Monica Prendergast

Found Poetry as Literature Review Research Poems on Audience and Performance

Creating found poetry from theoretical literature offers an arts-based approach to literature review in inquiry. Found poetry has a long history of practice in poetry as the imaginative appropriation and reconstruction of already-existing texts. This article presents literature-voiced research found poems that express distillations and crystallizations of a wide range of writing in contemporary continental philosophy and performance theory. The suite of poems forms part of a current dissertation inquiry in the form of a curriculum theory of audience in performance and education.

‘Shaped like a question mark’: found poetry from Herbert Blau's The Audience

Performance theorist Herbert Blaus The Audience (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) is an important yet neglected theoretical text on theatre audience. Deconstructive, dense and allusive in nature, Blaus text creates a real challenge for his reader. This paper presents a study of The Audience employing what I am calling literature-voiced research poetry. This consists of found poems created from certain kinds of theoretical texts, particularly those that are, like Blaus, rich, thick and metaphorical in nature. In creating these found poems, I am moving into using an arts-based research methodology as a way of knowing within an inquiry process, as well as a way of analysing and representing data (Oberg, A., Arts-based educational research, Notes from presentation at Association for Graduate Education Students (AGES) meeting, University of Victoria, 18 March 2003). My dissertation, Marked by performance: a curriculum theory and poetics for audience in the performing arts (in progress), will include literature-voiced research poems as part of my literature review and will move into researcher-voiced and participant-voiced poems that attempt to capture the residue of performance, and how the experience of performance (specifically theatre performance) has the potential to mark us, to shake us to our core, as Aristotle, Artaud, Barker, Brecht, Grotowski, Nietzsche, and other theatre theorists have long-hypothesized. The completed study will present poetic co-created representations of how performing artists, critics and other highly-experienced audiences, as well as students of audience education (secondary and post-secondary), experience the residue of performances throughout their lives as significant cognitive, affective, social and even potentially profound spiritual events. It goes on to pose the question: what are the implications of these poetic understandings of audience-in-performance (AIP) for emerging curricula of audience and performance studies in education? Thus, the study is an attempt to express these almost inexpressible experiences through poetry for the curricular purpose that, within our increasingly dramatized and performative culture, audience-in-performance education is an important yet neglected aspect of art education and education in general.

thinking narrative (on the Vancouver Island ferry) A hybrid poem

This is a hybrid poem, a grafting together of narrative research, qualitative methods, and poetic representation. “The offspring of genetically dissimilar parents” (www.answers.com), the poem attempts to exist in the rarely seen intergeneric worlds of poetry and inquiry. It is inspired in part by the poetic inquiry found in Qualitative Inquiry by poets and researchers such as Corinne Glesne, Ivan Brady, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Miles Richardson, Mary Weems, and others. This poem is dedicated to Dr. Antoinette Oberg, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, a wondrous mentor who retired in December 2005.

Theatre Audience Education or How to See a Play: Toward a Curriculum Theory for Spectatorship in the Performing Arts

Audience-in-performance curriculum theory sees nurturing spectatorship as centred in the imaginative and collaborative co-creation, with performing artists, of the performance itself. As well, this theory allows for the active involvement of students as participants in pre-and post-performance activities.

Poetic Inquiry, 2007-2012: A Surrender and Catch Found Poem

A found poem created from a selection of poems published in indexed peer-reviewed social science journals between 2007 and 2012 is presented. The excerpts from poems were drawn from a 595-page annotated bibliographic update of a bibliography on this poetic inquiry in the social sciences that was completed in 2007. Excerpts from poems were gathered from this updated compilation via Kurt H. Wolff’s phenomenological surrender and catch method. Surrendering to the process of engaging with the bibliography allowed me to catch phrases, lines, and verses. Excerpts were chosen based on aesthetic criteria such as imagery, metaphor, truthfulness, affective impact, and so on. These excerpts were then grouped according to various voice forms and topics covered. A found poem created from excerpts from 30 poems focuses on Vox Poetica, one of five new voices discovered that are employed in recent poetic inquiry practice.

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...

Smoking Cessation in Mental Health Communities: A Living Newspaper Applied Theatre Project

Using the Living Newspaper theatre form, the authors and outpatients at a psychiatric hospital created and performed an applied theatre play for fellow psychiatric patients and healthcare professionals about the connections between mental health and tobacco addiction. In comparison with Brown and Strega’s central tenets of anti-oppressive research, this article describes how the Living Newspaper form cultivated our anti-oppressive arts-based data collection. Upon further analysis, the authors draw attention to one limitation in the form, which they suggest limited the participants’ ability to share their deep understandings of the issue with their audiences. To conclude, Jerke, Prendergast, and Dobson suggest that with several minor updates, the Living Newspaper form could consistently foster arts-based, anti-oppressive research.

What I Learn from Theatregoing: Review Haiku

A haiku suite of theatre reviews and reflection on application to practice as drama educator and scholar.

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.

in exile/in flight: Two Poems From a Poetic Autoethnography of Academic Banishment

From 2008 to 2010, I was assistant professor in the Division of Creative Arts in Learning at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For various reasons—including my older son’s need to complete his final 2 years of high school in Canada—I commuted to and from my family home in Victoria, British Columbia to Boston. The position itself, teaching within a graduate program in arts integration, also called for substantial travel as the program is carried out in over 20 states. During this challenging time, I met many friends and colleagues who told me of their own periods of academic exile. This seems to be a common occurrence, as scholars are most often not able to choose where they work. Although we are highly privileged members of the social elite, we share this experience with migrant workers around the world who are forced, due to economic duress, to spend long periods away from loved ones.