SEEING SITES: DRAMATIC IMAGES AS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SOCIAL WORLD

…culture is conflict over meaning—over how to assign value to human existence, expression, experience. [1]

Drama is a visual art form. It offers mobile three-dimensional images of human action for contemplation by spectators in acts of theatre. In common with other art forms, the raison d'être of Drama is to enable critical interpretations of our social world. It exists to turn statements into questions. As such, Drama practices are increasingly used in nonformal contexts worldwide in pursuit of social and educational objectives [2]. Movements and practices associated with Community Drama and Theatre for Development have engaged with, and adapted the insights of theorists and practitioners working in critical pedagogy. Just as Susan Bennett observes…

With so much theatre activity operating outside recognised cultural institutions, the boundaries of culture are undoubtedly challenged. The feedback of non-traditional audiences has changed, above all else, the product which we recognise as theatre. [3]

…so is it equally true that the experiences of working with voiceless groups has changed forever our notions of what constitutes Drama pedagogy. This shift is evident in the work of the Philippines Educational Theatre Association, the Nigerian Popular Theatre Alliance, the work of the late Rose Mbowa in Uganda, and aspects of the programme of Wet Paint Arts, in Dublin. These examples illustrate the fertility of sites of struggle for citizenship rights as locations for the development of the art form. Drama is an art form which is a social process, and this fact interacts with its nature as a visual art form in which the performing body is central. These interactions produce fundamental challenges to established academic arrangements which dominate existing formal curricular provision in this country. They also announce important new opportunities around experiential learning, valuing and using vernacular knowledge and beliefs, and critical engagement with the social world.

The rate and complexity of change in our world, characterised by Richard Kearney as "the civilisation of the image" is extraordinary. It has produced a feeling not only of physical and psychic flux, but of moral disorientation, even collapse. Andy Hargreaves comments:

Where people are surrounded by a plethora of images, this can create dramatic spectacles but also moral and political superficiality; aesthetic attractiveness, but also ethical emptiness…images are everywhere…reality tries to live up to its images, becomes suffused with images, and may be indistinguishable from its images…[4]

In the light of these circumstances, a pedagogy which can simply, and radically involve learning groups in the production and critique of their own images becomes a cultural necessity, a human imperative.

Drama is fictional, and it is flexible. Grounded in a re-appropriation of these core facts, Brecht developed a semiotic theatre practice [5]. Such theatre acknowledges a lack of correspondence between what is seen and heard and what it purports to represent. It sets out to explore the spaces opened up by this radical destabilisation of Dramatic representation. Illusionist theatre, with its carefully faked verisimilitude, involves readers in their own disempowerment. Coleridge's canonical remark that theatre involves "the suspension of disbelief" institutionalises audience passivity in the face of the authoritative lie. Brecht's theatre, and practices which extend and develop it, places before its audiences the fact that what they are witnessing is a representation of reality. Audiences are invited to engage with Awam Amkpa's insight that "there is no act of representation which is not also an act of interpretation" [6]. Addressed as critical interpreters of theatrical representations, spectators are inspired in their hermeneutic task by the realisation that the images presented to them are in themselves the results of interpretive practices. Anti-illusionism exposes the aesthetic device, and as its revealed social function is critiqued, the possibility of resistant and transformative practices is made manifest.

The audience in anti-illusionist theatre, in its interrogation of the imagery it permits to exist, is actually involved in the creation of belief. Drawing on this understanding of audience, Drama pedagogy reverses the Romantic project of creating art as a means of withdrawal from an unpleasant reality, of making the world go away. Drama pedagogy is a means of drawing the world near, by interrogating created fictions the better to know it and transform it. Drama is the art form in which the fact of the contingency of representations may be made most evident. As such, it is well placed to enable engagement with the politics of representation. The liberal academy is profoundly uneasy at the thought of cultural politics. The materiality of imagery in the social order is vigorously denied, in strategies such as the invocation of the transcendent nature of art, and the ideology of universals. Policy makers tend to hold quite firmly to such distinctions, and to deny curricular space to anything too contemporaneous, too close to issues and events in which learners have an actual stake. It is extremely unlikely that a real commitment to providing learning opportunities of the kind envisaged here will spontaneously emerge.

In addition to the unacknowledged assumptions regarding knowledge and the world which inform the very fabric of educational bureaucracy, there are stark systemic problems to be overcome. One such is the very real fear of curriculum overload. Even if the case for an experiential Drama pedagogy were to be accepted, the secondary-school timetable as it is currently structured in the Republic of Ireland, would have difficulty accommodating another subject. This draws attention to the need to embrace interdisciplinarity, and to pilot new ways of organising knowledge, evaluating and accrediting achievement [7].

How we perceive the nature of Drama has profound consequences for what we allow the subject to become and for the kinds of opportunities we are prepared to make available to learners. The following script of an actual conversation opens up questions around the politics of knowledge in the liberal academy:

Scene: The senior common room in a university, somewhere in Britain.

Time: 1990; a Spring afternoon. Tea is being served.

Dramatis personae: Professor of English; Head of Drama

Professor of English: I say, I've been pondering why the college needs your department, when we look after your subject perfectly well…

Head of Drama: And have you reached a conclusion?

Professor of English: Well, yes. I have. Take Shakespeare, for instance. You see, we both read Shakespeare. The difference is that you walk around while you're reading it.

Literary studies introduces and canonises Dramatic Literature. For reasons of misrecognition, or administrative convenience, some courses which are styled Drama Studies choose to endorse this construct. To the extent that they do, they reinscribe a fundamental denial of the artform itself. The question of the text is central to this context. Literary Studies accepts the novel, the poem, the story as texts for study. Dramatic Literature is seen as another source of stable, authored texts [8], which are acknowledged with varying degrees of enthusiasm as having another life in the theatre. Drama Studies must proceed from the insight that playwrights produce scripts, which are pre-textual. Pre-texts are then worked collaboratively into physical manifestations, and achieve textuality with audiences, in acts of theatre.

To illustrate the differences which arise from these orientations, consider the case of Dermot Bolger's The Lament for Arthur Cleary [9]. For a Dramatic Literature course, this is a problematic text. Because of the intimate involvement of David Byrne and Wet Paint Arts in creating the theatrical text, the record of which was published, Dramatic Literature is frustrated in a key concern: there is no ‘satisfactory' author [10]. This does not arise in Drama Studies. The dynamics of the collaboration in question are fully understood as the nature of the work, not as an aberration which raises awkward questions around ownership and individual genius. The distinctions involved here are of great importance. The contest reiterates the battles fought around literary theory in university departments over the past 25 years or so. Scholars engaging with instabilities in the nature of the literary text had to confront the literary canon. In so doing, they came face to face with the pedagogical modes which serve the canon. It was often at this moment that academics began to acknowledge that pedagogy itself is an act of cultural production. In the light of poststructuralist commitments to embracing difference, the necessity to democratise knowledge became paramount [11]. Demystifying authorship, in tandem with a commitment to experiential learning, enables learners to experience creative autonomy in their collaborative working processes.

Drama is a visual art form. It can only be travestied if domesticated as a subset of Literature. In proposing a curriculum, there is a primary need to recognise that experiences which set out to enable understanding of the world through the lens of Drama are different from other experiences and offer something unique to learners. The centre of the practice is the dramatic image, which offers a concrete actuality to be scrutinised. Dramatic images are simply constructed, and are available to young children and postgraduates alike, as intellectually respectable points of departure from which to interrogate theme and art form. Newly formed, the image is uniquely the concern, the property and the project of the learning group. The dramatic image includes and makes available all the dynamics of theatre. Mute, it includes language. Still, it implies movement. It focuses overtly on dramatic action, the focus of meaning-making for both performers and audiences. The radical power of the dramatic image is in its status as a to-be-completed dramatic text. The opportunity/problem of completion is uniquely that of the learning group.

In discussing textuality, we return to the paradigm of theatre interaction, the site of textual production in Drama. The extent to which rich enabling experiences actually come into being in moments of textuality depends to a great extent on audience stances in relation to reading dramatic texts. Susan Bennett's comments should be recalled. The co-ordinates of the teacher/learner/content relationship are provided by the semiotic theatre practice of Brecht, the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky. Learners are positioned here as practitioners of the art form, problem solvers and cultural workers [12]. In experiential learning in Drama, students are positioned as those who create and perceive meaning and offer critical readings as to its representations. Meaning is not unitary. The pedagogical tactic of acknowledging and exploring a range of meaning acknowledges difference, multiplicity and contradiction, and opens the site of learning to diverse voices. There is a strategic acknowledgement that in the movement from intention to communication there will be slippages where unintended meaning produces textual instabilities. Experiential Drama pedagogy envisages a practice in which action and reflection are fully engaged: a praxis in which content is experienced, critiqued, more fully experienced and more insightfully critiqued, in a dialectical dynamic. There is no reductive distinction between theory and practice. Embodied experience informs, and is informed by critical reflection, before, during and after the event.

The suggestion that Drama is primarily a visual art form enables a radical rethinking of the relationship of spoken language to visual material in dramatic communication. Pedagogical practices arising from this enable narrative meaning to be shown in the process of construction. In the classroom, studio or rehearsal room, the production and critical reception of images offers the conditions in which the dynamics within and between practices of interpretation may be revealed. In so doing, the practical and ethical contestations involved in practices of representation may be addressed. The processes of demystification thus mobilised enable learning groups to grapple with complex questions of social and cultural significance. In this respect, the re-imagining of Drama as a visual artform liberates both the form itself and the knowledge which it makes available.

[1] Ben Agger, Cultural Studies as Critical Theory, Falmer, 1992, p 10
[2] See T. Prentki, The Empire Strikes Back: the relevance of theatre for development in Africa and South-East Asia to community drama in the U.K., in Research in Drama Education, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1996, pp. 33-49
[3] S. Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (Routledge 1990), p. 182
[4] A. Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers' work and culture in the postmodern age, Cassell, 1994, p. 77
[5] See J. Schulte-Sasse, On the Difference between a Mimetic and a Semiotic Theory of the Modern Drama; foreword to p. Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, Polity, 1987, pp. vii-xvi
[6] A. Amkpa, in conversation with the author
[7] This argument is developed in detail in V. Merriman, Education in the Arts: an entitlement for young Irish people (paper to conference of the Art Teachers' Asssociation, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993.
[8] N. McMonagle, writing on the new Leaving Certificate English syllabus, lists a series of literary texts, including novels, nonfiction, "and Frank McGuinness's play Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" in an article entitled Shiny new texts and new ideas… (The Irish Times, Weekend, June 26, 1999, p. 9).
[9] Bolger, D., The Lament for Arthur Cleary in A Dublin Quartet, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, pp.11-68
[10] Christopher Murray exemplifies this position: "A Dublin Quartet (Penguin, 1992) contains The Lament for Arthur Cleary, The Tramway End (two monologues), and One Last White Horse. All of these were directed by David Byrne, to whom the volume is dedicated, "with thanks," as well it might be. Who is to estimate what the contribution of the director and players was to these four plays? The situation mirrors the insoluble problem surrounding The Hostage: Where does Theatre Workshop leave off and Behan begin?" C. Murray, Not Blinded By The Light, Theatre Ireland, No. 29, Autumn 1992
[11] Agger argues: "Conformist concepts of culture stress the common sharing of values and meanings. Cultural studies proponents tend to emphasise the lack of consensus about common values, stressing the conflictual nature of values and meanings in capitalist, racist and sexist societies. They add that these conflicts are powerful initiators as well as symptoms of social change, not to be dispelled or suppressed." (Agger, B., op. cit., p. 10)
[12] See West, C., The New Cultural Politics of Difference, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R. Ferguson et al., p. 17: "…a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference…(which) acknowledges some discontinuity and disruption from previous forms of cultural critique."

Victor Merriman is Head of Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

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