Juliana Saxton

Comfortable, Confident, Committed: A Model of Drama Practice

This paper describes the results of a five-year project to develop an effective structure of delivery that engenders confidence in teachers new to drama.

A complicated tangle of circumstances

The post-modern curriculum, drawing on chaos and complexity theory, recognises the realities of a world in flux and posits that the teacher and the class are always teetering in the midst of chaos, ‘not linked by chains of causality but [by] layers of meaning, recursive dynamics, non-linear effects and chance’ (Osberg 2008, viii). The phenomenon of such (paradoxically) ‘constant’ change is a living part of the realisation of Everyday Theatre company performances that are, in turn, specifically designed to effect shifts or changes in understanding for their audience participants. It is this changing, changeful, changeable, change-ringing context that we investigate in this article as we look at the layering of the experiences of Everyday Theatre through the lens of a post-modern curriculum of complexity. For us, the work of Everyday Theatre exemplifies the post-modern curriculum at its best, confirming what we as drama educators have intuited: a rich pedagogy unfolds in the midst of chaos as students meet a complex narrative that creates powerful metaphors they are invited to explore through their own acts of experience.

Three decade drama/theatre and (for/with/by/about) youth crowd-sourced timeline

What events, patterns, or people have shaped the field or marked its milestones since Youth Theatre Journal’s (YTJ’s) first issue in 1986? We put the call out to YTJ readers, this rich array of ent...

Story Drama Structures

Twenty-five years ago, drama innovator Gavin Bolton (1984) recognised the power of embodied narrative when he argued for placing drama at the centre of the curriculum. Rather than seeing literacy practices as discrete competencies unconnected to students’ lives outside school, Bolton, together with Dorothy Heathcote (2003), uses drama to cross disciplines and subject areas. They create learning contexts in which students use their literacy skills in multi-modalities immersed in situations that demand their participation. It is this “apprenticeship into the very specific forms of [social] languages and literacies represented inside and outside the classroom” (Hawkins, 2004, p. 17) that makes drama such a rich pedagogy.

‘To See The World As If It Were Otherwise’: Brain Research Challenges the Curriculum of ‘Organized Chunks’

Abstract In this paper we look at current brain research in an attempt to bring about a rebalancing of the traditional, or measured, curriculum to include the arts as imperative pedagogy. As drama teachers, the art of teaching (and our pedagogy) is allied to Anderson, Ewing and Gibsons (2007) discussion which draws attention to the components that quality teaching embraces. Teaching is more than the delivery of content and must be responsive to the social and cultural contexts of the classroom. Pedagogy attends to the emotional and intellectual needs of each student and involves a partnership between learners and teachers, of skills, knowledges and understandings. Brain research enables us to understand the significance of such things as: variety; movement social relationships context low-risk environments; pleasure and how these are most effectively embedded in the arts (e.g., Damasio, 1999, 2010; Goleman, 2006; Jensen, 2008 Iacoboni, 2008 Ratey, 2008 Willis, 2007). While any of the arts (music, dance, literature, visual arts) would be appropriate sites for this exploration, we focus on the role of drama as an exemplary curriculum discipline that is discrete, cross- disciplinary and ‘brain-compatible’ (Norman, 1999).

What matters? Keynote address July 6th, 2015: 8th International Drama in Education Research Institute, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

ABSTRACT As we prepare for the 9th IDIERI in New Zealand, this paper revisits the issues foregrounded at the 2015 Institute and offers possible prompts for considering the state of our art today. A meditation on the concept of ‘open culture’ – the Institute theme – this keynote explores Kuo Pao Kun’s injunction ‘to extend one’s self beyond one’s own culture’ and how and why our capacity for that ‘extension’ is so constrained. Exploring the ‘famine of quality conversation’ and exampled by a case study, the author offers three possibilities that may make it difficult for ‘the light to get in’ and ways in which our own practice may act as a deterrent to that occlusion.

Seduction of the real: the significance of fiction in applied theatre

We realised when beginning to work on the second edition of our introductory text Applied Theatre: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice (Prendergast and Saxton 2009) that there was a new aspect of applied theatre emerging that we had not addressed: what Martin (2012) calls ‘theatre of the real’. In her book of that name, she lists a number of terms: ‘verbatim theatre, reality-based theatre, theatreof-fact, documentary theatre, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre’ (5). These fact-based theatre forms often rely on the sharing of very personal stories. In a world filled with reality television shows, confessional blogs, homemade YouTube videos and documentary films, the seduction of what audiences are told are ‘true’ stories cannot be denied. Yet the presentation of people’s lives can be voyeuristic and exploitative. How can these risks be avoided in the practices of applied theatre? Why should they be? What the book was missing, we then recognised, was an intrinsic part of what makes theatre theatre: stories that are metaphors, fictionalised or just plain ‘lies’. The lie that tells the truth is our interest here as we consider the lure of the real versus the potency of fiction in applied theatre practice. Applied Theatre has multiple roots and practices, and is centred in community; much of the content is the stories that emerge from that community. Retelling stories of our lives can help us as narrators and listeners to understand better what has happened. When hearing stories from someone about his or her life we make an assumption that this person is telling us the ‘truth’. The facts of the story may continually shift according to circumstances – it is well known storytellers like to embellish the facts for effect – but the question always is, has that embellishment altered the truth of the story? These are significant matters when story is used to make theatre, but what concerned us was how often, in these emerging reality-based forms of applied theatre, the story is told onstage by the person to whom it has happened. In applied theatre, theatre is a vehicle for entertainment and education and has an inherent attachment to the local and participatory. It is not surprising then that we get a blend of fact and fiction in many forms of applied theatre; a continuum that moves frommore factual to more fictional, depending on circumstances and choices made by facilitators and participants. Applied theatre can work very productively across this continuum within which a fictional source might serve as a catalyst or jumping-off point for more local non-fictional stories and storytelling. All dramatised stories – that is all stories clothed in fiction – are conversation starters; a call to remember, to think. In the case of applied theatre the use of stories, operating as steps in an unfolding narrative helps us to become more aware of issues, concerns, histories, so that we may take responsibility, consider action and provoke change.

Unfolding the cosmos or divining ‘what's up?’

This short paper considers the question: what of the future of drama in education? It suggests that perhaps, because we are artists, the future is already in play. If that is so, then we need to address those questions of value, advocacy and marginalisation more rigorously while, at the same time, addressing the impact of technology on empathic development.