Staging education: practices, problems, and potentials of theatre in education.

Abstract

Theatre in Education (TIE) emerged in England in 1965 as a complex convergence of conditions that propelled theatre-based performance practices into school settings, ostensibly as a means for enabling radical educational transformation. However, as a set of practices, TIE exists within a set of contradictions, problematics, and occasional lack of reflexivity that can evacuate its potential for radicality. This historical and historiographic study explores the educational terrain in which TIE navigates, the conditions of its emergence and dissemination, and the narratives that frame its repertoire of practices in order to articulate the problems and problematics that make TIE a risky endeavor. Focusing on four aporias of TIE, the study asks if TIE is worth pursuing in the historical conditions of the United States and other nations in the 21st century, particularly in school(ing) sites that employ high-stakes standardized testing as a Foucauldian form of discipline. The study then makes several proposals for directions TIE practitioners must consider if it is to remain relevant as a transformational practice of theatre and education, including a constant engagement with a postmodern notion of ethics, a focus on a Freirean critical performative pedagogy, and the consistent activation of ludic play and ludic space. While looking to numerous TIE programs that span the history of TIE practices for examples and critiques of the problems and potentials of TIE’s practices from a bricolage of critical lenses including performance studies, historiography, postcolonial theory, Foucauldian analysis of power relations, and critical pedagogies, critical analysis in this study is chiefly rooted in specific case studies, including Pow Wow (1973)and Homelands (1984) from Coventry Belgrade TIE, The Giant’s Embrace (2006), Pow Wow: The Power of the Circle (2005), and Living with Macbeth (2002) from Theatr Powys in Wales, With These Wings I Will … (2007) from the Creative Arts Team in New York, and Parry Jus’ Once (1998) from Arts-in-Action in Trinidad and Tobago.