Drama Tuesday - Flowering in unlikely places

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 There are many characters in my teaching career but one of them I remember with  mixed feelings was the Deputy  Principal of Western Australian Secondary Teachers College.

Somewhat typically of my generation we found his leadership was blustery and bureaucratic and not always warmly accepted. Intolerant lot we were, I know. But there is one story about him that continues to  endear him to me. 

If still from the deserts the prophets come  (A.D. Hope Australia)

Early in his career - so the story goes - he was a teacher in what in Western Australia were called “one teacher schools”. That’s a school out in a rural community where all of the students are taught in one class. All ages from the youngest to the oldest (remembering of course that the age of leaving school was somewhat younger in those days). If you are familiar with the Anne of Green Gables stories, you may remember a similar school was featured.

As the single teacher of the school the person I’m talking about decided that he would mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This involved all the students in the school. The littlest students, in homemade costumes stitched together from flour sacks by willing mums, were the guards on the battlements of Elsinore. The production was staged in the school room with rudimentary lighting and makeshift scenery put together in woodworking Friday afternoon classes the hammering alongside the line memorising. The roles were shared across all the students according to their capacities but everyone, including the teacher, had roles. 

Maybe rough and ready. Maybe not the Bell Shakespeare. But, according to legend, it had energy and verve. And heart. 

When you think about all the incidental applied learning and the bringing together of community involved, there’s a kind of rough magic to the teaching. 

Edward’s Boys ensemble in the 2013 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, directed by Perry Mills. Photo by Gavin Birkett, courtesy of Edward’s Boys.

Let’s not over romanticise this. It’s the sort of thing that happened in the straightened years after the Second World War when there was a flood of returned soldiers and airmen adjusting to the recovery years. This story seems incongruous with the image I have of clashing impatiently with him in his role as Deputy. But we should give credit where credit’s due. 



On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth (Shakespeare, Henry V Prologue) 

Cambridge University Press

978-1-108-81023-4 — Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare Harry R. McCarthy in the Elements in Shakespeare Performance series

This story came to mind today as I read about a contemporary drama production project in the King Edward VI Grammar School (KES), reputed to have been attended by Shakespeare. Over time within the school there’s developed a theatre project known as Edward’s Boys dedicated to  ‘striving to explore the repertoire of the boys’ companies’ under the direction of the school’s deputy headmaster, Perry Mills. Edward’s Boys is an amateur troupe composed entirely of pupils (aged 11–18) from the school which has been in continuous operation since 2008. They have performed at the grammar school in Stratford on Avon, as well as on tour in venues as varied as Oxford college dining halls, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, St Paul’s Cathedral, a chapel in Montpellier, and a ducal  palace in Genoa. “These productions constitute the largest corpus of early modern boy theatre in performance available for examination by twenty-first-century scholars.”

The focus of this company is a range of early

modern dramatists such as Marston’s The

Dutch Courtesan and Antonio’s Revenge, extracts from Lyly’s Endymion and Mother Bombie, Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and, Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho!. They also have produced Shakespeare’s Henry V

As McCarthy observes,

“these unique productions had been distinctly shaped by the company’s institutional context and their development of a vigorous, contemporary performance style … in the hands of Edward’s Boys, early modern drama becomes a site of sport and play, of physical experimentation, and of exploring contemporary boyhood.”

There is something quaintly and quintessentially English about the notion of exploring the early repertoire built on a company of “scholar actors” in the spirit of the companies of boy actors in Shakespeare’s times.

It’s also inspiring. And thought provoking.

Drama Tuesday - But does drama education really work?

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 I have titled this post provocatively  and purposefully.

One of the questions we need reassurance about is whether what we do really works and how it works?

Research in drama education is more likely to be qualitative rather than quantitative. That probably says something about drama education researchers. Therefore it is interesting to find newly published research that focuses on mixed methods research using quasi-experimental pre-post-test design. It is also research that explores the role of drama education pedagogy in creative thinking, perspective taking as an underlying process “that explains both creative thinking and the development of socio-emotional competencies by permitting the child to see from another person’s perspective, providing several ideas-solutions for a problem (creative thinking), as well as understanding other people’s emotions and motivations (theory-of-mind).”  In other words, the focus on drama education is through its impact on the  broader field of the psychology of creativity. 

So often in my professional life I have been asked to answer the “doubting Thomas” sceptics who want “proof” that drama education really does what it says. 

And, perhaps too often, as advocates for drama education we have been reluctant or unwilling or unable to provide the answer to the question. Leave aside that the concept of “proving something” is a flawed logic, there are questions that we as drama education researchers need to address. 

I was recently re-reading Michael J. Finneran’s thesis Critical Myths in Drama as Education, and reminded about the sometimes hazy constructions of drama education that are provided. Celume and Zenasni note that while there is evidence of positive effects of drama education pedagogies, 

…we agree with several authors (Goldstein et al., 2017; Winner et al., 2013) who establish that there is a number of drama-based studies that lack scientific rigor, presenting an absence of controlled trials (Joronen et al., 2012), which results in there being little evidence to support the crucial role of pretence activities in children development (Lillard et al., 2013). (2022)

The evidence or our practice – strongly recorded in qualitative research – does provide a sound foundation for our field, yet can be too easily dismissed or ignored. Not that I am arguing for more quantitative research. But there is research in allied fields for us to notice.

The important question for us is to answer the critics who demand “proof” of our claims. 

Youth Arts Incorporated

How do we know if drama education works? 

Really works?

The discussion in this newly published research provides some clues to how drama works.

In drama we often talk about being in the moment and out of the moment simultaneously – the concept of metaxis. To my mind this aligns with the concept identified as perspective taking. The active processes of learning and reflection that we build into our drama education activities are also directed towards developing “a wide range of cognitive, social, and emotional competencies in children, such as social relationships and behaviors, empathy, humour, emotional understanding, and Theory of Mind (ToM)”.

What do you think?

Bibliography

Celume, M.-P., & Zenasni, F. (2022). How perspective-taking underlies creative thinking and the socio-emotional competency in trainings of drama pedagogy. Estudos de Psicologia (Campinas), 39. doi:https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-0275202239e200015

Finneran, M. J. (2008). Critical Myths in Drama as Education. (Ph.D.). University of Warwick, Warwick. 

Drama Tuesday - Barracking for the Umpire

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Black Swan State Theatre Company, Subiaco Theatre Centre 

It’s great to see Black Swan supporting new local writing. It’s wonderful to be back in the neglected Subiaco Theatre Centre. It’s important that the often unspoken issue of lingering impact of football injuries is aired with local resonance and heart. Recognisable characters in familiar settings. And, it’s funny. Genuinely funny. Audience erupting into laughter funny.   

The exposed brick, arches and vertical blinds set is on song. Like much of this production there is attention to detail. We begin with the twilight world of Doug (Steve Le Marquand), former footbal great for Donnybrook as his lifetime achievement is about to be celebrated , bringing about a family reunion. Footballer son, Ben (Ian Wilkes), journalist daughter, Mena (Ebony McGuire), and the daughter who stayed home, Charlene (Jo Morris). Holding it all together is Delveen (Pippa Grandison) holding to herself the secret of Doug’s condition (CTE Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). There is a strong trajectory for characters glued together by the toxic masculinity exhortations of the Coach (Joel Jackson) who magically appears from behind the exposed brick bar. Rounding out the cast is Charlene’s former husband, football tragic, (Michael Abercrombie). 

At one level, these “typical” Ocker names signal the comic chops of the play (a nod to Kath and Kim). But the play deftly navigates the journey from sit com to seriousness. The underlying violence of a culture is sharply focused. There is a thread of the Coach’s jaw clenched punching through the pain in Australian society that is deeper than football. It stains politics, work culture, relationships, broken dreams and families. Look beyond the fast and glib jokes. 

Interesting to see Black Swan performing at Subi. A warm and enfolding theatre space with a sense of human scale. I also noticed that unlike so many, maybe all, other plays in Perth over the last few years, the actors were not miked. Black Swan’s move out of the Heath Ledger and embrace of other venues such as the Octagon and The Mag, is worth watching as a trend.

 

The writing is confident and sure, though perhaps a couple of awkward moments that a film version would handle better. The jump cut generation may find the short “blue outs” and prop setting interruptions to the flow. In a couple of places – the long monologues and Delveen’s speech to the Toastmasters for Bunbury – it felt more like standup in flow and pace. A couple of curious lighting state choices, too, where the action downstage – the airport pick up and Del’s speech – seemed to have the main set in full light. I get the transition from the sitcom lighting (pioneered in the 1950’s by the I Love Lucy series) to the more subtle domestic lighting as the impact of Doug’s condition becomes apparent. Perhaps the lighting has yet to settle. 

A new writer to encourage. Well grounded characters. Firmly directed. Familiar and warmly explored territory. Relevance. Funny. 

What more can you ask for a good night at the theatre!

Drama Tuesday - IDEA 2022 Congress UPDATE 

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IDEA gathered for a Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, July 4-8. after a hiatus caused by Pandemic and troubled times, it was a great pleasure to be with friends in person and face-to-face.

This is a link to my report from Drama4All.

I set out to capture experiences of the Congress through images, video clips and words. It is published as an ePub so that we can use technology to share some of the moments of the Congress particularly for people who could not travel to Iceland because of the COVID-19 Pandemic and other circumstances.

How do you access this Report?

StagePage has published this Report on Apple Books.

Here is the link to the Apple Books

https://books.apple.com/au/book/idea2022/id6443526061

You will be able to download to your computer and view on screen (fingers crossed the technology works for everyone) 

Part of a larger project for IDEA30

This report is a chapter from a larger project I am undertaking to celebrate 30 years of IDEA. IDEA Remembered is a personal memoir (Link here for opening pages of that project).

This chapter is shared free of charge as a service to the drama education community and IDEA. 

When IDEA Remembered is finalised in the next few months, it will be available to purchase by donation with proceeds to IDEA.

Drama Tuesday - Swimming in the infinity pool of drama education

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 Reflecting on the status of drama education

Robin Pascoe, Honorary Fellow, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

An infinity pool is a swimming pool in which water continuously flows over one or more of its edges. This produces a visual illusion of water without a boundary, appearing to be vanishing or extending to infinity.

Drama explorations are powerful ways of engaging students in possibilities, creative opportunities to enter worlds where they have options. In taking on role, we ask students to be simultaneously themselves and others. They can make choices to explore ideas and situations beyond their immediate lives. Students living in suburban Perth can, for example, become group of refugee children on a boat from Sri Lanka. Students can imagine themselves confronting plague in other times and pandemic in their own. Students can question, wonder and challenge. They can explore their own lives and situations as well as imagined ones.

Teaching and learning drama  – like the infinity pool – does move towards unlimited possibilities. In taking on role and exploring situations through creating productive tension, we embody physically, mentally and emotionally the potentialities of human experiences that can be real and imagined. This is exhilarating and potentially life-changing opportunity for our students. But it’s also challenging. As drama teachers we carry a weight of responsibility. The choices we make as teachers about subjects explored and roles taken,  need to be responsible. When our students move into dangerous places, we need to know how to lead and manage experiences safely. We and they can be caught so strongly in the rip tide of the moment that we lose sight of the impending danger of drifting towards the cliff or edge where we crash over the abyss.

In a recently completed chapter for the Routledge Companion to Drama Education (Edited by Mary McAvoy & Peter O'Connor, Routledge, 2021/2) I explore the concept of “abyssal thinking” and its impact on drama teacher education. Santos (2007) identifies abyssal thinking as “a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of “this side of the line” and the realm of “the other side of the line”. In the case of the infinity pool, this side is inside the pool and safe; the other side is over the edge into the unknown.

What are the lines we draw as drama teachers? What are the limits of our practice, the edges of safety? When do we cross the line? Can we swim on both sides of the line?

How do drama teachers stand astride the line between safety and risk? 

After a lifetime of teaching Drama in schools and in universities, I am often struck by the observation that there is still a lack of acceptance of the place and value of drama. I wonder about what leads to this resistance to recognise that the teaching and learning of drama is life-enhancing and valuable. What leads some to put drama the other side of the line?


Drama is risky business

Some drama education teachers can find themselves being drawn towards unsafe practice. Some focus, concentration and warm up activities, for example, while helping students step into the drama can also take them into darker places. Some warm ups are considered too trance-like. There are reports of drama lessons where students disclose events that too revealing. The subject matter explored is sometimes considered too confronting or questioning of authority. 

In fact one of the major criticisms of drama in schools, driven by fear from some parents and community members, is that drama taking their children into places that they don’t want them to explore 1. They argue that drama classes are loose and uncontrolled “therapy sessions” where “it all hangs out”. They argue that the topics explored are “subversive” and question the status quo. The texts explored in drama are considered to be “unsuitable”, questioning values and social norms. As drama educators, we can be considered to be on the other side of that invisible line of what is acceptable (June 09, 2020). These sorts of myths about drama in schools are inflamed in the context of “culture wars” (Brownstein, February 15, 2022; Hunter, 1991) As much as we might scoff at this characterisation of drama education, we need to take these criticisms seriously or we risk being rendered invisible (see Finneran, 2008 for a critical lens on the mythologising of drama education). 

We need to be clear about the limits of drama in schools. Drama therapy is, as I tell my drama teacher education students, a legitimate field of therapeutic healing with medical protocols and protections, but this drama education course is not a drama therapy course. Drama therapy addresses specific mental health issues. “Drama therapy is an aesthetic healing form that …  [draws] its uniqueness among psychotherapies is that it stems from an expressive, aesthetic process--the art of drama and theatre” (Landy, 2007). It provides “a safe space for individuals in specific mental health and community settings to explore telling their stories, expressing their emotions, and finding new ways of looking at their situations, fostering a greater understanding of their experiences, as well as improved interpersonal relationships” (Snyder, 2019). As drama educators, we do provide safe spaces and encourage understanding of experiences but we also need to be conscious of the limits of our field and have strategies that help us know them – and when we need to seek help from trained health practitioners. When drama lessons unveil significant mental health issues or disclosures, we need to have skills to defuse situations and capacity to channel any student to the needed help. 

To help balance on that abyssal line, it is necessary to reaffirm the purpose and limits of what we do. For example, the purpose and focus of the activities that help us initiate drama – loosely, our warmups – need to recognise that they are something more than games and that they need to have clear educative purpose. They serve as a bridge from the world outside the  drama space and the safe space for exploration. They necessarily should pre-figure content, skills and processes of the drama lesson. I have written before about the skilful choices drama teachers need to make about their warm ups. In easing students into the drama space, each opening drama activity  needs to provide opportunities for:

  • Physical engagement – working our bodies and senses

  • Cognitive engagement – using our mind and brain

  • Social engagement – connecting with others

  • Emotional engagement – exploring our emotions.

These principles also apply to the content of our drama lessons. The choices that we make about the content of the drama exploration should be made with care. We need to understand how the topics we choose challenge and have relevance for students. We need to recognise that the drama we make can often set up dissonances between parents and students, between community and students. Drama education has long been associated with “progressive education practice” and identified with “subversive thinking” (See, for example, O'Toole, Stinson, & Moore, 2009). But it is timely to remember Boal,(Quoted in Moral-Barrigüetei & Guijarroii, 2022): “Art not only serves to teach how the world is, but “[…] also to show why it is like this and how it can be transformed” (Boal, 2011, p115). A drama exploration about the impact of farming practices on the Australian Great Barrier Reef, engages students with a significant climate change issue but it also necessarily involves students in the politics and competing passions of people. Drama teaching must take account of both challenging and conserving values and ideas.

Similarly, the texts we choose as we draw on the published literature of drama and theatre presents us with choices that can promote radical thought and challenges. The plays of Shakespeare, so often held up as the established cannon, also highlight teen rebellion (Romeo and Juliet) or the overthrowing of tyrants (Julius Caesar ). No text we choose (apart from the most bland) are values free. What interests us in  great drama is how it brings ourselves face to face with ideas, people and situations where something is at stake, something matters. Without this we do not have conflict and dramatic tension. But as Heathcote usefully reminded us, in drama workshops we need to build on productive tension (O'Neill, 2014). 

As drama teachers we walk the tightrope. Or swim in a pool of ambiguous possibilities.

Drama teacher education must be firmly situated within a values framework that recognises our responsibilities and balances them with our instincts to lead change. Drama teachers need an articulated philosophy of why and how they work – a Theoretical Framework. It is not enough to just recognise that drama is risky business but to know why it is and how we proceed to work in the world. Teaching is a refuge for pragmatists. Often, teaching is seen as atheoretical (a point I have often made about the way Australian Curriculum documents are presented to teachers). But none of us teach in a vacuum of ideas. We are the sum of our ideas of knowledge (epistemology), our  world view (ontology), systems of beliefs (ideology) and our values (axiology), all contributing to our praxeology that links our actions and our thinking. The quality of our work as drama teachers lies in our knowing, being and doing. 




To stay afloat in the infinity pool of drama education, we need always to know where we are and where we are headed. Without that, we risk moving towards another abyss – a loss of perceived relevance and we move towards that “the other side of the line”, becoming non-existent. We can be cast in the role of being “the other” in education. What we need to do is to challenge the most fundamental characteristic of abyssal thinking: the impossibility of the co-presence of the two sides of the line. We need to remind all that we are here, we have relevance and meet a human need. We do not belong beyond that perceived line, where there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence (Santos, 2007). As we teach our students about acting – we must be both in the moment and out of the moment simultaneously. We must be in the pool eying infinity while keeping ourselves oriented to present reality. We must fight against  being seen as invisible and ignored and, as a result, viewed as a “waste of  time”.

1. Note: I was astounded to see in the suburbs of Washington DC in July 2022, a table in the Barnes and Noble Bookstore labelled Banned Books. Among them was one titled Drama (Telgemeier, 2012), a graphic novel about middle school students and a drama production. In some places it has been banned not for profanity, drug or alcohol use, or sexual content but because it includes LGBTQ characters.

Drama = Danger (in some eyes!)


References

Boal, A. (2011). Juegos para actores y no actores. Barcelona: Alba.

Brownstein, R. (February 15, 2022). Why schools are taking center stage in the culture wars. 

Finneran, M. J. (2008). Critical Myths in Drama as Education. (Ph.D.). University of Warwick, Warwick. 

Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books.

Landy, R. J. (2007). Drama therapy: Past, present, and future. In I. A. Serlin, J. Sonke-Henderson, R. Brandman, & J. Graham-Pole (Eds.), Whole person healthcare Vol. 3. The arts and health (pp. 143–163): Praeger Publishers.

Moral-Barrigüetei, C. d., & Guijarroii, B. M. (2022). Applied theatre in higher education: an innovative project for the initial training of educators. EDUCAÇÃO & FORMAÇÃO, 7(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.25053/redufor.v7i1.5528 https://revistas.uece.br/index.php/redufor/index

O'Neill, C. (2014). Dorothy Heathcote on Education and Drama: Essential Writing: Routledge.

O'Toole, J., Stinson, M., & Moore, T. (2009). Drama and Curriculum A Giant at the Door: Springer.

Pascoe, R. (June 09, 2020). Misconceptions about Drama Teaching.  Retrieved from http://www.stagepage.com.au/blog/2020/6/9/misconceptions-about-drama-teaching

Santos, B. d. S. (2007). Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges. Review, XXX(1). 

Snyder, B. (2019). The Healing Power of the Arts - Drama Therapy and the Use of Theatre in the Treatment of Trauma. In: Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters. 370. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cusrd_abstracts/370.

Telgemeier, R. (2012). DRAMA: Scholastic/Graphix.

Drama Tuesday - Change government – change the nation - National Cultural Policy

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The change of the Australian government after the election in May is starting to play out in cultural policy development. 

It is a welcome sign that a consultation process has started. 

A new National Cultural Policy is needed to establish a comprehensive roadmap to guide the skills and resources required to transform and safeguard a diverse, vibrant and sustainable arts, entertainment and cultural sector now and into the future.

Our starting point will be Creative Australia, the national cultural policy launched by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013.

This new policy will be shaped by the diverse voices of the Australian arts, entertainment and cultural sector around the 5 goals of Creative Australia which have been distilled to the following pillars:

  • First Nations: recognising and respecting the crucial place of these stories at the centre of our arts and culture.

  • A place for every story: reflecting the diversity of our stories and the contribution of all Australians as the creators of culture.

  • The centrality of the artist: supporting the artist as worker and celebrating their role as the creators of culture.

  • Strong institutions: providing support across the spectrum of institutions which sustain our arts and culture.

  • Reaching the audience: ensuring our stories reach the right people at home and abroad.

We are seeking views on these pillars.

How you can voice your opinion

There are 2 ways for you to tell us what you think:

1. Making a submission

  • contact name

  • organisation name, if applicable

  • contact details, including telephone number, postal and email addresses

  • confirmation of whether or not your submission can be made public (published) or kept confidential.

  • All submissions need to meet the Digital Service Standard for accessibility in order to be made public. Any submission that does not meet this standard may be modified before being published. Please ensure you do not include any personal information that you do not want to be published.

  • If your submission is confidential, please ensure each page of the submission is marked as confidential.

  • Upload your submission using the form below, or email your submission to culturalpolicy@arts.gov.au

2. Attending a town hall event

At one level, I am concerned that the starting point appears to be the 2013 Creative Australia—National Cultural Policy (https://www.arts.gov.au/documents/creative-australia-national-cultural-policy). There is a need to recognise that almost a decade has passed. Huge social upheavals  have taken place – including the changes to education and social life as a result of the Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic. Participation in the Arts has changed. Schools and arts education face significant recalibrations as a result of economic, social and educational policies. Recycling is not enough. 

I have made a submission which I am happy to share. 

Rather than attempting to address all the issues of a National Cultural Policy, I have focused on Arts Education (unsurprisingly). I have done this by focusing on the 4th pillar of the policy document:

Drama Tuesday - What's in a prop?

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 “What is this quintessence of dust?” 

Duchess is looking for his brokendown drunk father, a former Shakespearean actor reciter in vaudeville houses. He does not find his father but he is handed something left behind by his father.



 At the height of his father’s fame, when he was a leading man in a small Shakespearean troop performing to half filled houses, he had six of these cases and they were his prized possessions.



The gold embossing on this one was chipped and faint, you can still make out the O for Othello.  Throwing the class, I opened the lid. Inside there were four objects resting snuggly in velvet lined indentations: a goatee, a golden earring, a small jar of black face, and a dagger. 



Like the case, the dagger had been custom-made. The golden hilt which had been fashioned to fit perfectly in my old man’s grasp, was adorned with three large jewels in a row: one ruby, one sapphire, one emerald. The stainless steel blade has\d been forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, allowing my father in Act 3 to cut a wedge from an apple and stick the dagger upright into the surface of the table, where it would remain ominously as he nursed his suspicions of Desdemona‘s infidelity.



But while the steel of the blade was the real McCoy, the hilt was Gilded brass and jewels were paste. And if you press the sapphire with your thumb, it would release a catch, so that when my old man stabbed himself in the guts at the end of Act Five, the blade would retract into the hilt. As the ladies in the loge gasped, he would take his own sweet time staggering back-and-forth in front of the foot lights before giving up his ghost. Which is to say, the dagger was as much of a gimmick as he was.



When the set of six cases was still complete each has its own label embossed in gold: Othello, Hamlet, Henry, Lear, Macbeth, and – I kid you not – Romeo. Each has its own velvet mind indentations holding its own set of accessories.

P. 247 

Your challenge is to make imagined prop cases for other plays.

What are four emblems central to Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet?

What would you choose to symbolically encapsulate any other of Shakespeare’s plays? 

Or any other play that you can perform?

How might this activity of looking for the essence of a play help you understand a role?


Towles, A (2021) The Lincoln Highway, New York, New York, Random House, 

Drama Tuesday - Fearless Drama

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During our visit to Washington DC, we saw this table at the Barnes and Noble in Alexandria VA, promoting the books that have been banned. At first  you think it’s a joke. But then, the reality of this America sinks in.

It’s sobering to think of the increasing pressure on schools and teachers from those who seek to control, censor and limit ideas.

Drama teachers are in the crosshairs (to use an apt but chilling metaphor) along with English teachers and history teachers.

As I have noted before, Drama has been criticised by association as “progressive education”. 

Looking back, I do recognise that at times our teaching has been fearless though sometimes foolhardy. But we were certainly braver than perhaps we might be if we were teaching in schools now. We pushed the envelope. We reacted against the perceived dead hand of censorship and “politeness”.Sometimes when I consider even the words that I hear on television panel shows that would have been found only in the roughest of vocabularies of those times, I think of how unrecognisable those times are.



Prompted by remembering The Chocolate War

In part this post is prompted also because, by chance, on one of the streaming services the other night I found the 1988 film version of The Chocolate War based on the novel by Robert Cormier. The tag line was that the film was it was “the most banned book in schools” or something similar. 

In 1980 at Mount Lawley Senior High School, we staged an adaptation of The Chocolate War as a school production. In part, we were attracted too the story because it was studied in the school and also because it was intrinsically dramatic.

Having survived a Catholic Boys School education myself, I had a sense of the manipulative power of the Brother Leon in the story, intent on having each boy in Trinity College sell 50 boxes of leftover Mother’s Day chocolates in a fundraiser. Inside the underbelly of this scheme are the efforts of the “secret” society called The Vigils. (This world of school was one that resonated and I had seen enough of the devious mind games myself. I always remind myself that while my Mother planted the seed to be a teacher, my commitment to teaching came from a desire to do things differently – better – from my own schooling!). The plot hinges on a new boy to the school directed by The Vigils to refuse to sell the chocolates. The consequences are dark. The cruelty is frightening. But why ban this book?

Our production transposed Australian Football and localised accents. But was faithful to Cormier’s dark and bleak vision of school as a battleground. 

Aside from concerns about infringing copyright (I said that we were often foolish), we had no hesitation in working with this text.

Were we braver then than now?

I have noticed a closing down of bravery amongst drama teachers. I see more and more safer choices being made (not that there is a problem with the Disney Junior Musicals, but they are quite sanitised. Even the version of the Jason Robert Brown production 13 which dropped on Netflix this week, has eliminated some songs – the notorious Here Comes the Tongue, for example – in favour of a sunny and sweet ending). 

Where is the sense of edge? Where is the risk taking?

I don’t wear the “progressive education” label as a badge of honour. Rather, it is a necessity that our drama work challenges, questions and celebrates. It must step beyond what is known.  It must open possibilities. 

Be brave.

Cormier, Robert. (1974). The chocolate war. [New York] :Pantheon Books

The Chocolate War (1988), Keith Gordon,Writer/Director. MGM

Drama Tuesday - Drama Education? Theatre Education? Something else?

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 If someone asks me what I do. I reply automatically: I am a drama teacher.

My most recent profession has been teaching drama teachers. Sometimes I teach theatre but it is within the scope of teaching drama.

This is something more than habit or comfort. It is a position that developed out of my role as a curriculum leader and writer.

When I found myself in a position as a Consultant and Writer for Curriculum I faced a confusing and conflicted landscape. On the one hand there were the teachers of “Speech and Drama” who were vying for status with the “Theatre Arts” teachers. There was also “Dramatic Literature” taught in English and Literature classes. There were competing syllabuses. It’s also fair to say that there was no single unifying understanding of the term drama. Add to that the overlaying of terms like drama in education and child drama and creative drama. Compared with other arts subjects such as Music and visual arts, the somewhat haphazard and opportunistic growth of drama as curriculum, meant that there was no convenient orthodoxy or curriculum codification to fall back on. 

There needed to be a recasting of the ways that the terms and categories of the field are sorted. It was a one of the first tasks I attempted. 

It had to be more than simply my preference or even my habit and practice. I spent time researching and drawing on different sources such as those published by NADIE (National Association for Drama in education – Australia) and from the United Kingdom such as Peter Abbs (1987), Dorothy Heathcote (1995), and the journal 2D. I also drew on my time as a Summer Fellow at Northwestern University, Evanston, Chicago and the traditions of Winfred Ward as well as the dynamism of Viola Spolin (1975). Particularly useful – because it stepped back to survey the broad field – was Richard Courtney’s The Dramatic Curriculum (1980) alerting me to the role of Play and Ritual.

Emerging from this flux of ideas was an argued model for the field. This served to underpin my work in curriculum writing in Western Australia and inform my contributions to development of National Statements and Profiles (1994) and subsequently for the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA, 2014).

Setting out the field of Drama Education

In the broad field of human experience, there are overlapping worlds of Play, Story and Ritual. Within these experiences there is a particular way of making and sharing meaning through taking on roles and enacting situation using the principles of story. Within the field of drama there are times when the Elements of Drama are shaped as Theatre. Overlapping with Drama is the wider field of the Arts and Performance. 

If you put all of that into a visual model, then these overlapping fields draw from each other, interact porously. They are not discrete pods but are fluid and dynamic. 

As a small animation, the conceptual model looks like this:

Facing the realities of differing points of view

Not that any of this is as simple as it is when you write it down on paper. When I proposed a curriculum workshop for the First Drama Education Congress in Oporto, Portugal, in 1992 – the founding of IDEA – we were asked to make sure that we provided translations of our abstracts for the three official languages: French, Spanish and English. Easy I thought (falling back on my first year Uni French 100) Drama = le Drame. It is always so much more than a simple transliteration of terms. As we quickly found out within the Congress, terms are enculturated, embedded in social practice and ways of thinking about the world. And people are prepared to “die in ditches” about terminology. 

I know that this naming of the parts is a sometimes futile attempt at trying to make all of the atoms stand still or line up. It is always a work in progress. There is no convenient compliance or even agreement, but at least for my purposes as a curriculum writer, it made some sort of sense and had an internal coherence that stood up to scrutiny. 

References

Abbs, P. (Ed.) (1987). Living Powers: The Arts in Education. London: Falmer Press.

ACARA. (2014). The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/the-arts/introduction

Courtney, R. (1980). The Dramatic Curriculum. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Emery, L., & Hammond, G. (1994). A Statement on the arts for Australian Schools. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation (Australia)/Australian Education Council.

Heathcote, D., & Bolton, G. (1995). Drama for Learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education (Dimensions of Drama). London: Heinemann.

Spolin, V. (1975). Theater Game File. In. St Louis Missouri: CEMREL.