Critical Themes in Drama: Social, Cultural and Political Analysis 9780367723552, 9780367723590, 9781003154792

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
PART I: Framing the drama of these times
1. Introduction to the drama of these times
Musings on ‘these times’
So, what is the drama of these times?
The structure of the book
A critical stance
Core and recurrent ideas in this book
A hopeful book
2. Enduring inequity
Releasing or entrenching the ‘other’
Recognition and representation – who gains what?
Agency
Voice and testimony
Hope and possibility
3. Useful drama in neoliberal times
What is neoliberalism?
The decline of grand narratives: why a focus on individuals matters
How do neoliberalism and drama interact in these times?
Drama and governmentality
Conclusion
4. Dramatic democracy
The normality of democracy
The link between drama and democracy
Explicit and reflexive spaces for engaging the democratic paradox
Dramatic democracy in action
Acting and participating as a citizen: possibilities and problems
Conclusion
5. Creativity and the global education reform movement
The problem with this solution to the perceived education ‘problem’
Creativity: syllabus and policy discourses
Curriculum and drama
Drama pedagogy across the curriculum
PART II: Examining the drama of these times
6. Glocalisation: mythologising place and community
Global, local, glocal
Context: glocalisation and agency
Mythmaking place and ideologies of home
Imagined communities
7. Migration – dramatic comings and goings
Migration, nation and identity
Migration
Exploring migration through drama: imagining difference
Drama for migrants
Portraying and representing migration in drama: telling stories
Conclusion
8. The theatre of battle
Drama that heals the wounded of war
This chapter
The drama of resistance
Drama that incites war
The performance of war and terror
Drama that intervenes and disrupts war
Drama that remembers and commemorates war
The drama of dealing with peace
Conclusion
9. The drama of sex and sexuality
The public performance of sex and sexuality: celebration and identity
Sex, performance and politics
Drama about sex: pedagogy and efficacy
Conclusion
10. The health and happiness project: being ‘well’ in these times
Healthy drama in these times
Challenges in evaluation and funding of drama and health projects
The complex reality of practice in drama and health
Contradictions and complexities
PART III: Preparing for drama of future times
11. Climate change – a battle for our hearts and minds
The environment, climate change and drama
The role of drama and art in climate change
The public and private performance of environmentalism
The role of storying in our caring and aware-ing about the environment
Community and collective responsibility
Embodied environmentalism in drama
Conclusions
12. Digital+ destinies
Technoscapes
Social acceleration
Changing paradigms and changing language
Digital+ drama communities
Digital+ drama communication
Digital+ drama identities
Digital+ artistry
Conclusion
13. Imagining and acting in the extended present for unthought futures
The post-normal present, the problematic future
Drama and the future
Future possibilities for drama
Conclusion
14. The future looks bright?
Youth as hope/youth as problem
Drama in these times
Youth and drama practice
15. Enduring discourses of beauty, love and hope
The changing world
Pleasure – beauty, joy and play
Hope
A final note – remembering love and care
References
Index

Citation preview

CRITICAL THEMES IN DRAMA

Critical Themes in Drama is concerned with the relationship between drama and the current socio-political context. It builds on and contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations regarding the use, benefit, challenges and opportunities for drama and theatre as a social, cultural, educational and political act. The intention of this book is to canvas current theory and practice in drama, to provide an extended examination of how drama as a pro-social practice intersects with socio-cultural institutions, to link critical discourse and examine ways drama may contribute to a broader social justice agenda. Authors draw on a variety of theoretical tools from the fields of sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. This combines with an exploration of work from drama practitioners across a variety of countries and practices to provide a map of how the field is shaped and how we might understand drama praxis as a social, cultural and political force for change. This book offers drama scholars, practitioners, researchers and teachers a critical exploration which is both hopeful and critical; acknowledging the complexities and potential pitfalls, while celebrating the opportunities for drama as a practice for social action and positive change. Kelly Freebody is Associate Professor at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on drama, social justice, creativity in education and school-community relationships. Her teaching interests include drama pedagogy and teacher education. Michael Finneran is Head of Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, where he leads BA and doctoral programmes in applied theatre. His research focuses on drama, theatre practice, creativity and social justice.

Learning Through Theatre: Dramatic Opportunities, Engagements and Challenges Series Editors: John O’Toole and Kelly Freebody

This series commissions in-depth studies of the use of theatre and drama for the widest range of specific purposes – beyond entertainment itself – that involve learning. Contexts include formal educational settings such as schools and colleges, as well as social, communal, health, political, developing world, human services, war zones and commercial contexts. In the fields of applied theatre and drama education, three paradigms often define the purpose and the practice:  • • •

drama as art drama as education drama as social action and change. 

Books in the series tackle both the opportunities and the tensions among these paradigms: the developments, the challenges and the achievements in this still-growing field. Critical awareness and appraisal are a key feature, with some titles primarily grounded in theory and analysis, some more illustrative of good and bad practice. Authors include pioneers and established leaders as well as emerging practitioners and scholars. Critical Themes in Drama: Social, Cultural and Political Analysis Kelly Freebody and Michael Finneran Teaching and Learning Through Dramaturgy: Education as an Artful Engagement Anna-Lena Østern For more information, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/LearningThrough-Theatre/book-series/LTT

CRITICAL THEMES IN DRAMA Social, Cultural and Political Analysis

Kelly Freebody and Michael Finneran

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Kelly Freebody and Michael Finneran The right of Kelly Freebody and Michael Finneran to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-72355-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-72359-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15479-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

x

PART I

Framing the drama of these times 1 Introduction to the drama of these times

1 3

Musings on ‘these times’  4 So, what is the drama of these times?  8 The structure of the book  10 A critical stance  15 Core and recurrent ideas in this book  17 A hopeful book  21 2 Enduring inequity Releasing or entrenching the ‘other’  27 Recognition and representation – who gains what?  29 Agency  30 Voice and testimony  30 Hope and possibility  33

23

vi  Contents

3 Useful drama in neoliberal times

36

What is neoliberalism?  38 The decline of grand narratives: why a focus on individuals matters  39 How do neoliberalism and drama interact in these times?  42 Drama and governmentality  45 Conclusion  46 4 Dramatic democracy

48

The normality of democracy  50 The link between drama and democracy  51 Explicit and reflexive spaces for engaging the democratic paradox  53 Dramatic democracy in action  56 Acting and participating as a citizen: possibilities and problems  58 Conclusion  60 5 Creativity and the global education reform movement

62

The problem with this solution to the perceived education ‘problem’  64 Creativity: syllabus and policy discourses  66 Curriculum and drama  70 Drama pedagogy across the curriculum  73 PART II

Examining the drama of these times

77

6 Glocalisation: mythologising place and community

79

Global, local, glocal  81 Context: glocalisation and agency  82

Contents vii

Mythmaking place and ideologies of home  83 Imagined communities  85 7 Migration – dramatic comings and goings

90

Migration, nation and identity  92 Migration  93 Exploring migration through drama: imagining difference  96 Drama for migrants  100 Portraying and representing migration in drama: telling stories  102 Conclusion  103 8 The theatre of battle

106

Drama that heals the wounded of war  106 This chapter  108 The drama of resistance  109 Drama that incites war  110 The performance of war and terror  112 Drama that intervenes and disrupts war  114 Drama that remembers and commemorates war  117 The drama of dealing with peace  119 Conclusion  122 9 The drama of sex and sexuality The public performance of sex and sexuality: celebration and identity  125 Sex, performance and politics  128 Drama about sex: pedagogy and efficacy  130 Conclusion  135

124

viii  Contents

10 The health and happiness project: being ‘well’ in these times

137

Healthy drama in these times  140 Challenges in evaluation and funding of drama and health projects  142 The complex reality of practice in drama and health  143 Contradictions and complexities  146 PART III

Preparing for drama of future times

151

11 Climate change – a battle for our hearts and minds

153

The environment, climate change and drama  154 The role of drama and art in climate change  155 The public and private performance of environmentalism  156 The role of storying in our caring and aware-ing about the environment  157 Community and collective responsibility  161 Embodied environmentalism in drama  163 Conclusions  164 12 Digital+ destinies Technoscapes  168 Social acceleration  170 Changing paradigms and changing language  172 Digital+ drama communities  175 Digital+ drama communication  176 Digital+ drama identities  177 Digital+ artistry  179 Conclusion  181

167

Contents ix

13 Imagining and acting in the extended present for unthought futures

182

The post-normal present, the problematic future  183 Drama and the future  185 Future possibilities for drama  190 Conclusion  191 14 The future looks bright?

193

Youth as hope/youth as problem  194 Drama in these times  196 Youth and drama practice  198 15 Enduring discourses of beauty, love and hope

201

The changing world  201 Pleasure – beauty, joy and play  203 Hope  204 A final note – remembering love and care  207 References Index

208 231

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has emerged from our collaboration with our drama education and applied theatre colleagues around the world. It reflects countless inspiring discussions and arguments that have taken place in classrooms, conferences and pubs over the decades. We want to acknowledge the incredible field we work in, full of scholars that share a commitment to critical reflection on and personal dedication to the work of drama and theatre for social, personal and political change. Special thanks to John O’Toole our mentor and friend for his careful, if not gentle, feedback through the process. (Kelly personally apologises for the myriad of grammatical errors he needed to wade through during drafting phases). It’s always a privilege to work with such a thoughtful scholar. Thanks to the team at Routledge for the support throughout the many years of this book.  From proposal through to final draft the editorial team has been supportive and efficient, which has helped us to write the kind of book we wanted to. Kelly would like to thank her family for the patience and support, particularly Ewan, Harriet and Theo, for the joy they bring, their constant love and the often-welcome distraction of having to prepare school lunches. Also, a shout out to Michael Anderson, Alison Grove-O’Grady, Rachael Jacobs and Kate Smyth for being extraordinary colleagues and friends. Michael would like to thank all his family for their love, support and patience with the frequent absences, especially Jean, and Mary and Tim (Mam and Dad). Thanks also to my wonderful colleagues Fiona McDonagh, David Clare, Dorothy Morrissey and Carole Quigley, and to research students Emma Fisher, Aideen Wylde, Norma Lowney, Laura McEntee and Shane O’Neill, each of whom has individually shaped some of the thinking in this book.

Part I

Framing the drama of these times

1 INTRODUCTION TO THE DRAMA OF THESE TIMES

“Theatre is a messy business, irremediably muddled up in the world.” (Rae, 2009, p. 38) This book has grown out of equal parts discomfort and fascination with these times. With the rise of a new global order of politics, there is a profound sense that the world is in the midst of a period of significant rapid change: Brexit; the rise of Trump; ISIS; global conflict; Putin’s Russia; the democratic crisis in Turkey; ongoing environmental change and decline. During the final 6 months of writing this book, we wrote against the backdrop of catastrophic bushfires in Australia, a global pandemic resulting in large-scale lockdown of populations, a resurgence of the black lives matter resistance after the killing of George Floyd and deep civil unrest at the impending Presidential election in the US. The times are challenging. The way we communicate, represent, create and connect in these times are multifaceted, instant, immersive, exciting, concerning and pervasive. With that diversity and immediacy of communicative and representational modes comes challenges to better understand art, knowledge and truth. In the edited volume from which this book emerged, Drama and Social Justice (Freebody & Finneran, 2016), Gallagher examines ‘our times’ with particular attention to rising inequality and the role of neocapital interest in ‘foreclosing the possibility of social justice’. She makes us uncomfortable by questioning whether, “in the face of mounting evidence of growing global inequality…a theory of drama and justice is possible” (Gallagher, 2016a, p. 55). This book begins with this question. Is it possible to contribute to a justice-informed theoretical understanding of drama in these times? Rather than providing a clear answer to this question, we aim to critically locate the social, political, cultural and aesthetic role of drama in institutions and

4  Framing the drama of these times

communities in a way that speak to the purpose and implications of such work. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to initiate discussions, queries, musings and concerns that we hope to draw on throughout the volume in more targeted ways in order to establish the ‘long game’ of the book. Although each chapter looks to a specific theme, there are key discussions that we position throughout the text so the reader can cumulatively establish their own theoretical depth and breadth from engaging with our consideration of key concepts.

Musings on ‘these times’ We suspect how one understands ‘these times’ is as much about personal preference as it is about theoretical considerations. Some, such as Robertson (1995), develop relatively neat explanations of how these times operate. He suggests the contemporary world has crystallised around the changing relationships, conflicting interpretations and different emphases on four elements that make up the current global-human condition: ‘societies, individuals, the international system of societies and humankind’ (p. 35). Geertz (1985) is more poetic in his explanation, suggesting that the un-defined, interlinked, scrambled way social spaces are merging as we see unprecedented mixing of cultures and it is like living in a collage. He notes that ‘confronting landscapes and still lifes is one thing; panoramas and collages quite another’ (p. 272). Far from a passive observation, Geertz goes on to suggest that our response to these panoramas and collages is, ‘one of the major moral challenges we these days face’ (p. 273). Despite a different approach to thinking about ‘these times’, Geertz shares Robertson’s focus on recognising the elements of how these times have crystallised and how they can be understood: To live in a collage one must in the first place render oneself capable of sorting out its elements, determining what they are … and how, practically, they relate to each other, without at the same time blurring one’s own sense of one’s own location and one’s own identity within it. (Geertz, 1985, p. 274) In this book, we are obviously interested in theorising these times, but perhaps more so in understanding their pieces, and how they fit together. Our intention is to unpack, unpick, piece together and connect the theories, practices, myths, intentions, representations and empirical understandings of drama in these times, to build a picture of drama. Throughout the text, you will encounter ideas of these times ranging from the descriptive [post-normal (Sardar, 2010)], to the causal [social acceleration (Rosa, 2003, 2013)], to the critical [culture of cruelty (Giroux, 2012)] to the hopeful [aesthetic

Introduction to the drama of these times 5

education (Spivak, 2012)], to the revolutionary [pedagogy of insurrection – (McLaren, 2015)]. In response to the collage, we offer a bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) of complementary insight that allows you to find your own perspective on these times. Returning from the collage/bricolage back to the landscape, in order to conceptualise the whole, throughout the volume, we draw upon the work of anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, as a way in which to map these times. Appadurai describes a series of ‘global flows’ which create (dis)junctures between economy culture and politics. These are: • •

• • •

Ethnoscapes – the movement of people. Mediascapes – the production and dissemination of information (serving public and private interests globally). They tend to be image centred, narrative-based accounts, ‘out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as others living in other places’. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 35). Technoscapes – fast moving, fluid technologies and their distribution. Financescapes – the disposition of global capital. Ideoscapes – ideologies of states and counter ideologies of movements.

According to Appadurai, the suffix ‘scape’ refers to the fluid and irregular shapes that make up landscapes – they are ‘deeply perspectival constructs’ and ‘the building blocks of what I would like to call imagined worlds’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). Appadurai’s flows allow us to at once understand the broad phenomenon and engage with its constituent parts. This allows us to connect with that which we are ultimately most interested in; how these times impact upon drama and how drama can be a force with which to respond to it. We want to provide new perspectives on how drama functions within the fast-paced, overlapping, (dis)junctures of global flows and their influence on the politics of global culture (Appadurai, 1996). In considering the diversity of perspectives on the landscapes we discuss, we issue a gentle provocation to the reader embarking upon this text. We have an obvious ‘pro-social’ theme running throughout this volume. We are not apologetic about this; it is something that is important to us as scholars and practitioners, indeed as people. One of the reasons we find drama important is because of its ability to bring people together, to build community, to develop empathy and share a common humanity (Hughes, 2016; Neelands, 2009a, 2016). We acknowledge, however, that Gallagher suggests that a theory of drama and social justice, if possible, ‘must, before all else understand that the very notions of “the common good”, “the collective”, “cooperation” and self-other relations, only come into meaning through the ways in which we use them’ (Gallagher, 2016a, p. 63). Geertz (1985, p. 274) too cautions us against “vacant murmurs of common humanity” suggesting it can lead to a ‘to-each-his-own indifferentism’. He suggests that learning how to embrace

6  Framing the drama of these times

diverse lives and perspectives without attention to their role in ‘a common humanity’, ‘is a skill we have to arduously to learn, and having learnt it, always very imperfectly, to work continuously to keep it alive’ (p. 274). Our caution and potential contradiction for the readers of this book is to bring with them both as they need distance and nearness; critique but also belief; and empathy and immersion. How can we make our role as members of ‘the collective’ useful without allowing ourselves to be too comfortable and self-congratulatory? How do we ensure that the collective do not unwittingly constrain our thinking? How do we honour pro-social perspectives without requiring social conformity or ‘correctness’? At this point, we should also take a moment to position both of ourselves within the collective, the landscape and the collage/bricolage. Our identities need some explanation given that socially just perspectives drive this book, and identity and ideology are at the heart of both concepts are understood. We are both white academics, working in our native countries (Ireland and Australia). We identify as he/his (Michael) and she/her (Kelly) and we are amongst the most privileged of our people having received the full benefits of a university education, and the stability and mobility afforded by having permanent full-time faculty positions in the university sector. Naturally, our identities are much more complex than that, but we acknowledge that we fit relatively archetypal understandings of Irish and Australian identities, respectively. We both have some trouble with that, given that our countries are constituted of indigenous populations, diverse ethnic groups as well as multiple religions and peoples of varying national backgrounds. This diversity of national representation is important to both of us, and we are biased in that regard around identity. Ideologically, we are both progressive educators and critical thinkers in the long 20th century tradition of those schools of thought. We believe in education for a better world for all, not just the privileged, and we both share a belief that the arts, and particularly drama, is key to how that might be achieved. We are also firmly of the belief that lack of access to drama and the arts more broadly is a marker of disadvantage globally, and we are deeply cognisant that the work we engender and write about is not available to many who need the benefits of its nourishment most of all. Our personal identities are tied up in our national identities, something which is dwelt upon in greater detail in the chapter on migration. In order to better understand us, it is worth dwelling upon it for a moment here. Migration is a touchstone issue for both of our countries, but it is a potent lens through which to reflect the caution and complexity required to approach many of the dynamic issues contained in this book. Storytelling has a tendency to reduce the multifaceted to the linear, particularly areas as potent as the many of which we seek to tell and understand here. History teaches us that migration has been a facet of human behaviour for as long as we have told our stories. In Irish folklore, there is a tale of

Introduction to the drama of these times 7

Brendan the Navigator setting out to spread Christianity by sailing forth in leather-clad boat in the 5th century and reputedly discovering America. If he did indeed reach America, he was the first of many generations of Irish people to travel west; some to escape famine, some to help build the New World, some to seek opportunity and fame. It could be argued that Brendan set the tone for a tradition of Irish migration – some 100 million people claim membership of the Irish diaspora, outnumbering the population of the island by a factor of 20. Equally, many people have come to live in Ireland; some peacefully, others forcibly. The Celts, the Vikings, the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons and the British have all called Ireland home over 2,500 years. British invasion, planting and the eventual conquest of Ireland led to 800 years of sporadic rebellion, slaughter and warfare, and remains to this day a contentious issue in the state of Northern Ireland in the North Eastern corner of the island. In the Republic of Ireland, a largely clerically repressed and culturally homogenous nationalistic state existed throughout the 20th century. Irishness was represented in singular ethnic and religious terms, deliberately ‘forgetting’ the genetic riches of previous waves of migration. That has now been supplanted by the reality of a state in which up one in six of the current residents were born off the island. That figure is not to suggest that it is an oasis for newcomers: immigration laws are notoriously tight; migrants with claims for refugee status are housed in ‘direct provision’ centres until they are (slowly) processed and which have been the subject of much controversy; racism is a facet of Irish life and the loathsome fearmongering of the far-right is emergent. Australia’s relationship with migration is even more complex. First colonised by white Europeans from 1788, Australia was home to indigenous (Aboriginal) Australian peoples for 50,000–120,000 years previous to that. British-led settlement brought dispossession, disease and genocide and resulted in a white-led nation where universal suffrage was only extended to Aboriginal citizens in the 1960s, and where their communities remain highly disadvantaged by all metrics. No settlement has ever been reached between the colonisers and the indigenous nations. In contemporary times, Australia has enacted a strict immigration policy to deter illegal migrants, while continuing to welcome skilled and unskilled economic migrants into the country to service an expanding population and economy. The harsh policy regarding illegal migrants involves the turning back of small boats containing people without papers, who are subject to mandatory detention. Some of these people are housed offshore rather than let them reach Australian shores, in notorious detention camps on Manus, Papua New Guinea and on Nauru Island in the Pacific. For all these complexities and deficiencies, our nations remain amongst the world’s most privileged, progressive and pluralistic democracies, generally with high levels of educational attainment, health outcomes and political stability. Our identities as the authors of this book are wrapped up in

8  Framing the drama of these times

these national identities. They are complex, emergent, critical, dynamic but ultimately privileged. Our understandings of war, migration, poverty and violence are through the study of these areas and through working with those affected, rather than as a result of being directly affected ourselves. In this text, we seek to use our unique position as both insiders to drama practice and communities, and outsiders to the experiences of many of the participants we write about, to engage in a critical exploration of the drama of these times.

So, what is the drama of these times? It seems that every drama book must begin with a discussion of what it considers drama. That is a study in itself. We know that there are sectoral and at times power-related issues regarding how we label what we do. This is territory well-charted in theatre studies, drama education and in applied theatre research. The range and diversity of terminology reflects what is privileged, preferred, understood and accepted as much as referring to different practices and theoretical perspectives in the field of drama and theatre. It also accurately reflects the range of global and context-specific practices as well as the assortment of ways in which it is understood that they operate. We have, as much as possible, tried to be appropriate and inclusive in our terminology. We are, however, attempting to map a broad and complex terrain, and therefore require (and ask of our readers) some license to use and adapt terms in ways that are at times more nuanced and at times blunter than might be preferred. To that end when discussing practices and ideas in this book, we simply use the word drama. In doing this, we willingly incorporate and perhaps appropriate a huge range of theories and practices across the spectrum of theatrical and dramatic activity: mainstage theatre practice, applied theatre, drama education, street theatre, drama therapy, theatre for development, community theatre and performance art and myriad other variants and emergent practices. We chose ‘drama’ rather than ‘theatre’ (which was the other obvious choice) for reasons of etymology and history. The Greek origin of the word drama is ‘to do’, which we felt holds active connotations of agency and action. The Greek origin of theatre is to ‘behold’, which we felt draws more on passive notions of witnessing. While either would have been appropriate given their modern use, it seemed to us that much of the work we discuss here has a specific change-orientation and aspires to being agentive. We consider drama porous enough as a word to allow all from playwright to primary teacher to performance artist to locate themselves somewhere within it. When discussing particular instances of practice or topics, we use more nuanced language to describe or orient to particular alignments to sub-fields. Our personal histories come into this equation as well. We are both former drama teachers. Kelly works in university teacher education, particularly

Introduction to the drama of these times 9

in the arts, applied drama and social justice. Michael, having worked in teacher education, now runs a theatre studies programme with a strong applied theatre orientation and practices as a theatre artist. Our shared narrative comes from our background in drama in education/process drama and our graduate training in those domains with two of the senior figures of the field (John O’Toole and Jonothan Neelands, respectively). This was the drama we began our professional lives with, but for both of us, it has evolved quite significantly in terms of form, mission and perception. Drama in these times functions at both the macro and micro level. It is used to shape and spread messages and ideologies through ever diversifying and sophisticated forms of theatrical practice. It is also used to unpick those messages and ideologies. Drama retains the potency to make meaning at the global level, but also profoundly at the local and personal level. Drama is used by these times in public institutions, local communities and in personal relationships to influence and shape public and personal meaning-making, as a way of teaching, to inform actions which might lead to individual and societal change. Drama and performance are nested concepts. The dramatic cannot take place without some element of the performative. Traditional modes of drama education and applied theatre scholarship have not probed this relationship in much detail, perhaps mindful of the separation of powers seemingly demanded by the received rules of the drama classroom versus those of the rehearsal room or theatre stage. This forced distinction is now less relevant than ever thanks to the bridging scholarship of Nicholson (2005, 2009, 2011) and the emergence of performance as a powerful mode of research methodology and presentation, resulting in the sort of genre-blurring thinking around the performative and the applied such as that undertaken by Haseman (2015). Nonetheless, it feels important for us to name the space in which we play and the worries it provokes for some: The worry often, with the kind of cross-disciplinary work that I am attracted to, is that theatre, and theatre studies as a discipline, might be weakened by shifts toward theatre as framework. The old pure-versus-instrumental argument rears its head. But I have never experienced this divide as self-evident, and while I am interested in all kinds of theatre, I have been especially interested in socially engaged theatre, or theatre that is in some kind of sustained relationship with specific populations, politics, or community purposes. (Gallagher, 2015b, p. 83) In order to best understand drama in these times, performance is as much a part of our discourse as any other facet of dramatic endeavour in this volume, even if typically, it has a strong socially engaged flavour. That usage is quite open. In much the same way that drama education has had a destructive process/product dichotomy, theatre studies and performance studies

10  Framing the drama of these times

have had a parallel divergence that has threatened instability on both fields something extensively probed and refuted by Madison and Hamera (2006). As is the case with the overall tone of our scholarship in this book, we wish to acknowledge and borrow from this tension but not be bound by it. We happily play between community centre, classroom and stage; between drama utilising bespoke elements of performance, drama as performance and the performance of everyday life, including the critical and gendered idea of performativity. This freedom of movement through and around these concepts gives us the scope to play between the landscape and the collage of these times. We argue that drama in these times occupies a complicated, multifaceted space: The theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts to the fringes, from the rituals of government to the ceremony of the courtroom, from the spectacle of the sporting arena to the theatres of war. Across these many forms stretches a theatrical continuum through which cultures both assert and question themselves… theatre and performance have been deployed as key metaphor and practices with which to rethink gender, economics, war, language, the fine arts, culture and one’s sense of self. (Harvie & Rebellato, 2009, p. vii) In the book, we explore how drama intersects with a series of key socio-political and cultural contexts evident in these times to map how this ‘rethinking’ is happening. We are inspired by Guattari’s (1995, p. 61) notion of schizoanalysis – ‘rather than moving in the direction of reductionist modifications which simplify the complex’, we aim to find comfort in the multiplicity and complexity of the ideas in this volume, and work towards making them more complex by examining the multiple intersections between them and acknowledging the many gaps and silences in our exploration of the themes. We are inspired also by contemporary feminist theory, urging intersectionality in the quest for more equitable meanings about those who are most disadvantaged because of their positioning at the intersection of issues such as gender, race and sexuality. We offer this as an inherently creative type of scholarship, befitting post-modernity (also of these times), refuting reductivism and embracing transdisciplinarity and complexity in our search for greater understanding and insight into our work in bridging theory and practice (Montuori, 2013).

The structure of the book The discussion in the book is organised around 14 themes grouped in three categories. These themes are chosen as they represent what we believe not only to be significant in current socio-cultural and political thought, but

Introduction to the drama of these times 11

crucially also because they are places in which drama is found. Each chapter draws upon relevant theoretical and popular literature to discuss the theme, examine drama practice from around the world, and connect the way in which drama both is impacted upon by these times, but in turn itself potentially impacts upon these times. We have written each chapter in such a way that it acts as an essay in its own right, while simultaneously connecting and interweaving the story of drama practice and potential. There is no set way in which each discussion has been constructed. The themes dictate the shape of the conversation, whether in theory or practice, in breath or in narrowness. Throughout we have sought to maintain a frequent spotlight on practice, and a commitment to the principles discussed later in this chapter. These spotlights on practice are not necessarily projects that we have had anything to do with, but rather accounts that exist publicly in the field about work that has happened all over the world. The spotlights are also not intended to communicate key idea – rather they are examples we use to provide context and direction in our discussion. We use the spotlights not to judge the work as good or bad, worthwhile or not, effective or otherwise. Instead, we showcase them as examples of a type of drama work that relates to the theme in hand. We unpack what we know about the work, which in this case is how the work is written about, rather than the work itself, in order to explore the socio-political and cultural discussions about how drama intersects with these times. Some spotlights are quite detailed, while others may involve only minimal information to provide the reader with a real case or exemplar to connect the theoretical discussions with practical work currently happening in the field. As we hope is clear at this juncture, the process that by which we are compiling this book is by no means a neutral, well-rounded, non-biased, undertaking. First, we acknowledge at the outset that this exercise is exploratory rather than comprehensive. There is a vast array of drama practices and projects globally and no possibility whereby two people, or even a team could capture and critique it all. Second, as critical scholars, we argue that the so-called ‘neutral mappings of fields’ are irresponsible generalisations and their presentation of socio-cultural and political constructs as morally neutral and outside of a relevant cultural frame is not useful. We, and our writing, are by-products of the identities and ideologies we spoke of earlier. There are three elements to the current context that make an exploration of drama in these times especially relevant. First, there is a clear social turn evident in the arts. First coined by Bishop (2006) and much commented upon since then, the idea is very simply that of marking ‘the recent surge of artistic interest in collectivity, collaboration and direct engagement with specific social constituencies’ (p. 178). Indeed, it can be argued that the social turn is now so mainstream that it requires little

12  Framing the drama of these times

further commentary. As ‘consumers’ of art, we are now expectant of the participative, immersive, multimodal, intermedial, site-specific and pro-social commentary characteristic of much work, across all artistic modes. The necessity of understanding the social and participative turn now mainstream in artistic practice is particularly pressing now, in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, where the only art available to the world has out of necessity become increasingly social and participative in nature. Second, there is now increased funding available (particularly outside of traditional school settings) to practitioners and teachers to use drama to educate for/about and address significant problems of these times, from migration to community issues to crises such as earthquakes. Concomitant with this increase in funding, scholars in our areas highlight the final context issue of concern to us, which is the lack of critical interrogation of the work: its aims; its intentions; its impact. This book aims to help address some of those lacunae. Issues such as migration and war are not only defining of generations in terms of political and private lives, but also have generated a critical mass of work in applied theatre, drama education and performance more broadly, which need critical pillars upon which to stand. Discussions of intentionality, change [also framed as affect/effect (Thompson, 2009b)], ethics, power, language and agency are key to this. This book is therefore informed by global drama practice, current theory and research largely drawn from theatre and performance studies, education, sociology, cultural studies and political economy. It is a montage of theory, practice and research using these times as its locus; a very human atlas with which to navigate the landscape. In this way, the book grounds the necessarily ‘big picture’ conversations in the actuality of how drama practice is used globally. As already noted, the themes around which we have built our chapters are what we have termed key political and socio-cultural ideas. They are not an exhaustive list of ideas that govern our public and private lives but are chosen because they are emblematic of topical issues and also of significant academic merit and rich in drama practice. With each discussion, there exists differences in the ways in which the themes explicitly or implicitly inform our lives; some may be considered solid and bounded ideas, while others are liquid and have resonance and significance for other themes. We acknowledge that none of the themes are unproblematic or uncontested in their definition or inclusion in this volume. The chapters are grouped around three simple orienting ideas: framing the drama of these times; examining the drama of these times and looking forward to the role that drama might play in helping us prepare for future times. The core themes of each of the 14 chapters in the volume are italicised in the exposition below.

Introduction to the drama of these times 13

Looking first to framing the drama of these times, we begin with an examination of the socially engaged drama work which is of particular interest to us: • •

•

•

Understanding the role of drama in societies marred by increasing and enduring inequality requires critical exploration of the nuanced relationship between identity, politics and social justice. In neoliberal times, we explore established and unexamined ideas and assumptions about the role of drama and its relationship to global cultural ‘flows’ (Appadurai, 1996). Drama interventions in neoliberal times are never agenda-less and can be considered a form of governmentality – the enactment of policy proposals about the types of people with which the drama work takes place (young, unwell, homeless, etc.). We advocate for deeper exploration of these proposals to ‘make harder those acts which are now too easy’ (Foucault, 1994) by moving beyond assumption and taken for granted understandings of the world. One of the most contested ideas in the world right now is democracy. Drama has a unique relationship to democracy and politics which we examine both historically and contextually. The breadth of this relationship is charted and critical questions asked about the assumptions we make of drama in engaging with political ideas and promoting democracy. The Global Education Reform Movement, known by educational scholars as the GERM, conceptualises education in a particular way, often for the service of economic competitiveness. In our discussion, we look at formal schooling and particularly the place of creativity within that neoliberal agenda, and its ramifications for the arts. We also look closely at drama within and beyond the curriculum in our schools.

The second part of the book moves the conversation to more specific topics where we locate the drama of these times: •

•

We begin in the most concrete way possible with two chapters fundamentally concerned with place. There is an increasing global- and localisation of communities where place, community and commodity merge. Drama intersects with place, perspective and glocalisation in micro, meso and macro ways – through individual, community and global connections and concerns. No single issue of these times seems to be as emblematic and emotive as that of the mass movement of people through migration. Understanding migration in these times requires interrogation of public ideas of nationhood, identity, morality and difference. There is a growing body of work in drama that deals explicitly with migration, refugees and resettlement.

14  Framing the drama of these times

•

•

•

This work intersects in various ways, educating about migration, giving voice to those marginalised by migration, and in spaces of advocacy typically for promigration perspectives. Very often, migration is forced upon people by conflict. From the earliest Greek tragedies, drama has had a predisposition towards portraying (and sometimes mediating) conflict and war. The conceptual mapping of this relationship between war and drama is vast – it is used to understand the nature of war, help those affected by war, and as a way of making and sustaining war. This chapter engages in an exploration of practice and charters a range of questions exploring the ethics and parameters of drama, war and terror. Few facets of public social life have changed as drastically in the last few decades as perceptions and rights surrounding sex and sexuality. Debates, victories and violations have been affected by, and affecting of social morality, ethics, public institutions, religion and human rights. Drama practice in this space has been educational, celebratory, political and personal, used by groups to engage in public and private discussions about inequity, oppression, identity and representation. Continuing the exploration of who and how we are in the world, wellbeing is a concept that is ubiquitous in socio-political thought and practice, but often poorly or often loosely defined, and linked to multiple, sometimes contrasting agendas. Drama work in health settings or for well-being can, at times, draw on discourses that problematise people and situations in order to seek to ‘fix’ them, sometimes drawing on what we consider to be a moral imperative to be healthy.

The concluding section of the book looks forward, as it must, to examine drama in future times: •

It begins with a discussion of another incredibly pressing issue of these times, climate change. Issues related to environmental devastation and the very future of the planet are products of these times. Some suggest that a lack of public action in the area is due to the ‘grandness’ of the narrative (Heddon & Mackay 2012, p. 168) – and that the climate crisis, “is simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge” (Norgaard, 2011, p. xix). Others point to the absence of artmaking aligning with the issue “It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays?” (McKibben, 2005). Despite a lack of ‘cultural embodiment’ of the problem, much drama exists and will no doubt develop in this area, delivering messages and responsibilising others to act. The complex relationship between art as expression of culture and art as education, plays out in urgent, public and sometimes controversial ways.

Introduction to the drama of these times 15

•

•

•

•

The digital has altered how societies understand the world, and their role within it, something never as patently obvious as during the COVID19 pandemic. Performance, particularly the performance of self, has been re-envisaged by new communication tools, new live- and non-live performance opportunities, and new digital cultures. Understanding mediatised, multimodal, intermedial and virtual reality ways in which drama insects with the digital + world is key to better positioning ourselves for future times. Contemporary discourses such as post-normality describe the complex, chaotic and contradictory nature of our current times and futurism describes the difficulties associated with ‘thinking possible worlds “out loud”’ (Candy, 2010, p. iv). In this chapter, we explore the ways future studies provide an interesting perspective on the role and potential for drama to be relevant to a discovering of now and a re-imagining of the future. As the book winds to a close, we try to conceptually place it in the hands of those for whom that future must be described. Youth are central to any discussion of drama in these times or drama as a tool for a re-imagined future; they are inherently intertwined with our understanding of our shared future. There is a significant amount of drama work undertaken for, about, or by youth and discussed throughout the volume. In this chapter, which serves as an extension of the one before it, we explore how young people use drama to grapple with their lack or representation in a future that is supposed to be ‘for them’. Finally, drama in these times must be seen as a hopeful practice. Although often not considered critical, we conclude this volume with a discussion of what we consider to be key governing ideas in drama: play, fun, hope and love. These are ideas known and embodied by drama teachers and theatre workers the world over. These philosophical discourses can be seen to intersect with drama work in these times in particular ways; hope as resistance, the aesthetic affect, the importance of imagination and fun and an ethic of care.

A critical stance Critical is a familiar word often used in drama – certainly by the generations of theatre workers since Freire and his contemporaries first founded a critical pedagogy movement influencing Boal (2000) in the development of his Theatre of the Oppressed. Critical also has broad colloquial usage and is often considered part of a contribution that drama can make to society: to provide opportunities for critical engagement where participants explore power and action in practice. In this volume, we will generally use the word critical to refer to this kind of work and the philosophies that have driven much drama praxis.

16  Framing the drama of these times

We also use it more formally to denote our research methodologies which are framed by our readings of critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltodano & Torres, 2008) and critical theory and performance (Reinelt & Roach, 2006). When we refer to the ‘critical stance’ of the text, we are using the term to align with post-structuralist notions of critique – exploring how dominant logics in the field of drama, or a society more broadly, make sense. We are attempting to breakdown and understand which common sense or naturalised ideas around drama maintain their prevalence or their ‘understandability’. We are not speaking about a critique with reference to any kind of judgement of right or good, but rather seeking to see things such as power, language and ideology for what they are – and to explore “what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based” (Foucault, 1994, p. 456). A critique of policies or programs aimed at protecting children, for example, might explore how, when and why some seemingly common sense ideas have come about: that adults must protect children, that children are anyone under 18 years old, that the state has a role in protecting children (even from their own parents), and that some physical actions or decisions (such as drinking or having sex) are not appropriate for children to make for themselves. This is not to say that the these policies and programs are not good or right, but it acknowledges that they govern and effect the discourses around shared social ideas such as ‘children’, ‘adults’, the role of the state in governing private lives, and the notion of protection of the those considered vulnerable. Beyond realising this, a critique also acknowledges that these assumptions have not always existed. Not so long ago, 15-year olds were considered adults, the state played no role in intervening in private lives for what might be considered the ‘public good’, not all children were expected to be in school past the early teenage years. The idea that ‘all children deserve education, love and protection’ was not a shared socio-cultural understanding. Rather than being ‘natural’ or ‘given’, therefore, these ideas have been created and maintained – through institutions, policy, governments and public discourse. We argue here that common understandings and key logics in drama praxis are similarly constructed and maintained, and that it serves us well to understand how, why and to what effect this has happened and is happening. Finally, by adopting a critical stance, we acknowledge a body of work within drama that draws on critical, problematic or opposing perspectives on the purpose and practice of drama. For instance, commercial theatre practices have long been subjected to judgement by progressive practitioners focused on social justice. Ahmed (2016, p. 164) reminds us to look more carefully, nothing that, ‘it is not what an applied theatre process stands for in terms of its constitutive elements, but what it acts for, in this case, neoliberalism, that defines its ethical contour’. There have also been disagreements regarding the perceived value of different practices, for example, debates in the past regarding the practice of teaching ‘theatre’ as opposed to ‘drama’

Introduction to the drama of these times 17

with Hornbrook (1985, p. 347) claiming there was a strong anti-theatre feeling within the educational drama fraternity. There are strong views regarding the role of drama in the maintenance of power related to language, culture and governing ideals (Kuo, 1996; Rajendran, 2016). We acknowledge the overlapping and complex nature of such critical understandings of the purpose, role and impact of drama in society.

Core and recurrent ideas in this book In our critical exploration of drama and these themes, lots of things matter. Sometimes in writing this book, the topics were so big that we have felt that every conversation was the most vital, ever. Nothing matters more than climate change… until we start writing about migration, or democracy, or the future. What we came to realise, however, was that at the core of many of the things that mattered were three interconnected ideas: social justice, identity and learning. As will be already clear from this introduction, these are the big ideas that emerged in our reading as prevalent and organising principles in drama work in these times. We seek to look from the inside out at the role of drama in building, maintaining or disrupting constructions of identity, education and social justice; but also from the outside in, acknowledging the effects of these discourses on drama work. We hold drama as a lens with which to understand these times, but also as something upon which these times impact and exude force. These three core ideas are each in their own right multifaceted aspects of society, each observable and understandable as discrete fields of study. Beyond their complexity, the way they intersect with drama work is at times overlapping, at times contradictory, often explicit (but sometimes not) and almost always contextual. Rather than considering them problematic, we hold them as tensions which can be considered characteristic of the interplay between art and society (Rae, 2009). Our challenge here is to briefly introduce them in a way that opens them up, rather than closing them down. This allows the themes and spotlights on practice in this volume to recruit the core ideas in ways that are meaningful and relevant, which we hope will provide more coherent and concrete understandings of how drama intersects with social justice, identity and learning in these times.

Social justice There has been a resurgence in writings regarding social justice and its relationship to drama. The idea that the arts are good for you (e.g., Carey, 2006) or that the arts ‘do good’ is a naturalised rhetoric in much discourse about why drama, particularly community- or children-oriented drama, is important. Much of that sense of good derives from the idea that drama is socially

18  Framing the drama of these times

just, equitable, ethical and simply good for us. Naturally, we wish to unpick that somewhat. We are interested in two points of intersection. First, many of the themes we address are sociological ideas informed by and informing of these times, and which exist in their own right as policy concerns or public ideas. They therefore overlap significantly with questions of justice, rights, access and oppression. Second, drama has (very deliberately) aligned itself with a social justice agenda. This is not to say all drama work aims for or achieves social justice. We do argue, however, that overwhelmingly the discourse in the field of drama is that of equity, inclusivity, empathy and the pursuit of pro-social outcomes for participant and audience members. These two intersections provide us with an intellectual and sociological playground within which to unpack the theme-based discussions in this volume. They allow us to work inside the history, philosophy and practice of drama, as well as outside it, exploring and critiquing its relationship to social policy and public discourse about ‘these people’, ‘this work’ and ‘these times’. Social justice is clearly a broad church. It is a phase used by resistance fighters, teachers, churches, politicians, advertisers, community development workers and the everyday public to refer to contradicting practices and philosophies (Brodie, 2007). Historically, although justice has been in public vernacular for as long as Plato has been published, social justice only emerged in the 19th century with a growing acceptance that the state would, could or should govern social lives (such as living conditions, family concerns, personal health and well-being) (Fook & Goodwin, 2018). This idea is still in contention centuries later. Initially social justice was concerned with the distribution of resources and access to services; the development of welfare politics. In the late 20th century, however, this concern expanded to be more generally focused on equality, and the social as well as economic needs of identifiable groups (such as women, indigenous peoples, LGBTIQ, immigrants and so on). In this volume, we draw on the work of Fraser and her colleagues to understand justice, social justice and work for justice. Their earlier work (e.g., Fraser & Honneth, 2003) outlined two dimensions of social justice – socio-economic redistribution; whereby members of a community or nation state were distributed goods and services in ways that allow them to participate equally in society, and – cultural recognition; which is concerned with ‘emphasising the distribution of social respect’ (Connell, 2019, p. 27). These dual principles capture the economic and cultural dimensions of justice and acknowledge that citizens need both resources and respect in order to be able to participate as full members of a social and political community (Fraser, 2007). Both, however, are concerned with the ‘what’ of justice, rather than the ‘who’. The question of who is included in the justice argument has often been assumed or assigned based on bounded communities such as nation states.

Introduction to the drama of these times 19

Fraser’s (2007) work discusses the effect of globalisation on this argument and extends her theories to include a third dimension to understanding and enacting social justice: representation. She claims that as well as economic or cultural dimensions of social justice in modern life, the political dimension is also central; that it ‘furnishes the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are played out. Establishing criteria of social belonging, thus determining who counts as a member’ (2007, pp. 20–21). This ‘politics of framing’ (ibid, p. 24) establishes, consolidates, contests and revises the boundaries and concerns of the political space. Access to the representation in political spaces is central to how justice is ‘received’ by groups of people. As an example of this, Daniels-Myers, Harwood and Murray (2019) refer to the postcolonial ‘settler’ institutions preference to administer rather than negotiate, allowing people and problems to be considered administrative rather than political (p. 40). This marginalisation of Aboriginal ways of knowing in post-colonial settings maintains systems that ‘misframe’ Aboriginal people through a political exercise of establishing boundaries that exclude them as active members deserving of representation.

Identity Identity refers to how we represent ourselves, and how we understand ourselves in relation to community, citizenship, well-being, culture and relationships. It is also about which stories of identity are given opportunities to be represented in public spaces as stories of significance. There are several governing ideas in drama that inform and are informed by identity, particularly as it is so deeply connected to social justice. Central amongst them is the importance of recognition. Individuals and groups require recognition in order to be powerful and maintain control over their lives. Recognition makes people and groups knowable, legitimate and important in public, policy and personal discourses. Drama is seen by many to enable and facilitate recognition. Research work we have done in the past (Freebody et al., 2018) found that published writings (evaluation reports, journal articles, websites, etc.) about applied theatre for social change overwhelmingly oriented to recognition and the ‘giving of voice’ as a key way such change is achieved. We argue that this aligns drama with social justice and social change in that it positions drama as a form of recognition. The role of identity in drama is thus connected to the role of social justice; it is concerned with ‘identity well-being’ as opposed to ‘material well-being’. In drama, the importance of people being given voice and opportunities to express themselves and as an opportunity to feel worthwhile and important is considered to be as important in these times as economic well-being. Another reason that drama is so deeply connected (explicitly and implicitly) with issues of identity is its participatory nature. Participation – by actors, students, workshop members or audience – is necessary for drama

20  Framing the drama of these times

to function. There is often a link made between participation and agency or empowerment – active participation, participant input and a focus on participant or community stories often the focus of this link. Critical perspectives on this unproblematised relationship express concern that agency can not only become mythologised, but the ‘mythology of agency (of prisoners, of people in poverty, of criminalised young people) can also render invisible the operation of constraints on freedoms’ (Freebody & Goodwin, 2017, p. 33). Identity will be present as a core idea in this book through a perceived or real connection and intimate relationship with discussions about social justice, recognition, agency and participation.

Learning Learning and education discourses are at the heart of our experiences of drama and of our exploration of drama and these times. The connection between drama and learning is established and maintained in two ways. First, there is a historical connection between drama, applied theatre and drama education as fields of practice and study. There are shared practices, scholars and movements in education and drama. For example, the influence of Freire and critical pedagogy on Boal’s work and the work of the field more broadly (Grady, 2003). Many applied theatre practitioners have training or experience in education, either as qualified teachers or as theatre in education workers. It is also the case that participants in drama are understood to be ‘pre-competent’ rather than incompetent (in need of, and able to learn), as opposed to public policy which often positions participants as in need of governance and intervention (and therefore incompetent). The other place that a view of participants as pre-competent is prevalent is education (Austin et al., 2002). These historical connections can go some way to explaining how and why education discourses and philosophies are interwoven through how drama is developed, learned and written about. Second, and more complexly, education is a prominent part of the discussions here because there is a common sense, naturalised connection between learning and change. Much of the drama work aiming to bring about change taps into notions such as developing deeper knowledge, changing behaviour, practising skills and learning new things. As Cahill (2013) states, Health and Human Relationship educators, and many working in drama and health, and theatre for development spaces, are “in the business of influencing behaviour” (p. 178). This is not without critique; there are many in drama who have queried why the work (particularly any aiming for change) would frame itself educationally rather than artistically or aesthetically or query the scale or ethical desirability of the change. Nevertheless, learning (sometimes as education or skill enhancement or as schools) is a core theme in which many of the spotlights on practice discussed here align, and which

Introduction to the drama of these times 21

can be understood to intersect with the other foundational ideas of social justice and identity in complex ways.

A hopeful book The purpose of this chapter is to not only introduce the reasoning and research methodology underpinning this volume, but to also provide foundational themes on which the ideas of this volume are built. In chapters ahead, we explore the sociological, political and cultural reach of individual themes, seeking to develop an understanding of how drama relates to it and helps shape it. In particular, we hone in on the frictions and fissures within each discussion, seeking points of weakness and fracture, as well as celebrating many fine exemplars of success. Our aim is always to emerge with a deeper understanding, not only of drama as it relates to the themes, but more broadly as it is used, understood, discussed and impacted on in these times. Our aim also is that the reader will clearly see how social justice, identity and learning run as underground rivers across the network of pathways that we mark out in the landscape. In engaging critically in work of this nature, these are always tensions. One tension is perceived as being that which exists between the ardent believer and the fervent critic in the power of drama. We wish to end this chapter by refuting the idea of this tension as a binary, and instead suggest the power of multiple positionality. We both believe in the place of drama in the world and maintain the necessity of powerful critique of its place and effect. We feel strongly the ills of the world, but rush not the conclusion that solutions are simple or instant or available to all. And finally, despite the critical tone adopted through this book, we remain both doubtful and hopeful. This, we believe, ultimately allows us to advocate for genuinely creative and sustainable radicalism and impactful systemic change. We take inspiration from the words of Baz Kershaw in this: I am choosing to approach the issue of potentially dangerous—fiery— practices in drama and theatre in this way partly because I want to interrogate those discourses of postmodernity which would place a limit on creative radicalism. Also because I wish to engage with questions of pluralism and relativism raised not just by postmodern and associated theory, but also by the spread of democracy in a globalised world. This entails a search for convincing accounts of the sources of the radical, both in the individual subject and in the collective action of groups involved in drama and theatre; because, if we can convincingly identify the possibility of sources as such, then should we be so inclined, we can steer our drama and theatre work towards their creation. (Kershaw, 1998, p. 69)

22  Framing the drama of these times

Remaining questioning and vigilant but in avoidance of a pathology of hope (Kershaw, 1998) or the skeptic’s cop-out (Conquergood, 1985) is our ambition. We wish for both ourselves and our field that we contribute to the way in which drama is understood in these times, not as salvation rhetoric or hero narrative (O’Connor, 2007) but instead as a space of critical hope, care, beauty, questioning, joy, community and possibility.

2 ENDURING INEQUITY

The decision to begin the volume by exploring inequity is not arbitrary, but rather a comment on what we believe to be a pervasive and unyielding socio-political reality of these times. We are establishing our belief that increasing and enduring inequity because of class, race/ethnicity and gender, denoted by markers such as access to resources, education and healthcare, is genuinely one of the significant characteristics of our time. Not necessarily in the obvious way it was in the Victorian era, but indeed just as profoundly affecting, and significantly more complex. We also want to acknowledge the critical intentions we have here. We are not objective observers: neither from our position as members of the educated, white, Global North, middle classes who hold so much power in the world; nor from our point of view that we believe that the world is inequitable and is in great need of change. This chapter is driven by a concern that public and political discourses silence discussions of equity – sleight of hand is often used to mask the issue or pretend it’s a different issue, which allows the structural causes of inequity to flourish. Beyond our belief in the importance of this theme, it is also included as an organising theme in this book because a vast amount of drama work, particularly in the field of applied theatre, takes place in settings that are explicitly or implicitly defined as ‘problematic’ in ways that relate to equity, either due to relationships with the distribution of resources (economic or otherwise) or (mis)representation and (lack of) recognition of social, political or cultural groups. There is a mythologised and often unspoken rhetoric that drama is about equity, or at least more about equality than inequality. As a community, we tend to foreground the equity brought about through being part of an ensemble and the immersive and seemingly equitable participation in drama workshops. We also highlight the inherently equity-oriented political

24  Framing the drama of these times

commentary of much theatre and the ever-present and tantalising possibility of equitable and lasting change brought about through drama and theatre. These beliefs are important; they fuel the space of possibility that brings so many equity-minded practitioners to dramatic form. However, in holding these ideas close, we naturally focus on what is happening in the room. In order to better understand the relationship between drama and equity, we argue that we also need to think long and hard about who is not in the room, who owns the room, and indeed why the room is shaped in the manner in which it is. In promoting the equity merits of drama, we neglect many aspects of dramatic practice which embody inequality: the vertical and often unquestioned hierarchical structure of much dramatic practice with the role of the director/facilitator in a dominant and often untouchable position; the privileged position of the white, western naturalistic tradition of making theatre; the financial inaccessibility of much commercial theatre with the average price of a Broadway ticket now $110–$120; the inequitable gender distribution in the choice of which works are staged and how parts are cast as demonstrated in the #WakingTheFeminists controversy in Ireland in 2018; the urban/rural divide in terms of accessibility which characterises all drama work, particularly for young people. The perils of having a global conversation about drama and equity must also be reiterated. This conversation is inherently reductionist in that it can never capture the reality but must satisfy itself by offering prompts based on some aspects of practice, typically those of the Global North. We acknowledge that in many countries, a formal tradition of the performing arts is not acknowledged, and performative practices (many of which are fundamentally equitable in nature) are happily integrated into many functions of society such as worship, celebration, ritual and family. The reality is that much formal theatre attendance remains within what can be termed the ‘3-M’ audience – Middle-class, Middle-aged and Minority (of the population as a whole). This is true for theatre-going audiences, but also applicable in many countries to the opportunities for young people to engage with the arts. Recent research in the Republic of Ireland (Smyth, 2016) indicates that as early as in 5-year olds, gender, immigrant status and especially socio-economic disadvantage are significant negative markers in the cultural participation of the extensive national sample of young people studied. And yet the arts, and especially drama, remain spaces of aspiration when it comes to exploring, embedding and explicating principles of equity. Examples abound of political activism in theatre seeking to make the world a better place such as in the theatre-making of Brecht, Pirandello, Boal and Churchill. The work of the practitioners in drama education and applied theatre examined in this very book stand as a prime example of a tier of activists, educators and artists who spend their lives trying to make the world more equal. Any critique offered in these pages cannot diminish

Enduring inequity 25

the impact of the sheer wilfulness of the human agency which results in those projects and which seek to make the world a better place. There is a well-documented ‘social turn’ (Bishop, 2006) evident in the arts where the more equal possibilities of community and participatory theatremaking are celebrated as part of the mainstream (Nicholson, Holdsworth & Milling, 2018; Finneran & Anderson, 2019). While there is a marked increase in work in this domain, we argue that there are significant lacunae in that body of drama work that understand how it operates as drivers of a more equal society. Our contention in this chapter is that the relationship between drama and equity demands disruption and critical analysis on a case-by-case basis and that overutilised understandings of ‘inherently equal’ ways of working in and through drama are not helpful. Even excellent and successful programs have complex relationships with the participants and institutions in which they work. There are a plethora of ways to understand how the embodied, emotional and intellectual act of engaging in drama may contribute to an equity agenda. Fraser’s (2007) conceptualisation of justice considers the redistribution of wealth, goods and services, the recognition and respect for diverse identities, and the rights to representation in the justice space. In addition, we aim here to draw on a range of complementary theories and perspectives on practice to provide a more holistic picture of this contribution. Equity agendas are often fixated on money. While there may be sound reasons for this, the focus can fail to acknowledge that the lived experiences of persons’ economic circumstances are not solely financial but have implications for lifestyle and identity formation – potentially leading to more systemic and inter-generational socio-cultural differences between people and communities. Bourdieu’s theories of capital (1986) can contribute to the nuance of this discussion. He outlines the importance of economic capital, social capital and cultural capital as markers of and potential movement between social classes. Also, he posits that the theory only works as a way of understanding the social world if the forms of capital are considered transferrable and convertible. So, cultural capital, for example, is convertible into economic capital; likewise, economic capital may be converted into social capital in some instances. This is important for the way we understand drama as producing or promoting capital. Engaging in drama work may develop social capital, for example, through participation in a theatre ensemble; however, if it’s developed in isolation, it does not necessarily change the circumstances of the participant. As we intend to both celebrate and problematise drama for equity in this chapter, we highlight common ideas that lay the groundwork for the perceived relationship between drama and equity. The chapter draws on one discussion of practice, the Crossing Bridges project, as an example of drama work aimed to promote positive, equity-driven change, and which allows for a more contextual discussion about drama, justice, agency and voice.

26  Framing the drama of these times

Spotlight on practice: the Crossing Bridges project (New York, USA) A project that aims to connect homeless and trafficked youth with Broadway’s stars to engage in theatre work together, the Crossing Bridges project first took place in New York in 2015 and has run twice more since. The project is led by Cathy Englade and involves professional artists, volunteers and youth from Covenant House International, working with scholars from the Central School of Speech and Drama, London. According to Englade, a key goal of the project is: …to give the youth the practical tools to ‘cross the bridge’ into a new space, laying aside the mantle of being homeless, broken, abused and abandoned. On a stage, in a script, they can choose a new narrative and tell the world who they are behind the homelessness. (Central School of Speech and Drama website: https://www.cssd. ac.uk/content/crossing-bridges-project-new-york) Our knowledge of the Crossing Bridges project has come from attendance at conferences where it had been reported on their website and other public material about the project, and an article discussing the project published in 2018 by a lead consultant, Selina Busby. The project brought together homeless youth with established theatre artists in a 4-week (24 hours total) theatre-devising process that culminated with a performance in an off-Broadway theatre. This process is considered valuable in the way it instils confidence in the youth and enables them to not just envision but also embody more positive ‘alternative versions’ of themselves that disrupt the usually negative ‘homeless youth’ brand that they often carry. In this way, the project can be considered one that explicitly and deliberately works with economically marginalised youth with the expressed purpose of making their lives better through drama. The final performance piece used stimulus stories from sources such as Disney films and was staged in an important cultural space; an off-Broadway theatre. The young people’s presence there is, in some ways, extraordinary – access to such a space would have seemed prohibitive to the young participants prior to their involvement. In fact, Busby recollects a student asking if they needed a passport to travel beyond 34th street – having never done so before. Drawing on Fraser’s theory of representation as a core component of social justice, we ask the questions: who belongs in cultural spaces? Who is represented by our culture? Who is given access to the means to represent themselves? Who has the ‘right’ to be represented in public space? This project is drawing on these themes to disrupt the status quo and offer an alternative perspective for the marginalised young people involved.

Enduring inequity 27

Releasing or entrenching the ‘other’ Busby considers the Crossing Bridges project to be an innovative, unique and important contribution to applied theatre practice. Through working together, the participants are given an opportunity to see each other as ‘knowable’, and therefore not ‘other’. Developing an understanding beyond ‘othering’ is considered to be a vital step in reducing prejudice and creating genuine relationships between people who do not live similar lives (Hughes, 2016). Beyond this, when drama represents the stories of people in poverty, or builds productive relationships between social class groups (such as in this case), it can result in the questioning of systems that entrench marginalisation. New questions and answers about the justice of how ‘someone like me’ or ‘someone I like’ could be placed in such precarious situations can instil a responsibility to act to make change. So while there is an inherent power-imbalance between the participants and artists as well as the participants and audience, there is also a potential for rebalancing some of inequity which excluded marginalised youth from particular cultural spaces in the first place. This reliance on the powerful to ‘know and like’ the marginalised, however, might lead to the cynical argument that the success of such an approach acknowledges that for those in poverty to see improved circumstances, they need to have people who are not impoverished to believe it’s a good idea. Despite her regard for the project and the potential for genuine relationships to emerge, Busby problematises the extent to which the binaries between the youth seeking shelter and the wealthy, successful creatives were further entrenched, rather than disrupted. She speculates that the extremes of their circumstances perhaps produced a constant ‘othering’ of their situations. The artists were always guests in the world of the youth and would, at the end of the process, return to their other situations. This maintains their distance from the circumstances of the youth. As Busby (2018, p. 370) reflects, ‘Once the curtain comes down … the guest artists retire to a nearby bar for the traditional end of show party, unbeknown to the youth, who return to the shelter’. There is a strong connection in work that aims to bring together people from different circumstances with the broader use of drama to build understanding and empathy for others. When in role, it is theorised that a participant is in a state of metaxis where they remain both themselves but are at the same time given distance from their own lives, and connection to a new context. They have a foot in both worlds. The fictional world of the drama does not necessarily require participants to react outside themselves and what they know, but rather behave as themselves in ways that are appropriate to the situation of the drama, which may lead to new perspectives on people, places and events (O’Toole, 1992). This work, many argue, can be richly rewarded if facilitated well. When participants take on roles that are outside of their own experiences they can embody and envisage alternative realities while still being themselves.

28  Framing the drama of these times

This is not an uncontentious perspective. Michael has argued previously that there exists: a pervasive belief that specific forms of drama (…) exist, that can reach all children and help them to learn, no matter what their particular societal or cultural circumstances, or indeed that the individual differences of the child may be. … This myth of universalism is based around primarily generic and unquestioned (Westernised) understandings of empathy, identity and shared humanity. (Finneran 2009, p. 227) More simply put, there is concern that the idea of ‘living through’ the world of another, theorised in metaxis, inherently privileges a normative the idea of ‘self’ as a comparator against which to pitch inherently deficit imaginative positionings of ‘other’. It also reminds us to be cautious of the ‘comfortable’ collective that in fact increases individual responsibility by seeing those that do not fit the collective or perceived universal (way of learning, way of being, way of communicating, etc.) as problematic. Attempting to embody or at least represent someone that is ‘other’ to me, requires (at least initially), a more simplistic representation, rather than a completely naturalistic portrayal or identification of a character. Particularly in process-based drama, the immediacy and spontaneity of participant involvement in the dramatic action result in a necessarily instinctive and simplified response. The opportunity here is that by taking on a role, one engages in the discovery of that role, leading to more complex representations of the role – who they are, why they are, and how they are connected to me. Such work, powerful as it is in its urge to get participants to think about someone other than themselves, places significant importance on a facilitator’s ability to use their own function to disrupt stereotypes as they emerge in the dramatic context or rehearsal process. Researchers and practitioners caution their colleagues to be aware that role play ‘may work eventually to confirm students in the restricted range of roles most readily available to them in the world’ (O’Neill, 1995, p. 78). While the Crossing Bridges project draws on notions of aspirational thinking and aspirational capital (Yosso & Solorzano, 2015), Busby invokes different perspectives on a culture of cruelty (Giroux, 2012) to wonder if the project has resulted in an exercise of cruel optimism; whereby the youth are encouraged to fantasise about a life that is not obtainable to them. Busby wonders if, ‘by inviting these young people into an elite world of arts and culture we were, in fact, showing them a world from which they would be forever marginalised… ‘expelling the hope’ of access rather than enabling it’ (Busby, 2018, p. 358). Although exposed briefly to cultural and social capital, they are unable to access it without being accompanied by the cultural insiders and have no opportunity to turn the social and cultural capital into economic capital.

Enduring inequity 29

Recognition and representation – who gains what? To further understand how we might conceptualise connection to social justice (or social change, or social good) for projects such as the Crossing Bridges project, it is important to explore the relationship between the personal and political, particularly the human agency at play. Both the youth and theatre professionals crossed bridges into spaces they would not normally enter, to engage in a collaborative, dialogic and productive drama-making process. While there is the rhetoric and assumed beliefs in the theatre world (and in many worlds of privilege) to suggest that sharing a theatre-making process can affect what becomes possible for all the participants (a ‘broadening of horizons’ agenda), there is an obvious focus on the benefits for the youth – through establishing relationships with those that could be potential advocates, the increase in confidence, the opportunity to express themselves and simultaneously embody ‘better’ versions of themselves. In documentation related to the Crossing Bridges project, a project consultant and project lead draw on Bourdieu’s notions of capital – both cultural and social – through the idea that experiencing and developing such capital may redress inequity. This is in the belief that the development of skills supported by such capital (confidence, social connections, positive identity development) can lead to positive social change. As discussed earlier, however, these forms of capital (which may be obtained through participation in a drama intervention), only ‘count’ as adding to a perceived equity agenda if the acquisition of such capital contributes beyond itself (Bourdieu, 2011/1986). That is to say that such invitations into new worlds are only equitable if they result in the participants’ gaining more than just the experience itself, but also a way to convert that experience to capital. The ‘kind’ of social justice work achieved in this project can also be viewed through Fraser’s (2007) understandings of justice. Recognition and representation were central to this project – essentially, the aim of the project was to provide the youth with access to ‘cultural capital’ in the hope that it would lead to aspirational thinking. That by representing themselves as worth listening to, they would begin to see ways they could be more powerful and positive protagonists in the story of their own lives. There was, therefore, recognition of the importance of the young people’s stories and a space for them to share them in the rehearsal room. The recognition work in this project appears to be more oriented to the participants, rather than the audience. The project expressed a strong focus on the importance of the young people themselves; that they are recognised by others, they recognise themselves as being worthy of aspiration and hope, and that they have worthwhile contributions to make to the theatre process. Arguably, it places the significant onus for change on the least powerful; the participants. The other discussion of representation and recognition in this, and many drama projects for equity, revolves around the artists, facilitators and

30  Framing the drama of these times

researchers involved. In previous publications, we (Freebody et al., 2018) and colleagues have problematised the constant focus on what participatory drama gives participants, rather than what practitioners or funders ‘get out of it’ (Snyder-Young, 2013). There is much focus on the benefits of drama work for participants, but the reality is that facilitators and donors also receive varying benefits from their engagement with the work, which are often unmentioned in discussions about why the work is successful and important.

Agency The agency of participants in drama for equity is often central to discussions of what drama offers as an experiential medium for learning and making. Generally speaking, agency is about our ability to make choices and then act to fulfil those choices. Taylor (1985) suggests that our capacity to evaluate our desires is an essential feature of human agency and that this responsibility is tied to identity and articulation. The ‘advantaged’ theatre-maker may articulate a clear pro-equity stance as fundamental to their identity and be agentive in enabling that. Regardless of the power or quality of the intervention, the ‘disadvantaged’ participant may not be in a position to articulate or act on the change they may wish to see in themselves (such as being a regular attendee on Broadway), rendering (to follow Taylor) their identity unchanged, their self-evaluation incomplete and their participation lacking in any greater agency. Simply put, no matter how good the project, unless structural issues (such as the accessibility of tickets) is addressed, arguably no substantive change may come about. The final piece of the Crossing Bridges project used existing stories to frame the work (usually, according to Busby, fairy tales), so did not explicitly include the participants’ personal narrative as subject matter. Busby has questioned the extent to which this has ignored the young people’s community capital and perpetuated the socio-cultural alienation of the shelter dwellers’ identity. However, this project, like many others, recruits the assertion that the kinds of expression available through drama, and the act of being watched while undertaking that expression, can affect participants in powerful and positive ways. This associates active personal, social and political participation with power and agency, a popular notion connecting participation parity (Fraser, 2005) with recognising and empowering the ‘voice’ of marginalised peoples.

Voice and testimony It is now a widely held belief that talking about our experiences is a healthy activity. This is a common idea in how we consider the benefits of drama. In the literature, there seems to be a multifaceted and ironically inarticulate

Enduring inequity 31

understanding of the concept of ‘voice’. It is sometimes drawn on to understand the personal benefits of drama. Other times it is considered political, creating opportunities to change public discourse about groups of people. Often it is concerned with a social justice agenda, providing recognition and representation. All of these facets can be understood to be actively engaging with the building and maintenance of ‘testimonial cultures’ (Hamilton, 2012) whereby autobiographical accounts contribute to public narratives of groups of people. Valuing representations of our lives not only provides outlets for personal expression but also allows us to display ourselves publicly and contribute to the collective discourses used to understand who we are. Promoting ‘voice’ combines opportunities for providing both recognition – through the naming of marginalised communities, the building of support for structural change – and the development of ‘cultural respect’, and representation – if it works to affirm or advocate for political power for those currently oppressed or aims to transform how we understand local, national or international communities, to ‘circumvent the more aggressive discourses’ that circulate about marginalised peoples (Balfour et al., 2015, p. 45). Providing fuel for empathy and understanding is seen to provide a counterbalance to unsympathetic problematising generalisations about groups of people. Giroux considers ‘bearing witness’ to be a way of analysing large social forces by connecting them to personal stories, suggesting that ‘witnessing and testimony lie at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn’ (2012, p. 14). This transformation of experience into evidence for public consumption acknowledges that activism exists in the territory of the everyday (Rose, 1999, p. 280). It allows communities to develop public discourses to describe experiences that may have otherwise been submerged, such as life on a public housing estate, the experience of post-natal depression or growing up in foster care. The notion of ‘giving voice’ to those considered under- or misrepresented positions itself as a social justice issue acknowledging that everyone deserves to have a say in the public discourses that describe their lives, and see themselves represented in positive and powerful ways. It also draws on an understanding that people will respond and connect more easily with those they perceive to be like them, allowing everyday testimonies to be powerful collective stories. These kinds of work are achieved in various ways through drama that aims to make visible the experiences of others or to enable individuals to process oppressive or traumatic experiences in order to make a change. O’Rourke and Mace (unpublished report cited in Hamilton, 2012), drawing on work in community writing, outline several ways narrative is used to achieve community or social action. We believe there is a strong resonance here with community and educational drama. They suggest that narrative and testimony can be used to celebrate, to develop group cohesion, to create a souvenir, to advocate for a group, to teach or provide information and to

32  Framing the drama of these times

create good drama. We would add that in such drama work there is a large amount of performance testimony that is used for a less specific, and more rights-based purpose – to allow people ‘voice’ with the belief that ‘having voice’ is a human right (Dalrymple, 2006) and that expressing one’s ‘voice’ is an empowering experience. There are, however, several critical perspectives on the ‘politicised use’ of personal narrative and the emphasis on ‘voice’ in work with social justice agenda. These critical discussions have not all emerged from the drama field – some have come from education, health and social work, but all offer cautions and concerns in this space. First, an awareness that participant ‘voice’ is not necessarily progressive. Rae (2009, p. 33) reminds us that ‘(e)ven when theatre-making can be seen as enacting or claiming a right, there is nothing inherently virtuous in it’. Similarly, Snyder-Young has recounted Theatre of the Oppressed workshops whereby the participants have actively chosen pathways she believes led to entrenched oppression, rather than liberation. After all, one thing we are sure of is that, ‘popular positions and ideas are not necessarily progressive’ (Snyder-Young, 2013, p. 40). Any testimony or narrative can only be understood in the context it is developed, and through the action that it generates. Testimonies, even those with good intentions, are not ‘necessarily innocent and on the side of, or straightforwardly aligned with, a transformative politic’ (Hamilton, 2012, p. 65). Testimonies are dialogic, and the act of bearing witness, and actions that may follow, are as important as the act of speaking or writing them. Second is a concern that testimonies are potentially dangerous and misused. There are hazards associated with requiring people to revisit trauma or harm through testimony as it does not offer an opportunity to change the injustices they have experienced. Re-telling a story does not necessarily change the ending, and that ending may still cause harm. Even when storytelling may be a positive experience for a participant, that in and of itself may not lead to transformed understandings more generally. There is a concern that participant narratives, particularly in the case of marginalised communities, may be reinterpreted according to dominant paradigms to give weight to hegemonic practices (Tseris, 2019). By presenting a response to an event, one can inadvertently universalise such responses, restricting diversity of experience. Third, the presentation of voice can be used to reduce experiences of marginalised people to ‘easily digestible soundbites’ that are often highly moving, but overly simplistic – focussing too heavily on individual experiences rather than accounting for the structural causes of despair’ (Tseris, 2019, p. 125). Crossing Borders has avoided this by not making the stories of the participants the purpose or subject of the drama work. The ‘equity focus’ was therefore repositioned to the participants’ experience of the drama program, rather than a focus on the experiences of participants in

Enduring inequity 33

their lives beyond the program. Beyond the simplification of these ‘soundbites’ to make them palatable to outsider audiences, the relationship with change is often simplified too. There seems to be the misguided notion that simply by giving voice we can empower: ‘Rather, narratives are both written and read through social, cultural and political frameworks, with the most powerful discourses acting as filters to distil complex knowledges’ (Tseris, 2019, p. 130). A final critique can be raised is in research that has found that in artsbased experiences which focus on personal narrative, much attention is placed on articulating the ‘right kind of narrative’. This can be seen in discussions of prison theatre and other theatre for development programs (Snyder-Young, 2013). In these ‘right’ stories, complex ideas are smoothed over to present a common-sense truth about a situation – that these people are good, kind, just, hard-working and so on. This distilling of complicated and multifaceted ideas, personalities and situations into a moral message can be dangerous when the people being represented do not ‘live up to’ their idealised image. People will turn against a person if they are seen to be angry, mean and lazy. It is particularly evident, according to Armstrong (2005) when personal stories are adapted for policy purposes. They refer to the process of ‘channelling troublesome voices into safe waters’, where ‘the ‘facts’ of a person’s life and experiences are selectively crafted and smoothed to ‘speak’ the changing priorities and ideologies of policy initiatives’ (Hamilton, 2012, p. 72) These criticisms acknowledged, the importance of personal story, voice, recognition and representation in work drama in these times cannot be underestimated. Indeed, we would argue that the reason for such criticism is because it is such a central part of how we understand the effectiveness of our work.

Hope and possibility Drama is linked to a multiplicity of outcomes, both personal and communal, that orient to an equity agenda: togetherness, democracy, cross-cultural understanding, empathy, collaboration, community cohesion, pride, confidence, passion and to skills which enable equity, such as literacy, team-work, social skills, communication and so on. Taken together, these provide a picture of how the field views the contribution of participatory drama work to the achievement of larger social goals. At the philosophical and practical core of many drama programs is hope. Hope that change is possible, that stories are worthwhile, that collaborative experiences build trust. Hope is a pervasive discourse through which we perceive drama. There is another side to hope: one that is considered more of an ‘opium of the people’. This is an ideological ‘social hope’ homogenised and commodified by capitalism (Hage & Papadopoulos, 2004). Within this there is

34  Framing the drama of these times

a neoliberal logic that considers a promising future for an individual as a completely solo pursuit – this sets up programs such as Crossing Bridges, and many like it, to potentially give false hope to participants – for although they may imagine better futures, the structures within which they enact them remain unchanged. Further, this ideological and individualised conception of hope brings with it moral responsibility. These drama programs are focused on working with people who, for whatever reason, are perceived to have strayed down a path that will not provide them with the social accepted ‘better future’ we all have a moral responsibility to want. Instead, we argue for a critical hope: ‘Critical hope mobilizes human beings towards guided, concrete action, and enables them to take part in social change’ (Antilla, 2018, p. 63). Such a hope requires someone to engage in a robustly facilitated creative process whereby they imagine a better future. It is, therefore, creative and participatory within an appropriate frame. Drama allows us to create an imagined world, robust enough to sustain context, characters and tension but also open enough to incorporate narrative and enable voice. Within this dramatic frame, we can enable a creative process that may develop critical hope, exploring and experimenting with alternative futures and considering obstacles and opportunities. And all of this is taking place within a context that can provide those opportunities to enable alternative futures and with the necessary support to overcome the obstacles. Definitions of critical hope also allow for discussions of practice and embodiment – useful for understanding drama work. Based on Frieire and Giroux’s conceptualisation of hope, critical hope is a social practice that engages emotion as an act of subversion to structure the way people interpret the world and communicate it to others. A critical analysis of hope and its contents may open up possibilities for both critical educators and drama practitioners to think, imagine and practise hope differently without easily subsuming our practices to the neoliberal educational contexts that situate our work. (Law, 2018) Hope is active, it is nurtured in relationships, it is practised and practiceable, it is embodied. The Crossing Bridges project is one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of projects or programs that link drama with equity issues around the world. This chapter has attempted to grapple with only a few of the multiple intersecting themes in this space: the connection between personal and social justice, recognition and representation. Drama is at once a personal experience and a powerful social opportunity. From participants’ access to drama (and who is given access), to how social issues are presented on stage (how people are recognised and represented), drama provides opportunities and

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challenges in the creation of a more equitable society. This chapter is at the beginning of this book because it is just the beginning of a much longer and more involved conversation about the relationship between drama and equity. When we speak of the themes of ‘these times’, equity is an enduring element that is tied to the global flows of people, information, capital and ideology. We hope that by placing this idea upfront, it can weave through and collide with the socio-political conversations to come.

3 USEFUL DRAMA IN NEOLIBERAL TIMES

As university lecturers in drama, education and social justice, we spend much of our time trying to convince students that common-sense is the antithesis of education. Common-sense ideas about ‘these people’ and ‘those places’ blind us to deeper and more complex understandings of communities, people, problems and opportunities. We urge our students not to assume a straight line from policy to practice, from problem to solution, but rather aim ‘for a richer understanding of the rationalities that govern us today, in terms of their origins, accidental mutations and contexts.’ (Davis, 2014, p. 301). We attempt to maintain this perspective throughout this chapter by engaging with the idea that drama interventions, in neoliberal times, can be considered a form of governmentality – the enactment of policy proposals about the types of people with which the drama work takes place (young, unwell, homeless, etc.). We interrogate this idea through a form of policy analysis that focuses on how policies make proposals about people and events through the way they allocate solutions to social ‘problems’ (Bacchi, 2009). Drawing on the work of Foucault, this analysis advocates for deeper exploration of these proposals to make harder those claims, ideas and acts ‘which are now too easy’ (Foucault, 1994), by moving beyond common-sense understandings of the world to explore established and unexamined ideas and assumptions about the role of drama in neoliberal times and its relationship to global cultural ‘flows’ (Appadurai, 1996). By drama interventions, we mean specific projects set up to effect a change of some nature, but we also aim to consider the role of drama and the arts more broadly when schools, cultural and public institutions are increasingly concerned with economic competitiveness. Like other chapters in this book, the remit is so large that we have had to make clear decisions about what we are going to try and achieve in the pages that follow. Our overall aim

Useful drama in neoliberal times 37

is to understand the bigger picture of how the incredibly influential sociopolitical phenomenon of neoliberalism has changed the way we interact with institutions, use language to describe and understand what we do, and seek funding to sustain our work. Balfour has suggested that practitioners in the area of drama and social change may orient to the neoliberal, pragmatic ‘usefulness’ of the work, but often maintain their personal agenda for social justice – that they find themselves being ‘half car salesman, half ideologue’ (Balfour, 2009b, p. 357), referring to the often political and problematic aspects of advocacy, advertising and funding. In this chapter, we acknowledge and consider this central paradox evident in much drama work. We begin with a brief, foundational look at neoliberalism, particularly as it’s expressed in the Global North, and why a focus on individualism matters to our work. Our aim is to critically analyse the extent to which drama has ‘adapted to the shifting ideological and economic territory’ (Jackson, 2007, p. 203). We consider the place of drama as an active and operative practice within a neoliberal ideology, shaped by the forces and assumptions of the institutions within which it operates. However, drama work is also governed by forces and assumptions of the field of practice, which is participant-focused, pro-social and sometimes capable of subverting the contemporary focus on individualism and mitigating the damage done by inequitable institutions on marginalised participants. To undertake a critical analysis that unpacks the relationship between drama and neoliberalism, this chapter extends on work done in 2016 (see Freebody & Goodwin, 2017) that drew on critical policy studies using the ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR) (Bacchi, 2009) methodology to attempt to understand the governing discourses evident in how the field of applied drama describes itself. It connects strongly with analyses and discussions in the later chapters of this book and the critical perspective we employ to explore drama in these times more generally. Rather than unpacking examples in our spotlights on practice, like we do in most other chapters, we will discuss documents that describe drama projects, as examples of how neoliberal ideologies shape how we express and advertise what we do. Although our spotlights on practice in other chapters also rely on documented accounts, we are still focusing on the practice itself, and how it aids or deepens our understanding of the theme of the chapter. What follows in this chapter, however, is focused on the words the documents use rather than actions they describe. It is a subtle but important distinction. We do this because the way practitioners and scholars talk about drama matters. Watson (2004, p. 2) says that ‘to speak the words the powerful speak is to obey them, or at least to give up all outward signs of freedom… this is language without possibility’. Words influence public and private understandings of what drama work is for and why. Key words in drama can become governing discourses ‘positioned as the nervous system of a whole body of

38  Framing the drama of these times

broader technical, institutional and representational practices’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 34).

What is neoliberalism? Described by Giroux (2012, p. 1) as a juggernaut ‘against both the welfare state and the concept of the public good’, neoliberalism is a political ideology that is, in our times, influenced by and influencing of a variety of fields: economics, education, anthropology, sociology, political science, cultural studies and so on. That said, there is often an assumed rather than explicit understanding of what it is and how it operates in much public discussion – it would appear it is a loosely defined ‘vibe’ rather than a clear range of political, social and individual systems or relationships (Ball, 2016). According to Appadurai (and as outlined in our introduction), globalisation can be conceived as a series of ‘scapes’ that act on global flows, connecting and disconnecting as they intersect. These include the movement of people (ethnoscapes), information (mediascapes), technologies (technoscapes), money (financescapes) and ideology (ideoscapes). It is the (dis)junctions between these scapes that interact to create, politicise and represent events, nations, movements and people. Some would argue that neoliberalism shapes the flows of our time – however, we believe neoliberalism is not the ‘grand’ theory or ideology informing political, economic and cultural landscapes but rather has grown out of these flows and disjunctures. We agree with Davis that: We can continue to debate exactly what ‘neoliberalism’ means, a debate which is entangled in the question of where precisely its origins lie. I would argue that we should look closer to the state itself, its experts, its imported rationalities, than to the history of economics as such. (Davis, 2014, p. 302) Neoliberalism, as we define it for the purpose of this discussion, is a political ideology that focuses on ‘advancing human well-being through the promotion of individualism and entrepreneurialism leaning up against privatised institutional frameworks supported by free markets and free trade’ (Harvey, 2005). Central to our understanding of neoliberalism is relationships between people, places, ideas and artefacts and at the core of those relationships is the individual, nation state and global market. Some may argue that neoliberalism is changed/changing/decreasing; however, we argue that even if this is so, the current socio-political climate is still ‘marked by the global victory of some version of neoliberalism’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 23). The excessive interest and attention to neoliberal ideals across the world appears to have enshrined it as a ‘lead social activity’

Useful drama in neoliberal times 39

(Wexler, 1998, p. 175) through which common-sense is determined (Apple, 2000). This is at the core of this chapter – unpacking what has been developed, over time, into common-sense understandings of what art, education, creativity, community, success and life are ‘about’ in these times.

The decline of grand narratives: why a focus on individuals matters Socially engaged art in this climate, Harvie (2011, p. 113) argues, can be seen as politically productive ‘perhaps not least given the postmodern alienation that is otherwise so widespread within capitalism’. We consider this ‘postmodern alienation’ as the decline of collective experiences and collective concern – the process of individualisation that focuses on separate biographies, the moral responsibility of individual choice and disembedding of shared narratives (Beck & Beck-Gersheim 2002, p. xxiii-xxiv). A defining feature of this definition of neoliberalism is a focus on individualism and competition (or entrepreneurialism). Ball, Maguire and Macrae (2000, p. 3) and colleagues argue that ‘(w)orking together, the ideology of economic individualism and individualisation as a reflexive project of identity formation mute and obscure the continuing class-based nature of structural inequalities’. Bourdieu talks about this as a new version of neo-Darwinism founded on a philosophy of competence (Down, 2009) that suggests the ‘best and brightest’ will come out on top: ‘the most competent who govern have jobs which implies that those who do not have jobs are not competent. There are winners and losers’. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 42) and individuals are responsible to ensure they make choices that allow them to continue ‘winning’: individuals are held more and more accountable for their own survival in a time where change is the only certainty. In the late modern period, the self is constantly engaged in a process of self-construction and reconstruction as part of a contingently reflexive life-time biographical project which responds to new risks and new opportunities. (Ball et al., 2000, p. 2) Khoja-Moolji (2015) discusses the neoliberal forces in the campaign for girls’ education in the Global South. Campaigns such as this focus on agency, choice and autonomy, which places ‘the burden of improving lives on individuals themselves’ (Tampio, 2018, p. 381). It leads to individuals becoming enterprising selves, whereby an individual is requited to be one who ‘calculates about itself and works upon itself to better itself’ (Rose, 1992, p. 146). This sees the common-sense philosophy of competence working to absolve institutions, governments and communities from taking responsibility for those that refuse to help themselves.

40  Framing the drama of these times

The focus on individualism is therefore tied closely to choice, competition and ownership. Individuals’ citizenship is manifested through the choices they make (and are allowed to make), goods and assets owned and managed and rankings in a variety of institutions (notably schools and workplaces). These ‘politics of ownership’ (Gamble & Kelly, 1996) shift the global cultural flows away from commitment to public good and towards a deference towards private interest (Grace 1994, p. 53). Alongside this is a celebration of individual rights and a moral duty imposed on individuals to make the right choice for themselves and their families. This is a ‘responsibilisation of the self’ where choices are seen as individual responsibilities and positions, and individuals’ lives and successes (or otherwise) as ‘up to them’ (Ball et al., 2000). The moral responsibility is held by the individual choice-maker rather than being influenced by systemic forces, where ‘people see themselves as individuals in a meritocratic setting and not as classed or gendered members of an unequal society’ (Ball et al., 2000, p. 4).

Spotlight on practice: the Choices project (New Zealand) The Choices theatre in education program consisted of arts workers coming to schools for one day to perform a theatre piece and engage students in drama-based activities about safe partying practices. The program was developed by Help for Young People at Events and in their Gathering Spaces (HYPE-GS), The Mess Up Theatre Company, and was funded by HYPE-GS, Health Action Trust, NMDHB Public Health Service, ALAC and Vodafone. The document being used as our spotlight on practice in this chapter is the evaluation report written by the company (Graves, 2011). The report is 44 pages, including appendices. This analysis, however, is concentrated on the executive summary and background sections (pp. 5–7). Within the Choices document, there are multiple proposals made regarding the representation of unsafe partying as ‘a problem’ and whose responsibility it was. Here we explore the proposals evident in the document to discuss how evaluations of drama programs can be considered as governing documents.

The driving premise of this document is that young people engage in unsafe partying practices, and that this is a problem as it leads to ‘poor outcomes’ (Graves, 2011, p. 6). …unsafe ‘partying’ practices, including alcohol and other drug use, sexual practise and safety. These behaviours were shown to impact in mental and emotional health and wellbeing, sexual and physical

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health and injury and contribute to youth offending and anti-social behaviour. (Graves, 2011, p. 6) The report alludes to ‘local reports and wider research that indicated that there was a high level of young people… undertaking unsafe “partying” practices’ (Graves, 2011, p. 6). This leads to the central taken-for-granted concepts of ‘partying’ as problematic, young people as risky, sexual practices and alcohol/drug use as ‘unsafe’ and inevitably leading to emotional, physical and social problems. A stated object of the program is attitudinal and behavioural change, placing the responsibility of the practices with the young people themselves; here, the focus on individual responsibility emerges. The young people participating in the program are presented by this document as simultaneously agentive and problematic. In this document, youth are given the responsibility of changing their behaviour and attitudes. They are positioned as ‘choice makers’, in charge, as Ball suggests earlier, of their own survival, and therefore responsible for it. If the first proposal made by the document is that the youth themselves are the ‘problem’ (evident in the idea that their change in behaviour is the solution), a second proposal extends on this and can be seen to suggest that the problem is that the youth lack knowledge and awareness. The proposed solution is presented in the document as raising awareness through the performance, firstly of poor choices and their consequences, and then of ‘alternative scenarios’ that illustrate ‘better outcomes’. This solution implies that once given this knowledge, behaviour and attitudes will change. This proposal also takes for granted the notion that adults, even adults that have no knowledge of the specific youth participating, have better knowledge about ‘safe’ choices for those youth and can therefore judge the worth of the decisions made by young people. In the evaluation document drama is presented as a solution to the problem of unsafe partying by providing a forum that connects with the real stories and life experiences of the participants in order to provide them with knowledge about how alternative scenarios can be enacted in real-life experiences. It’s the innovate nature of the approach – the use of drama – that is considered both a goal and successful outcome of the program. The authors of the report state that ‘the objective of the project is to use an innovative approach… to address unsafe partying practices…’ (Graves, 2011, p. 5). By placing success on the innovation of drama, the authors are implying that non-innovative approaches are problematic as they’re unsuccessful in changing youth behaviour and attitudes. The evaluation also discusses, on multiple occasions, the adoption of ‘real life experiences of local teenagers’ (Graves, 2011, p. 6) and ‘real stories’ (p. 5). This orientation to the relevance of experience for young people as part of the innovative approach suggests

42  Framing the drama of these times

that standard approaches do not connect with the reality of the young people they seek to engage.

How do neoliberalism and drama interact in these times? In many ways drama and neoliberalism seem ill-fitting, given that drama appears to expose ideologies, the reality is that drama practice is entrenched and intertwined with ideology (which is retrenched through collectivism and ensemble). Added to that, neoliberalism is a movement revering individualism and competition, typically not traits found in drama. But it appears to us that there are clearly influential flows between drama practice and neoliberal ideology. We are by no means the first authors to have made explicit links between drama practice and neoliberalism. Alston (2013, p. 128), for instance, talks about ‘entrepreneurial participation’. Their argument is that immersive or participatory theatre shares values with neoliberalism – entrepreneurialism, valorisation of risk, agency and responsibility. They also claim that this type of drama practice is characterised by hedonism and narcissism – with a focus on participant rights to experience, and have agency within, social and theatrical contexts. Most often, however, drama scholars and practitioners make links between drama and neoliberalism in more complex ways – focusing on the use of drama in relation to context and power, rather than the characteristics of drama practice itself. Socially engaged art is generally seen to do good (Harvie, 2011, Belfiore & Bennett, 2008). In fact, Belfiore and Bennett (2008, p. 4) have suggested that a belief in the power of art to transform people’s lives has become something ‘close to orthodoxy’ among arts advocates. Often, the precise way that this ‘good’ is achieved is outlined far less clearly than the belief that it is. Generally, however, drama ‘is understood to gather people in socially engaged ways to act together, performatively constituting themselves as a community, potentially in a formation understood as somehow democratic, and often as some sort of counter-public that acts with critical force to interrogate some existing oppressive social hegemony, (Harvie, 2011, p. 113). This ‘togetherness’ is an organising discourse amongst much writing in the area of drama, either drawing on community discourses – the building or strengthening of communities, evident in learning discourses around the harmony of groups of people working together (usually in institutions such as schools, prisons, or workplaces) or in more celebratory discourses that orient to the importance of people coming together to experience an event. Understanding the relationship of such socially-engaged art and neoliberalism requires ‘critical and open-ended interrogation of what the real value or impacts of the arts might be’ (Belfiore & Bennett, 2008, p. 10), within the contexts they are made. We consider it essential that our scholarship

Useful drama in neoliberal times 43

acknowledges that, ‘the performative potential of these art practices, their ability straightforwardly to enact social change is necessarily conditioned – and often constrained – by their cultural and material contexts’ (Harvie, 2011, p. 114). There has been an increased attention to this critical work; focused on understanding the effects and impact drama work has on participants, and society more broadly (Snyder-Young, 2013; Matarasso, 2013). The role of governments and funding bodies have also been drawn into this critical work, and understood as participants alongside facilitators and the ‘recipients’ of the work. Calls for critical understandings of drama work have been amplified in neoliberal environments as many applied drama workers and individual programs are funded by, or operate within, systems that may maintain exclusionary practices against the often very marginalised groups that ‘receive’ or ‘participate’ in their work (Balfour, 2009b; Etherton & Prentki, 2006). So, while ‘(d)ramatic practices that are applied to community and educational settings have always striven for inclusivity and equality…’ (Nicholson, 2010, p. 151), we are simultaneously reminded that politics of inclusion align with government policies in much of the Global North. Art practice’s social worth – not to mention its aesthetic worth – is potentially great. But I also think that its makers, critics and audiences should all be cautious about how we value it in a context where the neoliberal capitalism enjoys ever-increasing hegemony and where this art appears – however unintentionally – potentially to support that hegemony. (Harvie, 2011, p. 114) There is therefore a tension between the need to not only understand but also make public claims about the benefits of drama in applied policy settings, and the current language of evidence-based approaches and representation of ‘return on investment’. Researchers on the Art for Social Change project in Canada have found that shifts in public policy discourses ‘have a profound impact as organisations are compelled to re-tool how they represent their work’ (ASC! 2016, p. 11) in ways that are not necessarily relevant or useful for the facilitators or participants. This potentially narrows understandings of drama work and does not necessarily serve to further knowledge and practice in the field. This tension, however, appears unavoidable for drama workers as drama programs are not funded for their ‘agenda-less creative work’ (Balfour, 2009b, p. 350); rather, interventions are usually seen as acceptable to the extent that they provide participants with particular social competencies, the appropriateness of which is determined by funders and/or practitioners.

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Spotlight on practice: the Inside Talk project (UK) Inside Talk is a theatre and drama group work programme developed by Geese Theatre and designed to run in prisons in the Midlands area of the UK. The program ran for 10 days over a 6-week period in five different prisons. The document analysed in this paper is a report, written by Geese Theatre on the program (Harkins et al., 2009). The 14-page document reports on the results of a psychometric survey and interviews with programme participants.

This evaluation document sets up communication skills – particularly speaking and listening skills – as a ‘problem’ for offenders. Beneficial programmes offered by prisons for addressing problematic behaviours are described as requiring high levels of speaking and listening skills, and statistics are presented that indicate large numbers of prisoners do not have such skills. Drama is represented as a ‘solution’ to this ‘problem’ partly because it relies ‘less on literacy and expression skills’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 3). This problem representation justified the need for and perceived benefits of the drama programme. The authors of the report claim that the drama programme improved the communication skills of prisoners so they have the necessary speaking and listening skills to participate in other programs run by the prison that address more specific problematic behaviours: ‘…an attempt to increase oral language competence is critically important for offenders to allow them to derive the most benefit from prison programs addressing their offending behaviour’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 3). So according to this document, the program solves the ‘problem’ of prisoners communication skills, which is a barrier to accessing the beneficial programs necessary to address their offending behaviours – a need to teach an unskilled population. Beyond the problem of skills, the document explores the extent to which the offenders developed through their participation in the Inside Talk programme. The data being used in the report to understand the value of the program is exploring participants’ confidence and self-efficacy. The stated objectives of the evaluation involve ‘measuring self-efficacy and confidence in a range of skills’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 4) and examining ‘individ­ uals’ perceptions of the Inside Talk program’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 5). There is a direct link established, therefore, between the stated goals of the program (improving communication) and the offenders’ confidence and self-efficacy. This expresses a representation of the problem as the offenders themselves – their inability to ‘tackle the challenges that will come their way when they are released as they try to find employment and avoid or deal appropriately with the situations that have caused them problems in the past’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 10). By focusing on these specific

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personal qualities, the document makes the individual offender responsible for their circumstances, directly linking their ability to communicate well and access prison programs with their ability to think ‘good’ thoughts and make ‘good’ decisions. The ‘problem of the prisoners’ can also be understood through the presentation of drama as a solution. The document outlines the benefits of drama as allowing ‘participants to learn pro-social behaviours and skills through modelling interactive techniques’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 10). Central to this idea is the representation of drama as ‘practice’, giving the prisoners the opportunity to develop the pro-social skills needed to engage in effective decision-making beyond the prison. Drama is understood here as a rehearsal for real life, allowing prisoners to take on different roles ‘to increase their role repertoire so they are more likely to be able to meet their needs in the future’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 9). This presents understanding ‘real life’ as separate from the drama, and outside the prison: ‘rehearsing pro-social skills increases the motivation to apply them in real life’ (Harkins et al., 2009, p. 10), thus indicating the ‘problem’ represented in this document is the prisoners’ inability to function effectively in reality. The drama program, therefore, can be seen as a treatment for this problem by increasing the personal, pro-social skills of confidence and self-efficacy through improved communication.

Drama and governmentality By adopting WPR practices of analysis here, we aim to critique the ways documents written about drama programs focus on individual responsibility of participants. As we discussed in previous publications (Freebody & Finneran, 2013), the field of applied drama typically aligns itself with a radical history. What is evident in many reports of practice however, and what we’ve attempted to describe here, is that despite radical intentions, drama can be considered as a form of governmentality. That said, it is also the case that the field subverts some dominant discourses of governmentality such as the notion that the ‘problem participants’ are incompetent and/or antisocial. The simultaneous alignment with, and subversion of, such dominant discourses can be brought together to give us something different from what we normally see in social policy in neoliberal times. This form of analysis has therefore provided us with an opportunity to explore the potential relationship between drama and neoliberal agendas, which also provide an understanding of the ways writing about drama programs subvert dominant discourses often prevalent in social policy, and perpetuate discourses that are collective and anti-neoliberal. Specifically, instead of participants in these programs being represented as ignorant and anti-social (two common ways people considered ‘policy problems’ are spoken about), these programs represent participants as pre-competent

46  Framing the drama of these times

(Freebody, 1995; Martello, 2004) and pro-social (Neelands, 2009a). Both these ideas are common in literature and practice in drama, but less common in the field of policy development. As discussed in both spotlights a focus of these programs is on the representation of participants as, on the one hand, ‘lacking’ skill or knowledge in the area of concern, but on the other hand, as responsible for, and able to, learn new ways of thinking, acting and communicating. In this way, the programmatic practices rely on a particular conceptualisation of participants that we are referring to as ‘pre-competence’. The participants are not conceptualised as competent, but they are similarly not incompetent. Precompetence positions the program participants as capable and active and we therefore argue it subverts the more dominant ‘ignorance’ discourse. The participants in these programs are seen not only to have the ability to learn and change, but also are positioned as active in the process, able to embody ‘good choices’ and ‘good communication’. Another disrupted discourse evident here is the representation of participants in need of intervention as ‘anti-social’. This discourse is prevalent in social policy concerning incarcerated persons, youth-at-risk and community development. These drama programs, however, present drama as a pro-social solution. The proposals made in the two documents here may rely on the common social constructions of ‘anti-social’, ‘problematic’ behaviour, yet the programmatic intent, through drama, is steeped in pro-social practices.  The ‘pro-social’ aspects of drama are much documented in the field(s) of drama (e.g., Neelands, 2009a, Wright, 2006). Drama holds itself generally as pro-social as it is ensemble-based, concerned with building community and values the contribution of participants – their ability to be part of a collective and the worth of their ideas as they engage in the production of their reality.

Conclusion In order to understand the public perspectives on neoliberalism, one could explore the variety of metaphoric states it has been allocated in various fields (Fitzpatrick & Freebody, 2019). A stuttering, messy, hybrid shapeshifter (Peck, 2010), a nihilistic, market-worshipping syndrome (Brenner, Peck & Theodore, 2010), a Beast (Ball, 2016) and a ‘walking zombie’ (Monbiot, 2016), to name just a few. Others have been more positive, or at least neutral, as they worry that neoliberal practitioners are given too much credit/blame/ power for shaping global flows (Kingfisher & Maskovsky, 2008). They remind us that this, ‘is a complex, multi-layered, multi-vocal and deeply social phenomenon and is not a monolithic, ‘top-down ideological project’ (Larner, 2005, pp. 10–12). It is an influential framework certainly, but ‘not the only ideological force in town’ (Forsey, 2009, p. 466). In our analysis of the project documents above, the responsibilising practices of neoliberalism

Useful drama in neoliberal times 47

are evident in the way drama projects are written about, but there is also push-back against some of the dominant discourses that lay blame at the feet of individuals. These documents are not just one; they are a hybrid of ideology. We believe it is also worth noting, as we conclude our discussion, that there are many scholars who are predicting the end of the neoliberal regime: The rise of new nationalist authoritarianisms, the re-appearance of trade barriers, the striking growth of political racism, the intensifying backlash on gender equality and human rights, clearly matter… they signal we are in a moment when the apparently unstoppable trends of the last forty years are up for debate. (Connell, 2019, p. 34) So while an exploration of drama in these times, we feel, necessarily explores drama’s relationship with neoliberal ideals and practices, our positioning of this within global flows seem to be drawing more heavily on ideoscapes with financescapes shifting into the background. One need only look at the rise of ideological politics and new perspectives on nationhood through events such as Brexit to see these enacted. While some may argue we are enshrined in a ‘culture of cruelty’ (Giroux, 2012), others consider the potential for more hopeful and helpful historical possibilities (Connell, 2019). Either way, drama is both affected by, and affecting of, these times and will play a role in how we shape, define and represent our changing world.

4 DRAMATIC DEMOCRACY

An hour into the Broadway performance of ‘What the Constitution means to me’, playwright and performer, Heidi Schrek, calls for the house-lights to be brought up. Ushers come to the end of each row of seating and pass along a bundle of copies of The Constitution of the United States, one for each audience-member to peruse and then take home. Schrek makes cursory mention in her performance to a particular text reference regarding the lack of constitutional space for women’s rights. It’s a clear attempt to justify the breach of dramatic convention brought about by act of handing out the booklets, but the bridge feels like a contrived one. The point of this moment is clearly to put a copy of the constitution in each attendee’s hands, implying that everyone should educate themselves in constitutional matters and further implying a deficit of constitutional knowledge amongst the attending public. The theatrical moment feels significant. It is August, 2019. President Trump has recently been accused of making unprecedented racist verbal attacks on four Congresswomen of colour suggesting that these American-born women should ‘go home’; in the same week as he has verbally attacked the ‘rat-infested’ (and African-American dominated) city of Baltimore. During our matinée performance of Shrek’s show, a gunman kills 22 people in El Paso, Texas having published online a manifesto about his desire to murder Hispanic people. It is one of three mass killings in the US in 2 days. The political and democratic moment feels extraordinary. We are both in New York attending a conference in the heartland of Brook’s (1990) ‘deadly theatre’ on 42nd Street. There is an openly acknowledged moment of crisis in democracy in full flight around the world: the USA, Britain, Turkey, Brazil, Russia and Hong Kong are currently in public democratic distress. Such is its scale that even the most mainstream

Dramatic democracy 49

and deadly of theatre is openly addressing the crisis. The societal performance of democracy is palpable, profound and public; it is to be found on Twitter, on streets across the globe and one assumes in the drama classrooms and studios of many democratically minded teachers and artists. As a result of these extraordinary conditions, there is a sharpness and profundity to this chapter that is perhaps more pressing than others in this volume. The ideoscape (Appadurai, 1996) of these times is undergoing a radical and dangerous paradigm shift. This is a chapter of the here and now. In Spivak’s feminist post-colonial philosophy, she suggests that there is now an overwhelming ‘imperative to reimagine the planet’ and she calls for a radical alterity at this time of ‘a breakneck globalisation, catching up speed’. She posits that: There can be no doubt that “democracy” in the general sense is an unquestioned good. … It is necessary today at least to attempt to fill it with an agency other than a private goodwill … This developed postcapitalist structure must once again be filled with the robust imperative to responsibility which capitalist social productivity was obliged to destroy. (Spivak, 2012, pp. 335–350) Spivak speaks of an aesthetic education. This aesthetic education must be understood and valued as something defective for capitalism rather than being necessarily pre-capitalist in nature (her emphasis). The possibilities for democracy within a space such as this, particularly for drama as part of a vibrant aesthetic education, are what concerns us in this chapter. Winston (2007, p. 270) makes the point that ‘(i)n its work with young people and with vulnerable or marginalised groups, applied drama has readily allied itself with the educational, and above all the emancipatory, aspirations of citizenship and human rights’. Citing Hannah Arendt, he posits that drama creates a public space that allows individuals to be seen and heard, which mirrors the public space of politics. Shared spaces more so than inner qualities or beliefs unite people in common purpose and allows a ‘we’ to be established, which in turn allows for purposeful, collective action (ibid). Indeed, drama as a pro-social ensemble is a discussion that concluded our last chapter and emerges in almost every chapter in this volume, speaking to the profound emphasis that we, as a field, place on the potential for our work to highlight collectively and cohesion. The public nature of the work allows this quality to be on display. Witnessing, by audience or participants, is essential to this understanding of politics and citizenship: any action, particularly collective action, is a public matter. As theorists both within and outside the field(s) of drama have established, democracy is a public matter currently under threat. In this chapter, we seek to understand

50  Framing the drama of these times

the conceptual and practical role drama can play in reinvigorating our democracies.

The normality of democracy Whilst ostensibly about democracy, this is fundamentally a chapter about politics and drama, and moreover about the relationship between theatre and society. From the ancient Greeks to Brecht, from Boal to Dario Fo, that relationship is undeniable, but also complex and disputed. This chapter will look to the educative potential of drama for politics and examine both the historical claim which drama holds in militating for and educating for civic values and pressing current context for such claims. As with all our work in this book, there is an underlying set of conceptual ‘givens’ to our thinking that is worth drawing out again for clarity. It is our belief that artists and educators who use drama with affective/educative intent want to bring about change through making art-work that engages societies in a pro-social manner. We are happy to assume their belief that the change will be for the better, as they see it, although what they might understand as better is of course, deeply subjective. In terms of this particular chapter, we want to critically foreground another widely-held belief; that politics generally equates to democratic politics. For those of us lucky to have been born to a world of privilege (however relative it may be), especially if we are from the Global North, democracy seems temptingly normal. Yet, if the last number of years have taught us anything about global politics, it is that it is not. It is important to recognise that democracy is in fact, not a normative political state, but one which is invariably tied to a nation state’s level of development and wealth. Furthermore, it is widely assumed that democratic politics work in a fair, just and equitable manner. These givens no longer hold (if they ever did). They are critically flawed assumptions, which Spivak attributes as being characteristic of a post-capitalist world. We live in extraordinary political times: the debate on the radio as this is written is as to whether the Prime Minister of Great Britain would be arrested should he choose to deliberately disobey a new law passed by his parliament regarding Brexit. Democracy is not only fragile; it is in utter peril in many places. A recent global democracy index listing (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2018) notes that only 20 countries have what are regarded as ‘full’ democracies, representing 12% of the world’s countries and 4.5% of the global population. There are 55 and 39 countries considered ‘flawed’ democracies and ‘hybrid regimes’, respectively and 31.7% (n = 53) of the earth’s nations are ‘authoritarian regimes’. This means that 95.5% (147 countries) of the global population do not have access to full democratic rights. This situation has deteriorated over the last number of years, though interestingly, the slide has been

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arrested in 2018, a year that has also seen an increase in the scale of political participation. Democracy is indeed just one facet of the spectrum of political activity. Politics and theatre have been widely charted elsewhere [e.g., Kelleher (2009), Morgan (2013), Eckersall & Grehan (2019)]. But, frankly, given its precarity and influence on other themes in this volume, democracy seems an aspect of political life most worthy of our attention. It is in moments of crisis such as these that drama is typically invoked as a disruptive and dangerous force of resistance agitating and educating to help restore the privilege of democratic rights.

The link between drama and democracy Our global drama community firmly believes that drama can, in multiple ways, militate and educate for a more democratic world through process drama, social theatre, applied theatre and mainstream performative practices (cf. Prentki & Preston, 2009, Edmiston, 2012, Landy & Montgomery, 2012, Fisher & Katsouraki, 2017). We go so far as to say that it is somewhat of a foundational belief across the disparate elements of the art-form: One of the great services theatre can perform for the people of any country or region or town or village is to be the instrument of authentic democracy, or at the very least to push the community as near to authentic democracy as has yet been achieved. (McGrath, 2002, p. 133) The historical relationship between drama and democracy is lengthy, much debated and well-charted elsewhere. The evolution of democratic form is tied to that of dramatic form, and particularly the evolution of tragedy. Castoriadis (1983) discusses the creation of a democracy in the Greek polis. The polis can best be understood as the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece, and its form of democracy bears like comparison to what we might now understand as democracy, given that its citizens were male and generally slave-owning. Of most significance in Castoriadis’ analysis of the development of democracy/polis are two distinct but fundamentally interlinked ideas. Democracy meant the creation of a public space caused by general participation in politics, which was brought about by the direct participation of the people in the processes of decision-making and governance. This occurs in three distinct ways: the people versus ‘representatives’; the people versus the ‘experts’; and the community versus the state (1983, pp. 276–277). With regard to the latter, Castoriadis suggests that ‘(t)he community “receives itself”, as it were, from its own past, with all that this past

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entails’ (p. 279). In this, he establishes both a participatory and an iterative function in the democracy of the polis; at its heart was a communal place to take part in the telling of stories of importance. Physically that happened, to some degree at least, in the amphitheatre. David Wiles’ volume highlights the importance of this, noting that, ‘Athens was of course a deliberative democracy, but more importantly it was a participatory democracy’ (2011, p. 47) – (We acknowledge that this ‘participation’ was not universal and was contained to specific privileged categories of people). Wiles is somewhat cautious about over-stating the simultaneous emergence of theatre and democracy as meaningful, noting that it is somewhat problematic to think of tragedy and comedy as ‘material and embodied practices’ (p. 23) of democracy, suggesting instead that ‘(l)ike theatre, democracy was both an embodied practice and process, constantly engaged in renewal’ (ibid.). Allern (2017) explicitly states that ‘(t)heatre was not influenced primarily by democracy, but was a necessary precondition for it’, as a central part of the performative culture of Athens (p. 165). Significantly, Allern suggests that ‘the drama from antiquity contains aspects of importance for us as we consider solidarity, freedom of speech and active democratic participation’ (ibid.) This ancient idea of drama as playing a part in a participative democracy and the parallel performative idea of ‘acting’ as a facet of active citizenship are seminal to the contemporary relationship proposed here although they all but disappeared for a number of millennia. In the 20th century, the alignment of the idea of a healthy community with that of pro-active (acting) participation by those who can avail themselves of a public space finds resonance in the work of Williams (1961; 1975) and Sennett (2002). Williams (1975, p. 11) expands drama outwards beyond the textual (as it was predominantly considered in the 1960/70s) and looks to broader society for parallel activities. He finds that the key characteristics of drama transcend the permeable boundaries of the art and the field, and that drama is a, ‘specific, active, interactive composition: an action, not an act’. Sennett ostensibly comes from an opposite direction to drama/theatre – politics and sociology. He focuses on the contemporary imbalance between private and public experience, and the decline he perceives in involvement in political life. In examining the classical concept of theatrum mundi, Sennett looks closely at the idea of society as a theatre, and within that, the concepts of playing and acting, not just in the dramatic sense, but in the social sense also: (I)n modern society, people have become actors without an art. Society and social relations may continue to be abstractly imagined in dramatic terms, but men have ceased themselves to perform. (Sennett, 2002, p. 314)

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At the heart of this disjuncture for Sennett is the loss of the ability to play and to be playful. This in turn prevents people from taking roles and playing parts, something that is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. What is interesting for Sennett, however, is the fact that society is essentially dramatic, and the good functioning of a society demands both a recognition of that fact, as well as the recognition by people in that society, that they are social actors with roles to play. One of the most important of these roles is that of engaging in what Sennett identifies as speech (pp. 80–87), but which can be interpreted as being broader than that, and actually more akin to discourse. What the work of Castoriadis, Wiles, Sennett and Williams offer us is a pathway that allows us to weave a relationship between drama, community, participation and voice. Healthy communities are democratic, participative, active, playful and discursive. Drama offers both a means of developing these qualities in citizens but also a portal through which democratic actions can take place in fictional and safe form. In the same way that the polis had elected actors for the amphitheatre, drama can enable and encourage citizens acting in the world. In a troubled, neoliberal world, where democracy seems more prevalent and permanent than it actually is, this is significant. Two further points of relevance are worth noting. First, truth and fact are often now relative ideas, not givens. In a recent interview (Simpson, 2019), the actor Hugh Laurie suggests that the fractured political world is threatening the impact of drama. He makes the interesting observation that the ‘power of his profession’ is under threat from partisan approaches to politics which allow for truths to be debated, thus, he argues making storytelling more difficult. In the interview, he is quoted as saying that, ‘Storytelling requires a consensus of some kind … If you start feeling an audience fracturing, starting to think completely different things about the same piece of information, that makes storytelling very hard.’ Second, politics and democracy are performed and performative on a heretofore unimaginable nature and scale, something which is well charted in research in the work of scholars such as Larry Bogad (2016a; 2016b) and Baz Kershaw (1992; 1999) and discussed tangentially in the chapter on drama and the digital+. The post-normal world of post-truth intermedial performances of democracy poses significant challenges for those who might wish to use drama as a means to intervene.

Explicit and reflexive spaces for engaging the democratic paradox Increased and more democratic access to the arts over the last century changed their role and function. The marked social turn of the last 20 years is matched in drama by the emergence of performance theory with its

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emphasis on the ritualistic and efficacious function of performance, something discussed in more detail in Chapter 9. Indeed, the place of the arts in the social world is a significant debate. Shannon Jackson’s work (2011a; 2011b) and that of Belfiore and Bennett (2007; 2008; Belfiore, 2011) deal with this debate in a substantive fashion that is germane here. To some degree, it can be argued that the sort of art that currently has most caché is that which is socially provocative and disruptive. As implied by the earlier Winston reading of Arendt, there is a strong argument that the most productive use of drama with democracy is about the engagement of art in the drawing out of consent, rather than dissent. That drama is most valuable when it’s about creating agreement and the dealing with the ‘problem’ of disagreement. Others have wondered, however, if undisruptive art is not socially valuable. Bishop’s (2006; 2012) framing of the social turn in the arts foregrounds the need for antagonism and public disagreement. Implying that democracies sustain disagreement, rather than erase it, ‘(f)or Bishop, the more socially valuable function of relational art is not to manufacture consent… but to engage relational antagonism, discontent and dissonance’ (Harvie, 2011, p. 117). To Bishop’s mind, consensus in art and democracy seem to equate to stagnancy and coalescing agendas, which run entirely contrary to the true meaning of art, particularly in the social turn. This is an entirely arguable stance, particularly for those working with art in pedagogic, community, care or security settings and for whom antagonism and discontent are not feasible or desirable. However, it does offer a useful insight for those involved in applied and participative drama work: The mere fact of being collaborative, or participatory, or interactive, is not enough to legitimize a work or guarantee its significance. It is more important to observe how it addresses – and intervenes in – the dominant conventions and relations of its time. (Roche, 2007 in Harvie, 2011, p. 119) Doing drama is not enough. It must address and intervene in some way. The manner in which is does so is what shall concern our discussion for the remainder of the chapter. Drama work of this nature can be classified into two distinct areas: drama that engages with actively democratic ideals – an explicit drama for democracy; and, drama that more gently and passively embodies and promotes the fundamental tenets of democracy and which is regarded as a reflexive drama for democracy. Explicit drama for democracy typically addresses democratic issues outright through stage performance representing issues troubling or celebrating democracy, such as that evident in the works of Seán O’Casey, Athol

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Fugard, Tony Kuchner or Lin-Manuel Miranda. The dire circumstances of the 20th century saw the development of more audience-engaged theatrical forms, best represented in the epic theatre of Berthold Brecht that responded to the emergence of National Socialism in Germany, but also in the agit-prop, community theatre and theatre in education movements that characterised some of the story of the middle and late parts of the century in the UK. In Brazil, the powerful theatrical activism of Augusto Boal (inspired by the philosophy of Paulo Friere) saw the replacement of the spectator and actor through the emergence of the spect-actor in theatre of the oppressed, forum theatre and legislative theatre (cf. Cohen-Cruz & Schuzman, 2006). This work originated in poor communities after the brutal military dictatorship and sought to re-establish tenets of democratic and indeed human behaviour through participatory performance. The revolutionary zealousness and global popularity of Boal’s work amongst its proponents remain undiminished, but it is also subject to much critique (Österlind, 2008) and criticism (Davis & O’sullivan, 2000). Whilst we proceed to focus more on a reflexive drama for democracy in the remainder of the chapter, it is interesting to note that the presence or absence of ‘radical’ dramatic forms, such as these, can in itself be taken as a measure of democratic vitality: Many factors, of course, contribute to the well-being or not of democracy, but I suggest that changes in how democracy defines its citizens in any particular period is key to any prognosis of how it is doing. One useful way into the analysis of democratic vitality or lack of it may be through the creation of a kind of cultural graph of re-definitions of theatre audiences affected by changes, and especially economic changes, in both the theatre’s constitution and environment. (Kershaw, 1999a, p. 269) The reflexive drama for democracy we are concerned with is comprised of the more general artistic and educational efforts towards democracy embodied in the sorts of work represented throughout this book – work that often fits under the applied umbrella and usually takes place in studios and classrooms away from the mainstages of our venues. For us, this type of drama work may or may not even name a democratic intent in the work; sometimes, it’s simply about playing in and around politics and democracy. Often work of this nature is less didactic and more dialogic, more about the creation of a space of democratic potential. The creation of such spaces represents the fostering of opportunities of infinite possibility to explore what Mouffe (2000) regards as the democratic paradox characteristic of these times. This paradox arises because of the merging schools of thought of democratic theory and classical liberalism, resulting in the form of liberal democracy

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now evidenced. The heart of her analysis is a destabilising of the concept of liberal democracy suggesting that it is not a stable entity but a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation. Ultimately, liberal democracy is revealed as a form of political power, with all the consequent implications of hegemony and relativism that implies. Mouffe’s work is a useful way in which to think of democracy and drama; as a paradox being explored in a playful, fictional and dialogic ‘third’ space.

Dramatic democracy in action This chapter does not draw upon examples of practice to the same degree as others. However, it is timely to point to some examples of work that both explicitly and implicitly strive to engage with drama and democracy. Regardless of the explicit or implicit intent of the work, certain aspirations and tenets are clear and shared amongst practitioners and thinkers, irrespective of their use of dramatic form. John McGrath’s deeply provocative thinking captures the conceptual breadth of the role that he feels drama should engage with: In all areas central to the working of a democracy, theatre has its role to play: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

In celebrating and scrutinising the values within the borders of the Demos. In contesting these borders, external and internal. In giving a voice to the excluded. In giving a voice to the minority. In constantly guarding against the tyranny of the majority. In demanding the right to speak publicly, to criticise without fear. In giving a voice to the oppositional. In seeking true and balanced information. In combating the distorting and antidemocratic powers of the mass media. In questioning the role of large corporations, national and transnational, to influence both the law and the government of the day. In defining and redefining freedoms for the age. In questioning the borders of freedom. In giving a voice to the less equal. In demanding impartial justice and equality of all citizens before the law, rich or poor (McGrath, 2002, p. 137).

In reality, of course, particularly within the neoliberal paradigm in which they exist, contemporary projects are more modest in intent, whilst embodying some of McGraths’s principles.

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Spotlight on practice – Shakespeare Schools Foundation (UK) The Shakespeare Schools Foundation (https://www.shakespeareschools.org/) describes itself as the world’s largest youth festival, and reaches 300,000 children in the UK annually. The festival works with children through providing specialist workshops and teacher training to diverse schools and settings, in order to produce a Festival of Shakespearean performance, staged in professional theatre spaces. It places a particular emphasis on instilling curiosity and empathy, aspiration and self-esteem and in ‘giving young people the confidence to see that all the world is their stage’. Jennifer Kitchen offers an ethnographic study of the festival, having worked in a number of sites where ensemble performances were being prepared. Kitchen’s research (2018) looks specifically at the concept of ensemble pedagogy within the context of the festival. She understands ensemble pedagogy as active, democratic and theatre-based and examines the way in which it is used to in the creation of an ensemble third space for active citizenship within the children’s contexts. Of specific interest to the question of democracy and the drama of these times is her analysis of populism, which she posits as an undemocratic rhetoric. She holds that drama’s response to populism is in its pluralistic, contestive and processional nature, which directly address the morally exclusionary, totalising and static populist rhetorics which are anti-democratic in nature (Kitchen, 2020).

Kitchen’s use of the metaphor of family to describe ensemble, and that of teaching as mothering (2020, p. 8) is a potent feminist counterpoint to the contesting and combatting of the more traditional Marxist ideology of McGrath. By foregrounding care, empathy, sympathy and emotion and the possibilities of the third space for a dialogic democracy, Kitchen celebrates drama’s relationship with the world as a space of possibility as opposed to a space of difference or conflict. Other projects exist which are more directly democratic in nature, and which we name-check here simply to give a flavour of the field. Democracy through Theatre is a collaborative Norwegian/South Africa university project (https://www.democracythroughtheatre.com) that investigates theatre as humanistic education and an arena for participant-driven communication and utterance. It does this in response to a world that is characterised as post-democratic and the project is guided by a set of explicit values amongst which are a critical interrogation of dominant narratives, an understanding of theatre as a political act, and ‘a search for the meaning and practical implementation of deep democracy’. DemoDram – Democracy through Drama is an Erasmus+ (EU) funded drama in education project

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(https://demodram.com/) that ‘aims to provide engaging drama workshops and support teachers across Europe’. This project is inspired primarily by the drama in education work of Dorothy Heathcote, and strives to extend the development of democratic classrooms, democratic awareness and student civic engagement amongst teachers across Europe through the provision of a range of resources and fora for engagement. The challenge in looking to work of this nature is to understand both the intent of the work, and the manner in which this is achieved. Each of the three projects clearly embody many desires towards democracy though the extent to which they are explicit about them is less effective. What is evident from the spotlight above is that perhaps the most effective work in drama and democracy does not directly address it at all. Perhaps that is a luxury no longer afforded us. What is clear from these times, is that projects deliberately engaging drama for democracy are vital for many in the times ahead.

Acting and participating as a citizen: possibilities and problems There has been some scholarship that develops the instinctual link between drama and citizenship discussed earlier and so often felt by people working in the ways described by McGrath above. To a large degree, this scholarship focusses on a discussion of drama being a force in the development of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The quote from Winston (2007) and his discussion of Arendt cited earlier connects drama and democracy with the sub-themes of citizenship, human rights. These themes find expression throughout the work of Helen Nicholson (2005; 2009; 2011). Citing Mouffe in the earliest of those works, she asks the simple but profound question that cuts to the heart of much of what this chapter seeks to explore; ‘(i)f citizenship is about acting as a citizen, with all the implications of performance that this phrase entails, how might practising drama encourage people to become active participant citizens?’ (2005, p. 21). Whilst the conceptual path can be traced, the complexity of establishing a causal link between drama, democracy and citizenship should not be underestimated. How, for example, do we know that any potential increase in a sense of citizenship does not come about from simply being in a room with other humans, regardless of the activity being undertaken? Tim Prentki suggests that the key to this debate is not actually the dramatic content of any nature, but rather that the act of participation in drama leading to the development of active citizenship: (The) affective dimension of citizenship is connected to the concept of active citizenship in a democracy – that citizens can, by their actions, shape the society in which they have a stake. Active citizenship is about

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having the capacity to claim one’s citizenship status, translating rights and responsibilities into actions that call to account both the horizontal relationships between citizens and also vertical ones between citizens and those elected to power. (Prentki, 2015, p. 203) The specific manner in which agency and citizenship are developed through engagement with drama is discussed by many and is profoundly expressed in the work of Jonothan Neelands. He writes of the possibilities of drama to teach us how to act in groups as an ensemble (2009a); to spend time together (2009b), and to act in the world (2011). Neelands (2015; 2016) also details the manner in which drama develops a participatory imperative which in so doing ultimately makes people (children) powerful in the world. In a previous volume, we problematised the relationship between drama and social justice and made the case for a critical awareness in work of this nature (Freebody & Finneran, 2016). It is vital that the same criticality be engaged in discussing drama, democracy, agency and citizenship. Gallagher and colleagues note the fascination and challenge of much research in drama but also caution against its potential celebratory tone. They suggest that work of this nature can lead us as researchers to a point where, ‘(i)n our enthusiasm, drama gets assigned a great many important tasks: it engages the disengaged, it teaches empathy, it tackles difficult social issues, it democratises classrooms, it radicalises pedagogy’ (Gallagher, Freeman & Wessells, 2010, p. 6). Drama can be conceived of as a superhero of intent and efficacy. Snyder-Young (2013) talks eloquently of a ‘theatre of good intentions’ which is often bedevilled by a desire to change the world through theatre, accompanied by issues of (white/male) guilt, good intentions, privilege and value laden structures, all taking place in a context of global poverty and inequality. These bigger picture issues make a critical stance regarding any changes, particularly on an issue such as democracy, absolutely vital. Singular answers and simplistic claims are to be avoided. Adopting a similar critical stance, Stephen Bottoms (2017) offers an insightful analysis of some of the problems of claiming achievement or merit for democracy based solely on active engagement (participation) in drama. He suggests that the implicit suggestion of a participatory hierarchy is problematic, given that ‘spectating itself is an active situation … and not a passive state of disempowerment to overcome’ (2017, p. 167). Further, he notes that democracy by its nature is limited and flawed. Votes are solicited, candidates are selected, constituencies are designed ‘by the powers that be’ (p. 168). The same claim can be made of participatory theatre. Finally, as Fraser’s (2007) work reminds us – who is represented in a democracy is an issue of justice. Bottoms notes that democracies are always, by definition, exclusionary. They represent a fixed group of participants with clear rules about gets to take part. Which obviously begs the question of who is inside

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the circle and who is outside? Bottoms concludes his searing critique by noting that ‘(t)he chances are that they either paid for the privilege or that – in the case of applied theatre practices – they were brought “inside the circle” by a beneficent outsider. In either case, these are curious criteria for enfranchisement’ (p. 169). They are also reason enough to restrain desires of an antagonistic or superhero democracy drama in favour of a more reflexive and broader approach to agency, citizenship and kindness.

Conclusion In Russia theater has always played an important social role. It has been a means of emancipation of the internal energy of the masses, a mouthpiece of ideological dictatorship, a voice of forbidden truth, and, eventually, a school for democracy, teaching people to think and speak freely. (Prokhorova & Shamina, 2014, p. 72) As the quote illustrates, the morally vacant nature of both the form and content of work in drama and democracy allows them both to be potentially filled with unknowing or subversive meaning by unwitting or unscrupulous actors. This in itself represents a compelling argument for educating people in participation, critical thinking, agency and citizenship, in order that we understand the actions of actors in any democracy. The fictional space allows for the speculative exploration of a range of outcomes, both good and bad. This potentially encourages participants to explore the range of democracy, to figure out what works and doesn’t work, and without judgement. It also encourages agreement, consensus and the alleviation and perhaps resolution of conflict within that fictional space; not experiential qualities to be sniffed at in these times. In the introduction to her book, Snyder-Young (2013, pp. 11–12) describes three properties of theatre that for her are vital in terms of social change: it is live and public; it is not real; and it is a form of collaborative problemsolving. In concluding this chapter, we endorse these criteria and go somewhat further to include action and active participation as additional properties. We conclude that the very reason drama is a space of potent possibility for democracy is because of the range of complex characteristics elaborated upon in this chapter, regardless of whether there are explicit or reflexive agendas at play. Drama’s relationship with democracy is not an automatic one: drama by itself does nothing – it’s only what we do with drama that makes a difference. The practice of drama mirrors (both historically and in practice) the inherently performative and performed nature of democracy. The practice of drama also begs the question of who is looking in the mirror? And whose images are they seeing reflected or refracted? And are those images

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distorted or representative? Drama creates a ‘third space’ in which the contemporary democratic paradox (Mouffe, 2000) and the critical illness of democracy (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018) can be explored. Drama offers a mobile critical paradigm in which big issues can be dealt with (Freeman & Gallagher, 2016). Drama promotes agency, participation and acting. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, drama offers an aesthetic space in which to care (Thompson, 2015; Balfour, 2019). In a world where caring is often not encouraged or the scale of the world’s threats are so great that we simply do not know what we should care about, maybe this is the greatest gift that drama can give democracy.

5 CREATIVITY AND THE GLOBAL EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENT

Schools serve us. They serve communities, build citizenry, help individuals and aid meritocracies. Schooling, as an international project, is a hopeful one. It assumes that the next generation can be better than the current generation. That as a species, we have knowledge and skills worthy of study. Over the decades many have suggested, however, that schools have stopped serving us, or that they’ve only ever feigned to serve us. They have argued that education institutions are killing creativity (Robinson, 2006), entrenching poverty (Teese & Polesel, 2003) and failing youth (Giroux, 2012). Antischool writing dating back to the middle part of the 1900s with Benjamin’s Sabre-Tooth Curriculum (1939), Illich’s De-Schooling Society (1971) and Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a subversive activity (1969) were particularly influential in framing a critique of schooling, and at the same time, framed the background to the emergence of drama education. These texts positioned the teacher as an advocate, even at times, a liberator of students caught in a damaging system. The core tenets of drama education as progressive, subversive and concerned with freedom from oppression have their spiritual roots in these writings. The place of ‘school’ as an institution in these times, and its relationship to drama, is therefore complex, with views and practices on each end of a very large spectrum. We begin this chapter by acknowledging that diverse discourses in the domain of education are important (Rushek, 2017). In a system so big and complex, at once required to meet large and unwieldy social goals in nuanced ways that suit both systems and individuals, any one idea or judgement could be simultaneously correct and false. In order to explore these complex, chaotic and contradictory things that are ‘education’ and ‘schooling’, we again draw on Appadurai’s global flows and consider the disjunctures between financescapes, ideoscapes and how these have instigated and maintained

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a recent Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2016). In examining schooling and education, we wish to differentiate between it and learning, which is one of our underlying themes in this book and which occurs in various ways both within and beyond the formal school system. In the recent decades, schools across the Global North have been ‘restructured and re-cultured around the values of neoliberalism’ (Down, 2009), through the commitment of governments towards building, ‘a competitive, innovative knowledge-based economy that can compete and win in global markets’ (Rudd & Smith, 2007, p. 3). This has been influenced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), through the implementation of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) as a tool to test for the skills needed in such a ‘knowledge economy’. It is also attributable to the United Nations (UN) through their propagation of discourses about the public role of education, which have established schools as central places in which governments can undertake this ‘building’ work. It is via schooling, many argue, that these knowledge-based economies are achieved through attention to the development of workforces and the development of skills needed in to serve a productivity agenda (Down, 2009, p. 52). Forsey (2009, p. 548) refers to this as ‘neoliberalism in practice’. Some have more critically referred to it as a ‘McDonaldisation’ of education which results in ‘fast-food knowledge’ (Dey & Steyaert, 2007, p. 430). Certainly, there is an increased focus in systems ‘infected’ by the GERM on ‘displays of quality’ and the performativity of schools (Ball, 2003, p. 216). Looking through this lens, education becomes a private investment rather than a public concern, performing achievement, well-being and culture in ways that serve as advertisements to potential consumers (Lambert et al., 2017) and for the enhancement of careers and stimulation of economic growth (Down, 2009, p. 53). We believe the GERM is best understood, not as a decontexualised decision of governments, but as a global response to a series of perceived problems. First, in a post-normal society, the world is considered less knowable, and rates of social, political and practical change make traditional education potentially ill-equipped to prepare the next generation for the challenges they will face, and the workforces they will need to build. Beyond this initial, very large perceived problem, is another – how do we build and maintain equitable systems that serve a diverse public? As ethnoscapes move people around the world, most communities are now linguistically, culturally and socioeconomically diverse. How do we create education systems that are both equitable and functioning? Second, how do we have systems that respond to these two complex problems in ways we can afford, and sustain? And last, how will we know if the systems we build are achieving these things at all? The GERM, therefore, is driven by accountability and transparency agendas, coupled with a value for money imperative. It is focused on the idea that we should use education, ‘to cultivate active, innovative citizens for the skilled

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labour force required for emerging new occupations’ (Rushek, 2017, p. 140). In this chapter, we explore potential effects of the GERM as a solution to the perceived problems listed above. We consider the changing role of drama and the arts more broadly when schools, cultural and public institutions are increasingly concerned with economic competitiveness. In particular, we explore three ways that drama in schools has been impacted by these times and this agenda: syllabus and policy discourses of creativity, curriculum and pedagogy. Our position in this chapter is that despite the vast criticisms of the GERM (many of which we agree with), the GERM is not the ‘problem’. It is both a symptom and a reality. It is an identifiable trend across international educational systems that are attempting to address the ‘problem’ of failing systems, in a post-normal, globalised, over-populated world where, increasingly, schools can’t keep up with the rate of social change (Hobsbawm, 1995).

The problem with this solution to the perceived education ‘problem’ Schooling is a complex activity, and so the institutions built to manage it are just as, if not more, complex. Government agendas and educational policies (again, complex) are related but different those to the practices of schooling and educational institutions. In one chapter, we could never canvas all aspects of these relationships and the messy, multifaceted, institutionally and personally experienced effects of the GERM in these spaces. However, we do wish to survey a few concerns and necessarily considerations about how the GERM is enacted ways that effect drama practice. The activities of schooling have been the focus of much criticism related to GERM policy initiatives in the last decade, much of which echoes the anti-school writing of the early 20th century discussed in the introduction to this chapter. Sahlberg, who coined the term GERM (2012), worries that it increases testing, narrows curriculum and turns the art of pedagogy into mechanistic instruction. Additionally, understandings about the functions of schooling beyond those that ‘productively’ align with an outcome-driven agenda are side-lined, under-resourced, or effectively ignored. Alternative perspectives suggest that workforce-driven agendas in schooling are not only undemocratic and unable to serve an egalitarian society but are also uneducative. The self-serving requirements of a competitive school system provide little to no connection to the traditions, philosophies and practices of education. This raises questions about the extent to which schools should focus on making people powerful – rather than making them workers (Ayers, 2004), and the role of schools in a system that has historically considered itself a service, not a business. There is, therefore, a confused rhetoric that often accompanies GERM policy agenda as notions of marketisation are combined with perceived or hoped for effects of democratisation, equity, quality and egalitarianism (Forsey, 2009, p. 458). Some have gone so far as to argue that current

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frameworks of human rights, and legal discourse regarding the role of public institutions in such rights (education, health, etc.), are really the bureaucratic lubricant ‘of a neo-liberal, marketised political order’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 26). Scholars argue that, ‘the ultrarich have used the language and institutions of human rights to justify the global expansion of neoliberalism’ (Tampio, 2018, p. 379) and that the GERM is a prime example of this. The UN’s drive for standardised tests, accountability and business interests globally is tied together with a rhetoric of human rights (ibid); however, despite the oft-quoted rhetoric of fairer societies, GERM policy proposals orient to a ‘superficial-deficit model’ (Dede, 2002, cited in Rushek, 2017) that problematises individuals rather than systems and focuses on outcomes rather than processes. Through this, institutions such as schools become a focus of a ‘solution’ to a problem of equity and are linked to the emergence of a competitive knowledge-driven society with a strong, educated workforce. The public discourses around education tend to either maintain its place as the cure of our social and economic problems or lament its failure to deliver social order and a strong, competitive workforce. Some (including ourselves) have argued that ‘exceptionalising schools – either as a panacea for, or a cause of, societal problems – direct attention away from the mass of institutions that partake in the production of liveable conditions for people’ (Tampio, 2018, p. 88). Similar concerns are expressed in our chapter on health and well-being. Linking school practices (particularly under the GERM) with equity enforces a hegemonic perspective on the role of schools in society. Not only is it problematic to assume that our current, neoliberal school system can be strongly linked to social change – it has been shown time and time again that in reality it doesn’t work. Schooling reforms drawn from neoliberal ideologies are creating greater chasms between rich and poor (Rushek, 2017). Inequity appears to be growing in schools and society, not declining. Higher standards, higher expectations, are insistently demanded of these urban principals, and of their teachers and the students in their schools, but far lower standards certainly in ethical respects appear to be expected of the dominant society that isolates these children in unequal institutions. (Kozol, 2005, p. 34) These unequal institutions (that demand such high expectations from those that service them) are locking marginalised children out of participation in the knowledge economy while simultaneously reorienting schooling around these goals. The funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) of local communities, minority cultures, marginalised communities are ignored and the diversity of ways of being productive members of society become narrowed (Geertz, 1985). The standardisation of schooling and assessment does not allow for complex understandings of success. We argue that this leads to white, middleclass, patriarchal forms of engagement in work and society which are now

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synonymous with what has come to be known as ‘successful’ participation in our knowledge economy. The hegemony that allows certain forms of success to become normalised also shape the discourses of how institutions such as schools and practices such as arts and artmaking ‘help’ neoliberal agendas. But within such a challenging vista, wherein lies drama? For the remainder of this chapter, we explore the relationship between drama and schooling in these times, focussing on three different but intersecting locations and practices: creativity, curriculum and pedagogy.

Creativity: syllabus and policy discourses Spotlight on practice: the creativity agenda – a global phenomenon To prepare for 2030, people should be able to think creatively, develop new products and services, new jobs, new processes and methods, new ways of thinking and living, new enterprises, new sectors, new business models and new social models. Increasingly, innovation springs not from individuals thinking and working alone, but through co-operation and collaboration with others to draw on existing knowledge to create new knowledge. The constructs that underpin the competency include adaptability, creativity, curiosity and open-mindedness. OECD (2018) The future of education and skills: education 2030 In the development of their drama work, students will exercise their critical and inventive thinking as they work in groups to develop and confidently present a performance that can entertain, educate and encourage the audience to dialogue on relevant issues. Ministry of Education (MOE) Singapore (2018) Drama Syllabus As this country works to strengthen our place in the 21st century global economy, the arts equip students with a creative, competitive edge. The arts provide the skills and knowledge students need to develop the creativity and determination necessary for success. Americans for the Arts (2020) Australian governments commit to workinçg in collaboration with all school sectors to support all young Australians to become: successful learners; confident and creative individuals; active and informed citizens. Ministerial council on Education, Employments, Training and Youth Affairs, Australia (2008) Melbourne declaration on educational goals for young Australians Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki, has listed qualitative and universal education, increased intra-African trade and support for creativity and innovation as vital factors that would engender good governance in Africa. Oyelade (2018) This Day Nigeria

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It is not an oversight. We are aware that our spotlight on practice does not, in fact, include any discussion of practice. The shared cultural idea of creativity, it would seem, is often talked about rather than explicitly or systematically practised. This is something of an oversimplification of course. What is more accurate is that creativity is often talked about as an idea, rather than a practice. As we can see above, syllabuses and curriculum documents over the last decade have increasingly mandated creativity (Anderson & Jefferson, 2016). Many argue, however, that there has been no discernible rise in creativity in schools. In fact, Montuori (2012) states: Creativity and imagination will be essential to envisioning and developing alternatives to the systems, structures and processes that are presently failing us. But if the urgency and importance of creativity are clear, in education creativity is mostly conspicuous by its absence (Montuori, 2012, p. 64) So, despite this focus on creativity (the idea, not the practice) in official documents such as syllabuses, policies, white papers and mission statements, there appears to be a dearth of actual ‘creative’ work happening with participants in these spaces. This all depends, of course, on one’s understanding of creativity. And it’s hard to judge in these instances, as no concrete definition of creativity is generally provided. Confusing? Certainly. What is undeniable is that the catchcry of creativity and innovation is now ubiquitous. We have creative schools, creative societies and creative industries. Creativity has never had as privileged an existence; it seems. Our interest in the term creativity is because it has emerged as a range of powerful discursive weapons, as we can see from our spotlight above, used in different sides of the ‘what is education for?’ and ‘what are the arts for?’ debates that are characteristic of the GERM. On the one hand, creativity is recruited into neoliberal ideas about education as a preparation for work, training the future workforce and about the skills and capacities required to negotiate these times to be globally competitive and successful. There is also the more traditional understanding of creativity as both an adjective and verb describing activities used to teach people to think critically, influence others, work across disciplines in collaborative ways and produce new (useful and lucrative) ideas and things. The ‘buzziness’ of this ‘buzz word’ is clearly related to its usefulness in the future (rather than the now). Harris (2014, p. 17) suggests that ‘creativity discourses have been politically and pedagogically commodified, and to some degree co-opted from aesthetics and education discourses into economic ones’. Drama education in this discourse is at the centre of a political agenda that takes care to remind teachers, students and parents that ‘the market value of creative people has risen’ (D’Andrea, 2012, p. 87). Education and art serve this

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agenda by creating a citizenry and, more importantly, a workforce for our communities. On the other hand, creative skills are also transformed into learning experiences in anti-neoliberal arguments that express concern about ‘results focused’ education. These deliberately contrast themselves from neoliberal success agendas by proclaiming children’s rights to play, to have their own ideas valued and engage in social constructivism that allows them to work with each other to learn. These arguments also rely on the idea of creative experiences as useful, but it is the usefulness of making and experiencing art for its own sake, to engage aesthetically, to experience emotion and so on. There is a small pool of resolutely anti-neoliberal conversations in the creativity space – many of these emerge from drama and other arts education scholars. These conversations are focused more on the rights of children to be children and, following Dewey’s (1897, p. 78) arguments in the development of the progressive school movement, schools to be a ‘process of living, and not a preparation for future living’. As opposed to the ‘buzz’ of the new neoliberal creativity, this discourse aligns childhood with notions of imagination and play, presenting creativity as a potentially ‘lost’ or increasingly marginalised focus. It expresses concern that schools will teach young people that ‘the only productive creative endeavour is a profitable one’ (Harris, 2014, p. 28). Creativity as an informing concept of living, working, artmaking and educating in these times therefore is neither singular nor static. Some argue that there has been a recent ‘change in the way creativity is both perceived and pursued in contemporary culture’ (Harris, 2014). Even public and common-sense understandings of what the term means seem to be under review. Oft-quoted definitions of creativity tend to be product-oriented, yet emerging definitions see creativity as an amalgamation of interrelated processes, skills and capacities that people engage in when undertaking a creative act or to build a creative environment (Harris, 2016). Creativity is considered by most scholars to be under-defined. It tends to exist either as what Jefferson and Anderson (2017) consider an ‘aerosol term’; something sprayed around without being tangible, or an undefined desire; something ‘sought after but not well understood’ (Harris, 2014, p. 18). Despite its intangibility and ephemeral conceptualisations, ‘being’ creative is considered useful. It has been found to develop, ‘resilience, resourcefulness and confidence’ (Upitis, 2014, p. 2) and engaging in creative practices (such as drama) therefore has the potential to help people prepare for future challenges. Beyond this ‘usefulness’ to future lives, creativity can also be seen to have its own, intrinsic value – to improve the lives of those that practice it. This intrinsic value has particular prominence in drama education as highlighted by Gallagher’s (2007a) comprehensive analysis, although she

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also notes clearly the struggles around creativity and significant gaps in the knowledge-base that need to be addressed: As an under-theorized area in the field of drama education, a field fraught with disagreement over the very nature of the term creativity and how we might most effectively invite it into our classrooms, sustained qualitative research, discourse analyses, video-captured moments of creative exploration and expression, inquiries into peer relations, collective engagement, pedagogical practices, spatial ethnographies, innovative, postpositivist methodologies, continued philosophical and empirical inquiries are vital. Our research must also struggle further to articulate drama’s pedagogical sophistication and intricacies. (Gallagher, 2007a, p. 1237) Returning to the spotlighted statements drawn from policies and curriculum around the world, it is undeniable that the ‘discourse’ of creativity, however, conceptualised, figures strongly in discussions about how we teach the next generation. One aspect of these discussions has been the opportunities afforded to students to engage in risk-taking in their learning. Those that consider risk-taking as a component of creativity (Harris, 2016) have argued that, more than just not existing, creativity cannot exist within or alongside an outcomes-driven neoliberal focus because ‘the risk of failure necessary for true creative exploration is anathema to global neoliberal culture, including (or especially) sectors like education’ (Harris, 2014, p. 18). In fact, it is not just failure that is untenable in schools, but creative processes more generally as they can only exist where there are activities such as daydreaming, provocation and disruption are allowed and encouraged. These activities are not just unpopular but routinely outlawed in educational institutions (Harris, 2014). So, while neoliberalism in society and work may incorporate creativity discourses that see the potential for imagination and playfulness to increase productivity (such as in workplaces such as Google), neoliberalism is schools seems to produce the opposite effect. Cue drama. Drama can make spaces in schools for students to engage with creative practice separate from the pressure of producing ‘innovative outcomes’, and rather as a worthy, affective endeavour that is in and of itself important for learning, growth and expression. This is a push to make creativity an authentic part of learning. In the current political climate, Harris warns however, this can be seen as a proverbial double-edged sword – aligning drama education with imagination (daydreaming, time-wasting), risk (failure) and disruption (independence) and potentially signalling the ‘death knell of arts education’ (2014, p. 19). It is with this ominous prediction that we turn now to discuss the role of drama curriculum.

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Curriculum and drama Spotlight on practice: EBACC and the UK curriculum Established in 2010, the English Baccalaureate (EBACC) is a collection of GCSE subjects endorsed by the government as ‘core’ learning. While not mandatory, there is a significant push for UK teenagers to take an EBACC during their GCSEs with the government advertising that ‘choosing the EBACC at GCSE gives them access to a full range of employment options when they leave secondary school and the broad knowledge that employers are looking for’ (UK Gov, leaflet to parents). To undertake an EBACC, students need to study the following core subjects for their GCSEs: English, maths, combined science or at least two single sciences, history or geography and a Language. Students that received an A*-C grade in all these subjects obtain an EBACC. At its conception, the elite universities in the UK indicated that they supported the EBACC and that these subjects were what they considered to be a broad curriculum that would give students the opportunity for success post-secondary school. Despite a rhetoric around the EBACC being a curriculum that keeps young people’s options open and prepares them for future work (gov.uk), critics of the EBACC claim that it has narrowed the curriculum and reduced opportunities for young people to engage in disciplines outside the core, and that this is particularly devastating for the arts. Impact research found that in the 9 years since EBACC was established, enrolments in drama dropped nearly 30%, dance almost 50% and design and technology 65% (Richmond, 2019). Non-EBACC subjects such as these also experienced a large decline in employment of teachers, with up to 1,000 less jobs reported in some subjects.

The situation with drama curriculum, and schooling generally in the UK, clearly connects with the global phenomenon outlined earlier in this chapter that sees schooling as preparation for work. Students are under pressure to be ‘future ready’ in an increasingly competitive market. Young teenagers are funnelled into curriculum programs marketed as the best preparation for university entry and the workforce. The exclusion of drama (and the arts more generally) from the list of core study in the EBACC also serves to demonstrate how in times of increasing ‘datafication’ that almost fetishes measurement and accountability, drama as a school subject is considered ‘fluffy’, fun, easy, not academic and a subject for those that aren’t smart (Lambert et al., 2017, p. 204). Drama has always had a pretty ambivalent relationship with curriculum (Bolton, 2007, O’Toole et al., 2009, Finneran, 2016), but it is placed outside of the ‘core business’ of schools in neoliberal times, which focus on achievement, measurement, transparency and the commodification of culture to the benefit of individuals.

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It is impossible to disconnect the effect of curricular phenomena such as the EBACC on students’ opportunities to engage with arts curriculum, with wider discourses of creativity in education discussed previously. The discovery of ‘soft skills’ by employers and policy makers has seen education policy and curriculum clearly outline the need for creativity, collaboration, ethics, critical thinking and innovation (to name a few). At the same time, school subjects that typically involve creative practices, group assessment tasks and the demonstration of a range of perspectives are being marginalised. As Anderson comments: This body of research evidence provides a strong case for why the arts in general and drama specifically should hold a strong position in the curriculum and schooling. Yet the curriculum hierarchy persists (Anderson & Donelan 2009), and in some places that have traditionally been strongholds for drama curriculum like the UK, the subject has been systematically removed from the curriculum (Pitfield, 2013) (Anderson, 2014, p. 115) Anderson laments that this demonstrates that even in times of rapid change evidence-based change can be slow. We wonder, however, whether a characteristic of these times (and probably many others too) is a turn away from evidence as a core driver of change. The neoliberal focus on industry needs and speculation about an uncertain future seems to have allowed the ‘common sense’ of market practices, individual choice and personal views of powerful people, to hold as much weight as strong evidence or informed argument. It is also the case that in our reading for this chapter, we noticed a disjuncture in the ways drama curriculum in the UK is spoken about in debates on schooling and children and written about in official documents. Curriculum and syllabus documents tend to focus on the practice of drama and theatre, the centrality of performance and the making and interpreting of theatre. In fact, in the syllabus documents for A-level Drama and Theatre, beyond the obligatory mention in the aims that the course should ‘inspire creativity in students’ (p. 3), there are only two further mentions of the word – both tied up with specific skills related to theatre-making and communication of meaning to audiences. Yet, despite this focus on skills and knowledges explicitly associated with theatre-making and performance in the syllabus, the rhetoric brought to bear on the debates surrounding the introduction of the EBACC and its effects on arts curriculum tend to be focussed on the role of drama in developing passionate, thoughtful citizens. Words like play, investigation, creativity, ethics and emotion – essentially development of ‘soft skills’ – were drawn out to align drama with the kind of work young people should be doing in schools to become the kinds of individuals and communities we need in an uncertain future (Baldwin, 2013, Rosen, 2019, Snow, 2019). While it has been a long time since debates about

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drama process and drama performance were given airspace in the field, it seems there is still at times a separation between how we see ourselves and how we present ourselves as a curricular subject. We acknowledge that this does not at all mean that we do not know ourselves, but as we have discussed in earlier chapters, neoliberal media and governments have required us to position ourselves in different ways, for different purposes, to remain relevant in public discourses of schooling. The story of drama curriculum in these times is not all doom and gloom, however. In many systems in the world, drama curriculum is still ‘alive and kicking’ (Davis, 2015), and in fact thriving, with strength and support for the maintenance of a strong curriculum presence in many places in the world (Gallagher, 2016b). Emerging work from Hong Kong, which has explored students’ experience of a subject-drama curriculum (there is both a discrete school subject drama and extra-curricular drama offered in the Hong Kong system; the latter is more popular) and found that it acted as a practice of hope (Law, 2018). This mapping identified the ways in which the broader school system ‘distributed’ hope and compared it to drama. For instance, at the school level, hope was considered by students to be future oriented, deferring joy to a time post-individual effort and achievement (I hope to work hard and achieve now to have joy later). In drama, however, students saw the work as a cultural, social and emotional practice, underpinned by an ethic of joy and care that ‘unfolded’ the future, allowing a multitude of experience (Law, 2018). So, while the broader school system, informed by neoliberal logic promotes self-care and individualistic achievement as the pathway to a promising future, Law considers this to be ‘false hope’ (p. 15) and sees the drama curriculum as a space that can actively, ‘work against the (false) hopes that are translated into neoliberal discourse of governing the self to excel in marketable skills’ (p. 13). This sentiment is shared by Lambert and colleagues who consider drama in schools is a ‘safe’ and ‘smooth’ space, allowing for counter-hegemonic practices and opportunities for students to engage with the notion of multiplicity: ‘In drama students engaged in becoming through the trying on of a multitude of different identities’ (Lambert et al., 2017, p. 202). Gallagher’s (2016b) exploration of drama curriculum in Ontario, Canada notes the prevalence of opportunities to build identity, empathy and social justice. It would not be unreasonable to conclude that for many drama teachers, drama in schools in these times is a form of resistance. This is achieved through the development of safe spaces, and the focus on critical consciousness of students, with drama teachers creating ‘new weapons’ (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4), ‘to speak back to the neoliberal project’ (Lambert et al., 2017, p. 206). This resistance work takes place because of the rich potency of what drama curriculum is about (content) and because of how it is taught (pedagogy). It is not just a rich discipline of study, but also a philosophy for engagement in the classroom and society more generally. It is this idea that carries us to our next spotlight on the practice of drama in our schools and education system.

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Drama pedagogy across the curriculum Spotlight on practice: School Drama program (Sydney, Australia) Developed as a partnership between The University of Sydney and Sydney Theatre Company, School Drama is a professional learning program for primary (elementary) teachers in using drama pedagogy to engage students in literacy and literature. The program has been running, and growing in size and scope, consistently for a decade as we write this and there is, therefore, much written about it. This spotlight is primarily informed by the text The School Drama Book written by the program’s academic lead, Robyn Ewing, from The University of Sydney and the Director of Education and Community Partnerships from Sydney Theatre Company, John Nicholas Saunders. The program partners teachers with teaching artists for (at least) one school term. The teaching artists plan, co-teach, reflect and assist in the planning and implementation of benchmarking activities in structured ways. In addition to this, teachers attend drama pedagogy workshops (totalling 6 hours), are provided with follow-up activities, professional networking and participate in the ongoing research associated with the program. The program is underpinned by the following philosophical/pedagogical ideas: •• •• •• ••

Social constructivist theory and socio-cultural approaches to learning (Vygotsky, 1978). Drama and literature as central to the development of students’ critical literacy. Quality drama pedagogy, informed by critical pedagogy. The significance of imagination and creativity in classrooms.

The program and Ewing and Saunders’s (2016, p. 15) work focus on drama pedagogy, with a clear focus on drama strategies, conventions and methods. As they state early in the text, ‘the essence of educational or process drama is embodiment and enactment’. Students, teachers and teaching artists do drama together to explore literature and develop literacy in the primary classroom. Ewing and Saunders also discuss the research literature underpinning the program which indicates that beyond a development in literacy skills, drama pedagogy has been found to have a positive impact on a range of areas of schooling including motivation, organisation, collaboration, numeracy and other curriculum areas such as science and history.

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There is a huge body of research and theory that explores drama as a pedagogy and we risk over-simplifying it here for the sake of brevity. In our discussion of drama in this context, we separate two key purposes or motivations for using drama pedagogy (or drama in education or process drama) in a cross-curricular way. First, it has a role in developing understanding of other areas of discipline knowledge; as a powerful pedagogical means by which students can engage with curriculum content in other school subjects. Second, it can act as a pedagogy that promotes critical, personal and creative engagement with social, cultural and personal issues; drama employed as a humanising pedagogy that provides opportunities for students to develop cultural awareness and intersectional perspectives on their social selves (Singh, 2004). Regardless of which motivation drives the work (or perhaps a combination of the two), drama-rich pedagogy is understood as involving many of the following characteristics: play, creativity, imagination, embodiment, enactment, inquiry, dialogue, working in role and taking perspective, using symbols (and working symbolically), improvisation, reflecting on, revisiting, reframing and rethinking ideas and working collaboratively. It is the combination of these characteristics that are seen to provide the opportunities for developing students’ understanding of different perspectives, embodied engagement with discipline knowledge and the ability to transfer knowledge and skills across disciplines. The School Drama program explores and develops the use of drama pedagogy for literacy and literature learning. There is a strong foundation for this work, with the connection between drama pedagogy, story, narrative and writing, a key theme in much research and practice around the world (e.g., Booth, 2005, Belliveau & Prendergast, 2013, Miller & Saxton, 2016). The use of drama pedagogy to teach a variety of curricular knowledges and content, however, has been accelerating in recent decades. It may be that this shift aligns with changes associated with the GERM, particularly in instrumentalisation and the drive for literacy standards. Potentially, it is a result of changes in curriculum that emphasise the importance of inquiry and problem-solving, leading to more project-style work that requires students and teachers to undertake different roles than those normally seen in the ‘traditional’ classroom (e.g., Warner, 2013). Whatever the actual reason, there is clearly drama as pedagogy happening in history classrooms, science classrooms, language classrooms and civics classrooms. Drama is used to teach students about human rights, war, terrorism, folklore and the science of climate change. Further exploration into this growth gives an insight into the role drama is considered to play here. In the work described in the examples above, the drama pedagogy used draws on the possibilities of authenticity and experience bringing this to bear in the classroom. The embodied, spontaneous experience of drama pedagogy is seen to allow students to engage authentically with the process of inquiry (Warner, 2013, p. 261). Assuming

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the balance between the content knowledge and drama framing is done well (O’Toole, 2002), the process drama medium allows the knowledge to be deeply embedded into the relationship between the context of the drama and the personal experiences of the students (both as characters within the drama and members of the classroom). This can be achieved in such a way that the learning is indistinguishable from the very human and creative experience of participation in the drama. The seminal drama educator Dorothy Heathcote (1984, p. 70) suggested that the values of drama are first that it requires individuals to interact within groups, within the context and within their active processes; and second that it is play-based, with clear (and explicit) intentions. Heathcote also placed value on the extent to which drama allowed students elaboration time, lamenting that this is rarely offered to students by teachers potentially made impatient by crowded curriculums and their worry about the expectations of schooling. Integrating drama practice with curriculum work in other key learning areas provides not only rich learning opportunities, but more space in crowded school timetables for teachers and students to spend time playing with and elaborating on the outcomes of the fictional work. Beyond being an innovative way of engaging with content and curricular knowledge, drama pedagogy is often also considered an excellent participatory practice for the development of a ‘social self’ (Singh, 2004, p. 55). The development of social (and often personal) selves is achieved through building connectedness (Chan, 2013) and community (Neelands, 2009b); understanding different perspectives and considering the circumstances of others; building empathy and confidence (Cziboly, 2015); providing motivation (Anderson & Dunn, 2013). In fact, most of the qualities that would be considered desirable for young people to become active, informed, healthy and happy citizens in an increasingly difficult world seem to be developed through drama. Clearly these capacities are not only built through process-based drama pedagogy. Live theatre and performance-based theatre in education also have long histories of using theatre as a tool for exploring ideas, as opposed to teaching students about theatre or putting on plays. Much of this tradition has been oriented around activism, social justice, well-being and the value of children’s voices. Drama as a subject, pedagogy and practice in education is quite diverse, more so than in other areas of educational endeavour and passionately advocated for by those that work in schools and theatres. As can be seen in the preceding discussion, drama has and continues to struggle in curriculum but finds more purchase out in the open, as it were, as a space of potent pedagogical possibility where it can work across the life and learning of the school. Drama in schools tends to attract fervent devotees – we are arguably two of them ourselves. And there are, of course, criticisms of the large amount of advocacy as posing scholarship that uncritically places drama

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as a panacea for all of the world’s ills. However, it is undeniable that there is also a significant body of research, dating back many decades, that carefully and rigorously unpacks why and how drama in schools is both successful and incredibly important. This work provides us with a picture of drama in schools in these times which is at once broad, dense and unequivocally positive. And yet, the comprehensive picture of schooling and educational priorities, as sketched out at the beginning of this chapter, is a challenging environment for drama in which to find itself. The neoliberalisation of schooling made manifest through the GERM and the fetishisation of creativity but within an environment of instrumentalisation and performativity leaves few spaces for the deviant but playful existence which drama as curriculum or pedagogy likes to live. The struggle for drama within schools seems set to continue. To paraphrase Munday (2014), we live in hope that drama may well be performativity’s poison or antidote.

Part II

Examining the drama of these times

6 GLOCALISATION Mythologising place and community

This chapter is about the intersection of mythmaking, representation, place and people and how they relate to drama in these times. Central to this discussion are explorations of community, and the increasing global-, glocaland localisation of public and private lives. At times, our discussion moves between ideas which are different but related; place, community and home being clear examples. This is a deliberate ploy on our part as we attempt to critically engage with these vital meanings and constructively destabilise the way in which they are offered to you as a reader. A blurring of genres (Geertz, 1980) facilitates our approach and allows problematic concepts such as community and identity to be further interrogated in the next chapter on migration. We note at the outset that beyond the large discourses that we draw on to discuss place – community theatre, ecological theatre, mythography and so on – place and space are core elements of drama (Haseman & O’Toole, 2017). All drama happens in a space (and a place), is about a place (sometimes the same place it’s in, sometimes not), a time and a socio-political context. Unlike the argument made in classical unities of tragedy, it is no longer the case that these are consistent, logically ordered or omnipresent. Indeed, it is the often clever and unexpected weaving of these things that can make drama meaningful for contemporary audiences. While much of this chapter attends to the larger sociological concepts that relate place, community and global/local perspectives to drama, the centrality of these elements to all drama underpins and allows this discussion. Globalisation, according to some, compresses the world. While at face value, it extends countries and corporations beyond traditional borders, in reality, it links localities, stretching to connect and network social contexts and regions (Robertson, 1995; Giddens, 1990). This linking relies on

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an invention of locality; what Robertson refers to as an ‘ideology of home’ (Robertson, 1995, p. 35). This chapter explores how, in these times, a locality, or home or community, might be imagined and understood, and what the role of drama is in establishing homes and communities in the public imagination. We wish not just to establish what places and communities are, or could be, but also why they’re important; we want to explore a publicly imagined and shared ideology of home, and crumble concrete notions of place and space. This chapter is a bridge between the first and second sections of this book – here we are walking between ideas to sociologically frame and introduce ‘these times’ and examine drama practices within these times. It attends to both the overarching theme of glocalisation and the more immediate discussion of drama in and for communities and places. Glocalisation is a core socio-political theme of these times because its motivation and impact are multidimensional, spanning many of the themes of this book. It has been driven by both corporate expansion and human altruism, enabled by the alienating devices of new technologies but also the anthropocentric desire to explore and tell stories. While not uncontested or unproblematised, it has been endorsed as a legitimate theory for understanding a series of complicated social and political relationships: ‘the glocal offers an additional layer that allows social theory to capture the complexity and multifaceted nature of social processes’ (Roudometof, 2016, p. 10). These changes are simultaneously desirous of both commodification and sharing. It is a moral chameleon which is equally a part of Global North and South and which defies a binary analysis of good or bad. Glocality is relative (Robertson, 1995, p. 31). Spatial, temporal, cultural, social and political boundaries intersect to create these identifiable cultural and social places. They are not bounded realities that exist beyond the imagined version of what they are. In discussing the effect of glocalisation on gangs, Van Hellemont and Densley (2019) make the point that ‘gangs are often easier to describe than define’ (p. 3). This statement, we argue, could be similarly made for communities and places. Gangs use myths, which are operationalised as performance and storytelling, to foster cohesion and in(or ex)clusion: (M)yth-making is defined here as a process, whereby ‘impression management’ through performance (Goffman, 1959) interacts with socially shared narratives in an ‘upwards and downwards’ construction of reality (Hayward & Young, 2004). (Van Hellemont & Densley, 2019, p. 3) Mythmaking occurs through the intersection of emotional, social and sometimes practical needs with people, communities and societies. Mythmaking activities often include representation, either fictional or ‘real’, which

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stabilise the symbolism of a place or community to give belonging to insiders and allow it to be recognisable to outsiders. This idea of mythmaking is compatible with the way in which we understand the centrality of story (Kearney, 2002) as a force that shapes as well as reports and describes.

Global, local, glocal Some definitions of glocal refer to the blending of local and global – adapting global ideas, processes, practices to local contexts. Others have argued that this is a simplification of context because it doesn’t allow for a multitude of voices and perspectives. Robertson urges us to consider it more that the glocal is a linking of several ‘locals’ to make a picture of the global at a point in time (and place). There is a sense of the ethnomethodological concept of ‘order at all points’ here (Sacks, 1992). The theory of ‘order at all points’ discounts the idea that everyday interactions are governed by overarching powerrelated constructs or categories (such as gender or social class), but rather considers everyday interactions as governing of these constructs – that we understand a construct such as social class and how it operates through its presence in our everyday mundane interactions. In conceptualising ‘glocal’, rather than considering a tension between global and local, or a top-down influence of global on local (or universal and particular, or social construct and everyday interaction), one can understand them as governing of each other. Global ‘has involved and increasingly involves the creation and the incorporation of locality, processes which themselves largely shape, in turn, the compression of the world as a whole’ (Robertson, 1995, p. 40). Similarly, gender or social class (as social constructs) can be understood to shape everyday interactions (conversations, meetings, media articles, etc.), but can also only really be understood or enacted in everyday interactions. These, in turn, shape our broader understandings of the construct. It is a circular process. This allows a discussion of drama in these times as not only informed by global issues or attending to local contexts, but how they combine to create something new that is both informing and informed by its relationship to these things. We conceive of glocalisation, therefore, as combining rather than separating the universal and particular. In glocalisation, there is not a globallocal polarity, and local is not necessarily the resistance of the global; ‘local’ is considered as an aspect of globalisation, rather than a departure from it. Despite a socialised rhetoric in the field of drama that places value on issues related to glocalisation such as the community, place and home, concepts such as these are morally neutral. Like most socio-cultural concepts, the way that these issues play out in practical, recognisable ways is both political and ideological. There are many different ways glocalisation can be informing of work that benefits, privileges, oppresses or maintains status quo. In fact, the term ‘glocalisation’ is considered by many to be a ‘buzz

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word’ in marketing as the concept has been adopted to explain and explore the translation of global companies and brands to local markets. Here, we see glocalisation construct differentiation for a specific purpose: to sell things to diverse consumers. In this chapter, we would like to consider the results of glocalisation, not just in commercial terms – a Starbucks on every corner and a nuanced ‘same but different’ McDonalds menu in every city in the world – but from the perspective of the new focus on the local. To continue the gastronomical metaphor, we need to look instead at the renewed focus that is taking place on farmers’ markets, local craft delicacies and fresh produce. (There is obliviously an implicit flaw in this argument as it is socio-economically oriented). In artistic terms, we argue that glocalisation has allowed for and actually encouraged the current ‘social turn’ in the arts (Bishop, 2006). In the history of drama and theatre there has not, since Renaissance or Medieval times, been as much focus on local and community activity. Glocalisation has brought about a golden era of social engagement in, with and through theatre.

Context: glocalisation and agency To understand our discussions on place and community below, it is important to discuss in more detail the relationship between glocality and the specific context it is performed, practiced or understood within. Both time and place are central tenets in the conceptualisation of glocalisation. These two concepts are also central to sociological understandings of agency. Agency, as a core theme in much applied drama and drama education literature, has strong links to the action of people as participants in and consumers of social life. We suggest that connections can be drawn here that are useful to our discussions about drama in these times. Both agency and glocalisation, with different outcomes and purpose, can be understood to encompass the dimensions of contextuality, temporality and neutrality in similar ways. Concepts exist within a context, a time and place. Social actors do not have ‘agency’ as a personality trait; rather, it is something that one has or acts upon within a specific context. Glocality similarly can only be understood within the context it is situated in. Power and agency in a time and place depend on the role one takes or can take. The agency of students in a drama classroom is dependent on the institution, the teacher, the ethos and rules and a variety of socio-cultural elements specific to that context. Redman’s (2003) This is Camp X-Ray, which saw a replica of the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp installed in a busy roundabout in the suburbs of Manchester UK, existed as an agentive act through a metaxic tension. It highlighted and merged both local place and global place. The time and place it was performed in contrasts with the time and place it represented, highlighting power relations and global responsibilities. As soon

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as one of these elements change, so does the nature of participant agency. Context is everything. Time is also central to understanding both concepts of glocality and agency. Not only does any action occur within a temporal frame, but social action is embedded in many temporalities in that it is oriented towards the past, present and future at once (although the action may be more heavily oriented towards one of these within any one situation). Agentive behaviour looks to the past, in its perceptions of social and historical patterns, and requires understanding of present conditions in order to imagine possible futures (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Glocalisation can only really exist in a moment and as a local application. The glocal now will inform future globals and locals, which will create a new glocal. Similarly, agentive behaviour changes the present to affect the future. There is no inherently moral action within either concept; they are neutral. Both are imbued by the user/viewer with their assumed positive or negative connotations. Agency, for example, can both shift and entrench the status quo. When people are engaging in agentive behaviour, it is not necessarily for the greater social good – it is neither empowering nor disempowering but has the potential to be either. Similarly, glocalisation (along with inferred local and global contexts) can benefit or exploit, create or destroy. We offer this involved comparison between agency and glocalisation as it provides a link between core ways of understanding drama. Agency is an oft-quoted but seldom defined theme in drama literature. We argue here that agentive action is completely interlinked with context, time and can only be understood (as good/bad/effective/problematic) through an understanding of these relationships. It links with the recurring themes of social justice and identity that run throughout this book. Understanding the role of place and time in glocalisation and agency is essential to understanding drama work. Ultimately, it is about seeking to understand people engaging in actions that do things in and for a place.

Mythmaking place and ideologies of home Robertson argues that increasingly global expectations concerning the relationship between individual and society produce ‘existential selves’ that identify with mythic or imagined constructions of space and time. We are us, here, now, and that carries with it categorisations of entitlements, expectations, responsibilities and lifestyles. This attention to the relationship between people and spaces informs Sally Mackey’s (2007, p. 181) thinking; a key scholar exploring the relationship between place and drama, she offers a definition of place as an area ‘with which individuals (or groups) believe they have a personal relationship: there is a psychological interaction between person and location’. Drama in a place or about place can represent, disrupt, advocate for and/or mythologise that relationship, either for the benefit of

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those that belong there, or an outside audience. Place is a convoluted concept to unpack as it incorporates relationships, communities, contexts, histories and physical attributions into one overarching idea – often employed as if it is simply one thing. Davis (1987, p. 53) states that, ‘the simple idea that novels need to create locations is actually a fairly complex one’. Like many influencing discourses (such as cultural diversity, community development and nationalism), place discourses have become ‘proper objects’ (Robertson, 1995, p. 31) through the development of ideas from experts that govern their use in policy, research and art and are therefore as much, if not more, about how they’re used, than what they actually are. Glocalisation and the relationship between the global and local have resulted in a reduction of diversity in discourses of home and community. To share such discourses across global and local boundaries, they are necessarily narrowed to be recognisable across diversity, producing myth and nostalgia. Indeed, Robertson argues that: … we – the global ‘we’ - once lived in and were distributed not so long ago across a multitude of ontologically secure, collective ‘homes’. Now, according to this narrative – or, perhaps, a metanarrative – our sense of home is rapidly being destroyed by the waves of ‘globalisation’. (Robertson, 1995, p. 30) Drama is used at times, as we explore in the spotlight on practice later, to disrupt this simplification of narrative and explore subversive or alternative perspectives on place (and therefore time and context). Drama is also used, knowingly or unknowingly, to sharpen and recruit the ideology for a range of purposes – to place boundaries, incite belonging, represent specific identities and produce propaganda. No representation of place in these times, we argue, is without ideology. When it comes to drama and place, the work in the field is vast. Place is everything from a setting used by drama, to a reason for doing drama. Drama projects, such as Mackey’s Challenging Place work (2016), aim to help participants experience a place differently. Other performances invent aesthetic locations, ‘that play with the documentation and affective ‘reality’ of experience’ (Balfour, 2012, p. 31), manipulating place to provide a different perspective on an event or idea (such as evident in Redman’s This is Camp X-Ray). Projects such as the spotlight on practice below aim to have audiences understand places differently, while other projects enact place-making through drama to advocate for places, communities and people. Place as a base element of drama often draws on a metaxic tension to explore the interface between place, people and history. Indeed, the ability to identify a ‘place’ as a type of place is, ‘contingent upon the (contested) construction and organisation of interlaced categories of space and time’

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(Robertson, 1995, p. 35). From a representational and ‘mythmaking’ perspective, this is a rich space for artists to make meaning for participants and audiences, often used to intertwine story, identity, message, history and place: The embodied nature of drama work allows for space to be used, imagined, reimagined and disrupted for participants and audiences. History allows an extra layer here: spaces can be imagined across timelines, monuments can be constructed, generational stories can merge and physical contexts (land, space, props) can become characters in the drama and ‘sources’ of history. (Freebody & O’Grady, 2019, p. 216) Doing drama about a place attends to political, social and historical contexts of that place; however, it simultaneously creates a new reality, event or perspective on and for that place. This turns it into a new place, potentially shifting the perspectives and relationships of those concerned with it.

Imagined communities Discussions about drama work focused on place would be incomplete without attention to community. Mackey (2016, p. 166) comments that, ‘(c)ommunity’ and ‘place’ are frequently conjoined and perhaps too easily’. For us, after more than a decade of working in community education and community theatre scholarship, we have come to realise what a loaded term community is. It is such an evocative word. It is revered, sought after, mythologised and problematised. In much public policy, it is simultane­ ously the issue and the solution – stronger communities need to be devel­ oped, healthy communities can solve a myriad of health, education and social issues, yet individual communities are singled out as problematic and in need of intervention. While community seems a common-sense concept, Robertson (1995, p. 39) reminds us to ‘be careful not to remain in thrall to the old and rather well-established view that cultures are organically binding and sharply bounded’. Communities are not tangible; they are, rather ideas about a place, time, context or group. Community is a recurring theme in drama and social justice. Bauman (2001) notes that community is typically regarded as a safe, secure, trusting, happy and positive environment, but counters this by noting the price to be paid by being a member of community in terms of sacrificing individual freedoms. Membership of a community is tied up with the identity of the community, and security, leadership and boundary issues of membership are of great importance. Our previous research analysed discourses of change in applied theatre (Freebody et al., 2018) and found that the idea of community was directly

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related to the act of change. For example, drama can teach communities skills and practices that lead to good change and communities can have their voices heard through the use of drama. Beyond these ways that drama can help communities, it was also seen as a way to build community. Particularly in institutions where people are put together, rather than brought together, such as prisons and schools, drama was seen as a mechanism to engage individuals in common experiences, thus building memories, cultures and a sense of belonging. It is in this space that ideas such as Neelands’s work on drama as pro-social, ensemble (2009a) and democracy building (2016) are influential. Indeed, the perceived relationships between community, education, culture, democracy and drama has already been discussed at length in this volume and has a long history in the documented narrative of fields such as drama education, community and cultural development, theatre for development, community theatre and applied theatre, as will be explored in the next few chapters. Nicholson’s seminal text on Applied Drama (2005), for example, has chapters explicitly concerned with community and place and citizenship, and subsections in other chapters concerned with place and publics, all of which attend to discourses related to this chapter. There are also critical perspectives regarding the role of both community and drama in drama projects for/with/about communities. Snyder-Young’s (2013) work, for example, provides a critical perspective on the role and limits of community. Freebody and Goodwin (2017) draw on methodologies emerging from social policy analysis to ‘defamiliarise’ keywords such as ‘community-building’ in documents about applied theatre. This research questions the common-sense ideal of community, and instead understands community as both ‘constraining and enabling’ (p. 69). Central to this analysis, and discussed at length in Chapter 3, is attention to the idea of governments, NGOs and other institutions ‘governing through community’ (Rose, 1999) and the role of drama programs and interventions as community capacity building activities – ‘organisations and programs that take on the project of community building for government can be described as implicated in the neoliberal forms of ‘governing at a distance’’ (p. 70). Drawing together these three interwoven ideas of place, community and glocalisation, the spotlight on practice below provides discussion points for us to consider common and different perspectives on the role these ideas play in drama in these times. Our core themes of social justice, identity and learning can be either drawn out of or brought to bear on work in this space. Critical perspectives on place and community consider the distilling of diverse understandings and experiences of, place, locality and ‘home’ into one perspective. This is impacted upon by (or impacts) how drama is used to represent communities. We also consider the valorisation of community as common-sense, knowable force for ‘good’ (synonymous with Bauman’s description) and the subsequent (or coinciding) adaption of this idea by forces that would be historically problematised by many in the drama field.

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Spotlight on practice: a dramatic bus journey touring Hong Kong heritage (The Theatre Space Company, Hong Kong) Wan-Jung Wang (2016) offers an innovative account of community theatre practice in public spaces in Hong Kong in 2004. The practice of performing drama in public spaces, along with Wang’s discussion of this particular piece, offers an insight into the way in which drama can access and impact upon how the local is understood within a changing global context. In her account, she suggests that, ‘public spaces in urban cities, where the influences of postcolonialism, postmodernism and globalisation meet, have been greatly stratified, controlled and commodified by global transnational enterprises, national institutions commercial mechanisms and class distinctions’ (p. 42) and looks at how community theatre can help redefine the public spaces. Given the tension between local, national and regional place and politics in these communities, the impact of these initiatives can be clearly seen. The work in Hong Kong consisted of performers sharing devised pieces, such as duologues between two ‘passengers’, on different bus journeys to three sites of importance to the story of Hong Kong, and each of which were emblematic of the changing nature of the city state. Once arrived at their destination, a site-specific performance took place. One site was the Shek Kip Mei estate, one of Hong Kong’s oldest public housing estates which was, at the time of the performance, about to be demolished to make way for new high-rise buildings. The estate had at one time been a key site in housing many mainland Chinese settlers who had escaped the Chinese Civil War. The performance at this site was developed over months, with theatre workers interviewing past residents and exploring the published history of the estate.

Spaces, particularly but not only public spaces, are represented by governments, business and people in ways that ‘affect the reproduction of lived space in real life’ (Wang, 2016, p. 43). These representations can limit who has the right to access certain spaces. Drawing on Fraser’s (2007) idea that justice can be understood through redistribution, recognition and representation, the social production of space can restrict access to the service that public spaces provide, can fail to recognise groups as being worthwhile of public place and silence the rights for certain kinds of ‘public’ to be represented by, or representative of, the public space. This last aspect is particularly pertinent in spaces that are owned by or commodified for tourism,

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as it restricts who gets to represent Hong Kong (or any other place/city/ town/nation) to others. This piece of drama, therefore, can be considered, and indeed is considered by Wang (2016, p. 51), as a resistance – offering an alternative public space. Rather than being owned by tourism, the economy, or the government, the public space created by this drama has an ethic of care and a witnessing of inhabitants’ stories at its core. It is owned by the drama participants, resisting the ‘pervasive tendency of commodification and gentrification of place in Hong Kong”. All of this analysis takes on a certain poignancy in light of the way in which the place of Hong Kong is being radically changed before our eyes as we write this in 2020. This production can be read as playing with tensions in the relationship between personal and public spaces. Housing estates provide private spaces for people to live; however, public housing estates carry not only public mythology, but also the connotation of public intervention from policies, governments and media. Buses are public places however we tend to maintain personal space within them – overhearing loud personal conversations on buses as this audience did can provide an interesting tension between the public and private. Furthermore, bus lines can be considered as ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995), with ‘individuals taking on the role of spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle’ (Puthoff, 2006, p. 76). These non-places are designed for transience, to facilitate people moving through them, rather than for the deliberate enactment of experiences. Taken together, the disjunctures between travel on a bus and the experience of theatre provide heady intersections, allowing us to use this one case to draw out earlier discussions about how drama is tied to glocalisation through its relationship to the mythmaking place and the increasingly globalised ideologies of home. The representation of life in Hong Kong for those that have lived on the Shek Kip Mei Estate can be considered an act of social drama as it aims to subvert conventional representations of places or communities from more globalised mythmaking around such spaces. Housing estates are places that have been heavily mythologised in global fiction which then ‘influences local reality’ (Van Hellemont & Densley, 2019, p. 16). So fictional representations of a public housing estate in an unnamed city, when no referent is given, become representations of all public housing estates in all cities. Work such as the spotlight on practice can be seen to (or aim to) empower or give voice through representing this place specifically, distancing this place from other fictions and cultural constructs of similar places. This work highlights and recognises Shek Kip Mei as a home as well as a public space. The use of possessions of those that live there as props, and images of people using the spaces as a home, actively resists the metanarrative of home being imposed by globalisation (Robertson, 1995) to honour the relationship between place, people and history. Work such as this represents, [and here we use the word in a way that connects it to Fraser’s conceptualisation of justice (2007)], the people who inhabit these public spaces, or

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who are supposed to inhabit these spaces, potentially helping them regain or maintain belonging to the space (Wang, 2016). In the performances of this project, the artistic work created allowed audiences to actively engage with issues of concern to the locale and the broader society. They are instances of ‘performing place’, whereby a space is animated and made personal (Mackey, 2016). Wang (2016, p. 50) suggests that in these performances, through creating alternative public spaces, participants embodied ‘similarities and differences in social functions and cultural meanings’. They came together to socially engage with their physical environment, quite literally their place; they collaborated and communicated in so doing; they told stories of particular importance to women; and they engaged aesthetically with helping to redefine their own communities. The performance on the Shek Kip Mei Estate can be considered an effective cultural resistance in the old public housing estate, challenging the official erasure of Hong Kong’s local grass-roots history by ‘countering forgetfulness’ (Wang, 2016, p. 45). In this chapter, we’ve discussed how place, space, glocalisation and drama work together to make meaning. It’s a varied and blurred discussion, at times intersecting with a variety of socio-cultural ideas and themes that occur throughout this book. At its core, however, the main argument of this chapter has been that, when considered well, the intersection of global ideas with local contexts makes a drama experience powerful. Ideological and mythologised as it may be, place matters to how we make sense of drama.

7 MIGRATION – DRAMATIC COMINGS AND GOINGS

The movement of peoples has always been part of the human story. So much so that one could argue that the flawed thinking is that we in fact belong somewhere, or that somewhere belongs to us. But this is the status quo. People ‘own’ land. They form communities and raise family groups as the bedrock of the communities they establish. As we discussed in the last chapter, these communities have certain rules, myths and values which pertain specifically to them and govern them in implicit and explicit ways. Typically, they are expressed in religious belief, shared history, communal rituals, economic concerns, languages and shared beliefs and practices – collectively constituting a cultural and ethnic identity. That identity is described through all these things and generally believed by the majority to be normal, essential and shared by all. It is largely invisible and incredibly strong. Disruption to any community disrupts the ‘natural’ balance and challenges the status quo. Newcomers pose a threat to the fragile but indispensable identity of communities. They are ‘other’ to those who self-describe themselves as embodying the vital characteristics of the identity of the community. The choice for any newcomer is to embrace a process of assimilation (either partial or full) into the host community, should they be allowed to begin that process, or to retain characteristics of their original community and identity and persevere in living their lives in that manner at their new location, again should they be allowed to do so. Drawing on Bauman’s (2001, p. 4) work exploring contemporary communities, we are reminded that, ‘(t)here is a price to be paid for the privilege of ‘being in a community’ – and it is inoffensive or even invisible as long as the community stays in the dream’. Globalisation, and the disjunct global flows that drive it (Appadurai, 1996), have disrupted the dream and governments ‘strain their ingenuity’ between ingratiating themselves with the

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electorate by tightening immigration laws, whilst at the same time, encouraging the free circulation of ‘capital, finance, investment and the businesspeople who carry them’ (Bauman, 2001, p. 101). The result of these multiple forces is a global spread in ethnic diasporas: The immigrants have no choice but to become another ‘ethnic minority’ in the country of arrival. And the locals have no choice but to brace themselves for a long life amidst diasporas. Both are expected to find their own ways of coping with the power-assisted realities. (Bauman, 2001, pp. 102–103) This chapter is about understanding migration in the broadest sense. It is about understanding both sides of the process of coping with the experience of starting anew in a new community and dealing with the consequences of that trauma. Much of the time, the means of coping is by telling stories; of the old community and of the new one; of treasured identities and of emergent ones. Telling the stories of our identity is the job of storytellers: .. (W)hether it is thought of in terms of individuals, (immigrant, expatriate, temporary worker, exile, refugee, itinerant, cosmopolitan nomad, et cetera) or collectives (colonial settlement, diaspora, slave or convict transportation, trafficking, displacement), migration is, at its heart, about encounters with foreignness – with foreign people and foreign places. These are, it may be supposed, ingredients of good storytelling. (Cox, 2014, p. 3) This is often in oral or written form, but equally so through performance. Both stages and streets help tell the stories of who and what we are. From raucous St Patrick’s Day parades to the solemnity of ANZAC Day memorial services, performances perpetuate the received meaning of a community’s identity. But of course, it is more complicated than that. You are as likely to see Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister) and his (male) partner marching in a Pride parade as attending a church service; and amongst a significant section of the Australian public, Australia Day is deliberately subverted by labelling it Invasion Day, acknowledging the problem of celebrating a day that sparked violence and oppression for the country’s Indigenous peoples. The performances of our shared, communal identities are now as contested as the identities themselves. This chapter explores the way in which drama relates to identity and community through the very particular lens of migration. In probing this incredibly pressing issue of our time, we aim to bring a critical lens to explore the manner in which the broad church of drama deals with the complexities and vagaries of identity. In describing the performances of migrancy: between the poles of native and foreigner; visitor and immigrant; guest and invader; home and abroad, we have access to a vast store

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of thinking on identity, all of which helps illuminate the complexity of reducing a multifaceted continuum of community and identity to a series of simplistic binaries, best represented in the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Drama allows for such an exploration in two distinct ways; in showcasing aspects of migration in drama and in exploring aspects of migration through drama. The storytelling and showcasing of identities through performance is relatively self-explanatory and will be dealt with later in the chapter. The exploration of migration through drama is a potent domain and requires a little more explanation. The suspension of disbelief at the heart of many genres of participatory drama requires participants to adopt identities of those other than themselves and remains at the heart of the contrivance that is much dramatic form, with notable exceptions in the postmodern, postdramatic and performance art end of the spectrum. In the applied and educative tradition and as discussed in Chapter 2, the ability to understand the viewpoint of the ‘other’ is often at the heart of the work. Role is a significant preoccupation in this tradition as the belief generally holds that in role there is a possibility of better understanding ‘other’, with the concomitant hope that some efficacy may arise from that revelation. This may be a moment of learning or some change to ‘self’ on the part of the participant as a result of their participation (regardless of whether it is active or passive). As we have and will explore in this volume, such aspirations for change (‘affect’ as opposed to ‘effect’ as introduced in Chapter 1) are heavily critiqued, particularly in contemporary applied and community theatre scholarship (e.g., Thompson, 2009b; Prentki, 2013; 2015). Nonetheless, that hope of realisation or change remains part of the motivation and drive of many drama practitioners, in their desire to do some good in a fluid and troubled modern world. This wish for a better world chimes clearly with Fraser’s (2007, p. 18) understanding of social justice which we use as a touchstone in this work, and whereby she argues for a transformative reframing of justice. One of the reasons for this is that, ‘it is no longer axiomatic that the modern territorial state is the appropriate unit for thinking about issues of justice’. The migratory waves of these times lend credence to her thinking. Migration is fundamentally an issue of human rights and social justice; from the departure, to the journey to adjustment to a new world.

Migration, nation and identity A postcolonial understanding of nation is a useful lens through which to consider the relationship between identity and place, and the work of Homi Bhabha (1990; 1994) is particularly definitive in this regard. He seeks to highlight and deconstruct the ambivalence that ‘haunts’ nation and in doing so, argues that the concept of nation is inseparable from that of narrative, similar to the idea we explored in the previous chapter – easier to describe than define. He warns of not restrictively reading nation as either an ideological

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apparatus of state power, or as ‘the incipient or emergent expression of the “national-popular” sentiment preserved in a radical memory’, preferring the idea of looking at the ‘Janus-faced ambivalence of language’ (1990, p.3). This conceptual opening up of nation discounts nothing but allows for the dissolution of any sense of fixedness associated with the word, and encourages a look towards the borderlines of the nation space, where he argues that people become a ‘double narrative movement’ (1990, p. 297), both the objects of nationalist discourse, but also the subjects of a process of signification, constantly repeating and reproducing idea of nation: The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation. (Bhabha, 1990, p. 297) In foregrounding the edges and looking to those stories of a nation which are beyond the mainstream, Bhabha holds that the redundant singularity of ‘homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions or “organic” ethnic communities’ (1994, p. 5) can be entirely redefined. The stories of migrants can and should be helpful in defining a nation’s understanding of nation, of the story it tells of itself. Telling those stories, as we do so well in dramatic form, is absolutely vital in enabling healthy and celebratory understandings of migration, but also essential to the health and development of the story of any nation. Fintan O’Toole, discussing Irish identity, suggests that ‘Ireland offers no firm ground, just a set of tensions and contradictions’ (O’Toole, 2017b). The work of Charlotte McIvor (2016; 2019; McIvor and King, 2019) in examining performance, migration and interculturalism in Ireland eloquently develops that case. As noted in the introduction to this book, migration is a touchstone issue for both of our countries. The brief synopses offered there and extended here illustrate its intricacy and allow us to urge caution to the reader and plead for complexity in the approach to the issues. Storytelling and performance are rich, evocative, emotional and believable. For all their power, however, they also have a tendency to reduce the multifaceted to the linear, particularly in an area as potent as migration.

Migration Some specific understandings of migration are important, given that it is a vast rabbit-hole down which one can disappear without trace. Migration

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is best defined as the movement of peoples from one part of a country to another (internal) or to another country or continent (external). It can be temporary or permanent. There are many reasons as to why people migrate: economic and work-related; personal; familial; persecution and fear; environmental. Within the language of migration, there are immigrants and emigrants, internal migrants, refugees and asylumseekers. While acknowledging the socio-political importance of words used to describe distinctive individual contexts, to be inclusive of all these categories, we will refer to all these categories of people as migrants unless referring to a particular situation. The importance of drama as a personalising force that allows the conversation to move beyond the words and labels, however they are used or imposed, is vitally important. Migration is a topic that many socially minded artists, activists and educators broach in their work. Across the world right now in early 2020, we are seeing repeated migration crises emerge. The global cultural flow characterised by Appadurai (1996) as the ‘ethnoscape’ is shifting rapidly and in a non-traditional fashion in response to what he characterises as the needs of the globalised world and the needs of international capital in terms of production and technology, as well as the political narratives of nation states, which govern the policies towards migrants: (P)eople, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths; of course, at all periods in human history, there have been some disjunctures in the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale, and volume of each of these flows are now so great that the disjunctures have become central to the politics of global culture. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 37) This assertion is 24 years old. In the intervening period, it has multiplied in intensity many times over in tandem with growing division in wealth and increased expectation of a satisfactory standard of living as a result of globalisation, to a point where it can now only be described as a crisis: We watch an economic world of growing inequality between rich and poor, in which international corporations seem to be above the law and beyond democratic accountability and the individual questions his relationship with the collective and with the state … when the global south seeks refuge from the droughts and famine produced by our warming planet, as well as from the wars and violence caused by our interventions in their states, we put up fences to keep them out. So the victims of our arrogant complacency die in their thousands at our borders, drowning at our coastlines and rivers, crushed beneath the wheels of First World prosperity. (Wallace, 2019, pp. 1–2)

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The increased global movement is particularly problematic when it comes to those migrants who are seeking asylum as refugees. The word refugee is now synonymous for some with that of crisis, something that Jeffers (2011, p. 25) suggests has led to moral panic, false beliefs and sticky metaphors. Increasingly, migrants and refugees are conflated as categories, with little time or attention being paid to understanding the reasons behind the migratory journey, the legality or otherwise of the arrival, the human rights of the migrants or the moral responsibilities of the destination country. Migration at this moment in time is best captured through a series of vignettes. First is of a trained Irish medical doctor choosing to continue her working life in Australia, where she emigrates and settles without difficulty, assured of good living and working conditions and eventual citizenship. The second is of the body of a 3-year-old Kurdish Syrian boy lying on a Mediterranean beach after the rubber inflatable boat upon which he was travelling with his parent capsized and he drowned. Running from civil war and ISIL, the Kurdi family sought refuge in the hands of people traffickers in order to smuggle them from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos and entry to the EU. The shoddy boat capsized within 5 minutes of departing Turkey. The third vignette is of a refrigerated truck being opened in a port in Essex, and containing the bodies of 39 Vietnamese migrants, placed in the truck by a trafficking ring in Zeebrugge, Belgium for the last and fatal leg of their long journey to a new life in Europe. The fourth vignette is of a 24-year-old New Zealander on a 2-year working holiday visa in the UK, travelling across Europe in between short working contracts in London pubs. Finally, the last image of migration is that of President Trump’s wall. A central and as yet (August 2020) undelivered element of his presidency, it is an effort to control the vast illegal migration between Mexico and the USA. Purportedly costing 10–12 billion USD, it is widely regarded as unachievable and ineffective should it ever be delivered. It would neither stem the flow of illegal migration (which some argue the American economy depends on as a workforce) nor deal with the vast number of illegal migrants already resident within the borders of the USA. It is arguably a wall to keep American self-determination and narratives of national strength ‘in’ rather than keep migrants ‘out’. The nature and diversity of migration is powerfully captured in myriad written and artistic works, including Bauman’s Strangers at our door (2016) and the evocative Notes on an exodus (Flanagan, 2016). With these vignettes offering multiple, diverse and sometimes juxtaposed stories of migration, we ask what is drama in these times? How does it govern, create and intersect with these stories? The remainder of this chapter will take the form of a series of three discussions dealing with how drama work showcases and explores migration. These will overview a network of perspectives on theory and practice though which the reader can begin to position themselves upon the vast canvas of migration and drama.

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Individually, they are insufficient, but collectively allow for the formation of a bricolage, a layered multifaceted perspective on this complex issue, where a multitude of meanings are welcome in order to allow for increasing complexity and feedback looping (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004). Given the vastness of this discussion and the myriad attendant issues, this is our practical point of entry into the relationship.

Exploring migration through drama: imagining difference Drama, as it is understood in this book, generally seeks to be a force for good in the world; to be pro-social. We have explored the critical intricacies (especially the impacts and outcomes) of that work elsewhere in this volume but also in other work (Freebody & Finneran, 2016; Freebody et al., 2018). At the heart of much of the educative potency for drama, is its use as a force for understanding difference: different people, different places. This is most profoundly obvious in how we conceptualise humans, their identity and their places in stories of migration.

Spotlight on practice: Comings and Goings (Drama workshop) In my (Michael’s) early teaching days, I frequently led a process drama workshop called Comings and Goings. Starting with the experience of the immigrant Irish to the US, it used poetry, movement and images to bring university students through what I hoped was an affective and embodied experience. The intent was simple. It was offered in the hope that participants could experience an emotive fictional engagement with the story of famine-driven emmigration (typically burnt into the psyche of every young Irish person in formal schooling but also still very much a part of the cultural memory). This was done with a view to that emotional experience being mapped onto the stories of the ‘new’ Irish – the people of Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe who had sought to make this island home – a migratory wave of people of colour and many faiths never before experienced on our island. My neophyte teacher self naively believed that these experiences were transferable – that a sense of compassion felt for ‘our’ people would be discovered amongst participants and empathetically shared with the experience of the newcomers. I was wrong to assume that this was a self-evident truth. I’m not suggesting for a moment that my students were intentionally racist or unintelligent, but what I failed to understand was how big an obstacle difference is for many, especially in the light of a powerful national identity, as Irishness is. The challenges of navigating the depths and complexities of emotive and evocative identities and nationalities were evident every time I ran the workshop. And for differing and varying reasons. The sheer power of these cultural constructions of identity are worthy of consideration.

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The conundrum and complexity of identity as described in the practice above need some further consideration. It is implicit that one of the significant challenges faced by any migrant is that of identity, and by what ‘label’ they can and will be known. Stuart Hall’s seminal work (1996) questions the commonly received ideas of identity as a fixed and immutable entity, preferring to posit a non-essentialist understanding of identity which is a strategic and positional one. He suggests that identities cannot be fixed, stabilised, unchanging or singular, but instead must be looked upon as increasingly fragmented and fractured, and ‘constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourse, practices and positions’ (1996, p. 4). The implications of this perspective run to the conceptual heart of the challenges posed by migration. It is a perspective that is thankfully more commonplace now than when initially proffered, as a result of the disruptive forces of migration. Hall suggests that identity needs to be read as being produced, ‘in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies’ (ibid). The internal homogeneity and unities implied and proclaimed by the term identity need to be disrupted and recognised as constructions. Essentially Hall’s argument is that identity can only be derived from the discourse of a specific context and that disruptive practices and positions are actually formative in recognising identity. Similar to Robertson’s argument in the previous chapter, we produce existential selves that attend to the myths and values constructed by our context. The possibilities for drama are immediately evident in potentially creating a revealing disruption. By moving away from a fixed and immutable idea of identity, the playful and imaginary creation of ‘self’ within a dramatic context is viable – thus allowing also for the construction of ‘other’.

Spotlight on practice: The Immigrant (Drama workshop) Jonothan Neelands’ drama workshop The Immigrant (O’Connor, 2010, pp. 159–166) based on Shaun Tan’s now quite famous book The Arrival offers a good example of a drama education approach to immigration built around a powerful and beautiful pre-text. Using evocative imagery and employing polished pedagogy, Neelands layers a range of activities based on drama conventions – e.g. the walk, talking pictures, hand in hand, sympathy circle, street of shame – which culminate in an haunting and powerful farewell scene. Contemplative and ritualistic activities provide participants with the opportunity to reflect on their time in the workshop. The workshop is a starting point for the class to begin working on a ‘rich task’ on the topic of immigration. This is a longer-term piece of curricular work that prompts participants to research their own immigrant background and that of their area and reflect that dramatically in a docudrama or documentary.

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In his editor’s commentary, Peter O’Connor suggests that Neelands’ workshop is postmodern in its use of conventions, but with an unreservedly modernist worldview. He notes that the work is designed not merely to encourage participants to ‘question issues about immigration in the fictional world, but that their understanding and action in the real world will be transformed … The purpose is to create citizens who participate in the issues of today’ (O’Connor, 2010, p. 118). This perspective of drama education as a means of developing greater participation amongst young people as citizens is reflected in the references to drama and democracy throughout this book. What is clear also is that the intent in Neelands’ work is to provide a powerful aesthetic and affective ‘lived experience’ for the participants of the migrant arrival. Traditionally, drama practice in educational/workshop contexts has engaged directly with identity by encouraging participants to play roles that allow them to examine personal, social and political concepts from within the role. Although considered critically in previous chapters in this volume, this idea of ‘living through’ is understood as the basis through which much learning about the ‘other’ takes places. Simply put, this convention embodies the belief that in a dramatic context participants can momentarily ‘live’ through the lives of others (or at least occupy their footsteps for an instant); both on an imaginative but also an affective level. In theory, this creates a situation whereby participants can see the world from a difference perspective and imagine what it might like to be the ‘other’ in that situation, and hopefully then empathise and perhaps even change as a result of this experience. This is the premise upon which drama-in-education, process drama and much applied drama and theatre practices have developed. Bolton describes Dorothy Heathcote’s work: Her focus was always on one ‘internal situation’ breeding or ‘foreshadowing the next internal’ situation, rather than ‘plot’, whereas the latter prompts a ‘what-happens next’ mental set, the former is more conducive to ‘living through’ operating at a seeming life rate, a modus vivendi that lent itself to staying with a situation sufficiently long to explore it and understand it more (Bolton, 1998, p. 179) This foundational premise, often theorised as metaxis (O’Toole, 1992), still drives much of the philosophical understanding of how learning occurs through drama, as exemplified in O’Toole, Stinson and Moore (2009) and Anderson (2012), revived and lionised in Davis (2014), and succinctly observed by Franks as what he characterises as one of three interrelated connections between drama and learning: Deriving insights and attitudes from their experiences, both of everyday life and from their readings and viewings of life as it is mediated to

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them, they are able to project themselves into other roles, other places and other times. Involving the adoption of role, learning through drama requires the capacity to decenter, to imagine the self as “other”, to develop a sense of intersubjectivity and empathy. (Franks, 2019) From a critical perspective, a reliance on a ‘living through’ perspective as the conceptual pivot in terms of drama’s ability to portray and characterise difference can be understood as being dominated by a perspective of the world that embodies a universalist perspective; the belief that fundamentally all human beings are the same, and that that any human is capable of imaginatively projecting themselves into the situation of another. Leaving aside the question of the ability of the imagination to conjure up a realistic depiction of a context of which one has no experience, there is also in this the challenge of privilege. In the decidedly asymmetrical world of these times, one in which we recognise the extent of global imbalance and the privilege of maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality and citizenship of a Global North country amongst a host of other things, the gap between ‘self’ and ‘other’ has never been greater. Given the recognition of this, is it a realistic proposition to bridge this gap of difference through dramatic engagement and imaginative endeavour? The question of the efficacy of drama as a direct and powerful intervention is one that is now critically and explicitly asked (Balfour, 2009b; Freebody et al., 2018). As discussed later in the chapter dealing with drama and the digital+, the concept of a dramatic ensemble as a model of how to live together in the world is a compelling one. Neelands argues that the most potent possibility of drama lies within the demands of living and learning together in drama, which model and reflect the demands of citizenship of a democracy. He suggests that it, ‘is the quality of the social and democratic “being with” in the paedia of theatre that makes the distinctive difference to what is learnt in drama’ (Neelands, 2009a, p. 181). It is a provocative claim that the most important part of any dramatic process is simply being part of that dramatic process. The implication of this stance for an issue such as migration is fascinating and potentially turns much of 20th century social, applied and educational drama thinking on its head. The argument that derives from Neelands’ stance runs that the most potent use of drama is not as a means of ‘living though’ other lives, re-enacting scenes of leaving or trauma, or rehearsing how one might deal with difference. It is instead about the possibilities of drama being a force to allow people to be together, not to be other, but to be alongside each other. Drama is possibly at its best when it allows stories of difference to be shared first-hand, with each other.

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Drama for migrants Spotlight on practice – the Calais Jungle (France/UK) The Calais Jungle existed for a short 20 months but became the embodiment of the refugee crisis in Europe. Thousands of migrants camped illegally at the French port of Calais with the majority seeking illegal passage to the United Kingdom by jumping aboard a cargo truck in this busy terminal. The migrants were evicted by the French authorities in October 2016 and the Jungle demolished. For 7 months of that time, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson established and ran Good Chance Theatre in the Jungle. They ‘constructed a geodesic dome inside the camp that could hold up to 200 people. Besides offering shelter from the cold, the dome also held yoga classes, circus workshops, poetry readings, musical performances, rap battles, discos and discussions’ (Clair, 2017, p. 44). It attracted hundreds of volunteers who led workshops and provided a place for residents to showcase their performances, art and emblems of their places of origin. It was closed in March 2016 but had made a significant impact, both for the residents and on the watching world. The founders proceeded to partner with other artists to present Encampment at the Southbank Centre in London – 9 days of performances, workshops and discussions based on events of the Jungle (ibid.). (query) Murphy and Robertson went on to write a play entitled The Jungle, co-produced by the National Theatre, Young Vic and Good Chance Theatre and staged in the Playhouse Theatre in London in 2018. The successful run invited the audience to engage with the fictionalised story based on real events as ‘witnesses and friends’, but ultimately as a ‘party to the crisis’ (Miller, 2019, p. 504).

Exploring migration through drama takes on a more profound shape when the participants are those who have experienced migration first-hand. Making drama work with migrants is one of the largest areas of practice and research within the discourse of applied theatre and there is a substantial body of work concerning theatre with refugees (Jeffers & Thompson, 2008; Jeffers, 2011; Balfour, 2013; Balfour et al., 2015), which map in detail the challenges and successes of work in that area. Many times, these refugees are fleeing from war-torn regions and some further consideration of drama in these contexts is offered in the chapter dealing with war. In general, innovative work abounds, such as the use of puppetry with migrants in detention (Smith, 2016) and documentary theatre portraying the experiences of Indonesian migrant workers in Macau (4Cs - From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, 2020). One of the more prominent examples that gained widespread attention and indeed fame is Good Chance Theatre in what was known as the Jungle in Calais. As evidenced in the description above, the tensions of drama work of this nature are

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manifest, perhaps in itself a reflection of the reason it receives so much critical attention. From artistry to activism; altruism to publicity; volition to necessity; healing to exposing; there are many words describing conceptual poles around which work of this nature pivots and remains contentious and unresolvable. There is also a large body of practice in drama that explores identity and migration found in the realm of second language learning, particularly amongst those working with migrants to assist language acquisition in the tongue of their arrival country. This work is discussed and reflected upon by Winston and Stinson (2014) and Piazzoli (2018). Dalziel and Piazzoli (2018) refer to the work as performative language teaching, using process drama techniques. Their definition of this work understands it as having ‘a firm determination to engage the emotions but to avoid the pitfall of using drama as ‘simulation’’ (p. 13). Given that migrants obviously participate in such work, distancing through the fiction is essential in order to ensure that past traumas are not revisited. In one example cited by Dalziel and Piazzoli, participants engage with a scenario of southerly migration from Iceland, forced by environmental change. Building resilience amongst participants is also a significant part of the work, a commonality shared throughout much drama work with migrant participants. Dalziel and Piazzoli’s findings from using such approaches with migrant and refugee learners are, broadly, that drama was effective in triggering participants’ agency, intended as the motivation and willingness to purposefully communicate, verbally and non-verbally, in the target language’ (Dalziel & Piazzoli, 2018, p. 22). This activation of agency is found to be across four domains, pertaining to both drama and language: (1) a degree of (pre-existing) meta-linguistic awareness in the learners; (2) the drama tapping into participants’ attitude of reciprocity; (3) the role/status reversal of the drama activating participants’ intercultural literacy; and (4) the symbol of ‘family’ providing a potent sociocultural frame, connected to the participants’ affective engagement. (ibid.) The role of drama in work such as this is to provide a compelling, safe and rich artistic and linguistic frame within which participants can make meaning across a range of levels. These quick snapshots of practice give a small insight into the ways drama is used to explore different aspects of migration. They are examples of drama being using as direct intervention, helping people formulate and tell stories about migration, both their own and those of others. Drama can undoubtedly be a powerful force in this regard. However, as has been argued, it is a force that requires critical attention

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to and engagement with pedagogy and artistry and careful consideration of what intent is associated with the work, what outcomes (if so desired) are sought from it, and how those outcome are understood and characterised. Given the emotive nature of migration, and the potential precarity of those involved in work of this nature, this final point is a particularly important one.

Portraying and representing migration in drama: telling stories The global population of forcibly displaced increased by 2.3 million people in 2018. By the end of the year, almost 70.8 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations. (UNHCR, 2019, p. 2) Of this UNHCR figure of 70.8 million people in 2018, 13.5 million people were newly displaced, with 37,000 new displacements each day. 25.9 million people were refugees, 41.3 million were internally displaced people, and at the end of that year, 3.5 million people were seeking asylum. 67% of all refugees in the world come from just five countries: Syrian Arab Republic, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia (UNHCR, 2019). Notwithstanding this specific geographic focus, this is a problem on a global scale. In many ways, it always has been. There is an extensive, rich and impactful body of work that explores the portrayal and representation of migration – drama that is used to represent migration aesthetically and artistically. This work is not about an explicitly interventionist or presentational drama but more an emblematic one. And whilst largely delivered in a manner that does not explicitly presuppose or prompt change from participants or viewers, it is typically underpinned by a strong sense of social justice and developed with a view towards the greater good. Drama as an art-form and performative medium portrays the migratory act, and represents the migratory experience from the perspectives of those who have experienced it and indeed from those of us outside it, and generally helps us to better understand the migration experience. Drama has always dealt with migration and identity through the creation and performance of works for the stage. That tradition would have been the mainstay of any discussion such as this 50 years ago, as the canon of dramatic works attests to. From Medea to West Side Story, the process of attending a theatre and hearing powerful dramatic stories about migration: the departure, the journey, the arrival, remains for many the most prevalent way of experiencing stories of identity, nation, self and other. Emma Cox’s

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short volume on Theatre & migration (2014) describes the canon of dramatic literature in this area and elaborates upon many of the areas of discussion and concern merely alluded to here. Scholarly work has reflected the growing global concern at both the scale of migration and the emergence of anti-migrant nationalist discourses, and has theorised and captured some of the drama of migration. It addresses migration and refugee-related topics in a variety of ways – both thematically and through different uses of aesthetic form, typically in a performance studies frame, that have increasingly exceeded the strictly theatrical (McIvor, 2019, p. 231). Two special editions of RiDE have been published offering perspectives on migration and asylum: volumes 13:2 (2008) and 23:2 (2018). The editors of the latter edition note that their own work, and one assumes the work of others seeks, ‘to elucidate what it might mean to bear witness to the lives of others … or how we might understand the politics and poetics of listening … or how we might clarify dispositions of seeing’ (Cox & Wake, 2018). Cox (2017, p. 479) has written separately about the processional aesthetics of migration, where she identifies that, ‘a key aim of this analysis is to make sense of processional aesthetics as a way of viewing refugees, and as an embodied practice responsive to them. This body of work (and that of others) exemplifies a powerful aesthetic of care around viewership and conceptualisation and their importance for equity and social justice. It represents the possibility of good or change in learning through seeing and witnessing the stories of others. This change, made visible through performance, can be on societal as well as individual levels. McIvor (2019) notes that an intercultural dialogue of substance can be developed through looking to work which is sustained by intercultural theatre practices and which embodies, ‘core precepts of bottom-up dialogical transformation translated into performance practice’ (p. 232). She argues that a more structured and focused ‘multi-member-state perspective would be highly instructive in our evolving understanding of the possibilities and limits of this rhetorical/policy shift vis-à-vis interculturalism and the arts in a political moment that one could only describe as charged’ (p. 244).

Conclusion Our brief tour of drama and migration ends here, amidst a series of interlinked discussions of theory, intent and practice. It is our conclusion that work of this nature requires that one-eyed judgement of effect needs to be eschewed, complexity embraced and criticality engaged as an active stance in the passionate quest for social justice and a desire to lessen the hard boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’. There are three specific observations with which we wish to leave the reader. First, staging the stranger, whether on stages or in more applied

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settings, is a complex endeavour. Freeman opens his book on the topic by noting that theatre is indeed going global, and concludes by offering a salient warning: The book’s central conceit of “the stranger” allows for a view of different not as an immutable marker of identity but as an assigned role that is socially constructed in relation to local communities, to nation, to multicultural policy, and to notions of global ethics. … social negation of difference may well be turned to either to a positive end – as in a complex encounter in performance that offers a kaleidoscopic perspective on the legacy of colonialism through intersubjective encounter among performers and spectators; or to a negative end – as in stories of the white knight that generate suffering witnesses to the detriment of suffering victims. Through developing more refined discussions of difference, we can become more conscious about who is made strange and to what end. (Freeman, 2017, p. 138) Second, we must have a strong sense of ourselves in this work, of our intentionality and biases, with a view to avoid rushing into classrooms, workshops and theatres in the belief that we can change hearts and attitudes through a workshop or performance, what O’Connor (2007, p. 26) refers to as the ‘salvation rhetoric or hero narrative’. And yet, as the same author argues in a later paper, if artists and those passionate about righteous change are not in a position and able to motivate ourselves to engage in acts that may be construed by other as heroic, then who in fact, is? (O’Connor, 2015a). Heroism may be a motivation for doing applied theatre work, but capes sometimes get caught in the wheels of performance. Finally, we counsel that the link between drama and migration is more than a refugee crisis. It is incontrovertibly true that there are refugee crises in the world and those of us in privileged and powerful positions are called upon to act in support of remediating these human horrors. But is also undoubtedly true that the majority of acts of migration are not as refugees, and that the association of the ‘crisis’ label with all acts of migration is not inclusive of many migrant experiences and potentially unhelpful as it ignores the less immediate challenge of reconciling difference. The fact that a lot of drama work takes place in this space is unsurprising, given that it is an area of great human need, and also a space of tension and performativity, essential elements of good drama! We argue that the role of drama across the migration theme is big and full of possibilities, as we have sought to demonstrate in this discussion. The development of a more profound conceptual link in our quest to better understand what we do well here is work to be progressed further. Learning how to live alongside and live together is the ultimate goal. The poem There is no Sorrow by Iain Crichton Smith

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evocatively captures the journey of the migrant, musing lyrically about the dumb grief of exile and the strangeness of names and foreign harbours and the different stars at night. In the final stanza, Crichton Smith suggest that perhaps the lot of the migrant is just that of endurance, until waking one miraculous morning to put on foreign clothes and finally know that they are at last yours. Perhaps the role of drama in migration is to allow us to better understand the journey towards and eventually, the wearing of foreign clothes.

8 THE THEATRE OF BATTLE

“I won’t let you spoil my war for me. Destroys the weak, does it? Well, what does peace do for’em, huh? War feeds its people better.” ― Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children

Drama that heals the wounded of war This chapter opens in the most peaceful of settings. Michael is at a rooftop barbeque in suburban Vancouver, Canada. It’s a warm mid-summer’s evening, and he’s in the company of a mostly male group, sharing food, drinks and stories as the sun sets over the Strait of Georgia. Michael is there as a guest of our colleague, Prof. George Belliveau, who has had a relationship with these men over the past number of years. Theirs is a relationship of trust, mutual respect and artistry. The artistry part is probably the most unlikely aspect of it all because the majority of the men present are veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces many of whom were deployed in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), colloquially known as the Coalition forces. This force was put in place post 9/11 to invade Afghanistan, defeat the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, help transition Afghanistan to democracy and train the pro-Western Afghan security forces. It is reported that 159 Canadian troops lost their lives in the conflict, with 2,071 injured and wounded. The war cost 111,000 Afghans their lives, including 31,000 civilians, with 29,000 wounded. Both sets of figures are contestable and unreliable. They are simply provided to illustrate scale, and the real human cost of the conflict. What was apparent in conversation that evening was their pride in their service and solidarity with their fellow-soldiers. What was less immediately apparent was the price that they paid for that service.

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Almost 600,000 veterans in Canada have served since the Korean War. 25% report a difficult return to civilian life. When they return, their scars are not just physical. These are not numbers, these are people. Extract from ‘Contact!Unload’ cited in Lea, Belliveau and Westwood (2018) The gathering on that sunny roof was a celebration of cast, participants and crew to mark the end of the first performances of Contact!Unload, a piece of research-based theatre created with the veterans about their experiences in transitioning back to civilian life after their service. This project was based on the initial therapeutic enactment work done with the Veterans’ Transition Program (VTP) by psychotherapist Marv Westwood (2009) and further developed in collaboration with Belliveau and Graham Lea. The participants/veterans were graduates of the VTP and worked initially in visual art (a ‘tribute pole’ was created) and then in theatre to create a new play, which has been successfully staged and restaged on a number of occasions, including to high-profile audiences and significant media attention. The dramatic work draws on a rich and growing literature and praxis in playbuilding and research-based theatre (Norris, 2009; Beck et al., 2011). The resulting journey had myriad outcomes for the participants: rehearsing and sharing narratives of personal trauma; catharsis and normalisation through telling their story to a captive audience; opportunities to control the narrative; an opportunity to help and support to others in their extended ‘band of brothers’ (Lea, Belliveau & Westwood, 2018). Also discerned were psychological effects such as engaging with embodied trauma, reworking social connectedness outside the military context and reconstruction of personal identity (Belliveau et al., 2019). There were impacts further afield also. Belliveau and Nichols (2017) discuss the positive way in which the participation of veterans as performers had a significant impact upon viewers, how ‘live theatre provides a valuable mechanism to inform and educate a public, as well as activate a visceral and emotional response to issues veterans face’ (p. 6), and how amongst attending audience, the play raises awareness and knowledge of veterans’ issues. The work being undertaken by Belliveau and his team is ongoing with further future work planned. Similar work has been undertaken in an Australian context by Michael Balfour and colleagues, most notably with the Difficult Return project (Balfour, 2009a; Balfour, Westwood & Buchanan, 2014). What are the issues that arise when working with returned veterans? Moral and ethical issues undoubtedly, in terms of the justification of war and engaging with those who enact acts of violence, regardless of how righteous or mandated. Issues of safety also feature prominently, in this instance, psychotherapeutic issues. The majority of people who work in this broad

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domain are artists and educators, not therapists, nor even drama therapists. This is not work for amateurs or enthusiasts. Re-enactment of trauma for the injured and revisiting troubling memories is probably the most profoundly dangerous of the myriad ethical and safety dilemmas in dealing with traumatic memories.

This chapter Broadly speaking, the four themes of ethics, intervention, safety and memory recur repeatedly throughout the examination of drama in this chapter. There is a case to be made that drama should not meddle in the serious business of conflict, life and death. Inherent in the chapter, therefore, are a range of ethical questions around how drama and war coalesce, sometimes explicitly, sometimes more subtly. The chapter describes a range of tensions around the ethics and safety of drama in places and former places of war, of the tension between commemoration and exploration and of the intentions of drama practitioners who engage in such work. The somewhat ‘sensational’ nature of work in this domain means that the moral and ethical issues for those who intervene, as framed by Conquergood (1985), are incredibly prescient here. There is an inherent danger of selfishness, superficiality, cynicism or sensationalism in the journey to map the performative stances of ‘other’, given that conflict by its nature tends to be a binary. There is a focus on dialogic engagement in this work driven by the need to understand the ‘other’ and establish what it may reveal of the ‘self’. War is a multifaceted beast. From the earliest Greek tragedies, drama has had a natural and easy predisposition towards portraying and helping understand and mediate conflict. This has continued to the present day, as the horrors of great conflicts continue to be embodied and explored through dramatic form. The language and imagery of war is of course inherently dramatic and fundamentally performative. From the theatre of battle, to a choreographed attack, to the arena of war, to the pomp and circumstance of military ritual, to the leading actors in their elaborate costumes, to the extravagant props, war has more staging elements than a Shakespearean epic. It also has that most fundamental of dramatic elements; tension. The ultimate tension of life and death. In dramatic terms, the artist is the player and manipulator of these elements, with them being traditionally understood as either the ‘moralebooster who constructs mythological propaganda, [or the person] … who undermines or resists the false heroics of war’ (Balfour, 2007, p. 1). As well as attempting to problematise the ethics of the artist and the ideological stance of work being undertaken, we also wish to expand upon this continuum of activity; from resistance to propaganda.

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In order to do this, the chapter will explore a range of different ways drama can and is applied to instances of war and conflict: (i) as a means of healing those affected by war; (ii) as a means of resistance; (iii) as a tool for propaganda and therefore as way of making war; (iv) as the performance of war and as a way of understanding its nature; (v) as a means of remembering war; and (vi) as a mode of developing peace after war. This exploration will allow for a considered assessment of the ramifications of juxtaposing war and drama, and facilitate researchers and practitioners in locating their own practice in this area at a time, when the world seems to be in even greater need of such social and artistic practices. As this chapter will seek to illustrate, this has become an area of significant praxis and scholarship, particularly in applied theatre.

The drama of resistance In first thinking of applied drama and war, our minds tend to turn to the risky and righteous applications. Writing of performances created in the Jewish ghettos during Nazi occupation, Balfour explores a possible range of motivations for undertaking such potentially deadly performance: The whole question of civic resistance, the use of theatre as defiance, is very important. The cultural manifestations were an attempt to affirm human values, to deny dehumanisation. … Whether the decisions were motivated by a sense of history, a sense of aesthetics, or both, through their performances they were able to create a dramatic space in which they commanded power denied them in reality. (Balfour, 2001, pp. 3–4) Performances of resistance are spiritually close to many who work in this field. The liberal, progressive mission associated with much pro-social and emancipatory drama praxis can be genealogically tied to progressive educators such as Slade, Way and Heathcote, but also to theatrical performances of resistance such as those of Brecht, Dario Fo, Athol Fugard and particularly the work of Augusto Boal, which has become a touchstone for many. Without making any comparison to the genocidal conditions in which the work cited by Balfour was performed, those same values of affirming humanity in the face of a denial of any semblance of power inform much drama praxis. In a world of overwhelming global inequality for many, and continued persecution and oppression for many others, very often the act of making art may be the only act of resistance that can be engaged which will not result in physical harm. New work in drama as resistance tends to look more like the work of the long-established In Place of War (https://inplaceofwar.net/) project based in Manchester, which hosts myriad projects designed to promote artistic

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creativity as a tool for positive change and where ‘music, theatre and the arts can be a form of resistance, an act of defiance or a simple bridge of reconciliation’. The significant body of important scholarly discourse generated as a result of that project (Thompson, 2005; Thompson, Hughes & Balfour, 2009; Thompson, 2013) is also an important legacy for the field. Thompson’s work, in particular, sets a deeply committed but equally critical tone for much of this discussion. In a chapter examining the ends of applied theatre, he analyses a terrible incident of a massacre that left 24 dead at a child soldiers’ rehabilitation centre in Sri Lanka, and which took place some 3 months after he had led an applied theatre project with the participants there (Thompson, 2009a). Through parsing the possible (but unknowable) relationship between his project and the massacre, the tension arises for Thompson between the necessity of acting tactically (to address a specific aim or right a particular wrong), which he suggests most theatre practitioners are very adept in doing; and that of acting strategically, at which we are less practiced. He worries that the absence of strategy can leave performances and interventions open to the strategic manipulation of others. As much as we may have a well-placed tendency to fall into to the passionate belief that war can be somewhat reconciled in well-meaning drama; we have to acknowledge that the dramatic act is singular within a complex terrain, and ‘that the relationship between the vying in the public sphere and the actual work of applied theatre is not sufficiently explicit’ (Thompson, 2009a, p. 121). The resistance must be smart and strategic, as well as meaningful and heroic.

Drama that incites war In addition to competing with the vicissitudes of particular contexts and sites, it should be clear that drama itself possesses no inherently virtuous qualities. Indeed like any agentive act, it has a morally empty nature, and can equally exist as a means to bring about ‘bad’ changes through its message and aesthetic. These rather dark boundaries require some exploration. Alongside the Ghetto example cited earlier, Balfour (2001) also discusses the possibilities of drama as propaganda by exploring the manner in which the Nazis (frequently crudely and jingoistically) exploited the possibilities of performance for their evil ends. It is wide open to such usage. Performance and war are, after all, two words associated in some sense with, on the one hand, human creative potential and, on the other, human destructive potential. The paradox is that performance practice does not automatically find itself occupying the creativity side of the shaky binary of creation and war’. (Thompson, 2006, p. 48)

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As noted elsewhere, this book is written at a time of resurgence in populist, right-wing politics across the globe. In Hungary, Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, pursues an isolationist policy with a strong socially and politically conservative mission. From blocking borders to migrants from the south to forcing the George Soros founded Central European University out of the country to relocate to Vienna, it is widely perceived that Orbán has moved Hungary into a more authoritative and traditionalist form of statehood. One place that is particularly visible is in the manner in which the ruling party is ideologically reordering the curriculum to promote ‘true’ Hungarian values and literature. Relegated from the work of schools is Hungary’s only Nobel-winning author, Imre Kertesz, who writes on the human experience of the Holocaust, and amongst the work promoted is that of the conservative, nationalist playwright, Ferenc Herczeg, who was also an ardent supporter of Italian fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini (Khattar, 2020). As much as we tend to laud the liberatory practices of Brecht and Boal, Herczeg did and does not exist in splendid isolation, as clearly illustrated in the work of Berghaus (1996). Theatre and performance can and has been used to lionise and validate acts of passionate politics that are not far from what might be regarded as hatred or incitement to violence. One might argue that this has been a valid and important function of drama from the Greeks telling epic stories of war to ensure the defence of Athens; to the Romans guaranteeing that their populations were compliant and willing to support the incessant expansion of empire; to Shakespeare lauding victorious regents and safeguarding the continuation of monarchy when a republic seemed inevitable. Michael Balfour’s early work (2001; 2007) offers a comprehensive discussion of theatre and war including this amongst a range of issues. He goes back to Celtic and Norse times, noting the traditional ways in which theatre has responded to war fall into two camps of propaganda or resistance. As with Thompson, he recognises ‘theatre as a politically and socially malleable medium, as conducive to supporting the structures and ideologies of power as to resisting them’ (Balfour, 2007). The inherent propaganda possibilities of art are multiple and exist on a plethora of levels beyond direct messaging. Balfour (2001, p. 5) suggests that propaganda is subtler than we often expect, and typically ‘conceals itself in an attempt to coalesce completely and invisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society’. One can distinguish two categories at play with one being the deliberate incitement of people to arms and action, a ‘direct call’ to action in the long tradition of performative work of that nature and recently evidenced in the 2016 Donald J. Trump presidential campaign rally calls to ‘lock her up’ directed towards his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The second is of more relevance to the applied traditions with drama acting as a seemingly innocuous artistic medium but containing a deeply

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rooted ideological and arguably propagandistic ideals. Drama can act as an unwitting incitement to arms, sometimes knowingly but often unknowingly on the part of the makers. When work fits the ideological frame of the viewer or participants, we regard it as righteous and emancipatory, even if it unwittingly leads to problematic outcomes. When drama doesn’t fit our ideological frames, we tend to label it as propaganda and manipulative, such as in the case of Herczeg’s inclusion in school curriculum. This is a significant critical question for our field. How do we understand and address the potential unwitting outcomes of our work. What are the issues of ethics and responsibility if an evocative process drama about compulsory purchase orders becomes deepened and heightened to such a degree that it results in the arrest and charge one of the participants a number of weeks later for criminal damage whilst taking part in an anti-motorway protest? Clearly, direct causation cannot be proven in such an instance, and yet morally, there is a tension to be trod between enlightenment and propaganda. What is clearly essential is the development of critical perspectives that leads to reflective praxis on the part of the artists/educators, and through that the increased critical understanding on the part of the receivers/participants/readers. It has been argued (Bottoms, 2017) that this is something that has all too often been lacking in the applied tradition because of the often involuntary nature of the participation in much drama work (particularly involving youth), and the assumption that participation and engagement is automatically a ‘good’ thing.

The performance of war and terror This section explores how war and terror are presented through performative acts of war and terror, and through their representation on the stage. Understanding both the performance of war and its dramatic portrayal grants us another critical lens with which to evaluate the relationship. The discussion here necessarily meanders fluidly between around performance and we remind readers of the varying definitions of performance taken from the work of Madison and Hamera (2006) that we wilfully draw upon in the hope of critical disruption of meaning. The performance of war has seldom had as much attention as in the last 20 years. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the second Iraq war, the invasion of Afghanistan, the vicious expansion of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, the Arab Spring and the Syrian conflict, to name a few, never before have we felt as close to war or has the performance of war been as carefully choreographed and dramatically supercharged. Equally, we have never before had as much scholarship reflecting on the performance of conflict and war and the militarisation of everyday culture:

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The global everyday is not only controlled through militarization but is also experienced in vastly different ways depending on factors ranging from location to socioeconomic class to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. Faced with a status quo that continues to militarize the most practical operations of everyday life, from traffic light cameras to cellphone metadata collection, civilians are increasingly less recognizable as “private citizens” than as subjects of surveillance and counterinsurgency culture. (Brady & Mantoan, 2017, p. 2) This is a useful understanding to hold, because of course war no longer looks like that fought by Henry V at Agincourt or that engaged in by ANZAC forces at Gallipoli. War since the latter half of the 20th century has been asymmetric (e.g., Afghanistan), hidden from public view (e.g., special force actions), sometimes unrecognisable as conflict (e.g., the 2019 US/ Iran episode), multimodal in nature (e.g., ISIS use of streamed atrocities and cyber-attacks) and reliant on spectacle (e.g., the 9/11 attacks). The performativity of war and militarisation is part of the performance of everyday life whereby, ‘increasingly, social, political, economic, personal and artistic realities take on the qualities of performance’ (Schechner & Brady, 2013, p. 123). Recognising it as such allows us to consider new perspectives on the powerful role that drama plays in our lives generally, but also how we ‘consume’ or become informed about war and conflict. Interrogating this further, we consider the ways in which drama is impacted by war and conflict and the multifaceted ways in which we understand this relationship. Hughes probes this terrain in detail (2007; 2011) and asks the question as to whether ‘theatre that seeks an ethical response [can] indicate a role for theatre and performance in preventing war and terrorism, or is theatre destined to reinforce a global status quo geared up for more war?’ (2007, p. 150). This is a question about the nature of drama that cuts to the heart of the matter of all our discussions. The performative nature of the realities of our everyday, post-normal world means that the portrayal of war on stage can look like a pale shadow of the reality of war. It is no easier now to capture horror and suffering than it ever was. The use of stage work to illustrate and proselytise against the horrors of war is no less complicated that the vainglorious celebration of war. Sarah Kane’s infamous play, Blasted (first staged at the Royal Court Theatre London in 1995), sought to highlight the horrendous atrocities in the Balkan conflict of the early 1990s, particularly the use of rape as tactic of war. It seemingly ticked all the boxes required in generating political awareness by becoming an overnight sensation and the source of intense media debate and eviscerating reviews. However, therein lies the perpetual challenge of using the stage and its inherently singular and

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reductivist narrative to characterise a complex geo-political and horrible human reality such as rape as a war crime. The meaning of the play was unclear to many attending that first staging, and although clarified in later productions, the show was characterised initially as a brutal, disgusting and scandalous performance. Michael Billington gets to the nub of the matter by asking the question as to ‘whether Kane establishes an iron-clad connection between personal abuse and the larger image of civic chaos’? He asserts in conclusion that Blasted’s ‘assertion of the link between personal and public brutality seems imposed rather than inevitable’ (Billington, 2007, pp. 356–357). So despite intentionality on the part of the production, the effect created was most likely not that desired of the playwright. The deeper question of whether an engagement with the play might prevent a repeat of such atrocities, therefore, seems an eon removed. This is the conundrum that Hughes grapples with in her work. Her conclusion is that theatre and performance practices at best provide ‘humanscale creative acts that expose the limits of the self in our own skins and inspire a revision of relationships to self and other’. Critically, such human scale ‘does not establish a firm basis upon which we can act, fight and oppose; rather, it provides a space to feel vulnerable’ (Hughes, 2007, p. 164). Our understanding pivots from a drama of resistance or one of propaganda but instead to the possibilities of a drama of self-realisation and self-awareness.

Drama that intervenes and disrupts war Spotlight on practice – Nandita Dinesh; practitionerresearcher in war zones Nandita Dinesh’s autoethnographic works describing her dramatic interventions in situations of war stand apart from the more ethnographic contributions of Thompson, Hughes and Balfour outlined earlier in this chapter. Choosing to work in war zones in Rwanda and the Kashmir region amongst others, she has committed a decade of work to intervention in conflict and post-conflict settings. Her academic work (Dinesh, 2012; 2015a; 2015b; 2015c), particularly her books (Dinesh, 2016; 2019) vividly and reflectively chart her experiences in many arenas of conflict and reflect her belief that ‘(i)f the aesthetic experience is that which does not seek to be a transformation into stated objectives and goals, it must work in that space of bewilderment and discomfort; creating an aesthetic that is as murky as it is revelatory’ (2015a, p. 66). She strives for a theatre of change or a theatre of discomfort. Dinesh (2012, p. 293) posits elsewhere that the role of theatre in a place of war is to create a theatre of doubts, within which artists should call upon participants to negotiate identities, negotiate histories and negotiate agendas.

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Why theatre? Why theatre in times and places of war? I have been asked these questions innumerable times. By my family. By friends. By colleagues. By spectators. The only people who do not ask me this question, who don’t need to ask me these question, are fellow theatrein-war researchers and practitioners who simply ‘get it’. Over the years, my answers have been various. Sometimes long and winding and inarticulate; Sometimes short and succinct; Sometimes obscuring as much as I reveal. These are questions that I always ask myself too. Every day. Why do this work? Because encountering aesthetics in times and spaces that are otherwise defined by the horrors of violence can be exhilarating evidence of the indefatigable human spirit. Because the use of art in spaces of violence could, just maybe, reduce the chances of violence occurring again. Because creative spaces can manifest as zones for resistance and safety in contexts that are otherwise tenuous and volatile. Because I am a ‘dark’ tourist, vicariously looking for experiences that I have not lived. Because… (Dinesh, 2016, p. 53)

Drama that seeks to intervene in war is as far away from stage performance or school workshop as is imaginably possible. Whilst Brecht favoured the power of allegory and ridicule, some practitioners take their safety and lives in their hands and walk amongst the protagonists. This section checks some of that work, not with a view to imparting any great depth of description, but more by letting a key scholar that works in this area give sense of the relationship of work such as this to intentionality and safety. As is evident from the spotlight above, the intentionality of the practitioner-researcher is a highlighted concern in Dinesh’s work and the complexity of the role is immediately evident to the reader. Dinesh (2016, pp. 38–39) suggests that a discussion of the nature of change is tripartite, commencing with a requirement for them to specify the primary action they will employ, then describing, ‘the specific point on the theatre-making/ performance timeline that will be focussed on and [finally] the response that will be sought as a result of the chosen action and point(s) of focus’. It is an unashamed declaration of intention in the work, and describing this process at the outset of the process is essential to her.

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Unlike some of the more measured ideals of intentionality of affect (Thompson, 2009b), or a theatre of little changes (Balfour, 2009b), Dinesh is unapologetic about the presence of an explicit change-agenda at play in her work. She notes that she initially thought Balfour and Thompson to be advocating for an absence of intention, but has come to realise that the potential of affective frameworks is not necessarily about the lack of intentionality: Rather, by acknowledging the potential of affect and the possibility of little changes, the theatre-in-war researcher-practitioner might be provoked by Balfour and Thompson to shift how expectations are framed without discarding intentions altogether. (Dinesh, 2016, p. 30) Such explicit intentionality on the part of the practitioner-researcher clearly evokes ethical and ideological debates about how drama is being used, and to what end. Referencing a point made earlier in this chapter, it can be argued that such theatre for change is in itself a particular type of propaganda, reflecting differing political and ideological views to that of the participants: (A)lthough there is potential for theatrical processes to cause unpredictable traces amongst its participants, there certainly exist manifestations of process-focussed theatre-in-war projects that simultaneously seek a particular outcome — be it the creation of a performance, or a tangible/intangible post-process outcome. For example, using theatre as a methodology to create dialogue between members from opposing sides of a conflict includes both an intentional focus on the process and an emphasis on an expected outcome from that process. (Dinesh, 2016, p. 41) On a more existential level, Dinesh’s work also evokes a conversation about practitioner and participant safety, something evident and present throughout her work: Had I created Meri Kahani Meri Zabani (MKMZ, 2014) in the 1990s, when the violence in Kashmir was at its height… well, let’s just say that while I was only verbally accused of being a spy after MKMZ, in the climate of active violence in the 1990s, those same accusations would likely have taken a physical form. (Dinesh, 2016, p. 149) Whilst her work frequently cites instances of a potential lack of safety and remarks quite casually about the fact that it is better to work with ex-combatants (Dinesh, 2016, p. 98), it is remarkably quiet around the ramifications for others in so-doing. This said, Dinesh is clear about the personal choices

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and decisions made in doing work of this nature, something reflected in the individualised nature of her work and research. Regardless of the necessity for multiple critical lens’ to be brought to bear in evaluating interventions of this nature, the sheer bravery and determination of the artists/pedagogues in question has to be acknowledged. As is their desire to do what they understand to be good for the betterment of the participants involved. Faced with violence and ravages of war, what role does a theatre practitioner play? Having been through a war as an urban guerrilla, having seen dead bodies rotting with gaping holes and the charred remains of abandoned homes, having walked the streets of Dhaka city, clasping the clip of an unpinned grenade in my trouser pocket, it never occurred to me that theatre could have a function in a war zone. (Ahmed, 2006, p. 59) Thankfully, those are choices not faced by most.

Drama that remembers and commemorates war Spotlight on practice – Wrapped in Grief project (Canada) Esther and Isaak. They have disappeared into time. When? In 1941? Were they in the Warsaw Ghetto? I can never bridge this trespass. Here, at least, is a space within which I can represent the rupture. As an identity project, “Wrapped in Grief” helped shape each of us and our shared performances of memory. Within the aesthetic space of “Wrapped in Grief,” memory was transformed in performance; narratives transformed by research. (Zatzman, 2005, p. 102) Belarie Zatzman’s article describes her Wrapped in Grief Holocaust memorial project. At the end of the article, she concludes with the reflection above citing her own lost family members and of how the work, in staging history also helped her and her youth participants (between 12 and 16 years old) to behold the world differently and how the process and performance ‘made visible the ruins of memory – these complex narratives, meanings and relationships – as a powerful act of memory and memorial’ (ibid.). Zatzman’s (2005, p. 96) project is one familiar in shape to many who deal with troubled historical narratives in their drama work. The work itself is described as ‘a scaffolded pedagogy in which historical contexts became

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the foundation’ for a range of work. Tableaux were created to locate specific events including Kristallnacht and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising amongst others. Subsequent to that, participants worked on identifying moments of loss in their own lives, which they were encouraged to juxtapose with the historical material. Lastly, students participated ‘in the staging of a mise-enscene of memory, in which the young people fashioned large-scale sculptures as an artefact of their experience of memorial’ (ibid.). The aesthetic frame was also triumvirate in nature, encouraging the staging of history through creating narrative relationships with the textual materials, exploring students’ personal and artistic responses to them, all of which ultimately asked participants to consider their relationship not just to the Holocaust itself but also the manner in which it shapes contemporary lives.

Understanding the relationship of personal narrative to history through drama and applied theatre is at the heart of Zatzman’s ongoing research in this area. It stands to reason that we need to understand how we each tell the stories of the past, particularly the traumatic ones. The old adage reminds us that history is written by the victors. Therefore, the commemoration of historical events (the most profound of which are inevitably wars), and the telling of their stories have particular perspectives on both victory and loss. Facts are irrefutable but the manner in which they are presented is important. This is something examined in more detail in the case of Ireland in the final section of this chapter. A more recent publication from Zatzman (2020) reflects upon her applied theatre work in Canada’s new National Holocaust Museum. At the heart of her questioning is how ‘we might attempt to navigate through the complexities of loss and survival, memory and post-memory, through aesthetic forms?’ (p. 14). She feels that the promise and challenge of applied theatre work allow for this, offering as it does the possibility of interacting with history instead of ‘passively consuming historiographic narratives’ (p. 14) and supporting participatory practices implicating visitors in a process of active storying of history through foregrounding narrative. For her, this allows that, ‘(c)omplex, often-contradictory narratives – personal, private and political inheritances – might be witnessed in the relational space of a multidimensional applied theatre memory project’, where ‘(c)ontradictions are part of the telling’ (p. 15). Whilst Balfour (2007) warns us against the easy categorisations in looking at theatre and war, Zatzman’s work clearly points to the complexities of negotiating memory, remembrance, narratives and aesthetics, particularly in a space as profound as the awful legacy of the atrocities of war.

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The drama of dealing with peace This lengthy and diverse chapter opened with a discussion of drama’s possibilities in healing the wounded of war. Those wounds range from the physical to the emotional. Societies are as deeply wounded as their humans. The memory of those wounds are contested and painful. Some argue that the role of drama is in fact to help humans develop the imaginary resilience and skills to deal with those challenges; to move beyond the dystopian residue of war and instead become what Prendergast (2011, p. 69) describes as ‘utographers of better worlds’, in search of ways in which we can ‘cocreate and perform socially imaged utopias’ (p. 70).

Spotlight on practice – post-conflict Ireland The Republic of Ireland is currently coming towards the end of what is known as the decade of centenaries (2012–2022), covering a rebellion, a war of independence, a civil war and World War One, amongst many other events that took place roughly within the frame of 10 years. Given the range of conflicts and the nature of them, the period is obviously a contentious one in terms of how it is represented and commemorated. These are commemorations of events all directly or indirectly related to the partition of the Ireland into two states, and which led to decades of conflict in Ireland (the ‘Troubles’ of 1968–1998) which officially concluded with the Belfast Agreement of 1998, but which lingers on in multiple ways to this day. The centenary of the national theatre of the Republic of Ireland, the Abbey Theatre occurred just prior to this period and represented no less of a commemorative challenge. Writing of it, Maples (2011, p. 29) notes that such events always underline contemporary political and cultural pressures, and that ‘commemorations buy and sell the past in ways that incorporate it into a commodity of identity, culture and, indeed, the nation’. She suggests that all acts of commemoration are performative acts that act as ‘platforms for a community to enact that memory and, by doing so, make the public subscribe to the official (or on the other hand, counter-) memory being created’ (p. 32). They are complicit acts of people towards their community, and ‘cultural signifiers such as the theatre aid in the formation of the nation, while all of these factors are tied to the construction of history and memory by the community (p. 33). The memories shared in and through drama may well be communal, ideological and national, but drama allows for the reading as well as the telling of the story. Ireland and Northern Ireland’s long history of conflict in the 20th century can be understood as a forerunner of much 20th century warfare. To put it in quite sterile terms, it was a long-running irregular period of armed conflict involving multiple protagonists, driven largely by terrorist action (claimed as

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virtuous and freedom-fighting) with subsequent state and terrorist reaction (often characterised as defence of the Union) and which had strong ethnic and sectarian roots and both active and passive involvement by two sovereign states (United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland). The majority of those who lost their lives were innocent civilians, virtually all the actions were asymmetric, and the latter stages of the conflict were shared widely on television. It was a savage conflict, leaving deep divisions and scars in and between Northern Ireland, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. Unlike South Africa, for example, there has been no formal process of peace and reconciliation. The peace treaty that was struck in 1998 remains tentative at times and poor governmental structures and generationally divided communities are a legacy. Within a context such as this, what role for drama in the reading as well as the telling of the story?

This final section will briefly examine four projects each of which seek socially imaged utopias in different ways. These four projects are examples of range of drama work, both mainstage and in the applied drama and theatre domain that has emanated from Northern Ireland during and immediately post the Troubles. Bridging the religious and ideological traditions and in an early example of the manifestation of a ‘social turn’ is work such as that of McKinnie (2003) which looks at the geography of performance in immediate postconflict Belfast, a process that ‘involves the lamination of theatre practices onto a landscape in which the state’s struggle to exert its authority remains conspicuous’ (p. 582). Examining a series of site-specific performances set in the Crumlin Road Courthouse, home to the (in)famous and secretive Diplock (non-jury) courts used to convict many of terrorist events, McKinnie discusses the impact of visiting a place that was such a prominent part of the state security apparatus at a time of deep conflict. He concludes that ‘the experience of a place changes once it is theatricalised, but the politics of this process are no less contentious that they were before’ (p. 594). Moriarty’s community theatre work (2004) from the same time period has more explicit aims in looking at how drama promotes cross-community understanding. It describes a then ground-breaking cross-community project examining the issue of ‘mixed marriages’ across the sectarian and religious divide. She describes a complex and tension-filled process of building a site-specific, promenade production where everything from participant recruitment to location of rehearsal venues to the choice of playwright and manner of representation of communities within the script were contentious. When some Protestant members of the group threatened to leave because of the latter issue, Moriarty is frank in her then pessimism about

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the future of the project, but also torn because of the societal significance attached to it: I spent a long time wondering whether I, too, should leave. I felt that participants had been betrayed, and that the principles of community theatre, at least as I understood them, had been betrayed. … I felt that there were some people in the communities, in the media and in the arts world, who would regard this as a small but telling metaphor for the inevitable failure of the wider ‘peace process’. (Moriarty, 2004, p. 20) There were, to her mind, two different models of community theatre practice at play in the project, one a creative collaborative model, the other a more documentary theatre model of practice. The inevitable paradigm clash combined with a late delivery of the script, all served to undermine trust in the work. But of course, the production was finalised and received with audience enthusiasm and critical acclaim which led to a sense of ownership amongst the participants, but also an exaggerated sense of what work of this nature could achieve. Moriarty is clear about this and suggests that the project was certainly an achievement, but the impact of it was not what it could have been because the sorts of progressive community and political development frameworks for dialogue and generating long-term and sustainable change were not in place. This for her was a weakness, as was a less successful follow-up project based on football, and what is also clear is the personal cost to herself as facilitator, noting that ‘(f)or all its undoubted achievements and successes, I do not want to meet The Wedding Community Play Project again’ (p. 31). From a distance of some years after the peace process, Jennings (2016) discusses an intermedial theatre project utilising a range of drama approaches in exploring the contentious issue of peace-time policing, and specifically the rebranding of the Troubles-era Royal Ulster Constabulary as the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The project had three elements: 1. A professionally produced touring play. 2. A series of educational and community workshops and seminars. 3. An online presence, including the project website, a series of Youtube videos and an interactive ‘App’ for Android and iPad tablets. (Jennings, 2016, p. 420) Jennings (2016, p. 424) notes that 60% of audience members (across both communities) reported a change in perception regarding the RUC after seeing the production, with many former officers and their families reporting a validation at having the opportunity to express perspectives not publicly presented before. The schools workshops discerned that many of the youth

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involved had ‘little knowledge of the history of policing in Northern Ireland beyond inherited attitudes towards the state’, and of increased understanding after the engagements. Similarly, the App proved highly effective in reaching young people, although they also reported that live interaction still remained highly valued. Finally from this snapshot of drama in post-conflict Northern Ireland, Grant (2017) examines its impact upon a Protestant, Loyalist community (Tiger’s Bay) in an isolated enclave in North Belfast. Investigating the efficacy of using drama-based approaches for male mental health, Grant (2017, p. 164) assisted in building a performance to explore the precarious life in this area, where the sense of communal identity was as much threatened by the social and cultural change wrought by the increased prosperity of the ‘peace dividend’ as much as it had been by the Troubles. He notes that the continuing tensions between the Protestant and Catholic communities in North Belfast make it unlikely that such work would be developed on a cross-community basis, a fact that is a social reality, although he acknowledges that it seems cautious and a lost opportunity for applied drama to create dialogue. Interestingly, he also argues for the importance of ‘singleidentity’ projects, ‘based on the need to shore up the morale of beleaguered and isolated communities before they could be expected to engage with dialogue with others’. Each of these innovative works clearly contribute something to a postconflict societal landscape; in using drama to attempt to change troubled spaces, bridge sectarian divides, probe identities and bolster beleaguered communities. Yet, as the reports on the work make clear, the progress is labour-intensive, cautious and slow. Such is the damage wrought by war and the tension necessitated of drama that continues to tell as well as allowing for the reading of a troubled past.

Conclusion What we hope is clear at the end of this discussion is that there is extensive scholarship in the arena of drama and war, particularly in the performance studies, applied theatre and drama education spaces. There is much more that could be considered such as performance and the affective impact of war (Balfour, 2012), peace-building work in Papua New Guinea (Dwyer, 2016), humanitarian performance (Thompson, 2013) and performance and the creative transformation of conflict (Cohen, Gutierrez Varea & Walker, 2011). In all of these discussions, the variations in methodologies, form and context are underpinned by two variants of the same ethical tenet: ideology and intentionality. This is unsurprising as Balfour and colleagues (2015, p. 308) suggest that ‘there is more at risk in sites of conflict, more vulnerability and volatility and more exposure to the circuits and grids of power in the competition for dominance’.

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This chapter has sought to chart this extensive terrain of praxis with attention to the critical issues of ethics, intervention, safety and memory run across the continuum of praxis. We have aimed to extend the traditional binary of drama for good or for evil by describing work that extends across a continuum that can be roughly characterised as: resistance-propagandamanipulation-intervention-commemoration-healing. The chapter has also sought to strike a neutral note, neither dismissive nor encouraging of any work across the continuum, but instead consistent in its critical exploration. However, we too are believers in the space of possibility created by drama. No spaces are darker than those created by conflict and war and few humans more damaged than those who survive or are bereaved or traumatised as a result of conflict. Therefore, we end on a hopeful note, by suggesting that drama does indeed have a role to play in the mediation of terror for our children by doing drama in our classrooms (O’Connor, 2013), that it can be an enabler of utopias in the darkest of dystopias, (Prendergast, 2011) and that more than anything else, it can be a guide towards hope and care (Gallagher, 2015a).

9 THE DRAMA OF SEX AND SEXUALITY

A facet of social life that has changed radically in the last few decades is public perceptions of sex and sexuality. Representations of sex and sexuality have shaped political, national and personal debates about morality, ethics, public institutions, religion and human rights.  This chapter will explore points of connection with these debates and drama and performance more broadly. This discussion is necessarily interwoven with discussions of gender, feminism and identity politics – complex political and sociological issues in public and private discourse.  However, while we acknowledge this composite terrain and locate this chapter within the multifaceted and intersectional discourses of gender studies, queer studies and feminist theory, it does not directly focus upon them. This is for two reasons. First, there has been significant attention paid to this area of study in drama and we will refer to this body of work. Second, there is not sufficient scope in this chapter to canvas the issues and debates in enough depth to be useful to ongoing discussions in the field. Our preoccupation is firmly with sex as physical acts (our bodies) and the ways in which identities are defined by their sexuality (our rights). Having said all this, we wish to nail our colours to the mast at the outset, as we believe that a neutral ideological perspective is simply not possible when writing about this topic (or any topic in this book), such is its pivotal positionality in post-structural and critical discourse. We write from an unashamedly progressive, feminist perspective. Nowhere is patriarchy and gender inequity seen as clearly as in discussions about sex and sexuality, particularly for people who are queer, non-binary or transgendered. As with all battlegrounds, this is a deeply contested and personal terrain. So having described our positioning, we leave it to the reader to find their own position with regard to these debates. This chapter will draw broadly on examples of drama practice as identity, celebration, politics, intervention and pedagogy,

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and the governance and control of sex and sexuality. Our desire is to talk about drama and sex, which is the bracket term used throughout to discuss both bodies and rights, unless otherwise specified.

The public performance of sex and sexuality: celebration and identity Much of these times has been defined by battles about bodies and rights. In an increasing number of developed countries (not an unproblematic classification, as acknowledged elsewhere), questions of gender, identity, sexuality and bodily rights have progressed slowly beyond binaries. Gender is fluid; identity is changeable; sexualities are multiple; and the control of bodily rights by the owner of the body has been reclaimed from the traditional guardians (church, state, elders, etc.) of the society. None of this is to suggest for a moment that queer or trans people do not consistently have their rights infringed upon, many are discriminated against in multiple ways and frequently subject to bodily threat and attack, something Harris and Holman Jones (2017) describe as ‘Queer terror’. Neither is it to suggest that people around the world are free to have full control of the practice of their own sexuality; clearly it is not the case that all have body autonomy. From female genital mutilation to homophobic violence, sex and sexuality remain a private matter of public contention. Sex and sexuality are frequently a place of public moral terror. Perhaps more than in any other chapter in this book, they can be characterised as the site of the culture wars of these times, a place of flow beyond the Ideoscapes described by Appadurai (1996). At the heart of conservative-progressive battles and in the cauldron of where the protection of old ways of life meets the development of new and inclusive societies, sex and sexuality are a lens through which we can understand much of our world, and particularly offer windows of insight into culture and education, topics of central concern here.

Spotlight on practice – Sydney Mardi Gras Festival The massive public popularity of the Sydney Mardi Gras Festival is globally recognised and it has become a marker of the modern Australia. Mardi Gras is one of the largest in the world and is an extraordinary performance of sexual identity attended by hundreds of thousands every year. Having started 40 years ago as a protest and assertion of pride, it has morphed into the global, extravagant, much loved celebration that it is today. It is now not just a huge performance and celebration of queer identity, but also of community identity more broadly, with political parties, large corporations, police, army and other community organisations marching for, with, and as proud LGBTIQ+ members of society. Of particular interest to us is its symbolic role in describing

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the shift from public protest and assertion of gay rights to a public celebration and normalisation of diverse identities – a form of ‘homonormativity’. It is also interesting to further speculate upon its societal role in Australia’s journey to legislating for same-sex marriage. Sex, performance and drama are deeply intertwined on and off the stage, in the carnival float and at the ballot box.

Drama has often been the ‘showing place’ for many of the changes in these issues. The history of the Sydney Mardi Gras from protest to celebration, as an example of this, tracks such hard fought and fraught change. We spotlight it here because it is one of the most visible public performances of sexual identity in the world, and has had an undoubted impact on the representation (in Fraser’s terms) of queer identities in Australian life. Such performances can be seen on stages as mainstreaming the stories of previously ‘deviant’ sexual identities (such as La Cages aux Folles or Angels in America), to telling the tales of peoples struggling with nonbinary or trans identities and sexualities (e.g., Scorch by Stacey Gregg), to being a focal point for those opposed to the liberalisation of gender and sexual norms as Mae West’s highly controversial play The Drag was in the 1920s USA. It should be noted that it is not just the representation of queer identities that provokes controversy in drama. Sex on the modern stage, particularly in its performance or in the display of nudity, remains mildly controversial and certainly a matter of discussion (Pullen, 2017). Theatre and sexuality have always been spheres of overlapping influence: Sexual desire has long been a motivating narrative factor in plays and performance, the force that established or destroys relationships, that stirs jealousy and encourage infidelity, or that binds character or tears them apart, regardless of their sexual orientations. Theatre is also a place of fantasy and longing, of fleeting exchange between spectators and performers. With its liminal status as both real and not, as ephemeral and transformational, theatre has long been a site where misfits and the marginalised have congregated. Sexual minorities have found among theatre people a generous acceptance sometimes not available in dominant culture’s more constrained, conforming ways of life. (Dolan, 2010, p. 3) As Dolan suggests, drama and dramatic form generally celebrates diversity and difference (characteristics which make great stories as much as anything else) and it can be generally read as a place where the public performance of sex and diverse sexual identity has been celebrated. Fraser’s (2007) argument for reframing social justice in a globalising world is premised on the idea of parity of participation. Central to this

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participation is representation within the political frame – the right to be here. Injustice comes about when political boundaries and/or decisions deny some people the possibility of participating on a par with others. In order to participate, one must be represented, in order to be represented, one must be visible. Visibility, therefore, is key in establishing and maintaining representation. The frequently repeated maxim of, “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it” holds for drama and it is particularly relevant in helping us understand the importance of performative celebration of diversity in subverting preordained norms of gender identity. This is why the public performance of Mardi Gras is vital not just for the communities directly involved, but also for broader questions of representation in our societies. Butler’s seminal works considers the active role of visible social ‘norms’ in society and allow us to see how engaging (in the broadest sense) in performance (the widest possible definition) can help disrupt the pseudonormative performances of gender and sexuality that people, especially young people, assume to be ‘natural’: The theory of gender performativity presupposes that norms are acting on us before we have a chance to act at all, and that when we do act, we recapitulate the norms that act upon us, perhaps in new or unexpected ways, but still in relation to norms that precede us and exceed us. In other words, norms act on us, work upon us, and this kind of ‘being worked on’ makes its way into our own action. (Butler, 2009, p. xi) Butler considers individual acts of agency not as the ‘sovereign ground’ of peoples own actions, but ‘a complex convergence of social norms on the somatic psyche and a process of repetition that is structured by a complicated interplay of obligation and desire and a desire that is and is not one’s own’ (ibid.). Political acts are always within a set of norms sometimes hidden in plain sight, and which allow for the possibility of individual action at that moment in time. Butler asserts that in relation to both gender and sexuality, ‘none of us has the choice of creating ourselves ex nihilo’ (p. xii). This is especially the case for those in precarity – ‘women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless’ (p. xiii), about whom she poses three questions regarding performativity that are deeply pertinent here: How does the unspeakable population speak and makes its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require? (Butler, 2009, p. xiii) Linking Butler’s assertion with the earlier insight from Fraser, the key consideration for us is who is allowed representation; who has the right

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to be represented, how do we ensure socially just and inclusive modes of representation; how does this representation combat economic and sociocultural barriers to participation; and what role can drama can play in this? One of the ways in which Butler’s ‘unspeakable population’ makes it claim for representation is through performance and performative acts, placing a new ‘norm’ in public view. Drama is a place of staging utopia, and offers ‘a place to scrutinise public meanings, but also to embody and, even if through fantasy, enact the affective possibilities of “doings” that gesture towards a transformed world’ (Dolan, 2006, p. 165). Public performance (dramatic performance, we argue) has been a site of collective and individual possibility in seeking changes in societal norms of sex, sexuality and sexual identity. From the seemingly passive (though not on the part of the ‘performer’) everyday performances of diverse and multiple gender and sexual identities to the active acts of militancy that prompt changes in our societies through activism and protest, the performance of sexual change has inevitably prompted paradigm-shifting societal change.

Sex, performance and politics As discussed in Chapter 4, politics is inseparable from myriad aspects of the human experience; from the ways in which we govern our societies to the rights and responsibilities we as individuals have within those societies. The governance of bodies (sex) and of rights (sexuality) is very much a part of that. However, the subversion and ultimately the change of governance norms can also be brought about through drama and performance, on a level beyond representation.

Spotlight on practice – Panti Bliss (Ireland) In 2013, queer man, gay rights activist and drag queen, Rory O’Neill, took to the stage of the Irish national theatre (the Abbey Theatre) in front of a full house as Panti Bliss to deliver her ‘noble call’. The idea of a noble call has its origins in the Irish tradition of public song-singing, whereupon the singer just finished performing has the noble call in nominating the person to succeed them in song. Playing in the Abbey that night was James Plunkett’s play The Risen People (1958) set during the 1913 lockout. The lockout was a major dispute between employers and workers about their right to unionise and rise out of poverty and tenement life. It continued for nearly 6 months and was characterised by violence and near-starvation for the workers’ families. Although ‘won’ by the employers’ side, it firmly established trade unionism in Irish life and was an important historical moment in the march towards Irish independence. The inclusion of a ‘noble call’ from various prominent members of Irish society at the end of each performance was clearly an homage by

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the producers to honouring the voice of the people. In Panti’s eloquent and emotional call, she pleaded for a Yes vote in the forthcoming Irish marriage equality constitutional referendum. Her passionate piece of rhetoric (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0) went viral immediately and is noted as one of the changing points of the referendum (O’Toole, 2017a; O’Toole, 2019), which ended up with an overwhelming Yes vote, making Ireland the first nation to legalise gay marriage by popular vote. It was a performance of democracy within a performance of sexual identity, in a theatrical space, at the end of a dramatic performance.

A recent example of the public performance of sex impacting upon politics and politics is the wave of social protest that has brought about popular change to marriage equality laws, thus allowing for same-sex marriage in countries such as our own: Ireland and Australia. One of the most important recent moments in Irish social history involves an intersection of performance, performativity, drama and sex in the performance of Panti Bliss, which as noted above had a profound impact on a constitutional referendum some weeks later. The countries of the Global North, and, to a much slower extent, the Global South, have seen significant changes in public and legal attitudes towards sex and sexuality over the past half-century. Sexual relationships and practices are not as policed as they once were and body autonomy is regarded in many places as a human right. Homosexuality, from having been illegal in most of the world, is now socially accepted and legal in some parts of the world, with gay couples having access to equal marriage rights in an increasing number of countries. In addition, the public performance of identity (and specifically sexual identity) has largely been revolutionised in the same period. Publicly performed queer identities are accepted and oft-times celebrated. Full gender equality remains a distant dream, but from a situation of largely subjugated and inferior domestic and public roles, equity between the sexes and the general lot of women has also greatly improved in many countries and societies. The intersection of performance, politics and sex is of significance because it is all around us and very visibly resulting in changes to our societies. Bliss’ ‘noble call’ is one example of where sex and sexual identity, drama and the political intersect and result in social change. Scholarship in performance studies, theatre studies and applied theatre work chart other work, and that scholarship has particular profundity in areas in which injustice or abuse need to be highlighted and called out. For example, Mignon and Rae (2019) trace the impact of #MeToo (which originated in film) on both the way in which theatre work is conceptualised and produced as well as the experience of performing in a changed environment. The ubiquitous

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presence and implicit tolerance of rape culture in performance is charted by Quigley (2019). Other relevant research explores the normalisation of sexuality through the performative act (Phelan, 1997), and the theorising and problematising of sex for heterosexual females through performance studies (Bell, 2005). The collective impact of work in this domain in calling out injustice and shining a light in areas that are hidden, is to work towards a more socially just world in which the governance of sex and sexual identity is not just in the hands of traditional and patriarchal forces, but a dialogue between a state and all its citizens.

Drama about sex: pedagogy and efficacy A lot of thought has been given in societies to the ways in which sexual practice, identities and discourse are governed. Within governed is regulated; within regulated is controlled and within controlled is made compulsory, banned or labelled as taboo. These next two sections of the chapter look at work in which drama is used to deal with what we call the governance of sex. Drama has often taken upon itself the somewhat deviant and subversive stories of society. Perhaps because drama was itself regarded as deviant and subversive (an association derived from it being synonymous with playfulness and a certain fluidity of identity). It has undoubtedly also always been a place of refuge for many who sought such, a place where identify was accepted more readily in costume or in a workshop than on the street. Bottoms’ wide-ranging essay (2003) teases out the tensions between theatre studies and performance studies and in particular examines the emergence of Schechner’s ludic braid which sets efficacy and entertainment somewhat in opposition to each other in terms of the function of performance. He notes the prevalence of male homosexuality in American theatre at the time Schechner established the idea of efficacy, and suggests a reactionary link to this in Schechner’s search for a theatre that is ‘a model of “real”, “true” cultural performance based in a ritualistic context’ (p. 177). This aside, Bottoms strongly refutes the oppositional relationship into which efficacy and entertainment have been cast: Theatre has never been a particularly utilitarian form of social endeavor (despite the best efforts of some of its leading practitioners), but its potential as a site for reflection, for questioning, for searching remains undiminished by all the theoretical posturing of the last few decades. That potential, moreover, is inextricably bound up with theatre’s erotics—with the often indefinable, frequently promiscuous pleasures that it offers to both participants and observers. (Bottoms, 2003, p. 184)

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For Bottoms, the implicit power of theatre is not in its efficacious teaching but in what it offers in dealing with the mysterious or hidden aspects of human existence, such as sex. Drama is a safe and powerful space in which to deal with taboo subjects. In viewing drama, the protection of the fourth wall in theatre, and of role in more immersive work allows audiences to distance themselves from what they are witnessing and react publicly and privately (the same or differently) to the work. In workshop situations, participants are encouraged to dwell in fictional worlds and to move betwixt and between (metaxis) the pressing nature of the dilemmas they encounter there and a more reflective stance in their ‘real-life’ world whereby they can safely digest the ideas encountered in the drama and decide their personal position about the issues involved. Regardless of context or genre, drama is a potent space of possibility for exploration and efficacy, but not automatically so. As with all the other discussions in this book, critical care must be exercised in how this is done. Unlike the evocative searching and reflecting that Bottoms found in the theatre, the ways in which drama has often been used in sexual health has been quite interventionist and direct, as the history of theatre in education (Jackson, 2007; Wooster, 2007; Jackson & Vine, 2013) and theatre for development (Prentki, 1998; 2015) exemplify. A simple database search reveals a plethora of projects and studies that aspire to educate or change the sexual practices of participants and which are typically funded by a governmental agency or global non-governmental organisation (NGO). Very often, the niceties and complexities of affect/effect and efficacy/entertainment debates are pushed aside in favour of direct messaging through theatre with the assumption that impact and change will follow because of the nature of the engagement.

Spotlight on practice – the Life Drama project (Papua New Guinea) This Australian-led and funded applied theatre project took place in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and began as a response to a deepening sexual health crisis with the spread of sexually transmitted illnesses (STIs) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Having conducted audits of existing theatre and sexual health practice in PNG, they found that ‘contemporary performancebased efforts were heavily criticised for trivialising the issues through a focus on comedy (‘making the audience laugh’), conveying inaccurate and confusing messages and functioning as entertainment rather than as education’ and that ‘existing theatre-based approaches to sexual health education in PNG were ineffective in promoting behaviour change’ (Haseman et al., 2014, p. 99). As a result, the Life Drama project focused on the development

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of folk opera work embodying cultural influences from many areas of PNG, but with moments of participants engagement based around Boalian techniques. The moments of narrative tension concerned (specific to each context the folk opera was performed in) were driven by issues around HIV awareness and testing. The evaluation of the work notes that ‘the folk opera acted as a conduit for new knowledge of and attitudes towards HIV testing’ and ‘confirmed that participants had developed more positive attitudes towards both HIV testing and people living with HIV’ (p. 106).

We earlier discussed the role of drama and applied theatre programmes in creating ‘policy proposals’ about their participants. The idea here is that, for a drama or theatre programme to be successful, it needs to have outlined a ‘problem’ that it was intending to solve (Freebody & Goodwin, 2017). Further to this, the participatory nature of drama/theatre often results in the problem proposal being related to who these participants are (such as ‘teenagers’ or ‘obese’) and what they need (such as knowledge about safe sexual practices or the promotion of healthy lifestyles). In this way, some would argue that policy discourses are, ‘a means through which neoliberal rule is exercised over population groups’ (such as ‘the promiscuous’ or ‘the overweight’) (Fullagar, 2002). Despite the intent of the work seeming to be beyond question in terms of its merit, the same critique can clearly be offered of drama used as a tool for governing sexual practice; particularly through the education and promotion of ‘safe sex’ behaviours. The complexity of the relationship between governance (at a macro and micro level), identity and sexual practices is borne out in Cahill’s seminal work (2010; 2011; 2014), which explores in detail the possibilities and challenges posed by using process drama and applied theatre approaches to educate for HIV awareness in South-East Asian communities. Her work using drama as a pedagogical tool in a training programme addressing reduction of gender-based violence and the promotion of sexual and reproductive health (Cahill, 2016) was funded by UNICEF and conducted in partnership with the Bangladesh Government. Amongst the societal issues discussed in the research is one which pertains to much of this work; how to work ‘for the realisation of human rights without demonising culture or tradition?’ (p. 158). Cahill concludes that the answer lies in the process of participation and dialogue which allows for the reciprocal interchange of views, thus enabling culture change to come from the grassroots participants as opposed to being imposed by an outside agency. To that end, her work is based around pedagogic principles of description, rehearsal, critical thinking, deconstruction and visioning. Each of these has associated dramatic conventions such as the use of surrealist play where participants adopt the role of non-human

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objects (e.g., Pill, Condom, Implant) and appear as interviewees on a TV game show. Cahill (2016, p. 164) suggests that this non-naturalism grants permission for participants ‘to speak as social commentators rather than as social replicators’. All this dramatic action takes place in an essential critical frame – a process of enquiry, and a dialogic mode to pursue that enquiry. Without this, she warns that drama may not act as a pedagogy of change, but instead may serve to ‘provide opportunities to re-tell dominant stories, and re-inscribe presumptions about what is possible’ (p. 165). The effect for Cahill is not inherent in the instrument but in its application. Alongside work such as this, focused on increasing knowledge of, and health in, sex and sexual practices, sits drama work that seeks to deal with prejudices related to sexual practices, sexual and gender identity. Ignorance and misinformation in these areas tend to be rife. Low (2017) reminds us that one only needs to look to historic acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) campaigns to see discussions that are both frightening and stigmatising. She suggests that a lot of sexual health campaigns are suggestive of a deviant or non-normative view of sexual practices and that the discussions around sex can be suffocating and lacking spaces for participants ‘to breathe’. Theatre-making can counter this and create spaces for what she describes as ‘the exhilarating link between theatre and sex – intimacy, possibility and playfulness’ (Low, 2017, p. 148). These spaces avoid ‘dry didacticism’, offer participants a space for the individual exploration of meanings and not be asked to accept blame for ‘defective’ behaviour (p. 161). Drama’s possibilities in educating about difference and prejudice have been explored elsewhere in this book, most notably in Chapter 7 on migration. Prejudice at its simplest comes about from stereotyping and oversimplification in an effort to comprehend aspects of difference. At its worst, it is responsible for discrimination and hate crimes across the world and the challenges it presents education are substantial (Hughes, 2017). Those perceived as being sexually promiscuous, or sexually deviant or differently gendered are subject to some of the most punitive excesses of such prejudicial behaviour. Gallagher’s theatrical exposition of ethnographic scenes brings alive the performances of identity in the classroom in which she and her team worked: In this rather “typical” urban, public school, a culture of discrimination based on sexuality is “fair game.” Most students view symbolic and physical violence against queer youth as a crime unequal to other forms of discrimination based on gender, race, or class. On the hierarchy of oppressions, homophobia barely makes the list. (Gallagher, 2006, p. 65) She places stock in ‘theatre’s potency, its economy of expression, and its embodied character’ (p. 72) to draw our attention to these ‘interlocking

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forms of oppression’. It helps to interrupt the deafening silences by making visible the ‘invisible’ sexual minority presence in order that sexual identity and desire have their place in school conversations (p. 71). Shu (2016) describes using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to facilitate work on love, sex and gender in Hong Kong. He suggests that, ‘(o)ne important way to reduce oppression is to gain empathy through better understanding of other people’s needs and cultures’ (p. 70). The work undertaken with university students allowed participants to express their understanding of issues related to oppression in this area. He warns of popular ideas that emerge in these techniques are not always aligned with the intentions of the facilitator and, more relevant here perhaps, the necessary stereotyping, romanticising or unrealistic images projected when participants do not have lived experience or complex understanding of the issue. As with so many ‘difficult’ areas of human experience, drama enables a playful pedagogy of possibility that allows students to be active and embodied in their conceptualisation and representation of people, places, situations, problems and solutions. What is vital, as is clear from all the examples cited in this section, is that regardless of the pressing nature of the problem, or the desire of funders for visible impact and results, is that criticality, artistry and authentic engagement are as urgent in drama and sex as in any other area. The danger is that another form of monologue is launched at the powerless, producing a contradiction between form and content: messages of empowerment delivered in ways that are disempowering because they leave the target community in an increased state of passive dependency. (Prentki, 1998, p. 428) We have mentioned control and power a few times thus far in this chapter. First, in terms of Butler’s seminal work and the ways in which gender and identity are surreptitiously and silently regulated. Also, in terms of Fraser’s assertion that representation is at the heart of a contemporary idea of justice. Finally, we have the more explicit idea of control that is exerted in many societies over much sexual behaviour and identity. All of these things are, at their core, a form of governing. Our interest is in problematising cer­ tain ways of understanding, representing and enacting sex and sexuality to make judgements about ‘correct’ or ‘preferred’ forms of behaviour and exert public influence and control over private behaviour. Some of these modes of governance have an overtly social justice agenda, some have paternalistic, protective agenda, while others serve as propaganda. It seems the case that while both men and women are ‘told how to behave’, it is very different as to how this plays out in the world. Different standards are brought to bear on men and women when it comes to sexuality.

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Spotlight on practice – 100 Shades of Grey (Ireland) McIvor’s (2017) work in an Irish university setting uses theatrical devising techniques as a mode of community education to work with participants about affirmative sexual consent. She describes the project which resulted in a performance collaboratively devised by undergraduate and postgraduate students with McIvor to critically evaluate heteronormative, highly gendered and oppressive ‘sexual scripts’. These scripts ‘underlie the dynamic of gaining and giving consent between sexual partners’ (p. 137). All this is with a view to challenging assumptions about sexual assault and to support the promotion of affirmative consent education. McIvor’s research points to a range of work taking place in this domain (with a prevalence towards Boal-based approaches) and highlights in particular the potency of the feminist Brechtian techniques used with her ensembles. This is done in the belief that ‘(f)or sexual scripts to change, sexual relations and gender norms must be viewed critically and performed with a difference.’ (ibid.) Toxic masculinity and consent can be recruited as examples here. The existence of toxic masculinity is held as a societal problem handed down through generations of bad male behaviour, rather than the individual responsibility of the men whom are ‘stuck’ in a society that has bred such a problem. The suggestion seems to be that toxic masculinity needs to be addressed by society in order to protect women (primarily), but also to address increasing issues related to men’s poor self-concept and precarious mental health. Which we suggest is right and proper. However, when held up against other examples, this is a complex stance. Cis gender females, for example, often have individual behaviours problematised and are presented with implied or overt suggestions about appropriate sexual or gendered behaviour, responsibilising them entirely for that behaviour and ‘slut-shaming’ them if standards are not upheld. The idea that personal responsibility is entirely personal is questionable.

Conclusion The relationship between drama, sex and sexuality, whilst an intimate and juicy one, to use two obvious puns, cannot always be assumed to be meritorious, emancipatory or inherently celebratory of human sexuality and liberatory in terms of human identity. Social justice, as we understand it in this book, is about genuine representation of all people, however the powerful forces that control governance push back strongly against this. Drama has significant symbolic value, practical potency and playful possibility in dealing with sex (bodies) and sexuality (rights and identity), in performance, as performativity and in pedagogy. It has perhaps unrivalled

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potential to allow individuals to better understand their personal identity and find private solidarity in public performance. With great power comes great responsibility and the playfulness of the dramatic form does not preclude a seriousness of intent. What must be balanced against its potency is the possibility of destabilising and unsettling governance, something that threatens societal power-relations. It can also prove denuding of personal and collective identity and leave participants in a passive state of dependency. It also holds the power to potentially reinforce existing governance structures or replace them with other ones, as neoliberalism so often does. Cahill (2013) suggests that we have to align purpose and design in utilising drama for health and human relationships. Given that drama allows participants to step outside the expectations of their normal roles, garner an insight into the perspectives of others and perhaps even form new opinions of their own, criticality in its application in this way is vital to ensure that one prejudice is not replaced with another. This is a theme which sits clearly in harmony with many of the critical conversations in the chapters of this book. The desire to do good may not always be matched by the resultant outcome. In an area of human concern so important to how society understands equity and control, while at the same time as precarious as sexual practice, sexual safety, sexual identity, gender identity and the avoidance of sexual violence, such clarity is needed.

10 THE HEALTH AND HAPPINESS PROJECT Being ‘well’ in these times

In this chapter, we attempt to explore a variety of perspectives on drama and health, including the role of drama in social and political discourses regarding our obligations and desires to be ‘well’ in these times. We explore drama and wellbeing in these times drawing on the suggestion from Carol Bacchi (2009) that we seek to interrogate, not problems-that-exist, but rather established as particular kinds of ‘problems’ by interventions that seek to ‘fix’ them. As we have seen in the previous chapter, drama is often used in health settings as such an intervention. This chapter is the last in the current section which takes a long and deep look at specific issues pertaining to drama and these times. It and the next chapter on the environment are carefully selected as pressing issues in times to come. They are carefully positioned to pivot your reading from a focus on these times to future times. As with so many themes in this volume, the notions associated with wellness in these times link and weave their way through the ideas presented in multiple chapters. There are strong connections here with our discussion on equity (Chapter 2), neoliberalism (Chapter 3) and sex (Chapter 9), just to name the obvious ones. Health and wellbeing have been highlighted for specific discussion by us for a variety of reasons. First, there is a current research and praxis focus on drama and health around the world. Arts and Health networks (Aus), alliances (NZ), policies (UK) are emerging, bringing multidisciplinary perspectives to the place of drama in helping people be ‘well’ and promoting ‘wellness’. Second, discursive practices related to ‘wellbeing’ and the arts are often connected, explicitly or implicitly, with social justice being perhaps the most prominent theme. Third, health promotion is a common source of funding for drama workers worldwide. In this chapter, we unpack the idea of health as it relates to drama work, seek

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to understand the complexities inherent in being ‘well’ in these times and explore current practice in relation to these ideas. Besides being discursively connected (Spratt, 2017), the concepts of social justice and wellbeing have other things in common: they are both ubiquitous in socio-political thought and practice, are both poorly or often loosely defined and both are linked to multiple, sometimes contrasting, agendas. Fook and Goodwin (2018) note that social justice has been adopted to explain the work of several competing and contradictory institutions. Similarly, Weare (2010) suggests that several interest groups focus on different aspects and outcomes of wellbeing, often invoking different definitions to explain and understand their work. We will not necessarily outline a single definition of wellbeing but propose a clearer understanding of the concept we are discussing in this chapter – how it functions and for whom it functions. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) constitution, which came into effect in 1948, health is a ‘state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’ (Fancourt & Finn, 2019, p. 2). When the WHO definition was established, the shift away from a conceptualisation of health as the absence of illness towards the idea of wellbeing was considered both positive and ground-breaking. However, there has been criticism in the decades since (Spratt, 2017), particularly around the idea of ‘complete’ physical mental and social wellbeing – the critics arguing that this definition presents an unrealistic representation of what can possibly be achieved. While it may seem common sense to say no one is ‘completely’ well in all facets of their life, the WHO definition would then consider us all to be unhealthy, or at least not all in good health. This definition (all criticism aside) clearly positions health as a state, or series of states, of wellbeing. Which begs the next question, of course: how is wellbeing defined? This question has garnered much attention as many governments, non-government agencies, teachers, health professionals and researchers have tried to establish a series of indicators of characteristics of wellbeing. These include how those characteristics can be developed, what impact they have on individuals and communities, and how they can be enabled by institutions and policies. Wellbeing, as a socio-political discourse and as a practical activity, has been considered from both individual and social perspectives. Individualistic approaches tend to focus on an individual’s subjectivity around elements of health, wealth, comfort and virtue (Diener, 2009, p. 3). This approach focuses on what the individual has that allows them to function well and maintain health. Social wellbeing attends more to the idea that community is central to wellbeing and rather than focusing on what an individual has focuses more on how they function in relation to society – including their contribution to and integration in the society. Social perspectives, according to Arcidiacono and Di Martino (2016), were ‘originally aimed at bridging

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the gap between the “private” side with the “public” one of human optimal functioning’ (p. 9). There have been models that attempt to integrate these approaches, such as Seligman’s PERMA model which considers a theory of happiness that includes both individual and social aspects: positive emotion, positive relationships, engagement, meaningful activities and achievements. Similarly, integrated perspectives from the field(s) of economics consider happiness and wellbeing to be an individual pursuit that is heavily influenced by the kind of society that the individual lives in, acknowledging the large role that one’s community plays in the individual pursuit of health and happiness. Though there are different approaches and models of wellbeing, most of them promote an idea that developing wellbeing in society consists of removing obstacles to human thriving. In this way, we argue that wellbeing can be conceptualised as neither solely individual- or community-focused, but rather a collective action and reaction, that affects individuals and, as a result, communities. This idea is unpacked further towards the end of this chapter. In 2015, the New Scientist announced that ‘the world’s wellness obsession has gone too far’ (Spicer & Cederstrom 2015). While it may be reasonable to think that doctors should concern themselves not just with keeping people living, but also ‘sustaining the reasons one wishes to be alive’, the idea of wellness has now arguably become pervasive in society, with communities, families and workplaces increasing their focus on their members’ wellbeing. Research has found, rather ironically, that focussing on happiness and wellness can actually make us less happy and well. Rather than being a choice, a spectrum, or a regular part of living, good health and wellbeing has become ‘an unceasing command people feel they must live up to and it becomes a moral demand’ (ibid). We pause briefly before we move to discussions of drama and health in these times to remind readers of the critical perspective that we bring to bear in all of these conversations. At times throughout this volume, we have drawn on a Foucault-inspired post-structuralist perspective on policy and problem-solving to deepen our understanding of how the theme in question operates in ‘these times’. Unlike common understandings of problem-solving that consider a ‘problem-that-exists’ and discuss solutions to said problem, this perspective does not separate the solution from the proposed problem. Rather, it explores how ‘problems’ are proposed, created and maintained through the explanation and enactment of solutions (Bacchi, 2009). In a 2019 public lecture at the University of Sydney, Carol Bacchi, the key figure in the development of the Foucault-inspired methodology ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’ (WPR), suggested that what we propose to do about something reveals what we think needs to change and hence what we create the ‘problem’ to be. A problem is therefore produced as a certain kind of problem, inside the proposal we make for solving it. This production of problems is not, as the common understanding of problem-solving above

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would suggest, apolitical or amoral. The production of problems by governments, policymakers and societies have political, social and moral implications. A health-related example of this may be interventions to address obesity. If a policy states that its purpose is to ‘tackle obesity’ through activity regimes, then it is producing the problem of obesity as one of sedentary lifestyles. If the intervention is education focused, then the problem is produced as a lack of knowledge, skills or information. Both inventions implicitly responsibilise individuals to take action to improve their health. If, however, an intervention bans the advertising of junk food, then obesity is produced as a problem of advertising practices and responsibilises industry and marketing to improve the health of communities.

Healthy drama in these times There has been an increasing policy and research focus on the role of arts in health in the last decade and we have an increasingly thorough and complex understanding of the benefits, opportunities and challenges associated with this kind of drama work. There have been strong suggestions from those that work in the field of health promotion that dialogic, interactive and participatory programs are more successful in reaching their goals than didactic ones, and drama allows the activities of an intervention or program to be structured in a way that is relevant to the participants (Cahill, 2013; Baxter & Low, 2017). Drama research across various fields of practice has focused on the ability for learning to occur in the relationship between fiction and reality – a ‘kind of rehearsal for real life’ (Heikkinen 2002, cited in Joronen et al., 2008, p. 117), where participants can learn by observing others in action and obtaining immediate and low-risk feedback on their own actions and decisions. In the UK, an All-party parliamentary group was formed in 2014 to explore the potential benefits of the arts for health and wellbeing (APPGAHW). A report published 3 years later used significant evidence to reach the following key messages (APPGAHW, 2017, p. 4): • • •

The arts can help keep us well, aid our recovery and support longer lives better lived. The arts can help meet major challenges facing health and social care: ageing, long- term conditions, loneliness and mental health. The arts can help save money in the health service and social care.

Not long after this, a report published by the WHO (Fancourt & Finn, 2019) reviewed 900 publications relating to arts and health, establishing several findings in two key categories – prevention and promotion, and management and treatment. Drama for prevention and promotion aims to improve the health of individuals and communities by giving people the tools they require to make informed decisions about their health. It can therefore be

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considered, in many ways, as an education activity. Health promotion often focuses on youth and adolescents (Joronen et al., 2008), or others seen as ‘pre-competent’ (Austin et al., 2002) – those that have not yet learned the knowledge or skills needed to make ‘good’, ‘healthy’ decisions, but are considered able to acquire skills through an intervention. According to the WHO scoping report, this work can be categorised according to the following five (often interrelated) subthemes. First, there exists drama to address the social determinants of health and wellbeing. These social determinants are considered the forces and systems that shape and govern our daily lives. This can include how and where we live, access to services, the conditions in which we are born and stages of life. There is a large amount of drama work that is broadly relevant to this theme that focuses on developing social cohesion and reducing inequity, allowing participants to access necessary services and skills to maintain good health. Second, they report drama to support child development, focusing on mother (predominantly) and infant relationships and support, children’s education (such as the numerous programs run in schools aimed at developing children’s health literacy) and developing children’s speech and language. The third category is drama to support and improve caregiving which predominantly focuses on education and skills development for caregivers, as well as emotional and social support. Fourth, drama to prevent ill-health can encompass a range of programs and activities, however, common in the field are programs that use drama to reduce the impact of trauma (such as work with returned veterans or post-natural disasters), drama to reduce the risk of cognitive decline (such as work with dementia patients) and drama to support mental health. Finally, the category of drama to encourage health-promoting behaviours is offered. This often focuses on hard-to-reach or marginalised communities and contains messages regarding healthy living (such as healthy eating or anti-drinking programs), understanding of available services and reducing stigma regarding seeking treatment for illhealth. These programs use drama to encourage a particular group of people (such as ‘sex workers’ or ‘the mentally ill’) to understand their rights to, and ways of accessing services. The other major category in the WHO report concerns drama for the management and treatment of ill health, which, while overlapping in many areas with the previous categories, has a focus on more tangible health and wellbeing benefits from engaging in drama. This category is overtly concerned with supporting people to become well. There is, however, also a body of work under this theme that is about supporting people who might be considered unwell, without necessarily focusing on the need to ‘become better’. This work considers the importance of joy gained from engagement with arts, including self-expression and collaboration. Again, there are five subthemes, with work in this area falling into the following practices. Drama to support people experiencing mental illness provides participants with safe and

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supportive environments to engage with artistic practice. Drama to support people with neurodiversity or neurological disorders includes work focusing on education and practising social skills, providing physical skills and therapy and reducing cognitive decline. Drama to help manage diseases includes the management of non-communicable diseases and information for those with transferrable diseases about safe and healthy practices. Drama to help those with acute conditions has two different purposes – education for those that require skills or information to manage their condition (or the condition of others) or drama to support the wellbeing of those undergoing the trauma of an acute condition, such as drama in hospitals, often focused on bringing joy to patients. Finally, there is drama to support end-of-life care for both those in palliative care and those in bereavement. This typology of practice provides a comprehensive list of practices, purposes and contexts that drama is recruited in these times to understand, explore and manage health. This is achieved, according to Fancourt and Finn (2019), through the components of physical activity, social interaction, imagining, aesthetic engagement, focus on emotion, cognitive stimulation and interaction with health knowledge and health settings. It seeks to enable participants’ psychological, physiological, social and behavioural responses by means of these components, leading to outcomes of prevention, promotion, management and treatment.

Challenges in evaluation and funding of drama and health projects Alongside the discussions of how and why drama can be used for health and wellbeing, there is also a recent focus on cost-benefits and evaluation of impact for such projects. The 2017 UK Parliamentary report outlined the costs and benefits of arts for health programs in terms of reducing the financial burden of ill health. Their estimates regarding the value of such programs include the following assertions: after engaging in participatory arts programs, 79% of people in ‘deprived communities in London’ were healthier in their eating choices; 77% did more physical activity and 82% exhibited better ‘general wellbeing’ (APPGAHW 2017, p. 9). This report suggests that 1 pound spent on early education such as in a participatory arts programs saves 13 pounds of future costs because it improves participants’ social and emotional development, reduces anxiety and depression, prepares students for school and increases cognitive and linguistic skills. This one small part of a 99-page report truly demonstrates the importance and potency of such approaches in helping to ‘fix’ proposed problems associated with health and wellbeing. The WHO report reaches similar conclusions about the importance of the arts in health settings, the benefits to participants, the ‘value’ to the government and the centrality of the arts in our lives.

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Despite these positive messages being reported by government and non-government organisations, the constant search for impact and evidence-based outcomes in work of this nature is a challenge to the work itself. We hold a fear, reinforced from conversations with colleagues around the world that the continual struggle for funding has and will continue to force arts workers and companies to distil messages about their work in order to focus on often decontextualised and sometimes simplistic message of outcome, and essentially how work of this nature can save public money. This has sparked critical concern from some in the field that instead of focusing on spreading the message of the benefits of drama for healthy communities, theatre companies and arts workers are focusing on drama as societally cost-effective ways of making health and social welfare savings. The shift in discourse towards financial benefits is a concern expressed by many in the field and one that contributes to a sense that funding and evaluation documentation is merely ‘bullshit’ (Snyder-Young, 2018), and worse still, stressful bullshit that takes away our capacity to engage more fully in our praxis or do genuine research to find out ways to improve. At a recent research ‘huddle’ on re-storying homelessness through drama (held at The University of Sydney in November 2019 and attended by Kelly), representatives from Milk Crate Theatre Company, a 20-year-old organisation that works with people experiencing homelessness and mental health challenges, lamented that they collected significant amounts of data from participants, but the process of providing feedback to funders is so time-consuming that they do not have time to do anything more helpful with the data that might actually inform their practice in the future. This is a challenge expressed in the literature on evaluations and grant writing in applied theatre, with Balfour (2009b, p. 357) suggesting that drama practitioners are finding themselves ‘half car salesman, half ideologue’.

The complex reality of practice in drama and health Milk Crate Theatre is a good example of a particular kind of drama for wellbeing that is evident, but somewhat peripheral in the reporting above. It is not an explicit health promotion company, such as that in the spotlight on practice below, nor is it necessarily concerned with the development of skills that assist people to live healthy lives, like one might see in much prison theatre or education-focused drama for wellbeing. Rather, Milk Crate Theatre encourages its participants to step away from their identification with homelessness and mental health issues. It is a strength-based approach focused on what the participants bring as makers of art, rather than consumers-in-need of charity or intervention. The Artistic Director claims that this allows people to step away from the deficit label that they are so often associated with, to perform different versions of themselves than is usually required of them

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by government or non-government organisations. Work such as this considers participation in art-making to be an activity that supports wellbeing. Like Scott Rankin, the Artistic Director of Big hArt theatre, they consider a lack of access to art, a medium considered a positive force in individual and communal wellbeing, an act of discrimination. (Wright et al., 2016). This idea has been echoed by others who have suggested that involvement in participatory or community arts programs for health and wellbeing might help to overcome inequity in access to public art (APPGAHW, 2017, p. 10). Access to drama programs and public art more generally, these practitioners argue, provides people with opportunities to be represented in different spaces and in different ways, it reduces loneliness and increases belonging.

Spotlight on practice: Acting Against Worms project (Uganda) The Acting Against Worms project was a joint initiative of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, the Ugandan Ministry of Health, and Theatre science, a theatre company that aims to “engage new audiences with scientific thinking and bring informed scientific debate into theatrical spaces” (theatrescience. org.uk). The project ran from 2009 to 2010 and involved theatre practitioners working with primary school children in rural Uganda to develop drama pieces that contained health messages about schistosomiasis. These pieces were then performed for the wider community at a drama festival. This program of work has an obviously humanitarian mission to work with a community marginalised by poverty, infrastructure and geography, to address a health-related problem that ‘threatens millions of people, particularly the rural poor in the developing world’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 2). The information about the project discussed below is from the 90-page evaluation report (although we focus on the executive summary here) prepared by Fiona Fleming on behalf of all the partners and published on the Theatre science website.

We want to explore this practice through the lens of the program report because it combines the three threads of the earlier discussion: a focus on drama for health and wellbeing, specifically health promotion; critical perspectives on how health ‘problems’ can be understood through proposals of solutions; and issues related to how drama for health is distilled and expressed in evaluation practices and documents. So, we want to use this spotlight to draw out complexities in drama work for health in these times. The introduction of the report clearly outlines ‘the problem’ as poverty and place (rural, developing world). The first line of the introduction asserts that leaders are determined to ‘reduce extreme poverty’ (Fleming, 2011,

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p. 2), thereby from the beginning of the document making this clear link. The problem-that-exists, therefore, is stated explicitly as one of poverty, in this place, causing this health problem. This problem is outlined early and clearly in the document. Beyond this initial statement, a representation of the problem as poverty and place is absent in the document. This theatre intervention does not attempt to ‘solve’ poverty or infrastructure-related issues. Instead, the intervention solves different representations of the problem. There are at least two different proposals regarding the problem of schistosomiasis evident in the way the program is presented: the inadequacy of more conventional forms of health promotions; and the people themselves. In the report, drama is presented as a solution to the explicit problem of schistosomiasis and the more implicit problem of conventional health promotion programs. At times, in the document, standard health messages are explicitly problematised for being ‘too focused on the biomedical explanations of the disease and take the form of telling the reader how to think and behave rather than understanding the local context of the disease’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 3). This representation proposes that the health workers are too insular and ‘scientific’ in their communication with Ugandans. Drama as a solution therefore can be implicitly interpreted as unscientific and unbound by doctrine. This proposal can be understood further by drawing on the ways the discussion of the program explicitly outlines the benefits of drama as a way of providing health messages within and to communities, simultaneously problematising more usual ways of providing such methods. Beyond its ‘unscientific’ nature, drama is positioned as: community and youthoriented, and ‘proven to be a very effective means of communication within communities and in particular the youth in Africa’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 3). It is local and culturally relevant, with the assertion that ‘…dramas use clear information which is in context of local culture’ (ibid.). Finally, it is logistically straightforward, and ‘not impeded by the same logistical limitations’ (ibid.). This presentation of drama as popular, contextual and practical places it as a more appropriate (or even ‘natural’) solution than current standard practice, and therefore informs the proposal that the ‘problem’ of schistosomiasis is the standard health messages. The second ‘solution’ this intervention presents that we’d like to discuss is one that is evident in much of the writing on drama and wellbeing. This document, like many education or skills focussed interventions, poses a solution to the ‘problem’ of schistosomiasis as the need to ‘raise awareness’ of how the problem is prevented, and to ‘effect change in behaviour towards prevention of infection’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 4). This solution represents the problem of schistosomiasis as a problem of human behaviour. Ugandans are not behaving in ways that prevent the illness, most likely because of their lack of awareness or understanding.

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This shift from a focus on the explicitly stated proposal of context as problem (poverty and place), to the presentation of solutions for the proposal that people are problem is rationalised in the document. The introduction to the program begins with discussions of poverty and place, and then states that, ‘…methods available to control schistosomiasis have long been recognised as improved water supplies and sanitation, snail control and preventative chemotherapy’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 2). It goes on to systematically list the solutions unacceptable or already available in this context, such as the, ‘provision of clean water supplies and improved sanitation to the poorest communities is still lacking, and snail control has proved to be difficult’ (p. 3). It also notes that, ‘currently chemotherapy is the mainstay of the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s recommended strategy’ (Fleming, 2011, p. 3). These statements, early in the introduction, acquit the document of the need to justify further as to why the first and explicit problem proposal (context) is not elaborated upon, and makes justifiable the shift from wider context solutions (which are difficult or already practiced), to the individual, people-oriented solutions of awareness and behaviour change. The role of individual responsibility for solutions to social, economic, or infrastructure ‘problems’ is a contradiction that we believe is evident in much work of this nature in drama. We hold that this is due not to the individual focus of drama practice but to the participatory focus. We draw this complexity out in the next section.

Contradictions and complexities There are several contradictions and/or complexities that emerge when we take a critical perspective to drama and health promotion. We’d like to call out and unpack two of these here. The first draws on the earlier discussion to trouble the relationship between individuals and the collective in a practice that is participatory (drama) and personal (wellbeing). The second is concerned about the relationship between care – and other social responsibilities – and a capitalist society that requires carers to maintain the economy but does not consider caring or care work as part of the economy. Taken together, these two contradictions have the potential to make any health and wellbeing through drama work simultaneously necessary and problematic.

Individuals in context There is what philosophers and theorists might consider a natural tension between individuals and society. While Rousseau has claimed that ‘human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society’ (Fukuyama, 2018, p. 30), others argue that happiness can only be understood as relative to society. In much the same way, considerations of wellbeing are complicated by the

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relationship between an individual’s need for, and perspective on, wellbeing, and the needs and perspectives of a community. In our earlier discussion of definitions, we canvassed views that focus on either or both, and suggested that health and wellbeing may be considered a collective action, undertaken by individuals in ways that are either explicitly for or implicitly impacting on communities. We now want to unpack these ideas more, attending to the complexities that make the collective orientation of an activity such as drama such a potent practice in this context. Economist Sen, in his exploration on the economies of happiness, reminds us that although happiness is very important to individuals and societies, the assumption that it is self-evidently good and that we should advance people’s happiness, often implicitly makes ‘the claim that nothing else ultimately matters – liberty, equality, fraternity or whatever’ (Sen, 2009, p. 274). It also ignores the Kantian idea that nothing is unconditionally good except good-will (Fukuyama, 2018, p. 39). There is a call across various fields, led by ideas such as this, for us to develop more collective or context-oriented understandings of wellbeing, health and happiness. That said, happiness and health are, in many respects, individual considerations. That does not necessarily mean that work in this area is only concerned with individual outcomes, but rather that individuals are the ones who need to act in the interests of their own or their community’s ‘health’. Through this lens, it is reasonable that health messaging and promotion responsibilises individual agency. This is particularly the case when drama is used for health and wellbeing outcomes. Individuals directly experience health and wellbeing. Ill health impacts individuals first and foremost, and one can only gain and maintain health through making individual decisions to do so. We argue that one reason drama is such a potent practice in health settings is that it is both actionoriented and participant-centred, allowing a focus on individual actions and decisions. In this vein, the 2017 UK Parliamentary report discussed earlier considers the arts to provide participants with ‘an individual experience that can have positive effects on our physical and mental health and wellbeing” (p. 10). Within the drama literature, much of the rhetoric around this participation focus is positive – pointing to the agency that it gives participants to make decisions and represent their thoughts, lives and decisions (and we are in agreement with much of this work). In health and health promotion, however, there are clear and societally predetermined right (or at least preferred) decisions, actions and representations. In many cases, individuals are responsible for acting in ways that have been deemed right by others, a process which often problematises the participants by deeming them ‘in need’ of such an intervention in the first place. It is in this complex space that there have been critiques of some government policies on wellbeing and happiness. It is argued that such approaches are unable to focus on important aspects of societal wellbeing ‘in particular on people’s freedom

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to determine their own life’ (Arcidiacono & Di Martino, 2016, p. 12). But this critique itself is confusing in its orientation to both social wellbeing and individual freedom. Applied theatre practitioners too have worried that some drama practice ‘bares its neoliberal underpinnings that relegate social responsibility to self-care’ (Ahmed, 2016, p. 165). In many ways, this contradiction is such that the more we unpack it here, the more complex it is revealed to be. Rather than solve, or ‘close down’ this discussion, we aim to leave it open here, with the hopes that it weaves its way into the reading of the volume more generally.

A second contradiction: Fraser’s contradictions of capital and care The discourse of ‘care’ is one prominent way of understanding the overlap wellbeing and government policy and the manner in which wellbeing is operationalised in society. Care as a personality trait is broad in focus and considered good. Care, as a work practice, is more bounded and is often associated with children, although is also associated with the elderly, or the effects of the unwell on those that are well (caring for sick relatives, institutional rehabilitation, etc.). Caring for those who are not well, or those that are not yet able to care for themselves in a healthy, functioning way, is a core concern of health policy and a significant personal and political cost for those involved. Despite this centrality of care and care work to societal and individual wellbeing, Fraser (2016) posits that there is a ‘crisis of care’ that aligns with some emerging crises of health and wellbeing. She claims that capitalist neoliberal society undermines caring, particularly that associated with social reproduction activities – caring (for children, friends and family), maintaining households and sustaining emotional/social connections. Fraser accounts for this crisis by unfolding the contradictions of current society: ‘Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society’ (Fraser, 2016, p. 102). We depend on these activities to survive, thrive and be well. Someone must do housework, provide affective care and so on. However, these activities have no value or place within any powerful economic or socio-cultural structure. We believe that this contradiction plays a central role in how health and wellbeing is considered in these times. Moving beyond it, we would argue that wellbeing and happiness could be viewed as a similar state of crisis and contradiction, and for similar reasons. Capitalism cares about the wellbeing of its workers insomuch as unwell workers are expensive and unproductive. The moral imperative to be well, therefore, links with not only a social expectation, but an economic one too; with few structures in place to validate or encourage wellbeing activities, but interventions for those who fail to meet the moral goal.

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Wellbeing and care, as personal and public actions, have taken a rapid turn during the writing of this book with the COVID-19 pandemic. When Fraser wrote her article in 2016, she concluded by wondering if, ‘we should anticipate another mutation of capitalist society?’ (p. 117). In some places in the world, we can already see this taking place. Workers stood down from their jobs are taking on home-schooling of children during lockdown, some governments appear to be toying with the idea of a shorter working week as schools, tourism and business reopens and many are claiming that there will be no return to ‘normal’ for the foreseeable post-pandemic period. The effects of this global health crisis on a human level is profound. Ireland has lost nearly 1,800 people to the virus at the time of writing, and parts of Australia have returned to strict lockdown in the midst of a second wave of infections. The effects of this on both the economy and our traditional notions of care are unknown, but we are left wondering, as we emerge from lockdown in our respective countries, whether Fraser’s prediction is emerging with us. We have presented at least two competing perspectives and several complexities in this chapter. On one hand, health and wellbeing (being at the core of definitional health according to the WHO) are potentially problematic concepts. They are contested, complex and, at times, contradictory in how they function and who they function on in our societies. On the other hand, there is much evidence to suggest that drama (and the arts more generally) operates productively in this space, with clear promotion, prevention and health maintenance goals. Drama work is seen to do tangible good in this very intangible socio-political space. Ereaut and Whiting (2008, p. 5) suggest that, ‘wellbeing acts like a cultural mirage: it looks like a solid construct, but when we approach it, it fragments and disappears’. A goal of this chapter has been to use our reflections on practice to lay some solid foundations in this fractured space. Not unproblematic, of course; in these times of global flows, any solid foundation will have a complicated relationship with the place it sits and the people it houses, but tangible enough to begin an ongoing conversation about the role of drama in helping people be ‘well’ in these times.

Part III

Preparing for drama of future times

11 CLIMATE CHANGE – A BATTLE FOR OUR HEARTS AND MINDS

This chapter is about environmentalism and drama. We have positioned it here, at the beginning of our final section, because it is a seismic issue of the present but will also be a defining issue of the future. Our perception of the environment draws on our own romantic public or personal understandings of nationhood and of place. It is largely an intimate and personal relationship. Conceptually, it invokes nostalgia, love, anger, confusion and ambivalence, seemingly all at the same time. It is a noisy, dirty, earthy place. Probably now more than ever. It is perceived in space and place, landscapes, oceans and weather. These times have seen the peril of climate change become a public and political issue. It fuels and is fuelled by neoliberal ideas, glocalisation, understandings of collective action and equity. In this chapter, we wonder about environmentalism in the public imagination. How is this to be known? Is it through the science? The evocative nature of place? The local and global politics? Or is it in the story? We suggest that in story we find meaning in difficult times (Kearney, 2002), and want to examine the role of drama in telling this story, promoting the science, defining the politics and respecting the space. Smith and Howe (2015, p. 168) claim that it is ‘(t)hrough symbolic and narrative process, the raw stuff of nature is brought into the cultural world as the carrier of value, myth, affect and aesthetics’. For Spivak (2012), the imperative in dealing with many of the world’s problems (especially globalisation and migration) is to reimagine the planet. Drama can play a role in this reimagining, particularly in how nature is understood culturally, what it means to us as a cultural collective and whether we should care where we stand in (or more aptly, how we stomp on) the earth. As we traverse the field of drama and environmentalism, we focus this chapter on two interconnected aspects of how drama is used to build care

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(appealing to our hearts) and to make us aware (appealing to our minds). The former draws on how the evocative nature of story makes the environment matter to people, and the latter looks to the possibilities of drama in raising awareness of and teaching about the environment.

The environment, climate change and drama Returning to the idea of the personal and the public meeting in how we now understand the environment, it can be best captured in imagery. Hot summer days on the beach on one hand; rising sea levels on the other. Sweeping vistas worthy of our most revered romantic poets meet haunting images on our television screens telling the tale of catastrophic natural disasters. In drama also, the environment and climate can be a character, an event and a problem. The challenge is to find a discursive lens through which we can see the multiple as opposed to the singular. In order to do this, we draw on Heddon and Mackey’s (2012, p. 166) definition of environmentalism, focusing on the ‘range of contextual and often deeply contested signs that it mobilises, including climate change, adaptation and mitigation, debates and strategies, human relationships to and encounters with “nature” and so on’. This complex and multifaceted way of seeing environmentalism allows us to explore issues associated with the environment through what they are understood to be (science), how they are positioned (in art, politics and media) and how they are personalised (through relationships and experiences). We feel that, while complex, this allows a more holistic discussion of drama practice regarding the environment in these times and is in keeping with the general approach throughout this book. That said, there is a focus on climate change in the chapter. While acknowledging that a whole chapter could be dedicated to the discussion of other aspects of the environment, this chapter is written during the apocalyptic Australian bushfire season of 2019–20, suspected by experts to be intimately tied to environmental degradation. In these times of children’s climate strikes, warnings from scientists of irreversible tipping points, and fierce public debate, we feel any discussion of the relationship between drama and the environment in these times would be incomplete without serious attention to climate change. We discovered as we began reading for this chapter that there is not as much literature as we expected in the intersection between drama and climate change, with more energy existing in the theatre and performance studies spaces than applied drama. However, a seminal body of work from Baz Kershaw (2000; 2009; 2012) as well as timely contributions from Shaughnessy (2012), Hughes and Nicholson (2016) and an excellent special edition published by RiDE in 2012 shape our understanding of this

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issue. More recent work from Wang (2017) and Woynarski et al. (2020) offers contemporary perspectives. Responding to the claim that drama was ignoring this issue, Heddon and Mackey (2012, p. 187) argue that it is not theatre practice that is ignoring climate change, but theatre research: ‘Given the claim that climate change is a new cultural politics, the lack of research that engages directly with the relationship between theatre and environmentalism is far more striking than a lack of activity itself’. This is an important point and one of the ways in which we argue that environmentalism can shape drama. Connell (2019, p. 26) states that ‘movements for change need knowledge, concepts, explanations, strategic ideas and accurate information’. Everett (2015), however, claims that to change behaviour we need more than an increase in knowledge, we also need to increase our capacity and will to care. Exploring work in this area, and following from these ideas, we would argue that climate change in drama is not only concerned with representing information, but also the story of emotional and psychological challenges and dilemmas. It is a battle for our heads and hearts. The pages that follow, therefore, attempt to make sense of the ideas and practices connected to drama and climate change both as art that makes us care, and art that makes us aware. Advocates of teaching through drama would claim that this is precisely what makes drama an ideal tool for this work; that it has an ability to connect the emotional and cognitive. Rooted in imaginative and embodied practice, it instinctively responds to Sardar’s (2010) call for new ways of imagining in post-normal times. O’Neill (1995, p. 152) suggests that ‘(i)f we cannot imagine things differently, we will not be able to bring about any alteration in our circumstances’. It is this future orientation that we argue makes drama an important weapon in times of climate crisis. Drama as a pedagogy allows for the embodied experimentation of different ideas; drama as performance can present alternative futures to encourage new perspectives on how to engage with the world and the consequences of our actions. We will attend to these ideas throughout, drawing on three different examples of practice to draw out a deeper understanding of the potential (and the potential challenges) of drama.

The role of drama and art in climate change Those who make drama, and art more broadly, are taking their share of responsibility for messaging climate change knowledge in order to build awareness in audience and communities. This is a complex activity. Jones (2014, p. 4) argues that on one hand the gap between scientific and lay people’s opinions and their actions is caused by a gap in knowledge – the scientific community has access to specialised knowledge that the public does

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not and ‘transferring that information to the public makes a difference’. However, others query the role of ‘top down’ banking-style processes of educating through ‘drama as message’ style of plays and performances. While drama may be a good way to build awareness, particularly among illiterate people (Ahmed, 2016, p. 158), it can be a message imparted, rather than a dialogue shared. This is a deficit perspective on messaging – the assumption that the audience is lacking knowledge or ethics and therefore providing clarity and information will bring these people ‘into line’ and ‘on message’. Hulme believes that this is a ‘deeply unhelpful’ way of bringing climate change into the public discussion: ‘The metaphor of circularity, plurality, multiplicity, multi-vocality, is a much more engaging one’ (Hulme, 2011, cited in Heddon & Mackey, 2012, p. 173). While there is drama work happening across the globe that engages in this banking-style messaging, drama is also contributing to this more ‘engaging’ model of encouraging awareness. By allowing people to take the role of ‘emancipated spectator’ (Ranciére, 2009), drama allows for active translations of message that are relevant to context and meaningful for spectators and participants.

The public and private performance of environmentalism Kelly initially began drafting this chapter just days after the 2019 Climate Strike which saw 4 million young people and their allies around the world take to the streets. To us, it seemed this day marked a global attitudinal change and offered a public performance that suggested that everyone cares about climate change. The issue, of course, is that the care is equally vehement on both sides. At the Sydney strike Kelly and her 7-year-old daughter joined 80,000 people who were angry at their government for its inaction on climate change. In the days following the strikes, that government and community of sceptics demonstrated passionate anger in return towards those on strike who they accused of having denied their children the ‘right to be kids’ and ‘induced anxiety’ in the younger generation. In this battle for our hearts, both sides care deeply about the kids, it would seem. Dickenson expressed a similar sentiment decades before this when his group decided to do a community play on climate change in Dartmoor because ‘everyone in the area seemed to be concerned about climate change or angry with people who were’ (in Schaefer, 2012, p. 252). Despite these two opposing (but caring) narratives played out in our press, everything we read in preparation for this chapter indicated that most people believe that climate change exists. Beyond the science, environmentalism seems to be developing as a genre (and identity) in our public and private lives, a narrative by which people tell a story about where and how they live (what they eat, who they vote for, etc.) and therefore who they are: ‘Environmental change is not something apart from our lives. We are in it, and … it is in us too’ (Heddon & Mackey, 2012, p. 181).

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Yet even this idea is contested. Others argue that although it might have become part of our presentations of self, it has not become part of how we understand ourselves as a species: ‘We know about it, but we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays?’ (McKibben, 2005). Others consider a more nuanced relationship considering the extent to which individuals and communities have perfected the ability to live comfortably with uncomfortable information (Tickell, 2010, p. 3). So while there is a ‘social drama’ of climate change that is played out in our public and private discourses. However, the strong but differing perspectives within the same ‘public’ inhibit the adoption of any one collective story.

The role of storying in our caring and aware-ing about the environment We noted in the opening page of this chapter that drama plays a role in ‘re-storying the environment’ (Heddon & Mackey, 2012). For an issue such as environmental destruction which is ‘simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge’ (Norgaard, 2011, p. xix), drama can build stories that connect with people to incite personal, political and collective action. Hulme (2009, p. 329) suggests that we need to ‘approach climate changes as an imaginative idea’ and that this approach could serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs. There is a widely held view (Kearney, 2002) that narrative is at the centre of how humans make sense of the world and their place in it. Climate change, as a story or imaginative ‘entity’, has several forms. For some, it is a ‘malleable idea as much as a physical phenomenon, a story’ (Heddon & Mackey, 2012, p. 168). Others suggest that it is a ‘new cultural politics’ – not just unfinished but ‘unfinishable’ (Smith, 2011, in Heddon & Mackey 2012, p. 168). Smith and Howe (2015) have explored the idea that climate change is a social drama or grand narrative. Drawing on a cultural sociology perspective, they make three points about climate change and story. First, they note that, ‘circulating narratives in the public sphere concerning real-world activity often display the same Aristotelian properties as the staged fictional dramas he decoded’ (p. 51). ‘The public’ (and, we argue, people) have crises and events represented to them as well-made narratives, with clear storylines, moments of tension and resolutions. As a result of this, how things are represented in the narrative has consequences for public opinion and legitimacy. And finally, ‘genre plays a crucial role in risk perception in times of uncertainty’ (Smith & Howe, 2015, p. 51). It is used to flesh out facts, fill in the space between known actions and figures and inform the public perception of what is at stake. On their own, the facts of climate change do not do this. Rather, it is the story of what the facts mean (to me, to you, to children,

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to the story of migration, to the Great Barrier Reef where I want to take my children one day… you get the idea). We add to this two additional points to contribute to our discussion of how our understandings of climate change are influenced by storytelling: first, it includes the concept of ‘master narratives’ (such as tipping points which guarantee total meltdown of our icecaps) that challenge and change the story (Kershaw, 2012, p. 268). Second, in the story of climate change, there are goodies and baddies: politicians who hide information, forest users ‘driven by greed’ (Ahmed, 2016, p. 157), grass-roots warriors seeking change. Jones (2014) indicates that audiences for climate change messages are persuaded by the presentation of heroes, but not necessarily by villains. Villains are complex and breed defensiveness from many of those we require to act. It is through the presentation of the hero that the convincing happens.

Spotlight on practice – Kill Climate Deniers (Australia) The play Kill Climate Deniers has lots of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. The play by David Finnigan is about a fictional act of eco-terrorism. During a Fleetwood Mac concert taking place at Australia’s Parliament House, terrorists take 1,700 people hostage and threaten to kill them unless Australia becomes 100% reliant on renewable energy. The Minister for the Environment is amongst the hostages and takes up arms against the eco-terrorists, pausing to take photos of herself with the deceased to post on social media, in order to make comment about how serious she is about protecting Australia from terrorism. The development of the script was originally funded by the New South Wales Arts Council in 2014 but it took many more years, and much controversy, before it was performed on stage. Right wing commentators, incensed by the title of the play, pushed to ensure the play was not produced. Eventually it was staged by Garage Theatre in the US in 2017 and, after winning the Griffin Theatre Award, was finally produced in Australia by Griffin Theatre in 2018. In order to get the play into the public realm prior to these productions, it had been released as a written playtext but also as an album (a radio-style play with music) which people were encouraged to listed to on headphones as they toured Parliament House, making it a site-specific participatory performance.

David Finnigan (2018, p. 3), who is the son of a climate scientist and founder of a company, Boho, that produces performances and games that teach science concepts, claimed that he has spent years of his life trying to formulate change by ‘bending over backwards to avoid politicising the science’. Kill Climate Deniers is not that work. Rather than aiming to make change, he

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claims this work is ‘years of anger and despair…everything I wanted to say but bit my tongue about, year after year, until I sat down and blurted it out in one hit’ (Finnigan, 2018, p. 1). This play makes a complex contribution to our discussions around story for care-ing and aware-ing. It brings anger, rather than concern; its message is socio-political, rather than scientific. Finnigan comments that media debate concerning climate science had become ‘calcified’ and intentionally boring so the public would look away. He is quoted in a newspaper article unapologetic about the problematic portrayal of violence and anger: It would probably require a pitched gunfight between the environment minister and a terrorist on the Parliament House flagpole at dawn to make me pay attention again. So I wrote Kill Climate Deniers. Stupid, over-the-top, flashy, ridiculous, fun. And angry, because I am angry. (Hennessy, 2016) There are often critical discussions to be had in spaces where drama is recruited for social action – usually regarding the tendency of such work to ‘preach to the converted’. It is unlikely that any ‘climate deniers’ attended the show and, if so, even more unlikely that the anger swayed them to the author’s point of view. Finnigan’s focus on anger, however, does place drama of this nature in a murkier position within this discussion and position it as that of outlandish provocation and sensationalist entertainment. His point is that all of us, even those converted to the cause, are complicit in our boredom of the issue. We are intellectually converted (the head), but not emotionally converted (the heart). We are still too ‘politely angry’. Johns-Putra (2016) suggests that climate change in drama is usually a plot device – set up either through a catastrophic event, or the dystopian aftermath of such an event. In some ways, Kill Climate Deniers aligns with this, and certainly climate change was the driver of the action. In other ways, however, the focus was less on the event of climate change than the psychological, political, cultural and practical implications of such an event for the population. Climate change drove characters to act in ways that laid bare the often virtuous and problematic socio-political messaging about the environment; it is a play about the impact of climate change, real and political. The agentive intent of this work is not clearly articulated. However, if, as Kershaw (2012, p. 272) has suggested, the definition of performative is of ‘an utterance that effects an action’, then there appears an implication that the role of drama should be to do something rather than just say something, ‘as if the mere act of saying so could stop global warming’ (Kershaw, 2012, p. 272). The intent and impact of this work may be less obvious and more dependent on personal interpretations, but arguably no less agentive, evocative and impactful than Brecht’s parody plays.

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Spotlight on practice: Don’t Take Our Voices Away (Portland, Oregon, USA) Don’t Take Our Voices Away is a role-play activity developed by two Social Studies teachers (Julie Treick O’Neil and Tim Swinehart) in Portland. It grew out of an Earth in Crisis Curriculum workgroup and was originally published by Rethinking Schools magazine. The resource materials we’ve used to write this spotlight were published on Zinn Education Project site (https://www. zinnedproject.org/). The resources were inspired by the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on climate change, held in Alaska in 2009. The role-play follows a structure similar to Heathcote’s ‘mantle of the expert’ strategy whereby students are enrolled as stakeholders (in this case as one of six Indigenous groups ‘with intimate ties to the land, validated and honoured as legitimate observers to climate change’ (O’Neill & Swinehart, 2010, p. 2). The students are led through several days of research and in-role activities and at the end of the fictional summit need to agree on a series of priorities and actions. The explicit goals of the role play were to get students to recognise the urgency of climate change, to understand how it is affecting indigenous communities around the world, to develop empathy and to build not just a consensus among themselves as a class of US teenagers but an understanding of how consensus is built across cultures and perspectives in order to achieve action.

Drama as a tool to build empathy and understanding through work such as that above, can potentially allow non-Indigenous students to engage with the perspectives of cultures that have different relationships to the same land and environment. Each Indigenous nation has their own placebased knowledges, their own stories of land and environment and their own performative traditions to express them (Lane, 2011). Spivak (2012, p. 341) contends that ‘the more ecological practice of living, where the opposition between the human and the natural is made indeterminate, is, of course, the Aboriginal’. However, despite the strong connection to environment in most Indigenous cultures around the world, and the dispossession and rupture of relationship that most have suffered as a result of colonialisation, there is not a large body of research work exploring the intersection between drama, the environment and Indigenous knowledge or perspectives. Some notable exceptions in drama on a variety of topics relating to Indigenous life include Cox (2011), Linds et al, (2013) and Woynarski et al. (2020). Those that do work in the area claim that drama, the environment and Indigenous knowledges could be brought together in ‘mutually supportive and creativity-fostering ways’ to provide education regarding the environment, and communicate the diverse perspective and knowledges of these living cultures to cross-cultural audiences (Casey, 2011). A resource such as Don’t Take Our voices Away has obvious potential to foster some of these

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connections and encourage students to be embodied witnesses to the practices, rights and knowledges of these cultures (Casey, 2011). However, there are also concerns about the appropriation and misuse of Indigenous knowledges and the need for the voices of Indigenous people to be present in these learning events – through consultation, invitation and mutual respect. Some would argue that within a cross-cultural context, the performance of Indigenous knowledges is a political act. Combined with a focus on environmentalism, it can be seen to communicate the impact of ‘legislative and commercial interventions into their lands and lives’ (Casey, 2011, p. 54). The taking of role to embody, as well as research or understand, allows participating to become familiar with another way of knowing – finding a way to connect with their perspectives and experiences – so that we might understand, care, act and change. To some degree at least, drama can encourage all to act as if they are the traditional guardians of the land upon which they live, in a protective rather than an exploitative sense.

Community and collective responsibility Collectivity, consensus and community are core themes that consistently emerged for us as we read about climate change, the environment and drama. Bottoms and Laffin (2012, p. 230) claim that there is an ‘urgency’ in our need to highlight human similarity as ‘the things that we all share becomes particularly pronounced when considering environmental questions’. We will all lose something important. We will all experience this. We must all make change. We are all collectively responsible. Environmentalism is centrally concerned with collective responsibility and action. That makes sense, as the action required must be fuelled by a care for future generations, rather than for ourselves, and a responsibility to the humans and non-humans who will bear the brunt of current environmental policy. The extent to which we should make sacrifices as individuals, communities and nations is contentious territory. The two spotlights here – Kill Climate Deniers and Don’t Take Our Voices Away - provide different, in some ways opposing, perspectives on this key theme of collective responsibility. Kill Climate Deniers made the point that those who are not with us are against us. The Director of the performance notes that ‘if we do not actively fight against climate deniers we are passively accepting and thus supporting their politics’ (Lewis, 2018, p. 2). It seems to echo Hannah Arendt’s exhortation that while ‘law can indeed stabilise and legalise change once it has occurred […] the change itself is always result of extra-legal action’ (cited in Walsh, 2019, p. 229). This message is made quite literally in the play when the Minister for the Environment takes up arms against the climate activists. It’s a clearly and bluntly made point. Don’t Take Our Voices Away is focussed on the role of the collective and the building of consensus as a form of activism. Coming together to make shared decisions and develop a commitment to each other – building individual and collective responsibility to that commitment. As a form

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of educational participatory drama, Don’t Take Our Voices Away is also a collective art-making process. The building of a classroom community, a fictional summit community and a focus on a global community, can be understood as actions negotiated by people who share co-existence and the ‘co-implication to create something’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. 86). There are instances in the literature on drama and climate change that draw on the theme of community in ways that are adjacent to, or indeed quite separate from, notions of consensus and collective responsibility. Schaefer (2012) reports on two plays about climate change developed by Manaton and East Dartmoor Theatre Company. The goals of the work were not only to understand how a theatre company might tackle climate change (as an issue and for a social purpose), but also to explore how the public tackling of such a challenging social issue might ‘force a critical re-think of ‘community’ and its cultural practices (p. 261). Rather than trying to seek resolution or consensus, the work sought a response from audience, the shared experience of viewing art and a challenge to traditional understandings of ‘this’ community or place. There is always a critical perspective to be taken when we discuss community and collectivity. First, boundaries of communities are both inclusive and exclusive, so attention should be paid in reading them as to who is part of the ‘collective’ and what perspectives are represented. For example, what about non-humans and biotic rights (the rights of nature, and human’s responsibility within this)? Second, in the globalised political space, with climate change causing unprecedented levels of forced migration, how can a notion of collective responsibility maintain a connection to equity, access and fairness? When considering the fact that the earth’s biosphere ‘is being driven completely mad’ (Kershaw, 2012, p. 266), how do we recognise that no one is exempt from the madness and how do we ‘spread responsibility for trying to cure the madness fairly?’ (ibid). Ahmed (2016) describes theatre for climate change in Bangladesh with the development a Pot Gan production (a traditional theatre style that incorporates music, drama and images). The performance communicated the belief that wealthy countries are working against economically developing countries, that they are taking with greed and that they are the cause of many of the environmental ills. However, the same production communicates the message that it is in the interests of those in economically developing countries to act on climate change as they are most at risk (p. 161). The message is that these actions are important because they will save you. It responsibilises people to act on everyone’s behalf – serving a neoliberal call for personal responsibility. So a critical perspective on ‘us’ as a collective should acknowledge that the poor are bearing the brunt of destructive consequences of climate change despite not being the main cause. Climate justice needs to encompass concern for the rights of the environment, the non-human inhabitants and humans living in various precarious and privileged situations across the globe. Another core theme evident in literature on climate change and drama that can be drawn out of these two examples of practice is activism.

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O’Shaughnessy and Kennedy (2010) discuss activism as either ‘conventional’ – clearly defined, public activities such as protesting and lobbying; or ‘relational’ – which looks at more long-term, private activities such as creating networks and relationships that shift cultural or social practices. The drama work discussed here, we argue, weaves its way through both forms. Climate Summits are a defined and conventional form of social action and activism. Likewise, while controversial, the title and content of Kill Climate Deniers incited public debate in a way that positioned the work as an overt protest against the current Government’s response to climate action. Both however can be considered as forms of relational activism, which celebrates what can be established and achieved as a collective, rather than with a focus on individual agency. Both were experienced, either by participants or audience members, through the ‘contract’ of theatre; accepting the fiction, allowing the work to claim imaginative space. They were also experienced, as all drama is, as events, at one time, in one place, by this group of people. Allen and Jones (2012) have lamented that relational activism is often overlooked in favour of more conventional forms. In drama, however, we feel that engagement in relational activism is always present, though perhaps less overt: the prosocial ensemble work of drama classrooms and community theatre halls, for example; or classrooms even more generally. The role of education, flawed as our systems may be, fits clearly in this space. The authors of Don’t Take Our Voices Away began their process with an acknowledgment that learning is the first step to understanding how we can, should and do act. Education, then, can be considered as an act of relational activism.

Embodied environmentalism in drama Spotlight on Practice – Tilting at Windmills (Wales, UK) Tilting at Windmills was a performative walking event and accompanying film installation that took place in August 2010. Jess Allen, a UK dance artist and scholar, undertook an 8-day journey across mid-Wales, through 10 wind farms. The performance grew from an interest in the way in which wind farms interacted with the landscape, and the debates that grew out of such an interaction. The journey was conducted on foot and public transport and is described by Allen at one point as ‘political enquiry through art made by moving across space’ (Allen & Penrhyn-Jones, 2012, p. 213). During the walk much time was spent alone, but there was deliberate connection with those that Allen met on the way, and an engagement in discussions regarding landscape and climate. At the conclusion of the performance, footage from the walk and the voices of those she met on the way, were used in a documentary-style film installation developed by Sara Penrhyn-Jones, a UK film and media scholar, in collaboration with Allen.

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This was a different kind of perspective/practice in environmentalism and performance – what the authors consider ‘activism by stealth’ constructed around a peripatetic arts practice (Allen & Penrhyn-Jones, 2012, p. 215). The purpose, rather than ‘care-ing’ or ‘aware-ing’ audiences, was to stimulate debate about our own lifestyles and our behavioural commitment to the physical environment around us, while at the same time implicitly making a statement about our reliance on fossil fuels through the act of walking. In this way, it became a demonstration of the performers’ care and awareness, potentially with the hope that audience and participants might join in, but not as a prerequisite or necessarily a measurement of the success of the performance. We argue that in some ways this is a response to McKibben’s provocation outlined earlier that we have not accepted climate change into the narrative of who we are as a species. Unlike much of the drama we explored for this chapter, this piece did not have climate change as a special ‘character’ with a clear intention for education or message. Climate change isn’t additional to this story, it is just part of the landscape. It exists as we all do, in a multifaceted and complex physical and emotional relationship with people, props and land. There are strong connections to our chapter on place in this example of praxis. Allen reflects that she felt the physical and embodied nature of the performance set up a ‘three-way conversation’ between herself as performer, respondents to her performance (people she met on the way) and the location in which they encountered each other. The location was as much of a character in this piece than the main human protagonist. It was at once character, plot and set: the embodied and embedded experience of being ‘with nature’, the landscapes they were talking about and the place in which they were talking (Allen & Penrhyn-Jones, 2012, p. 217). Ideology and myth also take hold. Allen found that those who had a serious objection to the wind turbines tended to perceive the environment as a visual backdrop – to be looked at rather than lived in (Hall, 2009, p. 576). The ideology of home and the myth of this place; what it was, what it is, and what it’s for (Robertson, 1995) can be drawn on to consider how participants in this work link the realities of this local place with global realties of climate change, money and energy production.

Conclusions This chapter has focussed upon a few select aspects of environmentalism and climate change and how they interact with drama. From the role of art, to public and private performances of the environment, to aware-ing and careing drama about the environment, finishing up with community and collectivity and embodied environmentalism. As with so many of our chapters, this range of entry points do not claim to be a comprehensive mapping of issues, but instead hopefully offers the reader a myriad of reflections and refractions.

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There are many aspects that we’ve been unable to cover and which emerged from the literature. To list a few: •

•

•

Our discussion of Indigenous perspectives and knowledges in relation to land and environment is fleeting. This is a large and complex area for study, with critical connection to discussions on identity, post-colonialism and migration and socio-cultural and political connections to Indigenous performative practices, politics and place. The notion of the sublime and the romantic celebration of environment is another key way in which that the environment connects with drama. Moving the drama from the romantic to the pragmatic is a challenge in these times. The connection between local culture and sustainable development, and the ways theatre is used to foster ‘folk cultural forms and methods to sensitise grassroots people’ (Ahmed, 2016, p. 152), is fascinating to us. On the one hand, theatre for development work exploring climate change can foster grassroot actions and build the capacity in communities to cope with the impact of climate change through getting people to consider sustainable action as a part of everyday life. As we briefly touched on earlier in this chapter, this work seems to carry a neoliberal responsibilisation of the poor change to save themselves because the wealthy are not willing to change.

We realise this is opening up, rather than closing down, the conversation very late in the chapter. In an attempt to distil at least one idea from the proceeding pages we draw on the possibilities of drama to be imaginative. The narrative of climate change is built and maintained through various outlets, from media to policy, to dinner party conversations. The role of the arts in building these narratives is vast. In this space, art has the benefit of being (less) restricted by the governing forces of marketability that media outlets and other forms of cultural information-sharing (Allen & Penrhyn-Jones, 2012). It can invoke our imaginations, represent multiple perspectives and make us feel; it becomes part of our cultural story, as well as our scientific story. In this way, art can play a unique role in making the story of climate change in these times. We also remind readers of Balfour’s (2009b) suggestion that we consider a theatre of little changes echoed beautifully by Heddon and Mackey (2012, p. 181): ‘If the grand narratives of environmental change – particularly those of apocalypse and tipping points – induce denial or paralysis, what might an encounter with the small make possible?’. The accumulation of small achievements, of relational activism that might come together to reshape the everyday actions of people and communities, should not be overlooked. Finally, does one end a chapter on drama and climate change with hope or despair? For despite all the art, the talk, the care and the awareness, we

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do not seem to have found a way to cure our global insanity (Kershaw, 2012). In capitalist societies that reject the durable and revere the disposable, we can be reminded that art reconnects us with our precarious, emerging and provisional selves: Art, belonging to the realm of the fiction, returns reality to its precariousness ‘to the unstable mixture of real, imaginary, and symbolic that it contains. (Bourriaud, 2009, p. 100) Freire (2007) expressed the world as a challenge, not yet finished. This provides us with, not just reasons, but opportunities to imagine different futures (Heddon & Mackey, 2012, p. 180).

12 DIGITAL+ DESTINIES

The adage, ‘may you live in interesting times’, has perhaps never been more apt than as we begin to bring this book to a close. The saying is reputedly a translation of an ancient Chinese curse, the irony of which takes a moment to dawn. This chapter is commenced in Autumn, 2019. Michael finds himself at the edge of a lake in rural Ireland, many kilometres from the nearest village, in a little cottage, undertaking a writing retreat in order to meet deadlines and escape the busyness of modern life. Devices are on silent; email is returning an ‘out-of-office’ message to all correspondents; social media is being ignored and a digital detox is in full flight. The digital remains central, however. An hour has been spent this morning struggling to get the Endnote bibliographic software to ‘sync’ but soothed by some beautiful music streamed via Spotify, which will be muted presently in order to have a video chat on Skype with Kelly in Sydney, followed later by delivering a seminar to a classroom of postgraduates in Nashville, Tennessee on Zoom. That was then: those comments seem almost nostalgic now (August, 2020) in the light of the experiences of the past 6 months as the world has been ravaged by COVID-19 and many of us has been ‘locked down’ in our homes as a result. The ambivalence and fear held by so many for the digital (remember the digital ‘natives’ v digital ‘immigrants’ debate?) have been replaced by a reality where in both Ireland and Australia seeing your general practitioner (GP) is now done by video-call and the only mode of socialising for many is catching up with friends on a Zoom trivia quiz. The place of the digital in many of our lives seems to have undergone seismic change in a matter of months. Even our physical activity (weekly dance classes and gym workout) is mediated by the digital as we have all learned to live indoors. The Global North world is currently utterly reliant on digital modes of communication to survive and function in education, healthcare, community development

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and the arts. Without smart phones, tablets and laptops, the last 6 months would have been unimaginable for many. With this seismic change, another layer of privilege has been become central to how people access everything from work, to education, to health, to companionship: the ‘digital divide’. On top of all the other layers of advantage and disadvantage evident in these times, the ability to access devices and internet of sufficient quality (or at all for many) to enable access to the online domain is a significant division in the world. As university academics, we see this amongst our students. The educational benefits to those who have the technology and bandwidth to enjoy live (synchronous) classes and untrammelled digital resource access far outweigh those for whom getting online is a daily struggle or completely impossible. This chapter maps the rapidly changing terrain of drama and what we are calling digital+, which refers to the broad ways in which the digital sphere impacts upon our ways of experiencing life. Our term, digital+, acknowledge that the influence of the digital is not only as a communication tool, but has ramifications for community building and implications for how we understand identity; self and other. The relationship of the digital to these three ideas (communication, community and identity) and their impact on how we understand the form and purpose of drama will form the spine of this chapter and offer some consideration of how drama might be a force for some good in a digital world. This is not a chapter about technology. It’s a chapter about locating drama within a space that has been profoundly impacted upon by the digital ramifications of technology. As Appadurai (1996) eloquently demonstrates, this is not something which has happened in splendid isolation; it is one of a number of global flows which now define the places in which we live and work. We also aim to avoid two things: looking backwards with nostalgia or looking upon the advent of the technoscape as a deficit, as is a popular tendency to so do. Nothing is ‘going back to the way it was’, and, for all the challenge, opportunity and demonisation, a screenoriented generation is just what they are – human people – no better, no worse than any other generation. Given that this chapter is neither a defence nor refutation of the digital+, it is designed to mean different things to those who read it. It seeks to recognise the scale of the change and the impact of that change upon how we understand drama as an artful force for good in the world.

Technoscapes This increasingly complex space; at a personal, national and global level is part of the complex network of ‘global flows’ described by Appadurai and discussed in various other places in this book. To recap, Appadurai’s (1996) work suggests that the complexity of the current global economy

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has to do with a series of disjunctures between economy, culture and politics, which can be explored through five dimensions of ‘global cultural flows’, namely: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and technoscapes. Technoscapes are defined as the, ‘global configuration … of technology and the fact that technology, both high and low, both mechanical and informational, now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’ (p. 34). Appadurai argues that the global distribution of technologies that characterises the nature of the technoscapes is not as one might expect, driven by ‘economies of scale, of political control, or of market rationality’ (ibid.), but instead by money flows, political possibilities and the availability of un- and highly skilled labour. It cannot be understood independently – each of these flows and the relationship between them is disjunctive and unpredictable as each is subject to its own constraints and incentives, as well as acting upon each other as ‘a constraint and a parameter for movements’ (ibid.). To contextualise this argument within the frame of this book, let us look for a moment to a ‘headline’ theatre initiative that might be regarded as emblematic of the technoscape flow in drama. One can read the immense success of the NT Live initiative (productions streamed globally from the National Theatre, London - http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/) in many ways as a clear illustration of how technology is employed to further human (artistic) endeavour, and to add a new intermedial dimension to the staging of theatrical performance. One must, however, look also to the sophisticated modes of filming which don’t interfere with the theatricality of the performance, and the availability of High Definition (HD) technology and diversification of modes of distribution (the mediascape); the demands of a new audience as a result of the rapid change in the make-up of British society many of whom would not have come from cultural traditions of formal theatre attendance (the ethnoscape); the new revenue-streams generated through fees generated from attendances at cinemas around the world (the financescape); and finally the ‘social turn’ evident in the leadership of the NT but also the arts in the UK which demands greater accessibility to artistic work for a wider range of audiences (the ideoscape). Whilst there is plenty of public rhetoric casting the digital as an abusive villain that leads to anti-social behaviour, it’s just as tempting to define the digital as unproblematically altruistic. It is not sufficient to suggest that it is always about innovation and extending participation, and ‘values associated with the global, plural and inclusive … greater artistic freedom, increased audience involvement and access, further engaged civic communities’ (Blake, 2014, p. 7). What we take from Appadurai’s work for this discussion is therefore threefold. Technology is one of five flows that may be used to better understand the complexity of the modern world, but only within a deeply interdependent

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socio/ecological context whereby each of the flows acts as a constraint upon each other, and most relevantly, within a context of peak global capitalism.

Social acceleration It is a truism that we live in an increasingly fast-paced world and much of this acceleration can be considered intimately tied to technology. Even those who do not have easy access to technology have their lives impacted by the movement and acceleration of technology. It has changed who we are, how we relate to others and how we see and engage with the world. As a result, those without access struggle to relate, see and engage with the world in ways that are increasingly normalised and expected. The digital divide we referred to in the introduction of this chapter does not simply relate to access to the raw materials of technology (wifi, equipment and so on), but also access the digitised ways of learning, communicating, thinking and engaging in the world. But how to explain and contextualise what this might mean for us? What is a digital age and a digitised society? Social acceleration is a theory of modernity which offers an analysis of the temporal structure of modern society with a view to critically engaging with ‘the pathologies of the contemporary social world’ (Vostal, 2014, p. 235). Hartmut Rosa (2013) presents the idea that changes in the temporal structures of modern society change our relationships with each other and with ourselves, and the world within which we live. He suggests that acceleration is a keyword of our times, and a dominant force which has the potential to generate negative consequences; it is both a quantitative and qualitative phenomenon: Acceleration society is a society that is characterized by the simultaneous ability to cover processes faster in relation to time and the parallel qualitative rise of commodities, information, exchanges to be consumed, processed, and communicated. This apparent paradox serves a strong explanatory purpose: that, on the one hand, time scarcity purports more speed and therefore drives the need for ever-faster time saving technological invention, on the other, the tension between rates of growth and rates of acceleration essentially explains why we tend to perceive the world as ever-faster. (Vostal, 2014, p. 242) There are three building blocks within Rosa’s theoretical frame: technologicaltechnical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the acceleration of the pace of life. Technological-technical acceleration speaks to the development of practical means of acceleration, a progress begun at the industrial revolution and which now results in the digitised world in which

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we find ourselves. Rosa argues that the acceleration of transportation, of communication and of production has the profound impact of altering (but not determining) the connection between time and space, social and material relationships (Rosa, 2013, pp. 104–105). This reconfiguration of social relations (the ‘space–time regime’) has infinite possibilities in generating ethical and political dilemmas, but ‘the acceleration of social change is a direct (and in the end, unavoidable) consequence of technical acceleration’ (p. 154). Quite simply, the world is moving faster as a result of the machinery that surrounds us. The consequences of social acceleration range from the impact on globalisation to practical manifestations such as ‘the speeding-up of individual actions, the elimination of breaks, the temporal overlapping of activities (multitasking) and the replacement of temporally costly with time-saving activities’ (Rosa, 2013, pp. 128–129). Clearly, each of these have some impact upon dramatic activity, to which the temporal, within or without the fictional frame, is utterly central. Raymond William’s famous essay Drama in a dramatised society (1975) defined the beginnings of a sociological turn and established an unarguable link between society and the drama of that society. Our society is now in a period of acceleration. Much like the impact of fast food on eating habits and health, fast drama is worth considering as to how it pleases beyond the allure of mass marketing campaigns and moment of delicious initial engagement. Returning to Rosa, his work offers some insight into where and how drama continues to have relevance in the world. The theory acknowledges that ‘not everything accelerates in modern society … (m)ovement and inertia are dialectically intertwined in the process of modernization’ (Vostal, 2014, p. 241). The implication of such a dialectical relationship is that some processes and social situations remain at a constant speed or decelerate. Sometimes this deceleration is deliberate, such as the current trend of mindfulness activities, or the digital detox described in the opening paragraph to this chapter. In much the same way that the ‘slow food’ movement has been a direct response to the acceleration of the advent of ‘fast food’, it may well be the case that the ‘uni-tasking’ demanded of participation in drama (in whatever guise) may be a response to the at times overwhelming multitasking demanded of us by participation in the world today. Vostal notes that such intentional deceleration can be both ideological (e.g., the ‘slow food’ movement) or as a strategy for managing acceleration (e.g., ‘time-outs’ or ‘re-charging’). His analysis of Rosa’s ideas goes further in suggesting that the dialectic space between movement and inertia (acceleration–deceleration) may be a useful space in critiquing the way in which the world works: Contemporary capitalist modernity can, in fact, be seen in terms of a relationship between the dynamic process of technological innovation (ever intensifying and extensifying production and consumption as

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well as ever tighter proliferation of communication technologies into the individual lifeworld), the static principles of flexible accumulation and the rather deepening class antagonism: these features of acceleration societies seems to remain more-or-less unchanged. (Vostal, 2014, p. 241) Therefore, we should avoid the tendency to think of acceleration, particularly technical acceleration, as a simple speeding up. That aspect is certainly present, with all the ramifications that it holds. But as individuals interested in telling the stories of society, as all those involved in drama seek to do, social acceleration offers a useful dialectical space for pause and critique. The accelerated rate at which we now live our lives also results in a problematic relationship with truth. As evidenced by daily global politics, falsities are propounded (even by traditional bastions of truth such as politicians) at a rate at which they are hard to dispel. The problems created by a time of ‘false news’ or a ‘post-truth’ era as suggested by McIntyre (2018) are characteristic of the ‘post-normal’ times we are in, resulting in additional layers of contradiction, and where it is increasingly more and more difficult to discern which is fiction and what is real. How ironic that the Internet, which allows for immediate access to reliable information by anyone who bothers to look for it, has for some become nothing but an echo chamber. And how dangerous. (McIntyre, 2018, p. 95) The relevance of this for drama is not immediately obvious but incredibly prescient. In fact, the very conceptual basis for drama is entirely disturbed. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, Hugh Laurie has suggested that for drama or theatre to work, there traditionally needs to be an agreement on what truth is (Simpson, 2019). Storytelling requires a consensus of some sorts in order to allow for the suspension of disbelief, a willingness to abide by a range of playful conventions whereby the normal societal rules of behaviour are suspended for a particular period of time. By its very definition, the suspension of disbelief requires a belief. There needs to be an established set of truths which allow for a space within which fiction can take place. The profundity of the fake news phenomenon, whereby everything is arguable or disprovable, renders this impossible. How can you have fiction, when the truth is more fictional than the fiction itself?

Changing paradigms and changing language The fundamental case being made in this chapter is that drama work now exists in a space that is inherently digital, regardless of whether the form of the drama is in itself digitised in any way. This can be seen particularly

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in the interplay between the concepts of performance and performativity and the way in which the digital+ changes the nature of how we perform in classrooms and on stages but also how we perform in the world. The digital+ moves drama beyond traditional modes of teaching, rehearsal and performance. The move is neither temporary nor for a fixed period of time as the temptation may be to see it. It moves us into a new paradigm of altered ideas about how we understand performance and towards performative understandings of society. This shift requires that our conceptual engagement with drama and the digital sits not as a fixed point of entry but as a dialogic continuum. For that very reason, language is vitally important. In order to understand the digital in performance and the performative in a digitised world, we need to differentiate between the oft-times contested discourses around drama and the digital in what is an increasingly crowded space. We do not aim to get into the territory of definitions and distinctions in this chapter, but rather briefly trace the evolution of the space and canvas other significant scholarly voices who have ploughed this furrow already. Blake (2014) and Lonergan (2016) are two relevant starting points, offering overviews on theatre and the digital and social media, respectively, with Dixon (2015) charting a more complete historiographical view. Auslander (2008) and Causey (2007) contribute significant discussions examining issues of liveness and the digital culture in performance. Crossley’s (2019) recent volume is a significant contribution to the discussion of intermediality. There is a useful applied drama and theatre discourse around digital engagement. Nearly 20 years ago, the pioneer drama educator, the late John Carroll, identified the then fundamental challenge for those working in applied drama: (S)tudent participants are increasingly negotiating their own dramatic and discursive positioning within the discourses enacted in the films and digital media forms surrounding them. Further than this, their positions are mediated through and produced by their interaction with the technology. (Carroll, 2002, p. 131) That discussion was furthered in later work (Carroll, Anderson & Cameron, 2006; Anderson, Carroll & Cameron, 2009), and has been continued by Anderson and Cameron (Anderson, 2007; Anderson & Cameron, 2013; Anderson, Cameron & Sutton, 2015). The latest volume in that series (Cameron, Anderson & Wotzko, 2017) deals explicitly with digital art cultures. Susan Davis has also contributed a range of pedagogical innovations in drama and the digital (Davis, 2011; 2012; 2016). All of these writings grapple with language as well as concepts. The varying interpretations around the key terms: digital; mediatised; intermedial;

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multimodal; liveness; the information age; digital literacy; digital citizenship; digital natives; and digital immigrants are many and sometimes subtle in variation. Each of these distinctions is vital, and to some degree they can be read chronologically in reaching an understanding of the evolution of the relationship between drama and the digital. For the purposes of our exploration, we are content to allow these expert works guide the reader to a satisfactory definition. One significant macro differentiation is that between the discourses of multimodality and intermediality, and as defined by Chatzichristodoulou and Crossley (2016). Ontologically, they differentiate between live performance in a mediatised culture (multimodal), and intermedial theatre, which they regard as a marriage of the two, ‘being simultaneously live performances and their mediatised, semi-automated, mechanical counterparts’ (p. 285). They further identify dual conceptual challenges posed by intermedial performance: the non-liveness of the performance, and the sometimes-conflicted ontological status and disciplinary framework of the endeavour. That is to say, whether it remains drama or not! Increasingly, drama in the digital space is moving from the former into the latter, and onwards into a space yet to be identified and in a distinctly performative but not always performed or performance-focused. For example, in applied theatre, intermedial performativity might look to the manner in which migrant groups engage with digital technology or mapping as a means of seeking sanctuary. Clarity and confidence in this discursive domain are vital; particularly given the burgeoning nature of the digital domain, with the added confusion that many of us who navigate it are ‘digital immigrants’. The language used here to describe this work is simply digital+. The inscription of the plus sign simply represents a space of possible future happenings, which are not possible, but definite. Given the digital+ world that we argue drama inhabits in these times, the traditional neo-Marxist perspective and explicit call for change embodied by much of the pro-social drama discussed across these pages seem distinctly old-fashioned and almost redundant in some respects. And yet, as we discuss, the shape-shifting nature of drama allows this not to be the case. The remainder of the chapter will examine what drama looks like within a socially accelerated, post-truth, technoscape society, but also how in each instance drama is the very thing that offers possibilities in mediating and potentially altering this digitised landscape. It remains our argument that the digital+ and drama present two dialectics in stark relief: they are the space between threat and opportunity and that between presence and absence. The following four discussions embody these dialectics and identify both conceptual issues that arise but also identifies in praxis where they are actually being played out.

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Digital+ drama communities Spotlight on practice – digital storytelling The work of Megan Alrutz typifies the possibilities of new connections around community, drama and the digital+. She employs digital media forms to engage youth to create digital stories – ‘short, personally narrated movies and digital performance collages about and relevant to their lives’ (Alrutz, 2015, p. 1). Her use of digital storytelling as an applied theatre practice seeks to engage spaces of possibility, and she suggests that ‘(w)eaving digital storytelling and applied theatre together responds to many of the criticisms waged against digital media’ (p. 12), as well as the obvious need for theatre practice to embrace and embed technology to ensure continued relevance: Digital storytelling as an applied theatre practice relies on the intentional integration of live performance-making with digital representations. The processes and product include real-time, embodied theatre and interactive performance elements, as well as digitally mediated representations such as photography, stop-animation, recorded voiceovers, and video. The approach is critically engaged, in that it brings attention to issues of power, identity, and inequity. (Alrutz, 2015, p. 13)

Digital+ times undoubtedly change our traditional understanding of communities. We have a tendency to mourn this change, and to look upon what has been lost as opposed to what is now possible. Our collective attitude is best characterised as half ambivalence, half hostility. Alrutz’s work, however, runs toward the change, rather than away from it. She asserts the potency of the digital+ space in building knowledge about self, others and society; she witnesses young people realising that their stories matter (p. 71), and then invites dialogue and deliberation with audiences, through disrupting the ‘normative status of the audience, as well as everyday interactions between youth participants, and the audience’ (p. 106) in ways that are otherwise unachievable. For Alrutz, this is only possible within a deeply critical frame of practice and one that foregrounds agency and human relationships. Neelands (2009a; 2009b) has made a case for togetherness in drama as a powerful quality promoted through ensemble work. The general instinct is to envisage those as ensembles as bodies sharing a space together, who perform their work both to each other and to live audiences. Increasingly, the potency of digital+ possibilities allows for the creation of different ensembles, of different communities, of different ways of being

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together. Work such as that of Altruz showcases the possibilities for connection in a digital+ time. It prompts us towards a third space where new ensembles can arise, share stories with each other and with others, and in doing so, act powerfully in the world.

Digital+ drama communication Spotlight on practice – Prospero C&T (https://www.candt.org/) is an applied theatre company which works primarily though harnessing the possibilities of drama and technology. Having started life as a Theatre-in-Education company (Collar and TIE), the company has evolved into a group of practitioners who use technology and theatre to enable creativity. Their most recent offering is Prospero, which is an online platform that ‘uses the latest digital tech to harness the potential of drama pedagogy to let you create and share inspiring learning resources for any purpose, audience or context’ (C&T, 2020). Prospero (https://prospero. digital) is a digital+ toolkit that utilises sequenced interactive activities and resources to mediate and explore a theme. These sequences can potentially include any kind of material but typically they consist of video, images, text, questioning prompts and choices for the participants to make. The platform allows for the integration of mobile devices and the delegation to tasks to individuals or groups within a classroom context, which can in turn be uploaded by the participants. Prospero also can incorporate AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), haptic and motion sensing technologies to allow for the highest levels of interactivity and to engage learners. Essentially, it is a customisable piece of pedagogic software that allows for unprecedented modes of participation in dramatic activity in a single room or across multiple sites. Artistic Director of C&T, Paul Sutton, suggests that Prospero ‘curates the web into interactive fictions, populated with characters, conflicts and challenges designed to provoke “players” into taking part in these digitally enabled dramas by creating and sharing their own live theatre’ (Sutton, 2018, p. 38).

One obvious implication of the digital+ is that many, particularly youth, encounter significant aspects of the world chiefly through screens. This has implications for communication, and for our understandings of both pedagogy and change – key themes in this work. The digital+ space can also embody a dialectic of safety versus danger and hold a distinct sense of threat. For many, the majority of the digital+ spaces that are habitually discussed are spaces of threat (e.g., the ‘dark web’) as opposed to spaces of possibility. Projects such as Prospero, combining myriad powerful combinations and possibilities of the digital+ and drama, embody a strong position of both safety and effectiveness

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on that dialectic, offering as it does a curated and positive journey into the digital+ domain, taking the best of the dramatic into the virtual. For pedagogy, the implications are similarly hopeful. Sutton suggests that there are three imperatives linking pedagogy and creativity in Prospero. He notes that it is an open and democratic space for participation, as drama is; that it is a kinaesthetic mode of learning; and that it provides a scale and reach to applied theatre work that enables a level of efficacy necessitated by the internationalised and globalised world that we live in (pp. 38–39). It is also a platform where prerequisites do not matter, and ‘a space in which participants, almost entirely regardless of context, affluence or cultural opportunity can collaborate, learn and create with peers around the world’ (p. 39). Rather than the digital+ being the ‘death’ of drama as a medium for learning, there is persuasive case to be made that it offers possibilities for a pedagogical renewal and renaissance in a space within has always struggled for capital within the educational system.

Digital+ drama identities Spotlight on practice – researching identity through digital+ drama Kathleen Gallagher has consistently championed digital methods in researching drama and identity. Her body of work over the last decade has explored the experiences of young people and what matters to them. Most recently, this is in a large-scale study of drama classrooms and studios across four continents with a multisite ethnography using a range of qualitative methods (Gallagher, 2014; Gallagher, Rodricks & Jacobson, 2020). Gallagher and her team used a range of digital research and communication methods to facilitate the work and subsequently reflect upon aspects of their innovative research practice: Gallagher and Kim (2008); Gallagher and Freeman (2011); Gallagher, Wessels and Ntelioglou (2013).

A range of issues worthy of discussion emerge from Gallagher’s body of research, particularly regarding identity. First is the possibility of a loss of liveness in digital+ work, with the result that something of the human condition, essential to drama, is lost. Gallagher and Freeman offer an insightful refutation, suggesting instead gains in insight and understanding: Liveness is important in our research first because liveness is an integral property of dramatic performance (as opposed to recorded, reproducible forms of performance), and second because the related

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social performances that are of equal interest to us operate subtly, and often amidst fleeting moments of interpersonal negotiation in the live experience of our fieldwork. When we began to incorporate technology into our research, it was with the thought that it might help us preserve, or at least restore to our memory, our live experiences in the field. As the research progressed, it actually had the greater effect of attuning us more closely to the nature of knowledge production and sharing embedded in our research methodology. (Gallagher & Freeman, 2011, p. 359) Whilst obviously discussing their research practice, the very same digital+ qualities that enable greater potency in that regard also bring greater reflectivity to bear within the drama frame. They enable us to see better. They also enable us to communicate better, as illustrated throughout Gallagher’s work which would not have been possible without the digital+ and the dramatic coalescing. In a description of work with schools in Taipei (Taiwan), Lucknow (India) and Toronto (Canada), the place of Adobe Connect, a wiki, blog and video-recordings of work are discussed in rich detail, complete with successes and failures. Their conclusion is unequivocal that the digital methods utilised are, ‘very compatible with drama methods, as sources of data, as pedagogical tools, and as opportunities for collaborative data collection and analysis’ (Gallagher, Wessels & Ntelioglou, 2013, p. 179). Indeed, the digital+ accelerated the space of possibility: In the Lucknow example, the Aashwaasan students were inspired by a school theatre project that originated in Toronto, was shared with them, and from which they created their own performance. Both groups created performances exploring the metaphor of ‘doors’, what doors mean in their lives, doors as thresholds, doors that open, doors that close. The students in India explored this metaphor in the context of the real life story of Ananti after her father refused to continue to send her to school and attempted to force her into an arranged marriage … The digital technologies they were using seemed to alter the usual power relations of their community and school lives … offering us as researchers, and the school, the potential to profoundly rethink the relationship between young people, school, and society. (Gallagher, Wessels & Ntelioglou, 2013, pp. 190–191) One of the oft-cited criticisms of digital+ times centres on the role of social media, particularly in the lives of young people, who are of course a special focus of the sorts of drama work represented in this book. The discussion of identity, and how we understand others and ourselves features prominently elsewhere in this volume, most notably in the chapter on migration. The point is made there that drama tends to level significant claims in terms of

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its efficacy in this area, given its unique ability in facilitating participants to pretend to be other than themselves. This takes on another dimension of complexity when layered with the digital, where identity is largely disembodied and the image and avatar reigns supreme. The digital+ certainly changes how we present ourselves and conceive of others; it allows for curation of how others ‘know’ us and engage with us. But it can also close the gaps in seeking to understand self and others. It is tempting to think of the digital+ as a divisive space; where people are set apart and a noveau Cartesian dualism for the 21st century is reinforced. The excesses of digital overload, the horrors of trolling and catfishing and the vastness of the digital divide, as we have witnessed in recent months, seem to lend credence to this. And yet, what is evident from the work of Gallagher is that when combined with drama, the digital+ offers a space for meeting and shared humanity. More powerfully, it can offer participants a space for their own personal intellectual and emotional reunification of self with self; brought about when a mediated digital+ experience prompts deep listening and potentially deep empathy with the other.

Digital+ artistry Spotlight on practice – Coney Coney is a London-based collective of interactive theatre-makers who ‘make plays with ideas that resonate in the world around us’ and ‘create games, adventures and play where people can choose to take a meaningful part’ (coneyhq.org). At the cutting edge of immersive and participative theatre and technology, Coney makes numerous projects which engage with communities and issues that concern them. An example of the contemporary and responsive nature of their work is their current project – The Delegation, ‘an interactive performance that invites you to reflect on how our societies – while geographically disparate – find ourselves together in this time of crisis, experiencing the withering of post-pandemic capitalism’ https://coneyhq.org/2020/07/06/the-delegation/. Audience members engage with the performance via Zoom and asked to play roles as diplomats, dealers or culture-brokers as delegations come together from the United Kingdom and Russia.

Drama and theatre now exist irrevocably within intermedial and multimodal spaces, able to recruit live-ness, technology and digitised audiences to make dramatic meaning. This is visible in the availability of stage performances on screen (especially during the COVID-19 pandemic) and in the digitisation of scenography in the physical theatre. It takes a little more

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probing to discern the digital+ presence in more applied forms, but the example of Coney’s work points to the ongoing convergence of ‘mainstream’ theatre, applied theatre and the digital+. In more traditional educational and applied spaces, it can be seen in the existence of mobile devices in workshops or the use of streaming platforms playing music or video footage. A generalising tendency of traditionalists is to denote some of this as the death of drama; however, the firm contention throughout this chapter is that it instead presents hope for a long future for the artform. The theatre is always ‘dying’ in any event (Mamet, 2010) and performance conventions change habitually in response to the times they are in: A convention, in the simplest sense, is only a method, a technical piece of machinery, which facilitates the performance … because of the nature of convention, because of the dependence of any dramatic method upon this particular type of agreement, it is not possible, in any age, to go very far from the segment which is that age’s living tradition, or to begin from anywhere but within or on its borders. Thus we have the necessity of tradition-convention as tacit consent – and at times the equal necessity of experiment, from the development of new modes of feeling, and from the perception of new or rediscovered technical means – convention as dramatic method. (Williams, 1968) We live in digital+ times. They change much of how we see the world and certainly the manner in which we mediate the world. To follow Williams’ exhortation, this means that we must experiment with the development of new conventions, which more clearly link the drama we do with this age’s living tradition. So therefore, on every level, the digital+ space is a space of possibility, not one of loss. Our ultimate desire is to create effect and cause affect in our drama. That necessitates using the most appropriate tools (conventions) available to us in order to facilitate the performance. Barry Houlihan (2019) asks how does contemporary theatre function when it no longer entirely ‘human’? It’s a valid question. In answer to it, he suggests that, ‘(a)s the framework of truth and believed conceptions of what we know to be reality are dismantled on stage before us, it becomes apparent that the import of this work will be to keep challenging what exactly is live in theatre and how we as audiences assemble to listen and to witness it’. The digital+ demands some serious consideration not only as to how we communicate, gather collectively and understand both ourselves and others, but also the very nature and shape of dramatic endeavour. This can be considered an existential threat, but also an unparalleled opportunity.

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Conclusion The digital+ revolution within the context of the technoscape has changed and will continue to change everything at an accelerated rate. Everything. Even drama. This is new terrain and as a community of believers in the possibilities of drama, we have not fully got to grips with this, even in the midst of unprecedented forced progress as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a tendency to look to the normal (analogue) qualities of drama rather than its digital possibilities: Drama is able to provide a positive idea of the place of the individual in post-structuralist thought by providing drama conventions that negotiate constantly shifting identities. Within classroom drama, the student can be seen as a subject-in-process, capable of agency, role differentiation and integration within a range of environments both digital and dramatically enacted. (Carroll, 2002, p. 138) We have sought in the chapter to exemplify some of the best practices that engage with drama and the digital+ and which broker the future. Many more will emerge into the space of possibility where community, liveness, identity and the very form and purpose of drama is malleable. In such a space, it seems more fitting to end our exploration with a range of speculative questions rather than definitive statements regarding the future place of drama in a digital+ world. • • • • •

Is drama now a sanctuary of stillness and a place for ‘de-roleing’ in order to avoid the stresses and anxieties of multimodal life? If the cost of liveness not being as central to dramatic conventions is of a diminished empathy, is the benefit of greater connectiveness that of greater sympathy for the other in the world? Can drama play a part in deceleration and uni-tasking in the face of social acceleration? Is the power of drama as an educative force in its possibilities for connectivism (Siemens, 2004) rather than traditional philosophies of learning such as constructivism? Can drama be an oasis of truth and discovery for participants in a posttruth world?

The answers lie in virtual reality, yet to be discovered.

13 IMAGINING AND ACTING IN THE EXTENDED PRESENT FOR UNTHOUGHT FUTURES

This chapter ponders how we might locate the possibilities of drama as a critical resource in an increasingly uncertain future. This is particularly pressing considering, as we established in the previous chapter, in these times things are changing at an accelerated pace (Rosa, 2013) and in a variety of ways (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016). Throughout this volume, we have drawn on Appadurai’s (1996) work to understand how these times are characterised by increasingly rapid (and chaotic) global flows that see a series of ‘scapes’ intersect to cause complex relationships between people, places, events and institutions. The implications not only for now but for the future are obvious when one considers that the surge in the movement of people (ethnoscapes) across the world at once connects and disconnects with individual, national and global ideologies (ideoscapes), and this can be seen in a range of ideological debates related to refugees, low-wage ‘foreign’ workers, the ethics of luxury travel and new debates around sustainability and tourism. The connections and disconnections between ethno- and ideoscapes are in turn represented and understood through the movement of information and images (mediascapes) and have implications for financescapes and technoscapes that (mis)manage the flow of money, resources, communication and invention. These flows and changes are not isolated, but interconnected, not incremental, but simultaneous (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016). This is not just related to one issue (such as the movement of people) but all issues, happening at once, changing and impacting each other. Taken together, these global flows represent an unprecedented intersectionality. COVID-19 is a virus that was spread by the movement of people around the world. It then resulted in the lockdown of countries in such a way that saw nationality, politics and ideology converge (who ‘belongs’ here?; who counts as a citizen of this nation?). Ideological debates emerged regarding the ethics

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of wearing a mask, stockpiling toilet paper and access to social services. Who has money, employment and security changed drastically as typically secure industries such as travel, retail, airlines and higher education institutions are threatened with bankruptcy. The extent to which the intersectionality of these scapes collectively represent unknown futures has been laid bare by a pandemic. The rapid shift in the ethnoscape as a result of the cancellation of all international travel in 2020 has had significant ramifications on the financescape for a range of reasons. Whilst globalisation and capitalism may remain fundamental tenets of the ideoscape, and the technoscape has adapted to a large degree, the interdependency of the world on these shifting scapes is apparent. Throughout all of this, the natural world has benefited by our stillness. Images of the earth ‘healing itself’ have emerged alongside startling statistics regarding a drop in pollution due to grounded planes and closed factories. In this, like so many other instances, people, information, ideology, technology and money flow and intersect in ways that show there is little that happens in an isolated or linear way in world events. In this chapter, we seek to understand these times beyond the fictional ‘norm’, the speculative ‘what if?’ or any kind of sci-fi-esque vision of futurism. We explore the discourses of post-normality and the field of futures studies to seek to understand the current and potential role of drama in understanding our current times, and possible future times. Of necessity, this is a speculative discussion that links with other key themes in this volume. The cornerstones of this chapter are the conceptual discourses of post-normality, agency and imagination. We use these ideas to consider the landscape within which humanity finds itself in the early part of the 21st century.

The post-normal present, the problematic future Within the landscapes of globalisation, at a time when neoliberalism and individualisation are impacting the ways people interact with institutions, institutions with nations, and nations with each other, Sardar’s theory of post-normality can be understood as a description of these times, a sociological perspective on the present (and future), and framework for considering our actions on and in these times, that is beginning to garner attention across the humanities and sciences. The concept of the post-normal originates in Sardar’s (2010) provocative description of a world where the ‘old normality’, rather than being considered imaginary, is actually considered the cause of our ills (Gary, 2011). It is a description of the world in which things are uncertain and unpredictable, and our extended present and potential future are characterised by complexity, chaos and contradictions. According to Sardar, our times are: … an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Ours is

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a transitional age, a time without the confidence that we can return to any past we have known and with no confidence in any path to a desirable, attainable or sustainable future (Sardar, 2010, p. 435) Post-normality is weird (Sardar’s description, not ours) (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016). It is not necessarily the binary of normal, in that normal times and post-normal times can exist side by side. Indeed, for those born into post-normal contexts, they could be considered normal. Similarly, not all communities, institutions, systems and fields are affected by chaos, complexity or contradiction (the 3 Cs) in the same way or to the same extent. Some fields/systems (Sardar uses the examples of privacy and science) are already post-normal, others are yet untouched by the 3 Cs and others again exist in what Rao (2012) terms a manufactured normalcy – a normalcy that is influenced by the powerful institutions through global mediascapes, ideoscapes and financescapes that manufacture our reactions to and perceptions of, the present and future. To make things slightly weirder, according to Sardar and Sweeney, the present is not really the present but an extended present (encompassing now and the near future). The future, when most often discussed, is actually either the extended present or the familiar future (say within 20 years). There is also a third ‘tomorrow’ – the unthought future. And this is ‘not unthinkable but rather a horizon where something always remains unthought, which is to say that it is populated with seemingly infinite alternative futures’ (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016, p. 6). We have few mechanisms for predicting or understanding this space. Additionally, what is considered to be fairly knowable about the extended present and familiar future is fairly troubling for many – increasing inequality, climate crisis, increasing radicalisation of youth to the service of hate, rising house prices, rising sea levels and Hollywood’s seemingly never-ending commitment to remake Spider-Man – the familiar future does not seem a happy place for those looking for a hopeful foundation. So, the question becomes; in a world where work and life are precarious even for the most elite, where we are told that the jobs we educate young people for no longer exist, how do we best conceptualise the type of lives that we live? There is not just disagreement in how we answer this question, but different perspectives on what the question might be. On one hand, our concern with contemplation and the existential seems to have disappeared; all our activity is now essentially concerned with doing things in the future, rather than considering a future. On the other hand, current obligations of citizenship have been reduced to an individual concern with a blind disregard for participating in activities in the present that ensure a safe, democratic future. Are we too actively building our future or not actively enough? Both perspectives worry about individualistic, consumer-driven lifestyles. It seems the one view of the present is agreed on by many is that we are all

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racing on the social, political, cultural and economic treadmills, going at speed to places we cannot imagine and being incredibly busy and (for some in Global North nations) increasingly wealthy while we do so.

Drama and the future To understand the consequences of this, and the potential role of drama within it, we turn to the scholarship of futures studies. Futures studies is a diverse and evolving field. As the name suggests, it seeks to identify and theorise possible future societal happenings and dispositions – what is likely to continue as currently exists and what is likely to change. While focusing on theorising the future, the practice of future studies is experiential, embodied and performative, drawing many connections with drama practice. Candy (2010, p. iv) describes the landscape and the challenges facing the field: The great existential challenges facing the human species can be traced, in part, to the fact that we have underdeveloped discursive practices for thinking possible worlds ‘out loud’, performatively and materially, in the register of experience. There are links to be drawn here between futures studies and our understanding of human agency as a socio-material phenomenon. Agency is oriented towards the past, present and future simultaneously: As actors respond to changing environments, they must continually reconstruct their view of the past in an attempt to understand the causal conditioning of their emergent present, while using this understanding to control and shape their responses to the arising future. (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, pp. 968–969) Participation in drama has been described by Neelands (2010) as a process that has the potential to imagine possible futures through reflection on the past and present. Following Candy’s concerns, we can see a potential for drama as an embodied, performed experience to contribute to the ‘thinking of possible worlds’ to explore potential futures, with embedded understanding of the present, and consideration of the past. We draw out the discussions in this chapter exploring a series of examples of ‘drama’ work that fall under an umbrella of Futures Design, predominantly using the work of Stuart Candy and various colleagues. We use quotation marks here not to be ‘scare quotes’ but because, while many aspects of the work are recognisable as drama, the authors do not draw on drama terminology, practice or theory in their descriptions and analysis of the work. They do, however, draw on ideas of embodiment, enactment, creativity and imagination in similar ways to drama practitioners. This versatility

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of interpretation is in keeping with the way in which we have conceived of drama throughout the book.

Spotlight on Practice: the Time Machine project (and other futures design work) – Toronto, Canada ‘Why just talk about the future when you could visit it instead?’ is Candy’s opening line of an article explaining the Time Machine project (Candy, 2014, p. 34). Immersive scenario-based experiences (which might be considered similar to participatory dramatic inquiry in drama education literature), the Time Machine project had small groups of people working together to create an experience for others. The project used creative processes to bridge the gap between the abstract and concrete. ‘Artists and designers can build bridges of imagination between these registers to take people into alternative futures – or at the very least, to visit there and bring amazing things back’ (Candy, 2013, p. 28). The Time Machine is an experiential encounter designed to tell a story about the future, a ‘choreography of creative thinking calculated to bring deeper awareness of possible futures systematically into conversation with current artistic practices’ (Candy, 2013, p. 28). It draws on the framework of rigorous imagining – thinking that engages imagination to push boundaries, and rigor to ensure what is imagined is intelligible (Miller, 2007, p. 348). The workshop-style project has been conducted multiple times a year since 2012 in a variety of places. The workshop itself ranges in time from a few hours to longer, depending on the performance and context. The workshops consist of teams working with a scenario (what drama education colleagues might call a pre-text), which is a ‘brief textual story about the future’ and a timeline 10–50 years out to generate an immersive performative experience for an audience to ‘visit the future’. For a more detailed overview of the workshop plan, see Candy (2013). Examples of the immersive performances (Candy refers to them as scenarios) that emerged from the project include: ••

••

Exploring synthetic biology: participants are led into a facility where ‘doctors’ are testing a drug to remedy social-media addition. This involves an implant, oral medication and monitoring of your impulses to share newsworthy items via social-media. Participants are led through the rigorous ethics and consent process and given information about the trial. The love museum: undertaken in Singapore, participants attended an exhibition at the Singapore Discovery Centre about the obsolete institution of marriage, representing a ‘history’ of how Singapore moved from the notion of marriage to the separate roles of Sexter and Soulmate. People

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••

in role as the exhibition ‘staff’ answer questions and conduct tours. The exhibition included newspaper reports, video new reports, posters and ‘fragments of a vanished past: take, for instance, the condom, a personal device formerly needed to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Or the rose, which was once used by couples as a gift to symbolise their affection’ (Candy, 2014, p. 35). Media and content crimes: participants are led into a courtroom and participate in a trial of a woman charged with distributing unapproved content and ‘peddling such subversive staples of ‘liberal’ ideology as same sex relationships and universal health care’ (Candy, 2014, p. 36).

Beyond the obvious performed nature of the work outlined above, there are several other links to drama praxis. In common with much drama education literature, writings about the Time Machine discuss it as a powerful methodology as it gives the participants ‘educational leverage; they are not fed, but taught to feed themselves’ (Candy, 2014, p. 36). Candy also highlights the importance of the ‘story-world’, drawing on the idea of ‘diegetic integrity’; ‘diegetic’ being beyond simply the narrative of a story, it is rather the internal components of the world within which the narrative belongs. Drama practitioners are familiar with the concept – anyone that has asked a participant to consider the back-story of their character – how many siblings does she have? Where was he born? How do they walk when wearing their favourite shoes? The Time Machine project emphasised diegetic integrity; scenarios with no large gaps in logic, so that participants could imagine and seek to understand the future in a more coherent and concrete way (Candy, 2014). Writers such as Martha Nussbaum (2010) remind us the importance of the humanities not only in explaining something of the world, not only in creating moments of love and beauty, but of promoting and creating communities, and indeed democracies. We can extend this to consider the importance of the humanities in understanding our potential futures and impacting our actions in the present accordingly. Drama, as a method and field of practice within the arts and humanities, can be understood to provide opportunities for the development of collective imagination and engagement, social agency and intrapersonal intelligence (Anderson, 2014, Neelands, 2010b). Sloan (2018) considers the relationship between drama and these post-normal, post-truth times, by looking at affective arts-making processes as spaces of potentiality: … potentiality as a non-conscious moment of potential which may or may not become conscious in the act of ‘performance’ or inter-relation in a creative process. It is a point of indeterminacy, as participants engage in making choices inspired by their creative

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imagination. I, therefore, consider indeterminacy to be the relative freedom of an in-between state of notyetness when devising theatre. (Sloan, 2018, p. 586) This suggests the arts are not only a form of personal artistic freedom, but also a societal space of freedom for participants to re-imagine themselves in relation to the world around them; or indeed, re-imagine the world around in relation to themselves. The conclusion of Sardar’s 2010 paper calls out imagination as a powerful tool [‘indeed I would suggest the only tool’ (p. 444)] to enable movement from simple reasoning to higher synthesis in the way we understand the future, the present, and the effects of our behaviour within these. To manage a post-normal extended present, familiar future or unthought future, we must move away from linearity and attend to the interconnections and opportunities present in chaos, complexity and contradiction: ‘all stories we tell about the future(s) ought to emphasise their dynamic and mind bogglingly diverse nature, chaotic potential, contradictory possibilities and invoke imagination and creativity’ (Sardar & Sweeney, 2016, p. 3). Anderson (2014) draws on this to consider the role of drama education and applied theatre as a tool for social imagination, and suggests: Perhaps rather than being a threat to drama education and applied theatre, post-normality presents several opportunities that normal times do not for the revitalisation through some inherent qualities of drama and theatre that assist in the navigation through a post-normal world. Perhaps drama and applied theatre could make a contribution to the rebuilding of hope and the social imagination in these confused, contradictory and chaotic times. (Anderson, 2014, p. 115) A key focus of Anderson’s argument revolves around access (something he terms democratic creativity). In globalised, neoliberal times, the question of who is allowed to be recognised and represented in discussions and solutions regarding the present and the future, as we have discussed often in this volume, is a social justice issue (Fraser, 2007). Drama practitioners, particularly those in the field that considers their work applied theatre or drama education, take participatory processes to institutions and communities that work with a multitude of different people (war zones, hospitals, refugee camps, housing estates, schools and so on); often communities that are victims of post-normal conditions (Anderson, 2014, 116). Democratising access to spaces of imagination allows diverse group s of people to present, perform and be heard by others, providing communities with a potentially powerful form of social justice.

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The participatory experience of drama, which has been a recurring theme through this entire volume, can be used in these times to understand, develop or enact our post-normal present and problematic future, and in doing so we want to link back to an earlier discussion about agency in drama, touched upon in the chapters on equity, democracy and migration in particular. In their definitive exploration of agency, drawing on theoretical interpretations from a variety of fields, Emirbayer and Mische, (1998, p. 970) refer to three dimensions of agency. First, the iterational dimension refers to the reactivation of past patterns of thought and action. This dimension of agency gives stability to understood social universes and helps to sustain known identities, interactions and institutions. Second, the projective dimension refers to a social actors creative reconfiguring or reimagining of existing structures to generate possible futures. The third is the practical-evaluative dimension; the capacity for social actors to respond to the dilemmas and ambiguities of situations and structures and to make judgments about action. It attends to the idea that any alternative future that may be envisaged draws on experiences of the past and present, and that ‘new developments in the present change our living relationship to both future and past’ (Candy & Dunagan, 2017, p. 140). This changed relationship results in changed action. Our values and understanding in the present influence any decisions we make in the future. Visions of these potential future decisions (or embodied enactments), in turn, influence the decisions we make in the present, thereby affecting the future. These three dimensions offer researchers a complex and sophisticated framework for understanding how, why and to what end agency and action may be manifested within the interactive and creative work in drama, and the potential effect of these actions. To be cautious, and to align with the philosophy of the book more generally, we acknowledge the many critical explorations of generalised claims regarding drama as agentic, transformative and democratic (e.g., Snyder-Young, 2013; Nicholson, 2011; Freebody et al., 2018). The inter- and intrapersonal spaces of drama workshops, classrooms and activities are significantly more complex than these claims may indicate. For instance, in her discussion of an applied theatre focused on recovery from addiction, Sloan (2018) considers how the effect of shame may act as a barrier in drama. Drama programs that incite shame in participants (knowingly or unknowingly) may be the cause of disconnection with the drama, the group or the recovery process. Creating a space for potentiality with people in recovery from addiction, and perhaps anyone, involves an appreciation of vulnerability within the group and the corresponding modulations of shame felt by participants. It requires an appreciation that vulnerability and perhaps painful, or uncomfortable, sensations are part of the process. (Sloan, 2018, p. 589–590)

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Drama, while providing potential spaces for agency, growth and understanding, is not a magic bullet, and facilitators are required to be wellprepared, critically reflexive and self-aware if they are to create such spaces. So, although this consideration of drama in post-normal times does not attend overtly to critical arguments like we do in other chapters, we recommend the use of an active critical discourse around the signature pedagogies (Schulman, 2005) unique to drama which have broad applicability in an uncertain world. Broad claims that drama ‘solves’ the future will not serve the field, however, considered acknowledgements and rigorous explorations of the pedagogies, practices, creativity and opportunities for a shared and public imagination can provide frameworks for understanding the use of drama to encourage action in the extended present that may provide more fruitful, just or sustainable (yet unthought) futures.

Future possibilities for drama We have spent time in the discussion here on the synergies between drama and futures studies, and the complementary practices and opportunities regarding agency and imagination as tools for understanding and being in the future. However, despite simultaneous ideas emerging from the drama field(s) and the futures studies fields, whereby theories and understandings are being adopted across disciplines, there is little overlap or collaboration [with the exception of the Futures Theatre project (Head, 2012)]. New movements in the foresight fields of futures studies and futures design are drawing on embodied and experimental work ‘designing and staging interventions that exploit the continuum of human experience, the full array or sensory and semiotic vectors, in order to enable a different and deeper engagement in thought and discussion about one or more futures’ (Candy, 2010, p. 3). This work aims to bridge the ‘experiential gulf’ between abstract ideas about possible futures and ‘life as it is apprehended, felt, embedded and embodied in the present’ (Candy & Dunagan, 2017, p. 137). Head (2012) argues that the field of drama has been productive to futures studies, but the potential of the relationship has not yet been realised. One might argue by way of response that much drama work has an embedded futures orientation, dealing with rehearsing possible futures (Baldwin, 2009) and coping with situations of ambiguity (Fleming et al., 2016). In the drama field(s), however, Anderson (2014) and Sloan (2018) are some of the few that have drawn on Sardar’s work to consider the contribution of drama practices and the potential of the kind of work drama practitioners do. One noticeable departure from drama, particularly participatory drama praxis, is understanding and attention to role protection for the participants and audience members. When reading about futures studies projects, there were instances where there was an assumption that the audience would know

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that they were participating in a fictive environment, but in some cases did not appear to be expressly told. While when one enters a theatre there is an implicit contract – entering a space where fiction happens – those that have fiction thrust upon them in more ‘regular’ spaces, workplace, conferences, street corners, have not engaged in similar permissions. It is also the case that immersive experiences in the future have the potential to be distressing for the participants. The future could be scary, sad, heart-breaking and mundane. Drama praxis has a strong theory of role protection and debrief that sits at the core of our craft that seems to be either absent or unspoken here. This is not a criticism of this work. First, as neither of us have done a Time Machine we are not authorities on what takes place. But more importantly, we bring this up because it speaks to the history and purpose of these two fields. Much drama, particularly educational, community theatre, TfD and applied theatre, takes place with people who have a power differential from those who facilitate it. The target participant and audience for the futures work, however, is much broader, and the purpose for doing the work different. This work is concerned with affect and effect (as is so most drama work) but with different intentions. The participants, audience and facilitators are together involved in an experience that tries to understand something that no one in the room really knows about. A truly collaborative imaginative experience.

Conclusion Anderson (2014, p. 118) concludes his exploration of drama in post-normal times with a suggestion that now could be the ‘golden years’ for our field because our contributions to ‘social imagination, methodological innovation and democratic creativity can meet the needs of a confused and uncertain world’. Similarly, Nicholson suggests In a modest way, the theatre can help imagine what the shape of [the future] might look like. If theatre is an interweaving of memory and liveness and learning is constructed in negotiation and dialogue, theatre education offers a powerful place to encounter the unexpected, to extend horizons of expectations and consider where we are positioned in the world. (Nicholson, 2011, p. 214) There is certainly much opportunity, it seems, to connect these two fields and explore the role of drama pedagogy and performance in engaging people in futures thinking. Artmaking generally, and drama specifically, has not shied away from complex, chaotic and contradictory imaginings of the past, present and future and has historically provided people with tools for expressing and testing their understanding of the world.

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A concept tightly interrelated with unknowable and problematic futures that we have not canvased in this chapter is youth and childhood. Youth are inherently tied up with what the future is considered to be and why it matters. Generations work towards better futures for youth. Eventually, it will be ‘up to’ our youth to interpret and continue the world into a new present: ‘Youth provide a powerful referent for a discussion about the longterm consequences of neoliberal policies, while also gesturing towards the need for putting into place those economic, political and cultural institutions that make a democratic future possible’ (Giroux, 2012, p. 7). At the same time, youth hold an increasingly complex and precarious space in in the imaginary of our cultures. Scholars argue that childhood is disappearing (Postman, 1994), that there is an increasing hostility towards youth (Busby, 2018), and that youth today have lived through a ‘a debilitating and humiliating dis-investment in their future’ (Giroux, 2012, p. 46). The next chapter draws out these discussions to focus on how the drama for/of youth. It draws on the work in this chapter, extending the discussion to focus on the challenge of understanding and positioning youth in these times.

14 THE FUTURE LOOKS BRIGHT?

Youth are of special concern to us, reflecting our past lives as teachers and our work as university academics. Also, youth are a motivator of much of the work in our field – who we work with and for – and an organising principle of many of the socio-political presented here – why these ideas matter. When reading the manuscript up until the previous chapter, we felt that an explicit discussion on the role and importance of youth in these times was missing, and therefore, we attempt to address this gap here. The significant body of literature in youth theatre and drama education point to the importance of young people, education and development in how and why drama practitioners understand their work. With the ‘social turn’ (Bishop, 2006) evident in the arts and discussed elsewhere, this concern with youth and their participation and education in drama is now seen as mainstream (Gallagher & Booth, 2003; Finneran & Anderson, 2019). In this chapter, we turn our focus to youth and children as a specific theme for discussion about the future. Youth, as a category, social construct, or political concern are both revered and problematised in discussions of the complex present and our imagined future. On one hand, ‘young people embody the projected dreams, desires and commitment of a society’s obligations to the future’ (Giroux, 2012, p. xiii), while on the other hand, youth are demonised as problematic and responsible for the socially and politically chaotic future. We believe there is a third potent discourses emerging within the public discussion, which is not so much ‘about’ youth, but has significant impact on youth – ambivalence. In our opinion, this is evident in a variety of ways, but most painfully and obviously by the public refusal to invest in environmental sustainability. In many ways, we are knowingly damaging the future of youth. By drawing on the argument that in a culture of cruelty, childhood is disappearing (Postman, 1994) and youth

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have become disposable (Giroux, 2012), we aim to make links between the post-normal present, the uncertain future and the role/use of drama. It is appropriate that this is where the conversations in this book come to a close; in the metaphorical hands of those who must take them forward. There seems to be a naturalised, or common-sense relationship between youth and the future – children can only be imagined in relation to the adults that they are either different from (Postman, 1994) or on a journey to become (Jenks, 1996) and that, ‘when we talk of the child we are also talking about recollections of time past… and aspirations towards futures states of affairs’ (Jenks, 1996, p. 11). Additionally, ‘competing discourses of “youth as now” (or position-taker) and “youth as the future” (or not-yet-adult) take on a political inflection, as young people’s access to cultural self-representation is at stake’ (Bourke & Hunter, 2011, p. 106).

Youth as hope/youth as problem Lauded as a symbol of hope for the future while scorned as a threat to the existing social order, youth have become objects of ambivalence caught between contradictory representations, discourses, and spaces of transition. While pushed to the margins of political power within society, youth nonetheless become a central focus of adult fascination, desire, and authority, especially in the realm of popular culture. (Giroux, 2012, p. xiv) There is great romantic attachment to youth: ‘Children are the living messages we sent to a time we will not see’ (Postman, 1994; p. xi). Some argue they are the only real treasure we produce. Despite the complex representations of youth in media and politics, young people are inherently tied up with what we understand the future to be and who we consider it to be for. Children represent both hope and innocence, bringing forth a moral obligation for those that are not ‘youth’ to protect them, and to ensure the world remains accommodating of them. As simple as this moral obligation is, however, we are reminded by Greta Thunberg, the child environmental activist, that it does not always align with our understanding of our practical obligations in that we ‘say we love our children above all else, and yet [we] are stealing their future in front of their very eyes’ (Thunberg, 2018). And whilst we are generally very concerned with protecting youth, there is an obvious contradiction between this and the widely held belief in society that youth are not trustworthy. The phenomenon of treating youth as less than fully formed adults is widespread, a perception beautifully refuted by Rousseau – ‘Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs’ (Rousseau, 1979, p. 90). However, the deficit position stubbornly remains and results in youth being measured against inappropriate adult

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behavioural metrics rather than understood as being perfectly formed for the age at which they happen to find themselves. It is also the case that the age range to which the term youth pertains seems to be expanding in many practices, while shrinking in others. Whilst once it was common-place in Global Northern countries for the world of work to begin at 16 years, it then moved out to 19 years, and now seems to be someplace in the 22/23-year-old range. In many countries, young people are continuing to live with their parents longer than ever before (e.g., Australian Census). At the same time, youth have unparalleled access that many youth have to previously unachievable liberties including powerful and independent voices, many enabled through the manipulation of digital+ environments. As demonstrated by the climate strikes, romantic (although untrusting) perceptions of youth are crumbling under these complexities. So, while many agree that there has been an enduring if usually confused cultural commitment to ‘the good of the child’ (Jenks, 1996, p. 2), theorists and historians argue more complex contemporary relationships between children and society. As a practical example of this relationship, again relating to climate change, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, in response to those climate strikes, referred to a concern that we are subjecting children to ‘needless anxiety’. He elaborated: I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. I don’t want our children to have anxieties about these issues. (Murphy, 2019) In the wake of the devastating Australian bushfires (that were still taking place as we drafted this), images of children affected by the fires flooded social media – children fleeing in boats to get away from fires or distressed babies and families huddled on beaches, waiting for the signal to jump in the water. The quote from PM Morrison sat alongside these images and the public comments on them. The romantic idea that we let ‘kids be kids’ and that we protect them from having to grow up too soon is juxtaposed with imagery of youth being exposed to information and experiences that contradict that protection. This is further layered by the explicit and public ambivalence of adults towards changing their personal and national behaviour in a way that protects children’s futures, and terrifyingly, this ambivalence now means that we are unable to protect their present. The arguments that childhood is disappearing can be considered not only through the increasing need for children to fight adults for a sustainable future, but also for other reasons explained by the movement of Appadurai’s (1996) scapes. Research has found that children’s games which are often

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embodied and performed outdoors are rarely played by today’s youth (Skår & Krogh, 2009) but rather children’s versions of sports and games are now mimicking adult versions of the same; particularly the competitive and success-focused nature of these games. Similarly, the way in which adult and children’s clothes are designed provides less distinction between the two categories than they once were. While many would argue that this reconstitution of children in adult worlds is not problematic, others claim that it demonstrates an increasing public and private ambivalence towards youth and that, ‘to have to stand and wait as the charm, malleability, innocence and curiosity of children are degraded and then transmogrified into the lesser features of pseudo-adulthood is painful and embarrassing and, above all, sad’ (Postman, 1994, p. xiii). This ‘disappearance’ or reconstitution of childhood aligns with what Giroux terms the ‘crisis’ of youth that is, rooted in society’s loss of any sense of history, memory, and ethical responsibility. The ideas of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change, the idea of civic courage being infused by social justice, have been lost in an age of rabid consumerism, mediainduced spectacles, and short-term, high-yield financial investments. (Giroux, 2012, p. 15) The neoliberal way in which global ‘scapes’, particularly mediascapes and financescapes (Appadurai, 1996), interact in the present has overtaken and diminished the public idea that the future should be protected for children. In the landscape created by the global flows of ‘these times’, a focus on commodities, ownership, control and success has seen young people relegated to the role of commodity – something to be used to make money, something to be acquired and/or something to be controlled by the more powerful. This discussion was drawn out further in Chapter 4 of this volume, in relation to current reforms in education and schooling. In this landscape, we argue that youth are judged based on how useful, quiet, compliant and successful they are, understood as current or future commodities for the institutions that govern us; future workers, future citizens.

Drama in these times The relationship between youth and drama is steeped in complexity and contradiction (van de Water, 2012). We feel it’s important to note at this point, that the discussions about childhood and youth above are more concerned with the socially constituted ‘youth’ or ‘child’ than actual young people or children: ‘The idea of the child is the adult’s projected nostalgia, not a reflection of the child itself.’ (Amer, 2016, p. 9). We acknowledge that this places our discussion in a slightly asymmetric relationship to drama, which

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is often considered to be deeply personal and embodied. On that note, we wish to sketch three complex points that inform this discussion. First, young people do not typically get a significant say in how they are constituted by institutions, policies and public discourse. Despite this, the way they are constituted has lived and embodied effects on how they understand and enact their lives. Giroux (2012) reminds us that young people embody and experience the personal, social, political and pedagogical positionings placed on ‘youth’ and therefore any exploration of youth as a political or social idea should also consider the lived effects of those ideas on youth. The ongoing work of Kathleen Gallagher (2007b; 2011; 2014) explores these ideas in detail. Drama for and with young people is explicitly about youth participation and engagement, as opposed to policy about, or government of, youth from which youth themselves tend to be either excluded or retrofitted into as an afterthought (Jenks, 1996). This means that often the way drama is experienced by young people may or may not be connected with why and how young people are supposed to experience drama. Second, research has found that when young people are involved in discussion about their relationship to the future (their own and the world’s more generally), they are just as interested in the kind of person they want to be as they are in the kind of ‘job’ or activity they will undertake: ‘future thinking combines ideas about “destinations” (what sort of job I would like) and desires about being and becoming a certain type of person – these are not neatly separable orientations. Yet in research and policy discussions about young people, futures “daydreams” and “pathways” tend to occupy different worlds’ (McLeod & Yates, 2006, p. 104). One point we want to make about drama in these times is that rather than easily defined by a focus on pathways or daydreams, it may occupy what Cohen and Ainley (2000) have called a ‘third space’ as it attends to the subjective and personal, but in relation to the social, economic and structural contexts they take place within. Neelands suggests that: The social experience of acting as an ensemble, making theatre that reflects and suggests how the world might become in the hope that it is not finished is of course of paramount importance to our young. We pass them the burden of the world that we have made in the hope that they will in turn have a world to pass on to their children. In this task socially made theatre will be their mirror, dynamo and lens - their tool for change. (Neelands, 2004, p. 189) Drama, particularly with a social justice orientation, is often done for structural, social and/or political reasons. It is sometimes done to align with neoliberal governance of people and communities, as we’ve discussed throughout the volume. It is also, however, almost always concerned with, led by, and

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engaged with its participants and audiences, who experience drama as an imaginative event that is both personal and collective. This is as much, if not more, the case in drama with and for youth. Rodricks (2015) suggests that drama can be restorative for the ‘growing liminality’ of youth and, ‘as a way to mobilise for students’ fluid, hybrid identities and allow for recognition and visibility’ (p. 343). This must be accompanied by a criticality on the part of the facilitator, who must question their responsibility to critique their local environments, and also understand what they perceive to be the relationship between drama and change, ‘for those who may occupy, or claim to occupy, the third space?’ (ibid.). Finally, we want to draw upon Fraser’s (2007) conceptualisation of social justice (a theory that has repeated throughout this manuscript) to explore the position of drama as a tool for/place of social justice for youth. There are three intersecting discourses, common to drama and social justice, which align it closely with Fraser’s reasoning. First, all young people have a right to access the arts. The distribution (or redistribution) of funding and programming of drama projects for marginalised young people is a key recurring theme in drama literature which remains preoccupied with advocacy. It is also common in arts policy to require all publicly funded major performing arts venues to have high quality education and outreach activities. Second, drama for and with young people that celebrates their position in the world allows youth to see versions of themselves that are not steeped in problematising discourses. This is recognition work, promoting respect for young people within the broader community. Finally, drama made by young people, whether in a classroom, on a mainstage, or in the street, foregrounds their ideas and concerns. In a world where youth are not represented in political chambers or policy development, the public and performative nature of drama provides potential spaces for youth to have their ideas represented and concerns heard. It is here we have seen youth harness performance and public spaces (technological and actual) to engage in activism and the building of social movements.

Youth and drama practice There is genuinely a huge volume of drama work with youth. Drama education, theatre in education, theatre for young audiences, youth theatre, speech and drama – all these large fields of practice have young people at the heart of what they do. Many of these fields of practice are central to most if not all chapters in this volume. As a result, we want to spend time exploring how young people themselves use (rather than participate in) drama to grapple with their lack of representation in a future that is supposed to be ‘for them’. In coming to the conclusion of the book, we acknowledge that much of the work undertaken in the practices we have outlined is concerned with

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‘an aesthetic-political practice’ that aims towards personal transformation, while at the same time, enacting and reflecting the social relationships of a desired future (Serafini, 2018). Much of the practice we typically discuss, however, sees adults facilitating drama work that allows youth to ‘imagine the future’ in order to incite action or change in them/their behaviour. Here, we wish to pivot that perspective for a moment and discuss practice that sees drama work instigated by youth in order to change adults. Giroux comments that consideration of the future, particularly in light of the deteriorating state of youth in public discourse … … demands a new understanding of politics, one that is infused not only with the language of critique, but also with the discourse of possibility. It is a struggle that requires us to think beyond the given, imagine the unimaginable, and combine the lofty ideals of democracy with a willingness to fight for its realization. … It demands new modes of solidarity, new political organizations, and a powerful, expansive social movement capable of uniting diverse political interests and groups. It is a struggle that is as educational as it is political, one that must build upon self-awareness as well as historical consciousness. (Giroux, 2012, p. 8) We suggest that these new understandings and new modes of movement building are already being utilised by youth. Left off the RSVP list of what Miraftab and Wills (2005) refer to as the ‘invited spaces’ where active participation in politics and public life happen, youth are using performance-based strategies to develop alternative spaces through both virtual and on site performance, where ‘both spaces intersect, transforming the real world and the Internet into spaces in which social actors can engage and raise their voices’ (Kurze, 2016, p. 457). These performances range in scope, purpose and style from an online video shared around the world (such as the Haka performed by Nelson College, NZ students at the global school strike for climate) a site-based guerrilla performance, a piece of theatre, a spoken word poem, or many of the other performance-based tools used by youth to demand recognition and representation. They also intersect with numerous other ‘issues’ or themes in this volume; they play in a glocalised space that melds local and global; they interact in embodied and mediated ways using technology; they speak to issues of climate, education, migration and so many more. Youth in this way are actively engaging with their responsibilities for the future. Perhaps this is what Giroux meant when he claimed our current times are cruel to youth, and Postman meant when he lamented that childhood is disappearing. We live in a strange world, where children must sacrifice their own education in order to protest against the destruction of their future…

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where no one dares to look beyond our current political systems even though it’s clear that the answers we seek will not be found in the politics of today. (Thunberg, 2019, website) Before Greta began her Climate Strike, or Malala Yousafzai was shot for speaking up about girls’ rights to education, both at the age of 15, Postman concluded that it would be children themselves who would save childhood: Children themselves are a force in preserving childhood. Not a political force, certainly. But a kind of moral force. In these matters, perhaps we can call them a moral majority. Children, it would seem, not only know there is value in being different from adults, but care that a distinction be made; they know, perhaps better than adults, that something terribly important is lost if that distinction is blurred… American culture is hostile to the idea of childhood. But it is a comforting, even exhilarating thought that children are not. (Postman, 1994, p. ix) We argue that we are entering a future where the technoscapes are giving children unprecedented access to a voice in the mediascapes flowing across the globe and a voice in the ideoscapes shaping the globe. They are using glocalisation and globalisation to build movements that are unique to them and their concerns. Drama, in performance and the performative, has taken a role in the maintenance and communication of their messages for each other, and for us adults, who can stand in solidarity with them.

15 ENDURING DISCOURSES OF BEAUTY, LOVE AND HOPE

It was always our plan in bringing this book to a close that we would end in a hopeful manner, and by talking about the things that have brought us to drama in our lives and bring us to share drama through our professional lives. That is something of an impossible task, of course, given that it means something different to each of us. David Booth, an inspirational figure in our field, offers his description of why drama matters as a guiding light: Of course theatre educates, but often not in the ways we think, and not always within the traditional confines of grand stages. … We build a theatre sense from all our experiences with this live form as participants and observers – our own inspired dialogues in improvised drama classes, our recognition of the power of script writers, the awe of standing on a lighted stage, the wearing of a heavy mask we have constructed, the exercises with peers when we hold hands in a circle, the after-show chat with an actor, the sensation of the house lights dimming as an actor glides past. I want all of the above and I want it for my child and for the students I teach. (Booth, 2003, pp. 17–18)

The changing world So much has happened around the world during the time we have worked on this manuscript. What began as an idea in late 2016, became a proposal in 2017, a draft in 2018 and a book in 2019 and 2020. As we come to writing this conclusion, universities around the world have been paralysed as the world is no longer able to travel because of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our final drafting and editing were done via Zoom as Michael

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was unable to travel to Australia as planned. Many of our meetings were postponed as we were both involved in organising crisis-plans at work to pivot to a blended learning mode and protect the lives and health of our colleagues and students. Our countries are approaching their sixth month of some variant of lockdown. We have collaborated on many projects before in the knowledge that as university academics, we would be in a position to meet at conferences or visit each other perhaps twice a year. Without being melodramatic, this book may be quite old before we get a chance to see each other in person again. At Kelly’s home in Sydney, this has come off the back of the most punishing bushfire season in Australia. As of March, the estimated damage included 42 million acres burned (17 million hectares), over 3,000 homes destroyed, 3 billion animals perished and 34 human lives lost. Those lucky not to be in the path of the fires spent their holiday season clouded in smoke, with ash raining from the sky, looking on in horror at images of those less fortunate. Experts believe the landscape will be forever changed, as faster growing species of plant replace the old bush and rainforests. In Ireland, the imminence of a ‘no deal Brexit’ threatens to cause economic havoc on top of the pandemic-induced recession and destabilise a hard-won peace after so many years of bloody guerrilla war on the island. Sharing a land border and being major trading partners with Britain which (marginally) no longer wishes to be part of the European bloc poses an existential thread. So it seems ‘these times’ are as complex and precarious as they have always been, with Appadurai’s (1996) flows in full effect, colliding before our very eyes (or in the case of the global flow of people currently, suddenly halting). There seems to be a relentless stream of anxious and restless noise raining down on us. Perhaps it is just a symptom of being older and more responsible now that we notice these things. Perhaps it is because we have written this book that we’re more aware of them all! But everywhere we look, there appears to be a plethora of distressing news. An ever-growing smorgasbord of problems that make it very easy to be unhappy with these times. And we are amongst the lucky ones. We are fully aware of that. However, these times have also bred vast amounts of positivity, hope and beauty. New socially conscious movements abound; there is an open and powerful discourse of equity in our societies; fewer people around the world are starving than 20 years ago; young people in Kelly’s daughter’s infants school can choose to wear boys or girls uniforms; there is increasing respect and awareness of indigenous cultures and their dispossession; we see language revitalisation movements of minority languages; the decline in some countries of fossil fuel usage; socially engaged youth; the invention of beer can rings that double as fish food! The list goes on. The flows of information, ideologies, technologies, money and people have also paved the way for improvements in global communities, increased awareness of shared issues and greater possibility of collaborative solutions

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to the world’s problems. Many years ago, in a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in NYC, Neelends wrote (O’Connor, 2010, p. 121) that ‘in times of crisis, we turn to art as necessary response’. Now, as the pandemic freezes the world and we are all confined to our homes, we turn to art and artists: movies, online galleries, Netflix, music and poetry, to keep us connected and positive. There are certain things that academic professionals rarely mention. Beauty, love, play and fun are foremost amongst them. Their omission as critical terms is understandable, given their oft-times pejorative or sentimental associations in the vernacular. They are hardly ‘hard’ terms, being by their very nature ephemeral and deeply subjective. And yet, their presence, individually or collectively, is for many, at the heart of successful aesthetic and practical experiences. So, in this concluding chapter, we attempt to cast off our more practical and critical perspectives on the ways drama is operationalised in institutions and societies, and rather engage philosophically with some key ideas that we believe underpin the fields of drama. We have placed this chapter as a ‘last word’ to remind us that so much drama work (in these times or others) is a hopeful practice. It is done as a shared enterprise, with people coming together working to achieve something they consider worthwhile and share values that are central to the human condition. This chapter gently foregrounds and names some of the ‘hidden’ governing discourses of drama – known and embodied by drama teachers and theatre workers the world over – the reasons that many of us choose to work in and through the arts. These principles are deeply embedded in how our field understands itself and teaches itself to the next generation. They are often hidden because the neoliberal world in which we live attributes little value to their existence, given the impossibility of their measurement. These are not issues of our time per se, but rather philosophies that have underpinned much of the work discussed (critically or otherwise) in this book. We have our last word by considering elements of our work often felt, sometimes talked about, but seldom written about: pleasure and hope.

Pleasure – beauty, joy and play There is a significant discussion in scholarly literature about the role of beauty and aesthetics in drama (and indeed, in education). It has been brought to prominence in the work of James Thompson (2006) and Joe Winston (2005; 2008; 2010). It has importance as a unifying discourse harking back to more romantic ideals of what the arts should achieve, but longsince abandoned in the rationalist latter half of the 20th century. It also foreshadows and joins the recurrent debate around the nature of change and impact in drama, moving beyond the rhetoric of transformation (Neelands, 2004) and engaging instead with more subtle characterisations of affect

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and effect (Thompson, 2009b). Experiences in and with drama often place value on what Thompson (2009a, p. 116) refers to as the ‘affective registry – associated with pleasure, beauty and fun’. The focus on experience, aesthetic and feeling is described by Sloan, not as joy or pleasure, but the ‘affective experience of alive-ness’. Rather than talking about feeling in terms of emotion, they consider it in terms of the sensation of life (Sloan, 2018, p. 593). This is an idea that resonates with us – the notion of being present in the experience of alive-ness. Others discuss the potent possibility of emotion of drama (Bundy, Dunn & Stinson, 2016) and the place of empathy in our work (Grove O’Grady, 2020). Regardless of the particular orientation, drama as embodied, relational, experiential, participatory, joyful, sorrow-inducing, is drama concerned with ‘feeling’ life. Alongside a prominent literature in aesthetics, beauty and drama, there is an enduring and much-loved relationship between drama and play. Many of our colleagues over the years have written about it, considering the opportunity drama presents for spontaneous and playful engagement with curriculum, social issues and learning. Neelands (2010b) considers it ‘betwixt and between’ mindfulness and playfulness that provides so much opportunity for learning, engagement and connectedness. Similarly (but differently), O’Toole offers a dialectic between art and play – between curiosity and control; ‘what if?’ and ‘as if’ (O’Toole, 2006). Scholars have lamented that our imagination and creativity are stifled by education institutions (such as school) and as we become older, we lose our ability to play. The opportunities afforded for playful engagement with bodies, ideas and place are seen as a ‘gift’ that drama brings to places usually considered lacking in such opportunities, places such as schools, prisons, hospitals and warzones. From theatresports in schools, to clowns in hospitals, to circus play in refugee camps, drama draws much of its power from the pleasure of the experience, the chance for fun and the opportunity for aesthetic connection to and with the world. This is a power that the world is questing for. It is considered by some an antidote to the excesses of the global flows and a rejection of the neoliberal impulse to commercialise feeling (Hochschild, 2003). Others see a perceptible turn back to joyous and pleasureable celebration of humanity observable in places where there is a renewed place of art in the world (Sommer, 2014), and where our democracies are revived and celebrated once again through the humanities (Nussbaum, 2010). At the heart of all of these desires sits drama.

Hope Hope. For those that do not spend their days considering the concept (or relying on it), then it may simply mean ‘wanting something to happen’. Kelly’s 7-year-old might use it in a sentence such as ‘I hope I get a treat after

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dinner’ (and let’s face it, don’t we all). For others, it may be a synonym for optimism; a positive attitude that allows for a sunny disposition. However, as Cornell West reminds us, optimism and hope are different. Optimism is more rational; it is based in the idea that there is evidence things will be better. Hope, however, involves going beyond the evidence, creating previously unconsidered possibilities and enabling, ‘visions that become contagious to allow us to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantees whatsoever. That’s hope’ (Anna Deavere Smith cited in Gallagher & Rodricks, 2017, p. 126). For drama educators and practitioners, hope is the foundation on which we build our work. It is expressed in different ways, for example, Busby (2018) refers to ‘fields of the possible’ and Sloan (2018) talks about her work with recovering addicts as, not necessarily ‘choosing life’ or choosing not to die, but ‘the choice to experience aliveness” (p. 583). Neelands urges those in the field of drama to look beyond the rhetoric of transformation and to keep in mind that the arts make children powerful (Neelands, 2004; 2015). Kershaw warns us of the avoidance of a pathology of hope (Kershaw, 1998). O’Connor reminds us that the arts present hope in the darkest of places (O’Connor, 2015a). All slightly different concepts, but tied together, we would argue, they build an important discourse about the contribution drama can make to its participants and audiences through the performative practice of hope. In education literature, hope, particularly the theory of critical hope, is a collective concern – wrapped up in a web of social relations (Jacobs, 2005) and a belief in the ability of the collective to make change. In Denzin’s words, hope is evident in: … struggles and interventions that espouse the sacred values of love, care, community, trust and well-being. Hope, as a form of pedagogy, confronts and interrogates cynicism, the belief that change is not possible or too costly. (Denzin, 2003, p. 174) There is, as most readers will know, a historical link between drama and hope born out of the influence of Freire’s work on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed theories and practices. As a result, the philosophy of critical pedagogy – its focus on the marginalised, the building of critical consciousness and active empowerment and its embracing of critical hope – is directly or indirectly referenced by many of the communities key drama and theatre practitioners (e.g., Gallagher, 2015a; O’Connor, 2016). The links made between embodied narratives and the participant’s responsibility to ‘change the story’ have developed a notion of participatory drama as a panacea for, or tool for combating, oppression. From bullies in schools, to human rights violations, drama has been recruited as a method for building an informed and ethical global citizenry. As a

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practice, undertaken in theatres, classrooms, community centres or public streets, drama work creates a space to play with possibilities, to represent and subvert, to walk in the words or (imagined) worlds of others, to participate in a collective imagining. Central to this philosophy is the idea that the more thorough one’s understanding of the world, their circumstances and the power structures of society is, the more equipped they are to create change. Thus nascent hope coincides with an increasing critical perception of the concrete conditions of reality.  Society now reveals itself as something unfinished, not as something inexorably given; it has become a challenge rather than a hopeless limitation. (Freire, 2013, p. 11) In a world unfinished, drama is used in lots of different ways – to increase understanding amongst audiences and participants, to highlight a common humanity, to encourage empathy and build resistance to oppressive regimes (large or small). Resistance is intertwined with the notion of critical hope in critical pedagogy – in order to be an unoppressive force in the world, one must first understand and then resist the hegemonic regime. Giroux’s notion of resistance celebrates human agency and: … portrays domination as neither a static process nor one that is never complete … the oppressed are not viewed as being simply passive in the face of domination. The notion of resistance points to the need to understand more thoroughly the complex ways in which people mediate between their own lived experiences and structures of domination and constraint… Inherent in a radical notion of resistance is an expressed hope, an element of transcendence for radical transformation. (Giroux, 1983, p. 108) In order to resist, one must first hope. In later work, Giroux worries that in these times of neoliberalism and commercialism, whether it is difficult for young people to find public spheres where they can locate, understand or engage with metaphors of hope. Having worked in and with drama for our entire adult lives, we argue that much of the work that takes place around the world is aimed at exactly this purpose – whether it is youth using new technological platforms to publically perform themselves and what’s important to them, or whether it’s a mainstage production of a new theatre for young people piece, or a schoolbased drama intervention for children returning to school after a natural disaster, drama provides public, embodied, metaxic spaces for students to experience, play, test and (hopefully) feel powerful.

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A final note – remembering love and care Kelly noticed an advertisement for a private secondary school on the side of a bus recently (let’s call the school ABC college), it suggested that an ‘The ABC college student is curious and resilient’. A few days later, another private school billboard advertisement let Kelly know that XYZ College produced strong leaders. Kelly began wondering, what happened to kind? loving? caring? compassionate? Should we be so solely focused on producing future community members that are driven, resilient, strong, leading types, prioritising and privileging these (very gendered) traits? We wonder what we are losing in our single-minded focus on progress, privilege and success. As educators of teachers, artists and humans, we have argued that the introduction of standards and result-focused, paper-drowning teaching that seems to be taking the world by storm has made invisible notions such as love and care in the way we talk about and understand the work of teachers. This is not to say that we are interested in seeing these words appear in our policies, curriculums or teaching standards – we don’t want ‘love and care’ to be governed by a top-down understanding of how these things play out in all the different drama classrooms or theatres around the country. We would, however, like to see them gain more prominence in the way we talk about and understand our work. We’d like to see them thrown about, unpacked, drawn up and argued over as core tenets of what it means to work well with others, build rapport with participants, explore controversial issues and make art. There are instances where this is happening in schools, theatres and the academy. Our colleagues suggest there is the ‘potential of drama work as a relational ethic and a beacon of possibility against the mounting evidence of cultural despair (Gallagher & Rodricks, 2017, p. 116); and when at its best it, ‘offers creative re-interpretations of what it means to live well and to live ethically’ (Nicholson, 2005, p. 165). For us, the space of possibility in terms of drama’s relationship with the world is best defined by the idea of social hope, and the impulse to care. As a community of practitioners and scholars, we are hopeful of our contribution to a more loving and caring public imaginary. Love and care. In these times, they feel like a resistance in and of themselves. We wonder if we talked more about love and care in our work, whether we could build a social movement with drama at the centre. This movement would be something akin to what Gallagher and Rodricks (2017, pp. 114–115) consider a ‘creative and artistic engagement’ to ‘provoke forms of engaged citizenship worth considering in times of increasing social economic and political instability’. A social movement that organises spaces, places and stories with people sharing, playing, expressing, collaborating and making, joyfully. Manifestations of hope.

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INDEX

Abbey Theatre 119, 128 acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) 133 acting, as a citizen 58–60 Acting Against Worms project 144 active citizenship 58–59 agency: glocalisation and 82–83; governmental 131; human 25, 29–30, 185, 206; individual acts of 127; inequity 30; social 187 Ahmed, S. J. 16, 162 Ainley, P. 197 ALAC 40 Allen, J. 163–164 Allern, T.-H. 52 Al-Qaeda 106 Alrutz, Megan 175–176 Alston, A. 42 Americans for the Arts 66 Anderson, M. 68, 71, 98, 173, 188, 190, 191 Anglo-Saxons 7 ANZAC 113 Appadurai, Arjun 5, 38, 62, 94, 125, 168–169, 182, 195 applied drama 9, 37, 43, 45, 49, 82, 86, 98, 109, 120, 122, 154, 173 Arab Spring 112 Arcidiacono, C. 138–139 Arendt, Hannah 49, 54, 58, 161 Armstrong, D. 33 The Arrival (Shaun Tan) 97 Art for Social Change project 43

artistry 179–180 Auslander, P. 173 Australian bushfires 3, 154, 195, 202 Bacchi, Carol 137, 139 Balfour, M. 37, 107, 109–111, 114, 116, 118, 122, 143, 165 Balkan conflict 113 Ball, S. J. 39, 41 Bauman, Z. 85, 90, 95 beauty 203–204 Belfast Agreement 119 Belfiore, E. 42, 54 Belliveau, George 106–107 Benjamin, H. R. W. 62 Bennett, O. 42, 54 Berghaus, G. 111 Bhabha, Homi 92–93 Big hArt theatre 144 Billington, Michael 114 Bishop, C. 11, 54 Blake, B. 173 Blasted (Kane) 113–114 Boal, Augusto 15, 20, 24, 50, 55, 109, 111, 205 Bogad, Larry 53 Bolton, G. 98 Booth, David 201 Bottoms, S. 59–60, 130–131, 161 Bourdieu, P. 25, 29, 39 Brecht, Berthold 24, 50, 55, 109, 111, 115 Brecht, Bertolt 106 Brexit 3, 47, 50

232  Index

bricolage 5, 96 Brook, P. 48 Busby, Selina 26–27, 28, 30, 205 Butler, J. 127–128, 134 Cahill, H. 20, 132–133, 136 Calais Jungle (France/UK) 100 Canada: Art for Social Change project 43; National Holocaust Museum 118 Canadian Armed Forces 106 Candy, S. 185–187 capitalism 148–149 care: capital and 148–149; love and 207 Carroll, John 173 Cass, G. 37 Castoriadis, C. 51, 53 Causey, M. 173 Celts 7 Central European University 111 Central School of Speech and Drama, London 26 Challenging Place work 84 Chatzichristodoulou, M. 174 child development 141 Chinese Civil War 87 Choices project (New Zealand) 40 Christianity 7 citizen: acting and participating as 58–60; possibilities and problems 58–60 classical liberalism 55 climate change 14, 153–166; collective responsibility in 161–163; community responsibility in 161–163; role of art in 155–156; role of drama in 154–156; role of storytelling 157–161 climate justice 162 Climate Strike 156, 200 Clinton, Hillary Rodham 111 Cohen, P. 197 Comings and Goings 96 community: collective responsibility and 161–163; responsibility in climate change 161–163 Coney 179, 180 Connell, R. 155 Conquergood, D. 108 The Constitution of the United States 48 ‘Contact!Unload’ 107 Covenant House International 26 COVID-19 pandemic 12, 15, 149, 167, 181, 182, 183, 201–202 Cox, E. 102–103, 160

creativity: curriculum and drama 70–72; drama pedagogy across the curriculum 73–76; and global education reform movement 62–76; overview 62–64; perceived education ‘problem’ 64–66; syllabus and policy discourses 66–69 Crichton Smith, Iain 105 critical hope 34 Crossing Borders 32, 34 Crossing Bridges project (New York, USA) 25–30, 34 Crossley, M. 173, 174 Crumlin Road Courthouse 120 C&T 176 cultural capital 25, 28–29 ‘cultural respect’ 31 cultural sociology 157 ‘culture of cruelty’ 47 curriculum: and drama 70–72; drama pedagogy across 73–76 Dalziel, F. 101 Daniels-Mayes, S. 19 Dario Fo 50, 109 Davis, Susan 38, 84, 98, 173 decline of grand narratives 39–42 democracy 13; link between drama and 51–53; normality of 50–51 Democracy through Theatre 57 democratic paradox: explicit spaces for engaging 53–56; reflexive spaces for engaging 53–56 DemoDram – Democracy through Drama 57 Densley, J. A. 80 De-Schooling Society (Illich) 62 Dewey, J. 68 Difficult Return project 107 digital+ 167–181; artistry 179–180; changing language 172–174; changing paradigms 172–174; defined 168; drama communication 176–177; drama communities 175–176; drama identities 177–179; social media and 167, 173, 178 digital immigrants 167, 174 digital storytelling 175 Di Martino, S. 138–139 Dinesh, Nandita 114–116 Dixon, S. 173 Dolan, J. 126 Don’t Take Our Voices Away 160–162, 163

Index 233

The Drag (West) 126 drama: addressing social determinants of health 141; addressing social determinants of wellbeing 141; communication and 176–177; communities 175–176; curriculum and 70–72; of dealing with peace 119–122; and democracy 51–53; digital and 167–181; embodying environmentalism in 163–164; encouraging health-promoting behaviours 141; environmentalism and 154–155; exploring migration through 96–99; future and 185–191; and governmentality 45–46; healing wounded of war 106–108; helping manage diseases 142; helping people with acute conditions 142; hope and 204–206; identity and 177–179; inciting war 110–112; intervening and disrupts war 114–117; for migrants 100–102; pleasure and 203–204; post-normality and 183–185; preventing ill-health 141; remembering and commemorating war 117–118; of resistance 109–110; role in climate change 154–156; role in health 137–149; role of beauty in 203–204; role of care in 207; role of joy in 203–204; role of love in 207; role of play in 203–204; role of youth in 193–200; about sex 130–135; supporting caregiving 141; supporting child development 141; supporting end-of-life care 142; supporting people experiencing mental illness 141–142; supporting people with neurological disorders 142 Drama and Social Justice (Freebody & Finneran) 3 Drama in a dramatised society (William) 171 drama of these times: identity 19–20; learning and education 20–21; meaning 8–10; musings on ‘these times’ 4–8; overview 3–4; social justice 17–19 drama pedagogy, across curriculum 73–76 dramatic comings and goings 90–105 dramatic democracy 48–61; acting and participating as citizen 58–60; dramatic democracy in action 56–58; explicit spaces for engaging

democratic paradox 53–56; link between drama and democracy 51–53; normality of democracy 50–51; overview 48–50; possibilities and problems 58–60; reflexive spaces for engaging democratic paradox 53–56 economic capital 25, 28 Emirbayer, M. 189 Endnote bibliographic software 167 Englade, Cathy 26 English Baccalaureate (EBACC) 70–71 entrepreneurialism 38–39, 42 ‘entrepreneurial participation’ 42 environment: drama and 154–155; indigenous knowledges and 160–161 environmentalism: defined 154; drama and 154–155; embodying in drama 163–164; private performance of 156–157; public performance of 156–157 ethnoscapes 5, 38, 63, 169, 182 Everett, L. 155 Ewing, Robyn 73 explicit spaces for engaging democratic paradox 53–56 Fancourt, D. 142 ‘fast-food knowledge’ 63 Festival of Shakespearean performance 57 financescapes 5, 38, 47, 62, 169, 182, 184, 196 Finn, S. 142 Finnigan, David 158–159 Fleetwood Mac 158 Floyd, George 3 Fook, J. 138 Forsey, M. 63 Foucault, M. 36, 139 Franks, A. 98 Fraser, N. 18–19, 25–26, 29, 59, 87–89, 92, 126, 127, 134, 148–149, 198 Freeman, B. 104, 177 Freire, P. 15, 20, 34, 166, 205 Friere, Paulo 55 Fugard, Athol 54, 109 full gender equality 129 futurism 15 Gallagher, Kathleen 3, 5, 59, 68–69, 72, 133, 177, 178, 179, 197, 207 Geertz, C. 4–5 Geese Theatre 44

234  Index

Giroux, H. A. 31, 34, 38, 196, 197, 199, 206 ‘giving voice’ 31 global conflict 3 Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) 13, 63–65, 67, 74, 76 global education reform movement, and creativity 62–76 Global North 23–24, 43, 50, 63, 80, 99, 129 Global South 39, 80, 129 glocalisation 79–89; and agency 82–83; context 82–83; global, local, glocal 81–82; imagined communities 85–89; mythmaking place and ideologies of home 83–85; overview 79–81 Good Chance Theatre 100 Goodwin, S. 86, 138 Google 69 governmentality and drama 45–46 grand narratives, decline of 39–42 Grant, D. 122 Great Barrier Reef 158 Greek polis 51–52 Greek tragedies 14, 108 Guattari, F. 10 Hall, Stuart 97 Hamera, J. 10, 112 Harris, A. M. 67, 69, 125 Harvie, J. 39 Harwood, V. 19 Haseman, B. 9 Head, S. 190 health: challenges in evaluation and funding of, projects 142–143; complexities in, promotion 146–149; contradictions in, promotion 146–149; defined 138; practice in 143–146; role of drama in 137–149; role of drama in addressing social determinants of 141; see also wellbeing Health Action Trust 40 Heathcote, Dorothy 58, 75, 98, 109 Heddon, D. 154, 155, 156, 157, 165 Help for Young People at Events and in their Gathering Spaces (HYPE-GS) 40 Henry V 113 Herczeg, Ferenc 111–112 heroism 104 Holocaust 111, 117–118 ‘homonormativity’ 126 homosexuality 129

hope 204–206; and possibility 33–35 Hornbrook, D. 17 Houlihan, Barry 180 Howe, N. 153, 157 Hughes, J. 113–114, 154 human agency 25, 29–30, 185, 206 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) 131–132 100 Shades of Grey (Ireland) 135 identity 19–20; defined 19; migration 92–93; nation 92–93 ‘identity well-being’ 19 ideologies of home 80; mythmaking place and 83–85 ideoscapes 5, 38, 47, 62, 125, 169, 182, 184, 200 Illich, I. 62 imagined communities 85–89 imagined worlds 5 The Immigrant (drama workshop) 97 indigenous knowledges, and environment 160–161 individualism 37–40, 42 inequity: agency 30; enduring 23–35; hope and possibility 33–35; overview 23–26; recognition and representation 29–30; releasing or entrenching the ‘other’ 27–28; voice and testimony 30–33 In Place of War project 109 Inside Talk project (UK) 44 Irish diaspora 7 Irish migration 7 ISIS/ISIL/Daesh 3, 95, 112–113 iterational dimension 189 Jackson, Shannon 54 Jeffers, A. 95 Jefferson, M. 68 Jennings, M. 121 Johns-Putra, A. 159 Jones, Holman 125 Jones, M. D. 155, 158 Jones, S. P. 163 joy 203–204 The Jungle (Murphy and Robertson) 100 Kane, Sarah 113–114 Kennedy, E. H. 163 Kershaw, Baz 21, 53, 154, 159, 205 Kertesz, Imre 111 Khoja-Moolji, S. 39 Kill Climate Deniers (Australia) 158–159, 161, 163

Index 235

Kitchen, Jennifer 57 Kuchner, Tony 54 Laffin, J. 161 Lambert, K. 72 Laurie, Hugh 53, 172 Lea, Graham 107 learning and education 20–21 LGBTIQ 18 LGBTIQ+ 125 liberal democracy 55–56 Life Drama project (Papua New Guinea) 131–132 Linds, W. 160 Lonergan, P. 173 love and care 207 Low, K. E. 133 Mackey, S. 83–85, 154, 155, 156, 157, 165 Macrae, S. 39 Madison, D. S. 10, 112 Maguire, M. 39 Manaton and East Dartmoor Theatre Company 162 Maples, H. 119 ‘material well-being’ 19 ‘McDonaldisation’ of education 63 McDonalds 82 McGrath, John 56–58 McIntyre, L. C. 172 McIvor, Charlotte 93, 103, 135 McKibben, B. 164 McKinnie, M. 120 mediascapes 5, 38, 169, 182, 184, 196, 200 The Mess Up Theatre Company 40 metaxis 27–28, 98, 131 #MeToo 129 Mignon, E. 129 migrants: drama for 100–102; illegal 7, 95; internal 94; Vietnamese 95 migration 13–14, 93–96; drama for migrants 100–102; dramatic comings and goings 90–105; exploring, through drama 96–99; and nation and identity 92–93; overview 90–92; portraying and representing 102–103; telling stories 102–103 Milk Crate Theatre Company 143 Ministerial council on Education, Employments, Training and Youth Affairs, Australia 66 Ministry of Education (MOE) Singapore 66 Miraftab, F. 199

Miranda, Lin-Manuel 54 Mische, A. 189 Montuori, A. 67 Moore, T. 98 Moriarty, G. 120–121 Morrison, Scott 195 Mouffe, C. 55–56, 58 Munday, I. 76 Murphy, Joe 100 Murray, N. 19 musings on ‘these times’ 4–8 Mussolini, Benito 111 mythmaking place and ideologies of home 83–85 narratives: decline of grand 39–42; embodied 205; master 158; participant 32; passively consuming historiographic 118; political narratives of nation states 94; public 31; shared 39 nation: identity 92–93; migration 92–93 National Holocaust Museum, Canada 118 National Socialism, Germany 55 National Theatre 100 Nazis 110 Neelands, Jonothan 9, 59, 86, 97–98, 99, 175, 185, 197, 204, 205 neo-Darwinism 39 neoliberalism: described 38–39; and drama interacting in these times 42–45; useful drama and 36–47 Netflix 203 ‘neutral mappings of fields’ 11 New Scientist 139 New World 7 Nichols, J. 107 Nicholson, H. 9, 58, 86, 154, 191 NMDHB Public Health Service 40 normality of democracy 50–51 Normans 7 Notes on an exodus (Flanagan) 95 NT Live initiative 169 Nussbaum, Martha 187 O’Casey, Seán 54 O’Connor, Peter 98, 104, 205 O’Neill, C. 155 O’Neill, Rory 128 optimism 205 Orbán, Viktor 111 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 63, 66 O’shaughnessy, S. 163

236  Index

‘other’: entrenching 27–28; releasing 27–28; and self 99, 102–103, 114, 168, 179 O’Toole, Fintan 93, 98 O’Toole, John 9 Oyelade, D. 66 Panti Bliss (Ireland) 128–129 Papua New Guinea (PNG) 131–132 participating, as citizen 58–60 peace, drama of dealing with 119–122 performance: and politics 128–130; of self 15; and sex 128–130; of war and terror 112–114 PERMA model 139 Piazzoli, E. 101 Plato 18 play 203–204 Playhouse Theatre 100 pleasure 203–204 Plunkett, James 128 Police Service of Northern Ireland 121 politics: of framing 19; of ownership 40; and performance 128–130; and sex 128–130 portraying migration in drama 102–103 possibility and hope 33–35 post-conflict Ireland 119 Postman, N. 62, 199–200 post-normality 15, 53, 63, 113, 155, 172, 183–185, 188, 194 Pot Gan production 162 Prendergast, M. 119 Prentki, Tim 58 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 63 projective dimension 189 Prospero 176–177 publicly performed queer identities 129 public performance of sex and sexuality 125–128 Putin, Vladimir 3 ‘Queer terror’ 125 Quigley, C. 130 Rae, P. 32, 129 Rankin, Scott 144 recognition and representation 29–30 reflexive spaces for engaging democratic paradox 53–56 Renaissance 82 representation: and migration in drama 102–103; recognition and 29–30 Republic of Ireland 7, 24, 119–120

resistance, drama of 109–110 Rethinking Schools magazine 160 RiDE 103, 154–155 The Risen People (Plunkett) 128 Robertson, Joe 4, 80, 81, 83–84, 97, 100 Rodricks, D. J. 198, 207 Rosa, Hartmut 170–171 Rousseau, J.-J. 146, 194 Royal Ulster Constabulary 121 Sabre-Tooth Curriculum (Benjamin) 62 Sahlberg, P. 64 Saraki, Bukola 66 Sardar, Z. 155, 183–184, 188, 190 Saunders, John Nicholas 73 scape, defined 5 Schechner, R. 130 schistosomiasis 144–146 Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 144 schizoanalysis 10 The School Drama Book 73 School Drama program, Sydney, Australia 73–74 Schrek, Heidi 48 second Iraq war 112 self: and ‘other’ 99, 102–103, 114, 168, 179; performance of 15; social 75 Sennett, R. 52–53 sex: drama about 130–135; pedagogy and efficacy 130–135; and performance 128–130; and politics 128–130 sex and sexuality 14, 124–136; celebration and identity 125–128; drama about sex 130–135; drama of 124–136; overview 124–125; and performance 128–130; and politics 128–130; public performance of 125–128; sex, performance and politics 128–130 sexually transmitted illnesses (STIs) 131–132 ‘sexual scripts’ 135 Shakespeare, William 111 Shakespeare Schools Foundation 57 Shaughnessy, N. 154 Shaun Tan 97 Shu, J. 134 Skype 167 Sloan, C. 187, 189, 190, 204, 205 ‘slut-shaming’ 135 Smith, P. 153, 157 Snyder-Young, D. 32, 59–60, 86 social acceleration 170–172 social capital 25

Index 237

social drama 88, 157 ‘social hope’ 33 social justice 17–21; and community 85; Fraser’s conceptualisation of 198; and migration 92; and and wellbeing 138 social media 158, 167, 173, 178, 195 ‘social self’ 75 social turn 25, 54, 120 Soros, George 111 Spider-Man 184 Spivak, G. C. 49–50, 153, 160 Spotify 167 Starbucks 82 Stinson, M. 98, 101 storytelling 6, 32, 53; digital 172, 175; of identities 92; performance and 80, 93; role in climate change 157–161 Strangers at our door (Bauman) 95 ‘superficial-deficit model’ 65 Sutton, Paul 176, 177 Sweeney, J. A. 184 Sydney Mardi Gras Festival 125–126 Sydney Theatre Company 73 syllabus and policy discourses 66–69 Syrian conflict 112

Thunberg, Greta 194, 200 Tilting at Windmills 163 Time Machine project 186–187, 191 toxic masculinity 135 Trump, Donald J. 3, 48, 95, 111 Turkey: democratic crisis in 3; and refugees 95 Twitter 49

Taliban 106 Taylor, C. 30 Teaching as a subversive activity (Postman and Weingartner) 62 technoscapes 5, 168–170 terror, performance of 112–114 ‘testimonial cultures’ 31 testimony and voice 30–33 Theatre-in-Education 176 Theatre & migration (Cox) 103 theatre of battle: drama healing wounded of war 106–108; drama inciting war 110–112; drama intervening and disrupting war 114–117; drama of dealing with peace 119–122; drama of resistance 109–110; drama remembering and commemorating war 117–118; performance of war and terror 112–114 Theatre of the Oppressed 15, 32, 134, 205 Theatre science 144 theatrum mundi 52 There is no Sorrow (Crichton Smith) 104–105 This is Camp X-Ray 82, 84 Thompson, James 92, 110, 111, 114, 116, 203, 204

Van Hellemont, E. 80 Veterans’ Transition Program (VTP) 107 Vic, Young 100 Vikings 7 Vodafone 40 voice: promoting 31; and testimony 30–33

UK Parliamentary report (2017) 142, 147 UNHCR 102 UNICEF 132 United Nations (UN) 63; drive for standardised tests 65 The University of Sydney 73 UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) 106 useful drama in neoliberal times 36–47; decline of grand narratives 39–42; drama and governmentality 45–46; individuals matters, focus on 39–42; neoliberalism, described 38–39; neoliberalism and drama interacting in these times 42–45; overview 36–38

#WakingTheFeminists controversy 24 Wang, Wan-Jung 87–89, 155 war: drama healing the wounded of 106–108; drama inciting 110–112; drama intervening and disrupting 114–117; drama remembering and commemorating 117–118; performance of 112–114 Watson, D. 37 Weare, K. 138 The Wedding Community Play Project 121 Weingartner, C. 62 wellbeing 14; care and 141, 148–149; defined 138; drama addressing social determinants of 141; see also health West, Cornell 205 West, Mae 126 Westwood, Marv 107 Wiles, David 52–53 William, Raymond 171

238  Index

Williams, R. 52, 53, 180 Wills, S. 199 Winston, Joe 49, 54, 58, 101, 203 World Health Organisation (WHO) 138, 140, 141, 146 World War 119 Woynarski, L. 155, 160 Wrapped in Grief Holocaust memorial project 117

Yousafzai, Malala 200 youth 15; role as hope 194–196; role as problem 194–196; role in drama 193–200 Zatzman, Belarie 117–118 Zinn Education Project 160 Zoom 167, 179, 201–202