Classroom drama and theatre – a manifesto
I am suggesting that in this coming century we re-educate practitioners to think theatre. If everyone knows that everything they make is theatre then the term may indeed appear more often in titles, but more important than that is the desirability that all teachers would recognise they are sharing the same common ground.All drama courses, all drama activities will be seen as practising one or more theatrical genres. All attempts to weave new theories will have the basic principles of theatre as their shared point of departure.
(Bolton, 2000:28)
The late 1980s can now be seen as a watershed in relation to the teaching of drama in schools in the UK. At this time two events took place that were significantly to alter the way in which drama teachers thought about their subject. The first was the publication of the Education Reform Act (1988) and the (soon to be discarded) 1989 version of the National Curriculum for England and Wales – which included drama only as a subcategory within English.The second was the publication of David Hornbrook’s polemical and iconoclastic bookEducation and Dramatic Art.
It is well-charted territory that the challenges of this period had a profound effect on the drama teaching community. Since then, however, influential writers on school drama have – explicitly or implicitly – responded to Hornbrook’s various challenges in a number of ways. Writers such as Jonothan Neelands (1998), John O’Toole (1992), Cecily ONeill (1995), and Michael Fleming (2001) all made attempts to broaden drama teaching’s theoretical base and to reframe ‘drama-in-education’ or ‘process drama’ as legitimatetheatre practice. Gavin Bolton – a practitioner long concerned with exploring the relationship between educational drama and theatre – has also recently and persuasively argued (2000) that a broad conception of theatre should now be adopted and that this would allow drama in education to be regarded as a legitimate ‘subgenre’ of theatre.
By looking to the work of theorists from other fields of enquiry, school drama practitioners during this period began to develop a moreinclusive conceptual model of practice.
In general terms, they attempted to:
- Legitimize drama in education (or ‘process drama’) as a ‘subgenre’ of theatre in its own right.
- Clarify its relationship to other ‘mainstream’ theatre genres.
- Re-emphasise theatrical outcomes in their teaching, alongside more instrumental aims related to personal and social development and thematic content.
- Seek to clarify thenature of learning in drama/theatre and explore issues of progression and assessment.
- Acknowledge that a drama/theatre curriculum should bebroad and balanced.
- Establish a broadconsensus of opinion in relation to the preceding points.
As to the effect of these developments, recent writings on teaching drama have made much reference to an emerging consensus amongst practitioners and the widespread acceptance of ‘inclusivity’ as its watchword. Although many current teachers would include themselves inside this consensus, Mike Fleming, one of the writers who first identified the move ‘beyond the fragments’ of previous in-fighting and disagreement has since begun to question what is meant by inclusivity:
What exactly does an ‘inclusive’ approach to the subject mean? Does it mean that any form of practice is acceptable? Does consensus mean simply that there is a greater level of tolerance of different approaches, rather than a coherent theoretical rationale or consistent set of practices?
(Fleming, 2001:2)
What is beyond dispute is that the drama landscape shifted in decisive ways during the 1990s. As a result, drama teachers have sought to recast their subject in ways that are having profound effects, not only on what is taught in the name of school drama, but also on how and why it is taught. Some of this ‘post-Hornbrook’ thinking about drama teaching has influenced our own understanding and we identify some key elements in what follows.
In an early response to Hornbrook’s critique, Stephen Lacey and Brian Woolland (1992) provided an interesting analysis of then current drama teaching practice in relation to theatre – specifically, what they labelled as ‘post-Brechtian modernism.’ This interesting article was one of the first explicit attempts to root school drama in a particulartheatrical tradition. In so doing, the authors were consciously seeking to use the conceptual language of theatre to describe a particular example of teaching – in distinction to the assertion that drama in education was somehow outside ‘the aesthetic field’ (Abbs, in Hornbrook, 1989:ix).
Of particular note in the article were references to the similarities drawn between ‘Brechtian’ acting and the drama teaching technique ofteacher in role. Previous assumptions about role playing had largely assumed it to be qualitatively different to ‘acting,’ but Lacey and Woolland were able to point persuasively to conceptual similarities. Although Gavin Bolton (1998) has more recently explored the nature of classroom acting in some detail, others have looked to other traditions for theoretical models that would help to clarify this and other relationships. In our own work, we have been increasingly drawn to the work of contemporary practitioners consciously operating in a radical ‘art theatre’ tradition.
In his bookA Formalist Theatre (1987), Michael Kirby helpfully frames the issue of what is meant byacting in terms of the contemporary theatre’s ‘flight’ from naturalism:
As recently as the fall and winter of 1964 the Tulane Drama Review devoted two complete issues to Stanislavski; now the method no longer has the absolute dominance it once did in this country, and certain alternative approaches have attracted great interest. Everyone now seems to realise that “acting” does not mean just one thing – the attempt to imitate life in a realistic and detailed fashion.
(Kirby, 1987:14)
He also makes interesting observations about the general changes occurring in contemporary theatre practice that seem to resonate with the concerns of school drama:
Everyone now seems to realise that ‘acting’ does not mean just one thing – the attempt to imitate life in a detailed and realistic fashion …(E)very aspect of theatre in this country [the US] has changed [since the 1960s]: scripts have lost their importance and performances are created collectively; the physical relationship between audience and performance has been altered in many different ways and has been made an inherent part of the piece; audience participation has been investigated; ‘found’ spaces rather than theatres have been used for performance … there has been an increased emphasis on movement and on visual imagery.
(Ibid:14–15)
Kirby also provides a useful ‘continuum of acting behaviours’ in which he attempts to classify acting within a broader context of performance:
Acting can be said to exist in the smallest and simplest action that involves pretence.
(Ibid:7)
Kirby’s continuum of ‘acting behaviours’ provides a taxonomy that can be applied to all performance contexts from ‘not acting’ at all, through ‘simple’ to more ‘complex’ forms of acting. Interestingly, he also suggests that contemporary theatre has seen a shift away from the ‘complex’ end of the continuum, towards simpler, perhaps less naturalistic styles of performance. Viewed in this perspective ‘role play,’ commonly encountered in educational contexts, is clearly a form of acting and may legitimately be seen alongside other forms of contemporary theatre practice. Kirby’s analysis of non-naturalistic acting allows a number of classroom practices – including that ofteacher in role – to findtheatrical legitimacy. Within Kirby’s framework, role playing can be seen as consonant with the notion of ‘simple’ acting; neither less nor more legitimate as ‘art’ than other forms.
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