Dramatic Cultures
Anna-Lena Østern (ed.)
Report from the Faculty of Education, Åbo Akademi University
No 10
Vasa 2004
© Faculty of Education, the authors
Vasa 2004
ISSN 1458-7777
ISBN 952-12-1382-5
ISBN 978-952-12-2910-7 (digital)
Printed by Multiprint, Vasa, Finland
Abstract
The Nordic Educational Research Association Symposium Dramatic Cultures
held in Reykjavik 10-13.3.04 was arranged in order to promote a dialogue
between researchers about the importance of drama as cultural production,
where the makers re-circulate material and mix genres in order to explore
meaning potentials.
In schools the aesthetic subjects traditionally are given a modest place, and the
aesthetic subjects often are marginalised in favour of so called core subjects.
When focussing on dramatic cultures this report wants to open up for another
kind of understanding of the importance of the aesthetic subjects in school
context and outside school. Today young people learn about aesthetics in their
spare time culture, which is to a large extent dramatised and where the signs of
drama, visual art, dance and music are used in an aesthetically developed way.
This competence can be part of the education if the aesthetic subjects can be
included as core curriculum, or as methods supporting learning. Aulin-Gråhamn,
Persson and Thavenius (2004) introduces the concept radical aesthetics as an
alternative to the modest aesthetics in schools of today. The authors have some
vital points in their argumentation. Firstly they argue that school today has a
shortage of meaning for the pupils. By introducing arts as method the meaning
project can be focused. Art welcomes the questions, it embraces the not yet
ready, it promotes a seeking and open attitude and it appreciates divergent
thinking and personal solutions. Secondly could the kind of negotiations
necessary in collective productions introduce school as an arena for democratic
dialogues about what kind of society young people want for themselves
tomorrow. In focusing on dramatic cultures we want to promote the discussion
about values and meaning by the means of drama.
The dialogue between text and context – the situated context and the cultural
context can be explored by using the dromena tree metaphor (Østern, 2000). The
dromena tree shows a possible interpretation of storytelling, its roots and some
of the dramaturgical solutions chosen to tell in a dramatic mode. The art teacher
and artist Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik has constructed a version of the tree for the
front page of this report. The dromena tree metaphor can point out some of the
themes of the article writers, the themes which all have in common the
production of dramatic cultures: role play and performance, virtual space and
drama, intercultural children’s theatre, the political theatre of Augusto Boal,
thoughts about dramaturgy and epistemology in drama education and the teacher
artist’s conception of an artistic process in drama.
In this report eight article writers present their perspective on dramatic cultures.
Through this report they want to participate in an international dialogue about
arts education in society. This contribution to the dialogue represents a Nordic
perspective on dramatic cultures concerned with meaning construction in
dramatic form as part of the democratic dialogue of participants in the global and
local society.
Key words: dramatic cultures, character forming, radical aesthetics, meaning
making
Abstrakt
Symposiet Dramatic Cultures genomfördes vid NFPF:s (Nordisk Förening för
Pedagogisk Forskning) kongress i Reykjavik 10-13.3.04 och arrangerades för att
befrämja en dialog mellan forskare rörande betydelsen av drama som kulturell
produktion, där deltagarna recirkulerar kulturellt material och blandar genrer för
att kunna utforska betydelsepotentialer.
I skolan har estetiska ämnen av tradition ett blygsamt utrymme, och de estetiska
ämnena är ofta marginaliserade jämförda med s.k. kärnämnen. I denna rapport
öppnas för en annan typ av förståelse för de estetiska ämnenas betydelse i
skolkontext och utanför. I dag erövrar unga människor en estetisk kompetens i
den ungdomskultur de är en del av utanför skolan. Ungdomskulturen är i hög
grad en dramatiserad, iscensatt kultur där tecken från drama, visuell kultur, dans
och musik används på avancerade sätt. Denna kompetens kan ingå i skolans
fostran om de estetiska ämnena inkluderas som en del av kärnstoffet i
undervisningen, d.v.s. konsten som metod stöder läroprocesser i skolans
undervisning. Aulin-Gråhamn, Persson and Thavenius (2004) introducerar
begreppet radikal estetik som ett alternativ till den modesta (blygsamma)
estetiken I skolan av idag. De argumenterar för det första med att skolan i dag
har brist på mening (för eleverna). Genom att introducera konsten som metod
kan meningsprojekt fokuseras. Konsten välkomnar frågor, den omfamnar det
ännu icke färdiga, den främjar en sökande och öppen attityd och den värdesätter
divergent tänkande och personliga lösningar. För det andra argumenterar de för
att de förhandlingar som är nödvändiga när en grupp kollektivt producerar något,
kan fungera som en arena för demokratiska dialoger om vilket slags samhälle
unga människor önskar för sig själva i morgon.
Dialogen mellan text och kontext – den situationella kontexten och den
kulturella kontexten kan undersökas genom Dromena trädmetaforen (Østern,
2000). Trädmetaforen förklarar det dramatiska berättandet, dess rötter och några
av de dramaturgiska lösningar som används för att berätta genom drama.
Bildkonstnär och bildkonstlärare Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik har gjort en
konstnärlig utformning av trädmetaforen för denna rapport. Dromena
trädmetaforen kan peka ut några av artikelförfattarnas teman, teman som har
som gemensam nämnare produktion av dramatiska kulturer: rollspel och
performance, virtuell värld och drama, interkulturell ungdoms, Augusto Boals
politiska teater, tankar om dramaturgi och epistemologi i dramapedagogik och
dramaläraren-konstnärens konstruktion av begreppet konstnärlig läroprocess i
drama.
I denna rapport presenterar åtta artikelförfattare sina perspektiv på dramatisk
kultur. Genom rapporten önskar de delta i en internationell dialog om
konstfostran i samhället. Detta bidrag till diskussionen representerar ett nordiskt
perspektiv på dramatiska kulturer upptagna av meningskonstruktion i dramatisk
form som en del av en demokratisk dialog mellan deltagare i såväl det globala
som det lokala samhället.
Sökord: dramatiska kulturer, bildning, radikal estetik, meningsproduktion
5
Contents
1. Introduction
7
Anna-Lena Østern
2. Formation of Otherness:
Handling the complexity of late modernity
11
Kirsten Drotner
3. Drama, Dramaturgy and Epistemology
21
Tor-Helge Allern
4. The Poetics of Augusto Boal
29
Arne Engelstad
5. The Metaphor Bridges –
a Collective Devising Process in an Intercultural
Children’s Theatre Workshop
39
Heli Aaltonen
6. Interactivity and Collaboration as Aesthetic Strategies
in Performance and Live-action-role playing
67
Ida Krøgholt
7. The Pedagogical Laboratory
75
Klaus Thestrup
8. Artistic (learning) Processes in Drama
- a Drama Student Perspective on
Constructions of the Concept
83
Anna-Lena Østern
9. Relations – Transformative Learning in
Drama Education
Pipsa Teerijoki
95
7
1. Introduction
Anna-Lena Østern
The Nordic Educational Research Association Symposium Dramatic Cultures
held in Reykjavik 10-13.3.04 was arranged in order to promote a dialogue between researchers about the importance of drama as cultural production, where
the makers re-circulate material and mix genres in order to explore meaning
potentials.
Susan Wright (2003, 303)1 writes about the cultural construction of reality in the
following way:
Artistic expression, in a modest or grand way, communicates and shapes our
thoughts, perceptions and feelings. It helps us represent our experiences of
life, and to develop, strengthen and transform our beliefs and values. Hence,
the arts not only reveal cultural heritage, they are also a means by which the
culture is defined and evaluated.
In schools the aesthetic subjects traditionally are given a modest place, and the
aesthetic subjects often are marginalised in favour of so called core subjects.
When focussing on dramatic cultures this report wants to open up for another
kind of understanding of the importance of the aesthetic subjects in school context and outside school. Today young people learn about aesthetics in their spare
time culture, which is to a large extent dramatised and where the signs of drama,
visual art, dance and music are used in an aesthetically developed way. This
competence can be part of the education if the aesthetic subjects can be included
as core curriculum, or as methods supporting learning. Aulin-Gråhamn, Persson
and Thavenius (2004)2 introduces the concept radical aesthetics as an alternative
to the modest aesthetics in schools of today. The authors have some vital points
in their argumentation. Firstly they argue that school today has a shortage of
meaning for the pupils. By introducing arts as method the meaning project can
be focused. Art welcomes the questions, it embraces the not yet ready, it promotes a seeking and open attitude and it appreciates divergent thinking and personal solutions. Secondly could the kind of negotiations necessary in collective
productions introduce school as an arena for democratic dialogues about what
kind of society young people want for themselves tomorrow. In focusing on
dramatic cultures we want to promote the discussion about values and meaning
by the means of drama.
1
2
In The Arts, Young Children, and Learning. Boston: Pearson Education.
Skolan och den radikala estetiken. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
8
The focus of the symposium in Reykjavik was on artistic practice and on the
aesthetic event as performance, to stage the subject in process. Mike Pearson and
Michael Shanks (2001)3 write about
/…/ the dramatisation of the past within heritage re-enactments; of the problems of
presentation and representation; of performance and the past as generative of, and
constituted by, multiple and conflicting narratives. Above all, both disciplines [theatre and archaeology] acknowledge their functioning as modes of cultural production,
involving the recontextualisation of material rather than its reconstruction.
This theme with poly centred narratives is made visible in the articles presented
in our report. The idea behind several of the articles is the possibility of drama to
be a dialogue partner in the forming of cultures in late modernity.
Performance tends towards liminality /…/ ‘the space in which cultural meanings
and identities always contain the traces of other meanings and identities’ It becomes an enacted Third Space where a cultures’s hybridity is articulated In this
it has echoes of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia4:
There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilisation, real places – places
that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all
the other real sites than can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and intervented. I shall call them, by ways of contrast to utopias,
heterotopias. (Foucault 1986: 24) 5
The dialogue between text and context – the situated context and the cultural
context can be explored by using the dromena tree metaphor (Østern, 20006).
The dromena tree shows a possible interpretation of storytelling, its roots and
some of the dramaturgical solutions chosen to tell in a dramatic mode. The art
teacher and artist Hannah Kaihovirta-Rosvik has constructed a version of the
tree for the front page of this report. The dromena tree metaphor can point out
some of the themes of the article writers, the themes which all have in common
the production of dramatic cultures: role play and performance, virtual space and
drama, intercultural children’s theatre, the political theatre of Augusto Boal,
thoughts about dramaturgy and epistemology in drama education and the teacher
artist’s conception of an artistic process in drama.
In this report eight article writers present their perspective on dramatic cultures.
Kirsten Drotner is especially interested in media as means of general character
forming (‘Bildung’) among children and young people. Media culture and drama
education have much in common. Drotner focuses on the relationship between
drama education and pedagogy. She underlines the fact that drama education is
built upon the complexity of the aesthetic processes, but she wants drama education to have a dialogue with pedagogy about learning. Thus for the future she
3
in Theatre/Archeology. London: Routledge.
Bhabha 1994, quoted in Pearson and Shanks (2001) pp 27-28.
5
Quoted from Pearson and Shanks (2001) pp 27-28.
6
Paper presentation at the York National Drama conference in 2000.
4
9
suggests a dialogue scenario including cultural as well as pedagogical dimensions.
Tor-Helge Allern has studied the connection between dramaturgy and epistemology especially in process drama. Thus he brings in an important perspective
on drama education and dramaturgy as a tool for the drama teacher in order to
promote meaning making.
Ida Krögholt concentrates her discussion on interactivity and collaboration in
role play and performance opposed to traditional dilemma handling in drama
education; with reference to Thomas Ziehe she writes: “Rather than fighting for
a certain perspective, [the participants] would do their best to cope with the differences. For instance if as a Drama-in-Education teacher you would confront
your students with a moral dilemma, one of them would tell you right away, that
different opinions are all right, said Ziehe.” Furthermore the article of Ida Krögholt argues for a different standpoint than Augusto Boal concerning the relationship between art and society. She argues that in role play and LARP the
power is exactly in the aesthetic effect, where you do not try to bridge the gap
between art and society.
Heli Aaltonen has made a narrative analysis of an intercultural children’s theatre
workshop around the concept Bridge. Her main focus is the meaning making
processes by theatrical signs and means.
Klaus Thestrup has focused on children’s play culture as a dialogical space with
its specific value. His article contains an outline for a pedagogical space between culture and pedagogy, body and media, playing and learning, services for
young children and school. An experimental pedagogy, which establishes a
space for learning based on the shared investigation of children and grown-ups
into essential questions with the help of media, play and narratives
Anna-Lena Østern is interested in the relationship between the role of the artist
and the role of the teacher in the professional development of the drama teacher.
Thus she focuses upon what constructions of the concept artistic (learning)
process the students reflect in a their portfolios.
Arne Engelstad describes Augusto Boal’s poetics in forum theatre and rainbow
of desire. He has used narratological tools from literary science to read a theatre
system as performed text.
Pipsa Teerijoki is constructing a theoretical foundation for drama education
through a Wittgenstein-type of description of an amount of dynamic relations.
She establishes a system for description and constructs a model, which can function as a theoretical description of drama education. She finds recirculated tiles
to establish a ruin stage as a metaphor for the drama education system described
through different kinds of relations.
10
Through this report we want to participate in an international dialogue about arts
education in society. This contribution to the dialogue represents a Nordic perspective on dramatic cultures concerned with meaning construction in dramatic
form as part of the democratic dialogue of participants in the global and local
society.
Vasa, October 2004
Anna-Lena Østern
11
2. Formation of Otherness: Handling
the complexity of late modernity1
Kirsten Drotner
Drama education is traditionally closely connected to wider societal discourses
about general character formation (Germ. Bildung), and about the makers’ self
realization and creativity – especially when the makers are children.2 What are
the contemporary boundaries for these discourses? And how can Nordic drama
education relate to, and help influence, these boundaries? These are some of the
important questions which my article addresses in the following. My point of
departure are recent trends in children’s culture, which is the “raw material” that
a large part of drama education feeds on and attempts to perspectivise. The main
argument, which is developed below, is that today mediatized leisure cultures
are central to children’s general character formation and that these cultures offer
important resources that may help innovate drama education in the future.
Leisure Culture and Otherness
One day in the beginning of March in a Danish kindergarten children dress up in
a medley of costumes. It is the time of Lent and according to tradition children
in costumes line up for a game of “hitting the cat in the barrel”: they take turns
hitting a wooden barrel filled with candy, and the one who is successful in
knocking down the barrel is crowned “king of cats”. The kindergarten children
appear in a variety of costumes from Darth Vader (known from the film trilogy
Star Wars) and Gollum (from Lord of the Rings) to Barbie and Britney Spears
look-alikes. Over half the children draw their inspiration from figures known
from foreign television fiction, music and computer games. The example goes to
demonstrate several important elements of children’s culture today:
− children’s culture, especially their leisure culture, is highly marked by
global forms of expression
− these global expressions are primarily conveyed via media
− the global mediatized culture nurtures and sustains encounters with the
foreign, the unfamiliar and odd, encounters that serve to perspectivise
what is well known and taken-for-granted.
1
The original Danish title is “Andethedens dannelse: at håndtere senmoderne kompleksitet”, and the article is a revised version of the author’s keynote address at the Fourth
Nordic Drama Boreale Conference in Stockholm, August, 2003. Translated by AnnaLena Østern and Kirsten Drotner.
2
It should be noted that the original German concept of Bildung has no equivalent in
English. In the following, it is translated as general character formation.
12
It is obvious that dressing up is a explicit play with identity, a possibility to learn
more about oneself through transforming oneself into another. It is less obvious
that in our everyday media uses this meeting between the other within ourselves
and others beyond ourselves equally operates as an integral part for children and
adults alike. Today, global media offers one of the most important sources for
children in developing an understanding of who they are, how other people live
and in what ways selected parts of the world operates. The media constantly
bring children into contact with the foreign, and with that which reaches beyond
themselves. But the media are so interwoven in everyday life that it is only when
witnessing unusual situations - such as seeing a group of children dressing up –
that we realize how the media operate: how children as well as adults via the
media both interpret and seek to understand the foreign and unfamiliar in light of
the well-known and familiar - and through that encounter form a space for perspectivizing what is taken for granted.
Media Cultures and the Character Formation of Otherness
The ability to look at oneself from the outside, to make comparisons between the
familiar and the unfamiliar and, through that encounter, act according to the
insight one obtains about oneself and the world - that ability is of fundamental
importance for being able to understand and operate in a globalized world. Here,
it is increasingly obvious that we are dependent on each other, even when we do
not wish or expect to be so. This external perspective is nurtured and sustained
by the new and old media - from novels, television news and movies to internet
chat and computer games. Media globalization serves to increase children’s
reflexivity about the conditions of others, even if they do not share these conditions. For example, satellite television and the internet make Inuit children gain
insight into other children’s lives and make them relate to children in seemingly
distant locations in the USA, Denmark and the rest of Europe (Rygaard 2003).
This virtual sensitivity makes media a fundamental means of general character
formation (Bildung) in late-modern society.
Today, general character formation may be defined as a personal training in
reflexivity, as an ability to handle complexity through looking at the unfamiliar,
virtual “other” and the real others - and thereby get a new perspective on oneself and the world. General character formation is a continuous training in cultural shifts of perspective revealing that what at first glance looks odd may harness unexpected familiarities, while the apparently familiar may hold aspects of
the unknown. Children primarily train such a reflexive “character formation of
otherness” in their leisure time and especially through the media. The result is
that today we witness a widening gap between formal education at school and
general character formation in (mediatized) leisure cultures.
My concept of a reflexive character formation of otherness differs markedly
from two of the most well-known and widely-applied concepts of general character formation, namely what we may term an essentialist and a functionalist
concept of character formation. The essentialist concept defines general character formation as being made up of particular, substantive norms and values that
children primarily learn (or ought to learn) through the educational system.
13
These norms and values are closely bound up with and dependent upon a discourse of a unified, national cultural heritage. According to such a concept of
character formation the media hold no cultural value and are therefore defined as
being beyond the field of character formation – and particularly bad are forms of
media expressions that originate outside the well-defined borders of the nation.
The functional concept defines general character formation as an outmoded and
unnecessary concept that in an innovative educational system should be replaced
by (measurable) competences (see, for instance, Klafki 1983).
My concept of a reflexive character formation of otherness is inspired by Theodor W. Adorno, who in 1959 published the essay “Teorie des Halbbildung”
(Adorno, 1959/1972). As one of the prominent critics of German idealism
Adorno argues that what he terms “halfway character formation” is character
formation that has petrified into a rigid form, an inflexible substance – as when
“educated” means to possess good manners, to be well-behaved. True characer
formation, he contends, is the ability to reflect upon its own foundations. Such a
view clearly considers general charater formation to be a reflective ability rather
than certain norms and values; and it clearly considers such a reflexible ability to
be a central cultural asset, not a dated tradition.
Being able to develop such a true character formation, says Adorno, presupposes
the exisence of some sort of external material, which may advance reflexivity,
and an inner disposition that allows the individual to be astonished. Adorno
would probably not include the media as external catalysts, since the media is
defined as non-culture in the critical theory of which he is a primary proponent.
Today, however, the cultural importance of the media seems more evident and
inevitable. The media help articulate forms of otherness – be it people, places or
perspectives – and through these articulations the media become catalysts for
continuous comparisons between the known and the unknown; and their often
intensive, emotional potential nurtures the individual’s desire to throw oneself
into these processes. That is why the media today are important tools of general
character formation. And that is why they ought to be central resources for future drama education.
Media Culture and Drama Education
Many active drama educators may agree with Adorno that their discipline offers
a welcome alternative to children’s media culture, and that there are few overlaps between the two fields. Seen from the distanced perspective of critical theory, the differences are certainly obvious: the media, critical theorists argue,
promotes passive use, whilst drama education allows active performance; the
media are driven by commercial forces that sharpen social divides between “media rich and media poor”, while drama education is a social equalizer offering
the same possibilities of creative action for everyone. In short: the media serve
to narrow and drama education helps widen the possibilities for children’s creativity and self development.
However, when regarding the relationship between media culture and drama
education from the more inclusive perspective of childen’s culture, one may
behold more common traits: in media use as well as in drama education recep-
14
tion and production are in constant dialogue. Children learn to create images by
watching and using pictures, just as children learn to create characters and stories on a stage by emulating others. In both cases, children’s own processes of
production give their modes of reception a new accent and perspective: children
start experiencing and evaluating professional forms of expression in new ways.
Moreover, media use and drama education resemble one another in that modes
of expression and analysis are part of the same process. For example, eight- and
nine-year-old girls will repeat certain video sequences ad nauseam when they
want to learn to draw a certain Disney character (Drotner 2003).
The similarities between drama education and media culture are nurtured by the
fact that during the last 10-15 years children in our part of the world have been
offered markedly more opportunities to express themselves via the media – and
they appropriate these possibilities to the full: they make home pages on the
internet, edit music, photos and film on the computer and grab the family camcorder to make little narratives. This development contributes to blurring the
clearcut distinctions made by critical theorists between on the one hand (passive)
media reception and on the other hand (active) cultural production; between
exernal structures of domination and internal processes of self-development.
When focuing on the very processes of production, these similarities become
even clearer.
Aesthetics and general character formation
Whether children work with media or with dramatic expressions, their work may
be defined as aesthetic production in the sense that their work is a conscious
shaping of a particular material, be it images, sound, words or bodily gestures. In
aesthetic production processes semiotic and social articulations are part of the
same process: when children redraw the same image again and again to perfect
their style, this process is situated in a particular socio-cultural context which
influences the production process. Thus, it is no coincidence that very few eightor nine-year-old boys use Disney characters as models for their drawings, as this
is very much associated in our culture with “doing girlish things” (Drotner 2003)
– so the children themselves embody their aesthetic processes in relation to a
gendered sociality.
Aesthetic processes may be defined as a certain learning mode in which producers, with Pestalozzi, combine the heart, the hands and the brain in the same
process to a degree that is rarely found in other activities (Drotner 1991/1995).
That learning takes place in aestehtic processes of production is, of course, obvious in drama education – it is the rationale of its existence, so to speak. But few
think of learning as being part of children’s interaction with media – perhaps
because it takes place in their leisure time, when children are often either on
their own or together with friends and thus beyond immediate, adult supervision
and instruction. Still, this informal learning is evident when children, themselves, describe their media use. For example, 11-year-old Tasha tells about one
of her favourite animation films Toy Story in the following manner:
Tasha:
I like it a lot that you, yourself, are a kind of toy; you look at it
from the ground many times, and that I really like.
15
Interviewer:
Tasha:
Yes,
That you enter the movie sometimes. That you, yourself,
are there running along the characters and so on, this is
what I like a lot (Drotner, 2003).
Tasha’s repeated viewing of the Disney video has made her aware of what in
professional language is called subjective camera. Of course she does not know
the word, but she recognizes the substance of the concept when she sees it. This
attentiveness is a good example of informal learning – that children learn something in their leisure time, when they least expect it.
Furthermore, aesthetic processes are particularly complex confrontations with
otherness, because the very work process throws into relief aesthetic, psychological and social boundaries. When children consciously engage with a particular material, they will experience that the material, as it were, harbours its own
resistance - they cannot do anything they want with their voice, with a drawing
or a story. These aesthetic boundaries are also psychological in nature: the
eight- and nine-year-old girls cannot draw as developed a Disney figure as the
ideal drawing in their mind, and their habitual stopping of the VCR in order to
freeze a single frame they want to draw, equally illuminates for them the discrepancy between the Disney style of drawing and their own. Especially when
children cooperate on aesthetic processes, they also note that they bring different
forms of what Bourdieu would call social and cultural capital into the process:
who beams with good ideas, who has good bodily posture, who volunteers to
clean up, who tries to resolve conflicts.
In short, aesthetic processes may be regarded as a unique laboratory where children can experiment with a general character formation of otherness, where they
experience the boundaries of otherness and train their skills in handling them.
Pedagogics and aesthetics
Considering how vital it is that children today learn to handle the foreign and
different – both in relation to themselves and to others – in order to be able to
make sense of a globalized world, one would imagine that aesthetic production
would be central in contemporary education. But this is far from the case. Today, children’s aesthetic activities primarily take place in their informal leisure
cultures, and these are often mediatized, as we noted. Thus, the aesthetic processes are of central importance to children’s future in a social as well as economic sense; but at the same time these processes are mariginal in the curriculum and in educational priorities. This marginal position is documented in the
Swedish “Culture and School” project, carried out during 1999-2002, as one of
the most extensive research and development projects concerning culture disciplines in school (among these the aesthetic disciplines). In the final report, one
of the project directors, professor Jan Thavenius, characterizes aesthetic learning
at school as a ”modest aestehetics”:
Aesthetics is modest because it is marginalized in the school, it fights for a small
room of its own instead of demanding to be present everywhere as a basic perspective in all disciplines. It is limited when it comes to being active and creative
16
in relation to new forms of art and aesthetics. It is rather disinterested in the
substance of aesthetic production as being part of meaning making. In didactical
terms, it operates with a an understanding of substance as taken for granted
without asking why the work is performed (Thavenius, 2003/2004, 115).
The “modest aesthetics” is part of an educational hierarchy in which culture
disciplines in general and aesthetic disciplines in particular are looked upon as
the cream on the cake of learning, whereas mother tongue disciplines and
mathematics make up the dry but heavy buns.
In immediate terms, the aesthetic dimension in school seems to be squeezed by
educational demands made on pupils’ visible and measurable competences. In
the longer term, the aesthetic dimension may, however, demonstrate its renewed
relevance. Certain signs indicate that we will see a battle about creativity – and
hence about the aesthetic learning dimension. During the last decade there has
been a huge growth in socalled creative industries, that is industries which, for
instance, make film, tv, computer games, design and fashion; and this is evident
in Europe as well as in North America and Japan (Caves 2000, Matarasso 2001).
In 2002, the European Parliament voted in favour of making these areas central
to European cooperation (Official Journal 2002). The economic growth has already found its social equivalent with the American Richard Florida (2002), who
nominates creative groups as being motors for the future economy (especially if
they live in the USA). The discourse on general character formation and creativity, which drama education has traditionally been a part of, will most likely become more complex in future, being suspended between functional demands
made on measurable competences and cultural ideals about aesthetics and creativity as catalysts for economic innovation. How can drama education meet this
complexity and itself participate in reducing this complexity?
Drama education, aesthetics and general character formation
Drama education is a discipline which has been developed in relation to two
discursive fields and educational fields of practice, namely the cultural field,
where drama belongs, and the pedagogical field, where education belongs. This
dual tradition gives some indication on the ways in which the discipline, itself,
may contribute to a character formation of otherness in the face of the complexity concerning aesthetics and creativity in the future. The two main dimensions
of the discipline may be sketched as follows:
17
Focus on the cultural dimension
Focus on the pedagogical dimension
An aesthetic discourse focusing on
aesthetic disciplines and their intrinsic
values and goals
A pedagogical discourse focusing on
aesthetic disciplines as means of
reaching an ulterior goal: general
character formation
Definition of aesthetics as art
Definition of aesthetics as sensory
knowledge
Focus on aesthetic aspects
Focus on ethical aspects
Focus on individual understanding and
analysis
Focus on (collective) forms of expression
Acknowledgement and appropriation of
professional traditions
Priority on new cultural artefacts and
forms of expression, inc. media and
ICTs
Figure 1. The positions of future drama education
Despite evident differences in foci and priorities, the two positions share an important trait which must be heeded if drama education is to develop and be proactive in forming the ramifications of future learning: both positions focus on
partial aspects of the aesthetic processes, not on a holistic understanding. As
mentioned above, aesthetic processes harbour forms of expression as well as
analysis; they are simultaneously aesthetic, psychological and social processes;
and general character formation is shaped in a dialogue between the individual
and symbolic and real “others” – and this is often a collective process. To these
“internal “characteristics of aesthetic processes should be added the “external”
and more structural fact that schools often have a rather weak tradition, or limited practical possibilities, of cooperation between drama teachers and teachers
in related aesthetic disciplines such as, for instance, visual arts, music and media
studies – not to mention disciplines like mathematics, history and mother tongue
education.
18
The future of drama education: divergence or dialogue?
Drama education faces decisive choices that are related to the complex challenges concerning the aesthetical field. One may feasibly consider two future
scenarios which are respectively based on divergence and dialogue. In the divergence scenario, an internal battle is fought between the cultural and pedagogical positions (cp. Fig. 1.). Proponents of the cultural position will seek to preserve and promote the integrity of drama education with its traditions of independent development of aesthetic production and analysis. In furthering this
position, one will certainly gain the respect of colleagues within the field, but at
the same time one risks jeopardising the possibilities of including pupils’ informal leisure learning and develop an character formation of otherness as describe
above. Conversely, adherents of the pedagogical position will embrace recent
cultural trends, including new media and ICT expressions, and they will be eager
to participate in cross-curricular cooperation. In furthering this position, one will
most likely gain positive responses from the pupils and some (new) colleagues;
but at the same time one may lose the chance of reflecting on the specific professional traditions characterising drama education. Irrespective of which position
”wins”, the divergence scenario will result in a ”modest aesthetics” that will
make it very difficult to actively impact on the future challenges facing the aesthetic field.
The other imaginable future scenario for drama education is a dialogue scenario
that encompasses both the cultural and the pedagogical dimensions. This scenario is undoubtedly the most difficult to realise, but as I see it it is also a vantage point from which more radical possibilities for the field may be developed.
Crucial to this scenario is that drama education builds on the complexity of the
aesthetic processes, themselves. By way of conclusion, allow me to list my
wishes for a dialogical vision of drama education:
Acknowledge and appropriate the complexity of drama education: analysis
and expression, the personal and the collective, semiotic and social articulations.
Combine discipline-based work with cross-curricular projects.
Document the specific practices of learning that characterise drama education as part of an aesthetic praxis
Argue for the value of the aesthetic disciplines as specific forms of learning
– a training in the character formation of otherness – not as a means of personal or economic growth.
Increase joint reflection on the traditions of the discipline and its sociocultural contexts.
Most likely, drama education will also in the future be part of contradictory discourses about the conditions of culture and education. In order to claim a distinct
voice in these discourses, drama teachers must necessarily train their internal
dialogue, not just to guarantee the survival of their discipline as a different field
of expression, but, in the final instance, to guarantee children the same.
19
References
Adorno, T. W. (1972) ”Halvdannelsens teori”. In P. Qvale (ed.) Kritikk og krise i
pedagogikken: 11 innlegg om oppdragelse etter Auschwitz Oslo: Pax Forlag.
Orig. 1959.
Caves, Richard (2000) Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Drotner, Kirsten (1995) At skabe sig – selv: unge, æstetik, pædagogik Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Orig. 1991.
Drotner, Kirsten (2003) Disney i Danmark: at vokse op med en global mediegigant Copenhagen: Høst & søn.
Florida, Richard (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life New York: Basic Books.
Klafki, W. (1983) Kategorial dannelse og kritisk-konstruktiv pædagogik: udvalgte artikler ved Sven Erik Nordenbo Copenhagen: Nyt nordisk forlag.
Matarasso, François (ed.) (2001) Recognising Culture: A Series on Briefing
Papers on Culture and Development Crosswell: Comedia, the Department of
Canadian Heritage & UNESCO. portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php
@URL_ID=18716&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
(consulted 31 July, 2003).
“Council Resolution of 25 June 2002 on a New Work Plan on European Cooperation in the Field of Culture” (2002) Official Journal of the European
Communities,
vol.
45,
C
162,
6
July.
europa.eu.int/eurlex/en/archive/2002/c_16220020706en.html (consulted 31 July, 2003).
Rygaard, Jette (2003) ”Youth Culture, Media and Globalization Processes in
Greenland”, Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 11, 4.
Thavenius, Jan (2004) ”Den radikala estetiken”, pp. 97-124 In Lena AulinGråhamn, Magnus Persson & Jan Thavenius, Skolan och den radikala estetiken
Lund: Studentliteratur. Orig. 2003.
21
3. Drama, Dramaturgy and
Epistemology
Tor-Helge Allern
Due to the traditional dichotomy between learning and the arts, science and fiction, rationality and feeling, there has been little research to examine the connection between dramaturgy and epistemology. My line of argument is based on the
idea that knowledge has a structure, and this structure does not simply illustrate
(what is interpreted as) reality, or fiction, but is a perspective on reality, or fiction. I understand epistemology as a way of thinking; the structures of thinking
or knowing that we follow when we know, think or decide something (Bateson
1988; 246; Ølgaard 1991; 21). Epistemology informs us about the process of
knowing; both how we get or create knowledge and what we can know something about. Different dramaturgies are connected to different epistemologies.
Drama is therefore not a perspective on reality, or fiction, but includes many,
and very different epistemological perspectives. In this paper I first raise the
question of dramaturgy, why it is useful to drama and Drama-in-Education, or
process drama;1 and at last the epistemological consequences of different dramaturgies, and combination of dramaturgies.
Drama and theatre
In my dissertation Drama and Knowingi from 2003, I make a distinction between the two traditions; a ritual and narrative tradition in which I include drama
and process drama, and a tradition that formalizes drama (in institutions), in
which I include theatre productions in schools. There is no abyss between the
traditions, their relationship is more complementary, because theatre might be
seen as an formalization of drama for a public audience, whereas in drama there
is not clear distinction between actors and audience.
The distinction may nevertheless clarify some historical connections and disconnections. In the ritual and narrative tradition there is no distinct abyss between
1
Drama-in-Education was established as a concept through the 1970s to describe play
that stimulated individual growth and creative skills. The notion was inspired by the
American ‘creative dramatics’ and ‘drama as education’. Through the 1990s drama theorists and practicians like Brad Haseman, Cecily O’Neil, Gavin Bolton started to use the
concept ‘process drama’, which Haseman (1991; 19) defines as “the distinctive form of
improvisation which has emerged from schools”. One of the main characteristics is that
this improvised drama is structured to arouse an artistic response at the participants. I use
Drama-in-Education and process drama as synonyms in this paper (jf. Allern op cit;
22
actors and audience, between fiction and reality,2 or between the arts. The ritual
and narrative tradition is in its thinking imprinted by juxtaposition and circularity, the formalized drama is imprinted by linearity and hierarchy. The ritual and
narrative tradition is imprinted by a metaphoric logic, while the classic tradition
is imprinted by a linear logic.3 The Odyssey juxtaposes the incidents in its plot
(kleos);4 there is no linear logical link between them as in The Bible, The Poetics
(Aristotle) and the Classic tradition. In the same way the ritual tradition juxtaposes in its expression all sisters of the arts. The cultural consequence of this is
that while modernity standardizes and creates hegemonies, the ritual tradition
includes many different cultures and local epistemologies. This does not make
ritual societies democratic, or ideal, but nevertheless it is possible to see connections and disconnections between the archaic aletheia and late-modern ways of
thinking; they illustrate the alternative to modernity, that is, a counter-modernity
(Foucault 1996; 414). It is thus related to what Eugenio Barba (op cit; 69) and
Richard Schechner refers to as the two main traditions; theatre based on the misen-scène of a written text, and theatre based on performance text.
In process drama we have both traditions, but what is of greater interest is that
they might contain different dramaturgies, or dramaturgical models. This is important for how the drama might arrange the learning situation and what kind of
logic the drama invites the participants to discover. What is essential in schools
is not to choose either of the paradigms, but that pupils get the opportunity to
experience both forms of drama and both forms of logic. I therefore regard
drama as the supreme concept, which includes process drama, theatre, and different genres within each of these forms of drama.
2
The title in English; Drama and Knowing. An investigation of the Relationship Between Dramaturgy and Epistemology in Drama and Drama-in-Education, Trondheim:
NTNU, 2003
3
Gregory Bateson (1991; 240) makes a distinction between two sorts of logic in our
thinking; the grass-syllogism and the Socrates-syllogism. The Socrates-syllogism goes
like this; Human beings die/Socrates is a human being/Socrates will die. The grasssyllogism goes like this; Grass die/Human beings die/ Human beings are like grass. The
difference between the two forms of logic is the way they classify, i.e. their structure.
The Socrates-syllogism identifies Socrates as a member of a class, and places him with a
linear logic in the class of those who die. The grass-syllogism juxtaposes predicates; that
which die, resembles the other thing which die. According to Bateson, the grasssyllogism illustrates a way of thinking that is not dominated by the subject, and creates
meaning by a metaphoric logic, or way of telling. Even if it is formulated by words, the
grass-syllogism expresses a logic which differs from the logic that usually characterizes
the verbal language, just because it juxtaposes predicates. This is important for drama,
because the verbal language has dominated European theatre the last 300 years, and this
domination has removed theatre from its roots in myth, rituals and symbolic ways of
thinking. The formalized drama, theatre, has been a part of a verbal discourse, with its
linear logical causality (Allern op cit; 121).
4
I have examined the epic plot, kleos in Allern op cit; 129f. Redfield 1975; 58ff
23
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is often linked to theatre in a formal sense. The concept denotes the
knowledge of the drama, how it is composed and performed on stage or in film
(Store Norske Leksikon, bind 3). Drama is then understood as the written form
as in Mark Fortier (op cit). When drama is connected to a broad narrative and
ritual tradition, as I do, dramaturgy is understood in a much wider sense, which
includes performance and the performative culture of late-modernity.5
Though dramaturgy is often connected to a literary tradition in theatre, it doesn’t
denote the text alone but the internal logic of the actions in a play. Szatkowski
thus denotes three levels of a dramaturgical analysis:
• The dramaturgical text-analyses, where the central question is which performance is written into the text, and which performance do we want to
write out of it?
• The dramaturgical realization-analyses, which is the transformation of a
given text to the specific performance, and includes analyses of the collective aspect in this processes, and how the aesthetic dimension is taken care
of
• The dramaturgical performance-analyses; which analyses a specific performance, the text hided in this specific performance, how the performance produces its own text, and consequences the artistic choices have for
possible statements of the performance (Szatkowski 1988; 13f).
These stages are also valid for process drama, where we can distinguish between
our written synopsis for the process, how this synopsis are transformed to teaching and the specific play we are doing. We know by experience that the same
synopsis and methods might give different pupils or students totally different
experiences, and the dramaturgical analyse is therefore meaningful to catch how
this was so. This distinction is of special importance to process drama, i.e. in
situations where there is not clear distinction between players and the audience.
Let me take an example from my own practice.
Dramaturgy in process drama
There is, however, no tradition, neither in research nor in practice to use the
notion of dramaturgy in process drama. This genre has strong impulses from
Britain, and in Britain dramaturgy is hardly a notion used in theatre (Daniel
1999). Pioneers like Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton don’t use the concept,
and they even mark their own theory and practice off from dramaturgical concepts like plot and catharsis. Although there is a tradition in Nordic process
drama to talk about ‘dramaturgical choices’, there has not been a corresponding
interest for dramaturgy, with Denmark as an obvious exception.
5
The performative quality in late-modernity might be compared to Greek antiquity,
where the performance quality was an aspect of both theatre, military forces, funerals,
weddings and public debate. (Allern op cit; 125, Rehm 1992; 8). This is essential to
understand how the private and public spheres are mixed both in Greek antiquity and
late-modernity.
24
In my research, dramaturgy has been of interest because it makes it possible to
understand the epistemological qualities in drama, i.e. how the different genres
of drama are related to different ways of thinking. I have found distinct dramaturgical thinking and combination of dramaturgical models in Heatcote’s and
Bolton’s practice, and in my own practice as well. While there is a combination
of classic and epic dramaturgy in a drama like Heathcote’s The Dreamer, there
is a more circular dramaturgy in her Cinderella, which seems to be the model
Heathcote prefers. Heathcote did The Dreamer with a group of American 12year olds. The drama focuses on the conflict between the sailors and a tyrannical
mate (teacher-in-role). The tension is strengthened when they discover that the
captain is dead – which is the solution when the girl that plays the captain is
away from school. Now the attention is directed to disclose the killer, and the
plot might develop a kind of linear ‘what-will-happen-next’ logic.
Heathcote creates a room for reflection by breaking the illusion with the reading
of poems and discussion; is it possible to understand our ship as something else?
A society? A journey? Through the negotiations between her and the pupils it is
decided that the captain didn’t have any place to sail, and that he didn’t have any
control with the supplies. Therefore he was killed by one of the sailors. Heathcote concludes the drama by formulating a universal experience about confidence; it is necessary to know the one we have to trust! The pupils have been
participants in a drama about some human conditions, where Heathcote combined classical and epic dramaturgy.
In Bolton’s drama Lion-hunting (1979), which he did with American 6-year olds
after being invited by a teacher who wanted to change the pupils attitude to Africans, there is a classical dramaturgy. The drama starts with exposition (a village
asks for help to catch a dangerous lion), which indicates the conflict and what
will happen next. The hunters prepare their journey and have to give preference
to what they must bring with them, and how to catch the lion. This increases the
tension, and is the desis of the drama. It is not possible to read out a pre-climax,
but it is an obvious climax in the catching of the lion, and a resolution (lysis) in
their victorious return. In an epilogue the next day the participants, still in role as
Africans, meet a foreigner from the USA (teacher-in-role) and they tell him
about their triumph. As he tries to soften them with money so that they can buy
modern toys, cars, etc., one of the girls tells him that he can tell the Americans
they also love their children. At least one of the participants had, according to
Bolton, received a more complete picture of Africans, and the example illustrates drama as a learning medium. The focus on a central conflict or problem
shows that this drama has distinct classic dramaturgical patterns.
This classical kind of dramaturgy may also be found in Bolton’s dramas like
Classroom and Violence (1979) and Soccer-riots (1979), whereas Robin Hood
(1992) combine classical and epic dramaturgy. But in The ‘Vegetable’ (1992),
about traffic-injuries, there is a complete different dramaturgy, without any linearity in time, with contradictory description of the life of the boy who was injured. The drama uses a retrospective technique both on the life of this boy and
on the accident. There is no conflict or intrigue in this examination of the consequences of such misery. The dramaturgy is characterized by retrospection and
25
montage. Bolton combines a different range of dramaturgies, and these differences have epistemological consequences.
While classic dramaturgy tends to disclose an objective truth, what the cause of
a conflict is fore example, or patterns in human behavior in given situations, epic
dramaturgy tends to emphasize the contrasts between the actions, which opens
for a reflection on how the situation could have been otherwise. The combination of classical dramaturgy opens for a mixture of these perspectives, which
may lead to the idea that although we may find the cause of a given conflict in
the actual situation, this situation could have been changed, and therefore otherwise.
There is, however, process drama that is of a different sort, which doesn’t focus
on the cause and effect relationship, as in classic dramaturgy and classic rationalist thinking, but on a more circular and hermeneutic way of knowing. At the
same time as Heathcote did The Dreamer in the 1970s, she did a drama that
broke fundamentally with classic dramaturgy. Although The Dreamer has a plot,
Heathcote considers plot as the surface of a story, and she wants to go beneath
the story-line, which she regards as the plot, to the universal.6 In Cinderella she
did a drama with a group of unmarried, young pregnant women (Wagner 1976;
50). The fairytale deals with the young girl living with her father (who dies), an
evil stepmother, and two annoying stepsisters, via the ball where she loses one of
her shoes, which is found by the prince, and leads to their wedding. These incidents are chains in a story, and they are linked, according to Heathcote, with a
plot, which could be described as the story line, but this, she thinks, doesn’t
make it a drama.7
It is the relationship between Cinderella and her stepsisters that the participants
are concerned about, which may be illustrated by the situation where she has to
wash the floor on her knees while the stepsisters mock her. It is the dwelling
upon this situation which is of interest, and not the chronology of the incidents.
When the participants have dwelt long enough upon this situation and the frustration of their own pregnancy, they begin to loose interest. Then Heathcote will
try to find her next material with what she calls “The Brotherhood Code’, i.e. the
common, inner experience of a situation abeam of time, place and social belongings.
In this way Cinderella might be further investigated with regards to the relationships between siblings. They might use stories like the history about Esau and
Jacob or Joseph and his Brothers in Genesis, or other fairytales like Snow White.
6
I do not agree to Heathcote and Bolton’s understanding of plot. When a story has an
inner logic, there is a plot. I therefore make a distinction between a) different kinds of
juxtaposing plots, like the epic kleos and in circular dramaturgy (which might be found
in Beckett and performance), and b) linear plots (which might be found in classic dramaturgy).
7
“The episodes are not related to story development but to the inner experience
of the work, so children (adults!) follow internal logic. That is why I can use so
very many conventions in the way work is set up”. Heathcote in a letter to this
author, 16.03.99.
26
This creates an inter-textual way of storytelling where meaning comes into being
betwixt and between the different stories, including the participants own stories,
and not from the linear causal links between them. The universal pattern is found
by mixing different perspectives on the same situation, which is a break with
classic dramaturgy and the progress in a drama like The Dreamer.
For Heathcote this is still connected to the idea of disclosing universals. It is a
cyclical dramaturgy which is connected to an idea of a transcendental truth,
which also may be found in myth. But the intertextuality opens for another way
of thinking, a circular way of understanding which we find in hermeneutics and
cybernetics. Cybernetics understand relations by co-ordinating them in a selfregulating system, and tries to denote the pattern that maintains and renews the
system. Incidents and conditions are not explained by finding the original source
or cause, but by finding the pattern of relations which starts running and regulates itself.
Circular dramaturgy does not look at the individual as an autonomous character,
as in classic dramaturgy, but as a totality of the relationships and circumstances
of which they are a part, like in epic dramaturgy. What creates the meaning of
the drama is not the incidents by themselves, but the dynamic between the actions that move around the actual situation. This opens for a learning process
where meaning or truth is not something that can be disclosed from some source
or cause, but is something that comes into being, again and again, from a difference, i.e. by repeating the same situation from different perspectives. This illustrates how process drama might combine different dramaturgies, and features
from different epistemologies as well. In this way, drama has a great potential
for learning processes, because it can create a context where learning becomes
meaningful, it can create a frame for the action that challenges traditional perspectives, and it can combine perspectives in a very stimulating way.
References
Allern, T. 2003. Drama og erkjennelse. En undersøkelse av forholdet mellom
dramaturgi og epistemologi i drama og dramapedagogikk, Trondheim: NTNU
(dr. art dissertation).
Aristotle 1952. The Works of Aristotle. Vol. I, Chicago-London-Toronto: Encyclapædia Britannica.
Barba, E. and Savarese, N. 1991. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology. The
Secret Art of the Performer, London and New York: Routledge
Bateson, G. 1988. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity, New York: Bantam
Books (1. Utgave 1979).
Bolton, G. M. 1979. Towards a Theory of Drama in Education, London: Longman.
Bolton, G. M. 1992. New Perspectives o n Classroom Drama, Hemel Hampstead: Simon & Shuster Education.
Redfield, J. M. 1975. Nature and Culture in the Illiade: The Tragedy of Hector,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
27
Szatkowski, J. 1989. ’Dramaturgiske modeller. Om dramaturgisk tekstanalyse’, i
Cristophersen, Erik Exe et al: Dramaturgisk analyse. En antologi, Århus:
Institutt for dramaturgi.
Wagner, B. J. 1976. Dorothy Heathcote. Drama as a Learning Medium, Washington D.C.: National Education Association.
Ølgaard, B. 1991. Kommunikation og økomentale systemer i følge Gregory
Bateson, København: Akademisk Forlag, 1991 (1. utgave 1986).
29
4. The Poetics of Augusto Boal1
Arne Engelstad
I recently wrote an article about this theme, in the latest issue of the Drama
magazine – some of you may have read it. One always tries to get the reader’s
attention from the very start, and in this article I tried to “hook” the reader by
comparing Augusto Boal to Thespis, from ancient Greece, who according to
myth invented dialogue in theatre, by stepping out of the chorus and then addressing it. Nearly three thousand years later, I wrote, Augusto Boal did a similar thing, by inventing dialogue between stage and audience. And I claimed that
Thespis and Boal thus were responsible for two of the very few major changes
that have ever occurred in the history of theatre communication.
Some colleagues of mine read this article, and blamed me for this tabloid statement, as they put it, and suggested that I perhaps was overdoing it a bit, because
of my strong fascination for this Brazilian man of theatre.
Well, of course I am fascinated by Boal, by his theories and his theatre methods,
and have been so for the past 25 years, since I first met him in person. Nevertheless, I do think that Boal’s work represents an important turning point, as far as
communication within the theatrical medium is concerned. This I cannot prove,
of course, but I discuss it and try to give well supported reasons for it in my thesis about Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed, which by now is in the
finishing process – at least I hope so. I do not have the time to go into this thesis
in detail, but I will try to focus on a couple of aspects, that in my view illustrate
what is the unique quality, what is the innovative quality of the poetics of Augusto Boal.
I will start by defining the word poetics, as I use it in my thesis. Most people
think of Aristotle’s famous little book when they hear this word, but through the
centuries several authors and theorists have published their views on what is the
nature of art, what is the purpose of art, and what are the means of expression,
the techniques of art. Poetics, in my view, try to give answers to these basic
questions.
In his books, Boal sometimes makes statements that could be read and interpreted as concentrated expressions of his poetics. For example when he describes the main purpose of the Theatre of the Oppressed as a double task: To
turn the spectators into protagonists of the dramatic action, and to prepare the
same spectators to be the protagonists of their own lives. Another paragraph
from one of his latest books refers to the mission of art as formulated by Shakespeare in Hamlet, who in his turn refers to the Aristotelian idea of mimesis. By
using the same Shakespearian metaphor – art being a mirror that is held up for
1
The article builds upon Engelstad (2004).
30
the reader or the spectator – Boal in my view formulates the quintessence of his
poetics:
Hamlet says in his famous speech to the actors that theatre is a mirror in which may
be seen the true image of nature, of reality. I wanted to penetrate this mirror, to
transform the image I saw in it and bring that transformed image back to reality: to
realise the image of my desire.
I wanted it to be possible for the spect-actors in Forum theatre to transgress, to
break the conventions, to enter into the mirror of a theatrical fiction, rehearse forms
of struggle and then return to reality with the images of their desires.
(Boal 1998: 9-10)
As you can see, Boal puts the emphasis on the reception situation, in which the
spectator is not only allowed to, but expected to act by breaking the mirror – that
is, cross the borders set by the text or the piece of art. Then the spectator will
change the image reflected in the mirror – that is, he will not just respond to the
text, but actually change it, using his own judgement. Finally he will return to
reality with these images – that is, he will make use of his theatrical experiences
in his everyday life.
Comparing this model to the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, we can see that
Boal extends this concept by describing a threefold process – from the world of
reality into the world of fiction and then back again to reality. In this respect, his
model has much in common with Paul Ricoeur’s interpretation and extension of
the Aristotelian mimesis concept. Ricoeur is, among being other things, also a
representative of theorists from the, say, past 25 years, who have focused
strongly on the receiver’s vital role in art communication. In his book Time and
Narrative, Ricoeur also introduces a threefold mimesis, or rather a mimesis divided into three parts: mimesis 1, elements of the real world that are recognized
in for example a play, mimesis 2, the making of the play by structuring such
recognizable elements, and mimesis 3, the reception of the play and the play’s
impact on the spectator in his everyday life.
Figure 1. The threefold mimesis of Ricoeur.
31
In this admittedly oversimplified model that I have made of Ricoeur’s rather
complicated concept, the circle illustrates the fictional world. Everything outside
of it is the world of reality. After his encounter with the text, the reader returns
to reality, but is put in a new place, a new position, changed by the encounter.
Because of this dynamics, Ricoeur will not speak of a mimetic circle, but of a
mimetic spiral.
To a certain extent this model can be used to illustrate what goes on in the Theatre of the Oppressed, but there are nevertheless major differences between the
two, which I will return to in a moment. For the time being I can suggest that
this has to do with the mutual fight, that is characteristic of the Theatre of the
Oppressed; the dialectic struggle, as it were, between the theatrical text and the
spect-actors – well illustrated by the title of Boal’s latest book, which will soon
be available in its English translation: Theatre as a Martial Art.
The mirror metaphor in Boal’s reference to Hamlet, I have also in a way used to
structure my own studies of Boal’s poetics. In those studies I operate with three
levels of investigation, and I start with the innermost level, the theatrical text
itself, asking: What is really happening to the text in the Theatre of the Oppressed, structurally? Secondly, I turn to the reception situation and ask what
happens to the spectator in this process, psychologically? Thirdly and finally, the
uttermost level: What will the impact of this theatrical experience be on everyday life, what will be or may be the ethical and political consequences, and how
can I argue for the probability of those consequences?
Necessarily I must confine myself to a limited number of aspects, and so I will
concentrate on examples from the text and the reception level. I will also concentrate on Boal’s most widespread and well-known theatre method, Forum
Theatre, although in my thesis I also try to analyze other methods belonging to
The Theatre the Oppressed.
The so-called narrativist turn has made its mark on the humanist and social sciences since the 1980s, from history and anthropology to theology and psychotherapy. During these decades there has been a growing interest for narrativity
and a new acceptance of narrative thinking as a means for learning and understanding. We are surrounded by chaos, as Frank Kermode once wrote, and we
are equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive, our narrative powers.
Narrative texts deal with the why-question, and so we use narrative texts to understand aspect of our lives, aspects that cannot be explained by measuring
things in laboratories.
I try to describe Forum Theatre in this narrativity context, because Forum theatre
deals with narrative texts, with plots of action based on elements from everyday
life, the mimesis 1 level. The fatal plot, the everyday tragedy – in Boal’s terms
“the anti-model” – is presented to the audience in the first part of a Forum play,
and is then modified, changed, deconstructed by the spectators on the mimesis 3
level, demonstrating that what happened, or what happens, is just one possibility
among a vast number of possibilities. Because there were, and there are, always,
other choices. Thus, working with stories from the past, Forum theatre prepares
32
for stories of the future, possible worlds still to be constructed, saying: There are
always choices to be made, and you have the power to make them.
The structuralists who took a special interest in narratology in the 1960s and 70s
often came up with impressive-looking models to show the grammar of narrative
texts. I have found this model, by Seymour Chatman (Chatman 1978: 54) useful
in demonstrating what happens during a Forum play on the structural level:
Figure 2. Functions: core and satellites.
The central horizontal line represents the plot in a novel, a play, a film. Such a
plot can be divided into narrative sequences: the more sequences in a plot, the
more action. The sequences are the circles of this model, and a sequence must
contain one piece of action where alternative ways of acting could be thinkable.
Such an action is called the core or the nucleus of the sequence: they are the
squares in Chatman’s model. The small dots represent actions that do not decide
the direction of the plot, some of them may have a foreshadowing function, others a retrospective function. An example: The protagonist of the plot is sitting in
a chair, drinking wine, watching TV. Those actions are called satellites, because
they cluster around a nucleus. But then suddenly the telephone rings, to steal a
famous example from Roland Barthes. Should the protagonist answer it, or
should he ignore it? His choice in this respect will influence on the development
of the plot, and for this reason his act will be a nucleus act.
What makes this model especially illustrative of a Forum play, are the lines
pointing out from the nucleus, visualizing how alternative choices would have
lead to alternative plots. In the Forum play the spect-actors recognize such nuclei
in the plot, probably more by intuition than consciously, and break into the text
at such moments to try out their alternatives.
Another way of illustrating this is by building on the model of standard composition, which I’m sure is familiar to you all. Figure 3 below shows one of the several turning points of the anti-model. Different alternative actions are tried out
by different spect-actors, some of the suggested solutions pointing towards the
same closure, others leading elsewhere – the main purpose being not always to
33
show a successful breaking of oppression, but to show the range of possibilities
that is always there.
Figure 3. Forumtheatre: “Chinese chrisis”.
A spect-actor who “enter into” the text to show an alternative way of acting,
often does this by putting emphasis on a more or less hidden quality of the protagonist’s personality. This is illustrated here in Figure 4:
Figure 4. Paradigmatic choices get syntagmatic consequences.
The vertical “shelves” illustrate aspects of the protagonist, the many possibilities
to choose between in a person’s character. For example will the quality humbleness (a) showed by the protagonist in a given situation lead to closure (b), whilst
34
stubborness (x) in the same situation will take it to (y). This gives, by the way,
also a hint of one of Boal’s other methods – The Rainbow of Desire – where the
spect-actors’ task, or rather one of their tasks, can be just this: to show the protagonist the multitude, the rainbow of different aspects that constitute his or her
personality.
Studying not only the temporal aspects of the Forum play, but also the spatial,
the thematic aspect, I have found the classic, but often criticized actant model
very useful:
Communication axis
Object
Receiver
Sender
The
Project
Axis
Helper
Subject
Opponent
Conflict axis
Figure 5. The Actant model.
This model can be very illustrative with regard to changes in the balance of
power, changes in the relations between protagonist and antagonist – for example by filling in the form, the scheme, before and after a successful intervention:
In the anti-model the protagonist may have been a reluctant helper of somebody
else’s project, in the intervention the opponent may be turned into a helper, and
the protagonist may become the subject of his own project.
I mentioned that the reception situation of the Forum theatre was a very special
one, compared to the situation that we experience as receivers elsewhere, reading, listening or watching. I will finish by illustrating this, using some very simple models.
What does it involve to be the receiver of a text, a novel, a painting, a theatrical
play? It means to enter into a world, a fictional world, whose limits are defined
by the text itself. You may interprete the message in the text as revolutionary or
emancipating or destructive, you may agree or you may disagree with the values
and the ideas expressed in the text, the text can make you feel involved or it can
leave you indifferent – common for all those cases is the fact that the receiver
must accept the premises given in the text. The text sets the agenda, so to speak,
and the reader or the spectator must move within the universe created by the
text.
35
Some texts of course offer more possibilities for such movement on the reader’s
part than others. Open texts, as some reception theorists name them, are texts
that require the collaboration or the co-creation of the reader to be fulfilled. Ricoeur in Time and Narrative describes the reception situation as a kind of melting process, a fusion, between the horizon of the reader and the horizon of the
text. His examples are, however, nearly always taken from literature of a very
special kind, generally from novels of the modernism movement – by James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. However, the vast majority of texts,
consumed by the vast majority of readers of books and spectators of plays, movies and televison series, are of a different kind. They are closed texts, meaning
that they do not invite the receiver into the creating process. The world described
in these texts and the events that take place in them are fixed, by strong coherence, causal chains, closure.
From my point of view, or rather from the point of view of the Theatre of the
Oppressed, there is a significant difference between the open and the closed
texts, since the closed texts are far more seductive, and thereby represent a
strong power that can be used in society as a means of ideological oppression.
But then again, from this same point of view, both open and closed texts also
belong to the same category, in a certain way, because they make us, if not always imprisoned by the text, then at least subjected to the text, and certainly not
the text’s equals.
Figure 6. Receiver subordinated to the text. Open (a) text.
This model shows a circle representing the limited and preset world of the fictional text. The reader of the text is bound to relate to this world, and for this
reason I have placed him inside the circle. This is an illustration of the open text,
and the reader’s upright position shows that the text gives him room to move
about.
36
Figure 7. Receiver subordinated to the text. Closed text.
The model of Figure 7 shows the reader’s immobility – signifying a closed text ,
the Aristotelian model, with involvement through pity and fear and catharsis as
the final reward.
Boal often refers to Aristotle and Brecht when describing the theoretical aspects
of the Theatre of the Oppressed. If Figure 7 is an illustration of the Aristotelian
reception, how could Brecht’s be visualized, in the same simplified way? I
would suggest to do so by picturing the reader or the spectator outside of the
world of fiction, as a detached observer of the text – like this:
Figure 8. The relationship between audience and text in Brecht’s theatre.
37
This observer must renounce on some of his emotional involvement in the text.
On the other hand he is no prisoner of the text, he is equal to the text, and from
the distance he can reflect rationally upon it.
Finally, to show what happens to the spectator in the Forum theatre, I need a
double model.
Figure 9. Forum Theatre: The Anti Model + The Forum Play.
The two parts of a Forum play involves two different, successive, but coherent
positions of reception. First, there is the antimodel, whose purpose is, in contrast
to Brecht’s, to arouse the spectator’s emotions, to involve him, to stimulate his
anger, his wrath, his impatience with injustice. This is very much a parallel to
what I just described as the Aristotelian reception, with one important exception:
the soothing and softening of catharsis at the end of the tragedy is in the Forum
play prevented by the joker, who tells the spectators after the anti-model: it’s not
over, you are not allowed to go home, there is no catharsis to be had. Instead the
spectators are invited into the intervention part of the play, taking their involvement and their still burning emotions to a place outside the text, to a position
from where they are able not only to analyze the text rationally, but to enter into
it, penetrate it, transgress it, change it.
The opening up of the text is signified by the dotted line, and the transgressive
action is signified by the arrow.
Thus, the reception situation characteristic of the Forum theatre can be described
as a synthesis of emotional involvement and analytical rationality. I think that
the didactic impact of the Forum Theatre is made probable through this very
synthesis. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche described the effect of such a synthesis on reception. Although his context was different, I still can make use of
his reflections upon this seeming dichotomy. Passionate involvement alone is
not enough. Rationality and detachment alone is not enough. Rationality, detachment is meaningful only after we show emotional involvement in a work of
art.
38
The last chapters of my thesis, which are still in the making, will discuss the
third level, that I mentioned earlier: How the experience of being the protagonist
of the dramatic action in theatre is likely to create the ability and the will to become protagonist of one’s own life. In other words: The act of transforming
transforms the one who acts.
References
Barthes, R. [1966] 1977. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”
in Roland Barthes: Image, Music, Text, New York: Hill and Wang.
Boal, A. 1998. Legislative Theatre, London/New York: Routledge.
Chatman, S. 1978. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction And Film,
Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Engelstad, A. 2004. Poetikk og politikk. Augusto Boal og De undertryktes
teater.(Diss.) Åbo Akademi Press.
Engelstad, A. “Å fortelle eller bli fortalt. Et teoretisk blikk på Boals Forumteater” i Drama. Nordisk dramapedagogisk tidsskrift, 1/2004.
Kermode, F. 1967. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction,
London: Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. [1872] 2000. The Birth of Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ricoeur, P. [1983] 1984. Time and narrative, Chicago: Chicago University
Press.
39
5. The Metaphor Bridges –
a Collective Devising Process in an
Intercultural Children’s Theatre
Workshop
Heli Aaltonen
1. Introduction
This article is an attempt to present the meaning making of two theatre workshop
leaders in a theatre educational work, when the metaphor Bridges acted as a
thematic, mediating artefact. In this introduction I contextualize the theatre work
to the educational philosophy of EDERED (European Drama Encounter – Rencontres Européennes de Drama) and define liminality as cultural context for
theatre work. It is essential to explain these aspects in order to promote understanding of the interpretation of the texts. I argue that all education is political
and based on certain values and happens in a specified cultural-historical context. As Giroux (2001,1997) points out, cultural studies offer a playground for
the dialogue between different political views. According to Burke (2000) the
ideas of Enlightenment brought members of western society to the historical
period of so called modernism, when there were three features which “were regarded by many as universal values”.
Intellectually, there was the power of reason over ignorance;
There was the power of order over disorder; and
the power of science over superstition.2
These values remind us to shape an ethical, historical and political discourse,
which is based on democracy, liberation and social justice. According to
Bauman (1996); Antikainen, Rinne & Koski 2000, 67) these values of modernism gave a great task for education to promote similarity and equality. When
everybody is different these values become problematic. In the time of postmodernism and post-colonialism all human values and great stories tend to become individual textual representations in a web of cultural texts. As Giroux
(2001,1997) emphasizes, post-modern feminism may help us to make visible the
political relationship between the marginal and the central in concrete actions. In
this case the political relationship is not in focus, but I use the ideas of postmodern feminism as theoretical lenses through which to examine the differences
in meaning making.
2
Burke 2000
40
The Estonian organiser of the encounter, Oomer3, explained why the organisers
chose Bridges as a theme for an encounter.
There are many interesting bridges in Viljandi4. There are many interesting things
happening between capitalistic and post-socialistic countries5. For children it is
good to see that life is different in different places, at different social levels, connection from one to one is a bridge from a person to an other 6. I liked the idea in
Suomenlinna7, where the theme Time was made in so many different ways8. I think,
that the theme Bridges can be understood between, age groups, genders, cultures and
languages9.
How the theatre leaders used the metaphor Bridges in examining the differences
and how they constructed significance together with children concerning the
metaphor, is in the focus of this article.
1.1. The educational philosophy of EDERED
The ideal of sharing, listening and having intercultural10 co-operation through
theatre lives in the discourse (language in practice) of the non-governmental,
voluntary organization EDERED11. In 1979 the political and progressive children’s theatre: theatre for children (Seilo 2000) and the creative dramatics with
children movement (Silius-Ahonen 2004; Ward 1930) was expansive. Helander
(1999) divides professional children’s theatre into three different genres: entertaining, teaching and progressive children’s theatre. Those three genres can also
be seen in the field of children’s amateur theatre. Theatre may offer the playground and symbols to create an aesthetic and cultural meaning in the world
around us or the symbols of theatre can be used to teach a message to the audience. (Seilo 2000, 6.) Progressive children’s theatre uses the symbols to create a
3
Research diary, leader meeting 9.7.2001 (21:00).
Real bridges acted as artefacts in the environment.
5
The political situation of Estonia in 2001 acted as an artefact.
6
The modern value of social consciousness acted as an artefact.
7
The 9th Children’s Theatre Encounter, Time, in Suomenlinna Sea Fortress, Finland
1998.
8
The artistic, pedagogical view and lived experiences of the organiser acted as an artefact. Oomer participated in the 9th Encounter.
9
There is a gap between age groups, genders, cultures and languages and the metaphor
Bridges offers a tool to give shared, negotiated meanings to these gaps.
10
“People born and socialised into specific groups tend to assume that the conventions
and values by which they live within their groups are inevitable and “natural”. It is when
they have some kind of experience, which leads them to question these conventions and
values – but not necessarily reject them – that they can begin to become “intercultural”.
(Alred, Byram & Fleming, 2003, 3). Martin (2004, 2) defines multiculturalism as “the
simultaneous existence of several cultures side by side”, cross-culturalism as a form
where “where people from one cultural background learn a form from another culture
and practise it.” Lastly “interculturalism is an area of interaction where new forms are
created”. Interculturalism was practiced in the theatre work in the Encounter.
11
Hauger, O’Dwyer & Pears 1999, 1; Saure 2002.
4
41
meaning for existence and political children’s theatre uses the symbols of theatre
to communicate a political message.
In 1979 Sweden hosted the Seminar of Council of Europe under the title of
“Children and Culture in Contemporary Europe”. The idea of organising European Drama Encounters for Children and Youth was born there. The need to
have a good interaction between different ethnical and cultural groups in Europe
was seen to begin from an inter-subjective cultural co-operation with children
from different groups through drama (See also Illman 2004.) It was decided to
create an intercultural, informal learning context: a culture of intercultural understanding, co-operation and listening. In this culture the diverse ways of working in drama and theatre were supposed to be the keys to obtain better understanding of each other. According to Kincheloe and Mc Laren (2000, 285) “cultural production can often be thought of as a form of education, as it generates
knowledge, shapes values and constructs identity.” With the term cultural pedagogy the authors refer “…to the ways particular agents produce particular hegemonic ways of seeing (ibid.).” These encounters were supposed to be the places
where the voice of the child could be heard. The EDERED handbook describes
the philosophy of the event: “The encounter exists for the benefit of the participants and therefore all the activities of the organisation must always have that
focus.” (Hauger, O’Dwyer & Pears1999, 1). The encounters should be organised
according to the rules12 which make an inter-cultural, theatre educational process
possible.
The discourse of EDERED is based on the progressive, experiential learning
tradition (Räsänen 1997; Saddington 1998). In this discourse the children and
their leaders are both seen as learners and they are supposed to find negotiated
answers to the questions which are important for them. The educator’s task is to
guide in the problem-solving process. Progressive education can be seen as a
part of social change. Experience is the source of knowledge and the learning
occurs in the group process, where interaction, participation, discovery and experimentation are essential. The task of education is to ensure that the educated
person becomes responsible. The learner’s life experiences are “a source of
learning and inseparable from knowledge (Saddington 1998).” The experiences
which progressive tradition uses for learning are structured. Dewey (1934) presented the transformative theory of aesthetic experience in his book Art as Ex12
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
The encounter should be open-minded and welcome diverse ways of working in
drama/theatre and facilitate diverse approaches in methodology.
The encounter should provide opportunities for sharing these diverse approaches.
The environment of an encounter is non-competitive.
The encounter is a process of listening and inter-cultural co-operation and provides opportunities for children/young people/leaders to share their ideas and
experiences in a safe environment.
Each encounter must recognise the unique opportunity provided for the social
interaction of children/young people from diverse cultures.
It should be fun. (Hauger, O’Dwyer & Pierce 1999, 1)
42
perience, which Sava (1993, 17) modified into a model for an artistic learning
process. The methods of theatre work during the encounter are based on the
transformative aesthetic theory as described above.
2. Liminality as cultural context for the research subjects
The 10th European Children’s Theatre Encounter “Bridges”13 was organised in
Estonia, Viljandi from 8th to 22nd July 2001. 18 different European amateur theatre organisations or groups from representative countries sent ten children, one
animateur (workshop leader) and one group leader to participate in the encounter. The children were not supposed to know each other before, in order to adjust
themselves more easily to a new culture. The main focus of the Encounter of
EDERED is to participate in an intensive intercultural theatre workshop. Following to the rules, two leaders from different countries and 20 children from 10
countries form an intercultural theatre group. The theatre work is divided into 10
workshop sessions, which comprise all together 20 hours work during which
they create a performance based on the given theme.
This may be considered as a construction of a new culture14. In his book, Schooling as a Ritual Performance, McLaren (1986, 5) argued “that culture is fundamentally formed by interrelated rules and ritual systems”. Many liminal15 positions were also discovered in the culture of EDERED. These positions might be
seen as a transformative and an active space for cultural learning.
(1) A linguistic third space between own languages and “lingua franca”,
English (Byram 2003; Kramsch 1993). To be able to achieve communicative intercultural competence in language it should be used in an activity where the “third space” is created as an effective space for learning.
(2) Social liminality emerges in a “rite of passage”16, which includes spatialtemporal aspects. In this case the encounter offered a transitional stage
from a national, individualistic culture to an inter-cultural, collective culture. The status movement and the change of spatial position are typical
marks of a liminal stage, (van Gennep 1960). Temporally this liminal position was a two weeks voluntary change of status-occupying and roleplaying in a new culture. The spatial separation from family, friends and
habits seemed also to be a mark of social liminality.
13
From 1982 to 2004 members of EDERED have organised 11 children’s encounters
and 8 youth encounters.
14
“Systems of symbols, created by people, shared, conventional, ordered and obviously
learned, furnish them with an intelligible setting for orienting themselves in relation to
others or in relation to a living work and to themselves. “ (Geertz, 1973, 130; Pavis
1996, 2)
15
“In this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen” (Turner 1974, 13.)
16
van Gennep called “… the rites of separation from a previous world as preliminal
rites, those executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites, and the
ceremonies of incorporation into the new world postliminal rites.” (1960, 21; Turner
1974, 232.)
43
(3) The space for aesthetic doubling17 emerges in an aesthetic space of theatre work, where the role, space, time and story are transformed between
(and betwixt) the reality and the fiction.
(4) The space of conceptual possibilities to play differences emerges through
the work with the theme Bridges, which can be defined to be a mental or
physical construction for example between two spaces, situations, feelings or groups.
(5) The ethnographic research position can also be defined as a liminal position18 (Burgess 1993, 11.). I took part in the culture as a participant observer, video-film maker, photographer, interviewer and collector of the
questionnaires. Based on praxis-theoretical experiences (Aaltonen 1996,
1998, 919, 2000, 2003, Aaltonen & Østern 2001) I have a tacit knowledge
(Polanyi 1962) of the process of children’s theatre work. As Huuskonen
(2004, 91) points out, the character of knowledge can be defined inside
or outside of the culture. Cultural anthropology uses the terms emics (inside) and etics (outside) for these two perspectives. According to Lett
(1990) these terms have epistemological character. “The source of
knowledge” (emics) “refers to the manner in which it is obtained”, and
“the nature of knowledge” (etics) “refers to the manner in which it is
validated”.
Finally, most cultural anthropologists agree that the goal of anthropological research must be the acquisition of both emic and etic knowledge. Emic knowledge is
essential for an intuitive and empathic understanding of a culture, and it is essential
for conducting effective ethnographic fieldwork. Furthermore, emic knowledge is often a valuable source of inspiration for etic hypotheses. Etic knowledge, on the other
hand, is essential for cross-cultural comparison, the sine qua non of ethnology, because such comparison necessarily demands standard units and categories. (Lett
2004.)
No position or perspective can be a guarantee for the truth. I cannot either “give
voice” to the participants as Riessman (1993, 8) points out in her critique of
17
Allern 2003; Boal 1979, 1995; Bolton 1979; Heikkinen 2002, 100; 2004; O’Toole
1992; Rasmussen, 2001; Szatkowski 1986; Østern, 2000; Østern & Heikkinen 2001.
According to Heikkinen (2002, 3.) “Doubling refers to all elements of drama / theatre,
that is in the player’s presentation of himself to others in time, in space and in the imagined acts and in the relationship between reality and fiction: transforming the actual
space into a fictive space and the real time into fictive time.”
18
Hetmar (2003; Harré & Langenhove 1999) divides the researcher’s position and perspective. In her view position signifies the mental state from where the phenomena are
observed and described. Perspective signifies the forms of understanding, the systems of
values and the theories which the observer uses from a specific position in order to understand the phenomena. Huuskonen (2004, 97) cites yoik-singer and researcher Gaski
(2000), who defines his research position as liminal, because Gaski is in his researcher
position an outsider and at the same time a participant (insider) of the Sami culture as a
yoik-singer.
19
I worked as a member of the artistic team in the 9th Children’s Theatre Encounter in
Finland, 1998.
44
certain types of feminist studies. I agree with her, I cannot give voice, but I can
hear voices from different positions and perspectives and interpret them in dialogue with each other. The qualitative researcher as bricoleur or maker of quilts
(Denzin & Lincoln 2000, 4) gives the possibility of using different strategies,
methods and empirical material in order to create an intertext. The different
definitions and theories of the phenomena create a web of texts and the interpretations of the participant narratives are based on movements between different
texts. The meaning of them emerges in between and betwixt them. Allen (2001,
1) suggests that “the text becomes the intertext.”
3. Methodological framework
My scientific interest in this study is language. The analysis of meanings in social life is the focus in narrative and discourse study (Morrow & Brown 1994,
260). Bruner (1986, 6; Antikainen, Rinne & Koski 2000, 291) has analytically
divided reality, into the experiences of reality and the expressions of the experiences. Reality exists in a context, and the experiences of the same reality are
different, because they are based on different positions in that reality. The expressions are the descriptions of the experienced reality. They are called “accounts” in discourse studies (Suoninen 1999, 17-37). The accounts are firstly
based on the relationship to the world and secondly they form the understanding
of the world around us. That is why meaning making of the reality is a narrative20 construction. This narrative construction is not subjective. It is socioculturally and historically contextualized to the discourse used in a specific
situation. Methodologically the research process was ethnographic21. The object
of the research was contextualized with the help of the philosophy of EDERED
and the concept of liminality. I used the tools of narratology in a heuristic way.
With help of narratology I defined the structure of the diary texts. I was inspired
by the idea of cultural mediation, which bridges an experience, an artistic creation and a narrative. Bahktin’s dialogism and Kristeva’s intertextuality (Worton
& Still 1990, 4) challenge me to recognize a space between texts. As a critical
hermeneutic interpreter (Kincheloe & McLaren 2000, 287), I am conscious that
“perception itself is an act of interpretation.” I seek the historical, cultural and
social dynamics that shape the textual representations in a dialogic/intertextual
network. Defining the liminal positions and educational philosophy of EDERED
as a cultural context for the research subject is a textual representation22. The
narratives of the workshop leaders were examined in relation to this representation. The meaning as an intertext emerged between the different texts of microlevel interaction and macro-level structures. The theoretical inspiration for this
20
According to Polkinghorne (1988, 1; Morrow 1994, 260) ”narrative refers to the primary basis of the making meaning. As a cognitive process it organizes the experience
into temporal episodes that can only be indirectly studied with structuralist-type methods
because they cannot be observed as such.”
21
“Ethnography is concerned with the description and interpretation of cultural patterns
of groups and the understanding of the cultural meanings people use to organize and
interpret their experiences (Spradely J. 1980, 55).”
22
Frow (1990, 47) suggests “from thinking intertextuality in relation to a cultural text to
thinking social structure as a whole through the metaphor of textuality.”
45
study is drawn from cultural materialism, post-modern feminism, sociolinguistics, critical theory and discourse studies. Listening and presenting different standpoints in context is the goal of my study. Olesen (2000, 222) defines
standpoint thinking in her literature review of qualitative feministic research.
She summarizes it with Haraway’s explanation of standpoints. Haraway (1997,
304) suggests that “standpoints are cognitive-emotional-political achievements,
crafted out of located social-historical-bodily experience – itself always constituted through fraught, non-innocent, discursive, material, collective practices”.
3.1.Research material
The empirical data of this case study were gathered in 2001 from the participants
of 10th European Children’s Theatre Encounter. All workshop leaders were
asked to fill out the questionnaires as diaries. I got the completed questionnaires
from five (out of nine) workshops23. For this article I chose two workshop diaries from one workshop, some documents of EDERED, the video film of the
final performance, 15 participant questionnaires24, observations of the encounter,
the research diary and reference literature.
3.2. Language as dialogical consciousness
In Vygotsky’s (1930/1978) view the signs (verbal and non-verbal communication, games and exercises) are used with a mediating function and they are fundamentally contextual and situated. At the same time they are related to the past,
present and future. Language is historical; it is used in time and space, and it is
fundamentally social (see also Lehtonen 1996). The reality is not a static state
either, but in an eternal movement and in process. The interaction of humans is
the source of the knowledge.
This meaning construction does not happen in a vacuum. All utterances have
many chains to other utterances. Bahktin (1981; Allen 2001, 8-60) argues that
the individual is bound into his culture. The utterances are linked together and
the individual does not give an individual statement of his own, but speaks his
culture as he communicates. The meaning construction does not happen in the
head of the speakers, but between them in a dialogic relationship.
As Wertsch (2001, 222-236) emphasizes, this opposes the individual view of
communication. In the individual view the actor is seen as disengaged from society. Firstly he is free in his utterances referred to earlier and secondly the
metaphor of language as conduit makes the communication a process of encoding and decoding. This individual view is based on the idea of an original
23
If only one of the leaders answered, it gave information from only one point of view.
That is why it was required that both leaders filled out the questionnaires.
24
12 girls and 8 boys from 10 countries participated in the workshop. I asked the group
leaders to help children in filling out the questionnaires before, after one week, and at the
end of the encounter. The questionnaires in this workshop were completed in Danish,
English, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew and Lithuanian languages. 9 girls
and 6 boys filled out the 3rd questionnaire and in this article all answers from them are
used.
46
thought, which in a successful communication situation is transported from a
speaker to the listener, who decodes it and gets an original thought. In a dialogic
way the communication can be seen as a process of construction, where the nature of a message is constituted in the act of communication. The theatre exercises were done in the transformative, dialogic processes and they relate to the
participants’ experiences in the past, present and future.
3.3. The content of the diaries and the point of view of the narrator
The content of the diaries and the questionnaires is dependent on the written
media. The diary texts present the goal, the process and the evaluation of the
work. The narratives are filled out in the form of questionnaires. I wanted the
workshop leaders to fill out this type of diary every day. I asked them to articulate their aims and evaluate their workshop and mention important pointers on
the drama process with the intercultural group. After each of ten sessions the
leaders were asked to fill out a diary questionnaire to find out how the workshop
leaders reflect the work done. They wrote the diaries alone and the questions,
which framed the writing of the texts, were the following:
What was the best moment today in your drama work?
Why?
What was the worst moment today in your drama work?
Why?
What would be the most important question to ask today? Answer that question.
The chief distinction usually made between points of view is between thirdperson narratives and first-person narratives. (Baldick 1990, 173) In first-person
narrative or mode of storytelling the narrator appears as “I”, recollecting his own
part in the events related, either as a witness of the action or as an important
participant in it. David25’s and Mary26’s stories were first-person narratives and
they were restricted to their partial knowledge and experience, and therefore
they will not give us access to other characters’ hidden thoughts. They seemed to
have written their diaries personally without negotiating about the reflections
with each other. D’s and M’s narratives are internal, subjective and personal and
they used the pronoun “we” or passive form when they meant the agent of action. They obviously shared the leading and responsibility of the directing together.
3.4. The conditions of the story
The plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader in a certain
order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their “natural” order and duration (Baldick
1990). Firstly, the story consists of three events and, secondly, three organisational principles are required (Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Sintonen 1999). The first
25
A pseudonym is used to refer to the workshop leader. In future D will be used to signify David. Code wm2ws2.
26
A pseudonym is used to refer to the workshop leader. In future M will be used to signify Mary. Code ww3ws2.
47
and the third event represent the setting of the story and the second part is active.
Three organisational principles are:
1. Temporal continuity between operations: “What happened next?”
2. Causality between operations: “Why did it happen?”
3. Inversion: A symmetrically or an asymmetrically closed story.
The first event was: no group and no performance. This represents the setting of
the story. The third event was: a well-functioning group and a performance. It
represents the setting after an active part of the story. The middle part represents
the second event and it was active. It told about these operations which were
needed to get a group and a performance. The causal relationship between the
events was implicit, because the first and the last setting are opposite to each
other. The story is symmetrically closed, because the need of the first state vanished.
The events logically form chain to each other in a horizontal line. In a vertical
line the events develop in chronological order.
3.5 .The comparative analysis of David’s and Mary’s diaries
During the process of interpretation, a description of the texts was required. It
happened by examining the content of the diaries. The texts of the diaries were
examined from different aspects.
1. The wholeness of the narrative: intention, setting, complication, resolution, evaluation.
2. The point of view of the narrator
3. The qualities of the agents
4. The order of the events. What happened next?
5. The frequency of the events mentioned in the narrative. What was the
frequency of the positive and negative events mentioned?
6. Duration. How much was told about different events?
7. What were the most important questions? What was the focus in the
drama work? What was the causality of the narrative?
8. How were the events described? How did they write about the work with
group and theme? What were the positive and negative events?
9. How was the metaphor Bridges was used in the narratives and what significance did the writers give to that metaphor?
4. Summary of theoretical lenses
The theoretical structure of theatre work emerged during the reading process of
leader narratives and theoretical literature. I combined leader narratives with
three different models in representing the process of theatre work in Figure 1.
The theory of sign-mediated communication (Vygotsky 1930/1978) and the
mechanism of creative fantasy (Vygotsky 1925/1971, 1930/1995, 31-37) were
applied and combined with four phases of theatre work as Kjølner (1994, 188205) defined them.
48
MEDIATING ARTEFACTS:
- The progressive tradition of education
- The philosophy of EDERED
- Liminality as cultural context
- Theatre exercises, games and improvisations
- Verbal and non-verbal communication
- The metaphor Bridges
Figure 1: Summary of theoretical lenses.
Kjølners (1994, 188-205) identification of workshop phases and Vygotsky’s
(1930/1995, 31-37) model of creative fantasy were combined together with a
model of sign-mediated action (Vygotsky 1930/1978) and description of workshop phases from leader narratives.
Mediating artefacts of the action (theatre work) were: the progressive tradition of
education, the philosophy of EDERED, liminality as cultural context, theatre
exercises, games and improvisations, verbal and non-verbal communication, the
metaphor Bridges and the methods of directing. Subjects of the action were the
leaders and the children. The object of the action was the significance of the
metaphor Bridges. In Vygotsky’s (1930/1995, 31-37) view, five moments are
included in the mechanism of creative fantasy: disassociation, transformation,
association, combination and taking shape.
5. A descriptive narrative of the theatre workshop from the leader’s
position
The theatre leaders described the process of theatre work as: preparing the workshop, talking, introducing, opening, exploring, expressing and making conclusion. First the participants of the theatre workshop got the idea of Bridges to
49
work with.27. They were supposed to find out a collective answer, a performance
through theatre work. Kjølner (1994, 188-205) divides the phases of artistic
work in the workshop as seduction, exercising, devising and rehearsing. I use
Figure 1 as my theoretical lenses in order to describe the process.
The leaders described the phase of preparation as sending e-mails28 and talking
about bridges. One can surmise that the work with theme and group process was
intertwined in the aims of the leaders. D also had an aim connected to his role as
a workshop leader and M expressed in her utterance the wish to give the participants a new way to communicate non-verbally. The focus of D’s work was to
find out the background of the participants’ theatre and drama skills, codes of
communication (aural, visual and kinetic) and the best possible drama and theatre exercises. The focus of M’s work concerned communication and group process.
Kjølner (1994, 199) explains the phase of seduction as “…a state of mind; a
creative mood where you move only when you are ready to move on”. This
phase was needed to get the group to work together. The seduction phase started
from the first session and the leaders had the main focus in a group process. This
phase was intertwined with work of theme and form, which started in the second
session. They worked until the fourth day with problems connected to the group
process. M mentions in her diary (fourth day): We had a beautiful result of improvisation. We really are a group now. Why? The group process started. She
continued during the same day with a question and answer connected also to the
group process: How to keep up this good energy? Giving the group the self confidence for everybody in the group to enjoy themselves like they did today. All
members got their chances now.
The work with theme and form from the fourth to the seventh session was without pressure. The leaders introduced new exercises and explored the theme.
Kjølner (1994, 200-201) describes this phase of “exercising”: “The ethics and
aesthetics of a possible production are negotiated through how the exercises
accentuate the use of body, voice and mind. From now on, exercises are expected to train something; energy, cooperation, sense of space, tempo … or exercises can produce concrete material for the performance”. For this phase were
included the three first parts of Vygotsky’s model: disassociation, transformation
and association. In the process of disassociation they deconstructed the complicated metaphor Bridges. The leaders talked a little bit about Bridges at the beginning of their work. They chose a free space and gave the children the task of
making imaginary bridges as sculptures. After the process of disassociation they
27
Drama and theatre in education can be divided into different genres (Østern 2001;
Heikkinen 2002, 2004). This type of theatre work belongs to the theatre genre called
“from idea to performance”, which is based on improvisation. White (1995, 29) points
out that “collective creations are a genre of the alternative theatre movement.” The traditional hierarchy of play production was substituted with “collective energy and creativity”.
28
The leaders had a preparatory meeting in May 2001, where they met each other and
decided working partners. All workshop leaders did not participate in that meeting, but
M and D participated and decided to work together.
50
started to make transformations of those parts, which were selected. They talked
with the children about what kind of bridge gives which association. Interesting
ideas emerged to be continued and they made improvisations out of the sculptures. The separated, disassociated and transformed elements were connected
together. The analysis of the theme work seemed to be problematic because of
language barriers. The best way to explore the theme was to find interesting
games and examine the answer through play. The leaders learned to use more
non-verbal exercises when they found out the difficulties with the use of English
language. M (fifth session) noticed how the children were aware of the bridges
they make every hour in this encounter.
D had three metaphorical questions and answers about bridges in his diary. The
first one is from the fourth drama session: “What was the first bridge? Between
elements in nature, between man and woman.”
M wrote in her diary during the third day that the discussion about the first
bridge of the world was too difficult for the children. The other two questions
and answers did not have any causality for the action. “Is the solidity in the beginning of bridge building? Yes, for some things you need others.” and “What
can be a reason for building bridges between people? Love, friendship, playing.” These metaphors were connected to the content of the theatre work and
rose out of the process they did together.
The leaders and the group explored many improvisations and exercises, which
continued into the eighth session when the devising phase began. To quote Kjølner (1994, 202) devising means a phase of “… producing material, and assembling elements from this material to mount a performance.” The leaders made a
frame and M mentioned (eighth session): Everybody seemed to be happy with
the frame D and I had for the final performance. Vygotsky’s word “combination” refers to the same phase, to the process of deciding, which are the essential
elements of the performance. The negotiation of the content was made in the
group work. The groups filled the frame with improvisations.
Rehearsing is the last phase before the performance. The elements selected in the
devising phase were played in order to remember the form and content of the
performance. This part of theatre work is usually the hardest, because there are
only a few new creative moments. The group must co-operate and all individuals
have to feel their responsibility.
The ninth and the tenth sessions were a part of the rehearsing phase. The last
account refers to the performing phase when D answered the last question concerning the focus of the work: “What will be the title of the performance? THE
BEGINNING! Of some new experiences, new friendship, new knowledge…” He
also gave a personal meaning to the title, when I asked him: “How do you see
your own work?” He answered: “This is my first international workshop, and a
new beginning.”
Finally it was time to perform the seven minute performance to the audience.
51
5.1.Performance and analysis
In front of the old castle ruins of Viljandi was an outdoor stage. It was possible to
play on two stages, which were on different levels. Half of the group played on the
first level, and the other half on the second level. Children came from two sides to the
stage. The main focus of the action was first on the first level and later on the children on the second level awoke. In the beginning half the group came from the right
side to the stage and hid under separate blankets. There was music in the background made by other children and leaders. The children on the first floor awoke
and started to play with blankets. The blankets represented different things for them.
They found couples. One of the couples was a boy and girl who used blankets as
clothes. They danced together and sat close and looked at each other. Other couples
showed that the blankets represented different living creatures or things. These couples were not mixed, they were either boy girl couples. The action stopped and they
sat down on the stage as pairs. They sat close to each other, but did not have contact
any more. Then the children on the second level awoke and they made different every
day activities alone (in the video sequence a girl puts make-up on). There was a boy
on the second level, who started playing the saxophone and on the first level was a
girl who answered. The actors of the first level went to the girl and they improvised
around the sound of these two saxophones. Suddenly all the children from the first
and second level stages saw each other. They started to shake their hands and say
hello to each other. After that they all came to the first level stage and started to
show different skills to each other. After showing their own skills (dance, acrobatics
etc.) they taught these to the others. At the end of the performance a girl taught belly
dance to a boy, and a boy taught the girl weight-lifting and they made a show together and showed how strong they were. In the end all of them went under the blankets and formed a big circle together (a rock) and the song started from the tape.
“Thank you for hearing me (4 times). Thank you for loving me (4 times). Thank you
for seeing me (4 times)” The children woke up and left from the stage.29
5.2.The participants’ comments30
D tells about the performance in his diary:
In our short piece we try to explore different levels of “making bridges” on the basis
of individuality. You can do the same things alone, but also with somebody. Between
these two events is a “bridge”. We use blankets as objects for playing and also as
symbol of closeness and openness.
Answers from the children represent their different limited points of view. Here
are the questions from the questionnaire31 and the answers of six boys and nine
girls to them32.
(1) What does your performance look like?
29
The researcher’s description is based on video analysis.
No corrections have been made to the participant comments. They have been copied
from questionnaires and research translations are put in the parentheses.
31
Participant questionnaire 3. 20.7.2001.
32
All the children did not answer these questions or they wrote that they can’t tell anything about the performance, because it is a secret.
30
52
(2) What are you doing in the performance?
Then there are other questions and answers and at the end of the questionnaire a space for the narrative.
(3) Please tell me about your performance!
First-level standpoints, girls:
(1) Getragen werden – entdecken – kontakte knüpfen. [To be born - To
discover – To establish contacts.]
(2) Irgendwas mit Decken. [Something with blankets. 33]
(3) No answer (pg13ws2, 15 years34).
(1) En masse tæpper. [A lot of blankets.]
(2) Spise, gymnastic, tæppe. [To eat, gymnastics, a blanket.]
(3) No answer (pg10ws2, 13 years).
(1) I fink [think] it’s interesting.
(2) I’m playing [the] saxophone.
(3) PLANKETS (pg112ws2, age not mentioned). [BLANKETS and a
drawing of two squares.]
(1) Viską ką veikime sujungème. [Everything we did together.]
(2) Išsiritoine iš kokonų ir rodome kas ką gali. [We emerge from the
covers and see what everybody wants to do.]
(3) Pirmiausia visi subigo į scena. Po to žmonės opaċioje išsiroto iš
kokonur ladijalų ir išsivaisduoja, kad adijalai yra kokinors daiglai
puz arklys, kamuolys, suknelė. Ir po to susėda. O žmonės viršuje
atidengia tariamas užuolaidas ir kašką veikia puz skaito prausiasi,
dažosi. Po to vienas žmogus viršuje prodeda groti saksofonu, o
kitas žmogus apačioje jom pritaria. Taip visa pradeda daryti kas
ką moka prie daryti kubverščius ploti, šoktį pilvo šokį ir
demonstroti sova raumenis. Oštai ir pabaiga (pg42ws2, 12 years).
[In the beginning all rush together to the scene. Then there are people who emerge from
the covers, but among them there are also different things and creatures, for example a
horse, a ball, a skirt. Then all these creatures and things meet each other. Then upstairs
one person starts playing saxophone and the other one downstairs reacts to this playing.
Little by little everybody starts doing different things and teaches those things to each
other, for example dances and the presentation of all kinds of own skills (also muscles).
And on that it ends.]
(1) Esityksemme oli hyvin valmistettu, mutta se oli aika outo. [Our performance was well prepared, but it was pretty strange.]
(2) Tanssin huopien kanssa. [I dance with blankets.]
(3) No answer (pg16ws2, age not mentioned).
(1) It’s about the world of girls and boys.
(2) I’m improvisation. [It’s an improvisation.]
(3) Our performance is very good (pg19ws2, 15 years)!!! [Drawing of
heart and text inside: I Like Estonia.]
33
Research translations of the answers are put in parentheses.
In the code p refers to the participant, g represents of girl and ws2 means the workshop
number.
34
53
First-level standpoints, boys:
(1) I am very happy with our performance.
(2) I am born to be a stone.
(3) You will just have to wait and see! I would like to thank you for an
excellent encounter (pb15ws235, 15 years).
(1) Se oli outo. [It was strange.]
(2) Teimme jotakin huopien kanssa. [We did something with blankets.]
(3) En ymmärtänyt sitä, mutta siinä oli maailman alku ja ystävien saamista
(pb17ws2, 13 years). [I didn’t understand it, but there was a beginning
of the world and getting friends.]
(1) From began I understand it [From the beginning I understand it],
but now I know what the performance say: Meet national. [Meet
nationals.]
(2) On the beganing I am stone [At the beginning I am a stone], then
I’m playing with ball. After I am the acrobat.
(3) There isn’t any words only music (pb18ws2, 13 years).
(1) Mes jame (savo spektaklyje) vaidiname pradžią, visko prasidèjima.
[We perform it (concerning the whole performance) in the beginning – so that it becomes connected by joints to the wholeness of
the performance.36]
(2) Mes vaidiname gyvių atsiradima ir rodome savo sugalvotus
skill’us. [We perform the beginning of living nature and show the
different possibilities of theatre skills.]
(3) Man jis labai patinka (pb41ws2, 14 years). [It pleased me greatly.]
Second-level standpoints, girls:
(1) Es wird gut. Jeder muss seinen Teil dazen beitragen. Jeder ist
wichtig. [It becomes good. Everyone must contribute with his part
to it. Everyone is important.]
(2) Ich muss eine Person in einem engen Raum spielen die dann
plötzlich andere Personen entdackt [I must play a person in a small
place and then suddenly the different persons arrive.]
(3) Etrepaar erwachen und sehen die anderen. Wir müssen in einem
Raum sein und etwas spezielles wachen dann müssen wir die anderen Personen antdedeen. Dann den Saxophonom folgen. Und dann
in einem Halb kreis etwas kleines vorzeigen. Komm doch und dann
siebst du es selber (pg21ws2, 13 years)!!!!!! [Married couple
awake and see the others. We must be in an area and do something
special. Then we must notice the other people. Then we follow the
sound of saxophone. We are in the half circle and present something small. Come and see it yourself!!!].
35
In the code p refers to the participant, b represents of boy and ws2 means the workshop number.
36
Jouko Grönholm translated the Lithuanian texts into Finnish and the researcher translated the Finnish into English. Translations from Lithuanian to Finnish have been left out
of this article.
54
(1) Moi j´aime bien, mais je ne sais pas si les autres vont comprendre,
c´est assez abstrait [I like it personally, but I do not know if the
others will understand, it is rather abstract.]
(2) Je n´ai pas un vrai rôle. Je suis dans ma maison, puis je rentre en
communication avec mes voisin et ensuite je suis genée par de la
musique. [I don’t have a real role. I am at home and later on start to
communicate with my neighbours and at last I become enthusiastic
of the music.]
(3) Certains sont en haut et font connee chez eux, ils sont dans leur
chambre et d´autres font les rocher et la suite … (pg78ws2, 12
years). [The others are upstairs and do something at home and the
others are downstairs as stones and then…there was also a drawing
of the scene and piles pointing, how the action goes on the stage.]
(1) Die Aufführungen erinnern mich an kleine Spiele, wo man sich
besser lernen kennen kann . [The performances remind me of small
plays in which one can learn more about oneself.]
(2) In unserer Aufführung bin ich ein kleines trauriges Mädchen mit
dem keiner Sprechen will. [In our performance I am a small sad
girl, with whom nobody wants to speak].
(3) Don’t verry [worry], by happy! (pg12ws2, 14 years). [A picture of
mouse, who says it.]
Second-level standpoint, boy:
(1) It’s about people who meet each other because of the things they do.
(2) I play the saxophone and because of that, I make the first “what-canyou-do”-couple.
(3) I will tell you about my performance. It starts with a lot (the half of us)
of us coming on the scene. They all have carpets and hide themselves
under it – look like small stones. They wake up and they use the carpets
as a ball, a snake and lots of other things. Then they are getting stones
again and on the long platform, the other half (included me) is sitting
behind carpets. The carpets are opening and everybody is doing things
like eating, putting on mascara and that stuff. Suddenly I blow my
saxophone and the group see each other. Nobody sees me, so I start
playing the sax. A girl downstairs answers me on her sax and I go
down to meet her. Then everybody starts to do acrobatics and other
things together! Then we hide under the carpet and getting [make] one
big rock (pb11ws2, age not mentioned).
A secret standpoint, boy:
(1) I can’t tell.
(2) It’s a secret.
(3) Bubbles are the BEST (pb111ws2, 13 years)!
55
The difference in meaning making cannot be divided between boys and girls,
between different ages or between the use of own language or English37. These
text extracts are from four boys and six girls from the first level, from one boy
and three girls from the second level and from one boy who wanted to keep his
standpoint secret. The difference in the answers emerges in this case between
those who played on the first level and the second level. It is remarkable that the
children who were on the second level and could see the performance better had
much more to say about the wholeness of the performance and their role in it.
There was also an exception to that (pg42ws2), a girl who described with many
details the idea of the performance and her position was on the first level.38 The
physical location (perception itself) on the stage had an influence on the meaning making.
5.3. The leaders’ appreciation of the workshop
The positive events in D’s and M’s narratives were mostly connected to the exercises and had a causal effect that the group felt well. One “best” moment was
connected to self-confidence and relaxation. The negative moments mentioned
concerned verbal discussions and the level of energy in the theatre work. M also
mentioned that the rehearsing phase was negative because the children were too
tired. Low energy, mess and confusion were described as negative. Individual
operations were not important to descripe, because they did not have any relevance in the process of group work. M used more emotional adjectives than D.
The leaders did not differ across any languages, genders or nationalities in their
narratives. M mentioned few kids, few members of the group or small group
when she wanted to express that not all the group was involved in the activity.
Their leader roles were active and transformative. M wrote: by changing each
day the situation. D mentioned two aspects: 1. Like a partner 2. Like a “provocateur” with questions. Saddington (1998) cites Knowles (1970), who describes
the progressive educator as a “helper, guide, encourager, consultant and resource” as contrasted with a “transmitter, disciplinarian, judge and authority”. M
mentioned that she … learned a lot of educational things in group process. Both
leaders gave positive utterances about their co-operation. They were happy with
the work with children and described it to be sometimes difficult but most of the
time rewarding. Both leaders assumed that the main purpose of the participants
was theatre making, but they learned not only new skills, but also communicat37
Three boys and two girls (one boy and two girls on the first level, one boy on the second level and one from a secret standpoint) used English as second language in their
answers and three boys and seven girls used their own languages in their answers.
38
Her group leader had a positive attitude (as many others) to the research work and she
wrote that the children found it interesting to answer the questions. The questionnaires
were filled out in national groups and that is why the attitudes were different and that
aspect can also be noticed in the answers of the children. The research work was challenging and demanding for the children and group leaders, because all questionnaires
were filled out during free time. Some of the group leaders pointed out that the research
work would have needed extra time in the time table so as not to feel such a stress in
filling out the questionnaires.
56
ing in a new way. M reflected over the situation of the final performance, when
the children hid behind the castle during other groups’ performance. She wrote:
The kids should SEE the final and not hide. She would have liked to change the
pressure towards the final performance.
6. Intertextual interpretation
The significance of the metaphor Bridges did not emerge from the texts and they
did not form any wholeness. The interpretation of the texts, the answers of the
riddles are between the theoretical texts and narratives. The theatre educational
process was a problem based research journey39 concerning the differences they
examined, and the performance was the result of their research in a symbolic
form.
I sum up my conclusions in five parts.
(1) In their journey of exploring the different levels of making bridges
on the basis of their individuality, they used different symbolical actions. In the process of theatre work they examined what was possible to do alone and when the group was needed. An individual does
not need to do everything alone. There is always a division between
an individual and a group. An individual must ask for the right to be
a part of the group, but at the same time everybody is needed. The
questions concerning identity and belonging to the group or being
outside seemed to be important to explore. According to Durkheim
(1969, 1979; Antikainen, Rinne & Koski 2000, 34) the meaning of
education is to adapt new individuals of a society to the requirements
of the society. It happens by bridging individual attempts to the
needs which society gives preference to. A theatre group is a society
in a micro-cosmos.
(2) Work with theme and group process were intertwined
Workshop leaders already articulated in their aims that their purpose
was to get theme and group process intertwined. The positive events
mentioned in the diaries were mostly their examples of such moments. Many children answered that their purpose in the encounter
was to become better in the skills of theatre and get new friends from
other countries. In their evaluation many children expressed that they
were satisfied with the theatre work, liked to be in their drama group
and that they got new friends from other countries.
(3) Building bridges between genders means: “Music, love, friendship
and
playing.”
D wrote: building bridges between people means: love, friendship
and playing. This sentence meant to me for a long time a general notion of connection between different people. The leaders did not
mention any individuals in their narratives and they did not divide
the group between genders in their texts. The differences between
39
According to Saddington (1998) “Experimental or problem-based methods are favoured because progressive education is about solving human problems.”
57
genders were not in my focus until one girl wrote about the performance: It’s about the world of girls and boys (pg19ws2). Another girl
described the birth of stones as Married couple awake and see the
others...40 (pg21ws2). The third girl wrote how the individuals teach
each other different skills...Little by little everybody starts doing different things and teaches those things to each other, for example
dances and the presentation of all kinds of own skills (also muscles)41 (pg42ws2). I watched the performance on video once more
carefully and found that individual acts and the doings in couples
were different with girls and boys. The only couple which was
mixed in the beginning was a boy and girl dancing together, obviously in love with each other and looking at each other. All other
couples did more stereotypical activities, which can be classified as
girlish or boyish. The boys played with balls and the girls took care
of babies. Then a boy started to play the saxophone and a girl answered with her saxophone. Music interested both genders. They
found each other as friends to whom they could teach these skills
they were good at. The divided individuals and small gender groups
found each other in sharing their knowledge. When they played together in the end, all the children danced belly dance and both boys
and girls could do weightlifting. The activities in a group play were
no longer stereotypical. The boys and girls taught the opposite gender their skills and found each other in a play where they enjoyed
playing over the gender gaps. If the meaning of education is to obtain equality between genders, a good tool for that is to play theatre
games together. These interest both genders, because they give the
possibility to play gender differences in an aesthetic, liminal space.
According to Vygotsky (1926/1992) “the moral behaviour is wholly
the product of education”. He thinks that moral education for children must be practical and the way to teach moral behaviour is to
play games.
(4) The “rite of passage” is described in the name of the performance:
Beginning! Of some new experiences, new friendship and new
knowledge… all of the participants came from individual cultures
and were temporally in a collective culture. The liminal, spatialtemporal transitional phase was finished and the performance was a
story about their transition. The name signifies an ideal, that this
transition could be a part of their thinking (knowledge) also in the
future.
(5) Work
with
form
symbolizes
cultural
transformation.
The question and answer of D. (fourth day, What was the first
bridge? Between elements in nature, between man and woman)
seemed not to have any connection with the performance or their
cultural transformation. But the performance narratives of the par40
41
Researcher translation.
Researcher translation.
58
ticipants implied what he meant. A participant wrote: It starts with a
lot (half of us) coming on the scene. They all have carpets and hide
themselves under it – look like small stones. ... Then everybody
starts to do acrobatics and other things together! Then we hide under the carpets, and getting one big rock. (pb11ws2). I studied the
performance on video and understood the meaning of blankets and
hiding. They played “the first bridge of the world, between elements
of nature”. First they were stones (subjective, individual view) and
after the games and exercises they formed one big rock altogether
(participated in a collective culture). Their cultural transformation
took on a symbolic form from elements of nature (blankets). A
bridge between man and woman was presented as a form of life that
emerged out of the stones. “Married couple awake and see the others” (pg12ws2). Human life was a representation of one form of life,
not as something better than other forms.
7. Reflection
The narratives were significantly affected by the positive and emotional discursive practice of encounter. M wrote after the performance in her diary: All the
group got involved and were enthusiastic at the end. The performance came
from them not from us. The leader expressed the satisfaction that everybody
enjoyed playing and the children decided the content of the performance. One
can assume that the participants took responsibility and were active. Critical
pedagogy challenges democratic inter-action and personal utterances (Giroux
1997, 2001, 199). Saddington (1998) sees that in the progressive tradition “education was seen as an instrument for social and political reform, which had a
major role to play in the maintenance and extension of democracy.”
The children know best themselves what the differences are that they want to
examine. The accounts of the leaders prove to be that they were dedicated to the
needs of the children. The group was interested in working with questions concerning their identity, gender and subjectivity and the relations in the group inter-action. The leaders followed their wish to do so. This means for me democracy learning in practice. The main focus of the leaders’ theatre work was to find
exercises which were the most suitable for the participants in a particular situation. The leaders mentioned that drama work needs energy, group involvement
and a clear focus to be successful. They expressed that a successful intercultural
drama process requires a well functioning group and fun with everybody. The
exercises should increase sensitivity, feelings and the skills of theatre. Such
kinds of exercises are non-verbal, fun to do, need group interaction and raise
emotions. The leaders seemed to be successful in finding such exercises, because
a participant from their workshop answered in his questionnaire: (I asked if the
theatre they make is different from that they are used to making at home). Yes a
lot! (How?) You have to use the whole body from the brain to your smallest toe.
And then you have to see inside yourself and really see what you are feeling (
pb11ws2).
59
The negotiation of meanings in a collective theatre work was based on the different liminal positions of participants. The theatre work was a method of constructing meanings of differences. The meaning making happened in the process
of transformation. The material for this meaning construction was the combination of theatre work and shared intercultural experience. The process of theatre
work affected the perception of every day life (children were aware of the
bridges they make every hour in this encounter42) and every day life gave inspiration for their theatre work. In this case art did not imitate life and art did not
imitate art. Art and life were in constant dialogue with each other and influenced
each other. The rules of EDERED were seen in practice in the final performance,
where the participants taught each other their own skills and bridged the gender
differences.
Based on the analysis of this material, I would suggest that the cultural learning
which emerged during the workshop is based on a progressive learning tradition,
positive, emotional discourse of intercultural understanding, symbolic order of
the encounter and the structure of the temporary culture. It seemed to have influenced the participants to make symbols of intercultural understanding in their
performance. These symbols embody their cultural learning.
8. Discussion of the methods used
The empirical research material for this article did not cover many diaries of the
workshops in the 10th European Children’s Encounter. The significance concerning the metaphor Bridges is situated to one workshop. I used a careful structural,
poetic analysis to examine the workshop leaders’ accounts, and it helped me to
see the different phases of the process. Structural analysis helped me to see the
content of the narratives in a table form, which was easier to examine. Out of the
leader narratives emerged a meta-narrative. The meaning of the narratives was
not in the texts, but somewhere between micro-level interactions and macrolevel structures. The consideration of the socio-cultural circumstances was essential in the interpretation process.
The leader narratives gave me a partial understanding of the meaning making.
The answers from the participants were essential to obtain deeper understanding
of the meaning making. Many answers forced me to look at the video film again
and the new hidden meanings were found from the performance. The symbolic
language of theatre has so many riddles that the meanings were not possible to
discover alone, without the dialogue of all the texts. Without the idea of standpoint thinking I would not have seen that the location on the stage influenced the
meaning making of the players. The different points of view gave me possibility
for a denser description of the meaning of the metaphor Bridges.
Vygotsky’s model of the mechanism of creative fantasy and Kjølner’s model of
the phases in theatre workshop were useful in the analysis of the narratives. It is
difficult to say how much the leader narratives contributed to the models used.
The process of research was writing and rewriting in order to be able to make an
interpretation of the meaning making. Post-modern feminist theories avoid sys42
ww3ws2
60
tem approach, because as Yeatman (1990, 294) mentions: “Per forcedly a system’s approach maintains monovocal, monotypical, monological orientation to
authority.” Undoubtedly she is right. All models represent the frames of the
playground. The work of research is to play a game within those frames. Models
are useful in a heuristic sense, because they give limits to playing theoretical
games. Generally, I find abductive logic very useful, because in that logic models and empiric materials can have a fruitful discussion.
The team work, intercultural understanding and group processes are the essential
elements of today’s work environment and the need to accept collective values
are important in different working contexts. The members of EDERED organisation made an attempt to create an ideal of community by playing with differences. As Young (1990, 320) points out “Radical politics, moreover, must develop discourse and institutions for bringing differently identified groups without suppressing or subsuming the differences.” It is surprising for me that only
radical politics is developing such discourse, because I think that the need for
different groups to co-operate without suppressing their differences is essential
for all politics of democracy and freedom.
9. Research work in progress
Theatre is a way to give an interpretation of life. When I asked from D what kind
of theatre is very good, he answered Theatre which develops personality and
creativity. I continued with the question Why? And he answered Because theatre
is a good medium for learning about life. This cultural learning does not emerge
in theoretical lessons, nor does it emerge in real life. It emerges in an aesthetic
doubled, liminal space. In an intercultural theatre there are several “spaces of
possibility”. John Martin is a director of the Pan Centre for Intercultural Art in
London. According to him (2004, 4) “Intercultural performance, therefore is not
one style, not one thing; it is an ongoing process of meeting, cross-pollinating
and producing new and relevant work for its surroundings. As long as peoples
and cultures meet there will be new ideas, new ways of communicating and creating.” And he continues: “Interculturalism is not a juxtaposition of styles; it is a
new result from a new meeting.”(ibid., 5). M wrote as a comment to me in her
diary: I wish you much energy to do this work for 4 years! The leaders often
used the word energy. M expressed how she got energy.
It was a great experience. My co-operation with D was very interesting
and without problems. I learned a lot of educational things and group process.
All the group got involved and were enthusiastic in the end. The performance came
from them, not from us. A lot of creativity between D & me, between the group
and us. I’m happy and thankful that I have been in this EDERED Encounter. It gives
me energy & creativity for the next year.43
Martin (2004) writes a lot about energy, which is a basic to all creative work. He
(2004, 6-7) asks how “to find a level of honesty, of truth in yourself and in your
work.” The actor must have presence, which Martin (2004, 7) describes as a
quality which “like a magnet, draws the audience’s attention to him or her.”
43
ww3ws2
61
How to get the presence? Martin (ibid.) gives an answer. “The word “energy” is
our key. Presence is the correct control of our energy.”
Playfulness44, rhythm, improvisation and training of voice are also essential
(Martin 2004) in intercultural theatre work. Martin describes that “physical energies” are a starting point. M and D also expressed the importance of the energy
in their work. The games and different actor exercises are essential to get the
level of energy potential for the presence which is required in serious improvisation work, where the meaning making starts. . Not by talking, but by playing45. I
asked the participants: What has been difficult? One girl answered: D´être
vraiment energique, mais rien n´a été vraiment difficile. [To be really energetic,
but nothing was really difficult.] Why? Parce que si nous n´etions pas energiques c´etait ennuyant(pg78ws2). [Because if we were not energetic it would be
annoying.] Because the concept energy seems to have such great importance to
the participants, I will study more carefully how it emerges in the material.
References:
Primary material:
Workshop diaries: ww3ws2, wm2ws2.
Participant questionnaires 3: pg10ws2, pb11ws2, pg12ws2, pg13ws2, pb15ws2,
pg16ws2, pb17ws2, pb18ws2, pg19ws2, pg21ws2, pb41ws2, pg42ws2,
pg78ws2, pb111ws2, pg112ws2.
Hauger, H. & O´Dwyer, P. & Pears, M. 1999, The EDERED Handbook. Approved by the General Assembly of EDERED in Jerusalem, July 2000. Dublin.
Saure, M. 2002. European Drama Encounters – Rencontres Européennes de
Drama: a speech
held in Cork, Ireland, November 2002.
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6. Interactivity and Collaboration as
Aesthetic Strategies in Performance
and Live-action-role-playing
Ida Krøgholt
A few years ago I listened to a lecture given by the German professor in pedagogy, Thomas Ziehe. Ziehe declared that the conflict- and dilemmafocused roleplay had come to an end, because instead of being engaged in discussions of
moral issues, the participants in a roleplay would claim that there are different
attitudes to life. Rather than fighting for a certain perspective, they would do
their best to cope with the differences. For instance if as a Drama-in-Education
teacher you would confront your students with a moral dilemma, one of them
would tell you right away, that different opinions are all right, said Ziehe.
Thomas Ziehe has discovered some serious changes in society; changes that we
need to know if we want to develop pedagogical strategies in terms of aesthetic
processes. I suppose, Ziehe hits the point in so far as his example serves a more
general description of changes in social behavior, as well as in aesthetic processes. His description might help us to identify some problems, which many of
us who work with dramateaching have experienced in practise. Furthermore, I
shall take Ziehes advice that we should pay attention to the way the informal
part of culture develops aesthetic processes. It brings me to compare chosen
aesthetic strategies from two different media, the british performancetheatre
Forced Entertainment (F.E.) and the autonomous live-action-role-playing
(LARP). Both share the priority of developing the creative processes with
drama-in-education, but with different purposes.
What can bring these different media together, then? The key concept in the
processes of LARP seem to be interactivity, whereas the processes of Forced
Entertainment stresses the importance of collaboration. Both, I suppose, can be
viewed in the perspective of complex learning processes, and so my point in this
paper is to show how interactivity and collaboration can be used in purpose to
initiate complexity. Consequently, what these creative processes have in common is, that they force the participants to examine how to manage complexity.
According to Ziehe we might consider changes in the social behaviour as exotic,
strange or even dangerous. But the point is that the changes involve all of us, and
a change in the culture of youngsters should of course be seen in a wider perspective. How come for for instance that young people seem to have lost interest
in the enforcement of fixed social norms? Why do some find it rather absurd to
discuss the balance between good and bad? Probably because they have experienced, that you can never unify the concept of justice in practical life. Alternatively they search strategies for "getting along" with each other. In the parent
68
generation you can see a similar tendency. We tend to meet our teenage children
on equal terms. Rather than confronting them with the ultimatum that as their
parent, you will not accept drinking parties at home, and if they break the rule,
they will be grounded, you will probably do your best to find an opportunity to
talk about things. And if you still think it is a problem, that the youngsters have a
party in your house, your best argument against it might be defensive, for instance you could object that the sight or sound of your children’s party life
makes you feel uncomfortable. As you choose to refer to the way things affect
your senses, you are using an aesthetic argument, according to Ziehe. The consequences of this sort of negotiation might be that when the party begins, you
leave home. In this case, your problems would be solved by the conclusion that
there should be room for all of us in the house, and so the youngsters carry on
their lifestyle, while you take care of your own business. This description pushes
it to extremes, I admit, the point is, that in everydaylife we tend to regulate our
social interactions with an aesthetic attitude towards each other instead of aiming at moral limits. These signs of aesthetisation in everydayculture doesn't
mean, that our western societies have lost interest in social behavior as such. But
instead of negotiating norms, we are inclined to reflect our lifepractices by examining our actions and behavior in an experimental way: what had happened if
I had done this instead of that…how would that have influenced on my feelings?
Instead of asking whether we did the right thing according to justice, we tend to
use our senses as a parameter for good and bad.
The aesthetisation of culture can be seen within the frames of the socalled society of hypercomplexity (Lars Qvortrup, Professor at Center of Interaktive Media,
Syddansk Universitet, DK). According to Qvortrup the society of hypercomplexity can best be described as a way of observing the world1.
To explain hypercomplexity as a mode of observation, Qvortrup operates with
three collaborative forms of optics on the world which he separates in three different perspectives:
Deocentrism (traditional society) A hierarchy with one system, the religious, on
top. The world is observed with the idea of the divine as the center of observation.
Antropocentrism (modern society) The systems are independent of each other
(economy, science, art, rationality, feeling etc.). They are different from each
other, but together they function in a synthesis.
Society is created by man, it is ruled by humanbeings (subjectphilosophy) within
a democratic order. The world is observed with humanbeings as the center of
observation.
Polycentrism (hypercomplex society) There is not one independent and natural
center of observation. Consequently you can't observe the world without observing criteria for your own observations. Instead of one privileged center, society
has developed a number of competing observing centers.
1
In Qvortrup Det lærende samfund - hyperkompleksitet og viden, Gyldendal 2002.
69
According to Qvortrup the consequences of a polycentric dominance in our picture of the world is that we are challenged to cope with complexity. I will complement Qvortrup by proposing that in a hypercomplex society, we are forced to
cope with differences rather than we try to identify humanity.
I will now suggest that Live-action-role-playing-games (LARP) can be viewed
in perspective of a polycentric society. LARP creates a parallel world. It operates in free spaces out of public control: Just do it. Fuck the audience, as a
LARP player declames in a resent publication (As Larp Grows Up). LARP is an
informal activity in the sense, that it is created by the youngsters themselves. In
the perspective of cultural development, it offers a lifestyle which is attractive to
young people, because it contains a doubleness: it creates a place for retreat
where you can get away from social controle and a place for interaction. A place
where you can develop a personal lifestyle in collaboration with other people.
If you examine the discourse around LARP (in articles, websides, interviews
etc.), LARP understands itself as closed, independent and autonomous systems.
To underline this, LARP claims to function as art (in As Larp Grows Up p. 21).
If you examine the different manifesto's that have been produced by people joining LARP, the purpose of LARP appears to be to create a parallel world, where
the experiment is to come to a maximum level of interactivity:
This becomes clear in the DOGMA '99, whis also goes under the name The Vow
of Chastity (= Kyskhedsløftet in Danish with reference to the filmmaker Lars
Von Trier and the dogma-brotherhood). It states the following rules:
1. It is forbidden to create action by writing it into the past history of a character or the event
2. There shall be no "main plot"
3. No character shall only be a supporting part
4. All secrecy is forbidden
5. After the event has begun, the playwrights are not allowed to influence it
6. Superficial action is forbidden
7. LARPs inspired by tabletop role-playing games are not accepted
8. No object shall be used to represent another object
9. Game mechanics are forbidden
10. The playwrights shall be held accountable for the whole of their work
The rhetoric of the Dogma 99 manifesto is clearly sceptical, as the intention is to
ban certain actions. The funny thing is that even though LARP doesn't compare
these "live" activities to the theatre, the scepticism of the Dogma 99 manifesto
could be hinting at the dramatic tradition of theatre. My pretext is not to say that
the aesthetic strategies of the Dogma manifesto are incomparable with the theatre. No, if anything, it is the anthropocentric world perspective, LARP differes
from. The anthropocentric idea has the purpose to identify humanity. And as the
dramatic tradition of theatre supports this worldview, it is precisely what LARP
refuses to commit to.
The dramatic theatre tradition can be described by a single formula, namely the
situation where A impersonates B while C looks on (as suggested by Eric Bent-
70
ley The Life of the Drama p. 150). According to this, a theatre performance is
explained as a representation of a dramatists script. The script is transformed by
the director into time and space. In other words, the authoritative voice in a theatre performance is the voice of the dramatist. The intentionality of the dramatist
is what the theatre performance communicates. It places the emphasis on the
representation of actions for an audience. The point is, that Bentleys formula is
aimed at a theatre ruled by one authoritative voice and one intention. Finally this
shall guarantee a whole and coherent representation.
In opposition to this, Dogma 99 will according to rule nr. 1., guarantee the here
and now of the play, while past (and future) is of no interest. Consequently
LARP claims to be an event.
Rule nr. 2 stresses the importance of each playing character, while "there shall
be no "main plot."" The polycentric strategy at work here is in the banishing of
one center of observation of the play.
Rule nr. 3. "No character shall only be a supporting part" foreshadows interactivity, because every player can add actions and response to the play at any time.
This rule also takes an absolutely opposite view of the dramatic theatre, while
the intentions of the many different players are given priority.
Rule nr. 4. insists on a non-hierarchical-process, because "all secrecy is forbidden." This means that any participant can be shown all documents that pertain to
the event - and use this to create actions and response.
Rule nr. 5. banishes intervention from the playwrights or from any other organisers after the play has started. This is a very important point, as it gives responsibility for the play over to the participants. The consequense is that the participants gain a maximum of options to respond to the play and hereby the rule supports interactivity and optimises the free flow of the play.
Thus, Dogma 99, as opposed to the dramatic theatre, aims at keeping the interactivity between the participants in constant flow. It leads to the assumption that
LARP could also be viewed in the perspective of a participatory theatre.
71
A ↔ B Players
Contract of fiction
C ↔ D Roles
Figure 1. A plays C while B plays D, a formula for a participatory theatre.2
If we should suggest a formula for a participatory theatre, it would be of importance to stress the need of what we call the contract of fiction. Normally we understand the contract of fiction as the way in which the theatre production establishes its communication with the audience. The performance creates a set of
rules by which it hopes to be measured3. Thus, the contract of fiction in a participatory theatre sets the rules by which the participants communicate with each
other, and what matters is what is played out between the players (as suggested
by Janek Szatkowski in his model of The dramatic Fiction concerning
dramapedagogy. See J. Szatkowski og Chr. B.M. Jensen (red): Dramapædagogik i nordisk perspektiv, Artikelsamling 2, Teaterforlaget DRAMA 1985).
In the polycentric worldpicture, which LARP seem to share, in between should
be taken quite literally as the play can't guarantee the players a common understanding of things. Thus, it is in the communicative space between them, the
interactive flow comes into existense.
What will the consequense of this polycentric proposal be? - That learning not is
a product that the individual ends up with. Rather that learning should be understood in terms of systemtheory, as changes within the communicative system
itself.
2
As suggested by Janek Szatkowski in his model of The dramatic Fiction concerning
dramapedagogy. See J. Szatkowski og Chr. B.M. Jensen (red): Dramapædagogik i nordisk perspektiv, Artikelsamling 2, Teaterforlaget DRAMA 1985.
3
See this explained in Niels Lehmann and Janek Szatkowski, "Theatrical Virtuality Virtual Theatricality" in L. Qvortrup, Virtual Interaction (4) 2002.
72
I put foreward this interactive idea of learning, as it can help to explain why
Dogma 99 is so radically open to the participant's responses - and even offer
them a chance to change the pretext as initiated by the playwrights. The rule that
"there shall be no "main plot"" exactly protects the play against morally supported imperatives a la "don't do this or that, for if you do it, this or that will
happen." In this view, LARP has absolutely no interest in moral learning. From
this angle LARP seems to be very well suited for putting the idea of a participatory theatre into practise, as it ventures to risk a consequently interactive play.
I am bound to say that LARP has developed a variety of instruments (socalled
"game mechanics") that can reduce the complexity in their plays. But according
to Dogma 99, the vision of LARP is the open and incalculable play.
A play with a high level of interactivity and complexity has to deal with another
important issue, namely collaboration. I suppose collaboration is as essential to
live-action-role-playing as it is to the theatre. A while ago I had the opportunity
to follow a theatreproces with dramastudents under the leadership of the actor,
Robin Arthur, from Forced Entertainment (F.E.). Here you could observe how
strong rules for behaviour created a totally chaotic playing situation, as playing
comes closer to F.E.'s concept of theatre than acting does. So, the interactivity of
this process was strictly controlled. To stress the intention, Robin Arthur repeated: Just listen to the rule. The rule of the play will tell you what to do.
Tim Etchells who is the director of F.E. presents his thoughts and reflections of
the theatregroups aesthetic strategies in the publication Certain Fragments. The
key concept in F.E.'s aesthetic is collaboration, and the reason for drawing on
F.E.s practice is that, with a postmodern attitude to theatre, they seem to share
LARPs polycentric strategy for communication, when they produce a theatreperformance. As Etchells writes:
"I trust discoveries and accidents and I distrust intentions."
Etchells continues: "I make a list of the misunderstandings and misrecognitions
in our collaborative process, celebrating these above the instances of clear communication." (Etchells p. 55)
What does collaboration mean then, in the context of F.E.? Collaboration is certainly not a perfect understanding of the other person. No, it is the misunderstandings, the mis-seeings and mis-hearings that counts. Collaboration is
"competing actions, approaches and intentions," and it is "just a good way of
confounding intentions", as Etchells says (Etchells p. 55).
As we see, collaboration can work not only as a principle for the process of production - it can also function as an aesthetic principle in the theatre. In the perspective of polycentrism, I suggest we see F.E.'s aesthetic strategy as a way of
keeping the differences between the participants alive. The aesthetic perspective
of this is, as Etchells says, coming out of the intention to do theatre as "a space
in which different sensibilities, different intentions could collide" while the goal
is to perform "play as endless transformation." These expectations to collaborative work would in real life be inbearable. But as rules for a fictive world they
can be usefull.
73
With this conclusion, I have tried to outline how collaboration and interactivity
can be closely connected - as long as you share F.E.'s idea of collaborative work.
The connection generates from the polycentric way of observing the world, I
have sketched.
But could we from this worldpicture say something more general conserning
aesthetic learning processes? Could we increase the aesthetic effects of the complex learning processes mentioned in this paper? I shall try to answer this with a
small comparative example:
The aesthetic strategies that I have profiled in this paper are different from for
instance the aesthetics of Augusto Boal. As I see it, Boal tries to overcome the
gap between art and society. He suggests that as you can handle things so well in
a fictive world, which you are a part of (when acted out live), then why shouldn't
you be able to transmit these qualifications to your everyday (and according to
Ziehe aesthetified) world? I would venture to try the opposite view, while an
aesthetic effect is precisely an effect that exists within a fictive world and is different from your everyday world. Thus, the aesthetic competence would be to
manage to switch your focus, in order to put life into the fiction. But if we believe that here we bridge the gap between art and society or between fiction and
non-fiction, the aesthetic effect might consequently loose its power.
To put in in other terms, you will reduce the aesthetic effect if you claim that the
fictive actions should be usefull in everyday life. The LARP manifesto's seem to
deal with this aesthetic view, as within our generally aesthetified culture, they
create rules for a fictive "state of emergency".
References
As Larp Grows Up - Theory and Methods in Larp, 2003. Knudepunkt.
Etchells, T. 1999. Certain Fragments, London: Routledge.
Lehmann, N. og Szatkowski, J. 2003. "Theatrical Virtuality - Virtual Theatricality" i Qvortrup, Virtual Interaction (4)
Qvortrup, L. 2002. Det lærende samfund - hyperkompleksitet og viden, København: Gyldendal.
Szatkowski, J. og Jensen, Chr. B.M. (red), 1985. Dramapædagogik i nordisk
perspektiv, Artikelsamling 2, Teaterforlaget DRAMA.
Ziehe, T. 1989. Ambivalenser og Mangfoldighed, Politisk Revy.
Ziehe, T. 2001. "De personlige livsverdners dominans," Undervisningsministeriets Tidsskrift Uddannelse10.
75
7. The Pedagogical Laboratory
Outline for a new way of thinking about pedagogy in school
and services for young children
Klaus Thestrup
This article contains an outline for a pedagogical space between culture and pedagogy, body and media, playing and learning, services for young children and school.
An experimental pedagogy, which establishes a space for learning based on the
shared investigation of children and grown-ups into essential questions with the help
of media, play and narratives1.
The pedagogical laboratory
An interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial development group in Aarhus, Denmark
has now for almost three years worked towards encircling a pedagogy which can
meet the demands of today and the future for pedagogical work with children,
when they start in school and after-school centre2. This work has taken place
through a range of smaller, practical projects. The projects have for example
been to build interactive Lego robots, playing with video cameras on the floor
along with other toys, filming Bratz Dolls, making digital diaries and inventing
one’s own toys. The development method has been to establish a pedagogical
laboratory in the midst of the children’s everyday life in school and services for
young children. In the midst of wet winter boots and left-over packed lunches, in
a complex reality. The work is not complete yet, but a framework for thinking
about pedagogy can be outlined.
1
The article is based on two lectures: One from the development group’s conference in
Aarhus, Denmark 23/4 2004 ”Når børn opdager – om nye medier og nye læringsrum i
fremtidens skole og læringsrum” [”When Children Investigate – on New Media and New
Learning Spaces in the Future’s School and Learning Spaces”] and one from NERA’s
congress in Reykjavik 11-13/3 2004 ”The positioning of Education in Contemporary
Knowledge Society”
2
The development group consists of Hanne Algot Jeppesen, Leader of the Multimedia
Workshop at the Culture Centre ‘Huset’; Torben Bjerre, Pedagogical Leader of the Media Workshop at Jydsk Pædagog-Seminarium, College of Education; Ole Caprani,
Senior Lecturer at the Department for Computer Science, Aarhus University; Lene
Borup Christensen, Preschool Class Leader at Katrinebjerg School; Dorte Grønkjær
Andersen, Deputy Head at Bodøgårdens after-school centre; Mariann Nygaard, Leader
of ’Blæksprutten’, the Katrinebjerg School’s after-school centre; Klaus Thestrup, Project
Coordinator for the development group and Senior Lecturer in Drama at Jydsk PædagogSeminarium Randers; Maria Thrane, Teacher at Katrinebjerg School and Claus V.
Jacobsen, MA Pedagogics and Teacher at Katrinebjerg School
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A research which is close to everyday life gives the researcher an alternate and
more current idea of how children use new media. Meeting individual children
each with their own potentials and difficulties also turns the research into pedagogical work, for every single idea of the structure of a project must suit the
children who have to exist within it. This view of research also fits with the development group’s view of pedagogical work. Teachers and pedagogues constantly have to develop their pedagogical knowledge, insight and practical competences in order to operate with new social tasks, the growing media and
knowledge society and different children in different times. While research is to
set up an experiment without knowing the answer, pedagogy is to investigate
into questions and construct connections with the users. In both cases there is a
definite risk of making mistakes or finding out that one should have acted differently, but also a possibility to discover new models of thinking, transferable to
new useable practises.
The shapeable technology
One of the projects in the development group has been to build and play with
Lego’s interactive robots. The children built small robots out of wires, motors,
batteries, wheels, sensors and an intelligent block, which has inbuilt technology
with a little monitor and pushbuttons. The classroom and the space in the afterschool centre were made into workshops with lots of Lego blocks, and the floor,
chairs and tables were all equally important places to construct and test the small
robots.
The projects with the robots turned out to bring attention to a particular way of
understanding the relationship especially between smaller children and new
technology. The computer is moved away from the desk and away from being
the overwhelming, stationary technology. This media is all of a sudden placed
between grown-ups and children as a joint concern. The technology is physically
present as something one can shape, change, take apart, construct and play with
in the same way as other toys3. The children can use their skills learnt from play
culture to grasp the technology.
Between monitor and floor
Another potential is to think of digital technology as a cycle. An example is the
project of filming Bratz Dolls. Here, a group of children from an after-school
centre played with Bratz Dolls and a couple of grown-ups participated in this
game with a computer and a small webcam with an editing program4. The children were already playing with the Bratz Dolls by dressing them, building rooms
3
See i.e. Thestrup (2003) ”Når medierne er børns legetøj” [”When the Media are
Children’s Toys”] in Ivar Selmer-Olsen og Svein Sndo (ed.): Mediebarndommen
DMMH´s publication series 2/2003, Trondheim: DMMH
4
See i.e. Thestrup (2004): ”Bratzland” [”Bratzland”] in the media periodical Tilt, or
Norge and Torben Bjerre: ”Bratz og kamera – uformelle læringsmiljøer”, [”Bratz and
Camera – Informal Learning Environments] documentation video, Jydsk PædagogSeminarium, 2004
77
for them, driving the Bratz-car to the discotheque and so on. The camera was
introduced into this play and used to film it. Afterwards, video clips and stills
were downloaded to the computer so the children could see what they had just
filmed and start editing it. This could then provide new ideas to the play with the
dolls and the camera on the floor.
What was happening on the floor was independent play with its own meaning
and play-space. The camera was incorporated into the play. At the same time,
what occurred on the floor formed the material for playing in front of the monitor. Here as well the children could use their play culture to play with the camera, the dolls and the monitor. Body and monitor, play and media get naturally
interconnected and all parts are important.
The narrative technology
The projects undertaken by the development group have all contained an investigation of the possibilities in a given material, but the experimentation with a
material has happened simultaneously with the construction of a narrative about
the material. The robots are built from motors and wheels and the camera can
film from different angles. But what are robots? They are at the same time alive
and dead, and they can be embodied by today’s very large industrial robots as
well as tiny nano robots in the future. The meaning of robots was among other
things investigated through verbal narrations, which were developed in interplay
between children and grown-ups5. The Bratz Dolls for example turned out to be
about being young. The clothes and the looks of the dolls point towards being a
teenager and the narratives, which formed on the monitor and on the floor, were
about boyfriends, spare time and fashion. The play with technology is driven by
an investigation of its possibilities as well as by what it can tell.
Invent Your Own Toys
In the Invent Your Own Toys project, the experiment was central. The aim was
for children and grown-ups to invent new toys out of media scrap, old toys and
discarded kitchen equipment. Gaffer tape was used to hold the different pieces
together. The invention did not have to work properly, but could be a proto type.
The results were a wealth of ideas. Among others, a castle with more than
twenty cannons in different sizes, all controlled by a keyboard. A computer
game made out of mouse mats, placed next to each other and put together with
gaffer. And finally a range of strange creatures made out of computer parts and
soft toys, broken into two and joined together in all directions. For example,
there was Cami who had a rabbit head as upper part and a red plastic camera as
lower part6.
5
See i.e. Hanne Algot Jeppesen and Jesper Wøldiche (ed.): ”Når robotterne går sig en
tur” [”When the Robots Go For a Walk”], project publication, The Multimedia Lab,
Culture Centre ’Huset’, 2002 and Lars Henningsen’s cultural video narrative:
”Robotterne går sig en tur” [”The Robots Go For a Walk”],, Zip Zap Video, 2002
6
See i.e. Kasper Schutt: ”Opfind dit eget legetøj” [”Invent Your Own Toys”],, in the
newspaper Jyllandsposten, JP Aarhus, 13/4 2004
78
The pedagogical framework for the project was partly developed on the way.
The introduction involved two grown-ups inventing a toy whilst the children
were watching. Two grown-ups took a toaster, put four wheels from a large toy
car underneath, taped a cardboard tube on the front and put a Barbie Doll in it.
Immediately, one of the children responded: A Barbie Shooter! Everybody now
knew what the idea was and together they could begin a very definite research
process.
Play as a laboratory
The development group would also have liked the children to present their toys
in toy stores with exhibitions, space for play and posters. The idea was fine and
easily understandable, but we found that the children, when they had made their
inventions, didn’t quite know what the innovations could do or their names. We
also found that we had not given them enough possibilities for exploring their
new toys, because the children did not have the space to play on the floor with
the toys! We then thought of making a test laboratory, where we played and told
stories with creatures and castles together with the children.
The development group did not teach the children how to invent when they were
making their toys. We gave them the possibility through the introduction, decoration of the workshop and the test laboratory. We managed to recreate the combined practise children already use when they play in their school breaks or at
home. At the same time we almost strangled it. For play to be important for the
pedagogical laboratory it has to be genuinely important. Play cannot be orchestrated because it will then lose its power.
The complex role of the grown-up
The roles of the teacher and the pedagogue become very complex in experimental pedagogical processes. The development group operates with four different
roles: Master, Participant, Guide and Agent. The Master and the Participant are
both about who knows and who can act. The Guide and the Agent are about
creating and leading on the process.
The master is the grown-up who knows more and can act more in connection to
content and idiom than the present children. The grown-up knows other and
more things about narrating or editing than the children. When the grown-up is a
participant, he or she is often the one who knows less than or just as little as the
other participants. In play it is often the grown-up who gets in trouble because
the children know more about this than he or she does. When the grown-up is
participant there are also questions about theme and idiom, which he or she may
like to answer or investigate.
When the grown-up is guide, he or she makes sure that everybody has the possibility to be part of the ongoing process. If a child is drifting away or if there is
something seriously wrong in the group, it is the natural responsibility of the
grown-up to help the child back into the process or to make the group work.
When the grown-up is agent it means that he or she actively assists so that the
79
group finds its cultural connective strengths. In the group, ways of getting along
and finding out what is wrong are established and strengthened.
Four roles
For an example of a master we could look to the project about making digital
diaries. Here, a small group of children and a grown-up made a diary about the
after-school centre’s yearly week by the beach. The grown-up introduced the
children to an editing program and used her knowledge about composition and
colouring to make the diary of a quality that the group of children could not have
handled at the time.
An example of a participant can be seen in the project where video cameras were
used along with other toys. In this course of events the children played with dinosaurs and built an island with caves and swamps. Each of the video cameras
was connected with a wire to a TV, so that one could straight away see what was
filmed. One of the children suddenly thought of placing the video camera in a
cave together with some dinosaurs and filming it all from the inside. An example
of the guide was shown when a child could not survey the experimental process
and needed to know what was going to happen next. An example of an agent
was a grown-up who in collaboration with a school class developed a storytelling culture, which only existed with this specific class.
The experience of the development group is that the four roles exist simultaneously in the meeting with the children and that they can be activated one or several at a time. For example, as a teacher or pedagogue I want to include a child
in the process (guide) by showing a possibility (master), which I don’t know
everything about (participant), but which I believe can contribute to the shared
investigation in the group (agent).
The cultural meeting place
The four roles are also tied together in that they are all thought out within the
investigation process at a cultural meeting place. It is also the pedagogue and the
teacher who learns from the experiments and together with the children. The
model in this article visualises this by identifying four situations of learning in
the relationship between children and grown-ups.
Firstly, children can learn from children in play culture. The grown-up is by
definition not directly present and the children themselves organise the play, its
content and sequence. The children use media, popular culture and the world
around them as the raw material for their play7. Secondly, children can learn
from grown-ups. If the grown-up knows of or has the ability to do something, it
should of course be used to qualify the investigation process. Thirdly, grown-ups
can learn from children. No grown-ups could have imagined meeting a creature
like the camera-rabbit Cami. And finally, grown-ups can learn from grown-ups.
7
See i.e. Flemming Mouritsen: ”Legekultur. Essays om børnekultur, leg og fortælling” ”
[”Play Culture. Essays on Children’s Culture, Play and Narration”],, Odense Universitetsforlag, 1996
80
In the different projects the grown-ups have had very different knowledge and
abilities and consequently learned from each other on the way.
In the middle of the four learning situations is then the cultural meeting place
where children and grown-ups meet in a shared investigation, each with their
knowledge, abilities and competences. The grown-ups are still grown-ups and
responsible for the pedagogical work and the children are still children who play,
but in the play, the construction of narratives and the experiments, the differences stand back. Standing out is a meeting place where the play, investigation
and the curiousness for more knowledge and abilities is sought to be established
as central.
The subject of Drama can here offer an explanatory framework, which can grasp
the central aspects about the cultural meeting place. In the foundational meeting
between children and grown-ups, children come from the play culture with their
abilities to play and create fiction8. The grown-up comes with his or her knowledge of theatre. What they create together and the way they create it is neither
children’s play culture nor grown-ups’ everyday culture, but a drama play. This
notion can be defined by the action of children and grown-ups constructing a
narrative or a universe of meaning together9. In the drama play, both parts use
everything they know and are able to do, and look for what they don’t know and
cannot do.
The pedagogical situation
The cultural meeting place can define the moment where the play breaks down
and the acute need for learning arises - when the robot suddenly stops or the
camera can’t be turned on. The technology must be investigated further for the
play to continue. Learning becomes a means to continue the experiment and not
a goal in its own right. The meeting place can also define the moment where
curiosity comes out of play and the experiment is a continuation of it. In both
cases the grown-up naturally steps in as he or she who directs a leaning process,
which might in the moment be aimed towards the child discovering or inventing
a connection, but which can at the same time also acquire the aim that the
grown-up discovers or invents.
The pedagogy of investigation
The pedagogical situation is very extensive. The role of the grown-up is complex. The experiments are characterised by being genuinely important. Play and
narratives dress the technology in meaning. Body and monitor are combined.
The media are toys. The meeting place is a place to ask questions. The pedagogical laboratory is well suited for experimenting, finding and constructing
instant connections. The laboratory can principally be used in all fields where
8
See i.e.Faith Gabrielle Guss: ”Lekens drama 2. En artikkelsamling” [”The Drama of
the Play 2. An Article Collection”], HiO-report 2003, no. 28, Høgskolen, Oslo
9
See i.e. Gudrun Ekstrand and Ulla-Britt Janzon: ”Drama- og teaterleg med de små”
[”Drama and Theatre Play With Small Children”],, Drama, 2000 or Kari Mjaaland
Heggstad: ”7 veier til drama”, [”7 Ways to Drama”], 2. edition, Fagbogforlaget, 2004
81
there are no answers or where the teacher and pedagogue know that the established knowledge isn’t complete.
Fundamentally, Denmark and the Danish companies have to live by being the
best inventors and developers in order not to fall behind in the global market
economy. Fundamentally, school and services for young children can meet and
use the best from both worlds. Fundamentally, children and grown-ups must
now as well as in the future conquer the many different media and be heard, seen
and enter into a dialogue about the complex and changing society they are in the
midst of. Here, the outline of the development group for a pedagogy of investigation is a possibility.
83
8. Artistic (learning) Processes in
Drama
- a Drama Student Perspective on
Constructions of the Concept
Anna-Lena Østern
The idea
Being a teacher in the art form drama demands from the drama teacher knowledge about the art form and skill in pedagogical thinking. In order to promote
these skills a group of advanced level students of drama education at Jyväskylä
University in Finland were given the task of preparing a short performance for a
defined audience. The guiding idea concerning this task was that a drama teacher
most often directs and guides students in their artistic work – and this task could
give the teachers a sense of what it takes to start from idea and let it be transformed into a performance. The students worked according to the dramaturgical
model presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1. A dramaturgical model for analysing theatrical communication
(Østern, 1998).
Almost total freedom was given concerning what the students could choose,
because the students were their own directors. It was also possible to choose a
kind of artistic portfolio presentation of a director’s job or an actor’s job done
84
elsewhere. The starting point was an idea about something you wanted to communicate to an audience in an artistic way. The next phase was to choose from
among the available forms and to transform the idea into a stage text. It could,
for instance, be a monologue, as the task was to be solved individually. The performances were planned for a certain audience and in the analysis of the stage
text the students should consider what kind of code competence the audience
might have. The last chain in this communication was the reception from the
audience. The finder of the idea starts from a certain, personal horizon of understanding and tries to choose the appropriate genre and theatrical signs in order to
communicate. The individuals in the audience have some kind of code competence concerning genres and signs – this competence is the basis for the horizon
of understanding in the audience and decides whether this certain performance
communicates, touches, makes sense, is interesting for the audience.
In this article I make an attempt to identify the main characteristics of the artistic
work done. I am especially interested in what kinds of constructions of the concept artistic (learning) process I can describe based on my interpretations. I am
using tools from narratology in the analysis and make an analysis of the narratives in the students’ reflective reports from this project. The performances were
given for fellow students, or reported to fellow students during the period 19992001.
Aesthetic learning processes
My pre-understanding is that aesthetic learning processes generate a knowledge
which is deeply rooted in the sensuous, a knowledge of the body where feelings
and thinking are integrated in a holistic understanding. This is why it is important that the teacher is able to stage aesthetical learning processes. It is not
enough to receive an active response. There is a qualitative difference between
an active response and an active aesthetic response.1 The aesthetic response implies for the student an active and conscious experimentation with form in order
to generate meaning. The active response might, however, involve a pedagogical
reduction where the meaning project of the student will remain unfocused and
the student asks what the meaning of all this is, or he does not want to engage
himself in the meaning project of the teacher. Through work in the art form
drama the teacher is able to challenge the student to give an active aesthetic response and the student might conquer ownership of his productive response and
experience the satisfaction of functioning creatively as an individual and as a
member of a group.
As a frame of understanding I problematize the concept active aesthetic response. In Figure 2 I have drawn a mind-map with concepts which can describe
some aspects of an active aesthetic response. The mind-map can be used as a
didactical tool in planning a drama lesson or in analyzing the outcomes. The pretext is looked upon as the recirculated (basic) text, and the texts produced by the
students as the new texts, ’text-on-text’.
1
Compare with Iser’s theory Teorie der aesthetischer Wirkung described in Akt des
Lesens (1967).
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Transformative,
dialogical
Serious
playfulness
Complex meaning
potential, personala
solutions
Active
aesthetic
response
Aesthetical
distance
and frame
Conscious
experiment
with form
Contact with existential dimension,
meaning making
Figure 2. Elements in an active aesthetic response. (Østern, 2002).
In using different starting points (impulses) and in applying different modes of
aesthetic forms the transformations will be evident and present exciting challenges. There is a Bachtinian heteroglossia and polyphony in the different solutions, which develop the students’ skill in changing perspectives and looking at a
phenomenon from different angles. This is what Aristotle might have implied
when using the concept of phronesis. This possible development might at its best
be called empathy. This means that an aesthetic work with form will be an ethical work. Aesthetic and ethic will go together into one whole in the production
of meaning.
When discussing about who can go through an artistic learning process there is
one preunderstanding that everyone has an inborn desire to express him or herself. Art is a tool for man’s wish to express himself. To experience artistic learning processes is thus a possibility for everyone. Raila Leppäkoski (2001, 153,
my translation) writes:
At it’s best and at it’s worst I have some part of reality in me which can be expressed
only through art. This is called the famous inner must. One not so good circumstance
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is that this wish to express yourself often comes from some ”wound”, in other words,
I cannot express myself in a, for me, satisfying way in normal communication. This
communication break-down between me and the world art can heal. Often literally:
only through concentrating on creative work do I feel fellowship with myself and
other people. /.../ even emotionally disturbed, personality disturbed, asocial, narcisstic, self focused or otherwise assholes can create wonderful pieces of art by
communicating through creative work.
Everybody can express him or herself in an aesthetic way, and most people want
to, if they get an opportunity. As trainee teachers of an art form, the drama students reflect upon artistic forming processes and what these processes mean to
them, what these processes do to them.
The students’ voices
In this section I quote some of the voices in the group about what they wanted to
communicate or how they planned the performance. The material for the analysis consists of 17 students’ performances and reflective reports.
I am not sure about that, if when planning a performance you should be very analytic
and negotiative. For my part I trust my inner knowing, intuition, feeling, which I
have noticed that I have and I build my performance listening to my own feelings.
(Female 1)
An idea that is me absolutely. I could make my artistic performance about my director job with my pupils and especially about those principles which I have become
aware of in my directorship... I am strongly of the opinion that the principles I have
found, those I have not found at the university, but right from the soil from which I
have been raised... the learning history of my whole life. .. I was able to express what
I wished to say in an artistic way. (Female 2)
Usually my theatre performances have as the starting point a message. I have a
burning urge to tell something, based on which feelings arise in my head and finally,
supported by a nice group, a text I have written myself. (Female 3)
The background idea was to make sort of a portrait of me. A young couple’s relational problems influenced me when I wrote the picture manuscript. I took one theme
from my own life, which I thought could be relevant for many others, too. My original idea contained only pictures which should form a series of events, which repeatedly comes back leaving a question hanging in the air: is this really going to go on
for ever? (Male 1)
My aim was to transgress my own boundaries: I hadn’t performed a monologue like
this before. I now know how bad it feels, when everything doesn’t work out the way
you wanted it to. In drama what is at stake is life, and negative experiences are part
of life. You have to take them and grow outwards and upwards. I had a strong feeling
of shame immediately after the performance (Male 2)
Last autumn I recognized something from my past, which has strongly influenced my
wish to make theatre. In my first year in secondary school I was bullied because of
my thoughts. I was before that outward-going, after this I became more introvert.
Luckily for me the world of theatre was opened to me through my sister: it helped me
to go on and simultaneously I was able, through theatre, to convey things and my
thoughts to an audience to contemplate. Every play I have chosen to direct has had
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some ‘message’, which I also on a personal level have experienced as important.
(Male 3)
If I had a half year left to live I would like to make a new performance (”juttu”), a
qualitative, ambitious and appealing one, even better than the earlier ones, but not in
any more special space or more advanced circumstances than what I have done so
far. I don’t want to act in order to get something like a job or to become well known.
Of course I want to make an impact, but where it happens is none of my interest. My
wish to make theatre is less than before, or perhaps I do have the wish, it is only that
acting has become more than a pure wish to express – it is more like exploring what
it means to be human. (Female 4)
From now on I will not agree to do anything which isn’t an inner must in me. You
have to live the live the life from where you can extract your art. (Female 5)
I listen a lot to melancholic music and especially flamenco, which in my opinion express the deep feelings of the human mind. One piece I loved especially much. In my
empty home it spoke to me and often aroused a wish to move with the rhythm... I was
longing for my travelling husband, and I started to dance. (Female 6)
I was putting myself into the monologue actor’s role 100 % (Male 4)
In drama the use of symbolic representation is at the core of the learning potential of the art form. Through the use of powerful signs a significant dramatic
action can be constructed. Pamela Bowell and Brian Heap (2001, 72) point out
that: Once the drama teacher begins to understand that she has symbolic, iconic
and expressive systems of representation at her disposal she can begin to fulfil
the requirements of the drama more efficiently by plugging in to the most appropriate signing system. The systems of representation are described by Jerome
Bruner (1966) as symbolic (relating to linguistic function), iconic (relating to
visual or graphic function) and expressive (relating to the active, performing
function). Bowell and Heap mention that drama primarily is perceived as an
expressive art form and that is why drama teachers are tempted to move their
work into the expressive mode. In this task the students were asked to choose the
expressive mode.
According to John Dewey (1934) an experience in life can be transformed into
an aesthetic experience through poetic elaboration. This poetic elaboration is
dialogical and transformative.
An artistic learning process is described as one where the learning person
through a transformative process creates new relationships of meaning. The person obtains a new perspective on reality, himself, other people, nature, on life in
general. The Finnish researcher Inkeri Sava writes about artistic learning processes as transformative, and her main point is that the learning person through
these transformative processes forms a new inner reality. The concept transformation is according to Sava, thought of as a mental process of change within the
person concerning interpretation and meaning making. (Sava, 1993, 15.)
Thus an artistic learning process according to both Dewey and Sava can be described as one where the learning person through a transformative process creates new relationships of meaning.
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The tools for the analysis
I am in the analysis using three concepts borrowed from the formalists: fabula,
sjuzet and forma. I am also using three basic concepts from analysis of narratives (See also Culler, 1975 and Glandinin & Connelly, 2002) in order to find
the students’ constructions of the concept artistic (or aesthetic) learning process.
Jerome Bruner (1987,13) writes: Narrative imitates life. Life imitates narrative.
He interprets the formalist concepts roughly in this way:
Theme (fabula) – the timeless aspects of the story (the mythic, the transcendent
plight)
Discourse (sjuzet) – the sequenced aspects of the story, incorporating or realizing the timeless fabula not only in the form of a plot but also in an untwining net
of language
Genre (forma) – plainly a type.
In the next section of this article I briefly sketch what these narratological reading glasses illuminate about theme, genre and discourse.
Theme (fabula)
I have identified the following themes in the performances
What is important in life?
How to live fully?
Why must life have an end?
My life myth (a tribute to the gift of life)
Longing for love
The fight about the right to interpret
The starting point for the students generally was something connected to their
own existential situation and the performance an elaboration of the private into
something that could have a more general interest. Right after the performances
and presentations the fellow students gave a response to the performer. Actually
that was part of the intention with this task: to train the students to give constructive and authentic response – taking as point of departure the formulation of the
task according to the analysis model given in Figure 1.
Genre, type (forma)
The genres and forms chosen for the performance showed a large variety. I list
the types chosen:
Collage of poems
Monologue/film/music
Dance/ drums
Collage of songs
Video montage
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Portfolio presentation of a community theatre
Poems and pictures
Artistic portfolio presentation of basic pedagogical view (director job)
Performance of poem and music by the performer
Punk band concert
Actor in a play
Director job
Storytelling, participant theatre
The shortest performance was 5 minutes long. Many were about 10-20 minutes,
but some of the performances were works done for some other purpose also and
consisted of theatre performances performed many times for different kinds of
audiences. Three of the students, all male, were actors in productions where they
had also produced the text, either alone or in a small team. I have made an
analysis of what kinds of dramaturgical models are to be found in the performances. I have identified epic and episodic dramaturgy, circular dramaturgy, dramatic dramaturgy, simultaneous dramaturgy, melismatic dramaturgy and metafictive dramaturgy. In the students’ construction of artistic there is a conscious
choice of dramaturgy (See also Østern 2001 about dramaturgical models).
Discourse (sjuzet)
I am approaching the third part of the analysis of narratives, the sjuzet or discourse. The discourses constructed were varying, which also can be seen from
the dramaturgical choices. There were some performances which were rather
closed with a clear leading thought and one story told. Most of the performances,
though, had large empty spaces to be filled out by the audiences. Thus it is possible to identify one more traditional theatre discourse and to a different extent
open discourses where some male experiments with form leave very much to the
interpretation of the signs used to the audience. It is possible to connect these to
the ideas of post modern performance without one distinct story, with a space
and a mood, a polycentered performance discourse.
Conclusion concerning fabula, sjuzet and forma in the performances
There seems to be only one fabula (theme) in these performances: about life at
the utmost – the wish to survive, to feel alive, to communicate. The sjuzets (sequenced actions) are various and the (forma) genres also. In the next section I
construct the students’ narratives concerning the concept artistic (learning) process – as a conclusion of my analysis. I bracket the word learning, because I wish
to underline the preunderstanding that an artistic process is a learning process.
The students’ constructions of the concept artistic (learning) process
Here I take one example from a male students report (my translation from the
Finnish) about a theatre experiment where picture montage and monologue were
mixed:
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The production process was most challenging and I learned a lot. The strength of
theatre was again that I learned something new. How the shared responsibility is
something you cannot talk too much about. Artistically, I learned that from an originally good idea you don’t always get a good product at the end, because there are
too many circumstances making the thing a kind of a laboratory, where you try out
different modes of expression, different styles and different art worlds together. In
this attempt I still stand for our thing. The total smash was also almost tearing the
soul of modern man into pieces in the audience. For the producers it was a unique
peak experience, when we had calmed down from it. I still think that the value of
amateur theatre lies in the fact that you can transgress borders without any obligation to explain to anybody but yourself. It feels like not having to do theatre for a
while now, when I have done so much. (Male 5)
In this student’s construction of the artistic learning process it is possible to identify at least these characteristics:
It consists of experimenting, exploring and is a dialogical work.
It is transgressive.
It is a peak experience, something unforgettable.
The artistic process in the texts is described as a complex transformative process.
Memories are often mentioned as good material to be used in developing the
theatre concept. I sum up some of the features identified in the students’ reports
Characteristics of an artistic process according to the students
• Large empty spaces for the audience to fill out
• Existential themes
• Existential meetings desired
• Experimenting
• Dialogical and transformative
• Flow experience
• Complex process
• Memories important material
• Cyclical process
• Ups and downs
Most of the students had already been active as drama teachers in different contexts when they entered the advanced level program in drama education. In some
of the reports the students reflected upon their task as directors for other drama
students, as facilitators of arts education projects which communicate. I quote
(my translation from Finnish) a female drama teacher student. She describes her
director job in the following way:
/.../ [it] primarily was to support and encourage the students to relay on their own
expression on stage, to bear the insecurity and unreadiness and to interact with the
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others and not only concentrate on themselves. My job thus was to direct (and teach)
by building and trusting, not by critizising and tearing apart. Concerning the question about when art is actualized I wish to quote Raila Leppäkoski [2001, 151,158].
She argues that it is enough that you do some passage as good as you can or describe the event and your relationship to it. If the players intention is clear, the invisible phenomenon appears to be a total, artistic world, which is continuously
changeable and creating new. (Female 6)
Part of the creative process in drama and theatre is this unsecurity, you cannot be
sure of the quality of the artistic process but the intention can be formed very
clearly. As a conclusion of the analysis of narratives I construct the narratives,
which according to my interpretation, describe the students’ constructions of an
artistic (learning) process in drama.
Which constructions of artistic (learning) process have become visible?
Based on the analysis I can form three constructions of the meaning of the concept artistic (learning) process, according to this group of students. The narratives focus on personal experience. The first construction describes a position
where the teacher position is clear. The two other constructions do not contain a
teacher perspective, they are more focused on the artist position. A drama
teacher can consider himself to be an artist-teacher.
1. I am a teacher with competence in an art form and I know how to initiate artistic learning processes. In these processes I am guided by my total life’s learning process.
2. An artistic learning process is closely connected to my life history, my
deep memories. I use elements from my lived life in order to create
meaning through the artistic process. If I had a short time left to live I
would devote myself to communicating through my art form.
3. I experiment with the borders of art, I transgress the borders, I play with
the myth of artistry. I am postmodern, I leave the interpretations to the
audience.
The drama teacher has a mediating function staging the artistic processes of pupils
Depending on what kind of construction of the concept artistic the drama
teacher brings with him he will influence the artistic processes of his pupils in
the future, concerning how the pupils will work on arts ideas, on arts skills and
processes, and how they will respond to art and consider art in society.
Robin Pascoe has had an important task as constructor of the arts framework
curriculum for the arts in Western Australia. Robin Pascoe’s (2001)2 text can be
found in The Western Australian Curriculum Framework for the Arts, where he
2
http://www.curriculum.wa.edu.au
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has described how drama work gives the students an opportunity to develop
aesthetic understanding and arts practice demonstrating four outcomes concerning (1) arts ideas, (2) arts skills and processes, (3) arts responses and (4) arts in
society.
Concerning arts responses, Pascoe (ibid. p 9) describes how students display
aesthetic understanding when they use values and knowledge of the elements,
concepts, the past and present to understand their experience in the arts and to
draw comparisons and conclusions about the worth of those experiences. He also
points out that developing aesthetic understanding is a life long process, but arts
experiences in school and learning settings serve as important stimuli and catalysts.
Pascoe points out the importance for the learning of the student’s capacity to
make meaning by articulating their processes. In drama two key processes are
important: to articulate the process of drama as an art form and to articulate the
processes of thinking (decision making, choosing and problem solving). To support these key processes, the teacher’s mediating function is of decisive importance.
In this article I have tried to interpret the students’ articulation of the process of
drama as well as their process of thinking in their portfolios. This interpretation
can be made by the students themselves as a means of making their constructions of the concept artistic visible in their own work with students of drama.
References
Bagley, C. & Cancienne, M.B. (Eds.). 2002. Dancing the Data. New York: Peter
Lang.
Bowell, P. & Heap, B. 2001. Planning process drama. London: David Fulton.
Bruner, J. 1987. Life as narrative. Social research Vol. 54. No1. Spring, pp.
Culler, J. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul.
Dewey, J. 1934/1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books.
Leppäkoski, R. 2001. Ohjaaminen – mystiikan ja matematiikan välissä. In P.
Korhonen & A.L. Østern (eds.). Katarsis. Draama, teatteri ja kasvatus, pp.
151-162. Jyväskylä: Athena.
Sava, I. 1993. Taiteellinen oppimisprosessi. In I. Porna & P.Väyrynen: Taiteen
perusopetuksen käsikirja, pp. 15-43. Suomen Kuntaliitto. Opetushallitus.
Pearson, M & Shanks, M. 2001. Theatre/Archaeology. London and New York:
Routledge.
Wright, S. 2003. The Arts, Young Children, and Learning. Boston: Pearson
Education.
Østern, A.L. 1998. Dramapoetikk og estetiske læreprosesser i drama . Key note
at the the Norwegian National Drama Network Conference. Stavanger University Teacher College, 11-13 November 1998. (Published in the Network
Report).
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Østern, A.L. 2001. Svenska med sting! En didaktisk handledning med tyngdpunkt på modersmål, litteratur och drama. Helsingfors: Utbildningsstyrelsen.
Østern, A.L. 2002/3. Aktiv estetisk respons? – ett försök med litterär storyline i
årskurs 6. I Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning. Fakultetsnämnden för
lärarutbildning. No 4, pp. 37-55.
Østern, A.L. 2002. Writing-in-role and active aesthetic response in drama – Edvard Munch’s paintings and diary as pretext. In G. Backhaus & M. Itkonen,
Lived images. Mediations in Experience, Life- World and I-hood, pp. 456479. University of Jyväskylä,.
Østern, A.L. 2003. Art form into meaning in Process Drama – the Pretext as
metaphor. In H. Heikkinen (ed.). Special Interest Fields of Drama, theatre and
education, pp. 32-46. Idea. University of Jyväskylä.
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9. Relations – Transformative
Learning in Drama Education
Pipsa Teerijoki
In this article I sketch the manifold relationships involved in learning in drama
and gather significant elements from the field of drama education. My intention
is to reflect upon the relationships between things, people and ideas: how everything is in connection with everything. It is difficult to study relationships, because they change and are transformed all the time: the relationship to fellow
students, the relationship to your own life world, the relationship to the theme
and role in question, the relationship to fiction and the relationship to the
teacher. My guiding thought is to collect the building bricks of the drama education system, the aesthetic-practical-theoretical working process. The concepts
chosen in order to do this are at least dialogism, socio cultural learning, space,
aesthetic experience and transformation.
Drama education appears as a system or as a kind of social construction, which
can be studied as a whole through its manifold relationships. Through the study
of its structure I try to understand its possible ways of reacting and through that
its predictability, even if I am aware of the complexity of the interaction between
elements of the phenomenon. I try to elevate the good bricks of the system: the
bricks, which are essential for drama education in order to form a new relationship to the world through artistic means. The point of departure is to reach qualitative and significant relationships.
System thinking is connected to relationship thinking. It is even more a way of
thinking and being able to reflect upon the relativity of everything around like a
method of its own. Human activity systems differ from other systems in that
they can never be a system to be tested and investigated; they are more like a
group of different kinds of results, which are all in their own way possible.
(Checkland, 1993, 14.) I investigate drama education as a ‘soft’ and human artistic-pedagogical system, which underlines interaction between the individual,
space and time and also between the real and the fictive world. I try to mould the
characteristic features of this system: which elements it is built upon and how
the relationships between the elements function in the totality and under which
prerequisites.
The relationship to the other person
Drama is the most societal of the art forms: its characteristic is to investigate and
research a phenomenon together with other people. According to John Dewey a
person is always bound to other people, to culture and history. The social context
consists on the one side of individually important persons and on the other side
the community or the communities to which the person feels he belongs. Ac-
96
cording to this cultural historical view on man the human being researches and
tries to change the world. He acts and is critical about what he does. In his research as well as in his action the human being discusses and argues with other
people and thus continually reconstructs the view of himself and of other people.
(Dewey 1957, 21, 56.) The community on the other hand is able to rescue the
realisation of being a human being. Society may force the individual to be suppressed and does not give any value to him as an individual. This problem between the individual and the community is called the eternal dilemma of humanism. (von Wright 1987, 177-182.)
In drama man plays the main part as an active agent. According to Saarinen and
Niiniluoto (1987, xii-xiii) there is a connection to Heidegger’s philosophy of
being: the world not only exists, it comes into existence through action. The
decisive element in the existence of man is to be together with other human beings. If we try to describe and structure the view of man, we always do it in relationship to other people, to the world. Juhani Aaltola (1989) writes about a dialogical view. Human significances in the world are not organised through the
individual, but in common interaction situations, which show the inner sociality
of man. From the point of view of human growth it is decisive to investigate
oneself through others. (Aaltola 1989, 226.)
In this dialogical relationship in teaching and education and in connecting it to
learning I see my argument for not considering place as the first point of departure for learning in drama, as for instance Jonothan Neelands (1998, 10) does.
The place is simply not somewhere ready or defined by other people, but it is
brought into being among people through people acting in social interaction
relationship. Because of this the first principle in drama education is man. In a
context decided upon together man has a possibility to structure his own place in
the world and to study himself as a person together with other persons.
The dialogical relationship in teaching and education presupposes the will and
skill to understand the other or a wish to ‘play the same game’. To meet can
under other circumstances end up in the other person only strengthening his own
experiences and conceptions of the other. Juha Varto suggests one model of
solution regarding this problem of the dialogical relationship of the subjectsubject. He suggests as a solution some possible persons’ life stories, some restricted perspectives on the phenomenon, which are not true, but which might be
true. They act like training models for meeting the other person. As one example
of this way of studying the world Varto mentions literature. (Varto 1994, 112113.) I suggest as a better alternative drama, where the construction of a shared
world, a framed place can be realised concretely. It suggests possible life stories,
where the participant may investigate the perspectives and attitudes of different
persons starting from himself or through his own drama work. The relationship
does not develop only in the mind of the individuals, but in collective, bodily
and shared experience.
According to Bakhtin everything spoken is valued ideologically, emotionally
and epistemologically. We do not hear plainly physical words but ideological
entities; right-wrong, making sense – not making sense, good-bad and more like
that. Words are not recognized because of their concrete meaning but because of
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their value, relation or way of relating to something. That is why the words spoken in a dialogue from the listener and from the reader demand a certain attitude
and a reception skill. (Peuranen 1978, 461-465). Valentin Volosinov (1990) talks
about the same or about personal understanding of the signs. According to him
every person creates his own meaning in the signs, which is founded in that person’s previous experience. These experiences form a sign material. A sign is
connected to other known signs. This placing in relation is realised in social
interaction, whereas the contents of the sign are filled up and understanding becomes possible. (Volosinov 1990, 27-28.) Because the expressions gain their
meaning only when you are in relationship with another person, one of the aims
of the dialogical is to broaden the sign material in interaction with others and in
this way to contribute to more understanding. The world of learning thus is a
dynamic movement of signs, which we try to understand and understand again
and in this way broaden our own sign material.
Man is active in relation to the world. He tries to interpret it and obtain some
sense from it. Man is by nature a person who asks questions, like an explorer and
makes hypotheses about different things, which he later on tries out. Man thus
looks for potential meanings for things, which he can see, hear, feel and experience. The practitioners and theorists of drama have spent much time in clarifying
how significance emerges. Significance and its emergence are connected to
pedagogical goals and originally in drama educational context was defined as
developing and learning through drama. The concept “drama for understanding”
introduced by Gavin Bolton in Towards a Theory of Drama in Education (1979)
functions as a bridge to a new understanding of the concept significance in
drama education. Later on, according to John O’Toole (1992, 216-217) you talk
about deep understanding and about reconstructing the reality. This can be called
transformative learning. Significance is not a passive thought construction and
could not be defined as that. The task for drama is active: it does not passively
mirror life, it is more like a means of thinking of life, a way of structuring it.
The aim of education is not only to promote the organization of facts and to
reach a better understanding, it is also a revaluing of such things and values,
which can lead to emancipation, and freedom from prejudices and misconceptions. In order to start an emancipation process in the learner you have to awake
a process of reflection, where he investigates the sense of his own beliefs and
actions, which have become taken for granted in his own consciousness. His
own meaning perspective is formed by these experiences: the totality of these
suppositions forms a frame of understanding for his interpretations of the meanings of his experiences. In this direction, called critical pedagogy, the learner is
asked to bravely question his own meaning perspective regarding presuppositions and to investigate the sources and consequences of the presuppositions. In
this way he has a possibility to decide consciously, how he in the best way can
realize some certain action in his own life. (Mezirow 1995, 28-30)
According to Jack Mezirow (1995, 20) meaning perspectives are acquired in the
socialisation process of childhood, where the child is in a close emotional relationship with the family, other close persons and teachers. To form norms creates safety, which is first needed before you begin to criticise what you have
98
learnt. The possible future threat to these meaning perspectives acquired at an
early age and these habits is that learning of something new can destroy the defence and bring the person into an imbalanced position, where it is painful to be.
The aim of transformative, renewing learning is to free the learner from epistemic, socio cultural physical torsions. One can be able to do this emansipatoric
investigation concerning ones own life through investigating possible worlds,
the space of being, in a different way.
The participants in drama can build a bridge between their own world and the
world of drama, make a shift in perspective and start to see a new way and above
all learn something from this shift of perspective. When you are able to be the
other and to link the being of you and the experience of being the other, you are
offered the possibility of acquiring a broad, flexible and analytic perspective.
The world of drama contains fictitious and symbolic action, where the essential
is to participate in the play and to dare to use your imagination or wish to engage
in the nature of the activity.
When studying Neelands’ (1998, 10) figure of the basic principles of drama and
theatre, you may there distinguish the dimension of time, place and presence and
the relationship of the person to all these: where I am, when I am there and who
I am there. Even if presence is there in Neelands’ figure, you can see no visualisation of interaction with other people nor relationship to other people nor relationship to the lived experience, which is formed by the activity and by the realisation. It is important to note from this figure that nature sets the borders for the
lived experience of the person – he cannot be in two places at the same time, and
not in any time other than right here and now, and a person cannot be in any
place other than where he is at that moment. People however want to have the
power over nature or to change the frames given by nature and seek different
kinds of alternatives in order to realise them (Neelands 1998, 10). I think this
disobedience and wish to change the conditions defined by nature is one reason
for drama’s birth: people wish to experiment and imagine through playfulness
what it is like to be another person, to be in some other place and time. People
want to experience how to live in another way, which gives place to a new subject or a new perspective, which may make such impact, that they do not come
back as the same but as a transformed person.
Neelands describes the imaginative play of children and theatre for grown-ups.
The child finds out early, that he can be in two places at the same time or that he
might be in yesterday just as well as in tomorrow or that he can be somebody
else. The theatre of adults creates the same illusion as the child’s play. An alternative reality is formed in that way, that you get two experiences at the same
time –real social experience and imagined experience. (Neelands 1998, 10.) Due
to the form of theatre you receive the imagined experience either as an audience
to others’ acting or as participant in the creating of a fictive world and its happenings.
The relationship to space
An important part of constructing the fictive world lies in the wish to participate
and in the power of fantasy: they have the possibility to free people from differ-
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ent kinds of obstacles for learning, because they offer a space to be in another
way. I intend by space here physical as well as psychic spaces for learning. The
group designs an independent place in order to show things for itself and for
others, in order to investigate and create drama. In this collective way of working the potential of the socio cultural learning is visible.
The American social scientist Richard Sennet has studied the impact of theatre
on people. According to him the change has especially concerned the fact that
collective experiences have become fewer among people and instead there have
been more moments of individual experiences, for instance in film and television. People have become passive, viewers from outside. (Hornbrook 1994, 3-9.)
Despite their privacy, people long for collectiveness, communal experiences, in
which they have a possibility to really be present and active. The Norwegian
theatre researcher Knut Ove Arntzen described the changes in the world of theatre in the last ten years. According to Arntzen (2001) theatre has during the
1980s passed through a conceptual post-avant-garde period and in the 1990s has
gained a new variety of recirculated styles. This new type of signing and using
direct communication may be called retelling the world. The recirculation is
trained in the texts of theatre and in the styles of making theatre, but also in the
free interpretation of the signs of the theatre. “To hang around” is the concept of
expressions and experiences. It is a creation of a new sense of space in theatre
and in art in general. (Arntzen 2001, 1-4.) The space is created here and now,
everyone has a possibility to participate in the happenings and in the organization, where the world is created anew.
Drama tries to develop an activity which reflects forms, traditions and values as
well as a global spirit in a multicultural society. It also seeks an activity which
takes in new aesthetic forms and purposes as an answer to young people’s continually growing dramatic experience of films, TV, games, sports, dance and
music. (Neelands 1994, 6.) The drama experiences of young people are not restricted only to the theatre stage or actually it is possible to state that drama experiences are explicitly from places than other the theatre. Scechner (1989) also
claims that the intertextual changes between theatre and other performing arts
and the social representations have become so broad and so rapidly changing
that we cannot any more isolate them in a theatre ‘box’ in a productive and useful way. There thus exists theatre in the theatre and theatre in ordinary life.
There are happenings which might be interpreted as theatre, happenings which
might be brought to the theatre, where they exist as well as theatre and as a continuum of ordinary life. (Schechner 1989, 311.) The field of drama education is a
part of the spreading of culture and in going close to people. There the field of
drama as a place for art and learning may appear to be a field containing fragments, bits and pieces, ‘ugliness’ and unknown places. To distinguish this place
from built stages and institutionalised places I call this a “ruin stage”. A space
for artistic learning has emerged on a decided but free “being together” or
“hanging around”, through the ruin stages of the post modern world and it wants
to seek the borders for its existence, for its artistic activity and for its learning.
Culture has a decisive importance in learning, because all knowledge is culturally tied. Social and cultural factors have an impact on the making of observa-
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tions, on behaviour, on how abstract phenomena like time and place are experienced. No thing is detached, it is always contextual and interrelated. The potential to learn exists in all human activities or usual everyday conversations, activities and happenings. The characteristic of a human being is to learn from experience and to use it for good in the future. Not only the individual learns, but
communities and whole societies learn.
Lev S.Vygotsky has made an impact on drama education in underlining the significance of role play in learning as a creative possibility or learning potential.
According to Vygotsky (1982, 57-60) the child while he is playing learns to
think about what is here and now. Donald W Winnicott (1971/1989) also talks
about a potential space in his book Playing and Reality. Winnicott describes the
mental space between the child’s inner self and the outer life world, which is
occupied by play and fantasy. It is the child’s own framed and controlled place,
where he has power and responsibility. The experiences gathered through the
outer life world move in this in between space and produce new significances.
In drama education learning usually is described through four learning areas.
Hannu Heikkinen has in his dissertation summed up the views of Hamilton, Bolton and O’Toole concerning the learning areas in drama education. Different
genres, ways of working, drama processes and products open up fictive worlds,
where you can learn in drama, about drama and through drama. In this way you
learn about (1) the content or theme or the phenomenon which is elaborated
through drama, (2) about yourself, which is connected to personal development,
(3) social skills or in other words, how you act together to promote a common
goal and (4) the forms of drama and theatre. The learning in these areas is
looked upon as creative, common and active like an experimental process.
Drama education can above all be considered as a meeting place, a space, where
the group gathers in order to create, explore and watch drama. (Heikkinen 2002,
91-93.) Talking about meeting places, interaction or communicative processes
plays a decisive part, because the drama meeting place emerges or is constructed
together through these processes.
In drama education you talk about a double context or a context, where you simultaneously keep alive the fictive world as well as the social reality. This double consciousness (recently the concept aesthetic doubling is in use) is the core
of drama education. The place is not static, but dynamic and renews the culture.
The participant knows that, even if he is present in body and spirit, he is after all
in role and not himself. At the same time the participant is aware of the common
contract, where place and time are fictionalised and thus do not represent a real
place and a real time. (Heikkinen 2002, 97-98.) O’Toole (1992) has made a division beyond the real and fictive contexts, and has introduced two more contextual skills. O’Toole presents the context of circumstances, which means the
physical place occupied for drama, but also the possible time or other resources
reserved for drama in school. The context of the expressive mode, according to
O’Toole, means the making of a drama contract or an acceptance of the rules of
the game, in order to get drama to work. (O’Toole 1992, 6.)
In the drama world things start to happen spontaneously, when people function
together seeking and filling the place with their interaction. Nobody knows at
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which moment or what kinds of spaces appear, but the participants throw themselves into uncertain places, where time and space, people and their relationships
become more concentrated, are symbolised and transformed. In these interaction
situations sudden and fast transformations take place, the invisible becomes for a
moment visible and disappears again.
The aesthetic experience strives to maintain homelessness in life (Vatemo 1989,
61). tries to accept that the world cannot be controlled and that one after another
of our presumptions will fall apart. According to Saarnivaara (2000) this could
be a task for arts education: first to study and learn in order to tame and conquer
things and then to jump out into something new and unknown, where you are
outside yourself. Art and everyday life are mixed in soch a way that they are
experienced as threatening and disgusting, because the directions you have got
used to do not function anymore. (Saarnivaara 2000, 39.) Then you stand on the
border, in a liminal place, as Victor Turner (1982) calls it. There one direction
leads outside the borders and the other direction on the other side tempts you to
the familiar and safe, where you are allowed to hate everything intermediate and
incomplete. To risk and to shut out are, however, not opposites, but complement
each other in a delicate way. The border always moves towards a new place and
needs a new order: there will be a movement between belonging and being
homeless. (Saarnivaara 2000, 38-40.)
The relationship to artistic learning
Drama is one form of artistic learning. Björn Rasmussen and Peter Wright describe how knowledge is acquired in drama it is: to produce such cultural significant forms and opinions where as the human body, symbols, metaphors and
the fictive collectively created drama world all are used as mediators. It is
drama’s way to encourage and praise the lived and fictive experience, feeling,
intuition and creativity in different performative modes, the process of which
helps us to become aware of different things and give them significance. (Rasmussen and Wright 2000, 1.)
The nature of drama education is collective, orientated towards process and
seeking qualitative meanings, and it permits playfulness in its activity. Drama
teaching ought to be qualitative also: this means a clear value foundation to the
subject and not only a learning tool or the use of different techniques without
content and aims. It implies functioning in an aesthetic-fictive reality in an educational context using elements of theatre. Its uniqueness among arts subjects is
crystallized in viewpoint from the perspectives of two worlds. When good
knowledge of the drama subject is in focus, skilful teaching is needed as well as
a view of man, and knowledge about education and skill as art teacher. As a
consequence of taking care of the qualitative elements of drama there will be
better art as well as better learning skill – not only learning about art. Experience
and education only are not enough to make a person a competent arts educator.
You need a conscious view on artistic learning, the skill to study the individual
person, art and learning as one totality. It is obvious that drama and theatre lead
to a humanistic view on education and the opposite. Drama is a collectively
shared holistic representation of human behaviour, which we consider dynamic
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and ephemeral, offering a bunch of meanings. The paradigms of education today, like constructivism and postmodernism, which do not always fit together,
offer drama education a multidimensional perspective and support to its activity.
As a signal of this multidimensionality you note that drama contains the networking of messages, an analysis of the dialogue between power and status, an
embodied announcement of ‘the death of reality’ and an offer to have fun.
Drama has all the prerequisites to be the first really post modern art form
(O’Toole & Lepp 2000, 27.)
In the relation between the individual and learning personal knowledge is born,
that is information which is transformed into deep learning at that point, where
the knowledge at your disposal is understood. What kind of qualitative dimensions knowledge and knowing have and how these can be acquired becomes
visible in the system of drama education, for instance in the active acting of the
participants on the practise-theoretical stages of drama and as a critical processing of knowledge in these changing contexts. The questioning and dynamic relation to knowledge is visible in drama processes, for instance through investigation, by acting in different roles or in different situations where you neither give
total discredit nor choose the one, right solution. Knowledge is considered broad
concerning both getting it and integrating it. Knowledge is gained holistically,
transmitted by different senses, language and body from which so called knowledge skill emerges: experimental, conceptual, social and personal knowledge. In
the system of drama education knowledge is handled together with the activity
and reflection of man, all constructed, continually changing and negotiated.
The roots of drama are in change and in the movement of social and cultural
situations. It offers a living and continually changing place, where people are
active participants in learning from the voices of society and inventing new
voices. Because of this drama is the most social/communal of our art forms and
thus differs radically from other art forms. According to Sava (1993, 137) traditional arts education is not founded in conscious social interaction, where the
learning has a possibility to deepen, for instance through observing other people’s artistic producing, in the sharing of experiences and in giving your own
interpretations and to learn from others’ interpretations. Community contains the
idea of interacting and creating together with others (Courtney 1990, 23.). These
constructed forms of knowledge change continually, conveyed by new, complex
drama activities (Rasmussen & Wright 2000, 12.).
When talking about drama education drama has the task of teaching and educating which contains the task of supporting and promoting artistic learning. How
do you teach drama art and learn and how does it differ from other teaching and
learning? In the background of teaching and learning different kinds of basic
views on man, learning and art influence to produce different learning. A common trait for all these learning conceptions or learning styles seems to be that
something is growing or changing (Sava 1993, 16.). Sava classifies the phenomenon of possible change in arts education into three major changes. (1) A
quantitative increase or change is as a phenomenon the easiest to observe, and it
is often possible to measure it physically. The goal might also be to delearn or to
decrease different kinds of false expressions or wrong knowledge. (2) Qualita-
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tive change in arts education means a higher artistic-aesthetic level. This learning is more difficult to evaluate and questions of taste come forth very strongly.
Cognitive psychology and its art conception has developed a view about the
importance of the structural changes in the learning situation. (3) In artistic
learning structural change happens in combination with the spatial, musical,
visual and body picture models of thought in the learner’s outer world and inner
action, or in the artistic-aesthetic concept and fantasy systems. (Sava 1993, 1617.).
The quantitative change in drama education might be better knowledge of
movement, expression or the techniques of improvisation, about the terminology
of directing and about the history of the reformers of drama/theatre. When
unlearning/relearning you can change the manners in an actor’s expression or
improve voice use technique. A qualitative change in drama means a richer and
more personal role performance than before, a deeper understanding of the
themes worked upon, or a more challenging interpretation containing a larger
meaning potential.
The concept of change though seems like something from outside, something
you can observe from outward signs and which can be measured from outside.
Learning as change and increase of knowledge may be seen as a broad knowledge of, for instance, theatre historical style directions, as sensitive movement
series in dance or in skilful mime. These are important and rich skills, but they
are not enough to show in total the movements of learning in drama. A better
concept in this connection is transformation. Transformation describes the strong
inner creative process which artistic-aesthetic experiences bring into being. According to Sava (1993, 17) transformation aims at the inner process of the mind
of a person who is experiencing and producing (learning) art: making interpretation and transformative happenings. Though the individual creates new meaning relationships concerning the subjects studied in the artistic learning process,
he gets a new perspective on reality, himself and the surrounding life in general.
The transformative experience is considered to be one typical feature of the so
called post modern way of thinking where instead of being, change and becoming are stressed. Other essential characteristics are broadening the mind, and
through that an opening up of a new kind of awareness. Learning and educating
in post modern thinking strive towards open, multidimensional and constantly
changing interactional relationships, where its features are recirculation, a combination of chosen styles and an acceptance of new technology. In these relationships the local and ephemeral are stressed instead of the universal. (Sahlberg and
Leppilampi 1994, 159.)
Transformative learning is nowadays an issue also in the field of drama and arts
education and it is considered to be one of the dimensions of the aesthetic experience in artistic learning and its research. Transformative learning can simply
be defined as a form of learning where the learner through meaning construction
will be able to use his knowledge in new changing contexts. (O’Toole 1992,
223.) The views of transformation according to Sava and O’Toole describe people’s new relationships to different things. That is what learning basically is:
after a new strong enough experience the relationship to existing reality trans-
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forms into another. In drama these aesthetic experiences and the relationships
brought into existence through these events are doubled: when shaping the
frames for work and creating a role of your own, when acting in fiction, and at
the same time looking at the situation also from outside. I mentioned earlier that
transformation is based on a strong experience, which has significance. This
experience in itself does not fulfil the conditions of transformative learning; the
relationship to lived experience is of decisive importance. To reflect upon and to
verbalize the experience is of central importance.
The aesthetic experience can be considered a core quality in education. If education is presenting and communicating culture, it is from its starting point an aesthetic activity. The aesthetic project of education is brought into existence in an
experimental process, which consists of the activities in focus for the individual’s interest and to which people also strongly devote themselves. Through the
experimental process and the communication art becomes a unique part of the
teaching. Rasmussen (2000, 15) writes that drama is an aesthetic way of knowing, where aesthetic does not mean looking for beauty but a specific form of
activity and thinking in the Kantian style. Rasmussen is here following in the
footsteps of Dewey, who has also talked about drama as an aesthetic way of
knowing. According to Dewey the aesthetic experience is brought into existence
in interaction with the person acting and the material with help from a certain
conveyor, a mediator. These mediators contain a qualitative potential, an active
force. (Dewey 1934, 200.) In drama space, time and role function as the mediators of aesthetic experience and these appear in the real as well as in the fictive
context.
Vygotsky (1934/1986) and Säljö (2001) write that it is specific for the human
being that he apart from other species develops and use physical and linguistic
tools by means of which he can allegorically exceed himself. Even if these tools
are not necessarily parts of the body or intelligence (as simple examples, Säljö
mentions the pen, calendar and pocket calculator) and do not think themselves,
interaction with these give more resources for our disposal. We can solve problems and control social situations with the assistance of these tools in a way that
otherwise would have been impossible. This mediation (the original German
word is Vermittlung or to convey) is one of the most characteristic features of
socio cultural development. (Säljö 2001, 73-75.) In a drama context for instance
role functions as an intellectual/linguistic and even physical tool, which conveys
reality to a person in concrete actions. To be in role supports the study of different themes and contents or social skills making sense and offering socio cultural
resources for your disposal. Of course, we can also investigate and analyze the
“pure” role and study it in itself (like the characteristics of a camera or a microscope).
It is obvious that the quality of the experience changes when the level of participation, the dramaturgy or the performance tradition are different. I for instance
think of the level of commitment of the participants, the relationship between
being a participant or a spectator or the structure of the drama process as Aristotelian or non – Aristotelian. Lövlie writes that experiences are experienced in
relation to the self and the material and in the relation between the self and oth-
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ers. It will then be possible to create a three dimensional relation between the
creator (subject), the production (product) and the reception (the receiver). The
relation forms a dialogical manifold whole and within the frames of this whole,
the aesthetic experience will take place. (Lövlie 2001, 35-36.)
The experience is always an existing phenomenon, because it is the result of the
interaction between the organism and the context. Dewey differentiates between
two types of experience. An everyday experience does not presuppose conscious
reflection, it is a passive observation of the world and is not an individual construction. Dewey calls the other kind of experience the experience of fulfilment,
which is of its nature holistic and enriching and it rises above everyday experience. (Dewey 1934, 19, 60.) This dialogical negotiation unavoidably bring us to
the cross point of new and old, where you are used to things that do not work
anymore, and are forced to think whether you can go back or if you will take the
risk to try something quite new? At this cross point and border there is a possibility of creating something new, whereas the challenge of this moment gets a
new form and the preserved old form is brought to life by being placed in a new,
previously not experienced situation. Thus there is no basic being of experience,
which bursts out into flower or strives towards som certain goal. All that is, is
elaborated here and now and all that is created during process and products.
(Lövlie 2001, 37.)
The core of experience and education is not, according to Lövlie (2001) in the
inner world of the individual, but in the cultural context. The experience doesn’t
begin at any certain point but always in relation to another. Nor does it develop
from some primitive level to a deeper one, or from one scheme to another, from
one multidimension to another. Visually you could think of it as a broadening
spiral and not as the form of an iron arrow. It is a complex totality which is challenged and in the creation changes into another complex totality. The transformative theory begins and ends with the processing of an experience. The mood,
feelings and intuitions are part of the experience as much as concepts, discussions and the skills of practice. There is no reason to make a distinction between
actions and experiences as belonging either to feelings or to the intellect and in
this way try to explain creative action as either affective or cognitive. In this
experience knowing, feeling and even participation are all unified. (Lövlie 2001,
33, 37.)
New relations to the world through the means of art
Drama represents a system of socio cultural learning, which consists of a group
gathered to work / study / produce / and experience with in an aesthetic – educational frame. The individuals of the group have expectations towards each other
and aims for the drama work and of the dialogue between the real and the fictive
world. The qualitative transformation of the experience and the learning from
this is the core of the system. This is true for the dialogue as well as for the
group and for the individuals in the group.
I still want to specify the drama education space that I have called “ruin stage”.
Ruin does not mean that everything is finally destroyed, dead and worthless or
that nothing important could grow from it. Ruin may visualize something that
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existed earlier, for instance a cultural heritage, which is looked upon with new
eyes. Heritage somehow broken into pieces and thrown apart around us. It describes the insecurity and unpredictability of the world of art and the world of
learning, which we have to accept. Chaos and order live together at the same
time in these ruins and represent change and the coming of another kind of order. On this “ruin stage” more than one meaning or one value exists, furthermore
it offers a new kind of social and cultural structure, where the moral and political
values and promises which drama education elaborates, appear. It also helps to
understand the surrounding culture and its change. The “new families” and “frail
communities” hanging around on the ruin stage give new possibilities to understand these promises and changes.
In order to visualize “ruin stage” I present two different kinds of children’s playgrounds. One of the playgrounds is neatly fenced and the ground even and
smooth and the play equipment chosen and built according to strict instructions.
It is safe and nice to play in the playground and the parents like to bring their
children there. The other one is almost the opposite of the first. The playground
consists of ups and downs, ditches, old tyres and cable wires. It is not fenced and
is not even originally planned as a playground. It is easy to guess in which playground the children prefer to play. For them the latter park, like the ruin stage of
drama, offers disorder, distress and messy relations. As a learning environment it
also offers authenticity as well as enough complexity to be interesting and challenging. Above all both the group and the individual have the possibility to experience that they themselves can influence and build their own learning. Because of this the space has to be incomplete, in disorder, and even insufficient.
On the “ruin stages” drama education offers an alternative aesthetic. This kind of
cultural work does not contain finished texts or artefacts, but there are everyday
dramaturgy and poetics, social presence, creativity, meetings and happenings
between people. (Willis 1990, 15.) Young people are pragmatic existentialists,
who live without escaping and defiantly in this moment. Willis says that it is
worthwhile preserving the pragmatic nature of cultural work and realisation
everyday. Because drama education appreciates and uses a large choice of aesthetics, it also uses differences in the everyday grounded aesthetics of your own.
By difference I mean the existential interaction experience of collective improvisation which is transmitted by symbolizing and transforming through the use of
space, time, words, sounds, lights, objects and human action. Drama education
recognizes the principle that if every person’s everyday aesthetics is valued, it
opens up possibilities to seek, find and even use other more formal aesthetic
traditions. (Neelands 1994, 4-5).
In drama education firstly there are persons and the relationships between them,
the meeting of their life worlds. From this meeting there might arise the wish to
investigate and act in drama, or the emergence of a collectively created bridge to
the drama world. To elaborate fiction is at the same time to choose and create a
space, that is the person creates the space, the space is not something ready and
waiting. After all, it is a question of an artistic learning environment, it is also a
space loaded with purposes and aims. There are several crossing routes and
paths on this stage. They may point at the central elements of phenomenon and
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direct the participants to form their own aims and strive to reach them. The non
linear nature of drama highlights the multidimensionality of knowing and a way
of seeing which destroys the borders between different subjects. You try to
merge cognitive, affective, and mental dimensions together.
What results might be found in the system of drama education? I will pick out
some good aspects which might be studied as the results of a well functioning
system. The basis of the drama process is every participant’s own life world or
the scripts of the participant’s own life, which are placed next to intertwined
with, and overlap with the world of drama, which is transformed through this
process. Original, experimental dramas are born, where the participants function
as participating dramaturges and directors. They move in a dynamic way from
logos to mythos and back again, between different cognitive levels and develop
their dramaturgical thinking. Szatkowski and Lehman (1997) call this pragmatic
dualism. Their starting point is the difference between being in fiction and talking about fiction. The analyzing they call logos (theory) and the experiences in
drama mythos. At the same time the participants learn about their socio cultural
reality and simultaneously they change and enrich it. (Szatkowski and Lehman
1997.)
The central results of the system are multisensuous, physical and visual expressions. In drama forms you train to use body language, movement, gests and
mime and to investigate the meanings produced by them in yourself and others.
The objects, the stage design, the lights and the colours also act as means to
reach aesthetic distance. They participate in a process where you create as well
as study symbolise and the use of metaphors, which in turn have an influence on
the development of the drama. Also these aesthetic elements function as mediators, tools in the conveying of thoughts and feelings. The words and linguistic
expressions mediate the outer world, and make it meaningful. When we communicate with each other we become parts of experimental ways of sketching and
describing the world and because of them we are able to interact with other people in different actions. (Säljö 2001, 82.) According to Bolton (1984, 155) the
whole drama is its own language: a concentration of experience, a sign system of
its own verbally as well as nonverbally. By this he means the life form of every
art form, where there is formed a certain meaning for words and actions is
formed, which has its own metaphors and symbols in its activity form. In drama
you learn to think and talk in the language of theatre, which is based on the specific symbolic language and body language (Boal 1992, 247). Through this dialogue in drama you learn as well about content and form: When involved in
drama students use transformation to generate learning in two related ways.
Firstly it is used where experience and knowledge are transformed through representation into action, Secondly it is used to transform knowledge through the
creations of dramatic symbol. (Carrol 1993.)
The conditions for the functioning of the system
The system thinking comes from the need to follow, understand and plan growth
and change under complex circumstances, where the different elements of the
group interact with each other. There are four types of systems: natural, planned
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physical, planned abstract and the system of human activity, which radically
differs from the others. Every system has its own interaction and information
paths, in order to make rules and control function (Checkland 1993, 14, 83). The
American Peter Checkland gave a new direction to system theory, positing the
so called system thinking. It offers a flexible frame for studying the models of
solution for different systems, where answers to the questions what and how are
sought simultaneously. In his book Systems thinking, systems practice (1993) he
describes different kinds of rules for the functionality of the system. I will present Checkland´s rules (in italics) and try to answer how the system of drama
education which I have constructed works in terms of these rules.
A. The system has a continuous task or purpose. It might be something not yet
reached, like for instance keeping up relationships or transferring knowledge
according to an academic model.
Learning is the basic mechanism in development and developmental changes are
interactive: a person’s relation to different things, people and happenings
changes. The quality of the relationship transforms into another. Drama education does not represent the transfer of knowledge nor the container of knowledge, instead there are post modern characteristics, where the aim is movement
and the relation to movements, and not reaching a certain goal. The task of
drama education seems like a goal not yet reached, like a continuous construction, where the transformation might be impossible to predict and even chaotic.
B. The system has signs of appearance, like signals, which develop or fade away
in the realisation of the purpose or in reaching the goals.
The totality of learning in drama education is an open system, where the material
(for instance people’s stories, universal concepts or a play script), energy (a wish
to engage oneself and participate) and information (the meanings constructed)
wander in and out from the system. The measure of performance might be process or product, where the content and form are intertwined with each other.
These processes and products transform and are transformed, they concentrate
and get compressed and remain I a way not fulfilled and offer the participants
meaning. If you take up the offers, they develop stepwise: first the word, subject
or activity is read only as a sign (if they are read at all) and only during the
course of the drama might a meaning form in our mind (Bolton 1992, 23).
C. The system contains a decision process, which is made by different agents not
one person. Within the frames of this decision process the system can in the light
of A and B take it into its system.
I consider the decision making process as a commitment to learning and the
ownership of the knowledge. Part of the process is the individually made decision as to whether I want to learn something new, would I commit myself to new
knowledge and does the new knowledge have some personal meaning for me. In
drama education you talk about the making of a drama contract. Heikkinen looks
at the contract from two different view points. (1) The contract might describe
the frames and the borders for the activity. Together you negotiate which genre
and theme should be elaborated. You also decide upon the stage for the drama to
be constructed and upon time and its roles. With this contract I focused upon the
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form in which to do the work and it is important, that all commit themselves to
the rules, otherwise the system will not work. (2) The other contract is the drama
pedagogical content: the goals and targets and values. Heikkinen in this context
talks about “role protection”, which means that the deeds of the fictive character
not are evaluated through the real person but related to the role and the fictive
world. (Heikkinen 2002, 89)
D. The system has its own components, which themselves are systems and which
have all the characteristics of a system in themselves.
The system components in drama are the agent and the material. The person and
his surroundings form a system of his own and the material might be almost any
theme, event or story concerning human, social life – from which the drama
emerges. The aesthetic experience comes forth in interaction between the agent
and the material supported by different kinds of mediators. Every art form has its
special forms of mediating. In drama they are space, time and role, which act as
mediators.
E. The components of the system interact which creates different kinds of contact
points (physical contact, energy flow, material contacts or transfer of knowledge) in such a way that they make an impact and the activity can be conveyed
through the system.
A paradox is a state of affairs which seems absurd, or a statement that looks
contradictory, but still might be true. A situation is called a paradox when it
seems to be at the same time true and untrue: it at the same time creates boundaries as well ass freedom, obstacles and possibilities. The logic of the learning
system of drama fulfils the characteristics of a paradox. There you live at the
same time with rapidly changing perspectives in the real world and in the drama
world, in role and outside the role and with a theme which is not the actual
theme.
Logics are usually considered to be a conclusive argumentation, where a sentence or an argument is true or false and not anything in between. Thus the logic
in question is dual in value. In the open and interactive system of drama education the situation is neither true nor not true, but something in between, where it
seems to be unclear, like fuzzy logic. There the clear cut black or white changes
into different shades of grey. It is not a situation in which you ought to survive,
but basically a new, effective way of thinking and seeing things. Bart Kosko
(2001) defines fuzzy logic as multivalent and inexact logic. It means that in general it is a question about differences in grade, also concerning truth. This multivalent logic was founded and developed in research concerning the principles of
unfocusedness in quant mechanics during the 1920-1930s. The concept “fuzzy”
was taken into use 30 years later and it has spread to other, fields of science,
including the humanities. (Kosko 2001, 35-37)
The components of the drama education system agent and material seem to be a
connection according to the principles of fuzzy logic between the life world and
drama world, where role, space and time function as mediators. You cannot, for
instance exactly tell when the participants move from inside the role to outside
of it is, for example undressing inside a role or moving out of role or some place
110
in between, and how will this influence the transfer of information between the
real world and the drama world. In addition to fuzzy logic you also can find
traits of chaos in drama. Sometimes in drama, though you work intensively and
thoroughly elaborate the aesthetic form, the transformation does not happen.
Again at other times, in a very small and fast drama moment some strong aesthetic experiences might be brought forth. In the system it looks as though meaning is constructed by chance, and is impossible to anticipate and you might never
be sure, whether something is happening or what is happening. Still my presumption is that when all parts of the system I have described are existing and
function together in a dynamic way, even chaos somehow in balance and thus
the behaviour is predictable.
F. Outside the system there are other systems or contexts, which the system interacts with.
The learning system of drama education can be part of the school context and its
circle of influence. School can offer prerequisites for interaction, but it can also
be through its own regulation, hindering the activity. The school system can set
the borders, for instance, through the curriculum, the schedule or the organization of space. Systems close to drama education can be found in the learning
areas of other arts subjects. Cross curricular arts education might also be part of
enriching the learning world of drama.
G. The system has its border (apart from F), which is formally defined as a field
where the decision process starts and which influences outsiders.
Drama represents a system of socio cultural learning, which consists of aesthetic
– educational frames. The borders of the system are constructed by the group
members who bring with them their own life world to the “ruin stage”, where it
meets the drama world. The dialogue between social reality and fictive reality
initiated by the group creates the system. Tony Jackson (1995, 165) has created
four frames, which can be considered as frames for the system of drama education. They are the narrative, performative participating and exploring frames.
The narrative frame is the creator of the contexts, and when acting in role the
performative frame is in use. The participating frame is supporting and encouraging collaboration and activity and the exploring frame is an analytic support
when studying information and the meanings constructed in drama.
H. The system has its resources through physical and human participation.
In drama situations an active individual is working together with others in order
to make sense of the world for himself. To be in this interaction with others is a
sign of being a member of society. The human being is together with other human beings and this connection is necessary for growth and education. A
“whole” and committed person is needed as the maker of drama(tic) activity: his
physical as well as his mental resources, his movement and skill and his imagination and creativity. (Taskinen and Teerjoki (1996, 7)
Transformative learning in drama differs at least in two ways, connected to each
other from learning in other arts subjects. The first characteristic is the strength
of the collective. Even if you in visual art and especially in music (compare, for
111
instance, choirs and orchestras) you study in groups, you are still more an individual in the group than a group. I base my argument about this characteristic of
learning and resource as different from learning in other arts subjects through its
physicality. The choirs and the orchestras also function bodily, but in a static
way and at least not very often interactively. The energy or strength resource of
the drama group is especially the collectiveness and the physicality.
I. The system has some kind of guarantee of continuity despite some hindering.
This guarantee may emerge from the commitment of the participants or be support from outside.
Drama education as a discipline and subject for scientific research has been and
still is in a marginal position in the Finnish school system and universities. It has
no actual formally defined area, which is both a good and a bad thing. A good
thing, because it has been forced to find its form under the motivational pressure
of educational science as well as from theatre art, and thus drama has in a way
been pushed to motivate its right to exist: to do more and more high quality research, to develop its curriculum, to work actively on international connections
and in that way concentrate on creating a good system based on strong arguments. A bad thing because the resources to develop the activity have been very
scarce and the lack of legitimacy as well as not being a subject and university
main subject does not give drama education the opportunities to spread in the
world of education or as a vocational name.
The system of drama education
Finally I in Figure1 have visualised the system of drama education in the form of
a figure. Here I have given attention to the significant elements and the main
concepts from the point of view of learning in drama and of the human prerequisites for a working system.
112
Figure1. The system of drama education.
113
The area in the spotlight of the figure (or between the two arrows pointing forwards) is meant to show the area which I have tried to highlight in this article.
The highlighted sector is the drama world, which is placed upon, under, parallel
to or across the life world. In this sector you can find the good aspects, which I
started to look for and finally to pick. The dynamic arrows are experiencing and
doing in art. I have visualized the emergence of significances as a spiral, whose
most symmetric and partly unpredictable nature the progressing movement intends to clarify. The change and complexity of the relationships and the expansion of the sign material are shown as a stage to be constructed. I still however
use the stage only as an aid in my description, as a metaphor and it does not here
represent the traditional theatre stage. The figure shows and highlights gradually
the things belonging to the drama education system, such as a dialogical view of
man, the meeting between the agent and the material on the ruin stage, the construction of the drama frame, the use of space, time and character as mediator for
the offer of an aesthetic experience and for the creation of a transformation.
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