Helen Nicholson

Acting, Creativity and Social Justice: Edward Bond’s The Children

This article focuses on the first production of Edward Bonds play The Children , which was written for, and first performed by, students at Manor Community College in Cambridge, UK. In this project, a group of students worked with Classworks Theatre Company for 2 weeks in an intensive rehearsal period, where they created and realised roles written for them. Although Bond has previously written plays for Big Brum, a Theatre in Education (TIE) company, The Children is his first play written for young people to perform. This article discusses Bonds interest in Theatre in Education and assesses the significance of his dramatic writing for young people. It also examines the experiences of the young people in the first cast of The Children and the perceptions of the teachers who facilitated the project.

The promises of history: pedagogic principles and processes of change

This paper offers a brief reading of the history of theatre education and applied theatre as a way to reflect on the principles and values that have informed their development. It argues that a critical genealogy of this history suggests that theatrical experiments in educational and community settings have always responded creatively and critically to their times. It argues that twenty-first century theatre practitioners are following in this tradition by experimenting with innovative forms of theatre-making that challenge artistic boundaries.

Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre

As the twenty-first century moves towards its third decade, applied theatre is being shaped by contemporary economic and environmental concerns and is contributing to new conceptual paradigms that influence the ways in which socially engaged art is produced and understood. This collection offers fresh perspectives on the aesthetics, politics and histories of applied theatre. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book illuminates theatre in a diverse range of global contexts and regions. Divided into three sections - histories and cultural memories; place, community and environment; and poetics and participation - the chapters interweave cutting-edge theoretical insights with examples of innovative creative practice that traverse different places, spaces and times. Essential reading for researchers and artists working within applied theatre, this collection will also be of interest to those in theatre and performance studies, education, cultural policy, social history and cultural geography.As the twenty-first century moves towards its third decade, applied theatre is being shaped by contemporary economic and environmental concerns and is contributing to new conceptual paradigms that influence the ways in which socially engaged art is produced and understood. This collection offers fresh perspectives on the aesthetics, politics and histories of applied theatre. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book illuminates theatre in a diverse range of global contexts and regions. Divided into three sections - histories and cultural memories; place, community and environment; and poetics and participation - the chapters interweave cutting-edge theoretical insights with examples of innovative creative practice that traverse different places, spaces and times. Essential reading for researchers and artists working within applied theatre, this collection will also be of interest to those in theatre and performance studies, education, cultural policy, social history and cultural geography.

The Sociable Aesthetics of Amateur Theatre

It was a laugh at first. No, it was serious. It was a serious intent to start a theatre group. It wasn’t ‘Shall we give it a go?’ It was, no, let’s actually do it. I’m quite pernickety – things have to be just so, so if I’m going to get involved in something, it has to be just right. So the word ‘amateur’ I don’t like. My perception of amateur theatre is the ham side of it – wooden acting, props falling off, staging going wrong, lighting going wrong. Some of Ramon’s plays are really serious, and if the audience is going to end up laughing, that won’t work... if we’re going to do it, it’s got to be right. We don’t have a huge budget, but it’s got to be right. (Maurice Newbery, Managing Director, Philippine Theatre UK)

Applied Drama/Theatre/Performance

I first heard the term ‘applied theatre’ sometime in the mid1990s from a colleague who had heard it used at an academic conference. At the time I didn’t ask which conference he had attended, although of course now I wish that I could locate the history of this keyword more precisely. There is, however, a general vagueness that accompanies all accounts of the derivation of the term, suggesting that it is not a phrase that was coined by a particular individual to describe a very precise set of practices or concept, but that the term that emerged haphazardly and spread like a rhizome to fill a gap in the lexicon. Locating the ways in which this keyword is used, therefore, is not a search for the authentic roots or the essential meaning of applied drama, theatre and performance, but in recognising its pliability and porousness. Inevitably there are ways of thinking about this field that I find more persuasive than others, but my entry marks an attempt to reflect some of the different ways in which the term has been understood rather than to insist on a particular derivation or single meaning. As the theatre historian Joseph Roach points out, ‘improvised narratives of authenticity and priority may congeal into full-blown myths of legitimacy and origin’ (1996, p. 3).

Making Home Work: Theatre-making with Older Adults in Residential Care

Abstract The paper reflects on the significance of artistic practice with older adults in residential care settings, asking what ‘home’ means to residents living with dementia. To consider how cultural stereotypes of ageing as narratives of loss and decline might be challenged, this paper draws on a recent production On Ageing that was staged at the Young Vic Theatre in London. This play dramatised gerontologist Tom Kirkwoods view that ageing is not a process of deterioration but accumulation, which determines how the body ages physically. Socially, we also accumulate ‘stuff’ as we grow older and home is often defined by the emotional significance of possessions. So what happens when, in old age, peoples physical space shrinks?. The research draws on the principles of person-centred care and non-humanist theories of materiality to debate how home is constructed through the imagination and in the material, spatial and temporal practices of everyday life. In considering how and why creative activity with older adults can help to change a residential care home from an institution to a domestic space, it suggests that the arts have a significant role to play in end of life care.

Looking for Fruit in the Jungle: head injury, multimodal theatre, and the politics of visibility

This article describes a collaborative piece of theatre made by members of Headway, a charity working with head-injured people, and students and staff at Parkside Community College, an 11-16 school in Cambridge. The authors consider how the piece employs multimodal forms of expression and representational resources (including body, voice, and the technologies of theatre and media) to challenge the invisibility of disability, and to perform a narrative of identity and resistance pieced together from combinations of memory, aspiration and polemic. The article also briefly considers the policy context of specialist Arts colleges in relation to this kind of project.

Attending to Sites of Learning: London and pedagogies of scale

This essay attends to the ecologies of learning that are afforded by performative encounters in cities. What might it mean for theatre-makers if its spaces, events, streets, pathways, buildings, vistas and so on are all considered to have pedagogical force? How might attending to architectural scale and urban perspectives invite new ways to witness, embody and inhabit cities? The essay reflects on three performative events that took place in different parts of London in 2010 and 2011, each of which referenced the scale of Londons architectural cityscape within its dramaturgical structure. The argument is constructed on the idea that the theatrical imagination has the capacity to interrupt fixed geographies of scale, and that, reciprocally, the geographical imaginary of space invites affective relationships with the performative materiality of the city. The process of exploring what is at stake if we apply these theoretical insights to pedagogy opens social constructivist theories of learning to critical scrutiny, and poses new questions about experiential learning. This paper asks, therefore, how the relationship between theatre and learning might be re-shaped by understanding the affect of scale, habit, temporality and spatiality.

Theatre, performance and the amateur turn

On 1 July 2016 groups of men in World War One military uniforms gathered in public spaces across Great Britain, at railway stations and harbours, in shopping malls, streets, and on beaches. Looking blankly ahead, the men were silent except for the occasional chorus of ‘We’re here because we’re here’ to the tune Auld Lang Syne, a song that was sung in the trenches. If approached, each soldier offered a simple card bearing the name of the man he represented who had died at the Somme exactly 100 years earlier. The presence of these ghost soldiers in contemporary settings was made more poignant by the fact that they were not only the same age as the men who were killed, but also because they were not professional performers but men with other jobs: teachers, office workers, students, flight attendants, plumbers, policemen, and many others joined the ranks. We’re here because we’re here was commissioned by 14–18 NOW, and created by the artist Jeremy Deller in collaboration with Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the National Theatre in London. Deller is perhaps best known for The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of a bitter dispute between striking miners and mounted police in Thatcher’s England in 1984. His largescale performances rely on choreographing cultural memory with nonprofessional performers as one way to attend to the narratives of the past and bring them into the present. We’re here because we’re here illustrates the resurgence of interest in the amateur and amateurism, and captures their affective power. Professionally conceived, it involved 1,400 men between the ages of 16 and 52 who volunteered to perform in this living memorial to the dead. Rehearsing in secret, the event required disciplined participation and restraint, but involved no ‘acting’ as such; there was no line learning, no dramatic narrative, no monologues and no characters to play. 1. For an account of this project, see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 30–37.

Participation as art

In her provocative new book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop challenges those involved in socially engaged art to question their foundational assumptions about its emancipatory potential and its status as art. Although any summary of her arguments in this short editorial would inevitably lead to over-simplification, I would like to respond to one of her overarching themes that there is confusion about how socially engaged arts practices should be read as art. Bishop’s primary concern lies with participatory art that is conceived by professional artists, though her words will resonate with drama practitioners from other backgrounds: ‘Without finding a more nuanced language to address the artistic status of this work’, she argues, ‘we risk discussing these practices solely in positivist terms, that is, by focusing on demonstrable impact’ (2012, 18). There is, of course, a pragmatic reason to demonstrate the effectiveness of drama strategies to those who fund participatory arts and to convince those responsible for education and cultural policy. But Bishop is surely right to point out that social and artistic judgements demand different criteria. She argues that conflating these two agendas have led to participatory arts practices in which the process becomes the product (2012, 19). This may be challenging, but it is not far-fetched; we have all seen toolkits of participatory arts activities or theatre education programmes that, though open to a degree of interpretation by participants, are broadly replicable and designed to produce similar outcomes. In reaction to this emphasis on ‘demonstrable impact’, Bishop argues that the ‘double ontological status’ of participatory arts should be recognised, which is ‘both an event in the world, and at one remove from it’ (2012, 284). This double ontology has been much debated in applied theatre and theatre education, where leading thinkers have questioned the balance between sociality and artistry, variously articulated as distinctions between art and instrument (Jackson, 2007) between effect and affect (Thompson, 2009), between theatre that is ‘usedriven’ and ‘aesthetically driven’ (Cohen-Cruz, 2010). Despite this clear interest in the aesthetics of socially engaged art, I would suggest that many scholars are expected to follow positivist research agendas that risk overtaking and inhibiting artistic innovation. I am often asked how to publish work in this journal, and it is a difficult question to answer as there is no set formula. The inter-disciplinarity of the journal means that there is a genuine openness to new ways of thinking, making and perceiving socially engaged and educational theatre practice. But as the journal hits its 18th birthday, it is perhaps an appropriate moment to reflect on the different disciplinary perspectives and their implications for this aspect of drama practice and theatre-making. As editor of the open issues, I have found that the question reviewers ask most regularly is ‘where’s the drama?’ The impact is often demonstrated well, and the contribution to specific learning outcomes, well-being or social inclusion agendas, is often well made, but somehow vivid accounts of theatre practice their aesthetic strategies, RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2013 Vol. 18, No. 1, 1 3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2012.756184