Anton Franks

Drama, Desire and Schooling. Drives to learning in creative and expressive school subjects

Desire is an unfamiliar and neglected concept in education and schooling. This paper makes an argument for the need to consider desire as a drive to learning in schools. In parallel with both Freud and Piaget, Vygotsky draws connections between play in children, fantasy and imagination in adolescence and, in adulthood, the making and enjoyment of the arts. In each case, the force, or drive towards creativity is seen as an expression of desire. With the emergence of arts-oriented subjects in the curricula of mass schooling, adolescents are encouraged to draw resources from the internalised worlds of fantasy and imagination and to materialise these in the social production of various cultural forms, where the resources of production are held as much between the group of students as within their individual and internal worlds of fantasy and imagination. This paper focuses particularly on the secondary school curriculum, taking a piece of improvised drama as evidence and analysing it from a Vygotskian perspective. Firstly, how, in these kinds of activity, might educationalists gain insights into the individual and social drives towards learning and development and, secondly, what resources from the socio-cultural environment are utilised and transformed? Major themes to emerge will be the productive and dynamic set of tensions which are exposed between the desire of the individual and the processes of social production, between the drive of desire and structuring principles of particular cultural forms and, finally, between the force of desire and the institutional constraints of schooling.

What have we done with the bodies? Bodyliness in drama education research

How the body appears, is theorised and researched in drama education and applied drama is what concerns me here. In the wider world of theory and research into drama and performance, the body features as a component of meaning-making in theory and analysis (see e.g. Counsell and Wolf 2001; Conroy 2010). Yet, although the body figures in drama education research, my argument is that theoretical and methodological approaches to the socially organised, dramatic and dramatised body remain ripe for development, particularly in looking for the ways in which the presence and co-presence of bodies make meaning and contribute to learning in drama. Over the time I have been teaching and researching into drama education, the physical presence of diverse, energetic, creatively expressive and sometimes recalcitrant students has been one of the most impressive aspects of my experience. Sometimes, not always, when students ‘click into’ what Cecily O’Neill has referred to as ‘drama worlds’ (1995), the walls of drama studios drop away, school uniforms seem to vanish, and students are transformed and transported into other places and times. The bodies of students then seem to lose their fixity, becoming plastic, malleable, but nevertheless remaining very material presences. In the first issue of RiDE, I wrote about the importance of looking at and understanding the role of the body in learning drama. The argument arose because, although there was mention of ‘embodiment’ and ‘body language’ in relation to learning in drama, little writing on drama education at that time focused on the material presence and co-presence of socially organised and enculturated bodies. Rather, there was a tendency to see right through the bodily presence of students to get at learning. The ghostliness of the body appeared to me as emblematic of the continued dominance of a dualistic view and hierarchical model of learning, one that separates mind from body. It is as if the making of meaning and processes of learning can be entirely abstracted from the social and individual bodies of students. Drama can be said to represent and encapsulate aspects of the material world of human relations through bodied interactions and encounters located in place and history. Learning in drama draws on learners’ practical knowledge of situated human relations and their abilities to select, shape and enact aspects of the social world. It is learning steered (at least, in part) by teachers’ knowledge of dramatic forms and processes alongside their understanding of students as people and their particular patterns of learning. The teacher’s role is therefore one of complex mediation, negotiating between material aspects of social relations and the aesthetic

Extending the boundaries

As befitting this anniversary edition of RiDE, there is a concern not simply to be retrospective, but to be prompted to think about how the boundaries of drama education and applied theatre might be extended. The three pieces in this section engage with disparate areas of practice and propose some new ways of thinking. One blind spot in perspectives on applied theatre is illuminated by Helen Nicholson in her concern for the status of amateur theatre as viewed from the field of applied theatre practice. Nicholson is clear about how this journal, among fellow travellers, has done much to legitimate the practice of applied theatre by engaging with research and theory, yet she is concerned that the ‘critical community’ of practitioners/researchers might have created conditions for the generation of a certain kind of orthodoxy and where domains of knowledge are susceptible to reification. As part of the processes of defining the field, boundaries are created and these create exclusions as well as inclusions – inclusive community theatre is good, ‘am dram’ is bad. For Nicholson, the amatory and creative aspects of amateur dramatics, their popularity and populism is worthy of reflection and requires some critical but fair reappraisal. Molly Mullen’s research is concerned with the economies and management of applied theatre companies – areas that have rarely surfaced as issues in this journal in the past. As a side-effect of the socio-political commitment and focus on critical practice espoused by many companies, issues of funding and its distribution and the notion of effective management are seen as intrusions on, or even as contaminating applied arts practice. The criteria for funding, and the power that proceeds from them, are firmly held by the funders, who may assume or require particular managerial arrangements from companies in meeting the criteria. Informed by the work of economic geographers, Mullen calls for applied theatre practitioners to take a fresh and critical approach to their particular issues of economics and management, to hold onto their heartfelt principles whilst negotiating a path between the various economic, social and artistic interests that press on them and their work. The street cultures of hip-hop and break dancing and the staging of ‘street battles’ between conventionally trained artists and street artists, are points of focus for Adelina Ong. Here, she thinks about ‘disadvantaged’ young people in Singapore and how they construct their identities through the practices of street art. In this city-state, populated by people from diverse cultures, narratives of unified national identity in a globalised world are promulgated by the powerful élites. Ong sees the admission of the vernacular, hybrid forms of youth culture as offering the possibility of developing complex and productively ambiguous senses of identity. ‘Street battles’ staged by adherents of

Teachers, Arts Practice and Pedagogy

What are possible overlaps between arts practice and school pedagogy? How is teacher subjectivity and pedagogy affected when teachers engage with arts practice, in particular, theatre practices? We draw on research conducted into the Learning Performance Network (LPN), a project that involved school teachers working with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the University of Warwick. The aim of the commissioned research was to look at the effects on teacher development, focusing on the active rehearsal room pedagogic techniques and ensemble methods of exploring Shakespearean text and performance. The practices of working as an ensemble through rehearsal room pedagogy were central to the LPN. Our interest is in looking for possible shifts in teachers’ subjectivity, their self-perception. What affordances, limitations, accommodations and tensions are experienced by the teachers in transposing work from the rehearsal room to the classroom? We draw on a range of cultural theories that provide complementary perspectives on aspects of subjectivity; these include Vygotskian approaches to the psychology of art and acting. Raymond Williams’s work on the ‘dramatized society’ and Jacques Rancière’s work on spectatorship and pedagogy. Data in the form of excerpts from field notes, taken in an introductory workshop where teachers worked with theatre practitioners, and from transcribed interviews with participants in the project are used to provide evidence of shifts in perspective, self-perception and pedagogic practice.