her
mother replies. Her daughter, one of the astronauts, sang proud and
passionately and was the only astronaut to articulate each of the
narration lines; she truly shined on stage. A teacher looks to her
48
Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

student standing next to her mother, and asks her to tell her mom
about how the drama was practiced. There is only silence and nodding
of her head. It appears that the brave, beautiful astronaut is no longer
verbal and obviously uncomfortable with the present conversation. Our
work is not complete; the successful life skills demonstrated on the
stage must transfer to improving the quality of everyday life.
The significance of the Drama for Life-Skills process is its
contribution to establishing a basis for cross-cultural applications of the
drama process with special needs outside of the western context. The
nature of the work being done furthers the field by adding to the almost
nonexistent dramatic work with disabilities being done in West Africa.
The use of AFLS allows a standardized structure of tangible life-skills,
the ability to track and document what works and does not work with
each person, and a way to substantiate evidence for drama
intervention. We are still collecting qualitative and quantitative data,
receiving feedback from parents and the community, and analyzing the
AFLS data sheets in order to gain a full understanding of the outcomes
of Drama for Life-Skills interventions. Though the research is ongoing,
there are some outcomes that are already becoming apparent. Life
skills task mastery has risen exponentially at the CDC. The amount of
teacher and therapist turnover has decreased, and staff are more
engaged in lesson planning and assessments. Teachers and
therapists have confessed to increased levels of excitement in
planning tasks and lessons, in order to challenge students and add
more scenes to the performances. The school and preschool students
are forming bonds and relationships with their peer-mentors in the
adult unit. Parents have expressed their pride and support for the
program, some asking for the intervention performances to spread to
the younger units. And perhaps most notably, adults and adolescents
involved in the performances show increased signs of confidence,
community and self-advocacy throughout the school and curriculum.
As Drama for Life-Skills continues to develop and the
performances created from the process expand, the following
questions arise, guiding the next steps of research: Once these skills
are acquired, how do we break the barriers of stigma in Nigeria society
to allow these skills to flourish? How do we educate and inspire the
families and the communities? Nigeria has gained a passionate
disability inclusive theatre company full of potential. We are creating
opportunities for Nigerians with neurodevelopmental disabilities, and

49
Discovering a Planet of Inclusion

as they take a bow following a performance, in the words of Augusto


Boal, “The end is the beginning!” (Boal, 2006, 4).

SUGGESTED CITATION
Jaskolski, K. O. K. (2017). Discovering a planet of inclusion: Drama for
life-skills in Nigeria. Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 38-53.

REFERENCES
Akinadayomi, Y. (2016). Personal communication & CDC interviews.
Autism Speaks. (2016, December 12). Task analysis & applied
behavior analysis.
Bailey, S. (2010). Barrier-free theatre: Including everyone in theatre
arts—in schools, recreation, and arts programs—regardless of
(dis)ability. Enumclaw, WA: Idyll Arbor, Inc.
Benz, M. R. & Linstrom, I. (2003). Transition focused education. The
Journal of Special Education, 37 (3), 174-183.
Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre
Communications Group.
Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors (2nd ed.). London:
Routledge.
Boal, A. (2006). The aesthetics of the oppressed. New York:
Routledge.
Campbell, A. (2013). Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company:
The politics of making. In C. McAvinchey (Ed.), Performance and
community: Commentary and case studies (75-104). New York:
Bloomsbury.
Cattanach, A. (1992). Drama for people with special needs. London: A
& C Black Limited.
Chubmachie, M. (2016). Personal communication & CDC Interview.
Corbett, B. A., Key, A., Qualls, L., Fecteau, S., Newson, C., Coke, C. &
Yoder, P. (2016). Improvement in social competence using a
randomized trial of a theatre intervention for children with autism
spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental
Disorders, 46 (2), 658-672.
Corbett, B. A., Swain, D. M., Coke, C., Simon, D., Newsom, C.,
Houchins-Juarez, N., Jenson, A., Wang, L. & Song, Y. (2014).
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Improvement in social deficits in autism spectrum disorders using


a theatre-based, peer-mediated intervention. Autism Research, 7,
4-16.
Dreher, A. (2010). Functional literacy in a life skills curriculum.
Educator's Voice, 3, 82-89.
Eckard, B. J. & Myers, W. (2009). Beyond disability: A dialogue with
members of the Improbable Theatre Company. RiDE: The Journal
of Applied Theatre and Performance, 14 (1), 59-74.
Elkin, S. (2015). Embrace inclusivity. The Stage Retrived.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum
International Publishing Group.
Hargrave, M. (2015). Theatres of learning disability. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Jennings, S. (1979). Remedial drama. London: Pitman Publishing
Limited.
Jennings, S. (1990). Dramatherapy with families, groups and
individuals. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Jindal-Snape, D. & Vettraino, E. (2007). Drama techniques for the
enhancement of social-emotional development in people with
special needs: A review of research. International Journal of
Special Education, 22 (1).
Johnson, K. (2012). Stage turns: Canadian disability theatre. Quebec:
Magill-Queen's University Press.
Kempe, A. (1996). Drama education and special needs. Cheltenham:
Stanley Thornes Publishers Limited.
Kempe, A. (2010). Drama and the education of young people with
special needs. In S. Schonmann (Ed.), Key concepts in
theatre/drama education (165-169). New York: Sense Publishers.
Kempe, A. (2013). Drama, disability and education. New York:
Routledge.
Kempe, A. & Tissot, C. (2012). The use of drama to teach social skills
in a special school setting for students with autism. Support for
Learning, 27, 97-102.
McCurrach, I. & Darnley, B. (1999). Special talents, special needs.
London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
O'Sullivan, C. (2016). A longitudinal study of the impact of O’Sullivan’s
social drama model with children and young people with autism
in Ireland.

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Partington, J. W. & Muller, M. M. (2012). The assessment of functional


living skills. California: Behaviour Analysis Inc.
Peter, M. (1995). Drama for all. London: David Fulton Publishers.
Porter, D. A. (2016). Unspecified neurodevelopmental disorder.
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.).
Porter, D. A. (2016, 10 January). 2016 - Last update. Unspecified
neurodevelopmental disorder. Diagnostic and statistical manual of
mental disorders (5th ed.).
Ramamoorthi, P. & Nelson, A. (2011). Drama education for individuals
on the autism spectrum. In S. Schonmann (Ed.), Key concepts in
theatre/drama education (177-181). New York: Sense Publishers.
Sherrat, D. & Peter, M. (2002). Developing play and drama in children
with autistic spectrum disorders. New York: David Fulton
Publishers Ltd.
Szidon, K. & Franzone, E. (2009). Task analysis: Steps for
implementation. University of Wisconsin: National Professional
Development Center on Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to
the needs of all learners (2nd ed.). Virginia: Association for
Supervision & Curriculum Development.
Tomlinson, R. (1982). Disability, theatre and education. London:
Souvenir Press.
Warren, B. (1988). Disability and social performance: Using drama to
achieve successful "acts of being." Cambridge: Brookline Books,
Inc.
Warren, B. (1993) Using the creative arts in therapy (2nd ed.). London:
Croom Helm Ltd.

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Kaitlin O. K. Jaskolski

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Kaitlin Kearns Jaskolski is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape
Town, South Africa. She received her MA in Educational Theatre at
New York University in 2013 and her BA in Directing and Design at
Pepperdine University in 2008. Her research reflects interests in cross-
cultural inclusive theatre, with a focus on teacher training and cognitive
benefits of theatre intervention for adolescents with developmental
disorders. Since 2013, Kate has been a teaching-artist and educational
consultant in Lagos, Nigeria. Prior moving to the African continent,
Kate founded the Westside Inclusive Theatre in Houston, and trained
with inclusive theatres in Los Angeles, New York, the Dominican
Republic, and around West Africa.

53
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

The Evolution of Monologue as an Education


SCOTT WELSH
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
Scott.Welsh@vu.edu.au

ABSTRACT
Performance is social theory, or it can become so, when we use it as a
means to understand social phenomena rather than merely viewing it
as a spectacle or for entertainment (Brook, 1972). Theatre that
explores domestic violence (Welsh, 2014), homelessness (Welsh,
2014) or the plight of refugees (Robinson, 2015) are all examples of
dramatic processes becoming social theory. There are many more
examples such as the work of Lloyd Jones or Pina Bausch, both of
whom use experimental theatre as a means of educating,
understanding and criticising society (Marshall, 2002; Pendergast,
2001). This article explores the relationship between theatre and
education in three somewhat diverse contexts. Firstly, the
autobiographical monologue, The Outcaste Weakly Poet Stage Show,
describes experience in a conversational style. Experience and
conversation are inevitably educational, that is, being is learning and
listening is learning. Secondly, I explore the practice of monologue
writing with a sample group of Australian school students on the
subject of social labelling, reinforcing the idea that theatre practice is
54
Scott Welsh

education by applying it to a classroom setting. Finally, I examine a


monologue writing workshop conducted with a group of teachers-in-
training, revealing the potential of monologues to foster empathy
among teachers and their most difficult students. Theatre then
becomes a source of learning and philosophical reflection for
audiences, a way of practising social learning in a school setting and
increasing emotional intelligence, empathy and communication
between teachers in training and their students.

The world of performance and the life-force, or our experience of the


world, from which theatre emerges is all conceived around learning.
The playwright and the actor are inspired to perform because they
want to articulate something about their surroundings, some
knowledge. One may very well pose the question, how is it possible
not to learn? For experience, by its very nature, is pedagogical. When
we do, we either know what we do or we come to know what we do by
doing it. The tennis player hits the ball as it comes to her using either
an established method she knows from prior experience or comes to
know through reacting to the movement of the ball. How we perceive
the practice of theatre is largely dependent on our understanding of
what the medium is in terms of its creation, performance and reception.
I have always felt that my work as a theatre practitioner and researcher
was more philosophical than entertaining (Willett, 1978, Brook, 1972),
and there are numerous examples from my practice that illustrate this,
such as Barcode 30!!7 307: an exploration into domestic violence and
criminal behaviour (Welsh, 2009) or the recently performed Outcaste
Weakly Poet Stage Show (Welsh, 2014), perceived by many critics as
an expose on the troubles of people experiencing homelessness and
drug addiction. This was curious to me because the work merely
described my experiences with homelessness and drug addiction, but
this phenomenological fact was reinterpreted through the process of
developing and presenting a theatrical performance. Thus, the
performance of theatre becomes a sociological issue, as I melded the
presentation of the self on stage and in social reality (Goffman, 1993).
This ought to be obvious but theatre is still often viewed as escape or
fantasy, with no direct relationship to other aspects of our social lives,
despite examples of performance such as The Laramie Project, which

55
The Evolution of Monologue as an Education

are specifically directed toward influencing community and social


attitudes (Kaufman, 2001).
I will now refer to two recent examples from my creative practice
that epitomise the performance concept I label ‘real fiction’. The first is
an online clip taken from my days as a homeless street poet. The
intention of the clip was to capture a moment in time, of a group of
strange characters, all friends, sitting around on the street, chatting
about life, issues and street poetry to each other and passers-by
(Welsh, 2016). This footage of actual experience was used as the
foundation for the creation of a personal myth contained in the play,
‘The Outcaste Weakly Poet Stage Show’. What the footage reveals is
the relationship between experience and art, the way in which artistic
practice, in this case begging with poetry, is received in social reality.
The practice becomes the impetus for conversation and inspires the
foundations for the creation of a performance, The Outcaste Weakly
Poet Stage Show, in which the chaotic life of the street is recognised
and celebrated as the source of the work(Welsh, 2016). The
conversational tone is apparent both in the first clip of the real
experience and then the fictional or represented performance. The
atmosphere of the street is mirrored in the stage performance, where
the performers directly communicate in conversation with the
audience, encouraging a loose, relaxed and somewhat random or
chaotic form where the performers’ job is both to encourage the
audience to distract performers and then to subtly bring the
conversation back to performance in much the same way a stand-up
comedian does.

SOCIAL THEATRE & EDUCATION


My PhD research involved applying my play-writing method to a group
of secondary drama students to explore the idea of social labelling in
education. Most of my work with secondary drama students creating
theatrical monologues involved making them appropriate for a stage
setting, enhancing the voice I heard in the monologue for the sake of
an imaginary audience The foundations existed for some compelling
material. Like the process of selling poetry on the street, the
monologue workshops and the outcomes in the form of student
monologues constituted significant reflection on conversation and
human existence in the social situation. This not only allows a context
56
Scott Welsh

for student learning in the drama classroom but also expands the
potential of drama to act as education, building on the work of
McKenna (2003) and Haseman (2006) and the tradition of Brecht.
McKenna, for example, claims that ‘the embodiment of being and
performance’ ought to be viewed as ‘ways of being and knowing’
perhaps implying performance can be ontological and epistemological
(McKenna, 2003, p.2). He describes his methodology as performance,
that is, an action method or practice-based research. I claim, however,
throughout this article and in other aspects of my practice, sitting and
writing real fiction in fact involves reflecting on our personal experience
and our engagement with the world. It could be considered mere
journal writing, were it not for our attempt to hear the voice of an ‘other’
in the writing process and document this ‘hearing’ in a performance
context, whether that be a theatre or a drama classroom.
The importance of lucid, vibrant and meaningful Arts practice in
education is broadly recognised in contemporary drama education
literature (Ewing, 2010). In his article exploring the potential of
practice-led research, Haseman makes this assessment regarding
‘reflexive research’:

The situations of practice – the complexity, uncertainty, instability,


uniqueness and value conflicts…are increasingly perceived as
central to the world of professional practice. These are practice-
based research strategies and include: the reflective practitioner
(embracing reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action);
participant research; participatory research collaborative inquiry,
and action research. (Haseman, 2006, p.3)

Haseman claims that theatrical ‘…strategies re-interpret what is meant


by ‘an original contribution to knowledge.’ They may not ‘contribute to
the intellectual or conceptual architecture of a discipline’, however,
according to Haseman, ‘they are concerned with the improvement of
practice, and new epistemologies of practice distilled from the insider’s
understandings of action in context’ (Haseman, 2006, p.3). What
Haseman and others identify is the place of arts-based and practice-
based research, the distinguishing features of these practices and how
they fit into the rest of the research landscape.
I view any work that takes place in the theatre primarily as
‘education’ (Willet, 1974). As a playwright, I have argued with many

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The Evolution of Monologue as an Education

colleagues about what theatre ought to be doing and that, rather than
merely entertaining, it can also seek to invite a community
contemplation of the issues a play explores. This echoes the concerns
of many other practitioners, including Kaufman, referred to above
(Kaufman, 2001). To this end, Peter Brook’s argument against the form
of theatre and what he perceives as an over-emphasis on production
concerns (Brook, 1972), in favour of the literary tradition of ‘drama’,
plays with and shifts inherent power structures in contemporary theatre
practice. Like Brecht, I claim that the purpose of theatre performance
should be to educate ‘consciously’, ‘suggestively’ and ‘descriptively’
(cited in Willett, 1974, p.26).

I THINK THEREFORE I AM…AN EDUCATOR


One of the outcomes of my PhD research was that the practice
described therein categorized me as an ‘educator’ and I reacted with a
little discomfort, wondering about this identity and what it meant to be
classified an educator when I had never formally filled the position of
teacher in a formal classroom setting. And yet, here I was, being called
an educator. I should not feel insulted by this. I have nothing against
educators and, like Brecht, I have often called my theatre work
education (Brecht as cited by Willett, 1978).
It’s just to have that identity pinned to me or have the question
raised ‘Why do you say you’re not an educator?’, it was something I
couldn’t move past and I could never not be an educator after that,
even if I found an answer to the question. The question itself proposes
its own answer. Posed in a conversational response to my thesis by a
world renowned Drama Education expert, it is suggesting that theatre
is education and therefore anyone who practises theatre is an
educator. It links drama and education in the same way that Brecht did
when he said his theatre sought ‘to educate’ but it does it with a
modernist twist. It is somewhat dramatic, ‘Why do YOU not call
yourself an educator? You are an educator, whether you like it or not!!
After-all, you have argued that theatre IS education and now you argue
that you are a theatre maker. If theatre is education and you are a
theatre maker, how can you not be an educator?’
The potential of monologues to educate was considered and, with
an experienced education academic, applied to a teacher training
setting. This involved inviting a sample group of teachers in training to
58
Scott Welsh

write monologues with a view to fostering empathy for those students


from whom they perhaps felt disconnected or troubled by. The idea
was to bring oneself into the uncomfortable space of an identified
‘other’, one who is ‘other’ to you, not you. For the participating
teachers, they were asked to imagine and inhabit the narrative and
physical voices of their least favourite students or those students with
whom they felt a disconnect. This not only serves the function of
expanding the uses of the form of writing theatrical monologues, it can
also play the important social function of understanding ‘others’.
In this monologue, the student teacher here explores the problems
of English as a second language and the barrier to education it tends
to create. Through the use of monologue, the teacher fosters an
empathetic position for her student, imagining the social situation and
reality for an adolescent studying English when it is not their primary
language spoken at home. Considering the task, one could interpret
the language barrier as symbolic of any problem that makes one feel
‘different’, like an ‘outsider’ (No Outsiders Project).

Monologue
People, people, they think I’m stupid, not smart they think. He’s
dumb, they say. But they don’t know man. They have no idea. I
just can’t say what I want to say the words they hard not easy to
understand. In my own language, I could be a smart person, very
famous. But in English not much makes sense. In my own
language I could write anything I want to or I could say things to
make them make sense to you.

(It is so frustrating) It makes me angry. I know what I want to


speak, but nothing comes out good. My teachers, they correct me
all the time.

I cannot speak good yet, Miss, give me time.

No one speaks this language at home. I have to teach my big


brother but he is always busy, always tired. He gets angry too. But
he is angry at all the people he goes to work with. They don’t talk
to him. They don’t try. It is not fair, you know? We learn a whole
new language and they don’t even try. And they think I am stupid.
The character of the student, constructed by a teacher in training,

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The Evolution of Monologue as an Education

struggles with the sense that others perceive him/her as ‘stupid’ but the
narrative quickly turns its attention to the perceptions of the student,
who declares him/herself misunderstood, ‘They have no idea’. The
problem is then identified as belonging to language, or the ‘words’ of
others. Finally, as an audience, we find ourselves becoming more and
more distant and alien, as the student explains an unfulfilled desire to
be understood and how the familiar world of home becomes a symbol
of one’s own alienation, ‘No-one speaks this language at home.’ This
denotes the student experiencing social alienation like two ends of a
burning candle. He/she simultaneously identifies the world of school as
foreign and, through this sense of social distance comes to know that
his/her familiar world at home is in fact foreign, at least in the eyes of
others and indeed in the world in which he must now survive.
This raises several questions: How is the playwright’s practice in
the theatre educational? How can monologue-writing, for example, be
used in educational settings not just to learn about theatre and drama
but to learn about the world, ourselves and others? I believe there is
certainly educational value in the form of documentary theatre referred
to above, where we used the street poet example, but this becomes
quite another process when we contemplate the formal transformation
of the theatre-making/monologue-writing process from an arts-context,
that appears to educate in the manner that is referred to by Brecht and
others when they explicitly state that the purpose of theatre is to
consciously educate (Willett, 1978), to an educational context where
artistic processes are used to educate.
The process of collecting material from the drama educational
setting of the classroom and transforming it into a play can be
conceived in the same way as the poet example, where material is
collected from experience on the street and then written into a
theatrical presentation. In the drama classroom, the context is one of
learning. From the perspective of the classroom teacher or the
students, the goal of participating in the activity of monologue writing is
not in fact to create a monologue. The educational process is
paramount and one of the selling points of the process in terms of
pedagogy was how it facilitated learning about the self, in a space
where participants were free to express themselves with minimal
consequences. We had created a space where the distinction between
what was real and what was fictional had been blurred. When
participants spoke, it may have been their own voice or it may have
60
Scott Welsh

been one they created. In what follows, the student participant speaks
of an adolescent girl and her own relationship with her body:

Student Monologue 7
Student 7: My brother calls me fat. He’s a li’l shit. I get in trouble
for calling him a li’l shit but how much damage is done by that
compared to him calling me fat?!?! It’s not his fault. He’s nine. He
probably doesn’t even know what ‘fat’ is. Do I really know? Why
does it hurt so much, being called ‘fat’? I mean do I feel fat?
Sometimes. Am I really fat, though? I look in the mirror at myself
sometimes and I can hear a little voice in my head saying ‘Fat, fat,
fat…’ and then I’ve got him in the background right behind me and
just as the imaginary voice fades out, I hear the little shit and see
him smirking behind me in the mirror. So I’m not even looking at
myself in the mirror. I’m looking at him! And maybe I’m seeing
what he thinks!! He says I’m ugly but it doesn’t matter because
he’s nine! He calls me lazy because I sleep til midday. But one
day he will grow and so will I and I will shed my puppy fat and see
myself as beautiful. He will want to know me because I’ll be very
cool and I’ll want to know him because I’ll need my brother. But
what if he’s gone too far for me to love him anymore? What if I just
can’t trust him? I get in trouble for sleeping so late. Nobody would
even notice if he didn’t bring it up! He knows this. He thinks it’s
funny. Because he’s nine.

He’s young, a child. But then so am I. Who isn’t, anyway? When


do we stop being children? Being called fat makes me feel so
lonely, so lonely. I’m THE LONLIEST PERSON ON THE PLANET,
WHEN HE CALLS ME FAT! He laughs. He thinks it’s funny.
What’s funny about my loneliness?(starts squealing louder and
louder and louder)Ha Ha! She’s alone! HaHa! She’s a monster,
growing outward like an oil leak…FAT! FAT! FAT! How is that
funny? I’m shouting but can anybody hear me. Does he know how
much it hurts? It’s only because I’m a girl that it matters . I’m
already seeing myself as fatter than I’m s'posed to be. The last
thing I need is the word being bleated by a nine year old sheep.
But that’s just it, who’s he imitating?

My brother calls me stupid, old but it doesn’t matter because he’s

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The Evolution of Monologue as an Education

nine. It can’t matter. If it did matter, my brother would be more


damaged than me. He’s the one who’s cruel. One day he will look
in the mirror and he won’t like what he sees. But he thinks it’s a
joke so it’s a joke. His names don’t hurt because he’s nine.

It’s me that does the hurting in my own thoughts about myself, not
his names or labels. I remember being nine. I remember seeing
my mother look at herself in the mirror, back when I was a child
and she was a woman. Before I entered this, this age of
uncertainty. Anyhow, she’d stare at herself and describe herself
as fat, grab tiny handfuls of skin and call them flab, call herself
ten-tonne Tessy when she was all skin and bones!! What I can’t
work out is when I turned from being nine and knowing the
objective truth of what the image in the mirror looked like!

CONCLUSION
The relationship between education and theatre in my practice appears
to exist at its very foundations. This is apparent in the example from
direct practice, explored at the opening of this article. That is, the
practice is educational a long time before it enters educational
contexts. However, the processes involved in collecting primary
materials, whether they be from experience on the street or from
educational encounters in a drama classroom, are remarkably similar
and support Brecht’s claim that theatre ‘educates; consciously,
suggestively descriptively’ (Willett, 1978). To this we could add that it
also educates practically or in practice.
Particular performance types are, by their nature, social theory.
The practice of some forms of theatre such as social or documentary
theatre, embodiment or ‘real fiction’ is about making an impact in a
social and conversational context rather than creating an artifice or
‘entertainment’ (Brook, 1972). Education occurs in these contexts
because theatre is educational. Therefore, it seems a natural part of
theatre’s evolution from the stage to education for performance to be
incorporated into social learning in secondary school classrooms and a
teacher-training context.

62
Scott Welsh

SUGGESTED CITATION
Welsh, S. (2017). The evolution of monologue as an education. Arts
Praxis, 4 (1), 54-64.

REFERENCES
Brook, P. (1972). The empty space. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Cerabona, R. (2015, March 20). Ian Robinson play The Process
ridicules harsh refugee policies. Sydney Morning Herald.
Depalma, R., & Atkinson, E. (2009). Interrogating heteronormativity in
schools: The no outsiders project. London: Trentham Books.
Kaufman, M. (2001). The Laramie project: Alexandria, VA: Alexander
Street Press.
Marshall, J. (2002). La Mama: Psycho-physical. Real Time Arts, 51.
Pendergast, D. (2002, October 10). Derrida and writing: Notes on Pina
Bausch [Web log post].
Welsh, S. (2009). Barcode 30!!7 307.
Welsh, S. [TheBadgerscott]. (2012, November 8). The Outcaste
System Smith-Dundler-Welsh [Video file]. YouTube.
Welsh, S. (2014). The outcaste weakly poet stage show. La Mama
Winter Season.
Welsh, S. [Scott Welsh]. (2014, November 19). The Outcaste Weakly
Poet Stage Show Part 1 @ La Mama Theatre 2014 [Video file].
YouTube.
Willett, J. (1978). Brecht on theatre. London: Eyre Methuen.

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The Evolution of Monologue as an Education

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Scott Welsh is a poet and playwright. He combines his role as a social
theorist with practice as an actor and playwright. His plays have been
performed at Fringe festivals, La Mama Theatre, on ABC Radio
National (‘The No Teeth People’ with Dusk Dundler 2007/2012), The
Sydney Fringe Festival, Arts Victoria’s Testing Grounds, Geelong After
Dark, The Newtown Socialist Bookshop and on the streets under the
Martin Luther King Sign in King Street, Newtown. He holds a Master in
Philosophical Studies from Deakin University and recently submitted
his PhD thesis in Education at Victoria University.

64
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Noise as Queer Dramaturgy: Towards a Reflexive


Dramaturgy-as-Research Praxis in Devised Theatre for
Young Audiences
JESSICA M. KAUFMAN
jesskaufman7@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Dramaturgy is often considered the work of the ‘neutral outside eye’,
but in devised theatre, the dramaturg is embedded within. This
requires creative solutions for how a devising dramaturg might
navigate engagement with the totality of their work—the piece, the
devising process, and the context—from their own position within all
three. In this article, I will recount and re-examine my work as
dramaturg-researcher devising Martha and the Event Horizon. The
research inquiry suggests a praxis of dramaturgy-as-research inspired
by Home-Cook’s model of noise as a function of attention and
Sullivan’s (2003) poststructuralist analysis of queerness as both being
and doing, wherein the devising dramaturg embodies the queer doing
to take an external perspective on their work via the critical context.
Examinations of the devisor’s relationship to spectators by practitioner-
researchers Goode (2011) and Reason (2010) respond to the research
question and suggest a non-linear model within which the audience
experiences meaning through Boenisch’s (2010) reflexive parallax.
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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

Placing these research outcomes within Bryon’s (2014) ‘active


aesthetic’ and Nelson’s (2013) practice as research model, I propose
the dramaturgy-as-research praxis as the key to a rigorous, flexible
framework for constructing diverse avenues for meaning-making in
devised theatre, particularly applicable to audience-driven work.

I am a dramaturg, which means nobody ever seems to know exactly


what it is that I do. Historically, dramaturgy is often considered the
work of the ‘neutral outside eye’: an external practice of observing and
critiquing structures of meaning in text-based performance. In devised
theatre, where artists with or without formal roles create the
(non)textual material as an ensemble, dramaturgs are embedded
within the creative process, not outside of it. In devising, structures of
meaning include performance, production and reception dramaturgy
(and textual dramaturgy when text is present)9 but the dramaturg’s role
also includes crafting and analyzing structures of meaning in the
creative process itself. How then might a devising dramaturg find the
perspective to do this work without turning to endless navel-gazing? In
the foreword to New Dramaturgy, Katalin Trencsenyi argues that
dramaturgy has become ‘process-conscious’, “synonymous with the
totality of the performance-making process […] the inner flow of a
dynamic system” (2014, p. xi). This process-consciousness extends
throughout the work’s development, requiring creative solutions for
how a devising dramaturg might navigate engagement with the totality
of their work—the piece, the process, and the context—from their own
position within all three.
It becomes useful to break down the devising dramaturg’s work
into three phases: first, construction of process: did that exercise work
for us? If the theme is noise, how can we use noise as a devising tool?
Next, dramaturgy of the material and production: is our narrative
carrying tension the way we want? Does the lighting support the theme

9 This breakdown of dramaturgical tasks comes from White (1995). This breakdown is
not well-suited to the dramaturgy practiced by dramaturgs in today’s (often non-textual)
performance contexts. It is, however, useful here as this article focuses on the
relationship between audience reception and the creative process. It is worth noting
that in the United States in particular, dramaturgy is fused with textual theatre to the
point that, even in the thorough What is Dramaturgy? (Cardullo, 2000), not once does
an American dramaturg discuss their work outside the context of plays and text.
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Jessica M. Kaufman

in this moment? Then, there is a third phase: a reflective practice of


deconstructing the relationship between the first two phases and how
they create meaning together within the context of the wider field. It is
this third phase, which I am calling dramaturgy-as-research, that will be
the focus of this paper. I propose dramaturgy-as-research as a solution
to the problem of navel-gazing since it uses critical context as a means
to shift the dramaturg’s perspective so they can observe the work from
within and without. First, I will outline how this process of shifting
perspectives was derived from Nikki Sullivan’s (2003) analysis of queer
studies as a poststructuralist doing, exemplified by George Home-
Cook’s (2011) model of noise as a function of attention. Then, to
illuminate how this process might work, I will re-examine the
dramaturgy-as-research phase of my MA thesis work as devising
dramaturg of Martha and the Event Horizon10 at the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama. Deconstructing the interplay of
queer/noise structures in one key moment of practice answered an
initial research question of how a particular shift in intended audience
came about. Further, addressing that discovery suggests a reframing
of the dramaturgy-as-research praxis within Bryon’s (2014) ‘active
aesthetic’ and Nelson’s (2013) model of practice as research to include
and prioritize the practitioner-researcher’s experience of meaning-
making as a key part of the praxis.

THE QUEER ‘DOING’ OF DRAMATURGICAL NOISE


I began my dramaturgy-as-research phase just after Martha’s final
performance, looking back at how the work’s relationship to audiences
shifted over time. Martha’s instigating question was “Can we make a
single, queer, noise-based performance that is engaging and
challenging for adults, teens, and children together?”11 (Kaufman,
2015). However, Martha developed to reflect an earlier proposal, a
single performance ‘not for children’ and a separate performance for
children which was never realized (Kaufman, 2015). For this

10 Martha and the Event Horizon was devised by [Alter] (brackets are part of company
name) at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and performed at the
Camden People’s Theatre in August 2015 as part of the Camden Fringe Festival.
Martha was directed by Roxana Haines and performed by Jess Kaufman and Griffyn
Gilligan, devised by all three.
11 For this project, I defined children as under age 12, teens as 12-19, and adults as

20+.

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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

posthumous research investigation, my key question was: why did that


happen? What key decisions contributed to our shift in audience?
Chris Goode, a theatre maker and researcher based in London, states
that while creating “we are constantly aware of [the audience] as a
present body” (2011, p. 464). In devised theatre, it is the dramaturg’s
job to maintain this awareness, listening to the various structures in
place and how they interact with the audience and the makers. Having
just closed the show, I was still feeling very much inside it, so I
selected a critical context to offer myself a different perspective from
which to listen.
Drawing from our themes—noise and queerness—I turned to
Goode’s (2011) noise-based devising practice and George Home-
Cook’s (2011) theory of noise as a structure of attention. Home-Cook
considers sound/noise as structures of attention, arguing that “rather
than understanding theatre ‘noise’ as unwanted or unintended sound,”
noise is best understood by focusing on the signal/noise relationship,
as “phenomenologically speaking, listening is an act of attention”, of
foregrounding and backgrounding to capture meaning (2011, pp. 107,
103). Thus, noise is defined as sounds that are un-attended and
outside the structures of meaning, or meaning-less, and defining noise
becomes an act of meaning-making. The meaningful sound and the
not-meaningful noise become interdependent structures, reframing
noise as a poststructuralist dramaturgical act. Goode applies this
theory in devising with “make a mark, make a mess, make amends”
(Kaufman, 2014), which I learned in a workshop with him prior to
creating Martha12. Mark-mess-amends uncovers ‘meaningful’ material
by separating it out from 'noisy' material: the ‘mess’ (a series of tasks),
separates the ‘mark’ (an initial invitation) from the devisor’s intentions,
generating a large body of material Goode calls noise.
The ‘amends’ filters that material through the artist’s ‘why axis’ to
discover and select moments that align with their values, distilling the
material down into a ‘meaningful’ performance (Kaufman, 2014). In
the initial devising phase for Martha, I interwove mark-mess-amends
with my own ‘banking’ exercise to uncover our instigating question: we
generated a bank of values and ideas from each individual artist based

12I attended Goode’s “Make a mark, make a mess, make amends” workshop at the
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in October 2014. Citations referring to
mark-mess-amends are taken from my personal notes on the workshop (Kaufman,
2014) including direct quotes from Goode which are marked as such.
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Jessica M. Kaufman

on prompts I had prepared such as, “My work is ___”, “My audience
is___”, and “___ is crucial in devising”. We then isolated what was
meaningful to us as a group from the bank, our field of noise. Words
like “challenge” and “questioning” led us to “queerness”, and “access”
and “self-sufficiency” led us to young audiences; after lengthy
discussion, “collage”, “constellation”, and “post-dramatic theatre” were
left off our final list (Kaufman, 2015). We learned what was going to be
part of our process and work by actively attending what was outside it:
the noise. Whether aural, linguistic, or dramaturgical, noise reflects and
clarifies structures of meaning, as it did for [Alter] when we discovered
our initial intersection of noise, queerness and young audiences.
A brief foray into queer studies via Sullivan’s (2003)
poststructuralist analysis reveals how one might take this approach—
defining a structure by examining what was excluded—as a model for
meaning-making in the dramaturgy-as-research process. Queer
theory, as analyzed by Sullivan, offers a further consideration of noise
as not just a dramaturgical being but a dramaturgical doing, as
reflected in Goode’s practice and mine. Sullivan analyses queer theory
in the context of Foucauldian poststructuralism, arguing that because
power and resistance (in queer theory, normalization and queerness)
cannot exist except in relation to each other, the “queer” is both that
which is excluded from a structure (a being) and a positionality that can
be taken with regard to a structure (a doing) (Sullivan, 2003, p. 56).
Thus, noise is not just that which is outside the dramaturgical structure,
but a queer dramaturgical action. For example, in mark-mess-amends,
Goode generates ‘noise’ (a being) and then tries on the ‘noise’ material
in order to clarify his values in the work (a doing). In my earlier
example from my devising process with Martha, I noted that “post-
dramatic theatre” was intentionally left out: Martha was driven by
narrative, a decision I was not consciously aware we had made until
several weeks after that initial meeting (Kaufman, 2015). The bank of
rejected values (i.e. post-dramatic theatre) is noise, being. My act of
examining that noise and noting how that clarifies our group
dramaturgical structures (i.e. practicing dramaturgy-as-research) is a
queer doing that allows me to challenge and clarify the structures of
meaning at hand. Naming the noise and then taking a queer
positionality to attend to it deconstructs and clarifies my practice with
[Alter] as a dramaturg of devised TYA.

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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

UNCOVERING NOISE IN THE PROJECTED (YOUNG) AUDIENCE


Matthew Reason’s (2010) writing on young audiences offered another
vantage point from which I could observe and critique the interplay of
my process and production structures, revealing a framework I
unknowingly built into [Alter]’s dramaturgy. Around two-thirds of the
way through development, I decided that, while I felt it was in some
ways a failure, we needed to change the age range of our piece from
8+ to 11+, effectively excluding children. My reasoning: “this show
demands a high level of theatrical competence. The form and
semiotics are just too complex” (Kaufman, 2015). Reason lightly
deconstructs theatrical competence, broadly defining it as the ability to
recognize and decode the constructs of theatre and their interplay with
the text or material (pp. 11-12). Assuming that my imagined audience
(children under age 11) would not have sufficient theatrical
competence placed them as noise outside Martha’s audience
structure. My focus on dramaturgical clarity and synthesis echoes
through most of my documentation, as I wrestled with what Goode
(2011) describes as the ‘projected audience’. Goode states that while
devising, we rarely

[give] ourselves the freedom to enter into a genuinely responsive,


transformative dialogue with [the audience]; when we talk about
‘the audience’, we’re talking in a kind of generality that precisely
matches the generality of our own makings (p. 467).

Rather than entering into a responsive relationship with my audience, I


generalized them, accidentally defining a structure (theatrical
competence) to support my generalization. This reveals that my
concern was less with the audience themselves than with their ability
to receive my predetermined synthesis. Had I engaged responsively,
as Goode suggests, by inviting children to see Martha, I might have
tested my structure as I did just now, enabling myself to make more
deliberate decisions about form and audience. But I did not see it from
within the devising process: it was only by taking the different
perspectives on my process offered via Goode’s and Reason’s (2010)
theoretical framework that I was able to observe and critique my
attachment to synthesis as part of [Alter]’s dramaturgical structures.
But engagement with one’s critical context does not stop outside
the library: my experience as an audience member at Goode’s
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Jessica M. Kaufman

Longwave offered a significant contribution to my research. After


learning mark-mess-amends, I saw Longwave at Shoreditch Town
Hall. While I could not figure out the story or ‘point’ of the show, which
appeared to be a series of vignettes about two male scientists in an
arctic shack, I had an acute, abstract experience of loneliness, joy,
beauty, and loss reminiscent of the ‘constellation’ and ‘collage’ that
[Alter] set aside early on (Kaufman, 2014). Months later, speaking with
a mutual friend of Goode’s and mine, I was surprised to discover the
play is a narrative love story and there had been technical challenges
at the performance which concealed key elements of the dramaturgy.
Yet, I still found the work moving. Goode ended his mark-mess-
amends workshop arguing that the work does not have to “make
sense”: if it is meaningful to the artist, it will be meaningful to the
audience (Kaufman, 2014). Significantly, Goode separates meaning
from synthesis, leaving space for noise in not only how he makes his
work, but in how the audience receives it. In the case of Longwave, I
did not receive Goode’s intended synthesis of the text, but experienced
a loose constellation of meaning reflecting it. This highlights synthesis
as a normalized structure of understanding in dramatic dramaturgical
practice; meaning can derive from synthesis, but is clearly not
dependent on it, even in dramatic work. Thus, in dramatic theatre,
‘noisy’ meaning takes the queer position in opposition to the synthesis
structure. Looking more closely at experiences of meaning outside that
structure makes space for audience diversity, particularly applicable to
TYA.

AUDIENCE RECEPTION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR REFLEXIVE


DRAMATURGICAL PRAXIS
While this article has, thus far, presented dramaturgy-as-research as
the reflective/analytical phase of a more traditional research process,
further examination of audience reception structures in TYA not only
answered my research inquiry for Martha, but suggests further
refinement to the reflexive dramaturgy-as-research model. First, to
address my initial question. TYA offers a particularly clear example of
the audience reception structure Goode references with ‘meaning’:
when a child acknowledges materiality (the people on stage can hear
me) via an audible outburst mid-show, adults usually intervene, despite
the fact that applause acknowledges the same materiality in the same

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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

way. Even when it makes perfect sense as an expression of


sophisticated theatrical competence, we label children’s experiences
as (literally and figuratively) noisy when they do not match the behavior
of adults. Often, this noisiness is “the very behavior which shows that
the individual spectators are engaged” (Maguire, 2013, p. 19). In
“There Is No Audience”, Maguire argues that children’s experiences of
theatre frequently involve adults forcing them to behave as an
audience, despite their inclination to behave as individuals (2013, p.
11). When I excluded children from Martha’s audience, I based my
idea of engagement on the reception structures of synthesis for not-
young audiences—namely adult audiences who are used to seeing
theatre. This normalized and privileged one construct of reception
(quiet audience) over another (vocal spectators). This supports
Goode’s (2011) assertion that the constructs of theatre, (in this case,
unified, quiet attention) enforce and amplify the structures that hold
them in place (behaving as an audience), which keeps us from “truly
meeting” the audience: in my case, my young spectators. When I put
an age rating on Martha, I reinforced a structure of reception
dramaturgy that excluded children as queer/noise. Attending both the
‘normalized’ structure of quiet attention and the noise of children’s
meaning-making experiences might have better executed our all-ages
proposal with a noisy, audience-responsive dramaturgy.
This suggests that not only can a spectator’s experience include
dramaturgical noise, but it is enhanced by it. Peter Boenisch (2010),
using Goode’s (2011) work as an example, suggests a ‘parallax’
between traditional deconstructed representation/presentation and the
loose ‘symbolic cosmos’ and focus on materiality from performance
studies. Reflexive dramaturgy does not necessarily promise a ‘solution’
that synthesizes the text, its materiality, and the act of spectating for
the audience; rather, it trusts that meaning-making occurs in the
ricochet among their encounters of each, as it did for me at Longwave
(Boenisch, 2010, pp. 170-172). Matthew Reason’s qualitative research
on theatrical competence in children aged 5-9 shows that they do in
fact engage with the form—what Reason calls “material reality”—and
the content— “theatrical illusion”—and further, children delight in
examining their experiences and the way these dramaturgies interplay
(2010, pp. 59-84). This suggests that young children have the “fairly
sophisticated theatrical competence” needed to engage in reflexive
dramaturgy (Reason, 2010, p. 75). Oily Cart exemplifies this with what
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Jessica M. Kaufman

Webb calls “jazz structure”, where lengthy periods of improvisation


(“riffs”) that directly respond to the audience’s reactions are buffered by
scripted, structured passages (2012, p. 22). This approach includes
reflexive dramaturgy (simultaneous, responsive production and
reception) through improvisation, supporting individual spectators’
meaning-making via dedicated space to play with emerging
dramaturgical noise. When I wrote that my younger audience members
might not be able to synthesize Martha’s semiotics, I reinforced
synthesis as the essential dramaturgical structure, but the age-diverse
audience intended in [Alter]’s final proposal implies a diverse
experience of meaning.
This reflects a fundamental division in the way I considered what
makes dramaturgy ‘for’ or ‘not for’ young spectators, and suggests a
reflexive inclusion of dramaturgical noise as the key to a dramaturgy-
for-all-ages. Reflexivity unlocks the dramaturgy for a more diverse set
of spectators, challenging habitual ideas of audience, engagement,
and dramaturgy. It moves towards Pavis’ (2012) post-dramaturgy:
“dramaturgy of the signifier, not of the signified” (p. 41). Post-
dramaturgy shifts the focus firmly away from carefully constructed
systems of meaning and towards the myriad symbolic potential of each
individual element as experienced by each individual spectator,
resisting or re-setting traditional links between dramaturgy and
semiology (Pavis, 2012). As an artist making audience-driven work, my
dramaturgy-as-research praxis is no longer centered on ‘Will the
audience get it?’, but ‘What might the audience (or spectators) get?’
The goal is no longer to craft a clear synthesis, but to carry out a
thorough praxis around the heart of the work, constructing avenues for
meaning-making through a constellation of signs and structures.
Most significantly, answering my initial research question and
discovering how I might address it through reflexive dramaturgy
suggests a further evolution of the praxis of dramaturgy-as-research. I
suggest this parallax—diverse experiences of meaning through
reflexive dramaturgy—as the key to the devised dramaturgy-as-
research model. Using critical context to shift perspective makes space
to step in and out of the process to observe the complex interweaving
axes of process, product, and critical context through the lens of a key
question in every phase of the work, not just postmortem. Via
Boenisch’s (2010) model, the researcher’s meaning-making rests not
in clear synthesis discovered in any one perspective, but in the center

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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

of a space among the perspectives of theory, practice, and the


dramaturg-researcher’s experience of them. Significantly, as Goode
(2011) suggests, this occurs not after, but throughout the process,
adding another layer of reflexivity that feeds back into the company’s
development. This model places the dramaturg-researcher’s
experience at the center of the dramaturgy-as-research model, evoking
Bryon’s (2014) ‘active aesthetic’. Distilled from phenomenology, the
‘active aesthetic’ takes the practitioner-researcher away from the
“discipline(s) as abstract schematization and toward practice as a lived
experience” (p. 24); asking “not what we do, but what our way of doing
might be, the doing of our doing, the practice of our practice” (p. 25).
While my original model of dramaturgy-as-research was more aligned
with traditional research models, a focus on reflexivity moves towards
the practice-as-research method as described in detail by Nelson
(2013). Nelson’s “multi-mode research inquiry” (p. 9) places the praxis
–“theory imbricated within practice” (p. 37) – at the center of an
epistemological model including ‘know how’ (experiential knowledge,
for example embodied cognition), ‘know what’ (the outcome of mid-
process periods of critical reflection), and ‘know-that’ (critical and
theoretical context) (pp. 37-47)13. The devising dramaturg’s position
within becomes a crucial part of the research methodology. While there
is much to address regarding this emerging methodology (a thorough
conversation is begun in the collection of chapters comprising Part 2 of
Nelson’s book), it appears that when placed within Nelson’s reflexive
practice-as-research model, dramaturgy-as-research thus becomes
both a viable method for academic enquiry and the key to rigorous new
works development in audience-driven devising.

CONCLUSION
When beginning the analytical phase of my research into the
dramaturgy of Martha and the Event Horizon’s devising process, I
turned to the themes of our piece, noise and queerness, for inspiration.
Following Home-Cook’s (2011) model where noise and sound are
interdependent structures defined by attention, I began to re-examine
the structures in Martha’s devising process. Then, turning to Sullivan’s

13See diagram on p. 37, followed by in-depth discussion of the key terms on pp. 40-
47.
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Jessica M. Kaufman

(2003) analysis of queerness as a poststructuralist being and doing, I


began to deconstruct key moments in that devising process by doing
the queer work of attending to the things we excluded, and analyzing
what reflection those queer beings had to offer. Contextualizing this
analysis in the writing and practice of current practitioner-researchers
Goode (2011), Reason (2010), and Webb (2012), I uncovered an
attachment to synthesis that separated me from my audience, moving
towards a reflexive model of reception dramaturgy that includes
diverse experiences of meaning. Finally, reflection on this process
suggests a dramaturgy-as-research praxis where the dramaturg uses
research and critical context as vantage points to examine the work
and their experience of it. This allows the dramaturg to remain inside
the devising process while maintaining a critical outside eye, feeding
back into the work in real time and engaging the entire process and
their experience of it reflexively (not just postmortem). Nelson’s model
of practice as research and Bryon’s phenomenological ‘active
aesthetic’ offer opportunities for further exploration and development.
If dramaturgy is the practice of critiquing structures of meaning,
dramaturgy as research becomes a practice of simultaneous
construction and deconstruction which, when placed within the
devising process, allows one to construct, deconstruct, experience,
and critique frameworks in a dynamic, reflexive cycle. The practice of
dramaturgy and the practice of research become interdependent
structures, and space around one’s experience of the two—that
reflexive space—offers an elastic model for dramaturgical praxis that
can adapt and contribute to the process and product in question, even
when they are not yet fully developed. Practicing dramaturgy-as-
research awakens new possibilities for how one might approach the
creative process with both rigorous dramaturgical intention and an
open-mindedness that welcomes individual spectators’ diverse
experiences of meaning-making. There are, of course, challenges to
navigating this developing praxis, but for a dramaturg-as-researcher,
devised theatre offers the perfect staging ground for deep
investigations into how our creative processes, intentions, and
assumptions work together to craft structures of meaning on stage and
in the audience. For audience-driven devising, which demands
reflexivity in the creative process, dramaturgy-as-research has exciting
implications for the development of new forms and processes and
welcomes emerging applications of poststructuralist theory as we

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Noise as Queer Dramaturgy

investigate the complex, dynamic relationships among audience, artist


and art.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research was originally conducted at the Royal Central School of
Speech and Drama under the supervision of Lynne Kendrick, Nick
Wood, and Mischa Twitchin. Additional thanks to Deirdre McLaughlin
for her mentorship, and to Roxana Haines and Griffyn Gilligan, co-
creators of Martha and the Event Horizon, for their immeasurable
contributions to this research.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Kaufman, J. M. (2017). Noise as queer dramaturgy: towards a reflexive
dramaturgy-as-research praxis in devised theatre for young
audiences. In Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 65-78.

REFERENCES
Boenisch, P. M. (2010). Towards a theatre of encounter and
experience: Reflexive dramaturgies and classic
texts. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20 (2), 162-172.
Bryon, E. (2014). Integrative performance: Practice and theory for the
interdisciplinary performer. London: Routledge.
Cardullo, B. (2000). What is dramaturgy? (3rd ed.) New York: Peter
Lang International Academic Publishers.
Goode, C. (2011). The audience is listening. Contemporary Theatre
Review, 21 (4). 464-471.
Home-Cook, G. (2011). Aural acts: Theatre and the phenomenology of
listening. In L. Kendrick and D. Roesner (Eds.), Theatre noise:
The sound of performance (pp. 97-110). Newcastle upon Tyne,
UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Kaufman, J. (2014). Term one. Unpublished personal journal. Royal
Central School of Speech and Drama.
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Jessica M. Kaufman

Kaufman, J. (2015). Terms three and four. Unpublished personal


journal. Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Maguire, T. (2013). There is no audience. In T. Maguire and K.
Schuitema (Eds.), Theatre for young audiences: A critical
handbook (pp. 9-22). London: Trentham Books.
Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as research in the arts: Principles,
protocols, pedagogies, resistances. Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pavis, P. (2011). Preface. In L. Kendrick and D. Roesner (Eds.),
Theatre noise: The sound of performance (pp. x-xiii). Newcastle
upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Pavis, P. (2012). Semiology after semiology. Theatralia: Yorick, 15 (2),
37-49.
Reason, M. (2010). The young audience: Exploring and enhancing
children’s experiences of theatre. Stoke on Trent: Trentham
Books.
Sullivan, N. (2003). A critical introduction to queer theory. New York:
NYU Press.
Trencsényi, K. and Cochrane, B. (2014). New dramaturgy:
International perspectives on theory and practice. London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Webb, T. (2012). My life in cart: Writing and directing for Oily Cart. In
M. Brown (Ed.), Oily Cart: All sorts of theatre for all sorts of kids.
London: Trentham Books.
White, R. K. (1995). An annotated dictionary of technical, historical,
and stylistic terms relating to theatre and drama: A handbook of
dramaturgy. Lewiston, NY & Queenton, Ontario: Edwin Mellen
Press Ltd.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jessica M. Kaufman is a theatre and performance artist with credits
ranging from Off-Broadway and US national tours to the Camden
People’s Theatre (UK). Current projects include a musical adaptation
of the graphic novel series Hereville, a performance intervention for the
U.S./Mexico border with Mexican puppeteer Ana Diaz, and a deaf-
accessible play for families with The Deaf + Hearing Ensemble (UK).
Her writing has been published in Theatre and Performance Design
and she co-edited a special issue of Connection Science on Embodied
Cognition, Acting and Performance (2017). BFA University of Miami,
MA Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Children’s Theatre: A Brief Pedagogical Approach


DENNIS ELUYEFA
BISHOP GROSSETESTE UNIVERSITY, LINCOLN
dennis.eluyefa@bishopg.ac.uk

ABSTRACT
There are several theories as to what constitutes children’s theatre.
This diversity exists because the term is used as a literal description of
theatre that involves children in one way or the other – theatre for
children, theatre with children, and theatre by children. This complexity
means there is a need to specify the sense in which the term is being
used. There is no universal agreement within academic discourse on
the parameters in which the term should be defined. While some
scholars suggest age as a defining factor, others think it should be
decided by the performers who design a piece of theatre based on
their knowledge of the children audience. What is children’s theatre?
What should be the level of involvement for children? This paper is not
a systematic review of the discipline and it is not an attempt to
re/define children’s theatre. Rather, it is about a pedagogical approach
to creating a piece of theatre for children between the age of 4 and 10
that can enable them to learn and be morally developed while being
entertained at the same time. In this paper children’s theatre is the
term that will be used throughout.

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Children’s Theatre

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHILDREN’S THEATRE IN THE UK


Theatre has always been part of every culture from time immemorial. It
is therefore almost impossible to suggest a particular date that
children’s theatre began. However, in terms of a scripted play Bennett
believes that theatre for children started in the late nineteenth century
in Europe and took the form of ‘touring companies with dramatisations
of folk and fairy tales (2005, p. 12) and the first widely recognized was
Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) in the UK. Other successful theatre for
children is Milne’s Toad of Toad Hall (1929). There was a surge in the
formation of several children’s theatre companies shortly after the
Second World War including John Allen’s Glyndebourne Children’s
Theatre, John English’s Midland Arts Centre in Birmingham, and
George Devine’s Young Vic Players (Wood & Grant, 1997, p. 9).
During this time, writers began to write for a specific child based
audience.
Polka Theatre is another popular children’s theatre that started in
1967 as a touring company in the UK. However, following their
successful application to the Arts Council England, Polka theatre has
opened a theatre exclusively dedicated to children in their permanent
theatre space in Wimbledon since 1979, employing various art forms to
create new work for children. Polka’s mission is ‘to spark imagination
and fuel a sense of discovery in children from every
background…learning and participation is at the heart of Polka’s work,
encouraging children to explore and develop creatively’ (Polka, 2017).
In 1994, Polka Theatre won the Vivien Duffield Theatre Award, leading
to a scheme called ‘Curtain-Up’, offering free tickets to disadvantaged
schools. It is believed that over 90,000 children visit Polka every year
to experience engaging, fun and exciting theatre, often for the first
time.
Originally a touring company, Unicorn Theatre, founded by Caryl
Jenner in London in 1947, is another professional children’s theatre
that is famous in the UK, performing to approximately 60,000 children
a year through various extensive programmes of work, on and off
stage. Unicorn is a family oriented theatre company that welcomes
parents, schools and young people of all ages, believing that their
performances can “expand horizons, change perspectives, and
challenge how we all see and understand each other” (Unicorn, 2017).
It is therefore imperative to take into account the aesthetic values of
performance that includes adults as audience, having the same quality
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as adult theatre. This is reflected in their philosophy: “the best theatre


for children should be judged on the same high standards of writing,
directing, acting and design as the best of adult theatre” (Unicorn,
2017).
Beside the aesthetic experience, education is also part of the
ethos of these companies. This could be a way to meet with the Arts
Council England’s policies that emphasises education or learning as
one of the criteria for securing grants. This has made many children’s
theatre companies to include education and/or learning as part of their
philosophy and an important element of children’s theatre. This
philosophy is supported by Reason who suggests that; Children’s
theatre “inevitably operates within contexts of education and learning”
(Reason, 2010, p. 5). The Prince’s Foundation for Children and the
Arts in Britain also posits that taking children to the theatre can support
their learning:

A visit to the theatre has the potential to be a life-changing


experience, as well as an opportunity for a unique kind of
learning. It can touch the imagination, arouse curiosity, or fire
an artistic impulse. Theatre can also be an exceptional
resource, linking as it does to so many areas of knowledge:
history, geography, language, citizenship, and much more.
Learning in theatres has its own skills-set – theatrical literacy
and the understanding of dramatic conventions, a specialised
vocabulary, and the ability to sit and watch a performance
without distraction (The Prince Foundation, 2017).

Education or moral learning is also the main argument in this paper.


However, many directors, such as Purni Morell at the Unicorn and Tim
Webb’s at Oily Cart reject the idea that education and learning should
be an important part of children’s theatre but suggest that aesthetic
experiences should be the main focus. This paper seeks to combine
the two – education/moral learning and entertainment.

WHAT IS CHILDREN’S THEATRE?


Children’s theatre has been researched by many scholars (Maguire
and Schuitema, 2012; Schonmann, 2006; Wood and Grant, 1997) and
the definition of the term varies. When we say children’s theatre what

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Children’s Theatre

do we actually mean? Children’s theatre is classified as an art form


(Maguire and Schuitema, 2012) and consists of a performance of
largely predetermined theatrical artwork by actors in the presence of
an audience of young people (Rosenberg and Predergast, 1983).
Goldberg’s definition of children theatre is a “formal theatrical
experience in which a play is presented for an audience of children.
The goal of children’s theatre is to provide the best possible theatrical
experience for the audience” (1974, p. 5). Succinctly, children’s theatre
is a piece of performance that involves children as actors and/or as
audience. Children’s theatre is specifically created and performed for
children audience either by children actors or professional adult actors
or a combination of both. It is important to distinguish between various
forms of children’s theatre so as to advance the practice, artistic form
and aesthetic merits.
There are various terms that are being used within academics but
only three – (1) theatre with children (2) Theatre by children (3)
Theatre for children – will be discussed here. In theatre with children,
children and adult are actors, working collaboratively to create a
stimulating piece of performance. However, in theatre by children,
children are the actors even though the devising and directing process
might be done by adults. Adults, who are often professionals, are the
actors in theatre for children, “although a child may be used in a child’s
role” (Goldberg, 1974, p, 5). In recent years, university students do
devise and perform for school children as part of their study in UK. The
primary audience for all forms of children’s theatre is children.
Nonetheless, accompany members of the family can be part of the
audience. This could be one of the reasons why Goldberg argues that
“children’s theatre” is basically the same as the ‘adult theatre’.
Goldberg does not mean that there are no differences between
children’s theatre and adult theatre. There are many differences. One
of these is that children’s theatre tends to stress the perspective and
thinking of the children and dig deep into their world. Children’s theatre
tries to trigger and hold the imaginations of its audience for it is through
this that they can be taken on a wonderful adventure. Children do not
need to force themselves into a story like adults. They can get
emotionally involved. There is no need for a suspension of disbelief
because children believe everything they see is real – flying dragon,
speaking bears, etc. Although adult theatre also stresses the
importance of its audience’s perspective and the life around them, it
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also allows them to make judgement, and thus enables them to


contribute to any debate about the performance. The creative process
for adult and children theatre is also different as practitioners may
employ techniques, tools and methods appropriate to the
understanding of their audience. As a result, actors for both may go
through special and different training. The acting style for children’s
theatre is different. A melodramatic acting style in which everything,
including emotions, actions, movements, storyline, etc. can be over-
the-top is important in children’s theatre but this may not be good in
adult theatre.
Goldberg’s claim that ‘children’s theatre’ is basically the same as
the ‘adult theatre’ is about the aesthetic merits and the level of
professionalism in children’s theatre. Professionalism and perfection,
even if it is difficult to attain, is considered important in adult theatre
possibly because of the ability of its audience to make critical
judgement. Children may not be able to but accompany parents in
children’s theatre may make the same critical judgement. Therefore,
children’s theatre should be as good as adult’s theatre. Stanislavsky
pushes this further and suggests that the only important difference
between theatre for children and theatre for adult is that theatre for
children should be better. However, this view is vehemently contested
by Schonmann (2006) who fails to understand the underline
philosophy in Goldberg and Stanislavsky’s views. While a distinction
may be necessary, children’s theatre is not to be considered a form of
art that needs no substances that can be found in adult’s theatre.
Wood and Grant (1997) succinctly put this in a context:

If we are to trigger their imaginations, emotionally involve them


and give them an exciting, memorable new experiences; if we are
going to encourage them to enjoy theatre-going in their adult
years; if we believe that theatre can be educative as well as
entertaining, then we must endeavour to give them the best (1997,
p. 7).

Wood and Grant charge the children’s theatre practitioners to give their
audience the best experience possible. Children’s theatre needs to be
seen as a discipline itself, and as a result, a high level of
professionalism must be part of its creation by employing all the
techniques and principles in theatre generally. There is a generally

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accepted view that children will not tolerate ‘poor’ production (Klein &
Schonmann, 2009). Children are open-minded. They do not sit, listen
and decode the performance as adults do. They can release their
feelings openly by reacting to a change in anything that interests them.
Children do not pretend. They will react if they are bored. An
awareness of this is therefore important for children’s theatre
practitioners. If we think that children’s theatre is not as challenging as
adult’s theatre, this does not only suggest that we do not value that
particular area of theatre, but that we do not value children and their
experience of their world (Gardner, 2013). If we spend too much time
and money in creating, writing and putting an adult theatre together,
the same must be done for children’s theatre.

UNDERSTANDING CHILDREN’S WORLD


One of the ways to provide children the best experience in theatre is to
understand their world. Regardless of its form, children’s theatre is
based mainly around the interests of children, even though it also
takes into consideration the interests of the parents. The important
point is that it does not ignore the interests of children and does not
only take the interests of their parents or adult actors into account.
Children and adult audience may have different interests. Thus an
understanding of the children’s world is vital to producing children’s
theatre that engages their audience. If we consider children’s interest
as paramount in children’s theatre, we must delve deeper into
children’s world, to consider how they think, react to things in different
situations and circumstances. It may be difficult to sustain the interest
of children audience with a performance that does not interest them.
Children cannot be forced to engage with something they do not like.
The interests of children of the same age group who live in the same
area or study together in the same school may still be different. In the
same vein, children of the same parents may have different interests.
There are many factors that can contribute to the interests of
children audience, but the following two will be discussed briefly –
social and ethical factors. Social factors are facts and experiences that
can influence individuals' personality, attitudes and lifestyle, and this
may include religion, family or wealth. The social circle of parents –
who they meet, where they work and live, the club they belong to – can
influence the lifestyle of the children. Parents with a high social status
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Dennis Eluyefa

may end up sending their children to schools that reflect their lifestyle.
Children who frequently travel abroad with their parents on vacation
may be exposed to a new way of thinking. There are some
communities that are more multicultural, made up of different races,
ethnics and religions, often with their own cultural values, belief
systems, myths and fairytales. In some family, religion is a sensitive
and serious issue and children are brought up within a strict religious
practice, which cannot be compromised. The religious and global
views of parents are likely to shape the life of the children, and thus
play a key part in the things that interest them.
Ethical factors are things that can be seen as morally right. Ethics
simply means doing the right thing. However, what is morally right for
one family may not be necessarily morally right for another.
Furthermore, our understanding of rightness varies. Consequently,
there is no clear-cut blueprint of ethics that can cater for all children
audience and their behaviour. Some ethical issues are religiously,
spiritually, culturally, and socially constructed, and this varies from one
family to another. How children talk and react to one another is guided
by the ethical factors that surround their upbringing. All these are likely
to contribute to children’s interests, and as a result, should reinforce
the purpose of a children’s theatre. Therefore, it is vital for professional
adult actors and practitioners to be aware of the social and ethical
factors of a group of children so as to produce a piece of theatre that
interest them. To this end, they must see themselves as researchers
and not just as entertainers so that they can learn more about their
audience and also improve their own practice.

CHILDREN’S THEATRE PRACTITIONERS AS RESEARCHERS


In order to gain their interest and encourage an enthusiasm for theatre,
children need a performance that appeals directly to their world, their
pleasures, their fears and their experiences. This is certainly not an
exercise in a textbook. It is a ‘real’ task, which Tambling (1990) defines
as something that has a purpose, a deadline and a natural outcome.
The starting point for a professional group of actors performing for
children is to identify the purpose of their children’s theatre. What do
we want the children to gain from the piece? How do we communicate
this to them? A project is more likely to succeed and yield a positive
outcome if its purpose is clearly identified, stated and outlined. The

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Children’s Theatre

other task is to identify the target group – children that will benefit from
that project, including their age range. With this level of differences,
what is the strategy for creating a piece of theatre for a children
audience? A piece of research may be necessary as to understand
what interests a particular children audience. Children’s theatre
practitioners need to be skilled researchers. This can help them to plan
the best performances and experiences for their audience.
The research methodology can be decided by the group, but an
interview with the children, however stressful, is likely to lead to an
honest opinion. Practitioners decide on the number of research
questions but these should be comprehensive. Children are usually
honest, and if given the opportunity, they will speak their mind freely.
They need to approach this from the perspective of a researcher.
Therefore, they should be mindful of the research ethics, thus the
consent of the parents must be sought. Though children are the
primary focus, a piece of research can also be conducted among the
parents and teachers. Practitioners can gain a deeper understanding
of the children and their current thinking by watching, listening and
talking to them and their families. The nursery rhyme or fairytale books
they enjoy reading or listening to can be useful in gathering the
information. Practitioners also need to be skilled observers and
listeners. A visit to the playground to watch how children behave in a
free environment can also be helpful.
The outcome of such research can prove invaluable. A piece of
theatre can then be devised based on their findings. Another aspect of
the research is script development. Both the practitioners and the
children can work in close collaboration on the script. This is
particularly vital in theatre with children and the outcome, from
experience, has always produced an outstanding performance.
Theatre itself is a collaborative form of art work. Children can be
exceptionally active when they are involved in the planning and
developmental process of a programme that interests them. Clinton
also shares this view:

Where young people have been fully consulted and are involved
in developing a programme of arts activity their interest spans the
range of art forms and their commitment is high (1993: 12).

Generally, children like to be involved in everything, especially when it


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speaks to their world. They can feel empowered when they know that
they are valued. They can be exceptionally active, jumping up and
down, making noise, turning chairs and tables to drums, willing to go at
any length, showing interest in various arts form, singing and dancing.
They do so with great enthusiasm, inspiration and talent. Children are
impressionable. With their minds already set at the theatre they co-
developed, any moral lesson can be embedded in the piece. Moreover,
almost every fairytale teaches some form of morality one way or the
other.

CHILDREN’S THEATRE AS EDUCATION AND ENTERTAINMENT


EXPERIENCE
There has been a lengthy debate about the claim that children learn
through play, and many scholars, have contributed to this
comprehensively (See Dockett, 1999; Evans, 2000; Hamilton and
McFarlane, 2005; Roussou, 2004). The conclusion of these scholars is
that children learn more through fun. Theatre, beside schools, can be
another medium through which children can develop morally. Theatre
can stimulate children to learning as music does; “music learnt at
childhood is a foundation for learning social practices” (Okafor,
1989a:291). This is because children generally give their full attention
to everything that entertains them. Theatre can serve as a motivator
and become another medium for teaching, instructing and transmitting
information to children. Theatre can teach them morality and shape
their behavioural patterns and also entertain them. Therefore, if we
focus on aesthetics experience only, and if we fail to realise the
educational potential in children’s theatre, “we may be overlooking the
rich opportunities that play provides for children to make choices,
develop new skills, solve problems, and make sense of the world they
live in” (McFarlane and Hamilton, 2005, p. 10). However, Schonmann’s
argument is that children’s theatre “has to stop struggling to define its
legitimacy as an educational endeavor” (2006, p. 10). This is not about
legitimising children’s theatre as an educational endeavor but rather it
is about accepting the fact that theatre can be a medium for moral
development. Though a theatre can be created solely for entertainment
experience, children may be able to learn new things about life since
they often get absorbed in whatever they do or watch. This paper
proposes to divide children’s theatre into three categories; children’s

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theatre as aesthetic experience and entertainment, children’s theatre


as education or learning, and children’s theatre as both. The last
category will be developed in this paper.
Children’s theatre can be educational (moral learning) and
entertaining (fun) at the same time with consideration of the needs and
desires of the audience. Education here should not be confused with a
formal classroom teaching. Rather, it relates to informal learning where
morals – standards for good and bad character and behaviour – are
taught within the medium of entertainment. Twain posits that “the
children’s theatre is the only teacher of morals and conduct and high
ideals that never bores the pupil, but always leaves him sorry when the
lesson is over” (Twain, 2014). The context in which the children’s
theatre is grounded can afford the children the opportunity to learn
faster than the classroom. Twain further discusses the significance of
this in children’s theatre:

It is much the most effective teacher of morals and promoter of


good conduct that the ingenuity of man has yet devised, for the
reason that its lessons are not taught wearily by book and by
dreary homily, but by visible and enthusing action; and they go
straight to the heart, which is the rightest of right places for them.
Good morals often get no further than the intellect, if they even get
that far on their spectral and shadowy pilgrimage: but when they
travel from a Children’s Theatre they do not stop permanently at
the halfway, but go on home (Twain, 2014).

The morality in children’s theatre can be more effective than the one
learnt in the book. For example, the moral in a children’s theatre could
be that it is always good to be honest with one another. The children
should be able to connect with the performance to be able to learn
from it, hence the need for the entertainment value. Morality can be
taught within the context of entertainment by embedding it in the
conventions. Therefore, some conventions, which are vital to capturing
children’s attention and that, are necessary for children’s theatre as
both entertainment and education or in the 21st century should be
employed. Some of the conventions will be discussed briefly. They can
be embedded in the piece of theatre whether they are part of the
storyline or not. Though some practitioners may or may not include all
of them for their own reasons. They are important and must be studied
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Dennis Eluyefa

and mastered by adult performing with or for children’s audience.


One of these conventions is ‘suddenlies’. They are any actions or
speech, which, helps to hold the attention of the children (Wood &
Grant, 1997, p. 38). This can include awkward and unexpected
entrances of a character on to the stage. The suddenlies are important
and are vital to sustaining the interest of the children and keeping them
focused. Suddenlies can change constantly so that children will always
have something to focus on. There is no limit to the number of
suddenlies in children’s theatre and they can be anywhere within the
piece. Once children’s attention is captured, moral lesson can be
taught. Furthermore, morality can be part of suddenlies. Suddenlies,
like other elements of children’s theatre, must be part of the narration
because they can get the audience involved.
Narration or storyline is also vital to creating an intrigue piece of
children’s theatre, and moral lesson can be part of this. A good story
could turn out to be a bad performance if the process of telling or
narrating it is not properly and carefully planned and done. Narration
encompasses a style and a set of techniques through which the
performance is conveyed to the children. This may include the
narrative point of view or perspective of the narrators, the
presentational format and the story’s timeframe in which the story is
set. Narration also encompasses not only the characters – visible and
invisible – who tell the story but also how the story is narrated or told.
Therefore, whoever that is involved in the realisation of a story is a
narrator, including the playwrights and directors. Narration advances
the plot of a story. In children’s theatre, plots with simple structures can
be effective and easy to follow. Furthermore, a little extra help such as
giving extra detail is vital in children’s theatre. Although children may
be able to follow a complex story, however, avoiding it can help to
break the ‘fourth wall’. Succinctly, the reception of a performance will
partly depend on how the story is narrated.
Character is another important element that children can connect
to. Wood and Grant (1997) suggest that characters should be larger
than life. Children react to conspicuous objects, and this can cause
them to engage with the performance. The character establishes a
relationship with the children, and this enables them to follow its
actions, which can enable them to learn moral lesson the character
wants to teach. Children are likely to respond to any questions that
their favourite character asks them. In this vein, many moral lessons

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Children’s Theatre

can be learnt in a piece of theatre where there are multiple characters.


Slapstick, a type of humorous acting, is another important convention
that is specific to children’s theatre. Actors act and/or behave in a ‘silly’
way in other to amuse the children. This can include falling down or
throwing things over funnily and dramatically, tripping, slipping and big
reactions. Children love to laugh. Slapstick sets a scene for this
through humour. Humour shows the enjoyment of the audience and
enjoyment is one of the core purposes in every piece of theatre be it
children or adult. Within the plot of a piece of theatre, humorous jokes
can be embedded, and larger than life characters can act ‘silly’ to
create humorous situations. By using humour, the laughter of the
children can create a more vibrant environment, which the actors can
then build upon to carry out the morality they intend to teach.
Magic is another important ingredient of children’s theatre. Magic
is used in the form of fairies, wizards’ witches, and spells. It is
important to show that the magic is working as this is a symbol for
achieving the impossible things (Grant and Wood, 1997). Achieving the
impossible is particularly important in children’s theatre because it has
the potential to inspire the imagination of the children. Gardner (2013)
posits that children’s theatre is capable of firing the imagination of the
children as it gives them the skills and creativity to face the world, to
understand it, and in some cases change it. The use of imagination in
children’s theatre helps map out children’s thoughts and feelings for
them to be able to create stories on how they see the world. It can also
nurture creativity. Furthermore, it can encourage a debate, leading to a
series of questions, and deepening their understanding of the world
around them.
Audience participation is another convention that can get children
involved. Nonetheless, some children’s theatre practitioners may
decide not to use it. Furthermore, some interactive or immersive
theatres in adult theatre also use audience participation. In children’s
theatre, it will need to be properly managed as it can easily get out of
hand. This could be one of the reasons why some practitioners do not
use it. It is important that the characters are in complete control. One of
the ways to do this is by using a well-known song with a refrain and a
simple movement with/or a clapping routine. Practitioners can identify
songs that the children are familiar with through research. When
children enter into the spirit of entertainment they get excited, shout
and sing and this can help boost the energy level of the actors and
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Dennis Eluyefa

thus improve the performance. Another method is by using questions


that have precise answers. These can create a sense of intrigue, and
most children are likely to answer a direct question thrown at them by
the actors. The questions must be short and simple to enable children
to grasp them quickly. The simple yes or no to questions can be
effective and easily managed. For example, ‘Children, is it good to be
greedy’? The children will relate the question to an immoral behaviour
of a character in the piece and give a precise answer. In this way, the
lesson on greediness is taught by the actors and learnt by the children.

CONCLUSION
The pedagogical approach to creating theatre for children between the
age of 4 and 10 has been briefly discussed. The argument is not that
children’s theatre has to be always educational. Practitioners can
create theatre that entertains only. The overarching argument is that
children’s theatre can be educational and entertaining at the same
time. Children can learn about social and ethical issues and develop
some social skills through the medium of theatre, either by watching or
taking part in it. Moreover, moral lessons are often part of almost every
fairytale. In the same vein, moral lessons can be embedded in
children’s theatre in the context of entertainment. The paper also
suggests that practitioners start to see themselves as educators and
researchers and not just as entertainers. Through research – working,
observing and talking with the target children – they will be able to
have an understanding of what interests the children and plan and
devise a piece of theatre accordingly. Both the practitioners and the
children can learn from each other in the process. The practitioners
can learn more about how children think and speak in different
situations. Children also can begin to learn to develop their
communication skills during the interview session. By working
collaboratively, it is possible that some of the children might develop
their interest in theatre and take it up as a future profession. An
opportunity for children to discuss the morals at the end of the
performance, talking to their favourite characters can also be part of a
children’s theatre. It is high time that children’s theatre is taken
seriously and seen as another medium through which children can be
entertained and educated.

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Children’s Theatre

SUGGESTED CITATION
Eluyefa, D. (2017). Children’s theatre: A brief pedagogical approach.
Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 79-93.

REFERENCES
Bennett, S. (2005). Theatre for children and young people.
Twickenham: Aurora Metro Publications.
Clinton, L. (1993). Community development and the arts. London:
Community Development Foundation Publication.
Dockett, S. (1999). Play with outcomes. Every Child, 5 (3).
Evans, J. (2000). Play to order is no longer play. Every Child, 6 (2).
Gardner, L. (2013). Why children’s theatre matters. The Guardian.
Goldberg, M. (1974). Children’s theatre: A philosophy and a method.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hamilton, N. & McFarlane, J. (2005). Children learn through play. In
Putting Children First, the Newsletter of the National Childcare
Accreditation Council (NCAC).
Klein, J. & Schonmann, S. (2009). Theorizing aesthetic transactions
from children’s criterial values in theatre for young audience.
Youth Theatre Journal, 23 (1), 60-74.
Maguire, T & Schuitema, k. (2012). Theatre for young audiences: a
critical handbook. London: A Trentham Book, Institute of
Education Press.
Okafor, R. C. (1989). Of ditties, needs and amnesia – music and
primary education in Anambra State, Nigeria. British Journal of
Music Education, 6 (3), 280-303.
Polka Theatre (2017). About us.
Reason, M. (2010). The young audience: Exploring and enhancing
children’s experiences of theatre. Staffordshire: Trentham Books.
Rosenberg, H. S. & Prendergast, C. (1983). Theatre for young people:
A sense of occasion. New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.
Roussou, M. (2004). Learning by doing and learning through play: An
exploration of interactivity in virtual environments for children.
Computers in Entertainment (CIE) – Theoretical and Practical
Computer Applications in Entertainment, 2 (1).
Schonmann, S. (2006). Theatre as a medium for children and young
people: images and observations. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
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Springer.
Tambling, P. (1990). Performing arts in the primary school. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell Ltd.
The Prince Foundation (2017). Taking children and young people to
the theatre.
Twain, M. (2014). Mark Twain’s letters & speeches. Jazzybee Verlag.
Unicorn Theatre (2017). About us.
Wood, D. & Grant, J. (1997). Theatre for children: A guide to writing,
adapting, directing and acting. London, Faber and Faber Limited.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Dennis Eluyefa is a performing artist from Nigeria. He worked for
many years with Dr. Hubert Ogunde, the acclaimed father and founder
of Nigerian contemporary theatre, and had in-depth training in acting,
voice and movement with him. He also performed, danced and
choreographed for many top musicians in Nigeria. He played the
Yoruba talking drums professionally with the Nigerian Navy band 3, Sir
Oladiran and His Best Organisation and Sir Akin Erifeyiwa and His Juju
Dance Band. Dr. Eluyefa lived in Hungary for many years before
moving to the United Kingdom in pursuance of his academic career.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Drama at Bishop Grosseteste
University, Lincoln in the United Kingdom.

93
ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Feeling Blue: An Investigative Apparatus


CLARE HAMMOOR
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
sch399@nyu.edu

ABSTRACT
This auto-ethnographic inquiry explores found and constructed
apparatuses in the production of a devised clown show with 3rd-6th
grade children at Blue School in New York City. Through a playful
negotiation between artifacts, theory, and memory, this essay works to
untangle the production of meaning and the possibilities of children’s
theatre. Drawing from Agamben’s theorizations of apparatus,
Hammoor writes into knowing and understanding the frameworks he
built and discovered in directing a sad clown show with children.

DISPOSITIF
Clowning, circus, magic, side shows and variety acts make up forms of
populist theatre that are incredibly exciting to me. When they are
combined with children’s interpretations of New York City’s downtown
aesthetics, I have discovered explosive possibilities. It is with this in
mind that I proposed creating a sad clown show at Blue School, an
independent school in Manhattan founded in collaboration with the
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Clare Hammoor

Blue Man Group. I had been working at Blue School as a Drama


Specialist for a year before proposing a major, multi-grade production
— it was important for me to understand the culture and values of an
institution before proposing a major next step. The mission of the
school, which I found to be blossoming, is “To develop and share an
inquiry-based approach to education that fosters creativity, promotes
academic excellence, nurtures human relationships and inspires a
growing passion for learning” (Blue, 2016). After many preliminary
discussions centered on budget, parental expectations and school
values, I developed the following project description that was shared in
the school newsletter as an advertisement for students to join the
afterschool project.

Collaborate with a capricious cavalcade of clever, crestfallen


clowns!

We are incredibly excited to announce auditions for Blue School's


first multi-grade, full length performance opening this next
semester! Students in grades 3-6 (in the 2015-16 school year) are
invited to join an ensemble-driven cast and crew as we collaborate
to devise a new, old-school clown show featuring classically
inspired and original bits, dances, characters, and acts. With
empathy and physicality at the heart of this project, we will employ
a professional standard of care and commitment to build a new
performance from the hearts and minds of Blue School students.
Directed by Clare Hammoor, this devising process will be joined
by Blue School faculty as well as professional clowns, circus
makers, musicians, and theatre folks (Collaborate, 2016).

Over the course of 5 months, a group of 14 3rd-6th grade students


along with a team of professional artists and educators developed a
clown show that we decided to call Feeling Blue. Throughout the
devising process ensemble members developed clown characters and
dozens of act possibilities. In the end, we landed on 27 short acts and
an aesthetic marked by black smudges, teased hair, silver sparkles,
and the perspiration of challenging work. Simultaneously, our adult
process mirrored the explorations of the children through nearly a
dozen collaborative design meetings that worked to negotiate
possibilities given our population, budget, location and time.

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Feeling Blue

Composed of a choreographer, costume designer, two musicians, a


lighting designer, stage manager and myself as director, this team
became interlocutors with our clowns throughout our months of
process.

Figure 1. Feeling Blue Overture. Photo by Oskar Landi.

Before the production opened, I was asked by the Head of School


to develop a curtain speech outlining our process of inquiry and
development. Hoping for something to ground the work, she asked me
to “contextualize” (Gaines-Pell, 2016) what the audience would be
seeing. I have an aversion to curtain speeches not only because they
can limit ways of seeing the work but also because they interrupt the
production of theatre magic (in this case, the ensemble had a number
of small pre-show acts they wanted their audiences to notice as they
took their seats). In lieu of this speech, I developed the following
statement which we mounted to the doors of the theatre for folks to
pause and read or pass straight into our sad clown world.

Devising theatre is messy. It’s an artform that does not draw on a


text or a score. It’s a world of play- and meaning- making that
demands outrageous ideas and specific encounters. It’s the

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process we used to create the piece of theatre you’ll see tonight.


Beginning with just the germ of the idea ‘clown’ and the possibility
of growing empathy, the children you will see performing this
piece of theatre have imagined all of its scenes, rehearsed with an
experienced theatre team in professional studios, and committed
to the work of an artmaking process that is sophisticated and
caring. Inspired by their preconceived notions of ‘clown’ we have
challenged their assumptions through every step of this process
as they used the tropes of silent clowning to share their loud ideas
about the world around them and how they see their own lives
within it. These clowns would never survive under the big top.
They’re lenses for theatrical meaning-making. The idea of
clowning has given the ensemble the freedom to imagine the
selves they dream of (both in daydreams and nightmares) onstage
for you tonight. The scenes they feature in are short bursts of
energy, contained moments of exploration, that we wove together
to create a score of delight, sadness and strangeness. It’s all
them. It’s all the clowns. It’s all the kids. We just wrapped them in
a glittery bow. Welcome to their theatrical playground — a space
they built for themselves, their friends, their families, and our Blue
School community (Hammoor, 2016).

I wrote this dispositif within a larger conversation between what


contemporary clowning might look like with these children and the
school’s lineage from the Blue Man Group’s 80s antics. In looking
behind, at and ahead of our production, I found myself searching for
ways of defining what I came to know as sad clowns downtown. Sad,
because of their imminent failure despite the most absurd attempts at
success, clowns in their uncanny ability to reflect deep understandings
of the human condition through simple acts, and downtown because of
their surreal, glamorized, nostalgic aesthetic that sprung from the
clubs, queers and performances of New York City three decades ago.
Altogether, these inspirations became qualifications for contemplating
the possibilities of the production.
After the sold-out run, Matt Goldman, a founder of Blue School,
described Feeling Blue as ambitious “in scope and scale . . . simply
incredible” (2016). While the production was greeted with enthusiasm
by our community at Blue School, I was left wondering just what it was
we did that made it work? What frames did we put intentionally

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introduce and what ways of thinking did we discover haphazardly?


What rules and obligations were already present that opened doors
while nailing others shut?
Inspired by these questions, this essay works to unpack the
production of meaning. It unties that glittery bow we wrapped around
our clowns and puts it in under a microscope. It is a close reading of
artifacts and memories in conversation with theorizations, in search of
new interpretations. It is a search for fingerprints, nascent energies and
discarded ideas. In excavating these moments, I am interested in
developing a vocabulary of experience and reflexivity. It is my hope
that this lexicon finds application beyond the framework of this paper
and into contemporary practice.
At the heart of this excavation is the journey to understanding the
structures of power that rendered the clowns of Feeling Blue visible. I
am looking forward to sharing my engagement with a variety of
theoretical sources in conversation with artifacts and ultimately my own
memories. This positioning is also critical to my own understanding of
the development of this framework because it supports my own
understandings of responsibilities to certain inherent structures of
power. Most importantly, however, this essay works to develop a
methodology of reflection on my production of an apparatus with which
I hoped to capture the dramatic possibilities of these child clowns.

WHAT IS AN APPARATUS?
Perhaps it is first important to describe the ideation of the word
apparatus before attempting to dismantle and examine this one in
particular. I am drawn to the profundity of Agamben’s definition of the
term because it pulls from a Foucauldian genealogy while opening up
new possibilities for exploration and playfulness. In doing so, he
proposes “[N]othing less than a general and massive partitioning of
beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings
(or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings
are incessantly captured” (2009, p. 13). Agamben goes on to prescribe
the characteristics of an apparatus as “[L]iterally anything that has in
some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model,
control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of
living beings” (2009, p. 14). The breadth and potential depth of this
definition opens possibilities for its direct application into work in

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practice, as well as that which appears to be more traditionally


understood as theoretical. Meanwhile, its delineation between groups
is important because it leaves room between partitions for the act of
capture and, ultimately, the subjectivity that it produces. Agamben
situates a “subject [as] that which results from the relation and, so to
speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and
apparatuses” (2009, p. 14). This perpetual battle of subjectification is
critical to understanding the implications and inexorability of the
production of apparatuses. In the particular realization of the ideas this
paper is focused on, such interstices are exploited as tools of meaning-
making.

SUBJECTIVITIES OF CHILD CLOWNS


As I am interested in developing a framework of understanding
grounded in Agamben’s characterizations of apparatus, I am
simultaneously engaged with an understanding of clowning which
relates explicitly to children. While much has been written recently
(Bouissac, 2015 & Peacock, 2009) concerning the intellectual,
historical and theoretical origins of the art of modern clowning, I am
specifically interested in uncovering thinking that grounds such an art
in the embodiments of children. To this end, Adorno’s realization of the
role of the clown as somehow primal, in connection with the
possibilities of art itself, well suits my investigation.

In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the


primordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what
resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is
a collusion with art which adults drive out of them just as they drive
out their collusion with animals (2004, p. 159).

For Adorno, the clown functions on the “meaninglessness of meaning”


concurrent with and drawn from the “primordial world of
animals”(Coulson, 2009, p. 127). Here the conspiracy of children
creating dramatic work as clowns must somehow be even bolder than
the support of one subjectivity to another. If it is possible to distill their
subjectivity to ‘clown’ for both outsiders and the clowns themselves,
these moments of interaction are sparked by experiences of “collusion”
(Adorno, 2004, p. 159) while moving into a deeper understanding of

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the self. And while no one subject position defines a being, certain rich
potentialities are surely rehearsed by the “stubbornly purposeless
expertise . . . of clowns” (Horkheimer and Adorno, p. 114, found in
Simon, n.d.). Meanwhile, Adorno also nods to a problem of sensibilities
that results in adults pushing away possibilities of complicity with
clowns and animals imaginably in favor of a force that is somehow
more modern, refined and civilized. Adults’ work to “drive out” (Adorno,
2004, p. 159) these potentialities is wrapped up in the production and
re-production of their own assessments of meaning, learning and ideas
of what is appropriate for children. The implications of fears motivating
such forces will be teased out in the upcoming sections.

CONSTRUCTING AN APPARATUS
Examining the plethora of factors that influenced our production could
not be contained in the scope of this paper. Instead of gathering
motivations, inspirations, and restrictions broadly, I will attempt to
examine a few of them that involve my own positioning, institutional
and community expectations, and collaboration/collusion. Intertwined,
these headings represent elements of a “para-choreographic
apparatus” (Marquié, 2007, p. 36) which I consciously and
unconsciously deployed from Feeling Blue’s initial description to its
closing night. In this way, not only did the frames, rules and obligations
of my community foreclose certain choices while supporting others,
written and verbal expectations and descriptions of the work equally
influenced the possibilities of Feeling Blue’s reception.

Positioning
As noted earlier, I am passionate about making work with children that
springs from clowning. The joy of this work is life-giving to me. It
invigorates my notions of what art is, what an artistic practice does and
how art-making lives in the greater world. My glamorization of
downtown theatre devices and designs draws energies from decades
of queers, outsiders and weirdos before me. It’s inspired by current
clowns including Jennifer Miller and her raucous troupe, Circus Amok!.
It is both present in the messiness of theatre today and connected
through genealogies of storytelling, live performance, film,
photographs, scripts and artifacts. While that may sound sexy, it is not
a set of tastes often welcomed in the world of education, especially not

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outside of university settings. My own aesthetic sensibilities have


undoubtedly been supported by my subject-position as an educated,
middle-class, queer, white man making theatre with children at an
institution that charges a hefty sum for its education. Imagining this
work within my own public primary school, for instance, in the rolling
cornfields of a conservative state tightens my stomach. It reminds me
of the immense privilege I have in creating work with children whose
families and support structures are excited about their ideas and my
own predilections. It also reminds me of the frustrations many teachers
have in being forced to churn out work with children that is both safe
and sterile. I know these realities prove to be great constraints on the
application of my work broadly but I am more interested to see them as
provocations for children’s theatre, especially in the United States.
Feeling Blue felt like a step toward the horizon. But we never reach the
horizon, do we?
In briefly unpacking my own subject-position here I am working to
discover myself both as a collaborator, caught in the incessant
machinations of the apparatuses working throughout this process, and
as a director, im- and ex-plicitly utilizing systems of power to determine
our ensemble members’ subjectivity and visibility. I am working to bring
a sense of discernibility to my own thinking while holding myself
accountable for it.

Institutional and community expectations of aesthetics


At the heart of the germ of an idea for this project lay the necessity of
its interaction with Blue School’s culture. While the culture of some
institutions may be difficult to pin down, Blue School takes pride in the
development and disbursement of its ideas. Its mission statement
begins with the phrase “To develop” (Blue, 2016). Not to have, hold or
be. But to be in process. In progress. The lead of this word allows for
prospects in education and I was excited to realize what that might
start to mean for theatre and drama. The school’s mission goes on to
support an “inquiry-based approach”, “creativity”, and the nurturing of
“human relationships” (Blue, 2016). I capitalized on these sites for
meaning-making by describing a process of theatre that was devised
and collaborative “with empathy and physicality at the heart”
(Collaborate, 2016). The process of deciding the most attractive
language loaded in possibility for families was not an easy task. It
required a number of proposals and discussions before its evolution

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into the copy used in family communications and advertisements. In


looking to describe the possibilities and provocations of the work, I
found myself grappling with the tensions between academic and pop-
psychology lingo as well as the chore of translating the process of
devising into accessible, bite-sized phrases that could be quickly
grasped.
With the motivations for this project clearly aligned with the
school’s principles, the families, faculty members and supporters of
Blue School eagerly supported the few words I shared as the basis for
something that their children would bring into existence. Folks were
quick to sign their children up for the project and generously
enthusiastic throughout its process. This community was not looking
for another modern children’s musical. They expressed little desire for
another production of Annie, Jr. Instead, they spent energy pining for a
production that understood itself as postmodern; somehow
contemporary and primordial. Parents were interested in providing a
performance context that resembled their own backgrounds in New
York City’s theatre, performance art, film and dance scenes. They
shared anecdotes about their children’s discussions of rehearsal room
antics. Given sneak peeks into the rehearsal through photo and video
documentation as well as a brief trailer the students created, families’
energies supported their children throughout our 5 months together.
Tickets sold out days before opening night. I felt a true sense of delight
from parents and ensemble members as the production neared —
what an incredible space to hold as a teacher.

Collaboration and collusion


Our “commitment to build a new performance from the hearts and
minds of Blue School students” (Collaborate, 2016) led directly to
“beginning [the process] with just the germ of the idea ‘clown’”
(Hammoor, 2016). By inviting students into an artform they had only
cursory, pop-culture knowledge of, I was accountable for a certain
amount of knowledge/skill sharing before we could get into the work of
creating together. Questions of character development, physical life,
scene structure and movement analysis became ways of discussing
ideas the ensemble shared with its own members and their adult
collaborators. This framework cast me and the team of professional
artists and educators as experts and undoubtedly initiated a practice of
collusion rather than collaboration between our students and our adult

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selves. In reflecting on the previous sentence in relation to the


enthusiasm the child clowns showed at this juncture in our process left
me feeling as though their energies and ideations were somehow
secondary to the ones that the adults brought into the room. But
perhaps this is always the case with an inquiry-based approach.
Exemplified in a process drama, there is usually some seed of an idea
that begins a process of germination before collaborators can take
care of it on their own. In this way, my responsibility to create an
apparatus to capture the students’ work also functioned as a point of
departure, an inspiration, even. As students became more comfortable
within the context of our work together, their subjectivities seemed to
shift from outsiders to colluders to, ultimately, collaborators as clowns.
Simultaneously, the apparatus viewing and creating them also shifted
to support their new realizations of self as clowns. I can remember
moments of watching this understanding unfold in the rehearsal room,
beginning with their first experiences of wearing their individual, sparkly
clown noses.

Process and possibilities


I developed a nose-ritual for each rehearsal that began with children
resting on the floor, focused on breathing, preparing for the tiniest of
transformations. Walking through the room with silver body paint, I
dabbed a small dot on each child’s nose, inviting them to begin their
journey into character. This tiny mask marked the identity of ensemble
members as clowns from my perspective on the outside, as well as the
one inhabited within each child. As their bodies rose from the floor, the
children stepped away from some parts of themselves and into “a
world of play- and meaning- making” (Hammoor, 2016). In placing a
nose on each child, I performed a function of the framework of
acquisition while also inviting the children to graduate from colluders to
collaborators — all equal behind the mask.
This process of masking opened the young clowns up to the
possibilities of their own imaginations in performative ways. Freed from
their restricted selves often performed during school hours, these tiny
masks were big enough to hide the performed self of school and
highlight the performed self of the stage. I could see and feel the young
performers’ transubstantiation each week (even if it only lasted for a
moment or two). Philosophically and practically seen dialectically
rather than as pupils, our ensemble of clowns uncovered and

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developed deeper shades of themselves throughout their contributions


to our collective devising process.
Memories have a tendency to produce a sheen over imperfections
and my recollections of these clowns and this process is no different.
Of course issues of attendance, chitchatting, memorization, focus, and
continuous character commitment were manifest throughout this
process. They provided sites of struggle we ultimately overcame and
incorporated into the process of learning, thinking and making
together. What ultimately kept us moving forward was the sheer thrill
the ensemble members brought to the room each week that emanated
from the simplest of ideas.
From the beginning of our process, the only pre-designated
material in the room was the phrase “sad clowns.” These two words
proved to provoke and inspire an endless stream of situations that
would be whittled down and curated into the final show we shared with
the Blue School community. Ensemble members were challenged to
develop their own “10-second acts” that interacted somehow with the
idea of “sad clowns” and, collectively, we brought these ideas to life.
Some of these short bursts of energy turned into scenes with mini-
narratives, and others evolved into strange transitions, still others
became whole-group numbers that were spaced throughout the final
piece. From a hobo clown in the subway leaning too far over the
platform edge to 14 clowns dramatically failing at their first ballet class
to sirens and screams as a happy circus turned out to be a family of
butchers, the show developed over our twice-weekly rehearsals to
encompass a world of weirdness and wonder. Altogether, we cut and
pasted these acts and ideas into a pastiche of performances somehow
affixed to our theme. Without a narrative through-line we deployed a
clear delineation of what would be visible in the world of our
performances; the ensemble and design team together developed a
very controlled palette based on deep blues, silver, black and touches
of white for each mise-en-scène. Visually, these restrictions created a
world that constantly referred to itself through what Rancière identifies
as “sensory presence and ethical immediacy” as “opposed to
representational mediation” (2008, p. 8-9). Every prop, light, costume
and headpiece was painted, stained, dyed and tinted by these colors.
They were real materials vibrating in playful actuality rather than the
attempts at realism that so often plague our young people’s stages.
Everything felt as though it was part of the dissociated, disparate, and

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contradictory worlds we had created. In its production, we learned how


to create a structure that both supported children’s impulses and glee
while also making their rehearsed and spontaneous play visible.
The acts that composed Feeling Blue were less experiments in
precision than endeavors in explosive energy. By lowering the
demands of perfect repetition within the pieces of this show, we were
able to raise the possibilities of improvisation and presence within a
guiding frame. In reflecting on this distinction, I can see the literal
appearance and application of the apparatus of assessment through
which the work was constantly interpreted. If “the aesthetic regime of
art begins with that upheaval of the very idea of perfection” (Rancière,
2008, p. 8), then the outlandish and spontaneous acts the children
developed became the basis for new ways of being. Such
investigations into the “meaninglessness of meaning” (Coulson, 2009,
p. 127) as a solo clown stuttering across the stage with a “Welcome
Home” sign for someone who never arrived, speak to the state of the
ensemble members’ imaginations and the possibilities that their
friends, families, school and community craved.
Ultimately, what worked in Feeling Blue was the collaboration of
apparatuses and subjectivities that rendered it visible. It was a
manifestation of surrealist aesthetics and absurd practices that
reached into the school’s genealogy, reflected on its current children,
and hopefully developed a challenging framework for future
productions. Feeling Blue was powerful, meaningful and beautiful
because it existed in a specific temporality with all of its restrictions and
enthusiasms. The production shimmered because it knew more than
its audience — it somehow knew itself.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Hammoor, C. (2017). Feeling blue: An investigative apparatus. Arts
Praxis, 4 (1), 94-107.

REFERENCES
Adorno, T. (2004). Aesthetic theory. London: A & C Black.
Agamben, G. (2009). What is an apparatus?: and other essays.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things.

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Feeling Blue

Durham: Duke University Press.


Blue School Promise. (n.d.).
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transgression and the theory of laughter. New York: Bloomsbury.
Collaborate with a capricious cavalcade of clever, crestfallen clowns!
[Advertisement]. (2016, May 30). Blue School Newsletter.
Coulson, S. (2009). Adorno's aesthetics of critique. Newcastle Upon
Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Foreman, R. (1992). Unbalancing acts: Foundations for a theater (K.
Jordan, Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
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mail to the author].
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E. Jephcott Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Marquié, H. (2007). Dance discourses: keywords in dance research (S.
Franco & M. Nordera, Eds.). London: Routledge.
Peacock, L. (2009). Serious play: Modern clown performance. Bristol,
UK: Intellect.
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Scenes from the aesthetic regime of art. Art & Research, 2 (1).
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Polity Press.
Rancière, J. (2009b). The emancipated spectator (G. Elliott, Trans.).
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Clare Hammoor

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Clare Hammoor is a theatre practitioner, the Primary and Middle
School Drama Specialist and Director at Blue School, and the Director
of Education at Brooklyn Acting Lab. He facilitates theatre and drama
with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks in New York State as
a college instructor with Hudson Link and as the Artistic Director of
(re)emergent theatre, which he co-founded. Clare holds a MA in
Educational Theatre from New York University where he is an EdD
candidate.

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

Participatory Aesthetics: Youth Performance as


Encounter
PAMELA BAER
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
pamela.baer@mail.utoronto.ca

ABSTRACT
In this paper the notion of a participatory aesthetic is developed by
exploring how a collaborative and creative process provides
opportunities for young people to engage in an act of becoming in
relation to one another, building powerful and affective art work that is
not bound by the conventions of traditional forms of theatre and art
making. The paper begins with a discussion on the role of affect and
participation in applied theatre, offering a theoretical framework that is
used to analyze two case studies. The first is a project in Accra, Ghana
that resulted in a youth-led documentary film about HIV/AIDS and
gender relationships. The second is a YouTube based applied theatre
project with LGBTQ youth in Toronto, Canada. In both case studies the
paper demonstrates the power of dialogue in building a participant
driven aesthetic rendering of theatre for social change. The paper
concludes stating that a participatory aesthetic is a deeply visceral and
vulnerable encounter that builds important pedagogy through affective
artistic engagement.

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Pamela Baer

INTRODUCTION
I had a meeting recently to discuss the implementation of a digital
storytelling project in a classroom setting. I was there as a consultant
to share my experience in digital storytelling and help work through the
pedagogical shaping of such an undertaking. I began by asking a
number of questions about the goals of the project and one of the first
responses was, ‘I want it to be good, I don’t want the videos to be bad.’
This surprised me and I wanted to respond by saying ‘Can it be bad?’
but I bit my tongue, because I understood what was meant; the goal
was student-led, but also achieving certain aesthetic standards, even if
this meant taking some authorship away from the students. We would
be ‘setting them up for success.’ This conversation was brief, but it
brought up a number of questions I have been sitting with for years.
What constitutes good and bad art in student-led or participatory
creative work? Are participation and aesthetics at odds with one
another? Must we judge creative beauty solely on the product that is
created? How can we reimagine the notion of aesthetics through the
power of participation?
In my experience as an applied theatre artist and scholar, common
project goals such as anti-oppression education, social engagement,
social change, youth participation, and youth empowerment often sit in
tension with the goals of aesthetic quality and authorship (Gray, Baer,
& Goldstein, 2015; Goldstein et al. 2014; Snell, 2013). This requires
artist-educators to navigate competing interests throughout the
creative play-building process and work to understand how important
outcomes are negotiated. The field of applied theatre has begun to
explore these tensions (Collins, 2015; Gallagher, 2014; Goldstein,
2012; Prentki & Preston, 2009; Thompson, 2009; White, 2015),
however a great deal of the literature still focuses on the possibilities
for applied theatre as a form of anti-oppression education rather than
exploring the tensions that arise when drama is used as a form of anti-
oppression education (Anderson & O’Connor, 2013; Boal, 2000;
Cohen-Cruz, 2006; Neelands, 2009; Nicholson, 2005; Prendergast &
Saxton, 2009; Woodland, 2012). Affect has also been taken up by
applied theatre scholars in recent years building the argument that the
affective realm of theatrical encounter is as important to the political
work of applied theatre as any other component, and that the political,
aesthetic, and affective cannot sit at odds with one another because

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they are tangled together in performative moments (Gallagher, 2016;


Nicholson, 2016; Thompson, 2009).
My focus within this field of study is in the belief that affective
encounters govern the creative production of the work as much as the
final performance event. Theatre artists are trained to attend to “the
dramatic structure of the play…, the performers presence and
physicality…, the staging…, as well as the language and words used in
the script” (Gray, Baer, & Goldstein, 2015, p. 8). The focus on these
elements of theatricality constitutes a dominant aesthetic of what
theatre is and should be within traditional and applied theatre spaces.
As artists engage this dominant aesthetic sensibility in order to build
affective performances for audiences, the participatory possibilities of
the form are potentially limited - authorship becomes a site of
contention to be negotiated by those leading the project, rather than as
a collaborative emergence from participants. It is from this
understanding that I build and explore the notion of a participatory
aesthetic, wherein the encounter between participants becomes the
gage for understanding the aesthetic quality of the work rather than a
valuation based on a cultural standard of theatricality.

PARTICIPATORY AESTHETICS
As mentioned above, there is widespread belief within the field of
applied theatre that projects must produce work that meets prevailing
notions of artistic merit, based on cultural and professionalized norms
of the theatrical form (Prendergast & Saxton, 2010; Neelands, 2008;
Thompson, 2009). This belief creates an opening for tensions to
emerge around anti-oppression education, because ethical
commitments to authorship and participation sometimes waver in
response to the need for a specific aesthetic standard – that is
governed by socio-cultural-political ideas of theatricality. This takes
away power from the people whose stories, ideas, and representations
are informing the theatrical performance, grooming their work to be
taken over by a professional artist in the final stages of presentation.
Most often the work that unfolds in this way is unaware of it’s own
limitations. As an alternative, a participatory aesthetic builds a deeply
visceral encounter through affective artistic engagement. A
participatory aesthetic does not occur solely in a completed
performance event, but rather is a collaborative process-based

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concept that has the potential to provide opportunities for people to


engage in acts of becoming in relation to one another and to build
affective art work that is not bound by the conventions of traditional
forms of theatre and art making. A participatory aesthetic situates the
body as a site of knowing by creating an emerging entanglement of
process and performance that lacks clear boundaries. This creates an
opportunity to make the familiar strange as participants and audiences
attune to the way that affect shifts, pulls, and pushes bodies by
isolating the moment of ephemeral encounter and escalating it through
aesthetic and creative means. This process opens up space for what
Sara Ahmed (2015) calls “wonder”.

What is ordinary, familiar or usual often resists being perceived by


consciousness. It becomes taken for granted, as the background
that we do not even notice, and which allows objects to stand out
or stand apart. Wonder is an encounter with an object that one
does not recognize; or wonder works to transform the ordinary,
which is already recognized, into the extraordinary. As such
wonder expands our field of vision and touch (p. 179).

An affective encounter through artistic engagement with everyday


experiences provides opportunities to critically examine the ordinary
through wonder (Boal, 2000; Freire, 2009). This enables participants
and audiences to notice how bodies move, touch, and see in relation to
one another. As a form of applied theatre, this figurative distancing
through aesthetic renderings (Snell, 2014; Snell, 2013) opens up
possibilities to understand how affect impacts our bodies’ ability to ‘be’
and ‘do’. Applied theatre aesthetics than are not only an artistic
“standard of excellence” as defined by euro-centric cultural norms
(Neelands, 2008) whereby power asserts its legitimacy as it is buried
beneath our assessment of theatricality (Rancière, 2009); instead
aesthetics create an opportunity for encounter with the material, an
embodied moment of becoming that emerges as bodies respond and
react to one another (Collins, 2015). A participatory aesthetic moves
away from an artist-led process of rendering stories through traditional
notions of theatre and towards a participant-led approach where
people can think and feel and respond in ways that are unexpected by
attuning to the in-between-ness that facilitates learning.

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To implement applied theatre projects from this stance there must


be a shift towards understanding aesthetics as a relational intensity
that is always in a state of becoming, but never completed, while also
working to reveal the normative cultural ideals that are tied up in
valuations of theatricality. Engaging a fluid becoming as an aesthetic
rendering inhabits the space between art as teacher and viewer as
learner by bringing an unknowability into the site of creation and shifts
our understanding of applied theatre to a more embodied, relational,
and affective approach to social change (Kumashiro, 2000; Nicholson,
2016). This emergent process works to reveal the unthinkable by
attuning to what bodies do in relation to one another. In other words
applied theatre has the potential to be a site of affective encounters
that create openings for unknowable ways of being to emerge. The
following case studies provide further insight into this understanding of
a participatory aesthetic.

CASE STUDY #1: UNWRAPPING THE SWEETS


Unwrapping the Sweets was a project that I designed and facilitated
with youth participants from the organization ‘Theatre for a Change’.
We explored topics such as HIV/AIDS, gender relationships, and teen
pregnancy in the community of a densely populated urban area of
Accra, Ghana called James Town. The project unfolded over 4 months
with the group meeting 2-3 times a week for about 4 hours each time.
Together the youth and I explored questions and experiences around
the topics by engaging Theatre for Development (TfD) and
Participatory Video (PV) activities. As a final outcome the youth
decided they wanted to make a documentary film about the things they
had learned from one another and use it as an advocacy tool
throughout their community. The documentary was written, filmed, and
edited entirely by the youth participants. While I was there as a guide,
to offer suggestions and technical support, I maintained that the
creative and narrative decisions belonged to the youth; this opened up
space for an original aesthetic quality to emerge. The film uses
process clips, original dramas, interviews with one another and
community members, and ends with the questions that are still left
unanswered. The film was screened throughout the community and
broached subjects such as money expectations in relationships, safe
sex practices, and the stigma of people living with HIV/AIDS.

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The journey that was undertaken by the youth was one of personal
exploration. They learned about themselves and their community
through creative conversations. As an example there were a number of
sessions where the young men and young women created separate
performance work that addressed all the things they felt they could not
say in front of members of the opposite sex. They filmed these
performances, shared them with one another, and then created video
responses. This dialogue continued for a number of weeks and opened
up conversations that the youth had never had before. What does it
mean to negotiate sex and relationships within the constraints of their
cultural context? What are the expectations put on people of different
genders? How do you begin to have conversations across these
differences? These questions were asked not as a direct address, but
rather through music, performance, poetry, and dance.
The pedagogy that emerged in and through this exchange was
intense, and the pieces that were created (and included in the final
documentary) offer an interesting social critique. In moments such as
this the aesthetic qualities of the artwork are embedded in their
pedagogical importance. What developed is a dialogic aesthetic, where
the process of dialogue is in itself the work of art, and an
understanding of that aesthetic lives in the space between the creative
works where the performers bodies speak to one another through
movement (Collins, 2015). Participants were affecting and being
affected by one another while simultaneously interfering with shared
assumptions about gender relationships through acts of spontaneity.
This spontaneity as it emerges, entangles, and intra-acts with other
bodies in movement creates a relational aesthetic that is always in
process (Dewey, 2005; Rotas & Springgay, 2013). Movement in this
sense is not about bodies on a trajectory from point A to point B, but
rather bodies that exist in relational movement with other people and
things. Here, aesthetic qualities emerge through embodiment, coming
to know through the body as it moves in relation to the wider world
(Manning & Massumi, 2014). This aesthetic act is an embedded and
relational emergence of power and knowledge, where movement
creates unpredictable compositions. When understood in this way,
audience members are invited into the dance of dialogic aesthetics,
and provided the opportunity to continue to (un)tangle what is known
through the creative work while simultaneously continuing to create
ephemeral moments of encounters through the act of witnessing. This

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relational movement is a participatory aesthetic that implicates each


person (creator and audience) as an active participant in creating
meaning through the dialogue of the artwork.
In this case the aesthetic qualities of the film were not those of a
professional Western filmmaker, the call to mosque is ever present
throughout the footage, the vignettes mirror Nigerian television, and
the arc of the film is episodic rather than narrative based. Instead the
dialogic and relational aesthetic presents a group of youth pouring their
stories and their own learning journey into an exploratory piece that
shares their vulnerable souls with an audience and draws on additional
aesthetic qualities that are culturally familiar. This culturally
recognizable aesthetic rendering has created an encounter, an
opportunity to be recognized, witnessed and validated and is a dialogic
provocation for Ghanaian audiences because when screened in James
Town the film facilitated heated and important debates. Yet, when
screened for a British audience whose understanding of aesthetic
excellence is defined by notions of colonialism and built through ideas
of class and politics, they had trouble finding an entry point through
which they could access the deeper visceral encounter proposed by
the film. This resulted in stalled discussion and lack of intercultural
understanding. In this case the aesthetic boundaries of euro-centric
cinema worked to limit both the affective and effective potential of the
film beyond its local context suggesting that aesthetic creation and
reception are culturally and temporally bound. Unwrapping the Sweets
challenged dominant western aesthetics in form, content, and purpose
building a participatory aesthetic that presented a challenge to
traditional ideas of applied theatre presentations by engaging instead
with a youth-led exploratory, experimental, relational encounter. If
understood in this way perhaps the British audience could have
received this film as the dialogic and processual provocation it was
meant to be rather than as a transmission of a completed artistic
artifact.

CASE STUDY #2: QUEER CONNECTIONS


In 2011 I worked with three groups of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Trans, and Queer) youth in the west, east, and north quadrants of
Toronto, Canada on a project entitled Queer Connections. This project
used YouTube to create weekly online conversations between the

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three groups. At the beginning of the project each group of youth made
a video exploring the theme of identity. The videos were then posted
online and viewed by one of the other groups who in turn created a
video response based on their reaction to the content and ideas
proposed by their peers. The videos document the dialogue and an
exploration of queer identities through drawings, acting, puppetry,
dance, history, music, storytelling, playfulness, and personal narrative.
Each video is not only a response to the video before it, but also a
catalyst to the video that comes after it. Twenty-one short videos were
created during the project each with their own artistic story, yet what I
want to discuss here is the process of creation and dialogue between
the videos as aesthetic quality.
In this project there was an ongoing process of making the private
public. The youth found different ways to share their experiences and
stories, some directly and others through metaphor and imagery.
Applied theatre often draws on personal stories to build some form of
public engagement. This engagement is political in nature, and
interested in a social change agenda (Cohen-Cruz, 2006). The very act
of making the private public is a political act as our personal
experiences impact the public sphere, but in a discussion of aesthetics
the act of making the private public is also a sensory act of
vulnerability. To engage the senses in a political becoming in this way
is an act of interference and disruption to the status quo. It is an
emergent politic that attunes to the ephemeral and sensational,
creating openings for affect. To lump the twenty-one videos of this
project together in this discussion is difficult because they each engage
their own aesthetic qualities, but through those qualities every single
one of the videos engages with affection through personal narrative
(real and imagined). Therefore, the embodiment of the private made
public through vulnerability, wherein our bodies enfold their context
onto themselves (Alvarez, 2014), makes personal story, told and
performed by its creator a powerful aesthetic of its own. As an
example, one of the videos created for the Queer Connections project
uses stop motion animation to explore queer identities post-coming
out. The group described the video as follows:

This week we responded to videos of coming out stories. They


had very [i]ntimate stories that were shared by the other groups.
We were inspired to continue the conversation by asking the

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questions: what happens after one comes out? Where would you
take yourself next? This video is part exploration and part
celebration of the various queer narratives and its different roles
and dynamics. Be fierce! (TaKe Out, 2012).

The video itself has no dialogue, the youth participants move around
the frame in a jolted manner, due to the stop motion animation, their
bodies playfully engage with one another as they try on wigs, make-up,
and fitted baseball caps. The youth embody different identities as they
spontaneously respond and react to their peers. This unscripted
performance is an embodied and relational site of becoming, where the
youth shift from fixed coming out narratives to queer possibilities, all
the time only ever existing in the moment (Mazzei, 2013). It is this
moment, the moment of engagement that brings forth the private to an
affective place of encounter. It is through the relational aesthetic of the
performers with one another that we as viewer are invited into the
narrative. John Dewey (2005) believes that we cannot discuss an
artwork without discussing what that art work does. In this case the art
that was created is a contested site of political becoming, where
groups of people engage with one another in an exchange of
vulnerable self and exploration. This ‘doing’ in relation to others,
becomes the aesthetics of the work of art, the stop-motion video is not
a piece of art on its own but rather a sampling of a larger piece that
can only be understood through the way it engages the videos that
came before and after it. The participatory aesthetic emerges in the
space between the twenty-one videos, providing each piece of the
dialogue an opportunity to find its own unique portrayal of encounter as
the youth navigate making the private pubic, vulnerability, personal
narrative, and becoming in relation to the other groups across the city.

DISCUSSION
Thompson (2009) argues that applied theatre practice is focused on
effective social outcomes and that we need to reimagine the aesthetic
and affective engagement of our efforts. The concept of participatory
aesthetics, as proposed here, is a site of affective encounter that
enables us to reimagine how applied theatre work can be effective
pedagogically, ethically, socially, and artistically.

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Pedagogy
As a pedagogical engagement a participatory aesthetic provides
participants with ownership and agency over their own learning. Rather
than a prescribed outcome that is required to engage with a dominant
aesthetic frame or even a specific goal-oriented outcome, a participant
driven process focuses on the emergences in the spaces between the
participants and the art. This unknown space presents a site of inquiry
for participants to work through on their own terms and in their own
ways – challenging, exploring, and creating movement together as
their bodies entwine and entangle, push and pull, and emerge a new.
This is evidenced in both case studies with the Ghanaian participants
decision to turn the camera lens on themselves and their own learning
journey as a culturally specific site of vulnerability and change, and
with the challenge Toronto participants faced in artistic interpretation of
difficult topics with peers they have never met. Both projects required a
re-thinking of pedagogy, not as a pre-determined approach to a
specific learning outcome, but rather as a journey through which
participants would learn about themselves through their encounters
with others. This dialogic artistic rendering is the very essence of a
participatory aesthetic – where the encounter is the artistic artifact in
and of itself.

Ethics
A participant-driven project that enables communities and individuals
to express, examine, and explore within their own cultural context
works to undermine the status quo by subverting and reimagining
euro-centric, colonial, and even oppressive frames of knowing. While
acknowledging that a facilitator or professional artist will undoubtedly
hold power within the context of an applied theatre project, the choice
to engage in dialogic art-making from the hearts and minds of
participants is a step towards acknowledging and diffusing this power
differential. A participatory aesthetic demands that ownership of both
the process and product remains entirely in the hands of participants
and that in doing so a new aesthetic quality emerges that can be
recognized, valued and assessed through a matrix of affective
encounter. For both case studies this emerges through the process of
encounter – with one another, with me as facilitator, and with
audiences; wherein the artistic product and aesthetic judgment shifts to
a site of becoming in relation to those around us.

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Social Change
Art for social change is often cited as a way to bridge empathetic
understanding, to see the world from another’s point of view (Mitchell,
2001; Rivers, 2013; Shapiro & Hunt, 2003; Wang, 2010). However, this
has the potential to reproduce a Self/Other binary, which can
contribute to the repetition and circulation of harmful and oppressive
discourses, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia (Kumashiro,
2000). It is therefore necessary to use the theatrical form not only as a
site of empathy, but also one in which we can complicate ideas, feel
with and through one another, attune to the way that affect is
circulating through bodies, and respond with a willingness to explore
the unthinkable (Gallagher, 2016). In applied theatre the artist is not a
sole muse - rather the artist is a community of learners who work
together to reflect on their own experiences and knowledges, to
transform harmful practices by engaging with what is silenced, hidden,
or unsaid. This reflexivity provides space for artists to engage with an
audience in a raw and gritty approach to artistic creation. Complicating
theatre in this way means that at times seemingly different approaches
to theatrical presentation are potentially intertwined and overlapping:
participants may subvert the dominant through the traditional and vice
versa. This emerges in both case studies as participants draw on their
own knowledges, contexts, and bodies to create and explore ideas
through an artistic process. This collaborative art making is not
polished and complete, but rather a process of performance, creation,
and presentation that is designed to ask questions, to open up
dialogue, and to reveal what is often unspoken or unknown.
Building on Helen Nicolson’s (2005) idea of transportation (in
contrast to transformation) as a momentary and often fleeting state of
change, a participatory aesthetic relies on the ephemeral encounters of
bodies in motion as a site of social change. When bodies are impacted
by one another, even if just momentarily, a shift occurs - the trajectory
of that body has been altered. Within the Queer Connections project
this is seen when the videos respond in unexpected ways – shifting the
dialogue to challenge the preconceived ideas of the group as the
conversation spirals in intricate new directions. Within Unwrapping the
Sweets this movement is altered through a block of affective energy
when the artistic artefact is denied within a different cultural context. In
both cases the aesthetic encounter has elicited a moment of
transportation – what comes next is unknown.

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Artistry
Conroy (2015) states “Aesthetics enables us to activate analysis of the
experience itself, to think in terms of our visceral and sensory
responses and to extrapolate these into understandings of human
agency and experience” (p. 2). This suggests that aesthetics are the
very thing through which we are able to encounter one another, they
are an ephemeral and embodied affection that emerges in and through
our experiences. In discussing a dialogic aesthetic, Collins (2015)
believes that one of the biggest challenges is “accepting the risk and
vulnerability that come with dialogue” (p. 123). This risk and
vulnerability provide the heart of a participatory aesthetic because they
position the sensory self as the site of artistic creation. In sharing
ourselves through others, by making the private public, a relational
aesthetic emerges and invites people into dialogue with one another.
This dialogical process is a site of aesthetic becoming. Dewey (2005)
offers an interesting metaphor to describe a processual aesthetic when
he says, “But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants he is
committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air,
water, and sunlight that condition the growth of plants” (p. 2). In this
sense, we should not be evaluating art as a completed object (film,
performance, video), rather it is an experience through which many
components (story, politic, and experience) encounter one another
creating a new emergence that redefines our understanding of
aesthetics as something that can be understood through feeling and is
situated within a dialogic process of becoming.

CONCLUSION
Our cultural relationship to polished and professional aesthetics is
shifting through the emergence of participatory media. Cell phone
videos uploaded to YouTube have the potential to change the world by
eliciting debate and rendering powerful stories. Although not a
facilitated applied theatre process, this reimagining of the public
sphere, where the masses have shifted from cultural consumers to
cultural producers is engaging with a participatory aesthetic (Snell,
2014). Through our encounters, our becomings, and our narratives
people are capable of creating provoking and engaging artwork on
their own terms and for their own purposes. Applied theatre facilitators
and academics can use the concept of a participatory aesthetic to

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navigate the tensions that riddle the field; questions of aesthetics,


participation, ethics, and assessment (Prendergast & Saxton, 2016)
can all be examined through a dialogic and relational lens of knowing
and becoming. Although the case studies discussed in this paper are
both youth projects, the ability to engage with a participatory aesthetic
is not limited to youth. Youth are perhaps more willing to take risks with
the unknown and this riskiness opens up possibilities for creative
encounters. Each and every one of us can engage with a pedagogy of
vulnerability as a site of becoming and it is this that defines a
participatory aesthetic.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Baer, P. (2017). Participatory aesthetics: Youth performance as
encounter. Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 108-123.

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Pamela Baer

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Pamela Baer is a theatre and media artist with a focus on community
engaged work. Pamela has facilitated applied theatre projects with
diverse groups, and wide reaching themes. Her current work focuses
on LGBTQ families, stories, and representations in her role as
Research Manager on the LGBTQ Families Speak Out Project.
Pamela has a BFA in Theatre and Development, Concordia University,
and a MA in Theatre and Media for Development, University of
Winchester. Pamela is currently a PhD Student at The Ontario Institute
for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto and an Instructor
of Applied Theatre, Brock University.

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ArtsPraxis
Volume 4 Number 1
© 2017

From Les Mis to Annie, Jr.: A Discussion of


Dramaturgical Adaptation for Musical Theatre in
Education and Accessibility of Musical Theatre to Youth
SEAN MAYES
sean@seanmayesmusic.com

ABSTRACT
As an arts educator, it is inspiring to have access to the spoils of the
art of musical theatre to engage and captivate young minds and artistic
hearts. In providing an artistic output, one affords both the satisfaction
of involvement in a collaborative art coupled with the lasting gift of
community and artistic inspiration. Regrettably, the endeavour towards
providing an accessible dramatic medium can prove challenging for the
best of theatre & music pedagogues and artists alike. Musical theatre
becomes increasingly more difficult as both musical and dramatic
requirements needed for its execution modify.
With these constraints, youth face obstacles in exploring many
works of the genre they love faithfully. As educators, the responsibility
in maintaining accessibility is tremendous. Improper attention to the
usage of the vocal instrument without regard of these developments
can cause irreparable damage. Limited access to works for youth and
negligible adaptation risk staleness and disinterest.
How might the educating artist continually provide an accessible
medium of musical theatre to the young performer? From a dramatic &
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musical lens, this paper discusses the responsibility of the educator in


identifying and addressing the unique challenges confronting young
performers via the art of musical theatre.

Working as an arts educator with youth provides both parties with a


privileged world of opportunity, exploration and discovery. Today, the
genre of musical theatre provides youth with a dynamic outlet in which
drama, music and dance are explored through an interdisciplinary
world, constantly building on the pulse of the social world in which we
exist. Musical theatre provides a relatable channel that youth identify
with. This is a breath of fresh air to the artist tasked with finding
material to satisfy their 21st century mindset. However, the educating
artist has an increasing responsibility within this craft of sharing and
exploring musical theatre with youth. Musical theatre offers a unique
collaborative form, which requires the arts educator to teach a genre of
drama that grounds itself symbiotically in music. With this, the arts
educator must encourage the conscious usage of drama in execution
of music as drama; otherwise risking dramatic staleness and disregard
of the form.
The educator is also confronted with both an absence of research
and support in musical theatre as dramaturgy, as well as in the vocal
training of youth in this area. Despite research and data in adult vocal
pedagogy towards the newly developed styles embraced by musical
theatre (MT), there is an overwhelming lack of research and
deliberation on the requirements for youth with regard to this new
methodology of singing. Texts on singing instruction for youth largely
model a classical framework inappropriate for full consideration of the
ever-changing requirements of MT, and scientific and performative
research have focused on the adult performer, largely ignoring the
unique needs of the youth performer. Additionally, MT is becoming
increasingly more demanding musically and inaccessible for younger
voices as both stylistic and technical requirements needed for its
execution modify. Inattention to the needs of youth in training can
cause negligent damage.
How does the arts educator provide a continually accessible
medium of musical theatre to youth? In this paper, I will undertake an
exploration of the obstacles facing the youth performer in executing

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musical theatre in consideration of the educator and their role. A


cursory appraisal of the genre with attention on dramaturgical
adaptation and youth focused works will be undertaken in providing
insight to musical accessibility alongside dramatic integrity. A
proposition towards additional research into the scientific support of
vocal pedagogy and dramaturgy for youth in MT is supplemented by a
manifesto supported through recent professional practice by which arts
educators may craft their own work.

IDENTIFYING YOUTH INTEREST IN MUSICAL THEATRE


As a practitioner, it is noteworthy to acknowledge the recognition that
the musical has earned amongst youth. Commercially, the Broadway
market has successfully made the appeal to younger audiences who
are arguably exposed to the Great White Way via family & adult
influence. Numerically, it is evident that a strong market of youth
access to commercial MT exists. Considering American statistics, the
Broadway League published that in the 2014-2015 Broadway season,
an impressive 1.14 million admissions of New York shows were of
youth 18 or younger (Broadway League, 2016). This access to theatre
is encouraging for youth and arts educators alike, as the importance of
theatre education both within and outside of the school continues to be
affirmed through research (Richardson, 2015; Rajan, 2017).
Graduation rates of at-risk youth with access to drama double, and
youth find higher levels in achievement and attendance in school
(Catterall, Dumais, Hampden-Thompson, 2012).
With exposure, youth are enticed towards MT with pieces that
encourage social development, expression and temporal awakening of
their surroundings and existence through stories and characters, which
explore themes not limited to childhood, discovery, love and friendship.
In her book Theatre & Feeling, Canadian professor of drama Erin
Hurley affirms the innate connections between feeling and our
investment in the theatre. She maintains that “feeling draws us into the
symbolic universe of theatrical performance by connecting us
emotionally with its characters […]; via emotional labour, theatre
intervenes in how we as a society come to understand ourselves, our
values, and our social world.” (Hurley, 2010, pg. 10) It is no question
why youth of all ages identify so strongly with these vicarious
experiences. With discussion of this evidence for theatre, it is worth

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considering the current landscape and how musical theatre is (or is


not) supporting youth access.

TRENDS, EXISTING REPERTOIRE, AND CONSIDERATION OF


SUITABILITY
An effective method of further analysis is in consideration of the
repertoire, and existent material that youth access, geared for both
youth and adult productions. Dramatically, in discussion with
professionals, the suitability of content for usage with youth is one of
the overruling stipulations for selection of material. Interviewed
practitioners with experience facilitating material for youth affirm that
suitability of content is a vital consideration in selection (M. Johnson,
personal communication, February 17, 2016; A. Merriam, personal
communication, March 30, 2016).
The consideration of the developmental maturity of a character is
a valuable one in choosing material. What journey does a character
take through a piece of musical theatre? Would this be a journey
suitable for the youth performer to endure as well? In application, it is
of course unavoidable that many youth performers act the roles of
adult characters. Inevitably, this may present youth with adult themes.
A performer who is able to convincingly bring the audience on board in
delivering the lines and story of an adult should be allowed to do so,
provided the experience will not prove damaging to the youth. Careful
consideration may be needed for characters whose storytelling journey
encompasses mature themes that may be less believable for the
audience, and more importantly emotionally problematic for the youth.
Consider the tremendous difference in dramatic journey through two
musicals adapted for youth in Annie (Kids, Jr.) & Sweeney Todd
(School Version). This is not to say that it cannot be done without
careful consideration; compare the content of some classic plays given
to youth for study by none other than Shakespeare! (M. Johnson,
personal communication, February 17, 2016).
In equal importance, role breakdown and consideration of adult
versus youth parts is crucial. A brief consideration again at the role
breakdown in Annie, Jr. helps illustrate this point. The overwhelming
lean towards adult over youth characters shows that only an average
of 24% to 30% of the characters in the production are under adult age,
dependent on the number of additional orphans added. This statistic,

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from a musical with a strong basis of youth characters & performers,


gives a glance as to how even musicals featuring youth often overlook
employment of a primarily youth cast.
One can see how in employment of a musical, it becomes
nonviable to produce a show with only youth if one is concerned with
placing youth in roles originally characterized and written with the
intention of being realized vocally & dramatically by adults. In their
consideration of this dilemma, iTheatrics, the company tasked with
creation of youth accessible shows through Music Theatre
International, has acknowledged this in their professional editing and
consideration of each piece revised for youth performance.
Respectfully, it is similarly requisite the educator consider this when
placing youth into their roles. Who was the role originally intended for,
and would the original content of the role (vocal tessitura, dramatic
maturity, technical ability i.e. dance, et cetera) fit the capability of the
individual?

ABSENCE OF ACADEMIC AND PRACTICAL SUPPORT IN VOCAL


TRAINING
As a musical discipline, it is unavoidable to view the training of youth in
part via the musical lens. As a genre heavily correlated with popular
music, musical theatre has often turned to the style of its age to
captivate its audience – arguably progressively so in the 21st century
drawing on numerous mainstream styles and contemporary styles of
production to convey its story.
Numerous texts and practitioners from New York, London and
other hubs of MT have yielded texts and methodologies by which adult
singers may be supported in undertaking a professional career as an
actor or actress in MT. There is also encouragingly a great deal of
evidence to validate the work of educators who support the craft,
whether at the conservatory level, or in the working field. It is
commendable to see the work of practitioners such as Jeannette
LoVetri, as well as Jo Estill, Mary Saunders Barton & Edrie Means
Weekly to name a few who have worked to both articulate the specific
vocal needs of MT through both profession and text (LoVetri,
Saunders-Barton & Weekly, 2014; Estill, 1988). Albeit not a closed
chapter, the gap in comprehension has slowly closed as the craft
develops and the educational need to support gains momentum.

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Despite this, however, this has not disseminated to the youth


community. The evidence and support for youth is negligible and
worrisome. Academic and practical evidence supports an industry that
is largely operated through the guise of the professional adult scene.
The boundaries of vocal scope in MT have expanded with the
maturation of the art, and present unique considerations for youth
execution. New shows draw heavily on influences of varying stylistic
forms, with strong emphasis on pop & rock in conjunction with the
traditional Broadway show sound. The average range of male and
female voices can span immensely in all three main foundational styles
of MT vocal work. A specific approach to these styles of music in MT
is recognized by vocal pedagogue Jeannette LoVetri, and identified
through the term, Contemporary Commercial Music, or CCM (LoVetri,
2014). This turn to mainstream sound is characteristic of the plurality of
musicals today, not only limited to those more accessible to youth.
The aforementioned expectations of the youth vocal mechanism in
full adult range are not fully attainable and should not be expected in
executing a vocal role that was originally intended for an adult
apparatus. It is obvious that this differentiation must be acknowledged
through work; neglect to do so in pushing beyond these boundaries
could cause reckless harm of the youth instrument. These
considerations are made in professional adaptation; a useful factor for
the artist educator tempted to mount a musical without considering
range or vocal style in execution. Improper imitation by youth of adult
voices more equipped to sing difficult material is problematic. I
maintain there is rationale behind the lack of practice-based and
academic support, which I propose is not executed through malice, but
rather in part through unawareness, both scientifically and
professionally. Consider the following:

1. Vocal health and production of youth singers has been


academically explored; however, is still inconclusive in some
areas due to biological limitations.

In drawing on evidence (Skelton, 2007), there are many variables


biologically in the youth instrument which present problematic
obstacles for exploring its training.

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2. Youth in the profession are auditioned and recruited with


different expectations than their adult counterparts.

A durable voice seemed well suited stylistically holds potential to rule


out over one trained professionally. A professional company will be
mindful that a youth performer may not have previous access to
training. This is particularly the case as professional companies may
often provide an on-site practitioner who is considerate of the youth
voice.

3. Musical theatre as a still budding practice-based art has


evaded some academic parameters, as practitioners who deal
with its execution are less concerned with notating findings.

Practitioners with an innate understanding of these difficulties are more


frequently submersed in the practical world, with less attention to
journaling their approach to working with youth voices.

A DRAMATURGICAL METHODOLOGY AS A FRAMEWORK FOR


ACCESS
I would like to briefly discuss the implications in the drama of musical
theatre for the arts educator. In consideration of musical theatre as a
total collaborative art, the potential dilemma of crossing disciplines is
evident. The arts educator with an aptitude towards music may be less
adept at looking at the same material through a dramatic lens in
combination with music. This is problematic as the collaborative art of
MT requires all pieces of the artistic puzzle complement each other;
music serves as a dramatic device in depicting the story. In seeking to
provide a dramaturgical approach to musical theatre that may be
accessible to the arts educator, I would like to provide a framework in
the realm of musical theatre dramaturgy. With this, an accessible
method of approach can be determined through the lens of dramaturgy
with the intention of serving all MT practitioners.
In approaching musical theatre as drama, one may consider its
mature cousin in the realms of music as drama, which utilizes music in
depiction of dramatic storytelling. One need look no further than opera
for this example, and more specifically, the Wagnerian approach to
total synthesis through the Gesamtkunstwerk, designed at telling all

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action and character through musical ideals associated with character


and theme through the leitmotif (Dawson-Bowling, 2013). Further from
this start point, we can see from opera and into musical theatre that
there is substantial work published on the usage of song and song as
drama (considering Acting the Song, Bergman & Moore, Allowrth,
2008; Acting in Musical Theatre, Dal Vera & Deer, Routledge, 2015).
Despite establishment, there is an absence in academia on
musical theatre dramaturgy specifically, likely due to the cross-
disciplinary work required of its executors. Recent publication has
shown that there is a desire for the development of this area. In the
recently published Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, American
musical director Brian Valencia reveals a comprehensive and itemized
account of the work of the musical director, and how this work relates
to the dramatic curve of a musical.
In his exploration, Valencia touches on the difficulty in
approaching the musical through one single biased lens as a
practitioner, claiming that if a dramaturg on a project is not a trained
musician, “components of musical theatre can seem arcane or
intimidating” (Valencia, 2015, pg. 342). This can lead to mistreatment
of content integrated with music, risking dramatic neglect. Consider his
thoughts in the following statement:

Limiting musical functionality to these two narrative-based


alternatives (forwarding plot or illuminating character) ignores the
fundamental polymodal fabric of musical theatre, stuns the
theatrical imagination, and results in replicative productions in
which putative realism often exists uncomfortably alongside the
musical’s inherently non-realistic conventions (Valencia, 2014, pg.
373).

In opposition to this staleness, Valencia prevents a series of questions,


which through character intention and development allow the arts
educator to consider MT from a truly collaborative approach. He
proposes that the streamline effect and combination of elements [of a
musical] create a dramaturgy of sorts, where all parts are effectively
dramatically linked to one another and serve each other (Valencia,
2015, pg. 373). In considering questions such as these, the arts
educator opens up channels for sensitive dialogue amongst youth in
considering the full dramatic scope of musical theatre, alleviating the

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likelihood of replicating musical theatre in a two-dimensional fashion


with minimal investment and passion.

SCHOOL VERSION AS MODEL & PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH


With a view to the MT song as music as drama by means of the arts
educator, I return once again to the School Version to endorse its
suitability in the art as an accessible, artistically satisfying model
through which to motivate and train youth. In examination of the
suitable genres, I will gear comparison and discourse through
consideration of the professionally published School Versions (Kids,
Junior & School Editions) available for licence through Music Theatre
International to support discussion. In discussion with iTheatrics,
responsible for the creation of the commercially produced licensable
School Version, there were numerous guidelines that were expressed
as being paramount in converting the average musical into an
accessible form – all being of use to the arts educator.
Dramatically, one of the largest themes that emerged out of
discussion was the necessity in allowing an adapted form to act as a
credible device for storytelling. This was stressed not only for the
necessity of the piece itself dramatically, but also in consideration of
the original artists’ intention and artistic integrity. An emphasis on
conveying storytelling may help ensure that a piece does not try to
replicate lines artificially without depth. Consider thoughts from
iTheatrics, which concisely approach this in mindfulness of the
audience and reception.

“It is all about telling a story – we stress that with students and
teachers; your job is to be a story teller. […] If you have the right
environment, the kids can learn and get something out of it in a
different way. […] I can honestly believe […] what I am going to
see […] as long as they are a good story teller.” (M. Johnson,
personal communication, February 17, 2016)

It was also important to emphasize that content suitable for youth was
a key proponent of the need for the School Version; however, artistic
license still requires that adapted or non-adapted musicals with what
may still be considered unsuitable requirements such as number of
cast and inappropriate material must be left unchanged in recognition

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of the original artist’s work and wishes. This may be a dilemma for the
arts educator faced with wanting to produce a full work that may be
considered questionable material. A proposal to this is indicated
towards the paper’s end.
Professionally, iTheatrics is in consideration of differences in the
abilities between adult & youth performers. Musically, iTheatrics
outlined that youth friendly considerations are undertaken with regard
to keys, difficulty of all songs (regarding range, tessitura, et cetera),
and show length (for vocal, physical & dramatic endurance). Specific
considerations of these guidelines are additionally offered at paper’s
end.

A MANIFESTO FOR RESPONSIBLE PRACTICE


Deliberation on these approaches provides a method by which the arts
educator must consider the delicate art of bringing youth musical
theatre to the stage. I would like to propose a manifesto supplemented
by personal practice by which the arts educator may consider all work
suitable (or not) for youth. Keeping in the mindset of education, all of
the suggestions listed here are done with the intention of best practices
in mind, and highest consideration for the young performer and their
unique needs.

1. Knowledge and passion of and for the genre

As an arts educator, knowledge of the genre is imperative. With a


deeper comprehension of the craft, we are able to make further
informed decisions that will enable youth to have access to
sustainable, healthy repertoire which will maintain interest and peak
inspiration. Inspiration in the arts comes through mastery; the more
that we know, the better our students learn.

2. Capabilities of our youth

It is crucial that the arts educator be well aware of the capabilities of


the youth they are working with, both musically and dramatically.
Inattention to specific inabilities can cause youth to become
disinterested with material, or worse and more vitally, may cause
impairment. Focus towards ability will provide momentum and focus

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towards success.

3. Appreciation of musical theatre dramaturgy and music as


drama

A practitioner more familiar in music must have a broad


comprehension of dramatic cohesion and function within form.
Attention to items such as character, plot, setting and form via all
lenses reinforce the paramount importance of the Aristotelian
fundamentals! The educating arts educator must approach musical
theatre as both a musical and dramatic form, and treat all elements of
music within as storytelling. Grounded approach in teaching drama
through the musical theatre song will ensure good practice.
In personal practice in development of the School Edition musical,
this proved crucial. In reducing original material, it was crucial to allow
material left to focus on telling the intention of the story, and to ensure
material removed was secondary and not crucial to the dramatic arch
and foundation of the storytelling. This enabled a more focused effort
at direct communication of the main concepts.

4. Vocal qualities and stylistic requirements

With comprehension of musical theatre comes knowledge of the


unique vocal requirements. As a genre, the reliance on the popular
sound and employment of vocal qualities is large; this must be
considered in selecting repertoire and determining range. It is
suggested that music in undesirable keys undergo transposition in
order to make this process more accessible for youth. As previously
discussed, one of the main justifications behind creating abbreviated
versions of the musical is to decrease the length of time youth are
singing. This should be considered even in the interim during practice
as youth rehearse.
Our consideration of this was also crucial in practical application.
With music composed in a rock idiom, much consideration was made
in creating pieces with optional keys for a lower range to prevent youth
voices from reaching too high in a belt-focused sound that could be
damaging. Changes were also made in inverting vocal parts to help
alleviate this.

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5. Content and suitability

Ethically, the discussion of content and suitability for youth is


particularly important. We know the arts educator is ethically and
professionally responsible for the well-being of their students in all
facets when dealing with material. Some shows without School
Editions may still be completely suitable for youth, or alternatively, may
offer one or two musical numbers that may be suitable to be performed
without the full show. It is up to the arts educator to decide what will be
deemed appropriate or too sensitive on access based upon knowledge
of the youth at their responsibility. The MTI school accessible
repertoire is a useful tool for helping to guide these decisions as
experts have appraised these pieces for their suitability. The final
decision, ultimately, must still rest with the ethical judgment of the
adult.
In revision of material in the original piece, it was necessary to
consider the suitability of some pieces with their content and whether
this would be suitable for a youth performer to speak or sing.
Resultantly, select material was adjusted in sensitive consideration.

6. Respecting creative license

Perhaps the one of the most difficult and vital aspects of selecting and
crafting material for youth is the aforementioned dilemma of copyright
and artistic license. Educators may seek to alter material in order to
increase accessibility. Regrettably, this creates issues as the material
being edited is under copyright, and artistic license remains with the
authors. It is worth considering that a simple change to a verse or an
edit of material is still copyright infringement and unlawful, despite
unlikely being done out of malice and only in best interest of the
performer.
What may the arts educator do about this, and what are some
tangible solutions for practice? In discussion on the issue with
copyright with iTheatrics, I have provided an optimistically
advantageous list for guiding principle.

The arts educator may...

• Make edits to a score with chorus parts harmonically; i.e.

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remove parts to make a four-part harmonically more


accessible to a smaller or less capable chorus
• Use a free standing score of an existing piece from a
musical (i.e. in a choral partition) through an independent
music publisher that will specifically meet the
aforementioned requirements
• Use instrumental parts to supplement a youth production

The arts educator may not...

• Remove verses in a song in order to condense time


• Edit or remove text from a scene in order to condense time
• Make transpositions in a published theatre score to suit the
performer

With limitations, it can be creatively disheartening in preparation for


younger performers. However, it is worth consideration that all
limitations are set in best interest towards preservation of the form, and
that other accessible options help to protect copyright, which ultimately
protects all artists in maintaining integrity.

FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF MAINTAINING ACCESSIBILITY


This article seeks to demonstrate the vast amount of evidence in
support of having musical theatre within school communities and
readily accessible to youth. There is, however, a great amount of
research left to be done on restricted youth access to music theatre
due to financial or demographic limitation. Consider the following in
pursuance of theatre:
Musical theatre as a live performance medium is often frequently
restricted to cities and regions where live theatre is abundant,
accessible and financially supported in production. This can cause
issues for many youth in external areas where theatre is not a cultural
staple. Youth in urban areas potentially have an advantage in proximity
over those in rural areas without access to theatre. Optimistically, MT
is embracing new forms of production and replication, which may be of
interest in exposure to the arts educator. One popular version of this
are the live TV movie productions of musicals (Grease Live!, Hairspray
Live!, et cetera), which are recorded in video in an attempt to share the

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form with as many as possible in being far reaching. Although enabling


accessibility to the form through the screen, it is far from a replacement
for the live theatre experience.
Despite being in an urban setting, however, youth may also be
limited due to financial access to the theatre itself. As mentioned
before, youth access theatre primarily through adult attendance.
Respectively, youth attendance is limited to the financial abilities of the
adults who would take them. In the 2015/16 Broadway season, the
average cost of a ticket was $103.11 US (Broadway League, 2016).
Quite the financial undertaking for providing a young audience member
with a theatrical experience! Resultantly, youth may find themselves at
the theatre on rare occasion.
Lastly, for the young theatre enthusiasts who do not access
theatre as live performance, the issue of school or community access
comes into play. The range of a licensing cost of a MTI Kids show is
between $395 and $495, and a Junior title may cost between $550 and
$645 (“Broadway Junior,” March 30, 2017.). This does not begin to
factor in the costly undertaking of all aspects of production (costuming,
props, set design, music, et cetera). This is an important consideration
as many schools may be unable to afford such a cost. Potential
cursory alternatives for access may include one of the options in the
manifesto such as a free standing piece, or ambitiously, an original
musical from the capable arts educator. However, it is evident that the
financial and demographic consideration is an important study to be
considered and undertaken.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, it is discernible that there is much work left to do in this
arena. Musical theatre continues to be an art by which young
performers appreciate, develop and grow. Musical adaptation has
helped in ensuring youth are able to access many pieces that may not
have been accessible prior. However, there is still work left towards
creating a foundational framework in providing access to the repertoire
and genre. Musically, scientific evidence is needed to supplement
vocal training, and further exploration into practice-as-research may
help to provide a clearer view into the minds of those working with
youth for specific technique. Further work is needed in analyzing the
process, training and development of the youth voice in application of

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musical theatre to devise and develop a CCM training that is sound in


practice. Dramatically, a further exploration into the field of musical
theatre dramaturgy is crucial, arguably so from the lens of the arts
educator. Professionals in the field need to acknowledge the need for
additional entry into their craft as research.
It is up to the arts educator in application to determine whether
material, designated for youth or not, is responsibly educating and
guiding youth on the route of developmental performance. The
educator must continue to perfect and provide a means by which
musical theatre may be enjoyed. It is up to the expertise and passion
of those working with youth to ensure that youth everywhere are able
to fully explore the magical world of musical theatre.

SUGGESTED CITATION
Mayes, S. (2017). From Les Mis to Annie, Jr.: A discussion of
dramaturgical adaptation from musical theatre in education and
accessibility of musical theatre to youth. Arts Praxis, 4 (1), 124-
140.

REFERENCES
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Endowment for the Arts..
Chandler, K. (2014). Teaching popular music styles. In S.D. Harrison &
J. O’Bryan (Eds.), Teaching singing in the 21st century (35-51).
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Dal Vera, R. & Deer, J. (2015). Acting in musical theatre: A
comprehensive course (2nd ed.). Abingdon, Oxfordshire:
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Dawson-Bowling, P. (2013) The Wagner experience. Brecon: Old
Street Publishing.
Dutton, S. E. (2001). Urban youth development – Broadway style:
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development. Social Work With Groups, 23 (4), 39-57.

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Sean Mayes

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singing and the implications for teaching children to sing. National
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keynote reflection. Theatre Symposium, 23, 7-19.

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From Les Mis to Annie, Jr.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
An active musical director, educator, teaching artist and organist from
Canada, Sean Mayes has professionally musically directed numerous
shows in varying venues throughout Canada and the United Kingdom.
Past work includes time with the UK Tour of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,
as well as work on the one-hour adaptation of a recent West End
musical.
In academia, Sean enjoys a busy career in both teaching and
writing, and holds degrees in Music & Education, as well as an MA in
Music Direction. Select work has been featured at recent & upcoming
engagements including the International “Putting it Together” UK
Conference -Investigating Sources in Musical Theatre, the NYU Forum
on Educational Theatre, and the Annual Conference for the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

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