Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education: Theatre, Literature and Philosophy 9781350026711, 9781350026742, 9781350026728

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Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Applied Theatre: Aesthetics, edited by Gareth White Dramatic Interactions in Education, edited by Susan Davis, Beth Ferholt, Hannah Grainger Clemson, Satu-Mari Jansson and Ana Marjanovic-Shane How Drama Activates Learning, edited by Michael Anderson and Julie Dunn MasterClass in Drama Education, Michael Anderson Mindful Aesthetics, edited by Chris Danta and Helen Groth Theatre, Performance and Cognition, edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook

Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education Theatre, Literature and Philosophy Matthew DeCoursey

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA   BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc   First published in Great Britain 2019   Copyright © Matthew DeCoursey, 2019   Matthew DeCoursey has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.   All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.   A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.   A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.   ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2671-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-2672-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-2673-5   Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India   To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Aesthetics, Ethics and Education: Dewey and Rancière 2 Aesthetic Experience and Learning 3 Drama Education and Emancipation 4 Drama Education and Curricular Learning 5 The Aesthetic as Intrinsic Motivation 6 Double Noesis, Metaxis and Learning 7 Dramatic Tension Conclusion Works Cited Index

viii x 1 15 37 63 95 119 135 161 175 187 197

Acknowledgements This project was conceived and developed at the Education University of Hong Kong, where I  have taught drama, drama education, literature and French for fourteen years. Central parts of this book were written in the course of a six-month sabbatical leave from the Faculty of Humanities of my university. I spent six weeks of that sabbatical at the Centre for Education Studies of the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. Many people directly advised me on the formulation of this project, including Jae Park and Joe Winston. Others, such as Jeffrey Clapp and Savio Wong, advised me on particular parts of this book. I  benefited from less formal discussions on related issues with Bidisha Banerjee and Michael O’Sullivan. I am grateful to Rachel King of the University of Warwick for the experience of her course on creativity in drama education and to the guest lecturers who did sessions in that course, including Jonothan Neelands, Joe Winston and Jo Trowsdale. I  also had productive discussions with the students of the master’s programme in drama education during my stay there. I changed fields some ten years ago. My initial research field was literature, and I changed over to drama education, enlisting a decade of experience of drama by that time to guide my reading, orienting me in a new research field. I am grateful that it was then possible to do this without being let go for insufficient productivity in research. Gary Barkhuizen and John Trent helped me to learn about qualitative research (which turned out to have much in common with literary criticism), and Sivanes Phillipson worked with me on my first research project in drama education. I benefited from workshops and research papers at drama education conferences, including those of the Singapore Drama Educators Association, the International Drama Theatre and Education Association, the International Drama in Education Research Institute and the Hong Kong Drama/Theatre and Education Forum. The only way to bring the disparate elements of drama, theatre, literature and education together was through philosophy. In the world of aesthetics, particularly through the European Society for Aesthetics and the Dubrovnik Conference on Philosophy of Art, I now have fast friendships and strong professional relationships with several people, especially including Iris Vidmar of the University of Rijeka, Croatia. Philosophers of art have turned out

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to be very open people, ready to discuss any idea that seems interesting, with no regard for credentialism or disciplinary origins. Three people read half or more of this book in the course of writing: Michael Fleming (Durham), Iris Vidmar and my former student Cora Lingling Xu, now of Keele University. All errors of fact and emphasis are of course my responsibility, but there would have been far more of these without the help of these friends and allies. Mike Fleming gave me perspective on how my points relate to the field of drama education and suggested what might be emphasized more and what passed over more quickly. Parts of the book were written while staying in the houses of Elaine DeCoursey and Murray Gallant, Michael Bietenholz and Susan Conley, and Bill and Inger DeCoursey. I owe a debt to Camilla Erskine, who was the first person at Bloomsbury to believe in this project. I would also like to thank the copy editor for Bloomsbury Press at Newgen, Smitha, and the project manager, Kalyani. Finally, I  must thank the hundreds of students I  worked with in drama courses and productions, in Turkey, Taiwan, Bulgaria and Hong Kong. On the productions, I travelled much of the way with my dear friend and collaborator Michelle Reyes Raquel. The photograph of the Laokoon group that appears here as a frontispiece is © the Vatican Museums and is reproduced with kind permission. A version of Chapter 5 was previously published as ‘The Aesthetic as Intrinsic Motivation: The Heart of Drama for Language Education’ (2016) in the Journal of Aesthetic Education 50 (3): 13–26. It appears here by kind permission of the Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Abbreviations EW

John Dewey (1967–72), The Early Works, 1882–1898, Jo Ann Boydston, ed., Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

GANA1

Augusto Boal (1992), Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 1st edn, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.

GANA2

Augusto Boal ([1992] 2002), Games for Actors and Non-Actors, 2nd edn, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.

LW

John Dewey (1981–90), The Later Works, 1925–1953, Jo Ann Boydston, ed., Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

MW

John Dewey (1976–88), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, Jo Ann Boydston and Sidney Hook, eds, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.

RD

Augusto Boal (1995), The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, trans. Adrian Jackson, London: Routledge.

TO

Augusto Boal ([1974] 2000), Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer, London: Pluto Press.

TTDiE

Gavin Bolton (1979), Towards a Theory of Drama in Education, Harlow, UK: Longman.

Introduction

Drama education offers something particular to teachers and learners. When it goes well, it is exciting. It stimulates the imagination. It builds motivation. Claims have been made about its particular power to transform the lives of learners. They learn to see things and think about things differently. It is claimed that drama education builds ethical understanding and allows for freer and more effective thinking. The particularities of drama education partially overlap with other arts education. Perhaps the particularity has to do with aesthetic experience, with building creativity and with the kind of cognitive development claimed for music education. Perhaps the particularity of drama education has to do with the status of drama as an art. This book will examine recent developments in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. (I phrase this carefully because the two are sometimes identified and sometimes separated.) The basis of what will follow lies in philosophical reflection on the psychology and neuroscience of attention. I will treat the experience of drama in the first instance as a special way of experiencing the world. Of course the participants in drama are also active. They do things. I will argue that recent advances in our understanding of the relation between cognition and the body connect action with perception very closely, such that this is not the problem it might seem. For me, aesthetic experience such as an audience member might have at the theatre is closely connected with the experience of creating dramatic art, whether with or without an audience. By taking this approach, I  will be able to build a unified understanding of drama education. Many previous theoretical writings on drama education have suffered from a certain limitation of scope, making claims for particular kinds of drama education, such as process drama or forum theatre. This book will take in not only these two but also scripted theatre, which I regard as a valid and important element of drama education. This last statement has sometimes

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been denied in drama education, as we shall see in Chapter 3, and where it is not denied, scripted theatre may be nonetheless neglected. From the beginning, the goals of drama education were quite lofty. Drama would not only produce practical skills or the knowledge of a particular subject area. It would also make students motivated, self-reliant and independent in their search for the truth. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmond Holmes said it would teach them mostly Christian virtues such as ‘tolerance . . . compassion . . . charity and . . . sympathy’ (Bolton 1999, 14). Drama would not be just a means of communicating knowledge to students. It would be a way of shaping their personalities so that they would be good people and good citizens. This tendency was both the cause and the result of the alliance between Drama Education and Progressive Education. In 1917, the pioneering educator Henry Caldwell Cook explicitly connected the use of drama with the development of democracy, and Gavin Bolton suggests that he was influenced in this by John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916 (MW 9); Bolton 1999, 8). As time went on, the goals of drama education did not become any less lofty, but they changed in nature. The very influential Marxist educator Augusto Boal claimed that drama could make people aware of the oppression in their social situation, and improvised theatre could be ‘rehearsal for the revolution’ (TO, 122). Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin Bolton saw drama education, in part, as something that could poison prejudice and lead to greater social understanding. Sometimes, drama educators have looked to philosophy to formulate their goals, and sometimes also to understand the means by which they might reach their goals. Two philosophers are especially important for this book. John Dewey, with his emphasis on the autonomy of the learner and the development of democracy, has been a perennial in this regard. References to Dewey can still be found in publications on drama education (DeCoursey 2016). Dewey also presented a vision of aesthetics in his book Art as Experience (1934; LW, 10). His aesthetics, while obviously relevant to drama education, has not been widely influential in the field, and he himself did not relate his aesthetics very closely to his views of education. In the last ten years, some writers on drama education have turned to Jacques Rancière, a philosopher influential over a wide range of education. In his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1987] 1991), he proposes a radical rejection of explanation, which he thinks results in ‘stultification’. In place of explanation, he proposes that students should use their own resources to solve problems set by their teacher, who does not in the traditional sense teach them anything at all. He also gives a special place to aesthetics in his understanding both of education and of politics. The most exciting of his ideas for drama

Introduction

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educators has been his notion that art may produce a new ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible). He suggests that the experience of art may allow the participant to divide up reality differently such that social life and politics may change. Social divisions may be reformulated with creative thought so as to produce a more just society. These two philosophers offer the possibility of relating a vision of the purposes of education to the notion of aesthetics, and the comparison of the two makes up the first chapter of this book. Dewey’s aesthetics has recently undergone a revival in the intellectual movement known as ‘embodied cognition’, a central aspect of ‘neuropragmatism’, which will be an important part of the philosophical grounding of this book. The idea of ‘aesthetics’ has had a particular functional place in drama education, especially where drama is viewed as a means to teach other material. A  drama educator may well be asked, ‘Why should anyone use your oddly indirect methods, when we can just explain the material to students, and then ask them to do exercises? Or, where issues are controversial, why not just have a discussion? How does pretending to be a fictional character help learn anything at all?’ The answer has tended to be that drama, as an art, has a different impact on the mind, body and emotions of students from explanation and, in significant ways, is superior. Drama is viewed as engaging students not as disembodied thinking machines but as emotional and bodily creatures, capable of imagining as well as reasoning. In the field, ‘aesthetics’ has come to be shorthand for ‘whatever it is about drama that sometimes produces a better experience or more effective learning than mere explanation or discussion’. It is then a kind of black box, but what is in the box? The use of the term ‘aesthetics’ throws us back onto a vast, complicated discussion beginning when the term was coined in the middle of the eighteenth century, flowing through the alternately enlightening and baleful influence of Kant, through industrialization and through the ideological storms of modernism, up to the present day. This introduction will use some of that history to frame the project of this book. Immanuel Kant ([1790] 2000) laid down the terms of reference for discussions of aesthetics for the centuries since his time. Even today, many philosophers turn to Kant, if not for answers, at least for ways of framing questions. Paul Guyer (2017) has recently set out to classify the questions arising from Kant that recent philosophers have used to formulate their questions in aesthetics. Here, I will set out two of his four categories – the most relevant to the problems of drama education. First, Kant claims that aesthetic ‘judgement of taste’ is subjective but, nonetheless, makes a claim to universality. According to him, it is senseless to say that something is ‘beautiful to me’. If we believe that something is beautiful,

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then we believe that everyone should see it as beautiful. A genuine perception of the beautiful is a genuine perception of something universal, relevant to all of humanity. At the same time, it is unlike reason, in that we cannot set out the steps involved publicly. Our inner, intuitive perception is all there is. We have just such a problem with drama education. Each participant in a drama activity, actor in a play or member of an audience has a subjective experience of the dramatic event, and yet such experiences must come together somehow if the experience is to be interpersonally relevant, justifiably present in the curriculum of an educational institution or subsidized by public grants. Kant’s formulation of the precondition of aesthetic experience is, famously, ‘disinterested contemplation’. ‘Disinterested’ means, roughly, that all that cannot be universalized must be excluded from the field of attention. Thus, if I love a picture of my mother, my pleasure in the picture may not be aesthetic because it depends on my relation to the person depicted. Equally, if I  own a Rembrandt and take pleasure in its great value, this response is not from aesthetic experience either, because my pleasure has to do with the possibility of personal gain. ‘Disinterested contemplation’ may well be interpreted as excluding the use of aesthetic experience to serve a practical purpose such as education. This objection will be dealt with in Chapters  2 and  5.  Kant takes it that ‘disinterestedness’ excludes emotional response. This book holds that emotional response is fundamental to aesthetic experience, and this view will be justified beginning in Chapter 2. Second, Kant takes a position on the cognitive result of aesthetic experience. He calls this cognitive response ‘the free play of imagination and understanding’ (Kant [1790] 2000, 76–7). Kant points here to a living question, also relevant to the use of drama in education: how does the experience of art stimulate our intellectual and imaginative capacities? Kant tells us that the distinctive thing about this cognitive state is that it is not subordinated to concepts. In explicit reasoning, we move from one reasonably distinct concept to another. A simple example is a syllogism: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. That kind of explicit reasoning had been discussed by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason. This way of thinking about the world, bound by concepts, is what he called ‘understanding’. When we look at an object in the world, such as a cat, we recognize it as a cat, and that recognition allows us to reason upon cats in certain important ways. But for aesthetic experience, we need to go beyond the semantic definability of the cat to something further, something not dependent upon concepts. This idea is also important for drama education, because if true, it establishes something distinctive about such artistic activities as drama, something not normally

Introduction

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included in curricular materials, conventionally taught. Conventional teaching gives the student only concept-bound mental activity. If drama gives something further, and this ‘something’ has value in life, then drama, along with other arts education, has an important place in the curriculum. In this book, I will construe drama as, in its essence, working on something beyond what is definable in language, and I  will use recent neuroscience and philosophy to support that position. As Guyer points out (2017, 357), one of the features of free play is a motivation to continue with the same experience:  there is a kind of feedback loop. We have an experience of pleasure in this free play, and we are thereby motivated to continue the same experience. This aspect of aesthetic experience is important to education, because it supplies motivation to learn. In Chapter 5, I will characterize aesthetic experience as tightly bound up in education with intrinsic motivation. In my title, I  have connected aesthetics with embodiment. Through the idea of embodiment, I believe, we can resolve some of the questions above for ourselves in a way that will be useful for doing drama education. What, then, is embodiment in the context of education? The notion arises from two major intellectual currents in our time. One lies in what is called ‘embodied cognition’. This movement exists in the space between psychology and philosophy. The philosopher Mark Johnson and the linguist George Lakoff came to prominence in the 1980s with their work on metaphor. Their book Metaphors We Live By (1980) suggested that metaphors do not only recognize existing meaning but also create it. In subsequent work, they came to believe that certain common experiences of all human beings structure our way of thinking. For example, nearly all human beings can walk from point A to point B. That is why we find it natural to speak of time using the same imagery. Through a series of books, they, and subsequently others, have built up a system of ideas suggesting that most if not all of our abstract thought is in fact the result of bodily experience, and that, as they put it (following neuroscientists), we ‘recruit’ cognitive structures that arise from bodily experience for the purpose of abstract thought. Mark Johnson, in The Meaning of the Body (2007), proposes a connection between embodied cognition and emotion, and a special place, based on embodiment, for aesthetics and art, and he favours the aesthetics of Dewey. The other intellectual current lies in the connection between neuroscience and psychology, though certainly with an awareness of philosophy too. In 1994, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio published Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. The ‘error’ in question is the sharp distinction, identified with Descartes, between emotion and reason. On the basis of empirical

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evidence, Damasio proposes what he calls the ‘somatic marker hypothesis’. He suggests that emotion does not merely accompany cognition but makes up a central part of it. He believes that when we have an emotional response to something, the organism ‘marks’ it as potentially important to survival. That marker has to do with the brain’s awareness of the rest of the body, and that is why we often feel our emotions in parts of our bodies: hence ‘somatic’. Damasio suggests that learning that is separate from emotion, while possible, cannot affect our practical behaviour in life. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) have argued that this hypothesis is highly significant for education, and the former in particular has developed these ideas in the essays collected in Emotions, Learning and the Brain (2016). Damasio’s ideas are consistent with those of Joseph LeDoux (1996), who argues that there is an ‘emotional appraisal’ to stimuli, and that a ‘cognitive appraisal’ occurs more slowly. I find a basis for formulating these ideas in a useful way in the work of JeanMarie Schaeffer. In Beyond Speculation ([1996] 2015), he argues, convincingly in my view, for an aesthetics ‘without myths’. By that, he means an aesthetics based on what we know of the human body, emotions, cognition and perceptions. He argues for a separation between aesthetics and theory of art, such that aesthetics can be seen as a significant aspect of human experience, not only of art but beyond art. In L’Expérience esthétique (2015), Schaeffer seeks to ground his view of aesthetic experience on the psychology and neuroscience of attention. For me, Schaeffer succeeds in disentangling the notion of aesthetic experience from some of the bad effects of the philosophical heritage: aesthetic experience may be seen not as exalted or metaphysical but as a category of human experience with important characteristics for education. Schaeffer divides aesthetic experience into three conceptual moments of a single experience:  distributed attention, emotional response and pleasure in this process. For him, a paradigmatic aesthetic experience begins with a certain way of paying attention to the world:  not purposeful in the sense of seeking something particular but seeking experience for its own sake. (Schaeffer speaks of a ‘pragmatic enclave’, a separation between the aesthetic experience and the practical aspects of life.) That way of paying attention leaves one open to emotion, and, very unlike Kant, Schaeffer views emotion as central to aesthetic experience. Finally, he discusses how it is that pleasure in aesthetic experience may be independent of the pleasure or displeasure of the emotions involved. I view this schema as well grounded at once in the philosophical tradition and in empirical evidence from neuroscience and psychology. It is practical for the purposes of understanding drama education, because it relates aesthetic

Introduction

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experience to elements under the influence of a teacher. Teachers constantly try to influence the way in which students pay attention. This scheme offers a frame for understanding the characteristics of drama education and other arts-related areas of education, such as the study of literature. The possibility of emotional response allows a connection with the ideas of Damasio and Immordino-Yang. If we can lead students to pay attention in a certain way, we may provide the conditions for emotional response, such that the material we are teaching will become memorable and may become ‘educated intuition’ as Immordino-Yang and Faeth (2010) suggest it should. Schaeffer tells us that the process is inherently pleasurable, even if the emotions involved are unpleasant. If this is right, then the schema sets out a way of conceptualizing the motivating potential of drama activities, which is one of the major reasons to use drama at all. Another issue that Schaeffer helps us with is more strictly philosophical: the relation between art and usefulness. R. G. Collingwood, disagreeing with Oscar Wilde, denies that art is necessarily useless, but remarks, ‘what makes it art is not the same as what makes it useful’ (Collingwood [1938] 1958, 32). By separating the mechanisms of aesthetic experience from the theory of art, Schaeffer makes us free to see variations. Even if an artwork per se is necessarily separated from usefulness, something analogous to an artwork may exist that calls upon aesthetic experience in a similar way but leads to increased knowledge and understanding. An artwork for education would be organized like an artwork, using, as Collingwood points out, the same mechanisms, but in terms of ultimate purposes seeking to improve lives in a direct way. A key characteristic of drama lies in the playing of roles, and the transformation of a real place (perhaps on a stage) into a different place (whether a living room or a battlefield). This interpenetration of real and imagined settings is called metaxis in drama education. Schaeffer does not deal with this kind of imaginative projection, because his book is about the experience of what is in the real world to be experienced and the results of that experience, not with the way objects and people may be refigured through imagination. The topic of drama requires me to go further, finding a place in this analytical schema for the projection of an imagined reality onto a physical setting that is, in itself, of quite a different nature. We shall see that in drama, participants, actors and audience members may all respond to an imagined reality much as Schaeffer has the human subject respond to something that is really there, though this statement must be qualified in various ways. Participants, actors and audience members always know that the imagined reality is imagined, and this observation has

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consequences too. An imagined reality is also, in a very significant way, under the control of the imaginer. Kant thought that the cognitive result of aesthetic experience was, as we have seen, ‘the free play of imagination and understanding’. This book will agree with him that there is a special cognitive activity resulting from aesthetic experience but, against Kant, will view it as deeply involved with emotion. It is, as Damasio suggests, the linking of emotion to experience that makes experience memorable and significant. The philosopher of art Jenefer Robinson develops a way of tracing the interaction between cognition (in the narrower sense of conceptual thought) and emotion in art. Her Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art (2005), partially developing the work of Joseph LeDoux, suggests a model for aesthetic experience. She argues that in any art form that develops through time, such as literature and music, an important experience is of what she calls ‘affective appraisal’. This is a version of LeDoux’s ‘emotional appraisal’. Once we have received the affective appraisal, we engage in ‘cognitive monitoring’. The initial appraisal is fast and powerful but may be inaccurate. The cognitive monitoring is slower but allows us to understand the reality of the situation. She argues convincingly that this process is central to aesthetic experience of literature and music. Robinson’s concern with literature will turn out to have much to say to discussions of drama, as the notion of embodied cognition allows us to highlight what is comparable. Branching out from Robinson, we shall find much other writing on literature and neuroscience of great help in accomplishing a parallel task for drama (Armstrong 2013; and once again Schaeffer 2015). Robinson shows that the interaction of emotion and cognition makes an important structuring device for literature and music, and we shall extend this principle to drama. If it is true, as Damasio suggests, that emotion creates memorability for experience, then an artwork like a novel, meant to provoke emotion, may produce memorable learning for the reader also. The concepts involved may gain in significance for the reader. And so may drama offer a special form of education for the participant as well as for the spectator. A considerable amount of writing has already sought to relate neuroscience to theatre (Blair 2008; Drinko 2013; Calvert 2016; Falletti, Sofia and Jacono 2016), but little of it takes philosophical writing into account. Yet philosophy has much to offer in terms of mediating the insights of different disciplines. We shall see in this book that philosophical works on theatre (Krasner and Saltz 2006; Hamilton 2007; Woodruff 2008; Zamir 2014) provide both clarification of questions and frames of reference for giving answers. Many philosophical writings quoted

Introduction

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here, however, are about literature. I  have found that there is a great deal of material in the philosophy of literature that is relevant to understanding the aesthetics of theatre, and it frequently fills in gaps in the as-yet fairly limited set of publications on the philosophy of theatre. Sometimes, my thinking about theatre has in its turn implications for understanding literature. That is why the subtitle of this book is ‘Theatre, Literature and Philosophy’. The model of aesthetics that grounds this book, then, will be built on the psychology of attention, the consequences of emotional experience and the possibility of creating emotional experience intentionally through imagination. Along the way, we will examine the consequences of mirror neurons in neuroscience for aesthetic experience not only of theatre but also of literature.

Defining the dramatic artwork for education I have identified ‘aesthetics’ as a key term for building a view of emotion and embodiment in education – but the term is notoriously slippery. I propose to deal with this issue by laying down a definition of the dramatic artwork for education. This definition must suit all the material set out above. It must be capable of being viewed in Rancière’s terms as leading to a new distribution of the sensible. It must be sensitive to issues of embodiment and emotion. It must be practical, in that it describes projects that may really be carried out in a classroom. Finally, it must find a place within the three-hundred-year tradition of philosophical aesthetics, for the issues raised by Rancière, Johnson and Robinson are not new. Here is my definition: A dramatic artwork for education is an activity or performance that, by means of aesthetic experience (understood as emotional and bodily as well as cognitive), significantly expands possibility in at least one life.

A number of things in this definition require clarification. I  write ‘activity or performance’ because I do not mean to exclude any part of drama education. An ‘activity’ in this context may be a large-group improvisation, whether in the tradition of Dorothy Heathcote or of Augusto Boal, or an incomplete scripted play with improvised audience participation at the end, in the tradition of Theatre in Education. ‘Performance’ should be viewed from both sides: I include both participation in performance, whether as cast or crew, and reception as audience member. The former might also be thought of as an ‘activity’, such that the overlap creates a spectrum rather than a pair of separate categories.

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The significance of playwriting in this context would be an interesting topic, but this book concerns drama as performed, whether script based or not. For the present, the writing of plays is excluded from consideration. ‘Aesthetic experience’ is problematic, of course. I  choose the category of ‘experience’ here because it effectively distinguishes drama education from ordinary classroom work. The experience of the regular classroom is often conceived as having to do with cognition alone, and cognition understood in a certain way. Students, by one means or another, learn to use conceptual tools to solve a range of problems, learning also factual material along the way. (This mode of education is involved with what Kant calls ‘understanding’.) Naturally, students do have emotions, but much conventional education treats them as if they had not. How can we distinguish a drama lesson from a regular lesson? It is not possible, or at least not economical, to do this by identifying methods and means of teaching. In a language lesson, we may ask students to deliver dialogues we have written for them, or we may ask them to improvise dialogue, as one does in ordinary life, but neither of these things would make the lesson into a drama lesson. In a lesson to do with ethics, we might ask students to simulate a morally problematic situation, perhaps standing over a fallen enemy considering whether to kill that person. But that simulation would still not be a drama lesson unless other requirements are met. The student standing over the enemy must enter imaginatively into the situation, imagine what it would be like to consider killing an enemy. The student must think about the emotional state of a person in that situation and perhaps also about the emotional situation of the potential victim. The physical environment of the classroom must be distanced in the minds of students, to be replaced by an imagined setting. These are the elements of dramatic tension, which comes into being by the construction of a fictional world. So also, drama in a language lesson would necessarily consist of identification with characters, emotional tension between characters. We would need dramatic tension in this case also. We will discuss the aesthetic status of dramatic tension later in the book. For now, let us specify that dramatic tension is a complex experience, one that affects both performers and audience members, and it connects imagination and emotion with cognition. This definition situates aesthetics, as an experience, within a dramatic artwork. The stress on dramatic tension, as we shall see, satisfies the demand from Robinson for affective appraisal. The existence of affective appraisal in the definition satisfies the demand from Johnson that emotions should be recognized as ‘a fundamental part of human meaning’ (2007, 67). Drama activities seek to do something meaningful, on the emotional and bodily terms set out by Johnson.

Introduction

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My definition requires that a dramatic artwork for education should ‘significantly expand possibility in at least one life’. This requirement is compatible with Rancière’s demand that the aesthetic should change the ‘distribution of the sensible’. It is the point of changing the distribution of the sensible to change lives. If the perceptions of participants and spectators are changed, then Rancière’s demand has been met. At the same time, however, as teachers, we cannot engage only with the grand project of building human dignity. We must also teach curricular materials. Students must become emancipated, yes, but they must also, in a language class, for instance, use particular words correctly and distinguish, in practice, between different verb tenses. Indeed, Rancière’s initial example, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1987] 1991), is of language learning:  Flemish students learning French. Rancière’s main attention goes to the relation between the teacher and the learners, but they were seeking to learn French in the first place because that would change their lives. One argument for drama as a teaching technique is exactly that it can alter, in a positive way, the relation between the teacher and the learner, in the course of teaching curricular materials. This requirement will be developed further in the course of the book. The development of emancipation is of course a very significant thing and may change lives a great deal. In the definition, ‘significantly’ is intentionally left open, to allow for a range of purposes. Significant expansion of possibility is very sensitive to particular cases: if one is teaching children with disabilities, significant change might be quite small by the standards of another context. In a single situation, there may be more than one point of view on what is significant. In a language classroom, the official goal is to teach language, and other educational goals may then appear as ‘insignificant’, but the teacher may still take satisfaction in creating the possibility of emancipation. Further, as we shall see in the conclusion, significance in the sense of possibility in life depends not only on what is close to the lesson but also on the overall social context. There are micro and macro factors. In the middle of the twentieth century, the threat of totalitarianism loomed large, and the desire to resist the domination of the government or of capitalist power was central to the purposes of educational reformers. In the conclusion of this book, I will suggest that times have changed, and that the problem now is for learners to gain the tools they need to build a strong identity. Drama can contribute not only to the expansion of possibility within the terms of existing structures of social life but can also build the significance of possibility. In the first instance, the words ‘for education’ have to do with the topic of this book. I am concerned here first with drama activities organized for the purposes

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of education, with the intention that someone should learn. At the same time, any artwork has an educative aspect. Anyone who is much involved with art of any kind can name ‘artworks that changed my life’. I hope, in this book, not only to discuss artworks intended for education but also to reveal a general aspect of all dramatic artworks. This definition may be used to discuss not only particular projects and performances but also kinds of projects and performances, as we shall do in this book. I do not intend to try to invalidate any currently existing practices or to argue that they do not constitute drama. Rather, I will examine the nature of the aesthetic experience involved in different kinds of drama activities and discuss potential impacts on learning.

The structure of this book We have seen that Rancière is important to drama teachers’ view of their function as teachers and that Mark Johnson has brought a renewed importance to the thought of John Dewey, with a new emphasis on his aesthetics. These are also the two philosophers most often quoted in current writings of drama practitioners. That is why Chapter 1 of this book will examine the two side by side, seeking to understand why they are sometimes quoted together in drama education articles and to see how they are philosophically distinct. We shall see that the two share a number of highly significant common values which harmonize with the practices of drama education. They differ in their views of the ultimate purposes of education and in the specifics of their aesthetics. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the new variant of Deweysim called neuropragmatism, centred on the writings of Mark Johnson. It will be suggested that Johnson’s conclusions have consequences for our conception of scripted theatre in relation to improvisation. Chapter  2 turns to the psychology of attention as relevant to aesthetic experience. (In fact, the relevant field has as much to do with neuroscience as psychology, but the end effects are psychological, and that is why I will use this term.) Indeed, the very notion of aesthetic experience requires consideration of attention. Taking recent philosophical reflections on this field of psychology from Jenefer Robinson, Paul B.  Armstrong (2013) and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2015), the chapter will show how a view of aesthetic experience may be built on this basis, incorporating emotion as important at once to attention and to cognition. The chapter will use the figures of four walks in the woods, ways of

Introduction

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paying attention to a person’s environment as providing a model of receptivity, emotional response and imaginative projection in a wider range of contexts. We shall see that the psychology of attention allows us to establish comparability between the experience of the audience and the experience of the actor. In order genuinely to be education, the change of perception cannot be momentary. If the learner sees things differently during an activity but entirely reverts to a previous way of seeing when the activity is over, no education, at least in the usual sense, has taken place. We know very little about the process of becoming permanent in changes of perception, but the chapter will end with a consideration of what is involved. Chapter  3 examines the notion that drama education can provide benefits in a very broad way, bringing more well-being to participants and, ideally, more justice to society. The starting point, drawn from Rancière, is the notion of emancipation. The chapter will compare the views of two theorists of drama education, Augusto Boal and Gavin Bolton, with those of a philosopher of theatre, Tzachi Zamir. All three, in one way or another, make emancipation important to their view of drama, and their ways of understanding this idea turn out to have important similarities. For all of them, one means of achieving emancipation is reflexivity, the ability of the actor or the participant to experience and reflect upon experience at the same time. Their dissimilarities are also notable. They take very different views of conventional scripted theatre, and each sees agency in artistic creation in a different way. I seek to account for the disparities, while emphasizing a certain consensus among them. Chapter  4 turns to drama as a means of teaching curricular materials. Different disciplines will be seen to relate differently to drama. History has intrinsic drama in the subject material itself. Literature often has intrinsic drama but also has its own ways of dealing with that dramatic quality. Science is undramatic, but drama can teach the significance of the topic, and of associated values such as precision of measurement and calculation. With language education, there is no intrinsic drama in the material, but the material is part of the raw material of drama. Finally, we will look at the impact of drama on subject self-efficacy. Chapter  5 offers a survey of recent discussions of Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’. I will relate the term to this discussion by viewing disinterested contemplation as a kind of attention. I will argue that recent reinterpretation makes the term effectively synonymous with ‘intrinsic motivation’ and that the idea is now connected with the notion of ‘focus’ or ‘concentration’. The implications of

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this revised view will be explored by the use of some real examples from student teachers in Hong Kong primary schools. Various alternative formulations have been proposed. Aesthetic experience will thus be seen as provoking a certain kind of focalization that contributes positively to education Chapter 6 seeks to distinguish between kinds of theatre experience based on altered consciousness and double consciousness. I will introduce my own notion of double consciousness, which I call, using Husserl’s term, double noesis. I will argue that a consequence of embodied cognition is that we can never escape the awareness of our real circumstances, but that we can, in addition, project artificial, imaginative meaning that we know is false. I  will argue that double noesis accounts for the material details of theatre that allow for the experience of ‘metaxis’, in Boal’s terminology, and ‘reflexivity’ in my own terminology derived from Boal, Bolton and Zamir. Chapter  7 will develop the notion of ‘dramatic tension’. This idea is very widespread in folk aesthetics and is to be found frequently in reviews, as well as in conversations about art works. Drama teachers and creative writing teachers use the term constantly. The use of dramatic tension for curricular education will be discussed. Some suggestions will be made on the relation of dramatic tension to the education of emancipation. The conclusion will relate the findings of this book to the sociological thought of Zygmunt Bauman. His claim is that modernity falls into two periods: in the first, ‘heavy’ or ‘solid’ modernity, the imaginary of the times is dominated by the threat of totalitarianism. When the social critics of solid modernity think of emancipation, they think first of throwing off an oppressive authority. Bauman says, however, that our own times suffer from a different threat: the dissolution of institutions and fixed ideas, which may serve to define a meaningful life. This means that identity is no longer forced upon us; it has become a task that faces each individual. I suggest that this distinction explains some features of the work of Boal and Bolton and seeks to place drama education in the new times.

1

Aesthetics, Ethics and Education: Dewey and Rancière

Even before Dewey became influential in the field, drama education had points in common with progressive education. In the early years of the twentieth century, Harriet Finlay-Johnson argued that drama education could make children ‘self-reliant, mainly self-taught and self-developing’ (Bolton 1999, 11). Since the 1930s, a large part of what we call ‘drama education’ has found its place under the umbrella of Deweyan progressive education. Dewey’s emphasis on experience and reflection upon it, his critique of merely fact-based learning and the high value he placed on the arts have all been congenial to drama educators. His work on aesthetics has not been broadly influential, however, and recent years have seen a new Deweyism, emphasizing his aesthetics and finding a basis in neuroscience. Mark Johnson and Jenefer Robinson find their place in that context. As we saw in the Introduction, recent years have seen the rise of Jacques Rancière as an important philosophical influence in drama education (Franks et al. 2014; Conroy 2015). This chapter will first examine the relation of Dewey’s ideas to those of Rancière. They have many points of contact, but important differences must be clarified. The last part of this chapter will deal with the new Deweyism, or ‘neuropragmatism’, briefly looking forward to the function of this view of embodiment in the next chapter. Both Rancière and Dewey seek to define how the artwork can affect practical life. We shall see how the two are compatible, and I will make efforts to resolve contradictions. Rancière brings a new focus, a sense of purpose, to drama education in a way that has to do with the growth of possibility for all in a democratic society. This chapter will argue, however, that his view of aesthetics is incomplete and needs to be supplemented from the tradition of embodied cognition. Dewey and Rancière are of very different generations and, partly in consequence, come from very different philosophical backgrounds. Dewey

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died at an advanced age in 1952; Rancière was then twelve years old, and is still alive as I write in 2018. Dewey was one of the leading lights of American pragmatism, along with William James and Charles Sanders Peirce; Rancière comes from a background of Continental philosophy and incorporates elements of post-structuralism. For all that, they share certain elements of philosophical background. Both have close and critical relationships with Plato. Though no one would think of Dewey as a Continental philosopher, he has something in common with them from having been a Hegelian in his youth. Though Rancière is of a much younger generation, it remains that his studies of philosophy have mostly to do with the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as his period in the study of literature is early nineteenth century. More than any other major current philosopher, Rancière is immersed in the thought of German Idealism, not only in the thought of Hegel but also in the thought of Schlegel and Schelling. Though no one would say that Rancière is a pragmatist, he does subscribe to a core pragmatist principle: the ideas he finds important are those that make action possible. The two philosophers also share some central concerns: democracy, education and the pragmatic impact of aesthetics on human perception and action. The thrust of their views on these matters has to do with the growth of possibility for the learner, conceived in different ways. In each area, they have some common principles that appeal to drama educators, which we shall see.

Democracy In a striking parallel, Rancière and Dewey both cite the elitism of Plato’s Republic and come up with similar critiques of it. Dewey says the Republic is ‘the most perfect picture of the aristocratic ideal which history affords’. But ‘according to Plato (and the aristocratic ideal everywhere), the multitude is incapable of forming such an ideal and attempting to reach it’ (EW 1:  241). Dewey saw this lack of inclusiveness as a fault. Rancière, in his turn, denounces Plato’s assertion that an artisan must take no place in political life because he is too busy doing his job: he says that according to Plato, ‘[t]‌here simply are bodies that cannot accommodate philosophy  – bodies marked and stigmatized by the servitude of the work for which they have been made’ (Rancière [1983] 2004, 32, emphasis in text). Nor does either of the two believe that democracy is satisfactorily embodied in the institutions of Western liberal countries but think that democracy must find its place in social relations. A key book for understanding the thought of



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Rancière for this, as for many issues, is The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Le Maître ignorant [1987] 1991), and this is the most influential of his books in drama education, or education more generally. Its relevance to democracy lies in its rejection of hierarchy. In this book, he sets out the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French university lecturer who found himself working in Leuven, Belgium, in 1818. His lectures in French achieved a certain popularity, and some Flemish students, knowing no French, wanted to come. Having no time to teach them French, he asked them to buy a bilingual edition of a novel with the original French and a Flemish translation on facing pages. He told them to learn French from it and write their thoughts about the novel, in French, six months hence. By the accounts of Jacotot and his allies, this was a stunning success, and he was greatly surprised by the good quality of their essays in French. Jacotot went on to formulate a philosophy of education that placed all emphasis on the independent ability of the learner to learn. He suggested that even illiterate parents could teach their children to read if they went about it intelligently, because each person is capable of learning well if the problem is stated appropriately. Rancière believes that Jacotot got one thing very right:  he did not explain anything to his students, depending instead on their native intelligence to solve the problems of learning. He suggests that teachers betray their students when they explain: Explication is not necessary to remedy an incapacity to understand. On the contrary, that very incapacity provides the structuring fiction of the explicative conception of the world. It is the explicator who needs the incapable and not the other way around; it is he who constitutes the incapable as such. ([1987] 1991, 6)

Rancière’s assertion is that the teacher, in explaining, creates a specious need for his or her services. He sees such a significance in most conventional teaching, saying that conventional education, instead of educating learners, makes them stupid and easy to manage. That is why he speaks of ‘stultification’ (abrutification). The student, by being primarily the recipient of explanation, becomes, not temporarily but permanently, a subordinate. That subordination is part of a larger structure of subordination in the whole society. The student conventionally should not step outside of his or her place as the recipient of education just as the labourer in Plato’s Republic should not step outside of his or her place as a labourer to become involved in politics. For Rancière, it is a first principle of democracy that everyone must be treated with radical equality. For him, this involves the presupposition that everyone is equally intelligent and can

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learn independently. He is very clear that this is not an empirical observation, but a necessary presupposition for valid and ethical education (Rancière [1987] 1991, 46). Carl Anders Säfström (2012) points out that Dewey is parallel to Rancière insofar as he redefines intelligence so as to resist the inherent elitism of believing that some are born more intelligent than others (p. 419). Rancière’s radical view of explanation finds a parallel in the formative practice of Dorothy Heathcote in drama education. In the television film Three Looms Waiting (1971), Heathcote is playing the part of a Nazi officer preparing an infiltrator (really an English schoolboy) to gain the confidence of British prisoners of war. The Nazi officer wants to know about the firmness of the infiltrator’s backstory. Where are you from in England? London. What part of London? Coventry. Though Coventry is a separate city, and she knows this, she just says, ‘Good place.’ The BBC interviewer asks in a follow-up interview why she hadn’t corrected him. She replies, Because I don’t give a damn where Coventry is. At that point, he felt right. He was working on an intensity of feeling, not on facts at all. I was saying, ‘You’ve got to convince the Englishmen’, and he said, ‘Yes!’ And that’s the level we’re working at. If he’d said the Man in the Moon, as long as he believed it at that point, it’s OK by me. After all, what’s a fact? I just happened to know Coventry isn’t in London. But there’s loads of things I  could have said equally stupid if you’re looking at this kind of stupidity. (1971, 9:15–9:44)

Heathcote’s position is not identical with Rancière’s. She does not state in principle that one should never explain. What they have in common is a determined respect for the learner, strong enough so that there is a refusal, or at least a strong reluctance, to explain what is true and what is not. Rancière’s concern with equality and his rejection of explanation were consistent with his view that education should be emancipation. Rancière writes, ‘We will call the known and maintained difference of the two relations – the act of an intelligence obeying only itself even while the will obeys another will  – emancipation’ ([1987] 1991, 13). A structural change is necessary both in the teacher and in the learner. In order to be an emancipated learner, one must first believe in one’s own abilities. The ‘emancipated master’, on the other hand, is one who refuses to subordinate the learner, trusting instead the learner’s own abilities: ‘To emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one need only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of the true power of the human mind’ (Rancière [1987] 1991, 15). This last formulation appears quite consistent with Heathcote’s portrayal of her own role as a teacher in the quotation above.



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Her conception of the power of the human mind differs from Rancière’s, as she stresses not intelligence as much as intensity of feeling and belief. We will have more on this difference later. Dewey, while less radical than Rancière, has a certain number of principles in common with him. He also wants the individual teacher to be emancipated: Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter. (Democracy and Education (1916) MW 9: 116)

Similarly, he fears that ‘the work of both teacher and pupil’ may become ‘mechanical and slavish’ (p. 117). Like Rancière, he refuses to identify democracy with elections, legislatures and so on. He sees democracy as an attitude to others in society, to a way of life. He writes, A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. (MW 9: 93)

‘Conjoint communicated experience’ presupposes equality in similar terms to Rancière. Like Rancière, Dewey is a critic of traditional education. Both see it as seeking to pass inert ‘knowledge’ to students: The accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction recitation and examination is made too much of. (MW 9: 168)

Nel Noddings summarizes Dewey’s position: Teachers in democratic societies should not try to pass knowledge – like bricks – to their students; they must engage them in patterns of communication that will help them to develop democratic habits of association as well as the requisite habits of mind. (2010, 279)

Dewey thinks that traditional education is a problem on much the same terms as Rancière, and to some extent they agree on what to do. Like Rancière, Dewey believes that teachers should set problems for students and they should make a project of solving them (MW 9: 159–70). The ‘project’ aspect of Dewey’s philosophy might well agree with Rancière, because the structure of a project resembles the structure of Rancière’s ideal education. Rancière writes approvingly about Jacotot:

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Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education His mastery lay in the command that had enclosed the students in a closed circle from which they alone could break out. By leaving his intelligence out of the picture, he had allowed their intelligence to grapple with that of the book. Thus the two functions that link the practice of the master explicator, that of the savant and that of the master had been dissociated. The two faculties in play during the act of learning, namely intelligence and will, had therefore been separated, liberated from each other. A  pure relationship of will to will had been established between master and student:  a relationship wherein the master’s domination resulted in an entirely liberated relationship between the intelligence of the student and that of the book – the intelligence of the book that was also the thing in common, the egalitarian intellectual link between master and student. ([1987] 1991, 13)

Here is one reason why drama educators might find the two philosophies compatible with their practice. When we do drama activities, it is very much the usual thing for the teacher to design a task and ask students to carry it out, using their own resources. The common emphasis in drama education on the independent use of students’ own abilities is equally compatible with both philosophers. The two philosophies might well produce a difference of practice in the classroom: a Deweyan drama teacher would feel freer to make suggestions, or even to teach aesthetic principles before the students do their project; a Rancièrian drama teacher might well feel constrained just to design the task and let the students do it. There is just such a spectrum of practice among real drama teachers. Further, Dewey thinks that teachers should pay attention to the ‘habits’ that students learn in education and try to form them. Rancière would surely condemn any such attention, or effort at formation, as disrespect to the individual. Rancière rebels against the notion that consensus is consistent with the notion of a democracy. In his book Disagreement (La Mésentente [1995] 1999), he takes issue with Jürgen Habermas on the latter’s search for consensus (p. 44). To Rancière, consensus is not an appropriate goal of political process. Political progress can take place only through disagreement, and this does not (as Hegel thought) become consensus over time. To Rancière, there has always been a class of people, which he calls the demos, which is excluded, invisible, unable to participate either in consensus or in disagreement. What another philosopher might call social consensus, he calls, reviving an older sense of the word, ‘the police’. By this he means the organization of society, particularly as it affects people’s perceptions of reality. His attitude to the police is essentially negative, and the moments he prizes are those when a new vision arises, when someone



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realizes that he or she is not after all to be identified with the social groupings set out by the police. He calls this moment of self-realization and rebellion, ‘subjectification’. (There is some confusion, both in French and in English translations, between ‘subjectification’, ‘subjectivation’, ‘subjectivization’ and so on. See Bingham and Biesta (2010, 33).) For him, subjectification can never be the result of adherence to a pre-existing identity. It must be something new, creative, unprecedented. Dewey’s early Hegelianism would seem to suggest an opposite tendency, toward a belief that a dialectical process leads to social consensus (cf. Forster 1998, 242–6). Carl Anders Säfström (2012), on the other hand, argues that for Dewey, Hegel placed reason in ‘the struggles of life’, and hence he came to a position more like Rancière’s, with a vision of intelligence as inherently and permanently creative, never arriving at a fixed understanding of political reality (pp. 422–3). Dewey, like Rancière, sees ‘the only true education’ in the learner’s efforts to solve a problem. He writes, I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling, and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. (EW 5: 84)

This quotation shows a practical correspondence with Rancière, as the emphasis is on problem-solving and development of individual insight. The same quotation shows an important contrast. Rancière would never say that the learner should move towards identification with a group. What is behind this contrast is a deep difference in political philosophy. Dewey is essentially optimistic about the identification of individuals with groups. He sees social groupings as a general category as positive for individuals and for human development. For Rancière, all social groupings are merely effects of ‘the police’. He does accept that one ‘police’ may be better than another, but it appears that he really means ‘less bad’. The identification with ‘the group’ Dewey sets out here would be, for Rancière, inimical to subjectification, the real goal of education. As far as the student’s learning is concerned, Rancière is more individualistic than Dewey. The latter places much faith in group work and in the communication of socially accepted values, which he sees as positive, whereas Rancière places the learning process entirely within the individual. He trusts the creativity and insight of the individual very deeply, and the virtue of accepted values not at

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all. From the perspective of philosophical ambitions for education, however, the situation is reversed. Rancière is deeply collective in his ambitions, wanting to see a better society, wanting to see a reversal of the disenfranchisement of the demos. He expresses sympathy for the individual disenfranchised person but sees the remedy of that person’s distress in collective change. Dewey, on the other hand, expresses his ambitions for education in individual terms: To prepare [the child] for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities; that his eye and ear and hand may be tools ready to command, that his judgment may be capable of grasping the conditions under which it has to work, and the executive forces be trained to act economically and efficiently. It is impossible to reach this sort of adjustment save as constant regard is had to the individual’s own powers, tastes, and interests – say, that is, as education is continually converted into psychological terms. (EW 5: 86)

Every part of this vision is individual, seeking to make a better life for the individual learner by building possibility. One consequence of Dewey’s individualism is that he pays close attention to matters of curriculum. He explicitly discusses the teaching of various subjects and the relative importance of different subjects. He imagines a learner who will have practical needs in the real social world. He recognizes, as the quotation above shows, that there is uncertainty in what will be needed in a life, and that is why he supports the notion of broad liberal education, but he pictures a world in which mathematics and literacy will be required, as well as practical subjects such as needlework and carpentry. Heathcote’s approach, and that of her collaborator Gavin Bolton, appears in this light rather Deweyan. From an early date, they sought to promote drama not only as a means of developing self-actualization but also as a means of working with curricular material. Rancière, on the other hand, appears very little concerned with issues of curriculum, as, in terms of philosophical goals of education, he is completely focused on issues of social justice. The example of Jacotot begins with a practical need for students to learn French, and he asserts that the practical goals were achieved, but there are some very obvious curriculum issues with the story. Rancière does not discuss them at all. Given that the students wanted to understand Jacotot’s lectures, how is it that he told them to learn French with a bilingual edition of a novel? It is difficult to see that this method would produce any aural competence at all. They would no doubt pronounce the French to



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themselves based on languages that they knew:  Flemish and probably Latin. Their spoken French, insofar as it existed, would be incomprehensible, and as a result, they would misconceive what to expect from the French they heard in lectures. This objection leaves Rancière’s point about the dignity of the learner untouched, but it does reveal a certain shortcoming of his strong emphasis on collective social progress. He does not offer a general theory of education, as Dewey does. He questions certain basic ideas about education, without attempting any large-scale examination of the role of education in social life.

Aesthetics Both writers place a strong emphasis on aesthetics, and both seek to establish strong links between aesthetics and ordinary life. Rancière more than Dewey integrates his notion of aesthetics with his project of equality and democracy. He uses the word ‘aesthetics’ in at least two distinct ways. Aesthetics is first of all an overall name for the cultural means by which people come to see reality in a certain way. His term for a view of reality is ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (le partage du sensible). We divide up reality, and group people, according to certain conventional ideas that we learn in social discourse. Hence, a certain space is my space, where I feel comfortable, and the fact of being comfortable in a certain space means that I belong to a certain group. Second, ‘aesthetics’ refers to the means used to alter the distribution of the sensible: when an individual arises who achieves subjectification, who sees things differently, there is a special role for art in the communication of the new vision to others and also in the formulation of the new vision. This last, to Rancière, constitutes the privileged function of art, because art allows a new distribution of the sensible to arise. Therefore, the production of true art, art which disturbs the distribution of the sensible, serves the purposes of social progress and equality. It is a question how art achieves the power to reformulate the distribution of the sensible, to which we will return later in the chapter. Rancière also sees emancipation in the very function of the artist and the nature of art. He writes, The artist’s emancipatory lesson, opposed on every count to the professor’s stultifying lesson, is this: each one of us is an artist to the extent that he carries out a double process; he is not content to be a mere journeyman but wants to make all work a means of expression, and he is not content to feel something

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Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education but tries to impart it to others. The artist needs equality as the explicator needs inequality. And he therefore designs the model of a reasonable society where the very thing that is outside of reason – matter, linguistic signs – is traversed by reasonable will: that of telling the story and making others feel the ways in which we are similar to them. ([1987] 1991, 70–1)

There is a hint in that last sentence of Dewey’s communication of values. The communicative juxtaposition of one person to another, the discovery of what is in common, would surely involve the transmission of values – but Rancière does not formulate his ideas in those terms. Dewey is equally concerned with integrating art and life, but he goes about that integration in a very different way. Dewey sees aesthetic experience in any completed action: The intelligent mechanic engaged in his job, interested in doing well and finding satisfaction in his handiwork, caring for his materials and tools with genuine affection, is artistically engaged. (LW 10: 11)

There is harmony here with the general view of Rancière, in the insistence on the intelligence and capacities of the ordinary person, the insistence that anyone can be an artist. The democratic impulse is the same. There is a distinction in that Dewey is interested in the internal structure of artistry in a very different way from Rancière. Dewey sees the aesthetic in whatever is ‘an experience’. Ordinary experience, in Dewey’s view, takes place as an almost continuous blur, full of hesitations and uncertainties. In contrast, Dewey explains, [W]‌e have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfilment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solutions; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and selfsufficiency. It is an experience. (LW 10: 42)

Dewey, then, sees some level of artistry and aesthetic experience wherever he looks. His democratizing tendency leads him to this position, making artists no longer a sort of priestly caste, but rather just anyone who can express the genius and ability of the ordinary person. Once again, in terms of fundamentals, there is



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something in common with Rancière, for we have seen that Rancière emphasizes the egalitarian nature of art. Rancière writes, ‘We believe ourselves to be Racine, and we are right’ ([1987] 1991, 70). The tradition of drama education agrees with them there, as it seeks to build an experience of engagement in aesthetic activity for all participants, regardless of age, origin or previous knowledge. Dewey’s stress on ‘consummation’ above relates to the notion of dramatic tension, which, as we shall see, is fundamental to the different traditions of drama education. At this point, I will seek to understand the views of aesthetics and art stated or implied by each of the two writers. References to drama education will be scant to non-existent here, as neither has anything to say directly on this topic, but there will be references to literature. The relation between literature and drama will become an issue in the chapters which follow. What, for Dewey, is the difference between art per se and the aesthetics of ordinary life set out above? Dewey asks what a successful work of art achieves: A work of art elicits and accentuates this quality of being a whole and of belonging to the larger, all-inclusive whole which is the universe in which we live. This fact, I think, is the explanation of that feeling of exquisite intelligibility and clarity we have in the presence of an object that is experienced with aesthetic intensity. We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves. (LW 10: 199)

There is something quasi-religious about this view of art, with its talk of ‘belonging to the larger, all-inclusive whole’. Further, this phrasing is consistent with his view that identification with larger social groups is broadly a good thing. So also, there is a sense of redemptiveness in Rancière’s view: the artist has a vision of a better world that can save society as a whole. Rancière himself speaks of ‘mysticism’ in this connection ([1998] 2011, 64). Ironically, Dewey’s view, expressed in terms of Christian theology, looks rather Catholic because of its emphasis on the redemptiveness of the Church as a collectivity. Rancière looks like a fairly radical Protestant in one way, because redemption depends on the religious sensibility of individuals, as was the case with Luther. For Luther, however, and for Protestants more generally, religious insight comes about from reading the Bible in a rational way, whereas Rancière’s artist looks more like a mystic who achieves insight by meditation and contemplation. Where Dewey sees aesthetic experience as a single, timeless category of experience, Rancière offers three different ‘régimes’ of art, which all exist simultaneously. At the same time, different régimes are dominant at different times, such that the taxonomy also constitutes a periodization. All are engaged with aesthetics in the general sense we have seen above, but he also uses the word

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‘aesthetic’ specifically for the last. He formulated the three initially for literature but generalized the taxonomy later. He lists his régimes as follows: 1. The ethical régime of art is that set out by Plato: artistic works are to be judged according to their resemblance to originals being imitated, as a portrait statue should resemble the person represented. It is this view of art that leads Plato to ban poets from the Republic, on the grounds that they are mere imitators of imperfect images of reality, whereas the real world is to be found in the Good. 2. The representative régime of art places art within a system of arts: ‘It develops into forms of normativity that define the conditions according to which imitations can be recognized as exclusively belonging to an art and assessed, within this framework, as good or bad, adequate or inadequate’ (Rancière [2000] 2004, 21–2). As this system determines what is representable or unrepresentable, this régime reflects a hierarchical social order; this régime of art serves to create a rigid distribution of the sensible. Fit topics for art are correlated with social class: tragedy and epic are about the upper class; comedy is about the lower class. Each genre has its own appropriate style, according to the classical principle of decorum. Finally, the representative régime of art is characterized by the primacy of action, as in tragedy and epic. Style flows from action as well as from decorum. Even language, in the representative régime, is action in the form of oration, delivered in terms appropriate to the speaker and to the audience. The representative régime of art was first described by Aristotle and was dominant in Europe until the end of the eighteenth century. 3. The aesthetic régime of art jettisons the principle of decorum: any action can be represented with any style, and that is why the whole notion of genre becomes irrelevant. (Rancière does not view the novel as a genre, but rather as the absence of genre.) Where the representative régime gives primacy to action, the aesthetic régime gives primacy to style. Rancière often refers to Flaubert’s ambition to create a work of pure style, repeatedly bringing up Flaubert’s remark that Madame Bovary is a book ‘about nothing’ ([1998] 2011, 36, 52 and passim). Where the representative régime emphasized language as action, as oration, the aesthetic régime emphasizes the experience of reading, and the indiscriminate availability of printed works to any reader, without regard for decorum. (See the synthesis of Rancière’s ideas on this topic in Tanke (2010).)



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It seems clear that Rancière sees the last, the aesthetic régime, as most conducive to the growth of human possibility. The movement from the representative régime to the aesthetic, which Rancière places around 1800, is then a movement of liberation, of removal of restriction, so that art may better offer alternatives for social life. There is a potential problem here for the extension of Rancière’s ideas to theatre: the change of emphasis from ‘action’ to ‘style’ looks like a shift from regarding theatre as theatre to regarding plays as literature. Perhaps the idea of ‘style’ would have a special significance in theatre. For instance, the theatre of Eugene O’Neill may be viewed as extending stylistic choices previously thought to be particular to plays about kings to plays about ordinary people. But then it is a problem to distinguish ‘style’ from ‘action’ as this scheme demands. It is hard to see how the stylistic choices of theatre may be separated from action. What gives art the power to change things? The answer implied in Rancière’s scheme seems to have to do with removing barriers, but what is the energy behind the overall project of art as human endeavour that makes it powerful? Rancière attempts to answer this question in his book La Parole muette (the title is problematically translated as Mute Speech, [1998] 2011). It is in this work that he builds up the distinction between the ‘representative régime of art’ above and its successor, the ‘aesthetic régime of art’. He makes it quite clear that it is the last, the aesthetic régime, that has the power to liberate, writing as follows: Emancipated ‘literature’ has two great principles. In opposition to the norms of representative poetics, it proclaims the indifference of the form with respect to its content. In opposition to the idea of poetry as fiction, it proclaims poetry to be a specific mode of language. (p. 36)

His vision of the power of literature depends greatly on the periodization discussed above. Rancière tells us that the word littérature had changed meanings around 1800. He gives a few quotations from Voltaire, which he contrasts with those from Maurice Blanchot, and he goes on to suggest that a change in the meaning of the word is visible within the writings of La Harpe. He sets out the contrast as follows: Voltaire speaks of a knowledge that allows normative judgments of the beauties and defects of existing works, Blanchot of an experience of the possibility and impossibility of writing, to which works are only the testimony. (p. 33)

Some aspects of the new vision of literature, which he traces up to the present day, are fully Romantic in nature: the rules must give way to genius, and aesthetic

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principles are ‘simply the codification of what genius does’ (p.  34). Owing to this genius, literature has become ‘an unheard-of and radical exercise of thought and language, perhaps even a social calling and priesthood’ (pp.  35–6). He sees literature as at once ‘sacralised’ and devoid of content. He says that the early German Romantics related literature to theology, ‘pledging literature to testimony of its own impossibility, just as negative theology was dedicated to expressing the ineffability of the divine attributes’ (p. 35). He emphasizes that this revolution in meaning went unremarked at the time, but insists that it nevertheless had far-reaching implications for human life. This treatise refers repeatedly to the power (puissance) of literature, which he says is the same as the power of language. He returns repeatedly to the language of mysticism. He says that literature under the aesthetic régime ‘under the heading of stone, the desert and the sacred, invokes a radical experience of language that is pledged to the production of a silence’ (p. 33). He insists on the importance of ‘language’ in this context, and suggests that ‘style’ may be identified with ‘the inmost power of the work’ (p. 51). One may wonder how this mystical and paradoxical language relates to the actual techniques of literature. He deals with this in only one passage, suggesting that there is a special place for metonymy and metaphor in this ‘power’: Poeticity is that property by which any object can be doubled, taken not only as a set of properties but as the manifestation of an essence, not only as the effect of certain causes but as the metaphor or metonymy of the power that produced it. This passage from a regime of causal concatenation to a regime of expressivity can be summed up in an apparently anodyne sentence of Novalis’s: ‘A child is a love made visible.’ What this means, in its full generality, is that any effect is a sign that makes visible the hidden power of its cause. The passage from a causal poetics of narrative to an expressive poetics of language is completely contained within this displacement. Any configuration of sensible properties can be assimilated to an arrangement of signs and thus to a manifestation of language in its primary poetical state. (p. 60)

He says, quoting Schlegel, that by these means, a thing may become ‘a mirror of the Universe’. Indeed, he suggests a sort of objective relationship between the poet and the real nature of the universe, saying, ‘The poet is the one who speaks the poeticity of things’ (pp. 60–1). What is particular about the poet, then, is insight. The poet can see how things really are and find adequate means to express that insight through figures of speech. He suggests that Proust was able to find truth in the noise made by a



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fork (p. 61). Later on in the book, he suggests that the insight which is expressed in language also has its origin in language. He writes, If language has no reason to be concerned with anything but itself, it is not because it is a self-sufficient game but because it already contains within itself an experience of the world and a text of knowledge, because it speaks this experience itself, before us. (p. 62)

It appears, then, that the insight to be offered into ‘how things are’ is already present in language. He says that language ‘is not an instrument of communication because it is already the mirror of a community’ (p. 63). As he acknowledges, this notion of language is a Romantic one (pp. 65–8). The power of poetic language, then, comes from an insight into a community. The poet sees what is true within the resources of language and is able to express what is true accurately and ‘with power’. This assertion, as he recognizes, relates rather problematically to his separate assertion that literature can only meditate on its own impossibility. If it only meditates on its own impossibility, how can it speak effectively of or for social life? He asserts the importance of style, but the only discussion of the details of style in the book is the extract quoted above, claiming the importance of metaphor and metonymy in the expressiveness of writers. Rancière is in the position of making large claims for the importance of style, without offering any substantive discussion of the relation of style to real impact on human action. He has cut himself off from the model of classical rhetoric, where style serves to affect at once the emotions and the intellect of the listener to persuade, for he identifies the latter with the representative régime of art, and any such effort to affect the emotions of listener or reader as ‘action’, as opposed to the style of Madame Bovary, which is ‘about nothing’. The means that writers use to create art, then, relate to a philosophical problem, which is apparently irresolvable by philosophical means. It requires art to make us think about the impossibility of art, and meditation upon that impossibility supplies what is positive about the experience of art: a meditation upon nothing. Rancière presents his definition of literature as the sole and inevitable real nature of literature in the modern age. Not all scholars agree with him. Paul Guyer, in his A History of Modern Aesthetics (2014, 3 vols), classifies theories of aesthetics into three categories:  aesthetics of truth, aesthetics of emotion and aesthetics of free play. He discusses many of the philosophers that Rancière depends on, including, for example, Hegel and Schelling. He classifies them all as aestheticians ‘of truth’. That means that they see the role of art as revealing

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truth. For Guyer, this characterization unites Hegel, Schelling and Novalis with the eighteenth-century Neoplatonists, who saw in art the revelation of the beauty and perfection of God’s world. For the German idealists and their heirs at least up to Heidegger, the product of art is not a vision of God but rather a clear perception of metaphysical truth. Indeed, that statement seems to characterize Rancière as well. Against this tradition, Guyer pits the aestheticians ‘of emotion’ who include, for example, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Vischer and Wilhelm Dilthey. There are a few, such as Hermann Lotze, who stress free play in isolation from other factors, but most of all, Guyer admires those theorists who bring the three elements together. From the point of view of Guyer’s scheme, then, what Rancière sees as central to the art of the modern age is only one thread of thinking about, and practice of, art. Guyer regards Dewey in quite a different light from the tradition stressed by Rancière. He sees Dewey as combining the aesthetics of emotion with the aesthetics of free play. In support of his periodization, Rancière cites Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s Art of the Modern Age ([1992] 2000; Rancière [1998] 2011, 35 n. 11, 183). Indeed, Schaeffer identifies a tradition very similar to that stressed by Rancière: Schaeffer gives it the name ‘speculative theory of art’. Yet, Schaeffer only identifies this tradition in order to distinguish it from another tradition, which he calls ‘aesthetics’. He places Kant here, and went on afterwards to write a book of his own in the same tradition, L’Expérience esthétique, which will become important to this book in the next chapter. Indeed, Schaeffer condemns the speculative theory of art in terms, as we shall see, very congenial to Dewey: Through our addiction to the (philosophical) mirage of Art, we have . . . cut ourselves off from the multiple and changing reality of the arts and art works; by claiming that Art was more important than this or that work, we have weakened our aesthetic sensibility (and – often – our critical sense); by reducing art works to metaphysical hieroglyphs, we have rarefied our paths to pleasure and denied the cognitive diversity – and thus the richness – of the arts. ([1992] 2000, 13)

Rancière’s view is very open to just such a critique. Dewey’s aesthetics is of quite a different nature. He is a pragmatist, and his view of the aesthetics of experience derives from his understanding of human interaction with the natural world. He finds the basis of aesthetics in biological existence in the world: There is in nature, even below the level of life, something more than mere flux and change. Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. (LW 10: 20)



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Life strives for survival and flourishing, and it sees in everything around it possibilities and dangers. For Dewey, this affects perception: When we perceive, by means of the eyes as causal aids, the liquidity of water, the coldness of ice, the solidity of rocks, the bareness of trees in winter, it is certain that other qualities than those of the eye are conspicuous and controlling in perception. And it is certain as anything can be that optical qualities do not stand out by themselves with tactual and emotive qualities clinging to their skirts. (LW 10: 129)

What Dewey places front and centre is not language as the expression of a community, nor a construal of the world that he views as having its origin in language, but our awareness of the world as a complex of meaning, not necessarily structured by language, with which we can interact. We are never aware of a property of a thing without being also aware of what is implied, and that implication, in Dewey, is not in general made to be verbal in nature. Dewey instead emphasizes practical interaction, as expressed in his notion of body–mind: [B]‌ody–mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication, and participation. In the hyphenated phrase body–mind, ‘body’ designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while ‘mind’ designates the characters and consequences which are differential, indicative of features which emerge when ‘body’ is engaged in a wider, more complex and interdependent situation. (LW 1: 217)

He specifies further how the possibilities of things, their ‘horizons’ as Husserl would put it, colour our understanding of them: A thing is more significantly what it makes possible than what it immediately is. (LW 1: 105)

This statement is notably consistent with Rancière’s view that if we change the distribution of the sensible, we can expand human possibility in life. Art, for Dewey as for Rancière, comes from the artist’s understanding of the world, but for Dewey that understanding derives from interaction with the world, and not from privileged insight into language. Certainly, a post-structuralist view might maintain that direct engagement with the world, apart from language, is impossible, but that is not Dewey’s view.

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Dewey finds a place for emotion in his aesthetics, as Rancière does not. He laid the foundation for that place in his book Experience and Nature: This state of things in which qualitatively different feelings are not just had but are significant of objective differences, is mind. Feelings are no longer just felt. They have and they make sense; record and prophesy. That is to say, difference in qualities (feelings) of acts when employed as indications of acts performed and to be performed and as signs of their consequences, mean something. And they mean it directly; the meaning is had as their own character. (LW 1: 198)

That is, emotion carries meaning. For Dewey, this understanding of emotion is integrated with his understanding of the living organism in the natural world. It is because we see the implications of what is around us that we have emotion. It is because we know that a snake can bite us that we fear it. This meaningful role of emotion suggests that in an experience, there is an emotional component, the loving and hating of things that gives an experience its shape. For Dewey, even the process of thinking is aesthetic, because it is emotional: Thinking goes on in trains of ideas, but the ideas form a train only because they are much more than what an analytic psychology calls ideas. They are phases, emotionally and practically distinguished, of a developing underlying quality. (LW 10: 44)

That meaningful role of emotion is one of the elements of Dewey stressed by Mark Johnson and Jenefer Robinson, and it has a special relevance to theatre and drama education, given the simultaneously cognitive and emotional nature of dramatic tension. Dewey places his understanding of the aesthetic between two extremities, each of which he views as ‘anesthetic’: At one pole is the loose succession that does not begin at any particular place and that ends  – in the sense of ceasing  – at no particular place. At the other pole is arrest, constriction, proceeding from parts having only a mechanical connection with one another. (LW 10: 47)

To recap, for Dewey, aesthetic experience is not exclusively involved with art but with the flux between any living organism and its environment. Art stands out from the environment chiefly in that it is purposely made to produce an aesthetic experience, and potentially may be more intense. We have seen how Rancière sees the place of the aesthetic within the process of education:  for him, the ultimate purpose of education is emancipation,



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a change of perspective in which each individual comes to trust his or her own resources and refuse the dominance of intellectual authority. The idea of aesthetics characterizes the distribution of the sensible that makes one person superior to another, and also the artistic move that alters the distribution of the sensible. The artist, from a posture of equality with the spectator, makes it possible for the spectator to be emancipated, to have expanded possibility in life. The relation between aesthetics and education in Dewey’s thought is far more problematic. His one book on aesthetics was published towards the end of his career. It does not discuss education as such, and he never wrote another work that integrates his ideas of aesthetics and education. Turning to secondary material, David Granger makes a strong effort to work out the implications of Dewey’s aesthetics in the context of his explicit discussions of education, mostly written earlier in his career. Granger shows that Dewey sees the individual largely as a result of habit, and he does not view this is a bad thing. For Granger, the aesthetic aspect of existence is the aspect that, in Dewey’s philosophy, can move beyond what is inherent in our habits: The breadth and vitality of the poetic self ’s working capacities make it especially well equipped to receive, respond to, and integrate imaginatively the meaningenhancing possibilities of the present moment. . . . In addition, the poetic self has the ability to solve problems in ways that maximize self-growth, establishing new avenues for richly funded experience. (2006, 231)

Once again, there is a certain similarity between Dewey’s vision and Rancière’s, because the aesthetic aspect of life is what enables action that moves beyond old views of the world, moving from the old to something better. As is consistent with what we have seen before, the purposes of education are here characterized in far more individualistic terms than we find in Rancière. Granger goes on to find progress for the individual not only in the superior experience of meaning but also in progressive improvement in the ability to create such experiences in the future (p. 231). To my knowledge, Dewey never discusses the applicability of aesthetic experience to the teaching of curricular materials. There are hints that aesthetic experience may be relevant to motivation in the teaching of any subject. For example, Dewey writes, [Art] quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms. (LW 10: 110)

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Extending the point, Pugh and Girod, in writing about science education, assert that the aesthetic notion of an experience can help to understand how an experience of education can be significant to a learner, and hence how it can fit into a life: In an experience, a person’s relationship with the world is transformed as the person comes to see some aspect of the world (which may include other people or oneself) in a new way, to find new meaning in this aspect of the world, and to value this new way of seeing. (2007, 11)

That is, aesthetics for them is about the significance of science for the learner. We can accept both Rancière and Dewey to the extent of believing in the capacities of the ordinary participant and seeking to establish a view of art that transcends the distinction between art and ordinary life. It is very consistent with the views of both to hope that each one of our participants should be, perhaps only in a small way, an artist. It is consistent with their views to see art as something that makes us realize that things are possible that had not even been conceivable before. Both seek to blur the distinction between the artist and the spectator, the receiver of art. In terms of what gives art power, it is hard to resist the view that Dewey is right and Rancière’s view is insufficiently developed. It does not help Rancière’s case that he does not recognize other points of view, and so makes no effort to counter them. Further, when Rancière explains how literature can have power, he cannot resist retreat into mystical language with no very specific conceptual application. He gestures at relating ‘style’ to specific figures, but no more than that. Even more significant for our immediate purposes is that the theory of drama education, in both Augusto Boal and Gavin Bolton, takes a view of aesthetics and learning much more like Dewey than like Rancière. This will be a major topic of Chapter 3. It is true that we can view Rancière’s writing as pursuing an insight that it cannot quite formulate, but there is no need for this, as recent philosophical writing, using recent advances in neuroscience to clarify the nature of attention and human experience, has given new relevance to the ideas of Dewey, under the general heading of ‘neuropragmatism’. The philosopher Mark Johnson sets out what I  view as the manifesto of neuropragmatism in his book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007). Johnson argues that certain universal elements of human experience structure our understanding of our world, and this is already true in newborn babies – that is, newborn babies have a significantly cognitive understanding of the world before they have any awareness of language. Where Rancière is a conventional philosopher in assuming the



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total dominance of language, Johnson breaks with that conventional view, arguing that this ability to use our motor abilities for cognitive purposes never disappears, but we continue to see the world in ways governed by our bodily interaction with the world. Citing Daniel Stern (1985), Johnson puts forward the existence of ‘vitality affects’, patterns of feeling which structure the infant’s understanding of his or her world. These are ‘patterns of flow and development of our experience’ (Johnson 2007, 43). Stern writes, ‘These elusive qualities are . . . captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as “surging”, “fading away”, “fleeting”, “explosive”, “crescendo”, “decrescendo”, “bursting”, “drawn out”, and so on’ (1985, 54). These qualities of experience are built up without the aid of language, before the infant has any use of language, and for our purposes it is notable that they are significant to any art that moves through time. Johnson connects them with Susanne Langer’s characterization of music as following the contours of emotion without actually having identifiable emotional content. Johnson remarks, ‘They constitute the qualitative difference between the mellow fulfillment of a long-hoped-for event and the abruptness we experience if we are surprised by an unexpected event’ (2007, 44). This connects very well indeed to Dewey’s view of art, because an experience is distinct from what is around it by just such qualitative distinctions, and Dewey would have no problem with the significance given here to affect. This idea is especially significant to drama because it helps to explain the phenomena of dramatic structure and dramatic tension. Johnson argues that many of Dewey’s ideas have received empirical confirmation in the work of psychologists and neuroscientists. If this is so, then the conventional notion that meaning is dominated by language must at least be greatly qualified. If it is true, as Johnson argues, that physical interaction with objects and people is of central importance to human experience and even to abstract reasoning, then it is reasonable to suggest that drama should have a significant place in education, because drama is the art that most intensively bridges movement, perception and language. Johnson’s views of aesthetics also have important ramifications for our view of the relation between theatre and literature. It is a traditional view that a play text is a literary work that is externalized in performance. We shall see here that Johnson’s view of literature would lead us to see private reading of literature, on the contrary, as a kind of internalized theatre. But before we can come to a characterization of drama on these terms, there is much to explore in the scientific findings on the nature of human attention and the implications of those findings for aesthetics. Those findings are the topic of the next chapter.

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Learning begins with attention: if we are to learn about anything, we must notice and remember things about it. Aesthetics, as we shall see in this chapter, has to do with modes of attention:  one may narrow one’s focus so as to notice only what is of practical use, or broaden it; one may oblige oneself to concentrate; or an object may be so interesting or moving that one cannot tear one’s attention away from it. In classrooms, there is a similar range of attention: students may economize effort by seeking out and learning only what will be on the exam, may broaden attention so as to see everything about an object or may, sometimes, feel the pull of an object so strongly that they cannot avoid paying attention for its own sake. This chapter works with the notion that the contribution of drama to learning has specifically to do with aesthetics, and aesthetics has to do with two things: mode of attention and emotional response. In this chapter, I  will connect the need for attention with the place of emotion, using, as we saw in the Introduction, a vision of aesthetic experience drawn from JeanMarie Schaeffer: he insists on a broad but intense state of attention in order that emotion should be able to erupt in experience, and it is emotion that creates memory and meaning. Rancière’s idea of changing the distribution of the sensible is itself about modes of attention. When our perception of the world changes, it is because we have learned to interpret it in a different way, that is, to alter our mode of attention to it. If we overcome the notion that the demos consists of animals that only produce noise, we have changed our attention to the people of the demos and thereby changed also our experience of the world. We have seen that Rancière has no good proposal as to the reasons why this might happen, but in this chapter we shall see that recent philosophy does have proposals to make in this area. Our scientific knowledge of the processes of attention, however, is almost entirely about short-term changes of perception, the longer-term ones that concern Rancière being much more difficult to observe. In Chapter 3, we

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shall look at possible connections between the psychology of attention and writings on drama education. We shall see then that this more permanent change can be related to issues of self-concept and identity. This chapter is concerned with the shorter-term changes to attention and consequently to the lifeworld. The earlier parts of this chapter have to do with general aspects of aesthetics, aesthetics as it affects a wide range of experience, including experience of art. Once again, literature will have a special role, both because there is much good work on literature already and because it relates significantly to the practice of theatre. It is only towards the end of this chapter that we shall come to the specifics of theatre, in the deliberate projection of an imagined world onto a real world that never ceases to be perceived. Recent advances in the psychology of attention have attracted the interest of aestheticians. Paul B. Armstrong (2013), Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2015) and Bence Nanay (2016) have all published books on aesthetic experience in which the psychology of attention plays a major role. We will find that through the notion of attention, it is possible to integrate the processes of cognition and emotion, and make a start on integrating the idea of free play, thereby moving towards Paul Guyer’s desideratum of an aesthetics that includes all three. All of these ideas will find their place in a solidly based aesthetics for education, relating aesthetic experience systematically to learning. It is true, of course, that in drama classes or in productions, the participants do not simply experience but also act, in the sense of taking an action. We shall see that it is possible to connect aesthetic experience with action through embodied cognition: since experience in the absence of bodily movement already involves imagined movement, we have a bridge available to us from ‘passive’ experience to ‘active’ performance. That is why it is possible for a wide range of aesthetic experience to open the range of possibility for the one who experiences it. In common with Dewey, Schaeffer objects to any element of otherworldliness in aesthetics. Like Dewey, he wishes to find a place for aesthetic experience in the context of everyday experience. Schaeffer, accordingly, devotes his book L’Expérience esthétique (2015) to grounding the notion of aesthetic experience in the attentional resources of the human brain, which are assumed to have evolved for more immediately practical purposes to do with survival. He sets out experimental findings that generally have nothing in the first instance to do with aesthetic experience and seeks to show that a notion of aesthetic experience can be grounded in them. This move is standard in writings about aesthetics that are grounded in psychology and neuroscience. Johnson says that aesthetic processes ‘recruit’ procedures in the brain that initially exist for other purposes. Armstrong



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prefers the term ‘recycling’: a part of the brain evolved for one purpose may be recycled for other purposes. In this chapter, I  will use the images of four walks in the woods or in the desert to clarify my ideas on the relation between attention in normal life and attention in aesthetic experience. These walks have experiential shapes and emotional charges that connect them to the ‘vitality affects’ set out by Johnson, as explained at the end of the first chapter. We will begin with an account of a walk from Roland Barthes. In a widely anthologized article, Roland Barthes ([1971] 1977) compared the experience of reading literature to taking a stroll beside a stream in a desert town in North Africa. For him, this strolling approach was the right way to approach literature. He called this open approach to literature ‘reading for the text’, contrasting it with a narrow search for the author’s voice, or for the historical circumstances of composition. He called the latter approach ‘reading for the work’. Schaeffer takes Barthes’s passage as the starting point for a discussion of the aesthetic experience, relating his philosophical reflections to recent findings in psychology and neuroscience at every step (2015, 47 ff.). He takes it that Barthes’s ‘reading for the text’ is aesthetic reading (lecture esthétique) and develops the openness demanded by Barthes into a more general phenomenon out of the psychology of attention:  ‘distributed’ attention, which he opposes to ‘focused’ attention. For him, the entry into distributed attention is an important moment in aesthetic experience not just of reading but of experiencing any artwork. I  will, at times, alter Barthes’s image a little, moving from the desert to the woods, so as to fit better with my own subsequent images. I would like to adopt Barthes’s image of aesthetic experience, suitably altered, and Schaeffer’s reasoning on it. I think it is reasonable to relate Barthes’s ‘reading for the text’ to psychology of attention and through that psychology more generally to aesthetic experience. I  think we need a clearly opposed image to that of Barthes, which Schaeffer does not supply. I suggest the image of a man with a metal detector, headphones on, searching for lost coins in the woods. Unlike Barthes’s strolling aesthete, the metal-detector man focuses on only two stimuli: the sound in the headphones and the movement of the dial on the metal detector. He must have some ambient awareness. He must avoid trees, and he may well think about where coins might be. Likely places would be along paths, or along places where paths once were. If he thinks someone may have buried a treasure, he may search differently but always with a distinct, narrow purpose. His focus is not on the experience of the moment but on the possibility of gain,

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on doing what he must do to get the coins. This, then, is my image of focalized attention. In Barthes’s terms, the man with the metal detector would be like the reader ‘for the work’, who searches for something narrower than it could be, though, indeed, the voice of the author is a wider and richer thing than a coin, no matter how valuable. His range of possibility is narrowed, though that narrowing may sometimes exist for good reason. Plainly, one may search narrowly in a text for a wide range of things, not just for the author. In doing my research, I  may need a quotation that will prove the point I want to make. Supposing I want to discuss the appropriate usage of the word ‘affect’. Perhaps I will scan an article for this word, keeping an eye out for related terms such as ‘mood’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’. That would be more like the metal-detector man than the strolling aesthete. Perhaps I am travelling and want to look up my train on a timetable. All that interests me then is the correct identification of the train and the correct reading of the time. Barthes’s terms of reference are too specific for our purposes. Our problem is of using aesthetic attention in the classroom, and the use of aesthetic attention contrasts with a more directly utilitarian kind of attention, like looking up a train. Fortunately, the American educationist Louise Rosenblatt has supplied us with just what we need. She distinguishes between aesthetic reading (the Stroll) and efferent reading (the Metal Detector). She derives the latter term from the Latin effero, to carry away. In efferent reading, one seeks to carry something away, extract some bit of information, like scanning a text or looking up one’s train. Here is her characterization of aesthetic reading: At the aesthetic end of the spectrum . . . the reader’s primary purpose is fulfilled during the reading event, as he fixes his attention on the actual experience he is living through. This permits the whole range of responses generated by the text to enter into the center of awareness, and out of these materials he selects and weaves what he sees as the literary work of art. (Rosenblatt [1978] 1994, 27–8)

Rosenblatt’s ‘aesthetic reading’, then, corresponds to Barthes’s ‘reading for the text’, which Schaeffer justly calls lecture esthétique. Rosenblatt is explicit about the ‘whole range of responses’ involved in aesthetic reading in the context of reading poetry. One must pay attention to the sound and rhythm of the words in the inner ear, attention to the imprints of past encounters with these words and their referents in differing life and literary contexts, attention to the overtones of feeling, the chiming of sound, sense, idea, and association. (p. 26)



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This list appears broadly consistent with the passage from Barthes, though Barthes does not emphasize feeling or emotion in this context. A  little later (p. 28), she stresses that the emotional component is essential: if the reader feels nothing, no literary work of art exists for him. This last point is consistent with Schaeffer, and with the point of view taken here. Rosenblatt’s formulation appears superior to that of Barthes in another way. Barthes’s picture of a stroll, attractive though it is, has an air of triviality about it. It is certainly true that a real stroll in a genuine North African town could be ruined by excessive purposefulness. One may stride off to a distant part of the town in order to see an unusual bit of ornamentation on a mosque, and thereby miss much of what the town has to offer. Indeed, a broader, more receptive approach to the experience of the town might make for a better stroll, but is the quality of strolls really of such importance? How is it that aesthetic experience matters? Rosenblatt’s stress on emotion offers a potential answer, which may be deepened by attention to other philosophers. In describing this phenomenon, Schaeffer uses the terms, drawn from the literature of neuroscience, ‘focused’ attention and ‘distributed’ attention (attention focalisée and attention distribuée in his translation of English ‘focused’ and ‘distributed’). He successfully uses this terminology to describe the phenomenon, but this choice of words creates a potential ambiguity. In normal usage, ‘focused’ refers not only to the narrowness of vision but also to intensity, as a magnifying glass can start a fire by focusing the heat of the sun. It seems as though ‘focused attention’ should be more intense than ‘unfocused attention’. This is unfortunate, because, at least in the domain of the arts, the focus of attention appears to be unrelated to intensity. ‘Focused’ attention may be casual and negligent, and ‘distributed’ attention may be intense. Indeed, Rosenblatt seems to be calling not just for broad attention to all aspects of the text but to intense broad attention. Schaeffer acknowledges this when he suggests that distributed attention is costly in resources, and that this feature of distributed attention needs explaining. Indeed, his presentation of the issues depends on intense attention to a wide range of elements of the text. For this reason, I will alter the language of the neuroscientific research, referring instead to ‘focalized’ attention. Schaeffer, in presenting his view of attention, layers different framings of the issue one onto another. He sets out Nelson Goodman’s 1976 formulation of ‘symptoms’ of art, with its distinction between ‘density’ (openness to many kinds of experience) and ‘saturation’ (thickness of experience within one category). He shows that Goodman’s categories oppose what is artistic to what is simplified in

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some way, schematized. He quotes Roman Ingarden’s list of ‘strata’ of the literary text:  sound formations, meaning units, represented objects and schematized aspects. Ingarden ([1931/1965] 1974), he reminds us, values ‘polyphonic’ reading, which brings together artistic formations at different levels into a single rich experience. These layers of different framings, though not fully integrated into a single model, create clear examples of the many kinds of richness that may captivate us in an artistic work. In discussing Goodman, he notes that he disagrees with Goodman that these are principally characteristics of the artistic work. He sees them first as characteristics of modes of attention:  one notices density or saturation, or else does not. He places all these in context, however, with a striking aphorism: ‘L’attention est une amorce; l’émotion y mord ou pas’ (Attention is a beginning (or bait); emotion bites or not). Like Rosenblatt, he views the experience of emotion as central to aesthetic experience. Like her, he sees the mode of attention as important in terms of openness to the possibility of emotional response  – but that response occurs or does not. The reader or spectator cannot feel emotion at will; she can only pay attention in such a way as to be open to the possibility of emotion. So far, we have seen two walks, representing contrasting forms of attention. To represent the intrusion of emotion, I  will introduce, in a third walk, a Snake. Walking in the woods, experiencing everything openly as Barthes and Rosenblatt recommend, I suddenly see a snake. The snake attracts my attention very quickly. I respond. I jump back. From a safe distance, I look at the snake, trying think whether it looks like a poisonous one: a viper, a krait or a cobra. I ask myself whether I should change my walking habits, report the snake to the animal control authorities or (if I am an expert in these matters) try to capture it myself. Two neuroscientists cast light on this event, taken as an illustration of the eruption of emotion into an attentional state. Joseph LeDoux would divide the two moments of this experience. The first moment, of seeing the snake and jumping back, comes from emotion, he thinks. This is a procedure of the brain, which he calls ‘emotional appraisal’. In survival terms, the important thing about emotional appraisal is that it is quick. It is not terribly accurate: I may jump back at the sight of a large earthworm, or even a stick in the shape of a snake. In a happy phrase, LeDoux says that emotional appraisal results from a ‘quick and dirty subcortical pathway’ (1995, 223). When I look at the snake from a distance, trying to think what sort of snake it is, I am engaging in ‘cognitive appraisal’, a slower but more reliable procedure. He has influentially cast these two appraisals as the products of independent systems. (Cf. also



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Daniel Kahneman’s ‘system one’ and ‘system two’ (2011).) Antonio Damasio is interested in the effect of the first, emotional experience on my brain and body. He proposes that an emotional experience is marked by the organism, in an involuntary way, as important for the survival of the organism. One remembers the experience because the body has marked it. That is why he speaks of the ‘somatic marker’. Damasio illustrates the significance of emotion for practical life when he describes his patient ‘Elliot’. Elliot has brain damage such that he has cognitive abilities, but no emotions. One result is that he finds nothing more significant than anything else. As a result, he is unable to set priorities and cannot organize his work (Damasio 1994, 36). The philosopher Jenefer Robinson has brought these two sets of findings together and reformulated them in a way that makes sense specifically of art that moves through time. The two arts that she discusses most extensively are literature and music. In her hands, LeDoux’s ‘emotional appraisal’ becomes ‘affective appraisal’, bringing the terminology in line with more precise and unambiguous definitions of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’. LeDoux’s ‘cognitive appraisal’ becomes for Robinson ‘cognitive monitoring’. This is important, because Robinson’s terminology makes better sense of the interaction between the two. As long as we use LeDoux’s two forms of ‘appraisal’, they appear as independent responses to one stimulus, one simply slower than the other, though more accurate. With Robinson’s terminology, we conceive cognitive monitoring in part as an ordered response to the affective. By Damasio’s account, it is only affect that makes a stimulus significant, and so worth thinking about, such that cognitive monitoring of affective appraisal appears as more significant than cognitive processing independent of affective appraisal. Robinson works through examples of novels and pieces of music, making sense of artworks in these terms. Antonio Damasio’s ideas are especially important for relating aesthetic experience to education. To Robinson, the somatic marker is important because it creates memory of the emotional moment within the experience of the artwork. That moment is then available for cognitive monitoring. The monitoring may produce emotional moments of its own, to create an interaction. It is also true, however, that the somatic marker produces memorability beyond the artwork. This is important for aesthetics, because the impact of aesthetic experience does not then disappear when we turn away from the work but persists in memory. It is even more important for education, because whatever receives the somatic marker is remembered, is available for reflection and, most important, becomes part of the practical ability of the experiencer to act:  it opens the doors of

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possibility because it creates significance. Damasio’s colleagues Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Matthias Faeth write about the effect of the somatic marker in education as the building of ‘educated intuition’ (Immordino-Yang and Damasio 2007, Immordino-Yang and Faeth 2010). Of course, the imagery I have used suggests that the openness of the Stroll is not strictly necessary if one is to meet a Snake. A person taking a MetalDetector Walk might also meet a Snake. I think the suggestion of the imagery is accurate for a certain range of aesthetic experience too. One is sometimes surprised by beauty, especially natural beauty. One can be striding along, late for an appointment, determined not to be late and be astonished by a shift in the clouds allowing a shaft of light to come through. Artworks, however, are often demanding, and the experience of the Snake – taken as positive here – may be available only to those who know how to pay broad attention to the artwork. The fourth and final walk in the woods is a rich example presented by Kendall Walton in Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990). It is this fourth walk that will take us beyond the elements common to literature and drama into what is distinctive about drama. Two boys, Eric and Gregory, are playing in the woods. They decide that all tree stumps will be bears. That is to say that when they see a tree stump, they must by the terms of the game treat it like a bear, either hunting it or running away from it. Walton reasons on this example very interestingly, pointing out, for example, that the terms of the game make certain things ‘fictional’, that is, real within the game, and that what is fictional is considerably independent of those playing the game. For example, the boys may see a moss-covered object in the distance: They approach the bear cautiously, but only to discover that the stump is not a stump at all, but a moss-covered boulder. ‘False alarm. There isn’t a bear there after all’, Gregory observes with surprise and relief . . . Eric and Gregory did imagine that a bear was there, but this did not make it fictional in their game. (p. 37)

This rule-governed aspect will help to make sense of theatre in future chapters, as Walton’s ‘generative principles’ become ‘theatrical conventions’. Walton’s example introduces new elements into our walks in the woods. The boys could stroll, after the fashion of Barthes, or seek something in a purposeful way, after the manner of the metal-detector man. They don’t happen to run across a real snake, so they create their own excitement through imagination. The bear in Walton’s example corresponds to the snake, with the important proviso that it is not real. Like Schaeffer’s seeker of aesthetic experience, they seek emotional



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response in the interpretable environment that surrounds them. But where Schaeffer sees his imagined subject as controlling only attention to what is really there, Walton has his boys introduce something new, imagined, in a game. Walton’s boys enjoy feeling afraid of the bear, even as they try to hunt it, imagining themselves bringing a bear carcass home in triumph. Although the bear is their own imaginative creation, they set up the game in such a way that they can be surprised by the presence or absence of a bear. That surprise depends in its turn on intense (but not focalized) awareness of their environment. Imaginative games, as seen in Walton’s terms, can supply a rich environment of experience and can evoke affective appraisal even as the boys remain aware that there really is no bear. Further, they presumably imagine themselves as strong, grown men with highly developed hunting skills, not children who might never have seen a real bear at all. It is not difficult to see how this game would be enjoyable, and that is one of the strengths of Walton’s example. Also, this kind of experience, since Lev Vygotsky and Johan Huizinga wrote in the 1930s, has conventionally been thought to be educational for children. Two questions arise for the philosopher:  Why is it enjoyable? And in what sense is it educational? In this context, we cannot be satisfied with an explanation, however coherent, which remains entirely unconnected with the material we have already seen in this chapter. If we are to have a practical, usable understanding of drama education, we must have a philosophical position that has a certain coherence. The Bear Game, by its nature, creates a doubleness of perception for Eric and Gregory, and it demands of them a certain discipline. It creates doubleness because they see everything around them in two ways at once. The woods around them are familiar and basically safe. The boys remember doing other things in these same woods:  looking at caterpillars, watching birds, having picnics. Perhaps one time they came to the woods to collect leaves for a school science project. They have played other imaginative games in the same woods: a bushy enclosure is sometimes the Batcave, and an unsuspecting passer-by on a nearby road was briefly the Penguin once. The woods are marked in memory by all these activities. At this moment, however, they are playing the Bear Game. Tree stumps, usually of little significance, become vital to them, and all the other significances sink into the background. This doubleness, combining two environments, perceived at once, is known in drama education as ‘metaxis’. Metaxis differs from this sense of doubleness in its seriousness of purpose. Augusto Boal, who coined the term for drama education, associates it with a serious effort to understand the world, to see

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how it is and ultimately how to change it. This doubleness has no purpose but fun, though indeed the boys may learn from the experience. In either case, the doubleness creates more perception of possibility. We shall examine the relation between this more basic notion of doubleness and metaxis in Chapter 6. Discipline comes into play because the boys are distractible. If Eric, in the midst of a bear hunt, notices an interesting caterpillar, he may forget the hunt and seize the opportunity to look at it. Gregory, who was enjoying the bear hunt, may object to this act of indiscipline. He may object within the fiction by strategically creating danger: ‘Oh my God, oh my God, it’s coming! Turn, Eric, face the bear, or it will kill you!’ Gregory is then divided. As his real self, he intends to preserve a game that he was enjoying. As his fictional self, the bear hunter, he is merely afraid for his companion’s safety. He must think strategically as a boy playing a game about how to manipulate the character he is playing to preserve that game. And this division is not particular to the moment of the caterpillar. When the boys are both committed to the game, each, in some part of himself, is thinking about the dramatic action as playwright: How big and dangerous is the bear? Will Gregory advance courageously and unproblematically on the bear, or will he tremble in terror so as to create more excitement? When Eric is distracted by the caterpillar, Gregory may also step outside the fiction and recover Eric’s attention that way:  ‘Oh, Eric, we’re playing the Bear Game now! You can look at caterpillars later!’ ‘OK, OK’, says Eric, a little embarrassed at being so fickle. And they both step back into the game. We can see from this example that the doubleness of the experience, the simultaneous presence of objective reality and projected fiction, is an element of playfulness, something that creates social cohesion between the two boys because it creates pleasure. Why this doubleness is pleasurable to us is not very clear. What is fun? Why do we find one thing fun and another not? One element of an answer is in the collaboration involved. The two boys are friends, and they enjoy being in a reality that is constructed by them and exclusive to them: a tree fort made out of images and words. Another element, from within the fiction, lies in the sharing of danger and ambition, in the pleasure of having the same emotion at the same time. The discipline involved is also double. Gregory imposes discipline on Eric by appealing to the rules of the game that both have agreed to. This is a conscious, external discipline that arises simply from being a game. One might enforce the rules of chess or tennis in the same way. As this is an imaginative game, there is another kind of discipline. Gregory’s enjoyment of the game, his commitment to the experience of the game, leads him to limit at once his perceptions and



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his actions. His sensation may be that the game is taking hold of him, that he is not limiting his own actions at all  – but in terms of function, in terms of what actually occurs, this limitation his imagination imposes upon the rest of his being is also discipline. The two kinds of discipline correspond to the two kinds of attention we have seen: there is a voluntary limitation of attention that arises from a desire to do something. There is an involuntary focused attention (‘focused’ because it is at once narrow in field and intense) that arises from the emotion of the experience  – encountering the Snake. In the Bear Game, the imagined bear imposes discipline too, which arises from emotional response and playfulness. Paul B.  Armstrong (2013) suggests that this element of playfulness has a deeper significance. That significance connects at once with the psychology of attention and with the philosophical tradition that sees the value of aesthetic experience in ‘free play’. Using a musical metaphor, Armstrong postulates a distinction between harmony and dissonance as basic to the structure of the brain and our experience of life. He asserts, and sets out to prove in his book, the following: Experiences of harmony and dissonance of the sort typically associated with art facilitate the brain’s ability to form and dissolve assemblies of neurons, establishing the patterns that through repeated firing become our habitual ways of engaging the world, while also combating their tendency to rigidify and promoting the possibility of new cortical connections . . . We have the kind of brain that thrives by playing with harmony and dissonance, and the experiences that have so widely and typically been reported about encounters with art and literature are correlated in interesting ways with basic neuronal and cortical processes. (p. x)

He suggests that play with the tension between harmony and dissonance is pleasurable for us, and that it has become pleasurable for us in evolutionary terms because it is essential for our survival. While seeking to anchor his view of aesthetic play in an impressively broad knowledge of neuroscience, Armstrong also looks back into the history of philosophy and literary criticism to ground his point of view. As he sees it, the brain cannot be exclusively devoted to harmony, because the brain’s responses would then become rigid and would not adapt to new stimuli. He connects that observation to Viktor Shklovsky’s famous formulation in ‘Art as Device’ of art as ostranienie, defamiliarization, or making strange. By Shklovsky’s account, as our surroundings become more familiar, they become invisible to us. The task

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of art is to make the world new once again, make us really see it. He suggests that we need art to ‘make a stone feel stony’ ([1925] 1991, 6). This is change in the distribution of the sensible, change in the nature of the experienced world, which arises from art. That, for Armstrong, is the role of dissonance in the internal play of the brain. He writes, The duality of the brain’s organization, its dependence on established patterns and its openness to new combinations, can support a variety of games, ranging from closure to open-endedness. Different kinds of play structure the brain’s fixity and plasticity in different ways, and our capacity to take aesthetic pleasure in different modes of play is a reflection of this fundamental, neuronally based variability. A brain that was more fixed or more chaotic would not be able to engage in different games or have different aesthetic experiences, because it would be either too closed to play or too open. The fundamental duality of the brain’s organization, its need not only for coordination and connections to make sense of the world but also for elasticity and adaptability to reconfigure itself in light of new challenges, makes it possible and useful for it to play. (p. 52)

For Armstrong, this fundamental benefit of playing with the tension between harmony and dissonance explains both the pleasure of play and much of its educational benefit. The fact of playing with the distinction between harmony and dissonance, regardless of other circumstances, keeps the brain both committed to stable, harmonious relationships necessary for continuity in life and the interest and pleasure in dissonance necessary for adaptability. The Bear Game example helps to understand how this distinction between harmony and dissonance can work in a theatrical game. The boys want to experience fear, so they imagine a threat. They want to experience triumph, so they imagine a worthy adversary, dangerous and difficult to defeat. The Bear Game constitutes play because cognitive monitoring tells them about the world outside their game. They have the emotional response to the bear, but the experience takes place within the awareness that there is no bear. Fictionality is essential to this form of play, and central to the sense of play in theatre. Of course, one can imagine either dissonance or harmony, and one can experience either dissonance or harmony in the real world. There are four possibilities, then: Imaginary Harmony Dissonance

Real



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The Bear Game consists in imagining a situation of dissonance that carries the possibility of a superior harmony: not the dull harmony of everyday life but the exciting harmony of a moment of triumph. The real situation that surrounds them is one of dull harmony, the everyday world of familiar places and familiar activities. (If there is a danger of real dissonance, it is in the familiar threat of parental annoyance if they are late for dinner.) The boys are free to play because imaginary dissonance is easily escapable and always carries with it, no matter how intense the game, a sense of unreality. The boys are between the real world and the imagined world, able to feel the excitement of the imagined world even as the dull harmony of the real world reassures them at every moment. The imagined quality of the game world means that the boys can step outside of it just by deciding to, so they are free. Their understanding means that the real world with its dull harmony is always with them. They can imagine intensely and so make it fade, but they cannot escape its presence. The inescapable presence of the real world means that they are free within the imagined world, free to act without threat or danger, without necessary consequences for the real world of ordinary life. What constitutes harmony and dissonance, however? Armstrong is dealing with the issues of literature, and he is left with the somewhat unsatisfactory need to postulate a natural, ‘hard wired’ need to play between the two, while maintaining that ‘what counts as harmony or dissonance is contingent and historically variable’ (2013, 14). With the examples we have seen here, and with the example of theatre, we can do better than that. The threat of a snake or of a bear is a primary threat to human life. The experience of encountering such a threat is dissonance, and this statement is not culturally relative. If Armstrong is right to maintain that dissonance is an essential element of human experience, then surely this is an example of dissonance for every human being. The example of a snake encountered on a walk is a serious example of a real threat to human life. The affective appraisal that makes us jump back and the cognitive monitoring that makes us seek to know what sort of snake it is might both be the result, if Armstrong is right, of learning from play. One responds appropriately to a life-threatening situation because one has rehearsed it in a non-serious situation. Perhaps also the playing has kept the survival machinery limber and well-oiled, ready to respond quickly even to a situation that has not been rehearsed. The Bear Game is just such a rehearsal. If Eric and Gregory live in a time and a place when there is a real threat from dangerous animals, then the Bear Game could be preparation for survival. If they do not live in

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such a time and a place, the game may still serve to keep the organism alert and adaptable in a more general way. In theatre, unlike in the literature that preoccupies Armstrong, we deal with the sight and sound of human bodies, not conjured up by the imagination but real and standing before us. Theatre uses the same non-verbal communication that we use in ordinary life. We have emotions, and they show in the expressions of our faces and the movements of our bodies. We are able to fake these emotions, or, given a real emotion, choose to show it to a companion or to suppress it. An important question for understanding theatre is how we should interpret this non-verbal communication and expression. I will maintain here that the most economical view of this phenomenon is that both audience members and actors interpret the expressions of actors by a process of internal imitation. The predominant view of non-verbal communication is that it is analogous to language. The 2017 edition of a textbook on the topic expresses this view as follows: The position we develop here focuses on the use of a communication code. That is, communication takes place whenever two or more individuals, using a socially shared or biologically shared signalling system, send and receive a message. A communication code (signalling system) includes certain kinds of signs, which individuals use to exchange information. (Remland [2000] 2017, 6, emphasis in original)

Linguists and literary scholars would recognize this view as a somewhat extended version of the one set out by Ferdinand de Saussure ([1916] 2011). Saussure laid great emphasis on the code that enables sender and receiver to understand one another. He regarded non-linguistic codes as essentially based on arbitrary correspondences, as language is. He recognized some kinds of motivated meaning but argued that all signification essentially relies on ‘the arbitrary nature of the sign’ (Saussure [1916] 2011, 67–70). In this case, the ‘biologically shared signalling system’ appears as a kind of code, not essentially different in its functioning from the syntax and semantics of a language, or from the codes governing quasi-linguistic use of gesture, as when a French person pulls down her lower eyelid to indicate scepticism. Just such approaches have been used to interpret theatre (De Toro 1995; Elam [1994] 2002). The notion of the sign is often thought to be in crisis, and this has been true at least since Umberto Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984, 14 ff.). There are many kinds of signification that are not readily amenable to the sign/



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code model. With a portrait painting, for example, we are able to detect meaning far beyond what we can easily give names to. Other problems with the semiotic model of communication are set out in Stewart (1995). In Remland’s textbook of non-verbal communication, the crisis shows itself in the multiplication of postulated ‘codes’. In discussing facial expression, Remland postulates a multiplicity of intrinsic, iconic and arbitrary codes, and seeks to reduce facial expressions to discrete signs that can be interpreted according to those codes. But expressions are not like the word ‘tree’, which consists of the exact same four letters every time it appears. They appear along a continuum, not susceptible to transformation into anything discrete. Further, no classification, for example, of smiles, can be fine enough to capture the meaning transmitted in the smile. The biggest issue with the sign/code model, however, has to do with emotion. There is an obvious issue: emotion is contagious. When we look at someone who is expressing any particular emotion, we are disposed to feel the same emotion. The sign/code model is obliged to deal with this issue in an uneconomical way:  by postulating separate mechanisms for emotional contagion. An alternative possibility is to propose that we mimic the expressions that we can see on other people’s faces: we smile when they smile, and that feels like a smile to us. This process need not show any traces in the observer’s appearance. The mimicking may take place in the image of the body in the brain. Within the context of interpreting the arts, the proposal was made by John Martin in the 1930s, in writings about dance. He wrote, When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially produced by any human body and therefore by our own . . . through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement had been of our own making. ([1936] 1968, 117, quoted in Reason and Reynolds 2010, 54)

A major advantage of this view is that understanding of meaning and contagion of emotion can take place through one single mechanism. A possible objection to the mimicry hypothesis is that physical mimicry is incapable of carrying conceptual meaning. It appears that this is not so. AzizZadeh et al. (2006) and Aziz-Zadeh and Damasio (2008) present neural evidence that there is internal mimicry of actions not only when we see them but also when we read about them – and not only when we read about them but also when we read figurative expressions evoking physical movements metaphorically. That is,

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when we read ‘grasp an idea’, there is a subliminal urge towards movement in our dominant hand: a movement towards grasping. These ideas are widely discussed today. Since 1996, such discussions have considerably taken place under the heading of ‘mirror neurons’ (Gallese et al. 1996). The idea of mirror neurons is a highly attractive and exciting formulation of a long-standing view of the relation between emotion and action. This formulation of the issue of internal mimicking is subject to widespread controversy. A  non-specialist like myself must steer clear of overly confident statements about the existence and significance of mirror neurons in human beings. Nevertheless, the fortune of the notion of internal mimicking is not altogether dependent on the specifics of mirror neurons, and the great economy of the hypothesis for the purpose of interpreting performing art must establish a certain credibility. The alternative sign/code hypothesis labours under much worse disabilities than a mere failure to provide final proof. What are mirror neurons? Gallese and colleagues discovered that macaque monkeys, seeing an experimenter reach for something, produced a response in a fraction of the motor neurons that would become active when they themselves reached for something. Further experimentation established that this response was not only the result of seeing a certain physical movement: the monkeys were aware of, and internally imitated, the intention behind the movement. Those neurons that responded in this way were dubbed ‘motor mirror neurons’, and much was built on this foundation. Further, there is a similar firing of neurons, dubbed ‘canonical mirror neurons’, when monkeys see an object associated with a clear movement, such as a cup. Seeing a cup, the monkeys’ motor area linked to their dominant paw would become active, though not as active as when they themselves pick up a cup: the sight of the cup alone activates only a minority of the neurons whereas an actual movement to pick up the cup activates all of them. Eric and Gregory respond not only to the imagined bear, but also to each other’s responses. Catching sight of a stump, Eric flattens himself on the ground, taking advantage of a bush to hide from the bear. Gregory is aware of this movement and imitates it. Gregory searches for the stump with his eyes, and when he sees it, he knows what the object of the hunt is. When Gregory flattens himself behind the bush, he is imitating Eric in the full and literal sense. When audience members look at the stage, then, they see both human figures and props. The human figures, the actors, produce expressions which produce responses in the audience members’ motor cortices. Armstrong suggests that these responses produce an effect he calls ‘primary intersubjectivity’ (pp. 133– 4). Our physiological response to the physiological expressiveness of our fellows



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on the stage is the same response that, according to Armstrong, first makes us believe, from the time of birth, that we are not alone, that other people in fact exist. Studies have shown that newborn babies are able to mirror the expressions of their parents before they develop any capacity for language and before they are able to recognize their faces in the mirror. The experience of expressiveness in the theatre calls on our very earliest experience, our first experience of meaning in the world. Eric and Gregory’s experience, the mirroring of their bodies in pretend play, makes them strongly aware of one another in their responses to the fictional bear. One may play the Bear Game alone, but for most children, it would not be much fun, and for certain it would then be a different game. The same is true of actors. As they act, they perceive one another’s nonverbal expressiveness. They respond to one another. Their actions are often rehearsed and are in some sense lies, but that does not change the essentials of the situation. Where members of the audience have responses in their motor cortices but generally do not move, actors respond physically to the expressions of other actors, because actors respond to each other on the stage. If one actor makes a threatening movement towards another, the second responds, on the spot, to that immediate movement. If the first movement does not come, or is too weak, the second actor may not be able to respond appropriately, regardless of how much the response has been rehearsed. Actors’ responses reflect those of audience members, but they are bigger, involving more of the brain because they produce actual movements. In this way, we can relate the experience of the actor to the experience of the audience: I postulate that the actor has the same experience as the audience, but more so. The reason it is more so is that the action potential represented by the mirror neurons is realized. The notion of canonical mirror neurons has deep consequences for our understanding of props. Armstrong writes, In some cases (fruits, vegetables, and sexual organs) these possibilities exist simply as a consequence of the intrinsic properties of the object and may or may not involve us with other agents (although the last item on the list very probably if not necessarily would). But in other cases (tools, clothes, as well as other human artifacts) these potentialities are a product of a history of action that has left its traces in the object’s affordances. In such instances, canonical neurons respond to the traces of agency embedded in objects and engage us with other agents in a web of intersubjective relations. (p. 150)

Armstrong draws a two-part distinction here between ‘intrinsic properties’ and properties which are ‘a product of a history of action’. In the case of drama,

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this necessarily becomes a three-part distinction. Some objects, such as fruit and vegetables, have the same properties as props as they have as real objects, properties which derive from their intrinsic nature. Others, such as letters or tools, have properties that we understand from our experience of real-life culture. A third category, however, is of properties that props may acquire in the course of a performance. In ‘Making Meaning in the Theatre’ (2015), I presented the case of a production of Macbeth that used wooden dowels in place of daggers for the scene following the murder of Duncan. The actors’ treatment of the dowels would lead the audience to understand that these are in fact murder weapons, not made of wood as the real objects are, but of metal like the daggers of the story. Within the fiction, the daggers are covered in blood, but that blood need not be present on the prop to be present to the story. When Armstrong writes about ‘the traces of agency’ embedded in objects, we see in theatre that these traces may exist only within the production, and only for as long as the performance lasts. In theatre, the properties of the object in the story may directly contradict the properties of the real object. The actors’ treatment of the knife corresponds to Eric and Gregory’s treatment of the tree stump. The boys have agreed on a convention that the tree stump is a bear, just as the actors in my production of Macbeth have agreed to treat the wooden dowels as metal daggers. Eric and Gregory’s movements make the agreement on the bear real to both, just as the actors’ movements make the agreement on the dowels real at once to actors and to the audience. Once again, we see the superiority of the mimicking hypothesis in terms of economy of explanation. Mimicking explains easily how fine elements of context can modify the meaning of either the dowels or the bear: we imagine ourselves in the midst of the situation, and fine movements gain significance just as they do when we are really present. It is important to notice that if the psychomotor cortex responds to an expression or to a prop, there is no necessary role for language in interpreting this aspect of the play. The signified must have a signifier, but that signifier is already present in the firing of the psychomotor cortex. That firing may produce a twitch in a hand, or a swallowing movement of the throat in the case of the cup, but even if there is no such movement, the physical change in the brain is already sufficient as a signifier. Monkeys interpret the world with just such changes in their brains, as do newborn babies. There is no reason to think that adult human beings lose this capacity, nor that it is transformed into something different because we have the additional ability to use language. Further, it is important to notice that the audience and the actor interpret props in the same way, whether from natural properties, like the fruit, from



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properties derived from experience of culture, like the letter, or from properties derived from the conventions of the play, like the dowels which are daggers. The interpretive procedure is identical, and the emotional charge given to the objects is parallel, though probably stronger in the case of the actor, for the reasons that we have seen. Drama generally does involve language, of course, since actors usually must either speak memorized lines or improvise new lines on the spot. As we saw in the discussion of canonical mirror neurons, it is reasonable to suggest that we interpret language quite broadly through the same responses of the psychomotor cortex: the response to the word ‘cup’, then, is not fundamentally different from the response to seeing a cup. This is not, as some previous theorists have thought (Derrida), because the sight of the cup is interpreted through language, but rather that the psychomotor response is fundamental to the recognition both of the real object ‘cup’ and the word ‘cup’. If we see language this way, then the relation between text and performance is transformed. Productions have sometimes been viewed as unfoldings of meaning first contained within the words of the work – that is, a play is first a literary work, and a production is a subordinate unfolding of that same work. A performance is externalized literary meaning. In my view, a silent reading of a play, or indeed a novel, is something like internalized theatrical meaning: one ‘performs’ the work within oneself. If the stage directions say, ‘Picks up cup and drinks water’, we internally perform those actions. It has always been known that plays leave many blanks to be filled in as we create a performance. This observation implies that every element of the text is open to interpretation, inasmuch as there are infinite possible movements that conform to ‘picks up cup and drinks water’. The action can be given a wide variety of significances: Is the character trying to avoid answering a question? Is the character ignoring someone, acting as if she were alone? Or does she simply have, as James Hamilton has it in one of his examples, ‘an eager thirst’? These distinctions certainly exist in performance – but they exist in silent reading too and make up a part of what the text is for the reader. The same observations apply to the spoken language of the text. If one character says to another, ‘Shut the window’, what does that mean? Perhaps one character is aggressively claiming the right to order another character around. Perhaps the speaker thoughtlessly presupposes the same right, and in the context of the scene, that is the point. Perhaps the speaker is ill, unable to move, and is tremulously requesting a service of a person who is usually his social superior (so nervous is he that he forgets to say ‘please’). This is what is sometimes called

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‘subtext’ in theatre. Actors are sometimes taught to write explicit subtexts for their lines, usually starting with ‘I’ or ‘you’: ‘I am announcing that I can command you’; ‘You are my instrument, nothing more’ or ‘I am embarrassed at my breach of protocol’. The audience and the actor both hear the pattern of stress and intonation, and respond to it emotionally. In the first case, the actor may respond with concealed resentment, expressed in a stiffening of the body and a pause. The audience may respond internally in the same way, as they identify with the character receiving the command. In the second case, the actor responds like a servant, routinely obeying the dominant speaker. Perhaps the audience stiffens anyway at the arrogance of routine supposition of authority. In the last case, the actor addressed may respond in a complex way, first stiffening at the impropriety of the request, then softening in sympathy with the character’s embarrassment. The audience may respond along with either of the two characters. And when we read a character’s speech silently, we rehearse the non-verbal manner of delivery internally. When a character speaks, we attribute intonation patterns to that character’s speech. When Oliver Twist says to the Master, ‘Please, sir, I want some more’, do we not attribute an intonation pattern to his speech? In order to find an appropriate intonation pattern, we must pay attention to the dramatic situation, to contextual clues in the passage. Oliver is said to be a ‘small, thin child’. The Master ‘was a fat, healthy man, but he went very pale. He looked with surprise at the small boy’. The words set up something very much like a theatrical tableau, with a contrast of both size and expression. If we are to be entertained by the passage, we must read slowly enough, as Rosenblatt advises, to receive the emotional resonances of every detail. She also writes, ‘out of these materials he [the reader] selects and weaves what he sees as the literary work of art’ (Rosenblatt [1978] 1994, 27–8). Part of that weaving is the construction of an intonation pattern for Oliver, and that intonation pattern is underdetermined by the text. What, exactly, is the subtext of Oliver’s request? ‘I am frightened of you’? ‘I am as good as you’? ‘I am proud to represent my friends in asking for more’? ‘I hope that if I am humble enough, you will not punish me’? Each of these suggested subtexts would result in a different intonation pattern, and the impact of the pattern goes beyond what can easily be set out in words. The Master hits Oliver with his spoon. How hard? Where on his body? We are not told. It is up to us to concretize the scene, not through visualization, as if we were imagining a movie, but rather through imagined action. The movement of theatre, then, is linked with the movement of literature, not because theatre is verbal, but rather because reading is theatrical. Does this mode of theatrical reading exhaust the



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range of aesthetic reading? Can one read well, in the mode set out by Rosenblatt, without taking such an embodied perspective? Perhaps, but there are certainly important aspects of aesthetic reading that are only accessible through theatrical, embodied reading. Robinson’s ideas about the movement of art in time may fairly be integrated with Armstrong’s ‘harmony’ and ‘dissonance’. Emotional moments in plays may be positive, of course, as when the couples marry at the end of a Shakespeare comedy. But that is an ending place. The moments which interest Robinson for her scheme are the ones that push the artwork forward in time. Perhaps in theatre, the archetypal moments of this kind are the climaxes of classically structured plays, and those climaxes are generally, or perhaps always, moments of dissonance. Nora comes to realize her marriage to Torvald is a sham. The servant of two masters is increasingly desperate in his efforts to satisfy two employers who are ignorant of each other’s existence. The failure of the Gentleman Caller to improve Laura’s situation, Laura’s despair and the anger of Amanda all make the situation untenable for Tom and push him to leave. Endings of plays conventionally present a situation of stability, with something like harmony, though the harmony may still be unsatisfactory or tragic. We shall see more on this in Chapter 7, on dramatic tension. We have, then, elements of a viewpoint on the aesthetic impact of drama, whether in the form of theatrical performance or in the form of whole-group improvisation. The first issue is attention. Audience members and actors are equally ready to give intense attention to the actions on the stage. When the play begins, both audience members and actors see expressive movements from actors, in faces and in bodies. They respond as people do in ordinary life, seeing expressiveness from another person. Their ordinary-life responsiveness is recruited to the purposes of art. The audience members respond largely within themselves, but their cognition of the play is still embodied, as the psychomotor parts of the cortex are responding within them. Actors produce embodied responses to the visible and audible expressions of others, whether these are rehearsed or improvised. As with the audience, their psychomotor cortices are activated. Unlike the audience, they respond with physical movement, such that not only mirror neurons but all relevant neurons are activated. The expressiveness of actors may produce, using Armstrong’s musical metaphor, harmony or discord. Harmony, in this instance, is the expression of positive affect, usually in interpersonal relations between actors; discord is the same with negative affect. These expressions of affect are considerably universal to all humanity. A person who did not understand the language of the play, and

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was unfamiliar with its culture of origin, would still most often recognize angry confrontation and loving caresses, both in vocal and in bodily expression. These expressions of affect produce, in Robinson’s terms, affective appraisal both in actors and in audience members, and that affective appraisal leads on to cognitive monitoring. The affective appraisal makes the play or activity memorable. The cognitive monitoring makes it intelligent and subtle. The two interact: cognitive monitoring may lead to emotional understanding, affective appraisal that itself leads to more cognitive monitoring. This is a crude model, to be refined later in the book, of what goes on in a play, on terms that combine the cognitive and the affective. In the example of the Bear Game, we have seen certain hints as to the nature of free play in this context, also to be developed later in the book. What we have seen applies to drama education as whole-group improvisation as well, since the expressive elements and their impact are the same – but we need further development of the notion of free play before we can draw a clear distinction between the two. The topic of this chapter, however, is not simply drama aesthetics but drama aesthetics in relation to education. In the remainder of this chapter, I  will mark out the ground in the relation between drama aesthetics and education. Those general statements, in turn, will open out onto two areas of education: emancipation, or general development of social progress and wellbeing, and education in curricular materials. One may learn from a play or drama activity in many ways. Perhaps in the midst of a play, a character in the role of a physics professor stands up and delivers a lecture on quantum mechanics. The audience, and the other actors, may learn about quantum mechanics from that lecture exactly as if it had been delivered in a usual classroom context. Perhaps in a drama activity, participants play the roles of students having a discussion of a social issue. That discussion might become simply and only a discussion, and those involved might learn from it exactly as they would if they were not playing roles. Such learning might have importance in a given case, as these more conventional forms of education might interact with the more distinctive contribution of the dramatic element – but for the moment, in this chapter, the topic is the specific contribution of drama to education, and we are working on the hypothesis that this specific contribution has centrally to do with aesthetics. Following Louise Rosenblatt and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, we have suggested that aesthetics has to do with two things: mode of attention and emotional response. Mode of attention must be distributed rather than focalized, but that does not prevent it from being intense. Following Mark Johnson, Paul Armstrong and their neuroscientific sources,



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I have suggested that reading is always embodied, in that we understand what we read through the recruitment of psychomotor response to the interpretation of narrative. Emotional response, then, must flow from this embodied nature, the imagined response of the body to the stimuli set out in the text, as we imagine the impact of the spoon on Oliver’s body, and also the movement of the Master’s arm in hitting him. We may identify with either or both (though indeed the text encourages us to identify with Oliver more than the Master). I have sought, in this chapter, to embed emotional response in the cognitive process of performing or creating a narrative event. We saw briefly that Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang regard affective response as central to the process of learning. In what follows, I  will seek to draw connections between emotional responses as they appear specifically in drama and connect them to the general process of learning in the terms of these two neuroscientists. If Rosenblatt and Schaeffer are right, the experience of an artwork can change our distribution of the sensible at least for as long as we are looking at the artwork. A desire to appreciate art induces us to shift to a mode of distributed attention. We notice different things. We allow ourselves to be guided in our view of the world, at least temporarily, by the artwork. We are open to emotional experience arising from the work, and sometimes, not rarely, we do experience emotion. Damasio and Immordino-Yang tell us that the experience of emotion can mark something as important for the organism and we remember it. It may be that this experience of emotion can go further, can create the possibility not only of experiencing momentarily but also of retaining a new distribution of the sensible. Is there evidence for this? A recent study (Balaban et al. 2017) provides empirical evidence of the validity of Damasio’s statements. It has long been known that affect has an impact on memory. Parkin, Lewinsohn and Folkard (1982) showed that people remember information marked with positive affect better immediately after the test but remember information marked with negative affect better after a delay of a week. Bradley and Baddeley (1990) were able to show that the same was true with a delay of a month: people remembered information better if it was marked with negative affect. Balaban et al. examined whether positive and negative affects had a similar impact on memory of landmarks in the course of navigation. They carried out two experiments with German undergraduates. They constructed a virtual maze made up entirely of T-junctions such that the subject had a binary choice of left or right in every case. Each T-junction was marked with a picture, carrying positive or negative affective valence, or else no affective mark at all. They showed a video to participants showing the correct route, with the affect-laden pictures. They found that when they used pictures

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with continuity of affect (i.e. positive and negative valences were not necessarily strong), affect produced only a slight improvement in wayfinding immediately after first learning the route and viewing the pictures, and no effect at all a week later. When, however, they restricted the range of affectively charged pictures to those with strong valence, they succeeded in showing that wayfinding was better with positive affect immediately after viewing the video, but a week later, the reverse was true: negative valence produced better practical memory. These results have deep implications for the project of this book. They indicate that an experience of negative affective charge has an impact on the way we construct our environment. A renewal of a negative emotional response intensifies our awareness of spatial configuration. To link this finding with the imagery of the four walks, when we see a snake, we remember where we were quite clearly. This may well have an evolutionary function: one then tends to be cautious in the place where the snake was. This notion of mapping may be connected to another well-known area of research: different people feel urban environments as more threatening than others. In particular, women and old people find their environments more frightening than do younger men. The research into the reasons for these disparities have thrown up some results of some interest for the project of this book. Experience of emotion forms both our mapping of environment and our understanding of ourselves. Koskela and Pain (2000) examine women’s perceptions of danger in their environments, and they find that women in Edinburgh and Helsinki map their cities in their minds according to perceived levels of danger. If this is an important way of distributing the sensible, then the women must perceive themselves as vulnerable. If a particular woman takes karate courses and begins to see herself as less vulnerable, then her distribution of the sensible changes even as her perception of herself changes. If she becomes intellectually convinced that other women’s fear of a particular place is unwarranted, her map may not change until her feelings change. So people use emotional experience to map their physical environment. They use emotional experience to retain the memory of landmarks, but that same emotional experience can produce distortions, fear where there is little real risk, and absence of fear where risk is genuine. The fear of violence may also be involved with prejudices of different kinds: Koskela and Pain (2000) suggest that women are often afraid of areas where there is a large number of immigrants. But the transformation of environment is only one aspect of possible transformation. Augusto Boal, as we shall see in the next chapter, identifies what we might call a location in life experience that needs to be transformed:  the



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experience of oppression. His assertion is that the performance of theatre can work a change in the value attached to this experience. It is possible to work out ways of dealing with oppression and allow people to construct it as something that can be changed. If the somatic marker on a spatial location can be changed permanently, then the somatic marker on anything can be changed permanently. One of the goals of drama education has historically been to poison prejudice, to deal with sexism and racism. A white person’s encounter with a black man can be many things. It can be dominated by fear of violence. It can be shot through with hostility learned from parents or neighbours. It can be like any other encounter with an unknown man. If a location can be made memorable and it is possible, through aesthetic experience, to transform the evaluation of the experience had there, then people can learn to construct their environment, their view of themselves and their view of their place on society differently. We might say that the essential aspect of an aesthetic experience is an experience of emotion, and that emotion must have a certain genuineness. If that experience of emotion is to be useful for education, it must be possible to receive it with a certain playfulness, a certain unseriousness that undoes its threat. As we saw with Eric and Gregory, the game arising from aesthetic experience gives rise to a certain discipline. In the Bear Game, there would seem to be two distinct kinds of discipline connected directly to the game: the first in the observation of rules in anticipation of the pleasure of the game and the second arising from the emotion of the game once it has begun, which draws their attention. Emotion, playfulness, discipline. We shall return to these terms. This complex of experience makes it possible at once to see the world in a wider way and to act within that world because of the discipline achieved. Theorists of drama education have made efforts to design forms of theatre that will change our distribution of the sensible. Their work largely predates that of Rancière, so the terms they use are not his terms, but the connection can be made. In the next chapter, we shall also look at a philosopher of art, Tzachi Zamir, who has looked closely at the experience of the actor in conventional theatre. I will argue that the characteristics he identifies in the actor’s experience can serve to understand the plans of Augusto Boal and Gavin Bolton for drama education. I will also cast doubt on some assertions made by both theorists.

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Chapter  1 was largely devoted to examining the philosophical purposes of education in relation to aesthetics in Dewey and Rancière. I  found much in common in terms of values between the two but also found that their aesthetics were very different. I  gave reasons for favouring Dewey’s aesthetics over Rancière’s and went on to discuss the modernization of Deweyan aesthetics in neuropragmatism. Chapter  2 developed a view of aesthetics based on the psychology of attention compatible with this neo-Deweyan perspective. This chapter turns to the topic of emancipation. It is Rancière who brought the idea of emancipation fully into discussions of drama education, and yet my rejection of his aesthetics may well have an impact on any possible acceptance of his ideas. Further, the stress of the previous chapter on attention suggests a particular direction for construal of emancipation in drama education, which we shall see. The word ‘emancipation’, in the first instance, refers to freeing from authority. In Roman law, emancipatio denoted the freeing of children from the authority of their father. In modern times, the word came to refer to manumission from slavery and to the elimination of legal discrimination against religious minorities (e.g. the Catholic Emancipation Act in the United Kingdom). In a more general sense, it means ‘Setting free, delivering from intellectual, moral, or spiritual fetters’ (Oxford English Dictionary). The core metaphor of emancipation, then, is of liberation from something oppressive, very exactly an expansion of possibility. In Rancière’s usage, ‘emancipation’ is said to occur when the student, despite the efforts of the system to make her into a receiver of information, comes to a practical realization that she can think for herself. As we have seen, an ‘emancipated master’ is one who fully understands and respects the powers of the human mind, and seeks to get students to use their own intelligence. Liberation from an oppressive ideology creates new possibilities for the master as well. The notion that art has to do with the process of emancipation also derives from Rancière.

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In this book, I  have built up a rather different understanding of aesthetics from that of Rancière. Is the idea of emancipation by means of art intrinsic to Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics, or can we retain or even improve it in relation to this new definition? If, as I proposed in the last chapter, the notion of aesthetics is dependent on modes of attention, then, one may fairly ask whether the emancipation available through drama education is an alteration of attention to the world. Indeed, some such idea would seem to be inherent in the figure of the four walks in the woods. The Metal-Detector Walk would then be devalued from this perspective, as too narrow in its mode of attention. A person who only ever took Metal-Detector Walks would be imprisoned within his own desire for profit and unable to receive a broad experience of the world. The Stroll would be more open, with wider attention to the world, and in that sense it would be superior. The other two walks then look like different forms of eruption of emotion into the Stroll. The Snake encapsulates the arrival of emotion based on what is there to be experienced. The Bear Game presents the seeking of emotion by the fictionalization of the landscape. Any of the last three might be seen as making a contribution to emancipation. The Stroll simply provides greater breadth of experience, as Barthes argued that it should. The Snake may frighten us, but it also makes us live in the moment, experience what is there to be experienced not only in contemplation but also in full, passionate participation. The Bear Game gives us control over ourselves and our responses through imagination. The fictional redrawing of lines in game playing may allow for long-term change in our views of the world: a new distribution of the sensible.

Boal, Bolton and Zamir In this chapter, I  will examine works of three thinkers on drama and theatre: Augusto Boal, Gavin Bolton and Tzachi Zamir. The names of the first two are familiar to everyone involved in mainstream drama education. Boal is among the most influential of all practitioners in the field. He began his career with political theatre in his native Brazil. As a Marxist, he sought to use theatre to provoke reflection and radicalization through his work at the Arena Theatre of São Paulo. He was deeply influenced by both Bertolt Brecht and Konstantin Stanislavsky. In 1971, he was kidnapped off the street, tortured and forced into exile in Argentina. It was there that he developed the set of practices that became known as Theatre of the Oppressed, set out in a series of books published over



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decades. This discussion will refer to books published between 1974 and 2006. The term ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ embraces more specific forms of theatrical practice, including, ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Image Theatre: Participants formulate their understanding of situations of oppression by the use of tableaux. Invisible Theatre: Actors develop scripted scenes concerning issues of oppression that they then perform in real public places. Those who listen to them do not know that they are actors. Forum Theatre: A group of actors performs a short scripted play depicting a situation of oppression, but rather than working through to a satisfying conclusion, they move to a conclusion designed to be both unsatisfying and realistic. They perform the play a second time. Members of the audience (spect-actors) may stop the play at any point and suggest changes to the script. Either the actors adopt the suggestions of audience members, or spect-actors themselves replace the protagonist and act in the way they think to be right. An actor takes the role of ‘Joker’, stimulating the audience to intervene and monitoring the action. The Joker may refuse suggestions if, for example, they involve magical thinking. Rainbow of Desire: After Boal moved to France in 1978, he found that he was no longer faced with the very obvious forms of oppression he had seen in Latin America. Rainbow of Desire is more psychologically oriented, though the theme of oppression is still strong through such constructs as the Cop in the Head: the internalized ideas that oppress people and prevent them from flourishing. Such techniques as Image Theatre and Forum Theatre were reformulated in relation to the new purposes. Legislative Theatre: Boal returned to Brazil in 1986. In 1992, Boal became an elected official in the city of São Paulo. Legislative Theatre was a means of enabling citizens to contribute to the legislative process.

The best known of these is Forum Theatre. Boal’s work is very strongly founded in the notion of oppression. Each form of theatre he sets out is meant to move from oppression to something better, such that the basic form of emancipation in Boal’s thinking is clear from the outset. Ultimately, the goal is action, but in order to get to action, one must first perceive what is true about society and, just as important, where there are possibilities for change. Gavin Bolton is a British drama teacher closely associated with Dorothy Heathcote. The two were the central figures in the movement first known as Drama in Education, and, from the 1990s, as Process Drama. Bolton’s book

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Towards a Theory of Drama in Education (1979, hereafter TTDiE) is the nearest thing to a theoretical manifesto and philosophical statement for the movement. This book is not necessarily representative of Bolton’s views later in his career, but it discusses issues important to my project, notably including the relation between emotion and cognition. We shall refer to later works for perspective on the later development of the Process Drama tradition. Bolton’s discussion in this book places itself firmly within the school system, and he asks how a responsible drama teacher should proceed and what constitute valid goals of drama education. Broadly, he was an advocate for whole-group improvisation based on a problematic situation or stimulus, what Cecily O’Neill would later call a ‘pre-text’. For him, the most important part of drama practice is ‘internal action’: the child should participate not only in an outward performance but also in an inner experience, a ‘living-through’. That experience allows not only for objective learning but also for subjective learning, a change in emotion, belief and attitude. For example, he tells of a workshop he did with disadvantaged youth in a high-crime area to do with attitudes to the police. He wanted students to see a policeman as ‘a man with a family’. They should overcome simplistic and inhumane thinking to become better people. Here, the change of perception is usually not as clearly linked with action, though there are specific examples where the link is stronger, as when he tries to deal with bullying at a school through drama. (Cf. also the discussion of similar ideas in Davis 2014, 89–96.) Tzachi Zamir is virtually unknown in drama education circles. Zamir’s perspective is valuable because he brings out points about the practice of scripted theatre, and of theatre more generally, that are slighted or ignored in the work of Boal and Bolton. Zamir is a philosopher working in a literature department who is also an avid amateur actor in scripted theatre. (He writes, e.g., of performing the role of Gloucester in King Lear repeatedly over a period of five years.) The experience of acting raises questions for him that he treats as a philosopher in his book Acts: Theater, Philosophy and the Performing Self (2014). He maintains that the experience of acting provides ‘existential amplification’, a specific way of ‘living more’, which accounts for the fascination of acting and allows him to argue that acting in the most traditional sense is a beneficial experience, a form of education. My discussion in this chapter will focus on that existential amplification as change of lived experience, and consequently as a form of emancipation, an expansion of possibility in life. All three authors base their writings considerably on the experience of doing theatre or drama. Experience is important, of course, but our writers have felt the need to supplement the testimony of their experience in various ways. In



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early writings, Boal set out to create a philosophical grounding for his work, discussing, for example, Aristotle and Hegel. The one point out of this discussion that he depends on in later work is his critique of Aristotle’s ‘catharsis’, which we shall see. His later works depend on anecdote and on statements backed up only by his vast reputation as a practitioner. Bolton makes limited use of certain theorists of education, notably including Piaget and Vygotsky, but he too depends mostly on anecdote, on his own reputation, and that of his close associate, Dorothy Heathcote. He was responding to what he portrays as certain negative aspects of the teaching of theatre in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, to which he alludes without making any attempt to ground his statements in external sources. Zamir, as part of his philosophical project, has read widely in the memoirs of actors, and many of the quotations in the main text of his book are first-person accounts by well-known actors such as Simon Callow. His book is also the best-grounded of the works discussed here in the philosophical tradition, primarily but not exclusively analytic. Since the publication of Bolton and Boal’s works, there has been considerable activity in the philosophy of theatre, including work by James Hamilton, Paul Woodruff and David Z. Saltz. That work is taken into account and discussed in Zamir’s book. All three authors argue that drama or theatre offers an opportunity for a change in perception, something approximating Rancière’s new ‘distribution of the sensible’. In all cases, as we shall see, they view drama and theatre as offering a wider sense of possibility in life. They differ on the way they conceptualize this change, and on what they view as significant change. All stress the autonomy of the participant to find an independent view, seeing the autonomy of the subject as a major benefit of drama to be preserved and extended. All (unlike Rancière but like Dewey) stress the need for an experience that is at once cognitive and emotional. Boal and Bolton have in mind to define practices for group leaders or teachers which will result in education. Zamir is different in this way: given his experience as an actor and a perception of benefit, he looks to define the benefits of the practice of theatre that come to be whether anyone seeks them intentionally or not. Zamir does not discuss how a director might maximize the benefit of theatre for actors: that work is yet to be done. Theorists of drama are like blind men with an elephant. Their descriptions are very different, but they may yet be examining the same object. Boal, Bolton and Zamir are all engaged with performance involving speech and bodily movement, in which participants take on identities not their own. Zamir assumes performance of scripted theatre for an audience and discusses the nature of rehearsal in this light. Bolton assumes an improvised, school-based

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activity carried out without student rehearsal or preparation. Boal assumes a committed group of actors who prepare activities to do with oppression, with the intention of interacting with ‘spect-actors’ who may only be with them for an hour or two. Given these big differences, they yet have a great deal in common.

Purposes of drama and drama education Boal’s view of significant change of perception is initially that of a conventional Marxist:  he looks forward to revolution. Accordingly, he seeks to draw a connection between the experience of oppression and future action. In Forum Theatre, the company of actors presents such a situation, which, ideally, will be a public one, directly recognizable to spect-actors and seen as a problem by each individual participant and spect-actor. The interventions of spect-actors are viewed as seeking to deal with oppression. They, accordingly, experience a change of perception:  resignation is replaced with a sense of possibility. Oppression becomes visible as such. An oppressive system once seen as unassailable begins to be seen as vulnerable. In some cases, especially to do with sexism, oppressors, unconscious of their unjust behaviour, come to see what is wrong with their way of seeing the world (see, e.g., Boal 2006, 107–8). After his move to France in 1978, as we have seen, Boal’s work became more psychological in orientation. Spect-actors come to be aware of oppressive elements in their own mind, as well as in their behaviour towards others. When the situations played out are not public but private, Boal was obliged to work not with identity of situation but with similarity. The goal of ‘Rainbow of Desire’, while still involving oppression, has also to do with mental health. Bolton seeks something less specific in education. He wishes to put students through a process of experiencing that will build skills, awareness and ethics. In explaining the results of his form of education, Bolton suggests, Various metaphorical terms are used in an attempt to describe the insightful change that can take place: refining, extending, widening, making more flexible, shifting a bias, breaking a stereotype, giving new slant, challenging, casting doubt, questioning assumptions, facing decisions, seeing new implications, anticipating consequences, trying alternatives, widening range of choice, changing perspective. (TTDiE, 45)

To put it another way, Bolton seeks to move students to be more flexible and effective in coping with real-life situations. Some of the terms in this list



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identify imprisoning elements of student thinking, from which they need to be liberated, such as stereotypes and biases. Where Bolton gives examples, they are often liberal in nature: one should think critically, should not be racist or sexist, should think in a subtle rather than a crude way. He is close to Dewey in these terms. In one place, Bolton becomes more ambitious, seeking a result that cannot be defined. He refers to Kant, suggesting that ‘further elusive meanings accrue’ (TTDiE, 84). He pictures a further result of the process, then, a change in ideas and outlook that cannot be verbalized. Bolton recognizes that such a deep change may frequently be out of reach. He identifies a number of ‘prerequisites’ to this major goal, each of which he sees as a worthwhile goal of education in itself: 1. Interest. The degree of initial interest in the topic. 2. Collectivity. The degree to which that initial interest is shared within the group. 3. Compatibility. The extent to which the actual emotional network of the class matches the emotional tone and level required by the topic, and is also congruent with their intellectual understanding of the topic. 4. Effort. The degree to which they are prepared to work at such emotional or intellectual compatibility, i.e. to work at commitment. 5. Form. The degree to which they are prepared to channel their energies released by commitment into some appropriate form. (TTDiE, 106)

These prerequisites help to clarify why he sees emotion as important in the process. ‘Interest’ and ‘effort’ are aspects of motivation, and it is easy to see how emotional commitment contributes to them. ‘Collectivity’ and ‘compatibility’ have to do with the collective emotional commitment of the class. Bolton deliberately uses the paradoxical term ‘subjective collective meaning’ (p.  38). Boal actually helps to make sense of this, because he uses the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ in parallel ways. Boal describes the theatrical space, saying that the dimensions of it are objectively the same for everyone present: so many metres by so many. The time of the activity is also objectively the same: from this time to that time, exactly so many hours and minutes. But the time of theatrical activity, for him, is ‘subjective’: it is in the minds of the audience and participants that the fictional space may be larger or smaller, that the fictional time may sometimes correspond to objective time and sometimes not (RD, 18–20). For him, these dimensions of theatrical fictionality are both subjective and collective, defined through the conventions of theatre (just as Eric and Gordon define a subjective bear that they both see). Boal goes on to suggest that these ‘subjective’ aspects

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of theatrical art allow for two further dimensions of theatrical experience: the affective (which has to do with memory) and the oneiric (which has to do with imagination) (p. 20). The benefits of emotionally charged collective activity is a deeply held value for Bolton (as for the Boal of Rainbow of Desire), and in this, his position is consistent with that of Dewey. ‘Form’ will be dealt with below. Zamir, like Boal, construes the benefit of the experience in theatre in terms of expanding perception of possibility. For him, rehearsal and performance allow the actor to experience a wider range of possibility in life, ‘existential amplification’. He identifies three kinds of existential amplification:  content amplification, self-animation and disembodiment. Content amplification is the most obvious: the actor enters a fictional reality and learns from the experience, parallel to what Bolton calls ‘an existential living-through structure’ (p. 53). Selfanimation is the energy that is often perceptible in all kinds of performing artists. That same energy in acting is a constant preoccupation of drama teachers, at least those who prepare students for performance. Disembodiment is a second consequence of the process of entering the new reality: one leaves one’s usual identity for a time, and Zamir sees this abandonment as in itself often positive. Zamir sets out these characteristics of acting primarily from the perspective of the actor but also maintains that all three forms of existential amplification affect audiences too. He maintains that audiences come to the theatre not only to be immersed in a story but also to witness the process of acting: they know at every moment that the actor is not really the character, and audience perception of the actor’s artistry is an important element of theatre aesthetics for Zamir. The visions of all three writers can be related to Rancière’s term ‘subjectification’. Boal writes that the ultimate purpose of doing theatre for him is ‘to change the people – “spectators”, passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon – into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action’ (TO, 122). This formulation is consistent with his view of theatre as ‘rehearsal’ for some sort of change, whether social or psychological (TO, 122; RD, 44). Bolton says that his goal is to create ‘the deepest kind of change’, which is ‘at the level of subjective meaning’ (p. 31). Further on in the book, he suggests that ‘[t]‌he learning is involved with a change in the relationship between the collective subjective meaning and the objective meaning’ (p.  38). Zamir suggests that especially through disembodiment, the actor can come to perceive the contingency of social roles and identity, to understand that it is deeply possible, through the discovery of ‘rolelessness’, to learn that we might be different (p. 26). Rancière’s formulation is more radical than we see in these three writers, since he wants a radical creation of something absolutely new – but Rancière is also very vague on means, only suggesting that



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art is a crucial part of subjectification. These three writers can only agree with him on that last point, but they have much to add in terms of process.

Emotion, cognition and reflexivity in the experience of drama The nature of the experience that creates these effects is a preoccupation for all three theorists. For the Boal of Theater of the Oppressed ([1974] 2000, cited as TO), the key element lies in playing out possible solutions to a problem. Boal always saw emotion as a part of the process, but the relation of emotion and cognition changed in the course of his career. In Theater of the Oppressed, he presents a chart contrasting ‘Idealistic Poetics’, which he links with Hegel, with ‘Marxist Poetics’, represented by Brecht. He lists ‘Emotion’ in connection with ‘Idealistic Poetics’, and ‘Reason’ under ‘Marxist Poetics’ (p. 95). It would seem that he favours reason over emotion in aesthetics, then. Indeed, his chapter ‘The Poetics of the Oppressed’ has very little explicitly on emotion. He does in one place insist that Brechtian poetics allows for emotion, but with constraints. Apparently, this emotion must not connect with individual characters, but only with impersonal economic forces ([1974] 2000, 103–4). By the time of Games for Actors and Non-Actors ([1992] 2002, 2nd ed.), Boal’s view has altered considerably. The first section of his chapter ‘The Actor’s Work’ is entitled ‘The Primacy of Emotion’ (GANA2, 29). The account of acting that follows has a great deal to do with Stanislavsky and very little to do with Brecht. He wishes his actors to build up credible characterizations by such Stanislavskian means as emotional memory (p. 32). He certainly does insist on an element of reason: actors must understand experience, not simply feel it (35 ff.). In Rainbow of Desire, he expresses the need for a double perspective on experience as follows: Theatre – or theatricality – is this capacity, this human property which allows man to observe himself in action, in activity. The self-knowledge thus acquired allows him to be the subject (the one who observes) of another subject (the one who acts). It allows him to imagine variations of his action, to study alternatives. Man can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking. (RD, 13)

This multidimensional perspective potentially has ethical implications:  If one can see one’s own actions in a wide context, not only analysing but also emotionally responding to the way they appear in thought or from another person’s perspective, there is the possibility of leading a better life, or being freed

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from the constraints of blind ideology. In what follows, I will call this element of theatre ‘reflexivity’. To set out his aesthetics of theatre, Boal uses an image drawn from Lope de Vega:  ‘Theatre is two human beings, a passion and a platform’. He adapts the idea in his own way:  ‘Theatre is the passionate combat of two human beings on a platform’ (RD, 16). He stresses the centrality of dramatic tension and sees that tension exclusively in terms of conflict. This works nicely with the emphasis on oppression, for oppression is a form of conflict. In Rainbow of Desire, he builds up a Freudian view of the human subject and suggests that interesting theatrical characters are always mentally ill (1995, 36). He presents acting as an engagement with the unconscious, affecting not only the actor’s conscious communication of meaning but also the unconscious transmission of feeling, unconsciously received by the audience (p. 39). Bolton advocates a parallel view of reflexivity in the dramatic experience. He writes, [W]‌e do not want the children to be mesmerised by the experience, but to be finely aware of what is happening to them and of their responsibility in it. So in fact they are, in part, watching themselves from the outside, not because they want to be effective for the sake of someone else but because the opportunity for heightened understanding is intuitively recognised. (TTDiE, 74)

In a published discussion with Bolton, Dorothy Heathcote expands on this point. She says that Mantle of the Expert work (a form of process drama) becomes ‘deep social play’ because (a) students know they are contracting into fiction, (b)  they understand the power they have within that fiction to direct, decide, and function, (c)  the ‘spectator’ in them must be awakened so that they perceive and enjoy the world of action and responsibility even as they function in it, and (d)  they grow in expertise through the amazing range of conventions that must be harnessed. (Heathcote and Bolton 1995, 18)

Accounts of Heathcote’s practice emphasize the prominence of separate times for reflection on what has occurred. Wagner ([1976] 1999) emphasizes this point (pp.  52–3), and Bolton (1999), twenty years after Towards a Theory, explains further: While it is certainly true that Heathcote uses the power inherent in the present tense of spontaneous acting behaviour, she, paradoxically perhaps, distrusts abandonment to it. There are very few moments in her videoed lessons when



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her pupils sustain their improvisation play-making beyond five minutes. More typically, hardly a minute goes by without Heathcote intervening with new input, checking, challenging, suggesting, protecting or high-lighting. (p. 180)

Bolton suggests in the later book that he and many others who worked in this tradition moved gradually towards a more immersive form of drama, emphasizing strength of emotional experience over reflection, while Heathcote placed a lot of emphasis on the need for cognitive processing, separate from the ‘living-through’. Like both Boal and Bolton, Zamir emphasizes the duality of dramatic experience: one experiences and also observes oneself experiencing: [I]‌maginary rather than real amplification . . . establishes the creative distance that facilitates insights that may escape someone who actually undergoes such overwhelming states. This is why a careful artistic representation can be more insightful than a first-person report. . . . The actor’s studied inhabiting of a previously inaccessible possibility is, accordingly, not necessarily a feeble substitute when compared to actual experiences. (p. 20)

Zamir stresses the importance of emotion in the process of acting, but his view of process is radically different from Bolton’s. Zamir envisions the actor spending months rehearsing, thinking, feeling, using emotional memory and improvisation to arrive at a place where existential amplification is possible. For Zamir, the repetitive nature of theatrical performance is a virtue. The actor must recreate a role anew every night, and for that reason, needs to introduce variations of interpretation. In a pregnant phrase, he suggests that the experience of acting reveals ‘the hidden thickness of the present’ (p. 42). All three, and Heathcote as well, stress the importance of emotion, but wish for the participant/actor also to reason. When Boal writes that the actor should ‘[f]‌eel himself feeling, think himself thinking’, he speaks for all three. Bolton and Zamir both stress an ‘existential’ aspect, that is, an aspect of experiencing the fiction and the process of drama, even using the same word, even while they disagree on means.

Scripted theatre and improvisation A significant difference among the three has to do with the elements of drama which are determined in advance, before the activity begins. One central element of this issue consists in attitudes towards scripted theatre and improvisation.

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I shall begin with those attitudes, but they must then be placed in a wider context of preconceptions in relation to dramatic activity. The three writers take very different attitudes to scripted theatre, and each portrays his attitude as arising from core principles. Bolton takes the most extreme position. While he accepts in principle that there might be educational value in performance, in practice he discourages it. In his description, a scripted play is simply a transformation of participants into the puppets of the playwright. He says children ‘seem to be required to share with an audience someone else’s encapsulation of experience, whether it be a Nativity story, a teacher’s or Shakespeare’s script’ (TTDiE, 130). Bolton also thinks that the emphasis on performance that often goes with scripted theatre has a negative effect on the experience of the participant. He pictures a child playing at being a policeman, immersed in the experience. What if the child wants to show his mother what he is doing? The child says, ‘Look at me, Mummy’. Bolton remarks, The child through this use of language has attempted to make ‘public’ what had been a private experience. The purpose is objectification of experience. . . . The mode, because of the new extra-personal direction, will be rendered less significant in its existential aspect. (TTDiE, 128–9, emphasis Bolton’s)

By ‘existential aspect’, Bolton means the experience of living-through, the fully emotional aspect of the experience. His presentation of ‘Type C: Theatre’ drama in his classification lists ‘clarity of diction in speech and action’ and transparency in ‘the external features of the action’ as the first two features of scripted theatre prepared for performance (p. 9). Throughout the book, he is critical of teachers who stress the objective accuracy of mime and gesture, and he suggests that this preoccupation is inherent in scripted theatre for performance:  ‘a Type C teacher’s major concern has to be “How far does what the child is doing represent the objective world so that anyone watching would recognize it?” ’ (p. 29). The same view of scripted theatre can be found in the later history of the DiE/Process Drama tradition. For example, Kao and O’Neill (1998) write that in scripted theatre, ‘[t]‌he challenge for the students in this method lies in the demands of presentation rather than in any struggle for communication’ (p. 7). This book hopes to challenge this excessively narrow view of scripted theatre. In Boal’s system, there are two tiers of participants. Those most involved are those who attend workshops and help create Invisible Theatre and Forum Theatre plays. I  will call them ‘actors’. Once these plays are ready, they are presented to members of the public, who may intervene in the ways we have seen. I will



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call them, using Boal’s term, ‘spect-actors’. In one formulation of Boal’s, both Invisible Theatre and Forum Theatre are plays with scripts: One point must clearly be understood: Invisible Theatre is theatre; it must have a text with a scripted core, which will inevitably be modified, according to the circumstances, to suit the interventions of the spect-actors. (GANA1, 6)

And in Forum Theatre, The text must clearly delineate the nature of each character, it must identify them precisely, so that the spect-actors can easily recognise each one’s ideology. (GANA1, 18)

Further, the ‘model play’ in Forum Theatre must have all the virtues of conventional theatre, with rehearsed blocking, clarity of characterization and, where possible, sets and costumes (GANA2, 263). Boal does also allow for an improvised model play, based on suggestions from the audience, but the formulation of Games for Actors and Non-Actors suggests that he views the improvised version as less than ideal. In all cases, however, the model play comes into being by a process involving improvisation. Despite some shifting in detail, much of the process is stable through the decades of Boal’s career. In Theater of the Oppressed, there are four stages: First stage: Knowing the body Second stage: Making the body expressive Third stage: The theater as language Fourth stage: The theater as discourse (TO, 126)

Boal maintains that social oppression results in certain automatic and habitual movements and habits which affect the very muscular structure of the body. In the first stage, the participant’s body is freed from these effects of oppression. In the second, actors learn to use the body to express on their own account in their own interests. The third stage includes Image Theatre and Forum Theatre, which we have seen. The last stage includes other forms of theatre which are aimed at breaking the ideological restrictions on actors and spect-actors, including the critique of official sources of news and entertainment which brainwash the people (Newspaper Theatre and Photo-Romance Theatre) and improvisatory activities aimed at breaking repression. Boal sees a problem with conventional theatre, but he does not exclude scripting. In his view, the problem with conventional scripted theatre is that

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the audience cannot respond. In Theater of the Oppressed, he seeks to place this objection to conventional theatre on a philosophical footing through a critique of Aristotle’s idea of catharsis (TO, 27–32). In his view, Aristotelian catharsis evokes the feelings of the audience, only to tranquilize and immobilize them. In Rainbow of Desire, he modifies this view, setting out four kinds of catharsis, not all of them negative, yet he maintains the same critique of Aristotle (RD, 69–73). His answer is the one we have seen in Forum Theatre: to empower the audience to intervene, making changes in the outcome of the play. He sometimes depicts the actor rather as Bolton does in discussing scripted theatre: as a puppet. The difference is that the actor may become the puppet of the spect-actor: The actor does not change his main function: he goes on being the interpreter. What changes is the object of his interpretation. If formerly he interpreted the solitary author locked in his study, to whom divine inspiration dictated a finished text, here on the contrary, he must interpret the mass audience, assembled in their local committees, societies of ‘friends of the barrio’, groups of neighbors, schools, unions, peasant leagues, or whatever; he must give expression to the collective thought of men and women. The actor ceases to interpret the individual and starts to interpret the group, which is much more difficult and at the same time more creative. (TO, 134, italics in original)

The reference to creativity does suggest that he views interpretation as a broader activity than do Bolton, Kao and O’Neill above. Zamir takes another view. He points both to the memoirs of actors and to recent philosophy of theatre to support his contention that productions of plays are by no means mere concretizations of playwrights’ intentions. Before directing his attention to acting, Zamir was a philosopher of literature, and he has a highly developed understanding of the relation between text and interpretation. He acknowledges that something like Bolton’s view used to be dominant, but asserts that recent developments in philosophy have, at least, cast a great deal of doubt on it: Like everyone else, philosophers assumed that theaters exist because people wish to watch plays. According to this conception, the best acting succeeds in making the performance itself a transparent vehicle, thereby communicating the literary merits of the play. Endowed with a sufficiently rich imagination, a sensitive reader of the play would not wish to watch it performed: such viewing can only fall short of what a perceptive reading yields. But this view – that we look (or should look) through the actors – is now perceived as descriptively dubious and as normatively implausible. The reasons for dropping this view are both varied



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and compelling: it misdescribes actual viewing experiences (since the audience, typically does explicitly think about the actors); it diminishes the aesthetic range of theater by ignoring what performers add to the literary values of the play; it cannot account for theatrical performances that are not based on plays; it is also selective, better suited for dramatized poetry (such as Shakespeare’s) than for excellent plays that depend upon performers providing the subtext that breathes life into paper-thin dialogue. An audience certainly does come to the theater to watch a play. But it also attends in order to see people enacting a play. Moreover, since the play can be read without attending the performance, interest in enactment may be more central in motivating spectatorship than are literary interests. (p. 10)

At the opposite extreme from the playtext-centric view, he places James Hamilton’s influential book The Art of Theater (2007), which argues that the script is an ingredient of a performance, not necessarily dominant or more privileged than any other. Using the example of Hedda Gabler, Hamilton sets out a spectrum of possibilities for performance ranging from the most conventional (‘Hedda-to-Hedda’) to a very radical production in which lines from the play are randomized and subsequently edited into a play (‘Pistols and Other Doors’), pointing to real trends in the theatre which make such practices credible (43– 50). Zamir sees himself as taking a moderate position between the traditional one and Hamilton’s, maintaining that performers neither concretize the literary virtues of a playtext as if following a recipe nor do they present a completely original performance, of which the play is merely an ingredient. Instead, they ‘make a claim as to the significance of the play’ which they have developed by entering into ‘dialogue’ with it (2014, 72). The actor, then, creates an original ‘aesthetic offering’ which derives from a dialogue with the playtext. His definition of acting is this: Acting is an aesthetically-controlled embodied imaginative transformation. (p. 12)

The aesthetic control involved has to do with the playtext (for Zamir, to treat the text as dispensable or beside the point is to betray it), but the manner of engagement has to do with the actor’s mind, originality and creativity. For Zamir, then, this view of the text and its interpretation grounds a view of acting as offering the three kinds of ‘existential amplification’ set out above. This is a far cry from Bolton’s pessimism about scripted theatre. The differences among the three in views of scripted, rehearsed theatre have to do with basic understanding of the theatre. For Zamir, creative

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interaction with the product of another mind is a central part of theatrical activity. When he writes about ‘content amplification’, his first variety, it is important and positive that the text should be the product of another mind. He is optimistic about the interaction of the actor and the text because he takes a very positive view of the actor and her power not only to complete the text but also to transform it, to take something that is very much the product of an alien mind and create something original out of it. In that sense, the more alien the text is to the actor the better, since an alien text will produce more stretching, more creative effort and more reflection, and the challenge of dealing with an alien mind will in the end produce a better aesthetic offering. Perhaps that effort to deal with a challengingly different text will also produce more self-animation in the actor, if the actor must travel far from her real self, creating a better and more interesting disembodiment for herself and for the audience. Boal’s discussion of Aristotelian catharsis is, to say the least, a controversial one, both as an interpretation of Aristotle and as a characterization of dramatic art. He takes a single interpretation of a problematic term to be the right one and supposes that the single word katharsis is the key to the whole of Aristotle’s Poetics. (For contrary views, see Nussbaum (1986, 389)  and Lear (1992).) Jacques Rancière has provided a helpful defence of the spectator in his book The Emancipated Spectator ([2008] 2011), discussed in the context of applied theatre by Gareth White (2013, 21 ff.). The notion that the spectator responds with subliminal physical movement, seen in the previous chapter and not discussed by Rancière, also tends to militate against the notion of the spectator’s passivity. Boal, to my knowledge, never presents an argument in favour of his position, merely asserting it in Theater of the Oppressed (pp. 1–52) and in The Rainbow of Desire (46 ff.). Boal and Bolton were wrong to present their views of conventional theatre as arising from the fundamental nature of that theatre, but they did not draw their views out of thin air. There is no necessity for spectators to be passive in mind, but that does not mean there are no passive spectators. There is no necessity for scripted theatre passively to present ‘someone else’s experience’, but that is not to say that there are no flat and uncreative productions of scripted plays. Our three theorists ground themselves in very different real-world situations. Zamir emphasizes the difficult and time-consuming nature of the actor’s art: he writes that ‘fictional embodiment is not some fleeting daydreaming: it is an arduous process of progressively inhabiting an alien’s world’ (p. 19). There may well be no time for such an arduous process in the classroom, and perhaps schoolchildren



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are not mature enough to go through the process set out by Zamir. Boal imagines his audience as difficult to make active in mind. Many audiences may well be so. My point is not that Bolton and Boal advocate ineffective techniques. Their techniques are plainly effective. It is that their effectiveness does not arise from the whole nature of theatre. It arises from the suitability of techniques to particular situations.

Metaxis and reflexivity All three theorists in some sense assert the importance of aesthetics in the practice of drama and theatre, though as of the 1970s, neither Bolton nor Boal was using the word. Bolton came to use the word later (1984, 1999), and Boal made it a central concept in Rainbow of Desire. We have seen Boal’s development of Lope de Vega’s image of the platform, two actors and a passion in terms of oppression, conflict and dramatic tension. The platform, however, plays a distinct part in the process creating the context in space of the duality of perception we have seen in all three writers. It is not necessarily raised above the audience, he says, as a literal platform is. The ‘platform’ is a space identified as special. Within that space, there is a duality: the actors are themselves, but they are also someone else; the location is the literal location of the theatre, but it is also somewhere else; time goes on as usual, but is also compressed or expanded, such that the events on the platform may cover many years, or a shorter time than the length of the play. Boal says that there is always at least one actor and at least one spectator, though these may be combined in the same person (RD, 19). Under favourable circumstances, this situation on the ‘platform’ may result in what he calls the phenomenon of metaxis: the state of belonging completely and simultaneously to two different, autonomous worlds: the image of reality and the reality of the image. She [the artist] shares and belongs to these two autonomous worlds: her reality and the image of her reality, which she herself has created. (RD, 43)

Those ‘favourable circumstances’ I  have mentioned include, for Boal, the possibility of audience intervention. The privileged, perceptive state of metaxis is non-verbal for Boal: one should not seek the ‘signification’ of each image, as words do not limit the meaning of what has been done in theatre (p. 43). That state of metaxis is the privileged position for fulfilling the purpose of theatre: in Theater of the Oppressed, Boal summarized it as follows:

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Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education It is not the place of the theater to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined. (TO, 141)

As this quotation suggests, Boal’s presentation of the issue in Theater of the Oppressed is quite cognitive:  one needs to see what the possibilities are and engage in practical reasoning about them. With the shift towards psychology in Rainbow of Desire, Boal retained the idea of possibility but reinterpreted it in terms of a rather Freudian model of psychology. He asserts that interesting characters in theatre are ‘all neurotics, paranoiacs, melancholics, schizophrenics: in short, sick people!’ (p. 36). He says that the actor draws the portrayal of these sick people from his unconscious mind. There is danger in this, because ‘one day these aroused personalities . . . may refuse to go quietly back to sleep, these lions may refuse to return to their cages in the zoo of our souls’ (p. 38). The only reason that this is worthwhile is that theatre makes it possible for us to change ourselves also for the better: Who is the ‘I’? The person [i.e. the whole self, unconscious and all], the personality [i.e. the social self] or the personnage [i.e. the character played on the stage]? It is very easy for us to decide – in fatalistic fashion – that we are the way we are, full stop, end of story. But we can also imagine – in a more creative fashion – that the playing cards can be re-dealt. (p. 39, italics in original)

He calls the theatre a ‘dance of potentialities’: If we are fatalists, then there is nothing to be done; but if we are not, we can try. (p. 39)

By the time of Rainbow, then, Boal had put affect in a more central place and stressed affective change. His emphasis on finding and rehearsing solutions had also softened by the time of Games: I believe it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution. Because, in my view, the thing which incites the spectators into entering into the game is the discussion and not the solution which may or may not be found. (GANA2, 230)

Bolton, like Boal, sees an essential part of drama in the interpenetration of two worlds: The external action of make-believe play . . . is the juxtaposition of two concrete worlds. One does not replace the other: both are present and interdependent. It is this interdependence that characterises symbolic play and drama,



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distinguishing symbolic play from other forms of play and drama from other art forms. (TTDiE, 19)

This aspect is quite similar to what we see in Boal, and it is no surprise that Bolton adopted Boal’s term ‘metaxis’ in a subsequent book (1984: 141–2). The term ‘metaxis’ has simplified somewhat in use. Boal, as we have seen, reserves the term for a privileged state of ‘belonging completely and simultaneously’ to two worlds. Using religious language, he tells us that the ‘real’ world must be ‘aesthetically transubstantiated’ (RD, 43). He also requires that the experience of metaxis should go beyond signification to non-verbal meaning and pictures metaxis as enabling play with images of the real world that will allow changes to the world we live in. John O’Toole (1992) uses the term simply to refer to the interrelation of the real world of the participants with the fictional world of the activity, abandoning Boal’s very demanding and value-charged requirements. I will adopt O’Toole’s usage, while recognizing that high vividness and emotional force are important elements of the impact of metaxis. Boal asserts that the possibility of making decisions within the fiction is important to the creation of metaxis. I do not view this as part of the definition but rather as a statement about the necessary conditions of metaxis, one that no one is required to accept in order to use the term. Metaxis relates clearly to the reflexivity we saw earlier. When one changes one’s perception of environment, one changes one’s view of self as well. When Boal asserts that the participant ‘practises in the second world in order to modify the first’, this is empowerment, and that empowerment must pass by way of subjectification.

Aesthetics, artistry and learning Bolton differs from Boal in devoting a great deal of space in his book to formal means of focusing participants’ emotional energy on particular characters, situations or symbols in the course of the activity. That is to say that, in the terms of this book, he discusses ways and means of procuring distributed attention and emotional response. He thinks of aesthetic experience for participants on terms compatible with those of Schaeffer. This makes sense, since, as we have seen, he stresses the need to create in drama an ‘experiential feeling level’ (p. 45). For him, the teacher cannot be part of the experiential level of the play but must devote herself to enabling that level in students. Bolton devotes one chapter each

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to ‘exercises’ (restricted drama activities that contribute to an overall narrative) and ‘theatre’ (macro elements of dramatic structure such as the movement from a dangerous first situation to its resolution). In the latter chapter, he writes, he wishes to define some of the elements that appear to raise the level of the work to a significance of form that could be described as art. . . . [L]‌et me make it quite clear that it is dramatic structure with which we are concerned. The existential mode is not taken away; indeed it can be enhanced by the introduction of structures that a playwright would happily employ in his writing. (TTDiE, 75, emphasis in original)

Bolton’s understanding of dramatic tension is broader than what we see in Boal. He writes that it need not only be conflict: Dramatic tension is a more subtle, more powerful quality, of enemies who search for ways to delay a battle, of friends who might choose to be dishonest rather than quarrel, of councillors who bury their differences because of a new outside threat (the Pied Piper again!), of husbands and wives who share a burden, not disagree about it. The tension is there because the conflict might be round the corner. It is this looking to the future because of what we do now, coupled with the knowledge that what we do now belongs to what we and others did in the past, that characterises the drama experience. (TTDiE, 76)

He also deals with other elements of drama aesthetics. In terms of visual impact, he writes about a ‘Treasure Island’ activity: That the child playing Long John is standing some distance way, a man alone looking across at a huddle of waiting men, is all part of the stock-in-trade of the ‘theatre’ director; whereas a director would have blocked that contrast in grouping, the teacher either imperceptibly contrives it or harnesses it when it happens accidentally so that the children sense the implied meaning in a particular use of space and grouping. (pp. 82–3, emphasis in original)

Such emotionally powerful elements are what enable the experience of ‘subjective meaning’, the combination of cognition and emotion that creates the most meaningful learning. For the Bolton of 1979, it is the teacher who must occupy herself with such elements of emotional impact. The participants should instead be immersed in the simulated reality of the activity. In the earlier book, it is almost entirely true that aesthetic impact in Bolton’s work is the responsibility of the teacher, and participants should not think about it. In Acting in Classroom



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Drama (1999) Bolton asserts a more important role for aesthetic agency on the part of participants. He says that Heathcote sees this in developmental terms: Not until the children make their own interpretation can the Heathcote method be said to be working, for her aim is to pass over the dramatist’s responsibility to the pupils, an aim that Heathcote is prepared to wait a long time for – two, three or four lessons on, depending, not on age, but on their maturity in dramamaking. (p. 185)

Rancière insists that students must be seen as ‘equal in intelligence’ to their teachers, but he does not take into account that there is often a need for scaffolding. As practical teachers, Bolton and Heathcote know that one cannot expect a child to take charge of everything on the first day. In the final chapter, Bolton warns against overemphasis on story (TTDiE, 139). He suggests that it is more productive for the teacher to focus on the moment of expectation, what he calls the ‘situation’: So one aspect of the teacher’s thinking is how to turn what appears to the children to be a rapid sequence of events into an examination of the present. It means that waiting for Grendel to arrive is significant in itself; the process of coming to a decision to leave a rural cottage in the eighteenth century for an industrial city must be more important than the leaving, and in turn the departure must be more important than the journey, and so on. Each is a series of presents steeped in significance. (TTDiE, 139–40)

Bolton does not fully explain the reason for this emphasis, but it goes with a repeated statement in the book that it is unproductive to put all the stress on ‘what happens next’: the result is a mere plot, with scant reflection (pp. 45, 51). He warns that children tend towards thinking in this way, and this admonition seems to be a result of his notion that the teacher must slow things down to enable reflection and emotion. I  would suggest that this slowing down, this emphasis on ‘situation’ over ‘story’, is an emphasis on a moment of possibility, resulting from an interest not so much in the events themselves as in the process by which the events come to be. As we have seen, he sees that process as both emotional and cognitive. Bolton’s emphasis on the moment before the decision casts doubt on the necessity of making any decision within the fiction. Obviously, there are such moments of tension leading up to a decision in scripted theatre too. Macbeth goes through such a process in deciding whether to kill Duncan. The actor playing Macbeth must explore the situation in a fully imagined way. Of course,

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the decision itself is scripted, but much of the work of an actor is imaginative, and it is entirely possible to imagine being faced with such a choice. Once again, specific situations may make Bolton’s method desirable, but there is no reason in principle to favour it as a foundational practice. Twice in the book, Bolton sets out examples involving props that seem to me highly revealing of his sense of theatrical aesthetics. In the first, children are doing a lesson on the Depression in the United States. Desperate migrants from Oklahoma arrive in California looking for something better. A  Californian, played by the teacher, meets them and tells them to go back where they came from. As he speaks, he peels and eats an orange (pp. 86–7). Bolton comments, [W]‌hen the Californian started to eat his orange, dropping the peel at their feet, it suddenly wasn’t a game: it was an insult. (TTDiE, 87)

We shall see much more about this example in Chapters  6 and 7.  A  second example, with which he ends the book, takes place among pirates: [A]‌s his fellow outlaws talk about buying back their freedom, teacher (in role) lifts high the piece of gold that is his share of the loot, and ponders on whether you can ever be free of your past. (TTDiE, 145–6)

In each instance, the teacher in role sharpens both thinking and feeling by focusing on a gesture and a prop, condensing a wide area of significance that is at once emotional and cognitive. In each instance, the issue is possibility, potentialities. In the first instance, the hostile Californian threatens to shut off the possibility of a creative response, a better life, while in the second, the children are optimistic about the future, and the teacher philosophizes about whether such optimism is justified. These two examples are consistent with his emphasis on the moment before decision-making, the moment of reflection. Zamir also sees the participant as occupying two spaces simultaneously, the real space of the theatre and the fictional space of the story. His three kinds of existential amplification are keyed to this distinction:  the first explores the fictional space; the second has to do with the energy of the actor in this activity; and the last, with the abandonment of the actor’s usual self (i.e. the act of abandonment: the awareness of the original self is essential for this kind of amplification to occur). For him, the philosophical grounding of this first kind of amplification is a vision of the world as consisting of possibilities (as Dewey does in Experience and Nature, LW 1: 105). As we live, making decisions as we go, we foreclose most of those possibilities. Zamir sees this feature of our lives as deeply emotional:



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Thinking of existence in this way explains responses such as feeling pity for people born with radically fewer prospects, being charmed by a baby, or experiencing difficulty in meeting the gaze of the terminally ill:  we react to possibilities or their lack. (p. 17)

Part of the satisfaction of acting, then, is in ‘exploring a newly discovered experiential space, a visit into a previously inaccessible region; the actor has become both a tourist and an eavesdropper in the process’ (p. 15). (Here, just in passing, Zamir reinforces the same duality of experiencer and observer we have seen in Boal and Bolton.) Acting is fascinating to actors and to audiences because it offers a seemingly magical way of stepping out of the limitations of our lives and living a life that may be completely different. Actors act because they want this experience, and audiences come to see them for the same reason. The alienness of the ‘newly discovered experiential space’ is dependent on the alienness of the author’s mind, and perhaps also on the difference between the author’s identity and that of the actor. The artistic energy of the second category of existential amplification would seem to be held in common between actors and other performing artists. Why do we want to watch musicians, as well as listening to them? Because we can witness the artistic focus, the energy that goes into performance. We also see and respect the commitment, the discipline, the many hours of practice that must have enabled the simplicity of the act of performing. It is one of the main points of Zamir’s book that audiences come not only to see a story but also to witness the act of acting, seeing people take on the artistic challenge of acting. Bundy, Ewing and Fleming (2013) offer evidence that this observation is true of student attendees of theatrical performances in Australia. Indeed, students saw the significance of live theatre greatly in their awareness of performers as performers (p.  155). Naturally, if that energy in performance is visible to the audience, it is more evident yet to members of the cast and crew, who have seen their colleagues work through the development of character and ensemble performance. It is the third kind of amplification that has most to do with emancipation. Zamir suggests that since it is possible for the actor to leave the composite impression of her unified personality behind and project a different image, we learn from acting that identity can be changed. That is, we not only witness an actor exploring possibilities outside his own life: we also learn that the identities that trap us may be abandoned. We may become something else. Perhaps, it is because this point is so important that Zamir remarks,

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Embodied Aesthetics in Drama Education I am not suggesting that the audience is merely aware of the actor’s withdrawal from embodiment, but that such a feat is precisely what they have come to watch. (p. 26, emphasis in original)

What resources does the actor marshal to achieve such a thing? Zamir discusses the debates between ‘feelers’ in acting theory – those like Stanislavsky who want the actor to feel the emotions of the character – and ‘projectors’ – those who like Brecht want the actor, above all, to think the situation and the character through. He does not merely suggest that both are valid, but that one cannot act with either of the two alone: acting requires both (pp. 32–3). Finally, in discussing the distinction between acting and pretending, Zamir makes a statement about the ambition of acting: The actor does not merely move away from reality, but aims to distill and convey a lasting and accurate version of it. (p. 37)

That is, in the art of acting, one tries to be truthful, to forcefully present something true and consciously decided upon by the actor. The truth in question may well be discovered from interaction with the text, but on Zamir’s terms, the meaning in performance arises from that interaction, and not from the text only. All three, then, stress connections between cognition and emotion in the experience of doing drama. All three move from this cognitive/emotional process to emancipation, seen as a sense of possibility in life, including liberation from constraints. The three differ on their construction of the cognitive/emotional experience and on the elements they stress in building the perception of possibility. Helen Nicholson offers an interesting way of expanding the notion of reflexivity and relating it to discussion of political issues. Drawing an image from Dwight Conquergood, she sees the process of applied drama as a negotiation between ‘the map’ and ‘the story’ (2005, 40). These are different cognitive ways of understanding human life. They are also emotionally different. In an account of a Theatre of the Oppressed project with homeless people, she discusses a conflict among the spect-actors. The central character of the play was an intermittently homeless man with a drug problem who ended up killing himself. Some spectators, homeless themselves, blamed him for a failure of personal responsibility. One other spectator insisted on material circumstances on a global scale. The first was ‘the story’, and the second ‘the map’. Nicholson suggests that the contributions of the personal-responsibility camp were ‘confessional and emotionally open’, and those of the materialist camp were ‘analytical, focused and angry’ (pp. 124–5). She also gives an example of an actor



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performing in a scripted play about her own traumatic experience. She needed to be emotionally true but also needed to be analytical, keep the emotional experience at bay (p. 97). We might say that the first is the story and the second the map. It seems fair to say that the early Boal gives the map priority over the story: he expects that an analytical understanding of social situations will be the outcome, and that this is to be desired. The later Boal seems not so sure, and Nicholson is rather typical of recent work in refusing to predetermine the result of the dialogue. James Thompson, as we shall see, refuses the search for solutions in a wide range of political situations altogether (2009). Nicholson links these issues to what she calls ‘radical citizenship’: Drama is a good way for people to extend their horizons of experience, recognising how their own identities have been shaped and formulated and, by playing new roles and inhabiting different subject positions, finding different points of identification with others. The idea that drama can take people beyond themselves and into the world of others is deeply rooted in the values of applied drama, and this chimes particularly well with a vision of social citizenship as a collective and communitarian undertaking. (2005, 24)

Emancipation is not of course the same thing as citizenship. One can be fully aware of one’s independent potential and remain entirely selfish. Perhaps one can step out of one’s usual role, experience the reality of others and then step right back into one’s narrow little world. Reflexivity helps to create emancipation and thereby creates the possibility of good citizenship without creating any necessity. The later Boal, Bolton and Zamir all require a certain fullness in the imagined fictional reality, and that fullness looks more like ‘story’ than ‘map’. For Bolton, this is a central element of the experience of drama. For Zamir, the fullness is a necessary thing, but he appears more interested in the experience of the actor as performer, in the interplay of the actor’s own self and the role. Bolton thinks that this fullness requires the absence of an audience, since he thinks that an audience can only detract from the full imagination of an alternate reality, from which the student can learn through the convergence of affect and cognition. Bolton pictures a child pretending to be a policeman in a private game. He turns to his mother and says, ‘Look at me, Mummy, I’m a policeman’. He explains what has happened: The child through this use of language has attempted to make ‘public’ what had been a private experience. The purpose is objectification of experience. The language form itself is not metaphor but the language of explanation. (TTDiE, 129–30)

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‘Explanation’, here, occupies the same space as Zamir’s ‘aesthetic offering’. Now, an explanation is a very different thing from an aesthetic offering. An explanation is merely cognitive and simple, whereas an aesthetic offering is emotional and complex. Bolton may well have a point in discussing a small child playing. It is easy to imagine that the child’s policeman-like movements would become simpler and the child’s concentration on the imagined reality would be interrupted. But Zamir is right, too. When actors spend months preparing to play a role, they think a great deal about the imagined setting, about the character’s language and what it means about the character’s place in the fictional world and about the function of the character in the production. Whether the actor is a ‘feeler’ or a ‘projector’, he must go through this detailed process of imagining, and everyone who has ever done it knows how robust it is. Having gone through this process, the actor can very well feel the emotions of the part, think about the elements of the fictional world impinging on the character and achieve an ‘existential living-through’. The presence of the audience, Zamir suggests, ‘validates’ the achievement of the actor, and experience suggests that not rarely, actors feel the fictional world, the emotions of the character, more in performance than in rehearsal. The two examples look like opposite ends of a spectrum, then, different responses to the presence of an audience rather than statements about the inevitable result of an audience’s presence. In all three cases, we see considerable stress on the sense of possibility. Boal and Zamir make that sense of possibility central to the very identity of theatre as they conceive it. Bolton makes the idea important but does not base his entire philosophy on it. In all three cases, the idea of possibility, the feeling of possibility, is intimately connected to a conceptualization of theatre aesthetics. In all three cases, that conceptualization has to do with both cognition and affect. In terms of goals, the three theorists are very consistent with Rancière’s view, and it is easy to see why Rancière would be popular among adherents of drama education. In terms of methods, all three appear consistent with Dewey and with the neoDeweyan view I have set out in the previous chapter.

Who is the artist? In each of the three cases, there is attention to the aesthetic experience of spectators or participants. Someone works to offer that experience to others, and that someone is engaging in artistry. The term ‘artistry’, in most definitions, implies the possibility of aesthetic success and failure. Someone, in each of



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these three models, is responsible for the success or failure of what Zamir calls the ‘aesthetic offering’. The answer to this question is clear in Bolton and Zamir (though I will raise questions about both), and with Boal, it varies from one activity to another. In Bolton’s earlier work, aesthetic control is almost exclusively the domain of the teacher. That is why his discussion of aesthetics is so extensive:  he imagines his reader as a teacher trying to understand the process of drama and learn the necessary skills. The participants often choose the topic of the improvisation in general, but the teacher chooses both ‘exercises’ and ‘theatrical form’. He allows that a participant may be so perceptive as to contribute to the aesthetic development of the activity but suggests that if there is more than one such perceptive person, it may be bad for the success of the activity. Essentially, he wants the participants to be unaware of aesthetic issues and leave them in the control of the teacher. For Zamir, the responsibility for producing the ‘aesthetic offering’ is entirely placed between the actor and the play text. The text has aesthetic qualities of its own, of course, and the actor should understand those qualities in order to enter into dialogue with it. Ultimately, however, the responsibility is with the actor. We have seen that Boal identifies two tiers of participants in Theatre of the Oppressed. In preparing Forum Theatre, the actors must work up a play with strong aesthetic qualities. The company is then jointly responsible for aesthetics. Boal recognizes that there is also a kind of aesthetics in process when the model play is presented and the spect-actors begin to intervene. It is part of the role of the Joker to make aesthetic decisions on the fly and keep the spectactors’ attention focused on the problem of oppression. Although Boal does not emphasize the point, members of the audience, spect-actors, who may spend a couple of hours participating in a production, may become actors, who may spend days and weeks preparing Forum Theatre or other activities. Further, Boal suggests that with spect-actors, one may begin by doing Image Theatre or other improvisational activities in which the spect-actors may exercise a degree of aesthetic control. Do these theorists take an ‘emancipated’ view of their participants, seen from the point of view of Rancière? From Rancière’s perspective, Bolton’s early position appears problematic. Bolton asserts the importance and power of aesthetics in drama, but then denies that power to participants, almost totally. Rancière’s position is that one should assume that all participants have equal intelligence, but when the aesthetic domain is reserved for the teacher, then participants are not being treated as having equal intelligence. Zamir’s position then looks very compatible with Rancière’s view. Indeed, the relation between

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the actor and the text resembles the relation between the novel as ‘third thing’ of Jacotot’s experiment and the learners. The interpretation of the text even resembles Jacotot’s students’ interpretations of Télémaque, differing only in being more demanding and creative. Zamir has almost nothing to say about directors, however, and that is a blank space in his understanding of acting that must be filled. Boal, seen from Rancière’s perspective, is mixed. If we look exclusively at the spect-actors of Forum Theatre, it appears that participants are being treated as unequal – but the Boal system allows for a sort of graduation from spect-actor to actor. In that case, the participant may ultimately be treated as an equal partner in a project that is at once ethical and aesthetic. That view, however, places a stronger light on the actors of the company than we see in Boal’s own writing, such that the experience of the spect-actor as merely introductory. The real experience of Theatre of the Oppressed would be the actor’s, not the spect-actor’s. If, as I have suggested, following these three writers, drama offers an aesthetic experience of a sense of possibility, how important is it that participants should be able to make decisions about what happens within the fiction? Plainly, Boal and Bolton place great emphasis on this decision-making, and Zamir does not find it important at all. In Theater of the Oppressed, Boal sets out an interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, suggesting that This relationship has well defined characteristics: the spectator assumes a passive attitude and delegates the power of action to the character. Since the character resembles us (as Aristotle indicates), we live vicariously all his stage experiences. Without acting, we feel that we are acting. We love and hate when the character loves and hates. (TO, 34, emphasis in original)

The audience empathizes with the tragic character who, despite his great virtues, suffers a fall because of his ‘tragic flaw’. When the catastrophe occurs at the end of the play, the audience experiences catharsis. Boal reaches out to another passage in Aristotle (not to do with theatre) to suggest that catharsis is a purification of something wrong and poisonous in the body. His suggestion is that this wrong, poisonous thing is the objection to a settled political situation with all its injustice. Aristotelian catharsis is therefore the opposite of what he pursues in his own work. Indeed, the passivity which Boal says is the result of ‘Aristotle’s coercive system of tragedy’ is opposed to the subjectification pursued by our three theorists of drama. Bolton’s nightmare is of puppetry. He discusses a lesson plan of his own from twenty years before his book was written (in the late fifties, then). He criticizes



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his younger self for trying to build externally convincing mime in children. While accepting in principle that the performance of scripted theatre for an audience may be of educational value, every time he refers to this kind of theatre, it is with some version of the ‘puppet’ nightmare. Like Boal, he in practice sees conventional scripted theatre as opposed to subjectification. What opposes the ‘puppet’ nightmare for Bolton is ‘existential living-through’ (p. 53). If the children are placed into a convincing dramatic situation, they may really experience the problems of that situation in a full way, as if they were experiencing real events. If the children are successfully placed in that situation, they are fully participants in the action. Zamir is similar on this, even using the same word ‘existential’, emphasizing the need for the actor genuinely to imagine the fictional situation and live through it. They both emphasize, as we have seen, the sense of possibility in theatre but disagree on the need for participants really to make a decision. Bolton emphasizes the moment of possibility over the subsequent event, yet sees the real openness in decision-making as important to the quality of that moment. Zamir emphasizes the sense of possibility but regards the fixity of the text as a virtue in this respect. If the text is always the same, one can build, over time, a deep understanding of one single dramatic situation, discovering thereby ‘the hidden thickness of the present’ (p. 42). Boal’s gaze is more focused in this matter, not looking for the whole of human possibility, but rather for the experience of oppression, seeking within that experience the impulse to liberation. Bolton’s stress on ‘puppetry’, and Boal’s on ‘oppression’, may arise from the prominence of totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century. Bolton and Boal were both born in the 1930s and came to maturity in the shadow of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Zamir is of quite a different generation, and there is an argument to be made that the problems of life have changed. The threat of totalitarianism is no longer as significant as it was, but people now face greater problems in dealing with the precariousness of life. Few people now join a large organization and spend their entire lives working in it, and the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has suggested that this precariousness affects all aspects of life today. In the Conclusion of this book, I will argue that some aspects of the thought of Boal and Bolton have become less applicable because our social existence has changed, and this change in turn affects the significance of scripted theatre and improvisation. There are shortcomings in each theorist’s presentation of the relation between cognition and emotion in theatre. Each of the three asserts that emotion and cognition must coexist and interact, but by what mechanism? They say that this

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experience of interaction has certain positive results in terms of emancipation, but how does this happen? What is the difference between emotionally charged cognition and cold, merely rational cognition? Bolton and Zamir, in particular, coin terms to describe the emotional experience they find desirable, but how much to these terms really explain? As the reader will have guessed by now, my answer is to be found in neuropragmatism, and the relation between science and philosophy explored in Chapter 2. Another question is this: What are the implications of bodily engagement in theatre? Zamir uses the word ‘embodied’, as we have seen, as part of his definition of acting, but it requires the material we have seen in Chapter 2 to explore the implications of embodiment. James Thompson’s Performance Affects (2009) has become influential in recent years as a commentary on this very issue. On the basis of discussions of arts projects and events in Sri Lanka and Rwanda, Thompson develops a critique of the notion that applied theatre should be a rehearsal for anything or should necessarily result in people ‘telling their stories’. He is radically opposed to any vision of art that sees affect as peripheral. Following Hans Gumbrecht, he points to ‘what is irreversibly nonconceptual in our lives’ (p. 115). He argues for a pause over the physical, the affective, the non-verbal. He says, ‘[t]‌he sensation is no longer the adjunct, the expendable adjective, but the dynamic texture of the work through which it finds its force’ (pp. 131–2). He suggests that the most productive affective state in applied theatre is often ‘bewilderment’ (2009, 134–5; 2003). On that basis, he suggests a return to an emphasis on beauty (pp. 136–59). He ends with an interpretation of Rancière’s new ‘distribution of the sensible’ that finds a stress on emotion in the overtones of the words ‘shock’ and ‘uncanny’, which, in the light of Mute Speech, seems to me overstated (2009, 175–6). Nevertheless, the goal of creating a new distribution of the sensible by means of emotion created through art is very much in tune with the upshot of this book.

Conclusion In the middle of this chapter, I  remarked that Boal’s reflexivity (‘feel himself feeling, think himself thinking’) potentially has ethical implications, and that there is a parallel emphasis on reflexivity in both Bolton and Zamir. I think this point can be developed beyond what any of these writers have done and can be related to the view of aesthetic experience I  have presented here. Take the example of objectification. A man looks at a woman and sees nothing but the possibility of sexual pleasure. As a result, his gaze falls upon her breasts and



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her posterior, and he imagines her vagina. This narrow attention governs his behaviour towards her. What is this but the Metal-Detector Walk? Owing to a narrow focus, there is a failure to experience the woman’s expressiveness and intellect. The ‘existential’ breadth in the experience of drama claimed by both Bolton and Zamir looks like an antidote to that narrowness. Both emphasize the distance between the participant’s real self and the self performed in drama. Both claim that, owing to that distance, a level of self-awareness can be gained that is generally impossible in the experience of normal life. Boal wishes his theatre to be about oppression, but Boal’s eloquent statement on reflexivity quoted above has wider application.

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Drama Education and Curricular Learning

Drama has been used to teach curricular subject matter for a very long time. If drama has special usefulness in teaching other material, it must, from the point of view of this book, use aesthetic experience to arrive at an experience of learning that is somehow superior. The notion that drama can be used to teach any subject matter is particularly associated with process drama. For this reason, at least one example under the heading of each discipline will be drawn from process drama, and other examples will appear where I know about them. I have not carried out a systematic survey of drama for curricular learning. That is another project and would require a book of its own. Some readers may be aware of other examples that raise other questions. I will not attempt to cover every discipline taught in the schools anywhere but will restrict myself to a few major ones: history, literature, science and languages. Under the heading of each discipline, I will ask certain questions (not always in this order): ●●

●●

●●

How far do the drama activities serve the purposes of the discipline? Does the use of drama result in pursuing goals aligned with those of the discipline? How far is aesthetic experience, as I have defined it in this book, marshalled to the purposes of teaching the discipline? Can we say that the learning obtainable by means of drama is in some way better than the learning obtainable by more conventional means? Perhaps there is reason to think that students retain course material better over the long term. In particular: Is the learning framed as opening significant possibilities for the learner in life?

In some cases, there is a clear issue of time use:  if a drama activity takes up extra time relative to other approaches (and drama activities often do), is the expenditure of time justified?

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The prominence of process drama in this section will require a brief review of important techniques used, so that subsequent expositions will be easy to understand. Process drama, like Theatre of the Oppressed and indeed conventional actor training, makes wide use of tableaux, otherwise called freezeframe. Students are given some sort of stimulus, perhaps in a written text, a photograph, or simply a word, and are asked to put together a still picture made of human bodies. The aesthetic aspect is to be found in dramatic focus. The intention is that students will find the dramatic quality in the situation presented by constructing visually dramatic images. Sometimes, two tableaux may be created for two situations (as Boal recommends), and work is done on the transition. A key technique for process drama is teacher-in-role. Many lesson plans begin with some sort of introduction of the context through photographs or props. Much of the dramatic impulse comes when the teacher steps into role. For example, O’Neill and Lambert (1982) set out a lesson plan entitled ‘The Way West’ (pp.  37–59). The teacher presents a photograph showing people travelling from eastern to western United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Students make a tableau to become familiar with the dramatic situation, and then the teacher steps in role. The teacher introduces herself as a representative of the government and explains that she is looking for people to go west, taking on dangers for the sake of free land. She takes questions in role. Some of the students claim previous knowledge of the dangers involved. She asks them to think about their decision carefully and give her their answer at a later meeting. That opens the way for a new activity that bears on the decision-making in a family context. Wagner ([1976] 1999) makes observations on the qualities required for the choice of character in teacher-in-role, or sometimes of a second person, such as a parent or a teaching assistant. She says that Heathcote often begins a drama activity with a vulnerable person with a problem. (Heathcote would later call this ‘A Man in a Mess’.) For example, she introduces a small Chinese girl who can speak only Chinese. Heathcote stands her under a clock in a classroom. In her hand are a Chinese passport and a much folded letter that says in English, ‘When you get off the plane, wait under the clock and I’ll be there’. When the group comes in, their first problem is how to approach somebody if you want to help her. They agree, ‘You can’t just walk up to somebody and say, “What are you doing?” ’ (p. 139)



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This way of introducing a lesson evokes the sympathy of participants and creates a social problem to be resolved. In another case, students were doing an exercise on medieval history (pp. 39–40). They happened upon an orphan illegitimate child. What should happen to this child? The obvious suggestion of an orphanage drew the observation that there were no orphanages in the Middle Ages. Thus, natural sympathy for a person in trouble led on to curricular material, in the form of the institutional structure of medieval society. In Cecily O’Neill’s activity ‘Frank Miller’, the teacher in role tells the class, in role as the citizens of a town, that Frank Miller is back, and that they all need to take measures to protect themselves against the dangers of his presence. Here, the teacher portrays a town leader, seeking to build an atmosphere of crisis for everyone present. The person in role need not be in trouble, but must, by dramatic means, elicit an emotionally charged determination to respond. A second key technique, especially for drama across the curriculum, is ‘The Mantle of the Expert’. Students are cast as experts on some subject and are asked to solve some problem. Many times, the teacher in role will be a baffled official, appealing for help to students’ (initially fictional) expertise. In Heathcote and Bolton (1995), this technique is set out explicitly in terms of drama across the curriculum. They write, This frame fundamentally affects their relationship with knowledge. They can never be mere receivers ‘told’ about knowledge. They can only engage with it as people with a responsibility. This responsibility is not to knowledge itself, although, paradoxically, that is what the students are indirectly acquiring, but to the enterprise they have undertaken. Knowledge becomes information, evidence, source material, specification, records, guidelines, regulations, theories, formulas, and artifacts, all of which are to be interrogated. This is an active, urgent, purposeful view of learning, in which knowledge is to be operated on, not merely to be taken in. (p. 32, emphasis in original)

In an activity on medieval history, a letter arrives from Bishop Anselm, asking the children to put together a book of rules for a convent his sister wishes to found. In this instance, as frequently with teacher-in-role, there is a request for help, putting responsibility onto the shoulders of students within a fiction. Children may be expected to both fear and desire responsibility. They may approach responsibility as Eric and Gregory approach the bear, with a tension between approach and avoidance, which is to say dramatic tension. At the same time, they realize at every moment that the responsibility is not real

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responsibility. They are only practising for adult life, and enjoying themselves playing in the meantime.

History These techniques, and drama more generally, relate to different subject matters in different ways. It is easy to suspect that history examples are particularly prominent because the raw material of drama is frequently to be found within the subject matter. There is dramatic tension in the fearful, courageous decision to set out in a covered wagon for an unknown land. Dickinson et al. (2006) have the teacher in role as Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor. He calls his people together to discuss what is to be done about the newly arrived pale people from Spain (pp. 97–100). Not only is there dramatic tension, but that dramatic tension results in greater involvement directly in the historical material. The Montezuma activity creates a useful range of perspectives:  the children imagine the situation of a powerful, confident people facing strange outsiders with new technology  – but they may also learn what ultimately happened to the Aztec Empire and benefit from seeing the dramatic tension of the immediate situation in wider historical context. Sympathy, not for a person, but for a people in trouble, may create emotion, and therefore memory. The simultaneous awareness of the thoughts and feelings that people would have at the time, without a knowledge of the future, and the ultimate fate of the Aztec, creates reflexivity, thereby taking advantage of one of the main features of drama that we saw in the last chapter. Somers (1994) gives an extended example of a drama activity based on the logbook of the students’ own school in England (pp. 165–74). It seems a tenyear-old girl who was a student at the school had drowned in a nearby river in 1910. The students gathered all the historical information they could find, and then used their imaginations to put together a play about what had happened, which they performed. Sympathy for a little girl who has drowned is easy, and that emotion was here put to service in motivating historical research. In the terms we have seen, the idea that a real girl had drowned produced emotion, as they themselves were students in the same spot. Students were able to deal with the issue well because it was not real for them in their own time, so there was playfulness. As students became more interested, there was an effect of discipline, a determination to remain as far as possible faithful to the historical record.



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In each of these cases, students certainly do come into contact with historical material, and the drama activity might credibly make it significant to them. Initial learning about the times may develop something like the ‘Stroll’. The notion of the fall of an empire, and on a different scale, of the death of a little girl, provides an emotional impetus: the Snake. Somers stresses that it was important to the children that the events had occurred in the real world. He reports that an old lady came to their performance and turned out to remember the real incident. The children had come quite close to the real events. Since there is contact with genuine historical material, there is an effect of the Stroll in a real landscape and encounter with a real Snake. At the same time, the characters they create in the drama are fictional, such that there are the same ‘play’ advantages we saw with the Bear Game. The students leave the dull harmony of their classroom for the discord of historical events. If all works well, they may rise to the superior harmony of historical understanding. This activity must have brought home to students the concrete reality of these events when they found a person standing in front of them who had been there, who had felt the emotion of losing a classmate as they could well imagine doing themselves. The landscape around them had become marked with significant events of the past. There is a danger that drama activities may violate the historical value on factual accuracy and promote an unduly strong narrative that may distort the historical record. For example, Wagner ([1976] 1999) reports that Heathcote did an activity on the American Revolution with American children. She plays the role of a ‘harsh and uncompromising governor’ (p.  204). A  child who threw snowballs at British soldiers is killed, and the boy’s own family is made to billet the soldier who killed him. ‘By the fifth day of the drama, the colonists decide to drive out Heathcote in role as governor and elect their own’ (p. 205). A historian might well be uncomfortable with the sharp contrast developed here between American ‘patriots’ and villainous British characters. The lesson looks to be serving the purposes of official ideology, not the legitimate purposes of history as a discipline. There is a partial answer to be found within the process drama tradition itself, in the Mantle of the Expert. We saw an example earlier of a group of children in role as monks and nuns, asked to come up with a rule for a new convent to be founded by St Anselm’s sister. Here, the drama bears not on the material to be researched but rather on the need for research. In this instance, the rule once written, the children might try it out and give it a ‘stress test’ in the form of an unruly person in the order. It would be easy to make mistakes. One wonders whether the founding of a convent really requires a new rule. There would

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have to be a reason why the existing rules (such as the Benedictine) were felt to be unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, there are resources within the process drama tradition to deal with the objections to the use of drama in history. Each of these activities would be time-consuming, but whether they are excessively so is a matter of systems and curricula. It is not immediately obvious that the extra time could not be spent, and it is easy to see that there may be benefits to be had. The life possibility developed here has to do with the possibilities of research, reading and reasoning to get close to the truth, even of events that occurred long ago. In the specific case of the drowning play, it has to do as well with overcoming a gap of generations and discovering a commonality of experience.

Literature The other major subject that includes dramatic situations within the subject matter itself is literature. Plainly, when studying a play as part of a literature syllabus, one possibility is to produce the play, or scenes from it, whether as readers’ theatre or in a full-scale production. When studying a work of prose narrative, one may dramatize parts of the narrative:  Aaron Shepard (2004) offers a set of conventions for doing exactly this. As we saw with Bolton, the process drama tradition has tended to denigrate this kind of drama. We have seen Zamir’s contrary view. Zamir, of course, presupposes very committed adult actors rehearsing a play over an extended period of time, and scripted theatre in the classroom may not be of the same nature. That does not necessarily mean that there is no way of incorporating scripted theatre in the classroom in an effective way. The important thing about scripted theatre in the literature classroom is that the emotional qualities of the text should emerge and be experienced by the students. This means that the text must be read as Rosenblatt recommends, with aesthetic reading rather than efferent reading. When students first read the play on their own, the quality of their reading will vary a great deal. A teacher who has good awareness of theatrical possibilities can demonstrate to students the wide range of ways in which any particular line can be delivered, and the wide range of ways any particular play text can be staged. Examples can be found of productions staged in unusual ways. In Macbeth, what if, as Terry Eagleton suggests, ‘the witches are the heroines of the piece’ (Eagleton 1986, 2)? What if the mysterious Third Murderer is Lady Macbeth (as was done in a production in Singapore in 2011)? What if the Macbeths are a loving couple, each of



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whom cares nothing for the crown but wants it for the sake of the other? These variations relate in different ways to the literary reading of the text. Eagleton’s view is defensible from the text. The ‘loving couple’ view is indefensible based on the text but made for good theatre when Cheek by Jowl of London performed the play this way in 2011. Recently, I was teaching King Lear in a literature course. I introduced the optimistic, conservative historical interpretation of A. C. Bradley ([1906] 1986) and pitted it against the Theatre-of-the-Absurd interpretation of Jan Kott (1964), influential on Peter Brook’s famous production. We looked at the life of each man and what might have led each one to interpret the play the way he did. That class was too large for extensive drama activities, but it would have been interesting to seek to apply each interpretation to performance. In performance, thoughts about the emotional impact of particular scenes become actual emotional impact, developed by theatrical means. The use of aesthetic attention in different ways could allow for better memory and more complex understanding of the text. A full-scale production would take up a great deal of time, which one usually does not have, but it would be practical to do short extracts and scenes if the class is not too large. In this case, unlike in process drama, the participants are immediately and consciously engaged in building aesthetic impact. They must observe the possibilities of the text and explore how to bring those possibilities into prominence in performance. They must play with such variables as the placement of bodies on the stage, movement of different characters at different times, and expression in voice, face and especially movement. They might consider set and costume design. Do students ‘live through’ the situation set out in the text? They must, because that is an important feature of the text as an aesthetic entity, and that living-through is essential to aesthetic reading: if one feels emotion from reading a text, then there is livingthrough, even before beginning to do theatre. The preparation of a production depends upon a rich awareness of the text, and students are in effect in role as theatre professionals. There is emotion not only in the experience of the text but also in the determination to present something good. There is playfulness, because they see their production in relation to other possibilities. And there is discipline, because they must find a way to collaborate to produce something that is, on some terms or other, good theatre. Joe Winston (2015) proposes a different approach to Shakespeare in particular, taking advantage of the materiality of the verse. Beginning from Cicely Berry’s work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he favours the use of bodily movement to emphasize the rhythm of the verse and to bring a bodily understanding of what is going on dramatically in each passage. He goes on

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to techniques for thematic exploration that derive from Boal and from the Process Drama tradition, such as the use of tableaux to bring out the changing family situation in Hamlet (p. 58). This approach to the use of drama to teach Shakespeare is one of only a few studies of drama for teaching to be documented with a rigorous study of impact (pp. 133–58). The philosopher of theatre James Hamilton is also a theatre educator, and he uses a practice that broadens the basis of theatrical performance of a text. Working with secondary school students, he reads through a wide range of ‘avant-garde’ plays over a period of two weeks, while time is also devoted to exercises in theatre practice. The whole group settles on a ‘target story’, something classic like Bambi or Romeo and Juliet. Small groups of students then choose one of the avant-garde styles and rewrite the classic story, presenting it with new conventions. He comments on the process: We examine techniques for dissecting, disassembling, and reassembling story lines. We examine theatrical styles that are simply non-narrative. We learn to develop techniques for focusing upon things other than the inner lives of characters; for example, the characters’ social situations, or their ideas, or their capacities for various kinds of expression. (Hamilton 2005)

This appears to me an interesting way of using the conventions of theatre to teach the relation between style and expression, and the possibilities of stylistic choices, both in literary composition and in theatrical presentation, to change the substance of what is being explored. As an alternative from the process drama tradition, Cecily O’Neill (1995) has attempted to incorporate the literary text as a kind of ‘pre-text’. O’Neill’s pretext occupies a similar space to Bolton’s ‘stimulus’, but she seeks to broaden our understanding of the kind of thing that can result in process drama. She rejects the term ‘stimulus’ because of its ‘disagreeably mechanical overtones’ (p. 20). She states, In process drama the pre-text operates, first of all, to define the nature and limits of the dramatic world and, second, to imply roles for the participants. Next, it switches on expectation and binds the group together in anticipation. The pretext that is the source of the work is different from the text generated by the process, which remains as an outline, a trace, in the memories of the participants after the event. The latter is an outcome, a product. (p. 20)

She seeks to place literary texts in the process of drama as pre-texts. She writes,



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The most successful pre-texts for process drama will resonate with the elements and archetypes that have been the life blood of theatre, and indeed popular culture, through the ages. (p. 43)

She compares the place that she gives to literary texts in process drama to the place of classic plays in avant-garde theatre practice: Experimental theatre artists, including Grotowski, Marowitz, Heiner Muller, Schechner, Wilson, and the Wooster Group, freely use classic plays as pre-texts. Dramatic masterworks may be a vital component in their theatre events, but they are not sacrosanct for these innovative directors and ensembles. (p. 36)

She gives an example of a process drama based on Arthur Miller (pp.  33–5), developed by Gavin Bolton. She asserts, The pre-text chosen by Bolton provided powerful parameters for the dramatic world that emerged. The setting, atmosphere, and power relationships of the original text remained intact, as did the atmosphere of spying accusation, and hysteria that is characteristic of The Crucible. . . . The work was valuable in its own right but also provided a powerful approach to the original play. (p. 35)

There is, however, no presupposition that students have already read the play, or even a summary of it. The whole situation of seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts, is introduced from scratch, including the moulding of a voodoo doll, and a request that students create tableaux indicating family attitudes towards respectability and reputation. The teacher in role as Reverend Parris announces to a community meeting that some children have been caught doing witchcraft in the woods. The participants, in role as children, decide whether they are guilty or innocent and they go through interrogations, both public in the church and private in their families. Finally, participants tell others whether they had decided they were guilty or innocent. The play constitutes a pre-text only for the teacher. The pre-text for students consists only in the dramatic situation as described by the teacher. In Bolton’s own account of the same activity, he writes, One of the difficulties for young pupils engaging with a dramatic text based on historical material is that their grasp on the hidden values of a ‘strange’ culture such as Puritan Massachusetts in the 17th century is too slender for them to make a connection with their own lives. They may be inclined to regard people who were prepared to burn witches as quaint or mad or too childish to be worth bothering with. My purpose therefore in setting up a drama experience about

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the play before they read the script was to whet their appetites and to make the circumstances of the play more familiar. (1999, 222)

The drama activity is then a form of pre-reading. The activity does not reflect the dramatic situation of the play as a whole but principally of the implied action preceding the opening moment of the play. In the play, there is no public meeting about witchcraft until the trials begin, and then it is not an open meeting but a trial under the authority of two judges. The only parent we see interrogating children on this matter is the clergyman Parris himself. Later in the first scene, Proctor’s adultery with Abigail emerges to the audience, and the mutual jealousy between Abigail and Proctor’s wife is a main driver of the action through the courtroom scene in the second act (or third act in some editions). Abigail accuses Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft, and when Proctor tries to defend her, he is himself accused. In the final scene, Proctor must decide whether to confess, as the children must do in the process drama activity. His motivation for refusing, however, relates to the requirement that he denounce others, which requirement does not come up in Bolton’s activity. An important point of the activity seems to be to create a lively sense of drama about the opening, the first few minutes of the play, so as to launch perhaps reluctant readers into the world of the play. The emotion lies in a vivid sense of the drama of the situation. The playfulness lies in the choices they are able to make in role, and there is discipline, because they must create a single imagined dramatic reality for one another. This example shows a difficulty in the use of process drama for the study of literature. Insofar as process drama is almost always improvised, any move towards process drama is a move away from the study of the text. That move might build a stronger awareness of the dramatic situation and a fuller imagination of the fictional world  – but it remains that one has moved away from the text, and the essence of the study of literature lies in the relation between reader and text. If process drama is to be used at all in literature class, it must be tightly controlled and limited to keep the focus on the subject matter. Certo and Brinda (2011) offer another alternative in the connection between drama and literature. They carried out a programme in an urban Pittsburgh school with a poor record of providing students with literacy. Their target texts were three young adult novels, used with sixth-grade students (about eleven years old). Basing themselves on the ideas of Louise Rosenblatt as developed by Dennis Sumara, they set out a series of activities designed to produce aesthetic reading. In the classroom, there were visual art and drama activities,



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and students could look forward to watching a performance of the story of the novel at the end of each unit, presented by a local theatre company. At every step, there was emphasis on reading the text accurately, so as to experience its aesthetic qualities. Where O’Neill wants students to be always playing the Bear Game, Certo and Brinda want them to have the experience of the Stroll and meet the Snake. They are playing, of course, so they can step back from emotion at any time, and are continuously aware that the events of the story are not real to them at that moment. It may be significant that one of the novels dealt with the Holocaust, so they must have been told something about the real historical situation. By Certo and Brinda’s account, they developed discipline because the text drew them in, and they spontaneously began to seek ‘intellectual rigor’, challenging the accuracy of one another’s interpretations of the text, even as they became more open to its emotional force (p. 29). The literary text is of course itself designed to produce emotional response and imaginative involvement, and many times, people can find the state they desire just by picking up a book and starting to read it. Where students are ready to become emotionally involved in their reading, all of these drama activities, applied to fiction, can look time-consuming to no purpose. The use of drama for teaching may not then look like a fundamental teaching technique as much as it does like a category of remedial activities to be used when the literature does not provoke aesthetic reading on its own, or else a way of provoking aesthetic reading in students accustomed to efferent reading. A class that is already used to aesthetic reading of fiction might still benefit from dramatic techniques focused on a play text and might also benefit from intelligent oral delivery of poetry. Any drama activities that move away from the text should be directed at creating a positive context of reading, or at making students understand that they have a certain freedom in creating a context of reading. Students who know literary techniques but have no experience in relating literature to their own lives might benefit from activities like Boal’s that focus on creating a dramatic picture of students’ own experience that might be brought into their reading of literature. All of these drama activities appear aimed at producing a vivid consciousness of the drama and emotional force of the text. There is another side of the study of literature involving the study of literary technique:  verse forms, ways of treating narrative, metaphor, irony and the like. Students are asked to identify these techniques in texts and discuss how they are used to obtain literary impact. That side of literary study appears more suited to conventional classwork than to drama.

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The sense of possibility that arises from these activities has to do with the significance of literature for students’ lives. By the use of these activities, they discover that literature can draw them out of their lived experience into another experience, one that builds up a different understanding of the world. Ideally, the students would find their way to an independent engagement with literature that would help them understand their own lives and possibilities in a wider way:  building new distributions of the sensible at once through drama in connection with literature and through literature directly.

Science Science is unlike history and literature in that the subject matter is not inherently dramatic. If a meteor were to strike the earth, destroying most of civilization, that would be dramatic for us, but it would be so as a human historical event. The laws of nature governing the trajectory of the meteor would have no bearing on the drama of the event. Sometimes in science classrooms, students are asked to represent electrons or planets, and they ‘play the roles’ of these inanimate entities (see Dorion 2009). In the case of the meteor, one student might play the role of the meteor and others might be the terrified inhabitants of earth – but the drama would not then be focused on the physics of orbits but rather on the fear of death and human responses to it. The student playing the role of the meteor might have feelings about the situation, but those feelings would not be relevant to the trajectory of the meteor. A teacher in role might, however, call students together in role as scientists and gravely announce that unless they can find a way of deflecting the meteor, the entire population of Earth will die. Students would then have to investigate the science in the search for a discovery that would deal with the issue. This is Mantle of the Expert. The scientific material to be learned would still be undramatic, but the students would have been given a dramatic reason for learning the material. They would have motivation, then, and perhaps the drama activity would make the material more memorable. That is, they have learned something about the significance of the subject as a whole to their lives, and have learned, too, that accurate reasoning and calculation are important to human survival and prosperity. That is emotion. The awareness that there is no real meteor allows for play. The pressure of the emotion will produce discipline. Mantle of the Expert appears especially suited to environmental issues, as the stress in the study of the environment has much to do with avoiding disasters for



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human beings and animals. Fels and Belliveau (2008) set out a series of activities on environmental activities surrounding fish farming (pp. 137–52). Students are divided into groups with competing interests, such as fish farmers, fishing boat crew members and government officials. There are drama activities to make the physical sensation of fishing real to them, and then they must research in role, be interviewed in role, write in role and so on. The drama, then, impacts the significance of science in life and provides a vivid sense of how the study of science can expand a person’s possibilities in life.

Second-language education Non-dramatic approaches to language learning themselves vary a great deal, and these relate to drama in different ways. The grammar-translation approach is the most traditional. Students would read about the grammar of the target language in their native language, and their teacher would lecture them on grammatical topics in their native language. When they have learned the principle, for example, of distinguishing imperfect from passé composé in French, they do exercises in which they must make the right choice between the two and give the correct verb forms, or, most classically, translate from the native language to the target language and the reverse. Grammar-translation often led on to literary reading in the target language more than to conversation practice. The structural approach was popular from the sixties through the early eighties. Students worked entirely in the target language, doing substitution drills in the target language and then generalizing the habits they had learned to form new sentences. An important subcategory of structural approach was the audiolingual approach. Students would watch a filmstrip telling a simple story, often involving some practical task such as booking a hotel room. Lines of dialogue are attached to individual pictures. After watching the filmstrip and repeating several times, they would be asked to repeat the dialogue using the pictures to jog their memories. Subsequent structural drill would help them to generalize their learning. The communicative approach emerged in the late seventies. The slogan of the communicative approach was ‘instrumentality of language’. Syllabuses would be organized around speech acts rather than grammar points, things like ‘making a request’. An important subcategory of the communicative approach is task-based language learning. In this approach, students are asked to carry out

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some sort of task which requires the use of the target language. This will involve some sort of gap, to do with information, reasoning or opinion. These approaches have links with more general philosophies of education. The structural approach was linked with behaviourism, for instance, and the communicative with sociocultural learning theory. Drama has been used for language education for centuries. Shakespeare may well have participated in plays in Latin at Stratford Grammar School. School theatre productions in second languages have been widespread wherever the language of instruction differs from the language of the home, as is common worldwide. Even where it does not, ambitious language teachers have often produced plays in the second language. (I myself have played roles in school productions ranging from a French-speaking hunter in ‘Red Riding Hood’ at the age of seven to the a Russian-speaking king in ‘The Princess and the Pea’ at the age of twenty-one.) Process drama emerged at about the same time as the communicative approach and has tended to be allied with it. Bolton and Wagner both quote the sociocultural learning theory of Lev Vygotsky, which is itself associated with communicative language teaching. That being said, the link between process drama and sociocultural learning theory is not always very substantive. Among the most prominent books on the use of process drama for language teaching is Kao and O’Neill (1998), Words into Worlds:  Learning a Second Language through Process Drama. (A new book, Erika Piazzoli’s Embodying Language in Action: The Artistry of Process Drama in Second Language Education, is about to be published as I  write (2018). I  think this new book may offer a considerable advance on Kao and O’Neill.) The authors postulate a spectrum of language-learning activities from ‘closed communication’ (structural language drill and scripted theatre) to ‘open communication’ (process drama). They identify the goal of ‘accuracy’ with the ‘closed’ activities. They say that the tension involved in the ‘closed’ activities has exclusively to do with ‘accuracy of language and vocabulary’, whereas process drama produces tension ‘arising from the dramatic situation and the intentions of the roles’ (p. 16). They give an example of a Spanish-language activity for American Englishspeaking students. Students took on the roles of adults who had agreed to adopt or foster South American street children. They did preparatory work in English, partly learning about the situation and partly making up details about the children. They wrote letters to the children in Spanish. They created tableaux about the children’s life on the streets and found Spanish words to describe the efforts of other groups of students. Taking on the roles of these children, they



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wrote letters and journal entries. More advanced students took on the roles of children and were instructed to make the situation challenging for the ‘adults’. The teacher took the role of a hostile official from the South American country, who wanted to prevent them from adopting the children. Finally, an activity imagined the same children ten years on (pp. 13–15). The emotion arises from sympathy for the children. The playfulness is possible because of fictionality, and because students learning Spanish would probably quite like being transported to a Spanish-speaking context. Discipline arises from dramatic tension and from the urgency of doing something to alleviate the suffering of the fictional children. This certainly could work as drama. Leaving aside the ‘white saviour’ mentality that infuses this design, we might ask some questions about the way the activity would fit into a coherent Spanishlanguage programme. A principal, a head of department or a parent might ask for evidence that the three hours given to this activity have been well used. What exactly did the students learn? They have certainly had language practice in meaningful context, but school systems generally demand that lessons have objectives. It is hard to see how the teacher could predict what aspects of Spanish language they would especially practise. In many school systems throughout the world (and this is certainly true about the one I know best, in Hong Kong) the lack of specific objectives would be unacceptable. Even if a teacher is in a situation where she can do what she likes, there is still a need for both teacher and student to understand what has been covered and what has not been covered. One needs some kind of systematic way of knowing what progress has been made and where one should go next. That is, even outside of a school system, there is a need for a syllabus. It may be possible to write a syllabus that would accommodate this kind of learning, but I have not encountered any effort to do this. The first author of this book, Shin-mei Kao, has supplied a partial answer to this question by arguing that process drama results in increased use of certain question forms:  the school system could be told that students were especially practising those question forms (Kao, Carkin and Hsu 2011). This might justify doing process drama activities occasionally even where the demand is to get through a syllabus quickly. Another difficulty with Kao and O’Neill’s vision lies in its more general objectives. Repeatedly, the authors assert that process drama leads to fluency and communication rather than accuracy, and they are critical of any procedure that aims to build accuracy. In doing this, they are taking sides in a discussion that was already taking place in language pedagogy circles. The ‘Natural Approach’, a kind of communicative approach, was then quite current. Krashen and Terrell

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(1983) distinguish between ‘language acquisition’ and ‘language learning’. They see the first as leading to fluency and communication, and the latter as building a ‘monitor’ to ensure correctness. In the Natural Approach, ‘speech errors which do not interfere with communication are not corrected; while the correction of errors may help learning, acquired competence comes from comprehensible input’ (p.  20). By the latter, they meant language input which students are equipped to understand (Krashen 1981). Krashen and Terrell suggest that ‘grammar will be effectively acquired if goals are communicative’ (p. 21). They also stress that it is important to ‘lower the affective filter of the students’ (p. 21), and that may mean tempering error correction. Kao and O’Neill appear more extreme than Krashen and Terrell, in that the latter recognize the importance of the ‘monitor’, whereas Kao and O’Neill ignore the issue. Krashen stresses the need for ‘comprehensible input’. Kao and O’Neill’s activities would seem to produce limited comprehensible input that does not originate with other students, such that there is not much opportunity within their drama activities to learn accuracy, even if Krashen were right about it. Already in 1998, however, Krashen’s hypothesis in its strong form was being questioned. Lightbown and Spada (1990) cite evidence that French immersion programmes in Canada  – ‘communicative programs par excellence’ according to Krashen (1977, 1984)  – had mixed results. They produced good fluency and confidence, but disappointing results in terms of accuracy. Lightbown and Spada went on to advocate a view of language education which would combine communicative and form-focused language teaching. Lyster, Saito and Sato (2013) produce a review of research on oral corrective feedback not only showing its effectiveness but also classifying it according to its effectiveness in different contexts. Afitska (2015) surveys the terrain in ‘focus-on-form’ instruction, finding much subtlety and much effectiveness. Another question to be asked is whether, especially, with children, the activity provides enough repetition of vocabulary in meaningful context so that students can acquire the words (Zimmerman 1997; Webb 2007). Today, the basis of Kao and O’Neill’s book in applied linguistics is looking shaky. For all that, there is much of value here. A major research example in Kao and O’Neill’s book is of first-year engineering students at a university in Taiwan (pp.  54–77). They had been studying English for six years and had passed a competitive English examination. The English programme at their secondary schools had been aimed at getting them through this examination, but they had little ability to communicate. These students did not need to practise accuracy. They needed to practise the skills that an exam-driven system had neglected. In



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this situation, the fluency-focused process drama methods set out in the book could well produce good results. Aesthetics has a significant role in the process of language learning as set out in the book. The authors identify aesthetics exclusively with dramatic tension (p. 28), and, as we have seen, they point to dramatic tension as an important element that distinguishes their approach from any use of scripted theatre (p. 16). The vision of aesthetics, however, is far less subtle than what we have seen in Boal, Zamir and, especially, Bolton. There is nothing corresponding to Bolton’s discussion of the relation between the moment of uncertainty and the moment of decision, or of the aesthetic impact of focus on props such as the gold coin in the pirate activity. In Bolton’s work, these elements are particularly associated with the quality of reflexivity. The Spanish-language activity set out above does offer an opportunity for reflection on the significance of learning Spanish, though this is not stressed within the book. It is true for American students studying Spanish that they are learning the language of largely much poorer people. The activity stresses the economic disparity between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries. Students are also invited to imagine travelling to those countries and engaging in a meaningful way with the culture of the place. I  have suggested that the ‘white saviour’ flavour of the thing might be a problem, but one cannot criticize the activity for failing to engage with significant issues. The need to engage in reflexivity, in the terms of discussion of this book, has much to do with the significance of the subject in the students’ wider lives. They may not adopt Spanish-speaking children, but they may well travel to these countries and need to mediate differences not only in culture but also in wealth. Students certainly do also learn language from scripted theatre. It is important to make a distinction here between scripted theatre and mere delivery of dialogues, in the manner of the audiolingual method. (Such dialogues have by no means disappeared from language classrooms with the introduction of the communicative approach.) Scripted theatre must be rehearsed and performed with artistic intention, seeking to understand the aesthetic qualities of the text and enter into dialogue with them as Zamir sets out. Scripted theatre supplies the actual ‘input’ that is not only ‘comprehensible’ but also correct. Since the discourse is carefully written by someone competent, any ‘errors’ are intentional and can be explained in context. Since it is artistically designed with aesthetic impact in view, a production can create the emotional force required for effective memory of linguistic features and for their internalization. Students who perform a script first memorize it, but then work intensively to make it

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meaningful by a process of play, being exposed to and using the same language over and over again while building increasing meaningfulness into their delivery and their understanding of the language of others within the performance. That is discipline. Zamir’s ideas, taken full strength, require a high level of commitment from the actor: he imagines a demanding, rigorous process of creating an embodied performance of a role, created in dialogue between the actor and the text. This certainly does sometimes happen in the course of a student’s language education. Michelle Raquel (2013, 2015) sets out just such a process for four university students participating in a production of Rob John’s Living with Lady Macbeth, rehearsed over five months in 2010–11. (Full disclosure: I was co-director of this production with Raquel.) The directors used a procedure known as Dynamic Assessment to develop expressive abilities in students, at once linguistic and nonlinguistic. Raquel is able to show that learning gained socially in rehearsal was internalized in the manner described in Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory. This was a production, and it required a level of commitment that one usually will not have in a language classroom. Can one apply some of the same ideas in the language classroom? I use drama to teach French. My course is for beginners, given to students of the Education University of Hong Kong. I write dialogues for them with some dramatic interest and have them practise them with bodily movement and expression. Using what they learn from these dialogues, they write dialogues of their own and perform them. In parallel, students sing songs in French, study conjugations and do dictations based on the dramatic dialogues. At the first class, I introduce Je suis and Vous êtes (‘I am’ and ‘you are’) with various complements, notably including un étudiant and une étudiante (‘student’ in the masculine and feminine). The distinction between masculine and feminine forms is part of the material to be taught. I practise this vocabulary with them for pronunciation. I regularly do a scene on that first day called ‘The Horrible Principal’. The dialogue is as follows: (Student knocks at door) Me: Entrez! (Come in!) (Student enters nervously) Me: Qui êtes-vous? (Who are you?) Student: Je suis (gives name). (I look at the student impatiently.) Je suis un étudiant / une étudiante. (I am [name]. I am a student.) Me: Ah. Vous êtes un étudiant / une étudiante. Sortez! (Ah. You are a student. Get out of here!)



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I have all students line up down one side of the classroom to play the role of the frightened student, and I play the role of the horrible principal. My acting skills are strong enough so that I can introduce some variation to keep other students listening, and a fair number of students think of different ways of playing characters so that their classmates watch them (and listen to them). I make the last word ‘Sortez’ theatrically rude: get the hell out of here. They laugh. This activity requires them to imagine a setting different from that of the classroom. It places them in a situation that is all too familiar to them, as they had been secondary students not many years before. The activity evokes emotion that they must have felt themselves. At the same time, they see me step into role. They know I am not really a principal, and that they are not really frightened of me. The Snake is there, as there is an evocation of real emotion. The playfulness is there, as the setting of the drama is not the real setting, and they are able to manoeuvre within the role they have to play. There is discipline, as they must carry out the difficult task of pronouncing the French words correctly. If they are tentative in their pronunciation, that is all right, because their character is tentative. The language learning does open possibilities for them: they can see that even the few words they learned on this one day might be used to mediate a stressful situation. In the rest of the course, I offer dialogues that are little plays. I prioritize dramatic impact over practical usefulness, as Hong Kong students do not usually study French for any practical reason. Dialogues often deal with issues of the heart, as many students want to learn French because of the romantic qualities they attribute to it. I  teach dialogues involving complimenting someone, approaching another person, rejecting someone, celebrating Valentine’s Day and breaking up. In this way, I  deal with emotions that are deadly serious to these young people in a playful way. The break-up dialogue is perhaps the most popular. One of the participants is made to be a bit of an idiot. The injured party ends by saying Va-t’en (go away). A student in a later cohort remarked ‘I will remember “va-t’en” for the rest of my life’. I point out to my mostly female students that when travelling alone in a French-speaking place, it may well be helpful to say this to persistent men. This connection offers a possibility of significance in life that has not only intellectual but also emotional force. In the first iteration of the course, I asked students to write reflections at the end of each lesson. Many students find the drama aspect motivating in a general way and find the activity helpful. For example,

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Today is quite interesting! The professor did some role-play with us. He let us say the sentences with big emotion! I was a bit shy to speak French as I thought I cannot pronounce correctly. This way helped me to be more brave to speak. Moreover he let us apply the words in some dialogues so that I  can read the dialogue in different emotions. The drama in class increases our involvement and things are memorable. The role play is relaxing and I  enjoy seeing others’ playing. Their plays were really good! My pronunciation was also improved from the role play I think.

There is occasional testimony, not solicited but freely offered, that these activities help them to remember specific items of grammar or vocabulary: The strategy of using dramatic situation to help memorizing is effective since I can still remember the main points, like vous, tu and Qui êtes-vous? And I am astonished to find after so many weeks, I can still remember what does « sortez » mean. And I think it is all owing to the drama on the first day which is very impressive.

I realize, of course, that I have not offered anything resembling proof of my success in the classroom. For reasons of space, I  cannot do this in this book. At the same time, I think there is enough here to establish the credibility of my position and set up a claim for the use of scripted theatre in the classroom. In Krashen’s terms, my drama texts constitute comprehensible input. What I have introduced is an aesthetic aspect, such that students may find the input both more motivating and more memorable. Language bears a different relation to drama from what we see with other subject matter. Language learning is like science, in that no dramatic situation arises from the subject matter, but different in that the subject matter is itself part of the raw material of dramatic art. Bolton and O’Neill, as we have seen, assign aesthetic control principally to the teacher – but this does not seem the right idea for language education. If the students are to have aesthetic experience grounded in drama, they must either find it in artworks made from language  – that is, literature  – or they must create it themselves, taking control of the aesthetic factors. There are two ways for them to create aesthetic value themselves. One is by taking the aesthetic experience that they find in a text and building it into a new aesthetic experience with their own contribution. That is, they may produce actorly interpretation of a text given them. Their interpretation may lead them to alter or distort the text, as Hamilton advocates. They may also produce literary texts of their own, as Somers has students do in the history activity above, and as I have students do in my French class. Once they have written a text, of course,



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they may also produce an actorly interpretation of that text, as Somers’ students also did. One may try to do this in one step, asking students to improvise artistically significant performances in the second language, but this seems very demanding. I myself would only try to do this if I had a class of language learners who were also experienced actors, or else if they were quite advanced in the language and I had time to teach them acting (as happens in my drama classes with Chinese students).

Significance for subject self-efficacy For all teaching of conceptual material, there is an aspect of the learner’s experience that is difficult to deal with: self-image as a learner. Some, of course, have poor self-image as learners across the board. But people also think they are ‘not good at’ one thing or another. Drama as emancipation can change that. Extrinsic motivation is very prone to disruption from lack of self-efficacy. Intrinsic motivation is more robust, and better able to supply the experience of mastery. As a teacher trainer, I  supervise student teachers in English language programmes on teaching practice. Once, some years ago, I  visited a student teacher who was assigned to a secondary school, working with students about twelve. The class had been reading Roald Dahl’s novel The Twits. When I saw the class, students had already spent a double period reading and rehearsing the plays. When students performed, they showed commitment to the task, and an enjoyment of performance. Of course there was some droning, and some English in performance that was hard to understand, but there were also moments when the students’ interpretation gave us all a theatrical experience. The best moment was when a weak student spoke his two words (‘Six hours!’) with energy and commitment, stealing the show from the strong ones. When I asked the student teacher about this boy after the lesson, she said that since he was especially weak, she had purposely given him a very short line with high expressive possibilities. For weeks after this class, she told me later, he became more active, and made progress in English. Another student teacher was assigned to a primary school, working with children of about seven. Her lesson from the textbook had to do with a boy named Ben, who found the garden of a giant king and began to pick the flowers. The giant king appeared and challenged the boy. The student teacher stepped into role, putting a crown on her head. She said, ‘I am the giant king! What do

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you say to me?’ A girl’s voice came strongly from the back of the room: ‘Hello!’ she said. Immediately after the lesson, the student teacher told me that the girl was a weak student who does not often speak up. In an interview weeks later, I asked her about this: So what does that achieve if she says hello? There’s probably not much language learning right? She probably knew how to say hello before. What does it do for you if she says hello? The confidence of using English to communicate instead of doing some exercises. (DeCoursey and Trent 2016, 531)

Finally, a former student, now become a teacher at an academically lowlevel school, put together a short play for the anniversary of her school’s founding. She wanted a particular boy to play the role of a cat, but he did not want the role, because the cat was the villain in an animal fable involving mice. She persuaded him to play the role after all, with very good results. More than a year after the performance, when he was no longer in her class, he sought her out and asked her to speak English with him. On this production, she remarks, So, in that drama, because I let them know that actually it is not that difficult. They can do it, and their classmates can do it. And it’s a proof that they can do it, and that’s why they have self-confidence. And I observed that they all did very well academically after that. And they all entered the A class after that drama. (DeCoursey and Phillipson 2011, 24)

In these three cases, students became stronger in English language, not because they learned anything in particular but rather because they performed well at a moment when they were using the language, and they knew their strength. The issue is their confidence for the particular subject, self-efficacy. The issue is also emancipation, in the terms of Rancière. (For a discussion of this issue in the context of an exam-driven system, see DeCoursey and Trent 2016.) Can we say in general terms that engagement in drama produces self-efficacy in the particular subject? Language learning is a special case in answering this question, for reasons that we have seen:  language is an important element of drama, and it is partly through language that drama achieves its effects. In the first two examples, the student’s contribution was purely in vocal non-verbal expressiveness: the student created an effect through tone of voice. Nevertheless, the student had the experience of success in self-expression in English.



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Some important forms of extrinsic motivation are fragile in their effects and hard to recover once broken. In the Hong Kong school system, classes are streamed, Band One being for academic high achievers and Band Three for low achievers. Schools are informally classified in this way. People say ‘That’s a Band Two school’, or ‘That’s a Band Three school’. Further, there are English-medium and Chinese-medium schools. Almost all university places require a high level of English, and almost all universities are in effect English medium. As a result, there is a strong view that students bound for university must go to Englishmedium schools. Once a child is in a Band Three Chinese-medium school, there is not much point, for most students, in saying, ‘You should work hard on your English, because you need it to get into university’. The child knows perfectly well this is improbable. Children in these circumstances also do not think they will get jobs that require foreign travel, or extensive contact with non-Chinese people. If you give these students extrinsic reasons to study, many of them simply will not believe you, and they may well be right. Intrinsic motivation, however, is available to any student, and aesthetics relates to intrinsic motivation. That connection is the topic of the next chapter.

Conclusion It is worth returning over this material, to ask what we may reasonably expect from drama lessons in each case. In science, drama may show, in an emotionally powerful way, the significance of the subject as a whole, and the significance of particular subfields, such as anatomy. Drama may provide motivation, then, through a vision of the possibilities opened by a study of the field. It may produce memory insofar as the students see science as significant. When we watch medical television shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, we often see elements of science, or at least the significance of their impact on people. Getting the science right may make the difference between life and death. We may hope for motivation for the subject as a whole, or for subfields. If students understand in a visceral way that a clear scientific knowledge of the structure of the heart could be a key part of saving someone’s life, then that specific knowledge may become more memorable to them. It is difficult to see, however, that drama will produce better memory of the details of calculation, because these are not themselves the objects of drama. History is very different. The dramatic situation itself is drawn from the subject matter, and drama can produce reflection on the significance of historical conditions and factual information, besides providing motivation

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and memorability for, potentially, every detail dealt with. One may learn from studying history about the potential of rigorous study in reconstructing the past and establishing commonalities with the experience of other people. Literature also produces its own dramatic situations, but it has its own internal ways of dealing with them. Drama may provide motivation for the unmotivated, and, as Certo and Brinda show, it is capable of producing aesthetic reading of the literary text. Language class produces no dramatic situations of its own, but drama may touch upon the possibilities opened up by the study of language. These differ from the instrumental purposes of language in that they may be emotionally significant. Emotional significance can produce subject self-efficacy.

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The Aesthetic as Intrinsic Motivation

I began this book with Dewey and Rancière, arguing that they present a vision of aesthetics open to a wide vision of what is possible, and ultimately to deep change in practice because of a change in imaginative vision. Much of the thrust of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 was towards the sense of possibility, the emotional belief that one has possibilities and that those possibilities are significant. This chapter returns to an aspect of what we saw in Chapter  2:  the sense of focus in the aesthetic on something that yet does not exist, like the bear in the Bear Game. Although aesthetic experience does open, as we have seen, on a wider sense of possibility, the isolation of the aesthetic from immediate practical considerations is also an important part of what the aesthetic is and of how it obtains its effects. It is important to Eric and Gregory that they are not genuinely in any danger of being killed by a bear. It is important to them that the imaginary danger from the bear should be isolated from the concerns of their normal lives. The history of aesthetics is in part the history of this paradox: philosophers have tried to resolve the tension between immediate isolation from practical concerns and possible future impact on those same practical concerns. Philosophers have come up with a wide range of phrases to describe this isolation: Edward Bullough’s ‘aesthetic distance’, for instance ([1912] 1989), or Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s ‘pragmatic enclave’ (2015, 161). In this chapter, however, I  will focus on the most famous and influential of these formulations, Immanuel Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’ and variations on it that have been introduced in recent years, including those of Arnold Berleant and Roger Scruton (Kant [1790] 2000, 90–1; Berleant 2004, 42; Scruton 2007). I will argue that ‘disinterested contemplation’ in a context of education is effectively synonymous with ‘intrinsic motivation’, with no more than a difference of emphasis. The notion of disinterestedness would seem to exclude the whole idea that aesthetics might serve purposes external to the aesthetic experience itself, since the desire to educate might well be seen as an ‘interest’, something external to

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aesthetic experience that pollutes its purity (Kant [1790] 2000, 90–1). Some who have looked at this problem have chosen to reject Kant’s notion outright. I am unwilling to do this, because I think the idea has survived for a reason. It does tell us something important about aesthetic experience, but in Kant’s fullblooded formulation, it is indeed problematic for the application of aesthetics in education. This chapter will first set out an interpretation of Kant’s view, then turn to examine recent discussions of it, seeking to see what recent philosophers have taken from Kant and what they have abandoned. This discussion will lead to the presentation of two criteria for the use of aesthetics as a means for language teaching and illustration of the use of these statements with real examples from student teachers in Hong Kong schools. The choice of language teaching in this example is not really conceptually motivated: I am using this example because I feel the need of real experience on this topic, and much of my work has to do with language teaching. Conceptually, language teaching is here an example of drama for curricular learning. ‘Contemplation’ is quite evidently a mode of attention. The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘The action of beholding, or looking at with attention and thought’. Subsequent definitions stress close attention and continuity, going on to identify a special usage in religion, as ‘religious musing, devout meditation’, remarking that this is the earliest usage and the commonest down to the seventeenth century. These definitions connect to our earlier discussion, since the first aspect, ‘with attention and thought’, modifies the kind of attention brought to the object, suggesting some element of narrowing. The stress on close attention and continuity reinforces the idea that there is some kind of bracketing here for the sake of closer and more continuous attention. The religious definition, of ‘musing’, however, works the opposite way. The suggestion is of close attention to something like a religious image or a biblical passage. ‘Musing’ does not suggest anything resembling our ‘focalized attention’ earlier but rather a kind of attentive free association. This tension within the definition will become significant later in the chapter. ‘Disinterestedness’ is murkier. Norman Kreitman (2006) identifies three ‘varieties’ of disinterestedness in aesthetic theory. The first two involve a distancing of the appreciating subject from elements of everyday experience: the first requires an exclusion of all previous experience, and the second would admit previous experience of the same art but nothing else. The last would exclude ‘personal associations’. Examples of relevant personal associations are to be found in Kant’s text. An Iroquois sachem is scorned because he prefers the cookshops of Paris to any of the cultural treasures there, and a ‘Rousseauesque’



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observer appears as not engaging in disinterested contemplation when he ‘vilif[ies] the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people’ on such a thing as a beautiful palace (p. 90). Other things may be involved, but interestedness at least involves that which connects with the needs of the body, such as hunger, and the distribution of money and economic justice. ‘Disinterested’ may be viewed as a modifier to the notion of close attention. We have seen the image of a man with a metal detector looking for coins. He is, in Kant’s terms, interested, as he is seeking to make money. Further, the desire to make money modifies his mode of attention. He focuses very hard on the dial and the clicking on the headset, so as not to miss any opportunity to find money. The interestedness of his effort to find money creates focalized attention, so disinterestedness may create distributed attention. Is Barthes’s strolling visitor to North Africa disinterested? She takes pleasure in what is around her, noticing all sorts of miscellaneous things. She is not seeking to gain advantage for herself beyond pleasure. She is not involved in the social life of the village but only observes it. So the term ‘disinterested’ applies fully. The term ‘contemplation’, however, introduces two things beyond what Barthes seems to be saying: one is continuous attentiveness to the experience and the other is a religious overtone, suggesting that the person is contemplating for the good of her soul. We saw briefly that the term ‘focused attention’ might be seen as about intensity, but the notion of ‘contemplation’ here brings intensity too, an intense attention to a wide range of experience, not subordinated to a purpose in the material world. There may be a purpose in the ‘spiritual’ world, however. We must imagine Barthes’s stroller as intensely contemplating everything around her, not merely experiencing the village but turning all experiences over in her mind, seeking to benefit from them in some non-material way. So also, Louise Rosenblatt’s model of reading fits rather well with Kant’s terminology understood in this way ([1978] 1994, 24). Her ‘efferent’ reading is reading that ‘carries something away’, generally something useful, like the time of one’s train or the information in the text that might be needed at exam time. This reading is that of focalized attention because it is interested, in that the reader seeks to benefit from the reading in a narrow and material way. Her ‘aesthetic’ reading, on the other hand, involves close attention (so it is ‘contemplation’), but it is broad attention, reading that is slow enough to allow the text to inspire emotion. The benefit to be hoped for is an immaterial benefit – not ‘spiritual’, exactly, but something different from money or a mark on an exam. The last part, the requirement of emotion, is not to be found in Kant. The reason why Kant excludes emotion is that he views it as entirely individual, not

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connected to the universality of the human spirit. Yet in the imagery we have seen up to now, the Snake appears connected to a universal fear of death and injury. Perhaps Kant would view this fear as ignoble, but it remains that this is an emotional structure that exists as an immediate potential in every human being. It is the contention of this book that this ignoble, basic emotion contributes to the grounding of aesthetic experience. In this chapter, I  seek to connect disinterested contemplation to intrinsic motivation. ‘Disinterested’ and ‘intrinsic’ have much in common. Both seek to deny a movement towards practical benefit. ‘Interestedness’ exists when, as Kant writes, ‘something is at stake for us’, that is, something material, some worldly benefit ([1790] 2000, 90). So also, ‘extrinsic’ motivation exists when there is a question of worldly benefit: making more money in the future or getting better marks in exams. I  would contend that ‘contemplation’ and ‘motivation’ refer to different moments in the same process. ‘Disinterested contemplation’ refers to the moment when the student in class comes in contact with the material, turns it over and over in his mind and takes the time to experience it. ‘Intrinsic motivation’ is the moment when that process of contemplation results in a certain energy to move forward in study unrelated to the achievement of worldly goals. The common factor is in the irrelevance of worldly goals. I hope to show in what follows that the one leads to the other. The matter becomes clearer when we turn more specifically to drama. Kreitman is probably right to argue that the first two of his definitions are untenable for arts in general but is quite certainly right with respect to drama. Drama is frequently in some sense mimetic of social interaction and cannot really be understood without reference to the world of social experience. Paul Woodruff argues that ‘[t]‌heater is the art of finding human action worth watching, and it mostly does this by finding human characters worth caring about’ (2008, 22). The issue here is a mode of attention driven by a particular understanding of significance: human action is significant, and theatre makes that significance real to the onlooker. Further, the human action in question is almost always social in nature:  most theatre, most of the time, deals with interaction. The elements of social experience excluded by the first two definitions are central to what drama is. ‘Disinterestedness’ in the third sense, however, is indeed descriptive of what happens in theatre, and we shall see that its relevance extends to the classroom. Paul Woodruff believes that theatregoers should ‘bring the play home’ to their own concerns, but ‘[g]‌ood watchers of theatre will not bring what they are watching home while they are watching it. If they did, they’d stop paying



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attention to the play’ (p. 202). The act of exclusion is necessary in order to focus on what is there. Woodruff clarifies why the audience needs to focus on what is there, excluding what is personal to them:  ‘Putting emotion in harmony is . . . the business of theatre. The art of watching asks an audience to set aside their everyday passions, as far as possible, and call up the feelings that suit the performance’ (p. 146). The very different philosopher James Hamilton suggests that a good theatre spectator must master a ‘basic theatrical understanding’ that is at once cognitive and emotional (2007, 74). He further suggests that spectators must not only respond but respond in such a way as to be in concert with those around them, thus excluding personal considerations (p.  95). This is a classic part of philosophical aesthetics. In 1912, Edward Bullough argued that, in theatre, characters ‘appeal to us like persons and incidents of normal experience, except that that side of their appeal, which would usually affect us in a directly personal manner, is held in abeyance’ ([1912] 1989, 323). It is widely agreed among aestheticians that there is such a necessity in the perception of the aesthetic in theatre. Extrinsic motivation has nothing to do with a person’s absorption in the object of learning. Intrinsic motivation involves a more direct connection between the learner and the subject matter, a bracketing or distancing of practical considerations for the sake of a better focus on the subject matter itself. That distinction, in its turn, is significant for education, as it is widely felt that intrinsic motivation is better for learning, so the introduction of the aesthetic may also benefit learning (Ryan and Deci 2000). Without stretching too much, the intrinsically motivated learner may be said to be engaged in disinterested contemplation of the subject matter. We might further say that ‘disinterested contemplation’ and ‘intrinsic motivation’ are parallel things, with a difference of emphasis. The first phrase puts the stress on the experience of the object in stillness, while the second stresses the motivation that experience provides to future action. That is why I  have formulated the two as different moments of one single process. We have seen that Rosenblatt’s ‘aesthetic reading’ may be viewed as disinterested contemplation  – but her formulation is meant to apply to education. It must be admitted that the notion of ‘disinterested contemplation’ is less than ideal for the purposes of education. However much one may insist that ‘disinterestedness’ involves great passion and commitment, the notion of ‘uninterestedness’ seeps back into its usage. ‘Contemplation’ is too static an expression for the purpose, suggesting a still, quasi-mystical experience, which would only be degraded if it were to be the instrument of another purpose.

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Roger Scruton suggests ‘disinterested interest’ (2007, 234). This clever expression uses apparent paradox to nullify the semantic leakage from ‘disinterest’ to ‘uninterest’. Arnold Berleant suggests the term ‘aesthetic engagement’ in place of ‘disinterested contemplation’: ‘Aesthetic engagement recognizes that beauty, or aesthetic value more generally, inheres not in the object or in the perceiver but is rather the leading feature of the reciprocal process of perceptual participation between appreciator and object’ (2013). One consequence of Berleant’s position is that aesthetic experience may be seen as active, a form of aesthetic creation, or the process of experience and creation may merge (1991, 48). Berleant’s examination of ‘disinterestedness’ leads him to exclude much of what Kant attaches to the concept, but he retains ‘a call to direct and focus our attention and to be fully receptive’ (1991, 45). The call to exclude extraneous considerations has not necessarily disappeared but has become subordinate to the notion of focus. Scruton’s ‘disinterested interest’ retains that exclusion, and I propose to follow him in that aspect. It is striking that this formulation applies both to the appreciation of art and to its production. Drama teachers may well recognize in it a need that beginning actors often have. They start out playing in the sense of fooling around and must learn to play in a more focused manner (cf. the discussion of this issue in Winston (2010, 50–4)). The practice of theatre considerably consists in learning focus in play. Penny Bundy brings the notion of aesthetic engagement into a discussion of drama education, citing ‘total conscious focus on the present’ as one of its aspects (2003). That focus is potentially of much use in the process of learning, and it relates to the need to pause, not rush over things. For some writers, Berleant’s ‘call to direct and focus our attention’ is a topic in itself. Ciaran Benson, a psychologist, begins from poetic characterizations of what he calls ‘absorption’ and asks what the psychological foundations might be. He grapples with the subjective impression that we are not paying attention to the aesthetic object: the aesthetic object is making us part of itself. He writes, ‘Aesthetic experience involves a fixed, sustained attention of a non-instrumental sort to appearances in the here and now’ (1993, 7). Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has proposed a similar formulation in ‘flow’, but his emphasis is on the effort to achieve something or to perform well. The appreciation of beauty is sometimes completely effortless, and even where substantial learning and painfully acquired competence goes into the appreciation of art, we do not tend to think that the sense of achievement is a major part of the appreciation of the aesthetic. Nevertheless, there is a connection here. Abuhamdeh and Csikszentmihalyi (2012) argue that the balance of challenge and perceived competence that is part



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of Csikszentmihalyi’s view of ‘flow’ is also constitutive of intrinsic motivation. The link to be found here between Benson’s view on the appreciation of art and Csikszentmihalyi’s view of the effort to perform well tends to support the view that appreciation of the aesthetic is closely related to the effort to achieve. This last characterization is congruent at once with Berleant’s view of ‘focus’ as the centre of aesthetic experience and with Bundy’s ‘focus on the present’. As Woodruff argues, the result of an audience’s focus on theatre is imagination, most often in the form of imagined emotional experience: empathy (2008, 165– 87). It is imagination and emotion that construct the special, strong attention involved in aesthetic experience of theatre, and that same attention, that same focus, is what is required for achievement in ‘flow’. In a context of education, the word ‘focus’ used by Berleant and implied by Benson does the work of ‘contemplation’ and does it better. Like ‘contemplation’, ‘focus’ implies a concentration on few, immediate elements. Unlike ‘contemplation’, ‘focus’ can be used for both a passive, observing state and for an active, creating state. Unfortunately, we have a terminological problem. Following Schaeffer, we have used the word ‘focus’ to refer to the exclusive concentration on a narrow range of criteria, corresponding to the concentrated search in skimming a text for one particular word (an extreme form of efferent reading). The indeterminate nature of the implied metaphor is creating problems for us. Both in the image of the man with the metal detector and in the image of the appreciator of art, the subject narrows the range of attention in order to concentrate on something. But if the goal is simply and only to achieve something that is preconceived, then the attention itself is focused: the subject becomes unaware of everything except the object of the search, the coins or the time of the train. In aesthetic attention, things are also excluded, such that one seeks experience in a narrower part of one’s field of perception. When one is watching a play, one does not look closely at the back of the theatre or stop to become lost in thought about the hairstyles of women in the audience (or at least if this happens, the play has already failed). When one is reading a novel, one may look up and see the cat entering the room – but this does not count as part of the aesthetic experience. It is not part of the same aesthetic attention. To this point, I have moved from Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’ to a more flexible view of aesthetic experience contained in Scruton’s term ‘disinterested interest’ and Berleant’s term ‘aesthetic engagement’. In the course of doing this, I  have gathered some hints as to the content of aesthetic experience:  a ‘fixed, sustained attention of a non-instrumental sort to appearances in the here and

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now’. Woodruff and Hamilton have suggested that, in theatre, the harmonization of emotions is central to this experience, with Woodruff stressing the imagination required to feel empathy with a character. This understanding of aesthetic experience may well involve an exclusion or at least distancing of the extraneous, whether defined as ‘personal considerations’ or as narrow purposefulness. This understanding of the aesthetic is consistent with the philosophical tradition. I  have retained from Kant an emphasis on bracketing, ‘holding in abeyance’ as Bullough says, something, to make room for aesthetic experience. The nature of that ‘something’ remains to be seen. The term ‘contemplation’ is accurate insofar as it emphasizes the need for close attention to experience, but it is difficult to use in the context of education because it is too static. When we are discussing the process of learning, the most significant moment is not the moment of fixed contemplation but the push that aesthetic experience gives to learning. I have retained Scruton’s ‘disinterested interest’ to signify the emphasis here on bracketing something and Berleant’s ‘aesthetic engagement’ to signify the dynamic nature of the interaction. Summarizing, we may say that, to be successful as an aesthetic activity, a drama activity must meet the following criterion: 1. The drama activity must successfully produce aesthetic engagement, conceived as disinterested interest that serves to provide a stronger focus on the immediate activity. That focus must provide stimulus to the imagination and/or emotion, for the purpose of building significance.

Where drama is used to teach curricular material, this condition is necessary but not sufficient. Curricular classes have goals of their own, and students may be aesthetically engaged and yet learn nothing about the material. Further, in practice, curricular classes have syllabuses set out in terms of items to be learned (can students distinguish in practice between the English past tense and present perfect and use these grammatical elements for expression?). For this reason, we must lay down a second condition, built upon the parallels we have seen between aesthetic engagement and intrinsic motivation: 2. The aesthetic engagement must successfully offer intrinsic motivation for the learning of the material to be taught.

I hypothesize, then, that successful aesthetic engagement offers the possibility of intrinsic motivation. In examining the three case studies, we will seek to characterize the nature of aesthetic engagement of a language teacher working with primary-age children. The second criterion is essentially a practical concern,



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and it is to the real workings of the classroom that we look to characterize how the aesthetic may offer a way of teaching specific non-aesthetic material.

Case 1: Myra The student teacher ‘Myra’ had a very particular set of skills. She was an amateur dancer. Her class was Primary Two, so her students were about seven years old. She had done a unit on English words for animals and had taught a song that attached names of animals to verbs. Some were ordinary verbs like ‘run’, while others aimed at creating a vivid image (‘a snake slithers’, and even ‘a hippopotamus dances’, referring to a cartoon film). She sought to use her own expertise to create engagement in children. In her final essay for the course, written after her practicum was over, she wrote, ‘Drama offers language learners opportunity to use imagination when they are learning the English language . . . which I  personally regard as the most important component of drama education in primary school’. Given her personal strengths as a teacher, she sensibly sought to use bodily movement to inspire imagination. After a warm-up game of ‘Simon says’, she reviewed the animals and the action verbs and had students divide into two groups. They chose animals from among those whose names they knew in English. Each student came forward and said, ‘I am a _________. I can _________’, thereby using the word for an animal and an action verb. The child then started to do the action and (at a word from Myra) froze in the middle, creating a tableau or ‘freeze frame’. Myra had each child stay frozen until all children in the group were in place and then said ‘Bippety-boppety-boo’, giving them the signal to move again. In one of the two groups, children playing predators such as crocodiles then pretended to take bites out of those playing prey animals such as rabbits. The rabbits, naturally, ran away. Having given permission for thirty seconds of noise and chaos, she then called them back to order and moved on to the next group or activity. The aesthetic element of the lesson consisted in the use of form to activate imagination. Myra had introduced the new language elements in a conventional way. In this lesson, she was seeking to embed this relatively superficial learning in the students’ minds through imagination and physical action. Her warm-up, ‘Simon says’, combined coordinated physical action with a need to listen closely to her words in English. This activity required focus but did not appeal to imagination, and only mildly to emotion, in the pleasure of the game. Myra then

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prepared the students to ‘be’ the animals. They had time to choose their animal and recall the relevant verbs. It is clear on the video that they also thought about how they would move their bodies. Children can be seen to be snapping like crocodiles or flying like birds in small ways, trying to stay orderly while anticipating their physical movement. When a child’s turn came, he or she had to come forward and say the appropriate two sentences, already imagining the movement. Myra let the child go for a few seconds and then said, ‘Freeze!’ The various ‘frozen’ children accumulated until she said the words and they moved freely. It is no trick to get a boy of seven to pretend to be a bird. Myra did something further:  she introduced a freeze frame in the middle. That created a sense of suspended motion, and children became aware of other children joining the tableau in particular roles. When the child spoke the sentences, he or she was already preparing in body to be a bird, a crocodile or a rabbit. The freeze required the child to remain fixed in role and to stay in role when coming out of the freeze. Dramatic tension consisted in the impulse of ‘predators’ to go after ‘prey’, and Myra made them feel the dramatic tension through a freeze frame that suspended a moment of potential action. As with any aesthetic activity, there were degrees of success. Myra’s first group seemed to forget what animals they were during the freeze frame. When she said the magic word and they all moved, they seemed to have become children again, having ‘dropped out of character’. The members of the second group successfully held their focus and were still in character when the magic word came. We may speculate, but cannot on the present evidence show, that they, therefore, learned the target language better, as it became associated with a more focused activity.

Case 2: Joy Another student teacher, ‘Joy’, used drama for language learning in quite a different way. She was an experienced actress and theatre director, faced with teaching Primary Five students (ten to eleven years old) this phrase: ‘Was there a ____________ in Hong Kong in [year]’. Students were meant to formulate this question reliably and learn to answer ‘Yes, there was’ and ‘No, there wasn’t’. She introduced the material in a conventional way, then announced to students that a guest was coming. The guest, Mrs Rainbow, was a very old lady who remembered what had been built when in Hong Kong. Joy left the room, drew some lines on her face and re-entered wearing a shawl and leaning on a rainbow umbrella. She



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introduced herself in a quavery voice and told them that ‘Miss Chen’ (Joy) had told her that they had some questions for her about the history of Hong Kong. They asked their questions enthusiastically. As she left, she complained that Miss Chen was ‘really mean’ to make her come so early in the morning. Through this activity, students had the experience both of imagination and of empathy. The joke at the end stressed the tension between the known reality (she is Miss Chen) and the fictional appearance (she is Mrs Rainbow). During the student questions, ‘Mrs Rainbow’ called on a soft-spoken girl. The girl formulated her question correctly but as usual inaudibly. In character, Joy asked her to speak up, as Mrs Rainbow was a bit deaf. The girl did speak up. In the subsequent interview, Joy told me that she had been trying for two weeks to get that girl to speak up, without success. That is, she would not speak up because a teacher demands it, but she would speak up to help an old lady.

Case 3: Wendy A third student teacher, ‘Wendy’, had some experience as a director and playwright in coursework. Working with Primary Five students (ten to eleven years old), she was teaching a dialogue on an apparently uninteresting theme, ‘Going to a restaurant’. The textbook writers had added some interest by making the food bad. Students were to fill in the last lines of the dialogue, and they had added interestingly awful things like ‘chocolate salad’ and a cockroach in the food. The dialogue was full of interjections like ‘Yuck’. Wendy asked students to practise performing these interjections with maximum expressiveness, requiring students to perform the fictional feeling only, hiding any pleasure in performance from onlookers. ‘You’re smiling! I can see you!’ she said to one boy. This required them to pause over the phonetic and expressive possibilities of the text. They were participating in ‘aesthetic reading’ of an apparently unpromising text, finding the expressiveness within it, and using the expressiveness in the text to express what they found fun or interesting. This constituted a genuine aesthetic experience, so it meets the first criterion. As language teaching, however, it could have been better targeted. Students will certainly not forget ‘Yuck’, but that word is not an important objective of the language class. Language objectives would have been better integrated into the activity if she had gone on to work on expressive delivery of whole sentences, thus practising English intonation patterns and making the rest of the language in the dialogue more memorable.

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Discussion In each of the three cases, there was a pronounced focus on aesthetic activity. In each case, the activity involved playing a role. The first, involving very young children, had quite basic roles, such as being a rabbit. The children had to focus to retain that role through the freeze. The second required children, first, to be an audience to skilled role playing, then play a limited role in interacting with the fictional character. The last involved imagining something disgusting and making the emotional response vivid at once to self and to others. Each of the three involved ‘disinterested interest’ because some range of extraneous considerations was excluded to aid focus on the task at hand. Myra’s students had to bracket their day-to-day awareness of their own bodies and imagine fictional bodies with quite different characteristics. Further, their animal characters had preset dramatic interrelations, as predators eat prey. They had to neglect their real interrelations and treat each other, within the game, as predators and prey. Joy’s students knew the whole time, of course, that the person in front of them was really a young woman, the student teacher in their class – but, for the purposes of the activity, they had to do everything as if she were an old lady. It was quite possible, of course, to do this through superficial ‘pretending’. Yet the example of the soft-spoken little girl shows that at least one student entered into the imagined world with imaginative fullness and responded to ‘Mrs Rainbow’ as if she were a real person requiring the consideration due to an elder. This example, and the clear awareness of reality as well as fiction, leads me to prefer the term ‘distancing’ to the alternatives that have already appeared. Wendy asked her students, for the purpose of performance, to distance their real pleasure in being expressive and entertaining for their classmates. By demanding that they do this, she asked them for a particular psychological act: to present only the fictional emotion and not the real one, they had to enter into the imagined reality. It seems fair to say that all three activities involved disinterestedness for the sake of greater focus on imagination and, especially in the last case, emotion. It appears from these examples that the exact identity of what is excluded varies with the activity. In Myra’s case, the change, the distancing, was first in the children’s own bodies and second in their social relations. In Joy’s case, the distancing had to do with her own identity. In Wendy’s case, the distancing was of the students’ own responses to a real classroom situation, to be replaced with an imagined response to an imagined situation. In the classroom, what is first distanced seems to be (1) the physical environment, (2) the identity of



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participants and/or (3) the social situation of participants. We come then to the unsurprising but significant conclusion that disinterestedness is closely related to imagination in drama, as it is often logically necessary that some part of the real situation be ignored, distanced, if imagination is to function. At least in Joy’s case, double perception appears to be part of the aesthetic experience: students responded to performance that pointed out its own fictionality, even while requiring them to take the fictional situation seriously. This kind of distancing is, at least in many cases, a precondition of aesthetic engagement because it makes room for the imagination by making the real fade. A second kind of distancing has to do with the use of aesthetic engagement as intrinsic motivation. When the students enter into the imagined dramatic situation, their attention is removed from the extrinsic need to please their parents by doing well in exams. The absorption created by the pleasure of makebelieve pulls them, as Benson says, making the immersion in English no longer hard study but disciplined play: something resembling ‘flow’. The two kinds of distancing relate differently to aesthetic engagement. The first is a precondition of aesthetic engagement, as it makes space for the working of the imagination. The second is a consequence of aesthetic engagement: students find respite from extrinsic motivation in imagination. This is a model of the process, then: one sets aside the constraints of reality in order to obtain aesthetic engagement, and aesthetic engagement succeeds in distancing extrinsic motivation and replacing it with intrinsic. Yet the second kind of distancing, as Guyer (2000, xxviii, interpreting Kant) and Rosenblatt both point out, is also a precondition of aesthetic experience. Where aesthetic engagement successfully distances extrinsic motivation, the purposes of aesthetic engagement are served just as much as the purposes of intrinsic motivation. At a first moment, then, the workings of the drama activity must activate imagination to distance the workaday reality of student existence in a classroom. At a second moment, the aesthetic engagement itself distances extrinsic motivation, thereby providing the preconditions for further aesthetic engagement. A  good drama activity can create a virtuous circle, creating evermore aesthetic engagement and therefore intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation can be motivation to do different things. An activity that is enjoyable to students and makes them receptive to learning might be said, in a loose sense, to be intrinsically motivating. For the purposes of curricular learning, however, it is necessary to focus a little more: does the activity supply intrinsic motivation to learn the material of the day’s lesson?

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It is Joy who most directly made use of aesthetic engagement to teach specific language. She violated the fiction of her performance far enough to work the data projector, giving students visual stimulus that formed the questions they were to ask. For example, students might see a picture of a cinema with the date 1946 and thereby be prompted to ask, ‘Was there a cinema in Hong Kong in 1946?’ They saw Joy in role and treated her as Mrs Rainbow at the moment of constructing the correct form. The formation of language and the constitution of the imagined person took place simultaneously. Myra also gave students a grammatical form to use:  ‘I am a _______. I  can _______’. Her language requirement related differently to the drama activity since students were not, strictly speaking, performing the role at the moment of the utterance. She was depending on their anticipatory imagination as they spoke the words and their memory of the words as they played the role. Further, they heard their classmates say what animals they were, and this information was significant to them. Wendy, as we have seen, succeeded in engaging the student in the imaginative activity but did not move on from this engagement to the language content of the day’s lesson. She gave students enjoyment in the general process of learning English but did not focus the aesthetic engagement on the material to be taught. This way of organizing the aesthetic in the language classroom allows for a way of thinking about drama activities conducive to lesson planning. The first requirement is that the drama activity produce aesthetic engagement. For primary children, aesthetic activities are very likely to be turned towards imagination; for secondary and later, it may sometimes work better to think in terms of emotion. That aesthetic engagement must be enlisted to make extrinsic motivation, as well as workaday reality, fade from their consciousness, to make room for absorption in the drama activity, such that their consciousness is no longer of hard study but of being received into an imagined world that requires some sort of performance from them. A  well-designed activity in a language classroom will also require the performance of the specific language items to be taught in that lesson, whether defined in grammatical or communicative terms. Many questions remain. Both Woodruff and Hamilton place substantial emphasis on plot. Classroom drama activities frequently do not have fully formed plot, but they frequently have narrative movement from one moment to another. Myra’s activity caught the children at the moment when the crocodiles were about to attack the rabbits. That moment, the tension of almostaction is dramatic tension. Dorothy Heathcote suggested that one of the best ways of beginning a drama activity is to present a person in trouble, a ‘man in a mess’ (cf. Wagner [1976] 1999, 138). That person is in a bad situation, and



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students are stimulated to try to help. That was one aspect of what Joy did: Mrs Rainbow moved with difficulty, sometimes had trouble hearing and apparently understood only English. These facts created dramatic tension exploited by the teacher to motivate students to communicate clearly. Dramatic tension appears to be something that engages students’ attention, strips away their need to use extrinsic motivation to find reasons to learn. Yet where exactly are the limits of dramatic tension, and how does it relate to what we have seen?

Conclusion I set out at the beginning of this chapter to produce a definition of the aesthetic that would have a place in the philosophical tradition while remaining conscious of the practical purposes of the language classroom. The idea of disinterestedness has been discussed as a precondition of aesthetic experience. My examination of practical cases has led me to prefer the term ‘distancing’. Following Berleant and Benson, I have made the central point of aesthetic experience ‘focus’. The term ‘focus’ does the work of ‘contemplation’ and does it better, though of course we have used it for a different purpose earlier. As a result of this philosophical/qualitative study, I have suggested distancing at two moments in a drama activity: aspects of the physical/social lifeworld of the classroom must be distanced to make room for imagination. At a second moment, extrinsic motivation is distanced too. The distancing of extrinsic motivation serves both the purposes of intrinsic motivation and the purposes of further aesthetic engagement.

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Double Noesis, Metaxis and Learning

In Chapter  4, I  was led to suggest that process drama activities often give students an opportunity to reflect on the significance both of school subjects and of specific learning within school subjects. In seeking the answer to a realworld problem in science, they may come to see the significance of scientific precision in solving real-world problems. While process drama is difficult to use strictly in terms of language curricula, it does offer an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of studying a particular language, and the difference linguistic competence might make to students. This stimulus to reflection, as we saw in Chapter 3, arises from doubleness of perception of real and fictional worlds, or metaxis, and from the related reflection on one’s own self, which I have called reflexivity. Metaxis allows for a new distribution of the sensible in Rancière’s terms, a yet unrealized potential mapped onto the ordinary world that we perceive. Reflexivity allows for the possibility of a new vision of self, a prelude to subjectification. This chapter discusses the material basis of metaxis and reflexivity, arguing that both are founded on what I call double noesis. For many years, I have taught a course I usually call ‘drama workshop’, though its formal name has varied over the years:  sometimes ‘Theatre and Dramatic Performance’, and sometimes ‘Dramatic Performance and Playwriting’. I teach students some basics of acting, including work on tableaux and improvisation. I ask them to develop a performance of a three-page play, then move on to a modern canonical play. For the final assessment, students must, in groups, write and perform a play of their own. Some years ago, for the canonical play, I settled on Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1974), because I  felt that it had a lot to teach about playwriting. The technique used is very much the technique of the theatre. The set described in the text is abstract, though suggestive of a paddock or a boxing ring. Settings change with no visible change on the stage. Characters talk about events which are in the past for them, and the events they remember are staged in front of us, and in front of the characters listening to the spoken recollection.

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For example, in Act I, scene 6, the psychiatrist Dysart has a conversation with his friend Hesther about a patient, Alan. He says that Alan burst into his office to shout the word ‘Dad’, and we see Alan do this. The impact of the play depends on visual impact, owing to beautiful and radical design of costumes for actors playing horses. The management of dramatic tension is exemplary. Over the years, a number of groups of students have told me that they found technique in that play that they used in their own plays. One group presented a family drama. A Chinese family consisted of two sisters and their parents. In the first scene, we learn that the elder sister is engaged, and that she has a conflict with her parents, especially her father, about her fiancé, and about arrangements for the wedding. In a second scene, the elder sister is seen talking to a friend in a coffee shop upstage while the father watches television with the younger sister downstage. Their conversations intertwine, though the characters in the two spaces never interact. The audience is left to reflect on the differences of perspective. In a final scene, father and daughter have a major confrontation, ending in tears and renewed understanding. The members of the group told me that they had started out thinking about Shaffer’s flashbacks, and from experimenting with similar technique, had come up with the upstage–downstage arrangement I have described. Since the setting in Equus was abstract and stood in for more than one place at a time, they learned that an unadorned stage may represent various places, bringing different places into an interrelation that does not exist until it is imagined in concrete spatial terms. They learned that different scenes at different times and places may intertwine so as to comment on one another. They learned rich ways of thinking about the significance of the action portrayed. This example relates to Boal’s metaxis, in so far as more than one setting appears to the awareness of participants and onlookers at the same time. Boal saw metaxis in the interrelation of the participants’ usual world with a world presenting a possible solution to their problem of oppression. In Equus, the use of layers of flashbacks requires audience members to picture: the time of Dysart’s first monologue, after the action of the play is over; the time of the conversation between Dysart and Hesther; and the events concerning Alan which are the topic of their conversation. By this means, Alan’s actions are shown to have significance for Hesther and for the Dysart of the earlier time, and both earlier scenes are shown to have significance for the Dysart of the monologue. The audience is required to envision three settings at once, even while remaining conscious of their own real-world situation and location, sitting in a theatre. In the student play, two conversations are imagined as taking place at once, one in



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the family home and one in a coffee shop. They concern the same situation from different perspectives, and the artistic impact of the play comes from this sense of multiple perspectives. In this chapter, we shall see that the grounding of these complicated effects lies in a simpler transformation of objects from their normal identity in the real world to another identity obtained via dramatic structure. In this chapter, I will use the word ‘noesis’ for the construction of meaning, since for me it deals most adequately with the problems that confront us in discussing theatre. The term was coined by Edmund Husserl, and it is therefore associated with phenomenology (Smith 2007, 257–61). It derives from the Greek nous, mind, and is a way of conceptualizing the making of meaning. For Husserl, the human mind pays attention to something and makes sense of it. In his terminology, consciousness has intention, that is, any consciousness must be consciousness of something, and that directing of consciousness towards something is intention. We may direct our attention towards something wilfully, and that is act intentionality, but there is also intentionality which is not willed, operative intentionality, because we carry ambient consciousness with us. We might say that we always ‘direct’ our consciousness to what is around us but not always by an effort of will. There is consciousness of environment that we cannot escape. We receive sensory stimulus, and we make sense of it. Husserl calls the constructed form of the stimulus, the stimulus given form and meaning by the mind, noema, and the process of construction of meaning noesis. The term noesis is parallel to semiosis, and indeed the two words have similar functions in very different philosophies of meaning. Semiosis is the creation of meaning by the logical interaction of a sign with a code. That is, we see the word ‘cat’ written on a page and we do not so much construct the meaning of the word as we recognize the place of this sign in the code of the English language. It refers at once to the spoken word ‘cat’ and to a concept, a set of characteristics including fur, claws, purring and so on. The word noesis conceptualizes the creation of meaning as something that emerges from the fact of intention, the fact of paying attention to something. When we pay attention to something, we use the resources that we have, including code, to construct a meaning for the percept. John Stewart, in Language as Articulate Contact (1995), credits Umberto Eco with pointing out the problematic nature of the absence of an intentional interpreter from common semiotic models (pp. 5–6). Where the entire text to be interpreted is the word ‘cat’, the difference is very subtle, indeed, almost negligible, but as the thing-to-be-interpreted becomes more complex, the difference widens. Efforts at purely semiotic interpretations of longer texts quickly become very complicated, as may be seen in Algirdas

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Greimas’s Maupassant: The Semiotics of the Text ([1976] 1988): the semiotician devotes over 270 pages to the analysis of a story of fewer than ten pages, and his model of semiotics would seem to make this necessary. Efforts to extend this model to theatre place the semiotic model under even greater pressure. If the interpretable content of the text is so complex, then there must be some sort of way of selecting from among possibilities, and it seems possible that the human interpreter is also creative in interpreting, not merely a machine for recognition. Keir Elam offers seven categories of codes (Elam [1994] 2002, 51–6). Michael Fleming (2001), from the perspective of a drama teacher, remarks, Response can be reduced to a systematic, mechanical process devoid of animation and ‘force’. There is danger of placing premature emphasis on a cognitive, analytic response and reducing the place and importance of intuition. (p. 87)

Fleming’s remarks are founded in the limited usefulness of semiotic models in an educational context. Recent emphasis on psychology of attention gives reasons for this limited usefulness, and it casts doubt on the utility of the semiotic model, or at least on its utility as a dominant model. If there is a real distinction between focalized and distributed attention, then one does not merely recognize a relation between a signifier and a code: the approach of the interpreter changes the relevant context. Think of the wide range of interpretations of such wellknown works as the plays of Shakespeare. For centuries, The Tempest was read as about artistry:  it was ‘Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage’. In the 1970s and 1980s, the parallel between the text and the history of colonialism became very prominent. It came to be a play about colonialism. One does not merely grasp the relation of signifier to code in whole or in part: one sees something different, depending on the context of interpretation made relevant by the interpreter. Further, as we saw in Chapter 2, the kind of attention paid to the details of the text changes the experience greatly. We have seen Rosenblatt’s proposal, in the distinction between efferent and aesthetic reading, and Certo and Brinda’s set of techniques for promoting aesthetic reading. In this chapter, we will look at the consequences of aesthetic interpretation, both for the participant and for the audience member. As I argued in Chapter 2, the participant and audience are essentially comparable. The participant is like a super-responsive audience member, even as the audience member is a quiet participant. If we imagine the creation of meaning as noesis rather than semiosis, we acquire a rich ability to reflect on what is within the play, and we can account for the great mastery that theatre companies have over the plays they present.



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Metaxis and reflexivity are grounded in double noesis. In Chapter 2, I cited a previous article of my own in connection with the place of props in theatre. I discussed an imagined production of Macbeth in which the daggers used to murder Duncan were replaced with wooden dowels. I suggested that the dowels would become, by the force of the dramatic structure, daggers in imagination with imagined blood on them. We never forget that they are dowels, while at the same time building a vivid consciousness of them as bloody daggers. Our ordinary ‘operative’ intentionality in Husserl’s terms persists, keeping us aware that the dowels are dowels, even as we wilfully enter into the fiction, in ‘act’ intentionality, seeing the dowels as bloody daggers. In that article, I expanded that transformation to the transformation of actors in the eyes of the audience and of other actors, such that they remain their everyday selves in operative intentionality even as they become the characters of the play in act intentionality. So too does each actor come to view himself as the character, even while never forgetting to be an actor on a stage, who exits by the right door and stays aware of sightlines. Some have suggested that doubleness of vision is important to what art is. For the characterization of aesthetic experience, I turn for a foundation to Richard Wollheim, who centres his understanding of art on the physical artwork. He raises possible objections to the identification of artworks with physical objects: This identification can be disputed in (roughly) one or other of two ways. It can be argued that the work of art has properties which are incompatible with certain properties the physical object has; alternatively it can be argued that the work of art has properties which no physical object could have: in neither case could the work of art be the physical object. An argument of the first kind would run:  We say of the St George that it moves with life (Vasari). Yet the block of marble is inanimate. Therefore the St George cannot be that block of marble. An argument of the second kind would run: We say of the Donna Velata that it is exalted and dignified (Wõlfflin). Yet a piece of canvas in the Pitti cannot conceivably have these qualities. Therefore the Donna Velata cannot be that piece of canvas. ([1968] 1980, 11–12)

By pursuing this objection, Wollheim arrives at the conclusion that we see art objects in two ways at once. We see that the St George is a block of marble, but we also see that it is St George in movement. In his book, Art and Its Objects, Wollheim calls this effect ‘seeing-as’ (following Wittgenstein). At a later stage, he revised this view, moving away from Wittgenstein, calling it ‘seeing-in’ (pp. 205–26).

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So with props, as in the example of the dowels which are daggers. That example, however, tends to imply that it is a matter of relative indifference what object stands in for the object in the story, or whether it is merely mimed. My use of the Bear Game as an example tends to reinforce such an impression, as the identification of bears with tree stumps does not rest on the similarity of stumps to bears. Such a claim would be far from being true. The dramatic function of the prop exercises pressure on the way the cast and the audience perceive it, but the actual choice of object, or the choice to mime it, is an artistic choice, affecting the way in which the double noesis works. By setting out an example of artistic choice in this area, I hope to ground my understanding of reflexivity and metaxis in the materiality of the theatre and artistic choices made about that materiality. In Shaffer’s Equus, some objects used by the characters, such as Dysart’s file folder and the blanket the nurse lays over Alan, are represented by material objects that resemble the objects in the story: ‘props’ in the usual sense. Others, like the curry comb Alan uses to groom Nugget, are specified in the text as ‘invisible’. In all cases, we understand the nature of the object in the story because of the location of the prop in the action. We know that the blanket is a blanket not only because it looks like a blanket but also because the nurse places it over Alan, as we all do with blankets in our real lives. To refer back to Armstrong’s reflection on canonical motor neurons in Chapter 2, this is an object that we can recognize because of our physical interaction with similar objects in the real world. When the nurse covers Alan with the blanket, we recognize the physical sensation both of covering another person with a blanket and of being so covered. We recognize the file folder as a cardboard object that may be opened like a book. We may internally mime opening the file when Dysart opens his file. Files have significance in the real world that derives from social practices. We may work at jobs at which we keep files. We know that there are files kept on us: medical records, for example, as Dysart’s file about Alan is. If we have had any run-ins with the law, there may be files about us that stand as threats if we offer any further trouble to the authorities: and that may well be the case with Alan’s file, too, given that he has committed a crime. (Of course, the situation has changed somewhat since the first performance of the play in 1973. Paper files were far more ubiquitous then.) The file also acquires significance in the course of the play. Dysart first opens the file when he takes charge of Alan as a patient (p. 21). Later, Alan is being recalcitrant in a session, and Dysart replies, Dysart: All right. Good morning. Alan: What d’you mean?



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Dysart: We’re finished for today. Alan: But I’ve only had ten minutes. Dysart: Too bad. [He picks up a file and studies it. Alan lingers.] Didn’t you hear me? I said, Good morning. Alan: That’s not fair! (p. 37)

While there is a range of ways the scene might be played, it seems clear that Dysart is ostentatiously turning his attention to something that is not Alan, and it is not just anything. It is a symbol of Dysart’s authority, a tool of his trade, and quite possibly the location of statements about Alan that might affect his life. In looking at the file, Dysart is abandoning any effort at friendliness and helpfulness for the moment and is retreating into his official role as an important man with power. By a use of the file that we might fairly call ‘theatrical’ (for Dysart likely does not really study the file, but only mimes studying it to present a certain impression), Dysart manipulates Alan into talking about things he does not wish to discuss. Later, when Alan has made a tape recording about his memories, Dysart sits alone in his office listening to the tape with the file open in front of him. At one point, the stage directions specify, He [Alan] stops, in anguish. Dysart makes a note in his file. (p. 48)

The file is here linked with Dysart’s cool, reflective side, rather than his empathic side, and that is consistent with his use of the file to assert his authority earlier in the play. This last scene is significant to the development of the character, because here he is alone. He is not using the file folder to present a certain impression to someone watching him; he is interacting with it in such a way as to define himself. The objects present to the story but not physically present, ‘invisible handprops’, are as follows in Act I: ●●

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String for a bridle when Alan worships the picture of a horse (p. 51) A coat hanger with which he beats himself (p. 51) A hoof-pick, first used by Dalton to remove a stone from Nugget’s hoof, then received by Alan (p. 56) Brushes and other tools for grooming, notably including the curry comb, used first by Jill then by Alan to groom Nugget (p. 57) The key to the stable which allows Alan to go for a night ride (p. 68)

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The ‘sandals of majesty, made of sack’ which Alan puts onto Nugget’s hoofs (p. 69) A bridle and bit (p. 69) A stick, the ‘man-bit’, which Alan puts in his own mouth (p. 71) A lump of sugar, ceremoniously offered to Nugget (p. 73).

These are all objects closely connected to Alan’s horse-worshipping religion. They exist in Alan’s past, first as his father Frank tells it, then as he tells it himself. The objects are not invisible merely because they exist only in memory, because when Dysart tells of his memories, the objects are visible. Indeed, all the events in the play occur in Dysart’s memory, so the file and the blanket are memoryobjects too. It appears that these objects are invisible because they have a sacred quality in Alan’s mind. They are not part of ordinary reality, but of another reality. As the play goes on, Dysart falls under the spell of Alan’s forcefulness, and one may interpret the play such that he views them as sacred too. We can, if we wish, refuse to cooperate in the making-real of these invisible objects, just as Eric or Gregory could refuse to participate in the Bear Game. That is one reason why it is noesis and not semiosis. We do not merely recognize how the sign reads against a code. We must participate actively in creating the objects as real things. Every detail of a physically existing prop is important to its significance. One might well reject a particular blanket as wrong for the part. One would not use a blanket with pink Barbie patterns on it, because that would characterize both Alan and the hospital setting wrongly. One might reject a blanket that was the right colour but is too light or too heavy, producing the wrong kind of motion when the nurse lays it over Alan. When one chooses props, the sensitivity of the choice is often unexpectedly great. In this case, the curry comb is really just an empty space of air. We expect the audience to notice this, and try to find a significance for the non-existence of the curry comb and the other implements used to groom Nugget. When the audience sees Alan, in Frank’s memory, place an invisible stick in his mouth and beat himself with an invisible wooden coat hanger, a first hypothesis might be that these things are invisible merely because this is a memory-scene – but that is not consistent with the play, for reasons we have seen, since the blanket and the folder exist visibly on the stage. The audience is expected to formulate a hypothesis about the reason for this invisibility, and ultimately one possible, reasonable conclusion is that invisibility has to do with sacredness. The author cannot control how the audience interprets the invisibility of the props in a positive sense, because there is no code to refer to before the invisible objects appear in the play. He



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can, however, exclude certain interpretations, such as the view that all memoryobjects are invisible, by consistencies and inconsistencies in the pattern of the play. In Walton’s terms, both the actor and the spectator are playing a make-believe game that depends on certain ‘principles of generation’ (Walton 1990, 38). Just as Eric and Gregory decide that all stumps will be bears, so Shaffer has decided that an abstract set will stand in for various settings, including Dysart’s office and a stable. Spectators know that, in general in plays, objects present to the story may be either present on the stage as props or mimed. Further, props may bear a close resemblance to the object in the story, like the blanket and the file, or be stylized, formed at one remove from resemblance, like the dowels which are daggers, or like the horse masks. The opening of the play, which establishes the principles of generation, is as follows: Darkness. Silence. Dim light up on the square. In a spotlight stands ALAN STRANG, a lean boy of seventeen, in sweater and jeans. In front of him, the horse NUGGET. ALAN’s pose represents a contour of great tenderness: his head is pressed against the shoulder of the horse, his hands stretching up to fondle its head. The horse in turn nuzzles his neck. The flame of a cigarette lighter jumps in the dark. Lights come up slowly on the circle. On the left bench, downstage, MARTIN DYSART, smoking. A man in his mid-forties. (p. 17)

Dysart addresses the audience, describing the scene the audience sees without looking at it. It is quickly apparent that the scene is in Dysart’s mind. This is a game, then, in which we may see what is only remembered or imagined. A spectator familiar with older plays (e.g. The Glass Menagerie) may immediately suspect that only this one character will address the audience, and this is borne out. The cigarette lighter of the story is a real cigarette lighter on the stage. When the file is introduced four pages later, it is a real file. The file gains in emotional significance in the course of the play, in the way that we have seen: it is a symbol of Dysart’s authority and consequently of Alan’s subjection to him. Dysart is constantly free to look at the file as a representation of Alan, as opposed to looking at Alan the character on the stage. Yet, the principle seems to be that if an object is significant to the story, it will have material existence and will look like a real example of a real object.

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In this first part of the play, Alan interacts with two objects that are invisible to the audience:  the television Alan watches on page  27, and the sandcastle he builds as a small child on the beach on page  38. These do not breach the principles of generation. The set, after all, is an abstract set, and these are not hand-props. They are invisible as the walls of Dysart’s office, and details of it such as pictures and books are invisible. The first invisible hand-props appear with the first appearance of Alan’s religious rituals, when Frank remembers seeing him kneeling in front of a picture of a horse, placing a string bridle in his own mouth, and beating himself with a wooden coat hanger. These objects are specified as invisible. That scene violates the old principle of generation and establishes a new one, signalling that these objects have a different place in the game. When Dalton and Jill introduce Alan to the stable, the hoof-pick and the curry comb are invisible too. A link is established between Alan’s ritual objects and these objects, which are perfectly ordinary to Dalton and Jill but sacred to Alan. As the memory at this point is Alan’s, as he recounts the memory to Dysart, that makes sense. The establishment and alteration of the principles of generation, or ‘conventions’ as we more usually say in theatre, demands of spectator and actor intense distributed attention, not decoding from previous knowledge of a code, but searching for clues to something one supposes must make sense somehow. I have written that the file is a ‘symbol’ of Dysart’s authority. It has this conceptual status because it is metonymically connected to Dysart’s function as an authority figure. That connection is not merely conceptual:  it is emotional just as the imaginary bear is emotional for Eric and Gregory. Dysart offers hope and fear to Alan just as the bear offers hope and fear to Eric and Gregory. We saw that Eric and Gregory see in the bear the hope of rising from the dull harmony of their regular lives through imagined dissonance to the exciting harmony of triumph and victory. In this play, Alan is in a state of dissonance, with his nightmares, his fear and his anguish over sexuality. As Dysart understands the situation, he can offer dull harmony. At the end of the play, Dysart says, You won’t gallop any more, Alan. Horses will be quite safe. You’ll save your pennies every week, till you can change that scooter in for a car, and put the odd 50p on the gee-gees, quite forgetting that they were ever anything more to you than bearers of little profits and little losses. You will, however, be without pain. More or less completely without pain. (p. 108)

The whole play pits Alan’s agonized devotion against the dull harmony of ordinary life. If the play works for us, it makes us feel Dysart’s regret for the



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savage immediacy of Alan’s world, an emotional conflict between our day-to-day values and another, stranger set of values. The distinct representation of props as visible and invisible contributes to that building of emotional, aesthetic effect. When the spectator sees the file, she knows both that it is a file in the story and that the prop is a file, or at least looks like one and makes a noise like one when it is opened or set down on the desk. When the spectator sees the miming of the stick which is the ‘man-bit’, she knows three things: there is no stick in the physical world of the theatre; there is no stick in the re-enactment in Dysart’s office; and there is a stick in the original sacred ride in the night. This is double noesis:  the stick exists and does not exist at the same moment. If this were the first scene with invisible props, the stick might have been invisible simply because it must have been invisible in Dysart’s office: but the invisibility of props in two previous scenes creates a logical problem for such a hypothesis. Boal tells us that theatre has deeply to do with metaxis, a double view of the physical space and the ‘subjective’, imagined space. But the process goes beyond a single physical space and a single imagined space. Different spaces multiply, and objects appear differently according to views taken of them by characters. The mechanism by which theatre performs this feat is double noesis. In this instance, the distinction between visible and invisible props is a distinction between modes of paying attention to them, between evaluations of them. The invisible props, it appears, are so because Alan views them as sacred. Their invisibility, however, is not exclusively attached to him: spectators ‘see’ the invisible props in a common space located in Dysart’s memory. We may well think that Dysart views them as sacred too, or at least is intensely and sympathetically aware of them as sacred to Alan. Do the spectators view them as sacred? There is no answer to that question, but at least they must look at them in the awareness that they are sacred in Alan’s world, and may be sacred – it is a question mark – in the world of the play. The horses are visible but do not look like horses. The actors wear ‘track suits’ of chestnut velvet, and their feet are always four inches above the ground, being supported by struts connected to horseshoes. ‘On their heads are tough masks made of alternating bands of silver wire and leather . . . The actors’ own heads are seen beneath them:  no attempt should be made to conceal them’ (p.  15). The actors, at given moments in the script, put the masks on ‘with very precise timing’, as a ceremony. The horses are presented to the story in intentionally distorted form. We know what horses look like, and we remember when we look at these horses. In some ways, the costumes create a greater resemblance to horses

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than could be achieved with a more natural shape: the actors’ weight is thrown forward, and the masks are heavy as horses’ heads are heavy. The shape of the costume makes it easier for them to move like horses. For all that, double noesis is outright enforced here: the actor’s head is always visible. His arms are visible, though his hands may be clasped behind his back. The actor constitutes the horse’s forequarters, and the hindquarters are invisible. We see them as horses, but we also see them as human figures. This doubleness matches the doubleness of the horses in Alan’s world: they are horses, but they are also spiritual beings with characteristics not like those of horses. Shaffer lets us see the world through the eyes of a kind of madness but does not let us forget the normal world. That double complex of meaning is metaxis, constructed by means of double noesis. We see different objects in a range of ways because we see different relations between real-world objects and the objects in the story. Objects that we first see as part of the normal world are seen just as we usually see such objects. The invisibility of some objects signals a difference, which the play defines in terms of the mad world. The mad world is, at least in part, a way of reflecting on our ordinary world. It is a novel way of seeing the significance of our ordinary world. That metaxis necessarily leads to reflexivity: we see ourselves, within our normal roles in society, in a new light, as something which is not savage exultation and celebration. We have seen that Boal, Bolton and Zamir all see metaxis and reflexivity as important to the possibility of learning through theatre. To grasp the educational significance of reflexivity, let us first return to the four walks in the woods. I want to discuss the educational significance of dramatic art by discussing first what is wrong with the Metal-Detector Walk. Of course, focalized attention is not always a problem. If a firefighter enters my house to rescue me, I hope his attention is focused on his task. I hope, for his sake and mine, that he does not pause to think about the visual impact of the flames nor should he at that moment think more widely about the social significance of his profession. He need not think about me very widely: I am a person in danger, and it is his job to rescue me. He need not wonder what my profession is, whether I am kind to animals, or whether I share his religion. I am a living person to be rescued, and that is all. The kind of attention he gives to his task should be focalized. At other times, however, focalized attention is very much a problem. If the same firefighter, a heterosexual male, look at a woman and see no significance in her but a potential opportunity for sexual satisfaction, that is a problem. Usually, we call that problem ‘objectification’, but I  think that this model of attention



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casts light on what that attention is. If he sees a black man on the streets of Hong Kong and sees no significance in him but as a potential drug dealer, that is a problem, which usually falls under the heading of ‘racism’. The two examples are different. The first consists in the inappropriate domination of a biological drive, the failure of other ways of relating in the face of one strong one. The second has to do with real social experience, and a lack of consideration of other possibilities, other factors in social life. In the first case, emotion is very much a factor in driving narrowness of perception, as the sex drive is itself an emotion. In the second case, it may be, since there is a basic fear of the mysterious Other, and black people are not numerous in Hong Kong. Personal bad experience either with drugs or with black men may be involved, building emotion. Given the rarity of real encounters with genuine black people, perhaps media portrayal has something to do with it as well, with the occurrence of stereotypes in entertainment media. Such media are, of course, calculated to create emotion, which may become active in a real encounter with a real person. Sometimes it is thought that the solution to these issues has to do with the suppression of bad representations:  If men do not look at pornography, their minds will not be so fixated on sex, and they will be free to build a view of women less dominated by sex. Perhaps the problem of racism would be less if people did not so frequently see images of black drug dealers. I leave these statements aside here, for the solution offered by drama education has not to do with restricting but rather with broadening experience: ‘existential amplification’, as Zamir says. As we saw in Chapter 3, Bolton wrote, Various metaphorical terms are used in an attempt to describe the insightful change that can take place: refining, extending, widening, making more flexible, shifting a bias, breaking a stereotype, giving new slant, challenging, casting doubt, questioning assumptions, facing decisions, seeing new implications, anticipating consequences, trying alternatives, widening range of choice, changing perspective. (TTDiE, 45)

These are the terms of broadening, and not of restriction. The focus of these terms is outward, describing changes of perspective on the phenomena of the lifeworld, the world as experienced, reflecting on what kind of a thing is in the world as we experience it. In another place, Bolton stresses students’ self-perception: [W]‌e do not want the children to be mesmerised by the experience, but to be finely aware of what is happening to them and of their responsibility in it. So in fact they are, in part, watching themselves from the outside, not because they

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want to be effective for the sake of someone else but because the opportunity for heightened understanding is intuitively recognised. (TTDiE, 74)

Indeed, the two are closely interlinked. Any change in evaluation of the world necessarily results in change of self-perception and vice versa. If one sees the world as more unjust, one necessarily sees oneself as an inhabitant of an unjust world, who must respond somehow. If we are to ‘question assumptions’, we must observe what our assumptions in practice are. Bolton offers some indications as to how double noesis may contribute to the reflexivity he seeks in education. When the Depression Californian produces an orange (see p. 84 infra), it is at once a real orange in the students’ real world and an orange as viewed by the Oklahomans seeking a new life in California. In their own persons, the orange may be a normal thing that their parents might have put in their lunch, or that they might have eaten for breakfast. In role as Oklahomans, the orange becomes a metonymic expression of the wealthier, healthier life enjoyed by Californians, of which the Oklahomans are deprived. When the teacher in role as a Californian peels the orange and drops the peels at the children’s feet, he is taking a certain attitude towards wealth and privilege. He is taunting them with their deprivation by leaving them the rubbish and taking the good of the orange for himself. Since in the real world they relate to the orange far more as the Californian does than as the Oklahomans do, they know that they might themselves be seen as responding in the same way. Just as the visible and invisible props build the fictional world of Equus, the orange builds the fictional world of the drama activity and links it to their own world. (Speaking as a director, I see more dramatic force if the orange really exists, if it provides impact on the participants by its colour and smell. Bolton does not specify, but I suspect he used a real orange.) This example may be seen as building moral awareness. The students learn a new way of assigning significance to issues of social justice, and how others might relate to them in relation to the same issues. It is at the same time a history lesson. The events of the Depression become real to them because they have had emotions about them, deriving from double noesis. The events of history acquire significance to them. In Bolton’s California example, the peeling of the orange carries emotion, because it is an insult: a person who has more is taunting those who have less. There is playfulness, because the children know that the person peeling the orange is not really a Californian (and indeed, if it was Bolton, the American children must have been aware of his English accent). The discipline of this



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moment, the discipline that imposes itself on the students, is the discipline of emotion. They need not force themselves to enter the world of the fiction: the emotion involved reaches out and grabs them, making them into participants in the world of the fiction. When Bolton writes of a changed connection between ‘objective meaning’ and ‘collective subjective meaning’, it appears that he is talking about a change in students’ vision of their place in the world. From innocent children, not members of any particular social class, they become people who may be privileged or less privileged. Since they eat oranges, they become open to challenge as privileged people. There is a change in their distribution of the sensible, their relation to people they might meet on the street. The reason why this change might be permanent for them is that they have had an emotional experience. If the scene was as I imagine it, with a real orange, the vividness of the smell, the colour of the orange, all these concrete things contributed to a change for them, resulting from a dramatic artwork for education. The late Boal of Rainbow of Desire sets out the nature of reflexivity, in theatre in general: In living the scene, she is trying to concretise a desire; in reliving it, she is reifying it. Her desire, because it is aesthetic, transforms itself into an object which is observable, by herself and by others. The desire, having become a thing, can better be studied, analysed, and (who knows?) transformed. In daily life, the protagonist-actor tries to concretise a declared, conscious desire; the desire to love, for example. In the aesthetic space, she makes the concretion of this love. In this process of revivescence, not only avowed, overt desires but also unconscious, covert desires become reified. Not only what one wants to reify is reified, but sometimes also things that are there, but hidden. (p. 24, emphasis in original)

Here, what is initially a relatively unconscious emotional experience becomes available for reflection. In the philosophical tradition, this position looks very much like R.  G. Collingwood’s view in Principles of Art ([1938] 1958). Collingwood suggests that ‘expression’ in a technical sense is to be distinguished from ‘betrayal’ of emotion. In its brute state, emotion is something that happens to us, but which we cannot understand. He sees art as the process of learning to analyse emotion even as we feel it, and analyse it in the full complexity of its real experience, not in terms of the abstract categories of the psychologists. He writes, The general nature of this change can be expressed by saying that just as our emotions no longer arise in us as brute facts, but are now dominated in such a way that we can summon them up, suppress them, or alter them by an act

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of which we are conscious as our own act and therefore as free, even though it cannot be called purposive or selective; so the bodily acts which express these emotions, instead of being simply automatisms of our psycho-physical organism, are experienced in our new self-consciousness as activities belonging to ourselves, and controlled in the same sense as the emotions they express. (p. 235)

Both Collingwood and Boal require that for genuine experience of art, both the artist and the audience should understand the emotion analytically while still feeling it. Both express a negative attitude towards a process that evokes an emotion in order to suppress it:  Boal says ‘catharsis’, while Collingwood compares the process to earthing an electrical appliance (p. 110). Collingwood, however, would not view Boal’s Marxist programme with a favourable eye. For him, it is quite possible to use the skills of an artist to promote practical action, but this is ‘a degradation more frightful than the prostitution or enslavement of the mere body’ (p. 34). Plainly, I do not share this view, or I would not be writing this book  – but two things that Boal presents as parallel are sharply distinguished in Collingwood, and the possibility of that sharp distinction casts into relief a division between the two positions not obvious in Boal. (Cf. also Jenefer Robinson’s defence/reinterpretation of Collingwood’s position in Deeper Than Reason 2005, 229–92.) Seeking to define ‘metaxis’ as the best, most powerful form of reflection, Boal writes, The oppressed creates images of his reality. Then he must play with the reality of those images. The oppressions remain the same, but they are presented in transubstantiated form. The oppressed must forget the real world which was the origin of the image and play with the image itself, in its artistic embodiment. He must make an extrapolation from his social reality towards the reality which is called fiction (towards the theatre, towards image) and, having played with the image itself, he must make a second extrapolation, now in the inverse direction, towards the social reality which is his world. He practises in the second world (the aesthetic) in order to modify the first (the social). (RD, 44, emphasis in original)

In Boal’s first formulation, in Theater of the Oppressed, the notion of rehearsal in order to change the real world was already present. As we saw in Chapter 3, his image of the process was then very cognitive. The role of emotion in the process was then small and problematic. In The Rainbow of Desire, however, emotion has taken an important role. In setting out his vision of reflexivity, he has his participant not only ‘thinking himself thinking’ but also ‘feeling



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himself feeling’. In this quotation, this greater stress on emotion is to be found in the religious language of transubstantiation. Rather than just thinking clearly, as was the case in the earlier book, the participant is seen to ‘play with the image’. With those notable qualifications, this definition still appears close to the earlier book since ‘extrapolation’ is clearly a cognitive process, and the notion of ‘practising’ here echoes his earlier stress on ‘rehearsal for the revolution’. We saw briefly in Chapter  2 that Viktor Shklovsky viewed the function of art as ‘making strange’ (ostranenie). So in Boal’s formulation, one function of drama is to take a situation familiar to the participant, detach it temporarily from practical consequences and make it strange:  interpret it otherwise. At the end of the quotation above, Boal calls for a ‘second extrapolation’, from the strangeness of the fiction to the real world. The participant has learned that what was previously not thinkable may now be conceived as possible. These are some of the preconditions of metaxis for Boal:  full emotional engagement, imagination, play. The earlier Boal insisted on an analytical approach to social reality and concrete planning for revolution. The later Boal lays great stress on emotion and imagination, and concedes, I believe it is more important to achieve a good debate than a good solution. Because, in my view, the thing which incites the spectators into entering into the game is the discussion and not the solution which may or may not be found. (GANA2, 259)

In his earlier formulation, theatre activity appeared only to be valuable if it rehearsed practical actions to bring on the revolution, where here ‘a good debate’ is in itself valuable. Much has changed. However, for Boal, subjectification always remained an important goal. Theatre should seek to make its spect-actors into creators of art and therefore ultimately of social reality. He reserves the term ‘metaxis’ for an extreme of this effect. It may be that I can take advantage here of Boal’s undoubted insight into the power of theatre to move further on what makes a change in the distribution of the sensible that leads in its turn to subjectification. His term ‘metaxis’ designates an interconnection of a real world and an imagined world that is driven by the affective and the oneiric, emotion and imagination. In Boal’s formulation, one must take a subjectively created, emotional and aesthetically transubstantiated image of the world as it is and set it into creative interaction with an image of the world as it is not, itself created in a full, consistent way, with imagination and dreams. The first is a version of the real world as experienced, but it is

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transubstantiated because the time and space of the theatre are not the time and space of the normal world: an hour can be months, years or (more rarely) seconds. The small space of the stage, as Shakespeare says, can stand in for ‘the vasty fields of France’. I would assert that the interrelation of the two worlds (both imagined and distinct from the immediate ‘objective’ reality of the theatre) takes place by the double noesis of concrete objects, including props, as I have set out here, and actors, as we shall see. There is an issue too of narrative dynamics, as we shall see in the next chapter. The idea of metaxis helps to understand how the emotional impulse to be found in the practice of drama can lead on to complex thought that can be so deeply influential as to alter our understanding of the world around us. Boal is thinking of the really existing world as defective and the imaginary world as offering alternatives and possible solutions. So also Shaffer’s Equus offers an image of the real world, which is found to be unsatisfactory, and an alternative world, which is seen here as in some way better (though certainly problematic). So the dull harmony of Eric and Gregory’s life is brought into contact with glorious, masculine achievement:  a better world. Although Boal formulated the notion of metaxis in terms of Marxist dissatisfaction with an oppressive reality, the example shows that the interrelation of worlds described by Boal need not be restricted by Marxist ideas. The model works equally well if we think of the negative reality as negative in any way, not necessarily definable as oppression. We gain perspective from the interrelation of worlds. With artistic activity, props and actors take on new significances, as the stumps in the Bear Game gain significance as bears in the boys’ imagined life. Metaxis is the result of successful artistry and successful interpretation. Boal draws a bright line between conventional theatre and his own Theatre of the Oppressed with respect to the accessibility of metaxis. He explains (following Brecht, cf. Suvin 2008) that conventional theatre allows for ‘empathy’ in the audience, and this is bad, while Theatre of the Oppressed allows for ‘sympathy’, and this is good (RD, 42). He presents the audience of conventional theatre as simply receiving the emotion inherent in the performance ‘osmotically’. Boal explains, The mainstream theatre juxtaposes two worlds: the world of the audience and that of the stage. The conventional rituals of the theatre determine the roles to be played by the former and the latter. On stage images of social life are presented in an organic, autonomous fashion, in such a way that the audience may not alter them. During the show, the audience is de-activated, reduced to contemplation



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(even if this contemplation is sometimes critical) of the events unfolding on the stage. (RD, 41)

The way he describes the ‘osmosis’ from the performance to the audience is reminiscent of Marxist ‘ideology’ or the sociological notion of ‘socialization’:  the audience is perceived as essentially passive receivers of something that comes from outside them and enters into them unreflectively. He gives the example of black children in the United States who are sufficiently integrated into white society in the north to receive the standards of beauty of white society: even though it is not in their interest to think that blue eyes and pale skin are beautiful, they still hold this value because that is what they have received. Theatre of the Oppressed seems separated for him by two things:  the play presented to the spect-actors depicts oppression, ideally, their oppression; and the spect-actor can change the plot of the play (RD, 42). Boal is quite close to his earlier perspective when he writes, ‘He [the oppressed] practises in the second world (the aesthetic), in order to modify the first (the social)’ (p. 44). All these passages, however, come in a section headed ‘The Three Hypotheses of “The Cop in the Head” ’, and that construct is itself a concession to the psychologization of Boal’s method. ‘Osmosis’ appears here to account for Boal’s newer preoccupation with mental health: psychologically damaging constructs are seen as entering into individual psychology from oppressive social life. ‘Metaxis’ is the second hypothesis. The third hypothesis is ‘analogical induction’. As Boal specifies, his earlier model dealt with literal, real-world oppression, as when a landlord sends thugs to beat up peasants. Then, the oppression is considerably identical for all peasants, something publicly known. ‘Analogical induction’ means that the preoccupation with psychological issues implies that the public nature of the oppression is no longer about identity but rather about analogy. People’s internal problems are not identical, and there is work to do to disengage what is in common (p. 45). If Theatre of the Oppressed can, in this context, proceed only by analogy, then one wonders what is to separate the activity of Theatre of the Oppressed from the recognition one often experiences in watching a scripted play, reading a novel or watching a film. There is a tradition in Marxist writing of asserting that this recognition is really misrecognition, as when Louis Althusser has the Ideological State Apparatus ‘interpellate’ the subject, forming the subject into what is advantageous for established power (Althusser [1970] 2001). Boal uses a similar idea in his notion of ‘osmosis’, with its overtone of passively taking on

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an idea that is just present in the discursive environment. Rita Felski attacks this idea in her book Uses of Literature (2008, 25 ff.). She writes, Critiques of identification . . . assum[e]‌that readers formally aligned with a fictional persona cannot help but swallow the ideologies represented by that persona wholesale. Identification thus guarantees interpellation. In reality, the relations between such structural alignments and our intellectual or affective response are far from predictable. (p. 34)

With respect to Boal’s second point, in any one theatre event, only a few participants are likely to contribute to changes to the plot. Boal recognizes this when he writes, I am not penetrated by the emotion of others; instead I project my own. I guide my own actions, I am the subject. Or else someone like me guides the action: we are both the subjects. (RD, 42–3)

Again, the issue is analogy:  ‘someone like me’. The concession represented by the last sentence may be minor in the original situation of literal and violent oppression: perhaps my neighbour does speak from effectively the same space as myself – but the moment the issue is psychological, or has only to do with very broad issues of social psychology, it is not at all obvious that my neighbour in the theatre is closer to me in oppression than a playwright who may come from a very different situation from my own. Further, there have been historical instances where the process of recognition has been very effective with much weaker analogy in cultural situation. Felski writes about the impact of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler on early audiences: In saying, ‘Hedda is all of us’, a woman comes to name herself differently, to look at herself in a changed light, to draw on a new vocabulary of self-description. (p. 35)

This instance is partially interpretable in the terms set out by Boal, since one woman may be seen as the companion in oppression of another within the same or similar cultural contexts. Already, however, ‘women’ constitute an extremely large and varied social group, even if we restrict our view to Western reception of Ibsen (indeed, even if we restrict our view to nineteenth-century Norway). Yet Ibsen provides a parallel case that raises more serious problems for Boal’s assertions. Ibsen is an important writer for Chinese literature. Chinese commentary on Ibsen first appeared in an article by Lu Xun in 1908, but Ibsen’s strong



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influence in China began with an article by Hu Shih in 1918 (Chang 2004, 25). Hu, referring to several Ibsen plays, argued that Ibsen represented a critique of traditional constraints that applied all too well to the Chinese society of his time. Chang writes, The term ‘Ibsenism’ came to symbolize a cluster of iconoclastic political ideas concerning female emancipation, liberation of the individual, and a critical attitude towards the existing order. These ideas helped to establish a basis of re-evaluation of traditional Chinese thought, especially Confucianism, and the formation of a new and more liberal society. (pp. 33–4)

In 1919, Hu wrote a play about a daughter’s rebellion against her father modelled on A Doll’s House, but failed to have it produced, because it was felt to be too radical. In the course of the play, the young woman’s father actually brandishes a copy of Confucius’s Analects to reinforce his authority. Ibsen was therefore perceived as anti-Confucian. The attention to Ibsen resulted in many Chinese writings about women in society (Tam 2002) and about Confucian values more generally. Lu Xun placed special emphasis on a very un-Confucian line from An Enemy of the People: ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone’ (Lin 2010, 280). Some Chinese sources make strong claims for Ibsen’s influence on Chinese culture. Guo and Liu (2006) write, Ibsen’s influence wasn’t exaggerated. Some Chinese women determined to join the revolution not because they read the manifesto of the Communist Party, but because they read A Doll’s House. (Quoted in Lin 2010, 279)

Ibsen’s cultural background was not similar to that of his Chinese readers, to put it mildly. Further, many of the Chinese writers influenced by A Doll’s House in particular were male, such that a male Norwegian with no intention of writing about Confucianism had a deep influence on other male writers from traditional Chinese backgrounds by means of a female character expressing feminist ideas. One can certainly identify an analogy of oppression, but the notion of ‘analogy’ is becoming so elastic that Boal’s ‘someone like me’ could pretty much include anyone in the world. These Chinese writers imitated the plot of A Doll’s House, and sometimes, as Chang points out, resituated parts of Ibsen’s own dialogue into traditional Chinese stories (p.  46). There are many examples in Chinese literature of creative reworkings of A Doll’s House, not only in terms of rehearsing solutions to problems but also many times in tragic terms. There is a certain analogy between this large social process and Boal’s ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’, but one does notice that it all takes place within the purportedly paralysing

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context of ‘Aristotelian’ theatrical activity. Is it true that these Chinese writers ‘delegate power to the characters to either to think or to act in [their] place’ (TO, 155)? Not at all. They engaged in a dialogue with Ibsen’s text that resulted in original thinking. Their intellectual/creative engagement with the text appears quite close to Zamir’s dialogue with the text for the actor. Boal’s presentation of traditional theatre is dependent on a simplistic view of the play text. The interpretation of the play text has a deep significance to the potential of scripted theatre in drama education. The lived experience of participants impinges greatly on their understanding of the play text, such that a rich text cannot impose a hegemonic interpretation onto a reader. Let us examine two contrasting interpretations of King Lear. The first is perhaps the best known of all discussions of the play, A. C. Bradley’s two chapters on King Lear in Shakespearean Tragedy ([1906] 1986). Bradley was a Victorian establishment figure, who set out an optimistic view of tragedy influenced by Christianity, by Hegelianism and by contemporary interest in psychology. He starts his book with a discussion of Shakespeare’s tragedies with a chapter presenting a kind of ideal picture of these plays. A  great tragedy must be focused on a single character. That character must be ‘great’, but in a one-sided sort of a way that results in tragic fall. The tragic ending is far out of proportion to what is just, but (this is where Hegel comes in) Bradley saw the natural world as favouring virtue over evil, and the development of the tragedy shows a righting of the balance, a return to good after an interval of evil or error. It was important to Bradley that the tragedy should result from a deliberate act, such as Macbeth’s decision to kill Duncan, or Lear’s decision to divide the kingdom. Bradley identifies Lear’s ‘greatness’ with his ability to learn true compassion and justice (Christian virtues) from the traumatic experience of the storm on the heath. Plainly, the very bleak ending is a problem for this view, as he was reading Shakespeare’s own version and not Nahum Tate’s seventeenth-century happy-ending version. The Fool, with his pessimism and apparent suicide, is another problem. Still, he finds a way of explaining how this works and makes a focused effort to show that his interpretation works for the play as a whole. Jan Kott led a very different life. A  Polish Jew, Kott was twenty-five when the Nazis invaded his country. He spent the war fighting as a partisan, during which time he became a committed Communist. In the early fifties, he was an establishment figure among the writers of Stalinist Poland. After Stalin’s death in 1953 and the consequent revelations, he became very disillusioned and he resigned his membership in the Party in 1957. His famous book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary (1964) includes a chapter on King Lear entitled ‘King Lear



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or Endgame’. The chapter begins with a quotation from Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame, such that Kott interprets King Lear as an absurdist play. Where Bradley finds the Fool a problem, Kott lays great stress on him as the character who points out what is absurd about the action. Kott also gives a good part of the chapter to an account of the scene where Gloucester tries to commit suicide in the company of the disguised Edgar. He perceives the scene as ‘grotesque’. Unlike Bradley, Kott makes no effort to account for the whole play. His emphasis is rather on his resonant interpretations of particular scenes. Though Kott’s work might certainly be viewed as less than rigorous criticism, Peter Brook found it inspiring. He based his famous production of the play with Paul Scofield partially on interactions with Kott (Lieblein 1987). Kott had much influence on other productions, including Peter Hall’s version of Hamlet. Both Bradley and Kott argue from the emotional impact of scenes in the play. Bradley, with the confidence of an earlier generation, has no hesitation in saying what ‘we’ feel about certain scenes. Kott makes the idea of the grotesque central to this vision and supposes that his readers perceive the absurdity as he does. Plainly, both reasoned from emotional responses that were very different because they had lived very different lives. It is true that Kott has been criticized for his failure to account for the text, and some have said that Brook’s resulting King Lear is not Shakespeare’s but a new thing (Lieblein 1987). This observation, however, is neither here nor there. One may take a range of views on the relation between text and interpretation in literary criticism. In the theatre, freedom of interpretation is in practice even wider. The conventional view is currently that a production that uses a version of Shakespeare’s words, in the order in which we received them (even with omissions), leaving the shape of the plot intact, then that production counts as a production of the Shakespeare play, regardless of any other considerations. That means that the text can be stretched a very long way and can be made to mean many things. As we saw, Zamir holds that a production should be ‘in dialogue’ with the play text. This is a fair point of view, stressing as it does the waste that results when the virtues of a good text are cast aside, and resulting as it does from real, productive experiences of interaction with good texts. However, as James Hamilton points out, a wider range of possibilities exists. Even if a production cannot reasonably be counted as a production of its text (owing, for example, to intentional distortion of plot and extensive reordering of the lines), it may still be good and legitimate theatre, and may offer an experience of reflexivity. Boal condemns conventional theatre because he perceives it as hegemonic, able to impress ideas onto a passive public, as if spectators were made of soft

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wax. And yet, if the text is capable of so wide a range of interpretations, is it true that the author’s voice has such power? If Brook could use Kott’s criticism to overstep the Bradleian interpretation widely influential in a conservative society, how can we say that texts are so hegemonic? Even if the spectator does not create a new artwork, the experience of art can serve as a way of creatively reinterpreting one’s own life. Even so does Philippa Kelly use the play King Lear to understand her own life, her own values and even the history of her country, Australia (Kelly 2011). I naturally do not deny that Boal’s method can be very fruitful, but I do take exception to his critique of conventional theatre. His conception of Aristotelian catharsis looks to me like a relic of a rigid, outdated Marxist orthodoxy. Conventional theatre does a much wider range of things than Boal gives it credit for. The average participant is naturally not Peter Brook or Lu Xun: it may be that their level of creative reinterpretation is not easily within the reach of the average participant, just as the average participant may not put in the months of rehearsal and creative thinking envisaged by Zamir. Boal’s techniques may make the experience of reflexivity accessible to people who would not otherwise be able to have such an experience – but that is already different from claiming that conventional theatre makes reflexivity and metaxis in the strong sense impossible. Aesthetic experience of drama involves the sight and sound of human bodies, and those bodies are subject to double noesis no less than props. In those bodies, the participants and onlookers see someone else, or something else, something that those bodies are not. As bodies are naturally expressive, and as the participants and onlookers are naturally receptive to expression, the bodies are experienced as communicating an emotional state. That moment, the viewing of bodies as something else and as disclosing an emotional state, constitutes aesthetic experience. An important aspect of human expressiveness is transformed in the course of doing theatre. Let us return to Collingwood’s distinction between ‘betrayal’ and ‘expression’ ([1938] 1958, 121–2). If I am embarrassed and I blush, the blush is not an expression of emotion but rather a betrayal. My emotion has become obvious to my interlocutor not because I wished it to, but because it burst out in my physicality. If I am surprised at what my interlocutor says, I may look at her sharply and so betray a surprise I might have wished to hide. It is in the nature of acting that this distinction alters. While it would take a remarkable actor to blush on cue, there are many other betrayals that I can fake if I am a good actor. I can look sharply at another actor as if unconsciously betraying surprise. That



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movement, if successfully executed, may look like betrayal, but it is in reality expression. The actor is in reality presenting the expression of surprise as part of what Zamir calls the ‘aesthetic offering’. For Zamir, the aesthetic offering is that of the actor. It appears to me that the aesthetic offering of the actor is part of a wider aesthetic offering, perhaps designed by the director, or perhaps by the whole cast collectively, though of course an actor’s creation may often be discussed and understood as a free-standing work. Further, Collingwood assigns no part to the betrayal of emotion in art, because emotion betrayed is unreflective. If I  glance sharply at someone in real life because something has surprised me, I gain no particular insight into that surprise. But if, as an actor, I look sharply at another actor, that action has a place in an aesthetic pattern that makes up this production of this play text. The process of placing that sharp glance into the context of a work is an act of reflection, and the process of interpreting it as a part of an aesthetic pattern is a process of reflection too. We see the apparent betrayal of feeling as reflection. We see the betrayal fully in context, as with betrayal of feeling in ordinary life, while we also reflect on it. In Chapter  2, we looked at the significance of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis for drama in education. We saw that Damasio asserts that an emotional experience is retained by the organism as important for survival. I  argued, following Jenefer Robinson, that this retention is important for the shape of artworks that move through time, and that it creates an interaction of affect and cognition. I pointed out, following Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, that this hypothesis has deep implications for education, because an emotional experience that receives the somatic marker is remembered and becomes available for reflection. In Chapter  3, we saw that Boal, Bolton and Zamir all stress reflexivity as part of the educational aspect of dramatic art. In this chapter, we have examined some of the effect of that focus on moments of emotion in theatre and looked at how the material resources of the theatre are marshalled to produce such an effect. I  argued, in agreement with Zamir, that scripted theatre can have an effect of reflexivity, which we know because it has happened. I concede, however, that techniques advocated by Boal may place the experience of reflexivity within the reach of people who might not otherwise find it easy to attain. In the previous chapter, I set out two criteria for successful use of drama in education. The first had to do with obtaining ‘aesthetic engagement conceived as disinterested interest’. The second (restricted to the use of drama for teaching curricular material) required that drama should offer intrinsic motivation for learning something in particular. The aesthetic engagement that results from

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double noesis comes from the building of significance. Two dowels are only pieces of wood, but when they become the weapons used by Macbeth to murder Duncan, they gain significance within the story. If the audience is persuaded to care about the murder of Duncan, they immediately care about the dowels. The blood imagined to be on them is not only blood but also the gory symbol of murder and betrayal. Even so, actors and whole settings undergo imagined transformations, becoming not only human bodies, not only wooden flats, but also characters and settings that have significance within a fictional world. Double noesis builds metaxis, creating a vivid sense of two places and/or two times in juxtaposition, or not only two, but many. Metaxis may not be important for all forms of learning through drama education. It tends to complicate one’s understanding of human situations. If the point is to build human perceptiveness and combat simplistic views of human life, then metaxis is a proper tool for education. If the point is to communicate concepts in a clear and distinct way for later use, it may not be the right tool.

7

Dramatic Tension

In the example of the Californian orange in the previous chapter, I suggested that students need not work to pay attention, but the scene reaches out and grabs them. The moment is in that way like the snake. We need not force ourselves to pay attention to the snake. It grabs our attention and will not let it go until we are safe. Dramatic tension has some of the same qualities, but it has another interesting characteristic: it moves through time, and it looks both to the future and the past. While double noesis looks to the reconstruction of space, dramatic tension looks to the reconstruction of time. It is widely agreed in drama education that dramatic tension is a crucial element of what drama is. We see the term in use in Bolton, Wagner and Boal, as well as in Kao and O’Neill. Drama educators think of it as an important aspect of the aesthetic appeal of drama. It is also an important element of folk aesthetics. When audience members emerge from a play, they often express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the show in terms of dramatic tension: if it ‘lacked dramatic tension’, the theatregoer on the street thinks the show was aesthetically lacking. The term is used in teaching screenwriting, and even the writing of fiction. For all that, there is little agreement on what the term means. Boal takes it to refer to the conflict of characters, and folk aesthetics is often in agreement with him on this. Bolton insists (rightly, in my view) that dramatic tension should be defined more broadly. He suggests, for example, that ‘friends who might choose to be dishonest rather than quarrel’ present dramatic tension, and that this dramatic tension is important for drama education. There is a conflict here, not between characters but between the impulse to honesty and the impulse to maintain peace. The two impulses might be divided between characters on the stage, but they might also be located within each character, without for all that ceasing to be dramatic tension. (Even so, Eric and Gregory, in the Bear Game, both feel a conflict between the impulse to attack and the impulse to run.) The definition and significance

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of dramatic tension, then, is an issue to be discussed. When we turn to the philosophy of theatre, it is a bit surprising to find that there is limited help to be had there. We shall see some helpful remarks from Gotthold Lessing and Susanne Langer. We will seek to relate the issue to Jenefer Robinson. This chapter, then, will seek to define dramatic tension and move on to its significance in drama education. I will relate it to the affective appraisal and cognitive monitoring we saw in Chapter 2, as much as to the notion of double noesis developed in Chapter 6. Dramatic tension is, in the first instance, a special case of affective appraisal. Indeed, with the example of the snake encountered on a stroll, a fight-or-flight reflex may well be appropriate, and one may be delicately balanced between the urge to flee and the urge to freeze. This is not dramatic tension, because it is not part of a drama activity nor of an artwork of any kind – but it is an example of the real-world substrate of dramatic tension, the experience in the real world recruited to be part of a dramatic artwork. In a play, it would be a problem to include a real snake (as it might just not remember its part in the story and behave unexpectedly) but this very scene could be performed on stage with one actor and an invisible mimed snake, some kind of technical effect, such as a puppet or mechanical snake, or a second actor playing the snake. As a moment of affective appraisal, dramatic tension could lead on to double noesis as set out in the previous chapter. Bolton’s scene with the orange set out in the previous chapter might well include dramatic tension, since the ‘Oklahomans’ may watch the ‘Californian’ in disbelief and rising anger as their silent, intense state of emotion rises, contrasting with the Californian’s nonchalant, insulting dismissal of their concerns. They may feel the urge to physically attack him and resist it. Bolton discussed the scene with the orange without considering the time element, as indeed I did in the last chapter. When we consider the time element, certain things become clear about what drama is and what it does. One thing to notice is that the element of duration may be introduced within the context of a still picture. Gotthold Lessing ([1767] 1914) set out a fundamental principle of dramatic tension in the eighteenth century. Although he was a prominent playwright and theatre critic, this principle occurs in a discussion of sculpture, and this turns out to be a helpful thing. The Laokoon (see frontispiece) is a highly dramatic sculpture, depicting a character known to Western readers from the Aeneid. In the sculpture, he and his two young sons are being attacked by snakes. We see them as the snakes are coiling themselves about the three people. The moment depicted, then, is shortly before the climax of the story, the deaths of the three. Lessing writes,



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It is evident that the single moment and the point from which it is viewed cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which gives free scope to the imagination is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think we see. In the full course of an emotion, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. ([1767] 1914, Ch. 3, 19)

‘Free scope’ is freies Spiel in German, and Paul Guyer suggests that a better translation would be ‘free play’ (Guyer 2014, 1: 373). Lessing thought that the most striking image is one which depicts one moment and implies another, the climax. It is worth noticing that the free play in terms of events is very limited: it appears perfectly clear that the three will die, and we know how they will die. As Lessing points out, however, the expressions on the faces are cryptic: they are not as full of emotion or as panicky as one would expect. The free play, the potentially creative ‘wondering’ on the part of the onlooker, has to do with the psychology of the characters present in the image, and not with events. If a visitor to the Vatican Museums (where the sculpture is located) has no idea of the story, she will still see a depiction of three naked people being attacked by snakes. That immediate impression has no need of context from the Aeneid. The scene is highly emotional, using as it does a very basic fear, the fear of death. There is, then, emotional impact to this piece that is independent of the context of the scene in its story. Perhaps a well-informed visitor knows that Laokoon tried to warn the Greeks about the Trojan horse. Perhaps he knows that the snakes were sent by the goddess Minerva (Athena) because she wanted the Greeks to win the war. All of this is cognitive content, leading to a deeper understanding of the piece, but not in itself to more emotion. If, however, a third visitor is a deep reader of the Aeneid, having been very moved by this scene in the poem, then there is an emotional contribution from context as well. She may remember the words, ‘Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes’ (‘I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts’) and infuse the statue with the emotion of previous reading, while simultaneously bringing more visual vividness to the moment of the snake attack in the poem. Then there is emotion from knowing the story. It remains that the immediate viewing of the sculpture has an emotional impact that is independent of knowledge of context, and this observation is significant for understanding drama. Across a wide range of practices in drama education, we do ‘tableau’ or ‘freeze-frame’. We take a dramatic situation or a moment out of a story and ask participants to make a still picture with their bodies. In whole-group improvisation, we usually use a tableau to build up

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an emotional understanding of the dramatic situation, part of a process of building understanding of a story or situation. In scripted theatre, tableaux are most often used in the process of preparation, to build the emotional impact of scenes that should have such impact: to build affective appraisal in the actors and in the audience. That insight has to do with dramatic tension, because it typically involves a scene which implies another scene, another moment later or, sometimes, earlier. Cognitive monitoring plays a role in the creation of dramatic tension. First, it modifies the nature of the dramatic tension. When we see the Laokoon, we do not rush to rescue those poor people from the snake, because our cognition tells us that they are not in fact people, but pieces of stone. We feel the danger to the people if we ‘enter into’ the imagined reality of the statue. Kendall Walton has supplied us with a useful way of talking about this phenomenon. In his terms ‘it is fictional that’ a snake is attacking three people. Walton thinks that it is a consequence of his model that we do not ‘really’ feel any emotion about the fictional situation. Rather, ‘it is fictional’ that we feel emotion. A number of other philosophers have denied this. In some circumstances, Robinson’s model deals with this entirely. If one were walking in the woods, and the Laokoon happened to be there, we might see the shape of the snake out of the corner of our eye and freeze with fear. Realizing that it is only a statue after all, cognitive monitoring tells us there is no danger, but we may intentionally allow the emotion to persist for the sake of aesthetic impact. It appears that cognitive monitoring is not simply an on-off thing. It is like the clutch on a car. We can ease it in and out, staying aware that there is no real danger, but allowing for emotion felt in imagination. The statue is in fact in the Vatican Museums. A  person walking there would likely not be startled by the shape of the snake in any sincere way. We are able, however, to see that this is a statue and ‘enter into’ the emotion of it. We saw in Chapter 2 that response to human expression is very immediate. It seems it is possible to respond to the expressiveness of bodies and faces in the sculpture without having to assent to the proposition that these are real people. If, as I have suggested, the emotion of the dramatic scene has a free-standing quality, then it may be inserted into drama activity in a range of ways. Bolton wishes for dramatic tension to spur and give meaning to a decision made within the dramatic fiction, since he places his discussion of ‘situation’ within the moment of dramatic tension, the moment before a decision is made. He wishes to use dramatic tension to extend emotionally charged decision-making, such that the participants’ making of a decision is meaningful to them both on emotional and cognitive planes.



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Susanne Langer (1953) emphasizes the place of dramatic tension in narrative over the immediate impact of any particular scene. She remarks that in our normal lives ‘the impending future is very vaguely felt’ (p. 308). In theatre, by contrast, we look forward into future events of the play:  when Macbeth kills Duncan, we know that his guilty action will eventually bring him down. That is why she says that a key element of theatre is ‘destiny’: [O]‌n the stage we see acts in their entirety, as we do not see them in the real world except in retrospect, that is, by constructive reflection. In the theatre they occur in simplified and completed form, with visible motives, directions, and ends. Since stage action is not, like genuine action, embedded in a welter of irrelevant doings and divided interests, and characters on the stage have no unknown complexities (however complex they may be), it is possible there to see a person’s feelings grow into passions, and those passions issue in words and deeds. (p. 310)

She says that in the real world, we see a result and gradually come to understand what lies behind that result. In theatre, she remarks, it is the reverse:  we see the beginning of dramatic action and ‘The future appears as already an entity, embryonic on the present. That is Destiny’ (p. 311). We may notice that in the Laokoon, the plot implied by the statue moves from potential in the visible statue to its imagined fulfilment in the same way – but Langer means to discuss the larger shapes of plot. In the classically structured theatre that is Langer’s topic, Macbeth’s decision to kill Duncan connects logically with his death at the end of the play in a way parallel to the two moments of the Laokoon: when we are watching the play, we project from that decision forward into the play, just as we imagine the future results of the scene we see in front of us. When our imagined expert on the Aeneid views this statue, what he is doing is interrelating the affective appraisal from the statue with an already emotionally charged macrostructure of a similar kind. The informed visitor knows that the deaths of Laokoon and his sons foreshadow the sack of Troy and massacre of its inhabitants, and, looking further ahead, the events of the Oresteia: the deaths of Agamemnon and Klytemnestra, and the madness of Orestes. Langer does not believe in literal destiny: she says ‘there is no such thing in cold fact’ (p. 311). She finds it important, however, that it reflects ‘an aspect of real experience, and, indeed, a fundamental one, which distinguishes human life from animal existence: the sense of past and future as parts of one continuum, and therefore of life as a single reality’ (p. 311). It appears to me that she means that through narrative we make sense of our world, as Jerome Bruner has

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asserted (1991). While we cannot look at events in the real world and know what the result will be as we can when watching a tragedy, we still learn something about the link between earlier events and later, and ways in which sense can be made of the world. That is education in ways of thinking about the reasons why things happen. In Forum Theatre, Boal uses dramatic tension in the model play to spur the desire for a satisfactory conclusion. That play, as he stresses, should be developed with all the theatrical resources available for maximum aesthetic impact. His stress on oppression means that the initial situation must be viewed as oppression. He uses dramatic tension to spur the desire in his spect-actors for a more satisfactory completion to the story, using their disappointment as composers do who sometimes refuse to give listeners resolution, not ending on the tonic, but just ending in the middle. The emotional desire for resolution spurs not just thinking but emotional thinking, memory and imagination. In the case of the Laokoon, we are close to the climax, and the dramatic tension leads us only a short distance into the future, from the moment of the sculpture to the climax. In theatre, we are not restricted to such a short narrative stretch. In Joy Morton’s little play ‘The Body in the Bedroom’, the first event is a scream in the darkness followed by the sound of someone falling (Morton, Price and Thomason 2001, 5–6). The lights go up on a dead body. The audience being familiar with the conventions of mystery, one can expect that they will suppose that the man has been murdered, and the play will be about the investigation of the murder. This is what I  call in my teaching a ‘pregnant event’. So also in Boal, the event that reveals the situation of oppression is a pregnant event. The sense of expectation in the two cases begins from similar emotions, a sense of outrage against injustice (admittedly, in Morton’s case the outrage is blunted by the extreme conventionality of the image). In a murder mystery, the generic expectations are quite specific:  someone will investigate the crime and will catch the murderer. Justice will be done. In fact, the play works on from the discovery of the body to the realization that one character must be the murderer, and ends there – but its functioning is still absolutely dependent on generic expectations. In Theatre of the Oppressed, the sense of expectation is also constrained by the genre: the audience knows that they are expected to look for solutions. If a member of the audience suggested that the oppression should be made worse, because that would be more interesting drama, that would be a violation of expectations (though, indeed, a particular company might go with it).



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Pregnant events may be less constrained, however, and there is a substrate of the way we think about events and expressions in the real world. Here is a true story: one day, I was in the centre of Tai Po, the suburb of Hong Kong where I live. I was on the upper floor of a mall and wished to go down. As I stepped on the escalator, I could see five people ahead of me: a Chinese family consisting of a father, a mother, two boys of about four and six, and a girl of one or two. The father was carrying the little girl and the mother held the boys’ hands. Between them on the escalator was a young Indonesian woman, who I  supposed was the nanny. The little girl was kissing her father’s face and he was responding by making kissing noises to make her laugh. As I looked past them, I could see the nanny’s face. She was moved at the obvious love between father and daughter. Now, that emotion on her part could lead on to a story. In the real world, it might be a perfectly dull story. Maybe the sympathy the nanny felt for the family’s love made her work situation that much better. Maybe she worked for them for a few years and went home to get married, and that’s all. But maybe she fell in love with the father at that moment. Maybe she and the mother were both lesbians in love with each other, and the nanny’s respect for the father was a source of torment to her. Maybe the positive emotion of that moment changed the way she saw all men thereafter, affecting her future choice of a husband. Maybe other things happened that I have not even thought of. Like the nanny, I was moved by the love between father and daughter, but I was also moved by the nanny’s response. It seemed to me very human that she should herself feel love in response to the family love of father and daughter. I could see the mother beyond them, unaware of all of this. I  was led into imagining a psychological situation in the home and consequently into imagining future events. That, I believe, is a model of the impact of dramatic tension. The treatment of this space, between the pregnant moment and its resolution, the home of dramatic tension, is a key element in a great deal of drama, and we shall see that it serves to define the nature and possibilities of our three forms of drama. We have seen that Boal construes dramatic tension as all about conflict. We have seen that this is congruent with his stress on oppression. He uses tableau (‘Image Theatre’) above all to define oppression in personal and non-verbal terms. He uses Forum Theatre above all to work out possibilities of resistance to oppression, to rehearse solutions to problems. He insists on the need for spectactors to be able to change the resolution of the play, because he thinks that they will otherwise be imprisoned by the text. The text will tell them what to think, and they will think that way. Boal’s whole approach to drama is based on the perceived need to break with that imprisonment. There is dramatic tension,

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for him, in the search for solutions. The Joker is there to rule out excessively easy solutions, making decisions that are at once conceptually complete and aesthetically satisfying. It is a strength of Theatre of the Oppressed that it has this tight focus. It is also a limitation on the dramatic possibilities of the genre. In process drama, as we have seen, one of the classic ways of beginning is to present a person in trouble: ‘A Man in a Mess’. An image I have used (as I have a wedding dress, left over from a play years ago) is ‘the abandoned bride’. The emotion involved is sympathy with a person in trouble. The impulse is towards reassurance and comforting but more than that to the finding of solutions. As with ‘The Body in the Bedroom’, here is an image that provokes an emotional response very economically and gives a good impulse to cognitive activity: the group must solve the bride’s problem. Bolton tells us that Heathcote became dissatisfied with ‘A Man in a Mess’, and it is easy to see why. Its powerful impulse is always of the same kind, and there is a limit to the range of stories that can be told from it. Part of the history of process drama is in the exploration of different kinds of impulses. Heathcote developed ‘The Mantle of the Expert’, in which schoolchildren are asked for the benefit of their (initially fictional) expertise. Cecily O’Neill’s drama ‘Frank Miller’ begins with a whole community in trouble because ‘Frank Miller is back’. It emerges that he is a violent man, he has been in prison, and he has reason to be angry with members of the community. In process drama, the pregnant event is often presented in the form of teacher-inrole. This is reasonable, as the teacher is very often the person in the room with the strongest drama skills, and in a school setting, the teacher is responsible for focusing the drama on material to be learned. Dramatic tension relates to affective appraisal and cognitive monitoring. When we see a poisonous snake, we understand the danger, and there is tension: will the snake bite us or not? Should we freeze or run away? Should we compromise by backing away slowly? The longer the duration of this decisionmaking process, at once cognitive and emotional, endures, the longer we experience the tension. If the snake bites us as soon as we see it, then that tension disappears, to be replaced with a new tension to do with getting to the hospital. With the abandoned bride, the affective appraisal has to do with sympathy for a person who has apparently just experienced a devastating rejection. Cognitive monitoring has to do with making a plan to help. Bolton and O’Neill both cite Susanne Langer at significant points in their discussions of process drama. This seems at first surprising, since Langer’s emphasis on destiny seems obviously to relate to highly classical dramatic structure. When she says that we see destiny in an early event in the play, this is



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because we know what will happen, either specifically if the play is a famous one, or more generally, if we simply know it is a comedy or a tragedy. This is congruent with her emphasis elsewhere in her writing on classical music:  we know that classical symphonies will end with a sense of resolution, and Langer presents the shape of classical pieces of music as archetypal for her understanding of art in general (1929). For Bolton and O’Neill, this classical aspect of predictability is exactly not the point. They want the participants to decide what will happen following on from the pregnant moment. The quotations Bolton chooses are significant to the way he understands Langer. Bolton quotes, Theatre . . . moves not towards the present as narrative does but towards something beyond; it deals eventually with commitments and consequences. . . . It has been said repeatedly that theatre creates a perpetual moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. (Langer 1953, 307; TTDiE, 76)

Bolton continues, ‘It is this sense of time that does not rest in the present but is continually looking backwards and forwards that carries a tension of commitments and consequences’ (TTDiE, 76). Bolton, then, retains Langer’s conviction that drama is about the place of events in a larger life-meaning, while abandoning her stress on classical form. O’Neill (1995) also quotes Langer, using the world ‘destiny’ (p. 40), but the most revealing quotation for the influence of Langer on O’Neill is the following: Although these dramatic worlds develop spontaneously and in process, they possess their own structure, logic, and potential for growth. The embryo of process drama, like any other organism, carries within itself certain principles that constrain its development and suggest the specific features it may incorporate. (p. xviii, emphasis mine)

This is exactly Langer’s imagery (pp. 311–12), but what O’Neill is explaining here is her own development of the idea of ‘pre-text’ from Bolton’s ‘stimulus’. This unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious allusion suggests a deep influence of Langer on O’Neill’s thinking. Since Langer’s own discussion is of classically structured theatre, I  would suggest that there are grounds for creating links between the theory of process drama and of more classical theatre. When Bolton suggests extending the moment before decisions have to be made (his emphasis on ‘situation’ over ‘event’), he is looking to place the affective appraisal and the cognitive monitoring into a single time, and

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extend that time so that participants may have the experience of thinking emotionally:  relating the ‘collective subjective meaning’ (affective appraisal) to ‘objective meaning’ (cognitive monitoring, trying to deal realistically with the situation). That extension of combined emotion and intuition is dramatic tension. If Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) are right, then his intuitions were correct:  emotional thinking will produce better learning, and perhaps what Immordino-Yang and Faeth (2010) call ‘educated intuition’. Boal, as we have seen, also moved over time to emphasizing the simultaneous experience of emotion and cognition. He places the emphasis on reflexivity here and uses emotional language in his discussion of metaxis. For Boal, it seems that reflexivity, metaxis and dramatic tension all go together, producing a combined effect. As Bolton (1999) remarks, Heathcote was different in this, giving the experience of emotion in a drama activity, then looking to encourage reflection on that emotional/cognitive activity in a separate moment of cognitive monitoring. Bolton writes, ‘She wants the pupils to recognise the tension as tension and to understand something of its effect, a cognitive response as well as an affective one’ (p. 179). Both Boal and Bolton think that it is essential for the participant to be able to make decisions within the fiction. As we have seen in Chapter 3, pp. 83–4, Bolton’s emphasis on ‘situation’ over ‘event’ raises questions about this. The tension between Macbeth’s decency and his ambition makes up much of the dramatic tension of Acts I and II. Lady Macbeth, expressing no doubts, urges him to do it, externalizing the decision-making process and making this decision a domestic one between a couple as much as an internal decision for one character. No one would argue that this process lacks dramatic tension, so the difference is not in the presence or absence of dramatic tension. A  good production of Macbeth that would be valid for actors as education would require this decision to be understood at once in affective and cognitive terms as much by other members of the cast as by the two actors playing Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The actors playing the witches must make their contribution to the decisionmaking process, and the actors playing Macduff and Malcolm must understand, in cognitive and affective terms, their role in performing the consequences of the decision. They must understand the whole play in order to see the significance of what they do, and the same goes for every actor, right down to the servants and minor lords. I am not claiming that an effective production can never be done with actors who do not understand the play: this may actually be possible. I am claiming that a production of Macbeth that is valid as education must necessarily build such understanding in actors.



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I am inclined to shift the significance of decision-making within the fiction. Bolton and Boal tend to imply that if the participants cannot make decisions, then someone else must be imposing meaning onto them:  they are, as in a nightmare, compelled to accept or to act out, like puppets, a meaning that is not their own and is therefore meaningless to them, or even, as Boal implies, hostile to their interests. Our participants are in no sense obligated to be so brainless. It is important that the significance given to events emerged from someone else’s mind in the course of writing a script – but participants in a production and spectators in a theatre may, as Zamir points out, enter into dialogue with that meaning. Their understanding of that meaning, and their understanding of their independent relation to that meaning, feeds into aesthetic decisions that are theirs to make. The experience of dramatic tension for participants is capable of developing students’ understanding of possibility in life. It builds an emotional understanding of a situation that can have analogies with participants’ own lives. Where they may believe that their possibilities are constrained, they can learn that a wider range of possibility is within the reach of their understanding. If participants make a decision within the fiction, as is the case with Bolton and Boal, then that decision may be a new and creative one, beyond what they had previously imagined. In a production of scripted theatre, the process of reflection during rehearsals can build an understanding of an initial, pregnant moment beyond what happens in the script of the play, and actors, as they perform, must play characters who are unaware of the ending of the play. Further, as Zamir points out, they must see the possibilities for fine action in character, and the fact of repetition in rehearsal and performance makes it possible for them to find the whole width of possibility in the space between two lines, or in the non-verbal response to what is said and done by other characters. James Thompson (2003, 2009) may be viewed as constructing dramatic tension differently from any of the theorists we have seen so far. All of the others stress the movement from an earlier event to a later, from my ‘pregnant moment’ to a climax. Thompson argues that a premature stress on consequences has been damaging to the project of applied theatre, that in fact the experience of being bewildered within an emotionally charged situation may itself be educational. In a context of violence and genocide, he writes that a positive approach to extreme events would stress the struggle to deal with the appalling as an important occurrence rather than a moment to be elided. It is a desire to start from affect – and then move towards

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its different cultural manifestations. . . . a concentration on an affectual realm and what practices this generates in different communities. It is something embodied before it is articulated as being situated between two cognitively understandable points. (2009, 76, emphasis in original)

In discussing the political value of beauty, he writes, the argument here is that the deep yearn can be an affective impulse towards engagement with others. . . . [T]‌his desire to share a response ensures that an individual experience becomes communal. (p. 144)

What he values most is, in effect, the emotion of the pregnant moment, which pushes towards change, towards the future, but in itself, not only in relation to the moment of resolution. In curricular learning, dramatic tension is especially important for focusing attention upon detail. Dramatic tension in scripted theatre creates a sharp sense of the significance of particular utterances and actions in relation to the beginning and end of the plot. With dramatic tension in process drama, only the beginning is specifically laid down, and the teacher is responsible for maintaining dramatic tension as the activity goes forward. In scripted theatre, each element between the beginning and the ending gains in significance and therefore in memorability. In process drama, the class must make major decisions about plot, and dramatic tension serves to make those decisions significant. It is because of dramatic tension that they carry weight for participants. For language learners, a scripted play in the target language uses dramatic tension to build the significance of every line, of every word. The more the teacher/director succeeds in building dramatic tension, the more significant will every word in every line be, as well as intonation patterns and the nonverbal expressiveness that creates the context of meaning of every line. A process drama activity builds the significance of language use but lacks the advantage of repeating lines without loss of significance in context: students had better learn the first time, because there is no second time. On the other hand, the decisions that they make in the context of the activity gain in significance, and, as we saw with the Spanish-language activity in Chapter 4, such a process can build the significance of the subject as a whole and may help with motivation to learn the language. The study of literature is similarly dependent on the details of text. Dramatic tension may be enlisted to build the significance of every word, creating emotional impact as Rosenblatt recommends, arising from the literary text



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because of reflection on it. Dramatic tension is especially about the significance of micro elements of the work in the macro context of the work. It is not in the first instance concerned with the significance of the work as a whole in the lives of participants. Dramatic tension in history activities builds up in students’ imaginations the possible significance of historical circumstances and events for individuals alive at the time being studied. Students may be able to ‘live through’ the circumstances of the American Revolution, facing a choice between the British Crown and the new American nation. As the plot used in teaching history necessarily comes from outside history itself, drama in history lessons may emphasize whatever the teacher chooses to emphasize. The drama activity may certainly help to bring home to students what the stakes were in historical events – but there is no assurance within the activity of accuracy, which must be dealt with in other ways. Dramatic tension is a version of the structure Dewey proposes as ‘an experience’: something that emerges from the chaotic flow of events as having a beginning, a middle and an end. Dewey’s ‘an experience’ is an island of significance in a life that otherwise may seem meaningless. Dramatic tension may structure an entire play at the theatre. Mikel Dufrenne ([1953] 1966) suggests that dramatic tension produces what he calls ‘expressive time’, as opposed to the measured, scientific time of seconds, minutes and hours. Dramatic tension makes experience meaningful. Ordinarily, the meaning involved lies in identification with a character. As in the case of the Laokoon, the character may be represented in stone, in paint or through photography, or may be impersonated as in theatre. Meaning is achieved because the experience is grounded in very basic human responses, the same responses that persuade us that other people in fact exist in our world, our empathic response to another face, another body. Dramatic tension is very much the same thing as dramatic structure: if dramatic tension goes beyond the short term, the threat of death from a snake or a bear, and follows the pursuit of a desire through to its consequences, it can structure a play. The simplest and most famous shape of this structure is Freytag’s pyramid:  a situation is set out, tension rises to a climax, and tension dies away (Freytag [1884] 1900, 115). I would like tentatively to suggest that dramatic tension also relates to preverbal experience. We saw in Chapter 1 that Mark Johnson, in the course of arguing for his vision of ‘the meaning of the body’, evokes the notion of ‘vitality affects’. Johnson writes, ‘They constitute the qualitative difference between the mellow fulfillment of a long-hoped-for event and the abruptness we experience

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if we are surprised by an unexpected event’ (Johnson 2007, 44). In theatre, we would speak of these differences as of dramatic structure. The ‘mellow fulfillment’ looks like a classic ‘Freytag’s pyramid’, once we take into account the decline of hope when the hope is fulfilled. The surprise of an unexpected event violates the expectation of Freytag’s pyramid but, in classically structured theatre, relates to it exactly in this violation of expectation. I think it is true, as Johnson suggests, that such shapes exist and we become aware of them before we can formulate them in words, but exactly for that reason, they are difficult to talk about. Dramatic tension is about creating significance. As a form of affective appraisal, dramatic tension induces us, as Damasio suggests, to place a ‘somatic marker’ on a word, a human figure, on an object, on a movement. What is particular about dramatic tension in relation to other affective appraisal is that it structures time. It characterizes one event as an origin and another as a culmination, and does so in a way that reaches deep into our being. When we look at a still picture of a moment of dramatic tension, we give significance not only to what we see but also to what precedes and follows what we see, and what, in psychological terms, may motivate the action that we see in the picture. That extension of significance affects the movement of drama as well, creating emotional reflection on what is merely suggested and not only on what is portrayed. It inspires emotionally charged reflection not only on the way events occur but also on the psychology motivating action and response to action. Dramatic tension is important to drama education because it opens out a text, a play or an activity from the limited world of what is in front of us to a wider world of what can be imagined. The engagement that produces this reflection is aesthetic engagement, an involvement in what is in front of us that leads to two consequences for learning. At a shallower level, dramatic tension makes elements of what we perceive memorable, as when a drama lesson contributes to building vocabulary because the lines that contain the words have significance and thereby a use of each word in context becomes memorable. At a deeper level, dramatic tension, as Susanne Langer shows, leads to a reflection, a tentative construction of the relation between earlier and later events, a construction of the logic of human action consequent on the making of a story. That is to say that dramatic tension builds a cognitive-emotional understanding of the significance of things.

Conclusion

In Introduction of this book, I proposed a definition of the dramatic artwork for education. A key expression in the definition was ‘significant expansion of possibility in at least one life’. I remarked then that the notion of significance was problematic, both at the micro level and at the macro level. It is the latter, the macro level, that I wish to deal with in this final chapter. As times change, the appropriate goals of education may change too. I would like to suggest that times have indeed changed, and the changes in the condition of life partially account for changes in views of drama education. In Liquid Modernity (2000), Zygmunt Bauman suggests that there was a change in the course of the twentieth century from ‘solid’ or ‘heavy’ modernity to ‘liquid’ or ‘light’ modernity. Both kinds involve the dissolution of the structures of the Ancien Régime, from the French Revolution onwards, but in ‘heavy’ modernity, the idea was that the old structures would be replaced by newer, more rational structures. That push to reform government resulted in Western liberal democracy and in the Soviet state. A different kind of rationality resulted in the Fordist factory. Bauman (1989) famously argued that the Holocaust was also a result of the push to rationalization resulting from the Enlightenment. ‘Liquid’ modernity, on the other hand, is characterized by constantly changing structures. The old, heavy modern structures are dissolving, but now there is nothing to take their place, no new structures that can be expected to last, no permanence. Bauman quotes Daniel Cohen: ‘Who starts a career in Microsoft has no idea where it is going to end. Starting with Ford or Renault, entailed on the contrary the near-certitude that the career would run its course in the same place’ (Bauman 2000, 58). Our jobs are unstable. There is much talk today about the ‘gig economy’. Bauman believes that this instability affects every corner of life, including, for example, love relationships. Bauman’s work is in the tradition of ‘sociological imagination’. This means that one does not find statistical proofs in his writing, nor are there exactly watertight

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arguments. He is extraordinarily erudite and draws examples from his massive reading, as well as arguments from other theorists in and out of sociology. His views have struck a chord with the scholarly public, however: Liquid Modernity has over 13,000 citations on Google Scholar. People read what he says and find that it matches their experience. I think of the science fiction I read obsessively as a teenager in the 1970s. Authors had the mentality of solid modernity. Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ([1966] 1997) presents a world in which a single massive computer controls much of life in a lunar colony. Neither he, nor any other author as far as I  remember, predicted that particular people would have their own computers. If anything, science fiction writers believed that institutions would become larger and larger, until particular corporations, and indeed particular machines, dominate entire planets. No one predicted that hundreds of millions of private individuals would have computers of their own or that the new technology would be so personal in every way. The imagination of solid modernity resulted in certain anxieties: That heavy/solid/condensed/systemic modernity of the ‘critical theory’ era was endemically pregnant with the tendency towards totalitarianism. The totalitarian society of all-embracing, compulsory and enforced homogeneity loomed constantly and threateningly on the horizon – as its ultimate destination, as a never-fully-defused time-bomb or never-fully-exorcized spectre. That modernity was a sworn enemy of contingency, variety, ambiguity, waywardness and idiosyncrasy, having declared on all such ‘anomalies’ a holy war of attrition; and it was individual freedom and autonomy that were commonly expected to be the prime casualties of the crusade. (Bauman 2000, 25)

Indeed, this was the nightmare of the science fiction writers too. (I think of Norman Spinrad’s Agent of Chaos ([1967] 2011), in which a unified and totalitarian Hegemony opposes a Brotherhood of Assassins. The goal of the latter is simply and only to spread disorder.) And the same views found their place in theories of drama education. Boal’s emphasis on ‘oppression’ looks very much like the same tendency: an oppressive, capitalist society destroys the lives of individuals. He saw conventional theatre as part of an ideological system invading the mind of the public: ‘the spectator assumes a passive attitude and delegates the power of action to the character’ (TO, 34). When Boal made his move towards psychology, he placed more emphasis on individual passion and creativity, but he still imagined a uniform ideology as penetrating the individual by ‘osmosis’. He constructed the activity of his participants as resistance to the threat of totalitarianism. Bolton laid far less stress on an oppressive society,

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but he certainly favoured ‘contingency, variety, ambiguity, waywardness and idiosyncrasy’. His opposition to scripted theatre was based on the notion that the actor/participant/pupil becomes the puppet of the author. As indeed Bauman says, in discussing Huxley and Orwell, that both imagine a small elite holding in their hands all the strings – so that the rest of humanity could move through their lives the way puppets do; of a world split into managers and the managed, designers and the followers of designs – with the first keeping the designs close to their chests and the second neither willing to nor capable of prying into the scripts and grasping the sense of it all; of a world which made an alternative to itself all but unimaginable. (2000, 54–5)

It seems to fit if we say that Bolton wished the puppets to recover their agency and find their own understanding of the world. ‘Emancipation’, for these theorists of solid modernity, had to do with becoming conscious of the puppetry of a totalitarian system that controls us. We need to cast off the shackles and declare independence. In the world of liquid modernity, however, things have changed. Bauman suggests that the old quandary is outdated since ‘the individual’ has already been granted all the freedom he might have dreamed of and all the freedom he might have reasonably hoped for; social institutions are only too willing to cede the worries of definitions and identities to the individual initiative, while universal principles to rebel against are hard to find. As to the communitarian dream of ‘re-embedding the disembedded’, nothing may change the fact that there are but motel beds, sleeping bags and analysts’ couches available for re-embedding, and that from now on the communities  – more postulated than ‘imagined’  – may be only ephemeral artifacts of the ongoing individuality play, rather than the identities’ determining and defining forces. (2000, 22, emphasis in original)

That means that identity is no longer something forced upon the individual by powerful external forces, but a task to be accomplished. Each of us must now build an identity for ourselves. There are collectivities to help us:  churches, schools, universities, mosques, political parties and so on. But these collectivities are no longer inevitable. Knowing we can choose them, we also know that we can change our minds and choose something else. There are parallels to the problem of theatre to be found in literary theory. The literary theorist who best reflects the anxieties and nightmares of solid modernity would seem to be the Marxist Louis Althusser. In a 1970 essay, he proposes the existence of ‘ideological State apparatuses’, notably including religion and

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education. He sees the function of those apparatuses as to ‘interpellate or hail’ the subject of discourse, and thereby constitute that subject. The ideological State apparatuses work to confirm the domination of the ruling classes. In Althusser’s 1970 formulation, there is no element of choice on the part of the subject: the ideological State apparatuses speak, and we recognize ourselves in them. Althusser’s followers Macherey and Balibar explicitly extend this analysis to literature:  ‘literature is historically constituted in the bourgeois epoch as an ensemble of language – or rather of specific linguistic practices – inserted in a general schooling process so as to provide appropriate fictional effects, thereby reproducing bourgeois ideology as the dominant ideology’ (1978, 6, emphasis in original). This is very much the phenomenon described later on by Bauman in the quotation above, as it reflects the fear of totalitarianism, and it is parallel to the formulations of Boal and Bolton of about the same time. (Not that the world is uniform. I live at the edge of China, and while Hong Kong looks like liquid modernity, not all of China does.) Yet already in the 1970s, a more sophisticated understanding of the literary text was on offer. In ‘What Is a Text?’, Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between the structure of meaning implied by the text itself in relation to the grammar and vocabulary of the language, and the interpretation of it. The words on the page can only imply a structure, in itself static and inert. It must be ‘appropriated’ by the reader: By ‘appropriation’, I understand this: that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self-interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself. . . . reflection is nothing without the mediation of signs and works, and . . . explanation is nothing if it is not incorporated as an intermediary stage in the process of self-understanding. (Ricoeur [1970] 1991, 57)

The reader must bring the text into his own world of experience. It does not dominate the reader but serves as an instrument of self-understanding. The Chinese Ibsenists, far from being dominated by the distant Norwegian, appropriate Ibsen’s text to the purposes of opposing Confucianism. This presentation, of course, simplifies what they did: they actually read Ibsen and selectively imported his ideas into their thinking about Chinese society. When Lu Xun quoted Ibsen saying, ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone’, he was, using his intelligence, adopting an idea from Ibsen into a new context, in full consciousness of what he was doing. In any case, the text did not seize hold of these writers and make them believe anything at all.

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Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of artistry in the novel involves the appropriation of other discourses ([1963] 1984). Bakhtin wishes the novel to be ‘polyphonic’, built up out of many discourses appropriated by the author. He is particularly intrigued by free indirect speech, in which the turns of phrase of previous discourses appear in the narrator’s own voice. Here, the voice of another person is preserved, but placed in dialogue with others, with some kind of implied commentary or comparison by the author. I  would suggest that a scripted theatrical production does not reproduce the text of the author, but rather quotes it, with a newly constructed context giving it new meaning. Productions can wholeheartedly endorse the textual meanings, be ambivalent about them, or reject them altogether. In order for Bakhtin’s vision to be realized, it is necessary that the text not be authoritative, or not authoritative in a full-blooded biblicalinerrancy sort of way. The text may be authoritative in the sense that the company and audience believe that it has value, that there is something to be learned from it, that it must be respected, without any need for affirmation of any particular propositions. Ricoeur’s model of literary reading bears a close relation to that of Louise Rosenblatt, which I  have used as one of the building blocks of this book. Rosenblatt also sees the reader as weaving the work of art in imagination, within the reader. Rosenblatt lays greater stress on emotion as a central part of this process than does Ricoeur. So also Ricoeur’s model bears a relation to that of Tzachi Zamir. We saw in Chapter  3 that he sees the actor as creating an ‘aesthetic offering’ based on a ‘dialogue’ with the author’s text. Like Ricoeur, he sees the reader as engaging in a reflection upon identity, and as the process of engagement with the text as making that possible. His three modes of ‘existential amplification’ are all involved with reflection upon identity:  the first is an experience of a fictional identity, the second is an experience of artistic energy and the last is an abandonment of dayto-day identity that makes us see that we might be otherwise. It is visible, then, that in a world of solid modernity, there might be grounds for suspicion of playing a role written by another person. In a world of liquid modernity, totalitarianism is no longer an ever-present threat. The problem is rather to build skills and create an identity that can survive the rigours of a liquid world. Rancière’s view of emancipation has seen a sharp rise in popularity in recent years, and I think the move from solid to liquid modernity partially accounts for this. He certainly does present a vision of a unified system that oppresses and excludes some individuals, which he calls ‘the police’. Yet, he does not view

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the police as restricted in its form or shape. Rather, ‘the police’ is the name of a tendency towards oppressiveness that is inherent in the nature of social life, something that people may feel even in liquid modernity. The emancipation he seeks, subjectification, is a kind of enhanced agency, an ability to find one’s own original vision of oneself, of one’s place in the world. This vision is very transferable to a world of liquid modernity. Improvisation, then, has a special place in the world of solid modernity. Where the average person is ‘interpellated’ and dominated by the ideology of the powerful, the improviser is free, creative, individual. To improvise is to resist the powers that be. In a world of liquid modernity, the place of improvisation in drama education cannot be the same as it was. If there is no particular need to resist a dominant, unitary ideology, there is no need to idealize the improviser or to denigrate the virtues of scripted performance. Improvisation still has value, of course, but before I come to that, I would like to discuss the possible functions of drama education in this new world. If the problem is to acquire skills and values that allow for a strong, autonomous identity, what would those skills and values be? One answer might be that children should acquire the basic skills they need to feel themselves competent in the world:  literacy, numeracy and perhaps ‘digital’ skills. We might put more complex things like ‘critical thinking’ in the same category. In most of the world, competence in English falls into the same category: it is no longer a potentially useful foreign language, but rather a skill no one can do without. We might call this a ‘skilfulness’ model. When our students go out into the world, they should be able to deal with the practical problems of the world. While the world might change, it is hard to imagine that literacy and numeracy will become less important. English is the language of higher education over much of the world, and many people with lower-skilled jobs have some use for English. None of this seems likely to change in our time. The difficulty with digital skills is not in knowing that they are necessary, but rather in predicting just what skills will be required. When I  was a student in the late 1970s, I  learned a computer language called PL/C. Certainly, I  learned something about how programming is done, but in my present world, I  am not called upon to program. The computer skills required for an academic specializing in drama education are those of an end user. One lesson of this book is that students should learn not only the skill itself but also the significance of the skill. Learning should be meaningful, in the sense that students understand not

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only what the skill will be useful for but also how the possession of the skill will help them to lead a meaningful life. As an English-Canadian six-year-old child, I was sent to French school. The acquisition of French has been tremendously meaningful in my life, creating connections with certain people, allowing access to French-language culture and even making me feel like a better Canadian. It is not accidental that French writers have been significant to this book and have allowed for a unique perspective on the problems of drama education. But French is still a skill. Bauman stresses that in the world of liquid modernity, identity is a task for the individual. He writes, ‘[I]‌ndividualization’ consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance. In other words, it consists in the establishment of de jure autonomy (whether or not the de facto autonomy has been established as well). (2000, 31–2)

De jure autonomy consists for Bauman of the establishment of legal rights and lack of oppression. De facto autonomy is the actual establishment of a fulfilled, secure self, able to act and find a place in the world. That task is more difficult than it was in the premodern world. If we picture a small farmer living in a homogeneous village, in which every person belongs to the same church and has the same problems in relating to the landlord, to merchants and so on, it is visible that the establishment of a secure identity is easy. Even a rebellious person can find meaning in life in rebellion. And the same goes for many conditions of solid modernity: a union activist at a Ford plant; a dissident in the Soviet Union; a lesbian trying to live her life under conditions of repression. One has many problems, but identity is probably not one of them. So it may be that one of our life tasks is to build an identity strong enough to withstand radical changes in career, in social life, in romantic life, strong enough to withstand changes of values in the surrounding social world. If that is a task for each individual, we must also ask if it is a task for education. In the world of liquid modernity, each person must be free not only to take action but also to make sense of action both prospectively and once it has been taken. At every point in life, we need to be able to look back and say, ‘I did that at that particular moment, and the decision was significant to the story of my life.’ We make career choices. We decide to get married. We make efforts to keep in touch with old friends, or we don’t. The struggle to resist climate change is part of our lives, or it is not.

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One of the consequences of what we have seen in this book is an emphasis on emotional force. In Chapter 2, we touched briefly on Damasio’s patient/research subject ‘Elliot’. Elliot, it may be recalled, had brain damage in such a way that he had no emotions. He could pass every test of his cognitive skills, but he was unable to function in life. One thing that Damasio tells us is that he became indecisive: he once debated with himself for twenty minutes about where to have lunch. One thing this suggests is that the ability to act and find significance in things is linked with emotional experience. I would suggest that drama education should provide students with experiences that have emotional force, because that emotional force is what will allow them to build a view of the world in which human action has significance, so as to have a strong self, able to act in the world. As Bolton saw, we must both ‘live through’ the experience of drama and reflect on it. In Dewey’s terms, drama should be ‘an experience’, providing emotional force and cognitive sense. In a word, significance. In setting out the four walks in the woods in Chapter 2, I related aesthetics at once to the psychology of attention and to emotional force. The Metal-Detector Walk, if taken as a general approach to life, seems a sure way of building a meaningless life. We may search for particular things that have instrumental value, but they do not help to build an identity, a meaningful life. When we take a Stroll, that fact fulfils some of the preconditions of meaningful life: openness to what the world has to offer indeed has importance. But if Damasio is right, events in our lives only gain significance to us through emotion. My encounter with the Snake stands in for strongly emotional experience in life. Whatever else, a narrow escape from death has significance in any person’s life. The Bear Game brings the significance of emotional encounter into the control of the individual, making it possible, through emotion, to mould the world as significant. Dramatic tension takes affective appraisal, the encounter with the snake or with the bear, and narrativizes it, bringing it into the time-bound world that we inhabit. In this light, the strength of process drama lies in the exploration of significance. In Chapter  4, we saw the example of a Spanish lesson for American students in which they played the role of prospective parents looking to adopt a Latin American child. I found the possibilities of the exercise in terms of exploring the significance of learning Spanish very striking, though I was not convinced it would produce effective language practice. In Chapter 6, I introduced the notion of double noesis and argued that it is the basis of Boal’s metaxis, as well as of reflexivity. I believe that these various forms of doubleness have to do with the significance of emotional experience,

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bringing subtlety to it. For Boal, metaxis sets the participant into a space between the familiar world, in which injustice and oppression are naturalized, and an imagined world in which the problems of oppression may be solved. But the possibilities of double vision are not restricted to the Marxist frame. Through double noesis, we may see the same characters, the same objects and the same events from more than one perspective at the same time. Double noesis is of course a feature of both scripted and improvised theatre. We have seen examples of double noesis from both, and have suggested that Bolton’s examples show double noesis in action, even though he does not construe his experience that way. Scripted theatre may structure such things into a performance in such a way as to make them more highly significant than in improvisation, but improvised theatre may have its own special effect by providing surprise. Participants may not see that a character has a particular double meaning until the moment of that doubleness’s creation. The strength of scripted theatre in this context is threefold. One, it is a longterm project. When we are doing an amateur play, we see the same people once or twice a week for months. The whole of our effort lies in building the meaning of a production. In order to do this, we must thoroughly understand a text created by another mind, develop our own understanding of the issues raised and embody our understanding in rehearsals and in performance. Zamir is right to stress the arduousness of this process. That embodiment, as Zamir argues, affects our own understanding of ourselves. Two, it has a very strong climax in performance. There is not just a series of experiences with other members of the team. There is an episode in life with a memorable shape, ending in the strong emotion of performance. When a student has been part of a production, that memory remains significant when the surrounding circumstances are forgotten. Three, it is a social event. Jill Dolan suggested that theatre provides ‘a vision of utopia’ (2001, 458). She writes, ‘It’s this affective quality of utopia that performance can draw for us – ordinary people being lifted from their lives to form connections that in utterly simple ways make the world better’ (p. 476). Her vision is expressed in terms of the link between a performer and her audience. Monica Prendergast (2011) asserts that the same vision can be brought to process drama. I would suggest that that same vision, the vision of utopian community, can find its place in the course of rehearsing a scripted production. There is a vision of utopia to be found, many times, among the participants in a production. It is certainly true that when we choose a text to produce, we are adopting a structure of meaning that in some ways we cannot change: copyright agreements often specify that the text must be performed word for word as written. It is

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certainly true that all members of the cast are then left in dialogue with a text that raises certain issues and not others, allows for certain kinds of content amplification and not others. Scripted theatre does not allow for the same level of freedom to explore that we find with process drama. I have not myself ever had an experience of emotional significance in process drama comparable to many experiences of scripted theatre in my life. That is not to say that it never happens. I  have identified some reasons above why scripted theatre might have more emotional force than process drama, but the world is wide. Drama educators do many things. There has been little empirical work on the actual impact of different kinds of drama. I have not discussed playwriting in this book. When people write a play, however, they have freedom to explore the implications of a dramatic situation or an issue at least equal to that of participants in process drama. Playwrights often produce first drafts of plays alone, but this is not a necessary thing. Groups of people write plays as well, and may try out parts of plays with their bodies and voices before rewriting. The difference between process drama and playwriting has much to do with the significance of improvisation. What difference does it make if one must come up with a response quickly, under pressure? I can say from the experience of playwriting that there can be a kind of internal simulation of the dramatic situation, and one feels out what to do next in an emotional as well as a cognitive way. And yet, one is not under such time pressure, and there is more possibility of thinking things out through cognition, whereas in improvisation, there seems to be a stronger element of responding in an emotional way. This is a topic for future research. In a world of liquid modernity, I would wish for our students to leave us with a strengthened sense of self. They should be able to say, ‘These are my values.’ They should be able to maintain that assertion when the social context changes. In the last episode of the great television series Nurse Jackie (2015), the title character faces being arrested for illegal possession and use of drugs. She faces prison, but it first strikes her that she would never be able to work as a nurse again. She says, ‘If I’m not a nurse, I’m nothing.’ In a world of liquid modernity, that view of professional identity may no longer fly. I would wish for our students to be able to change professional identity, even very radically, while maintaining a core of humane values. How is it possible to maintain a core of humane values when living through a radical change of circumstances? I think that we must go back to what is most basic about us, as Dewey did, and as I think Robinson, Johnson and Schaeffer are doing. We are embodied, emotional, cognitive beings, a single combination

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of ‘body–mind’ as Dewey has it. When we see the betrayal of emotion in other people, and even in animals, we respond. When others cry out in pain, there is an answering response in us. When others smile and laugh, we respond too. Yet the basic response, the wincing when someone hits his thumb with a hammer, does not get us far. We can only extend that basic response that assures us we are not alone, through thought, through cognition. We can only remember our cognitive responses in a practical way when they are charged with emotion, which is to say, with embodied feeling. We are capable of creating structures that create emotional cognition, memorable cognition that is capable of affecting who we are, and therefore the regularities of our behaviour, and those structures are called ‘art’. I have written that the dramatic artwork for education should, in an organized and positive way, expand the possibility of at least one life. In a world of liquid modernity, it is difficult to foresee just how the shape of a life will be changed. We have good reason to think, however, that embodied feeling bears a strong relation to change. We know that certain feelings allow for sharing with other people. I have argued that Kant’s ‘disinterested contemplation’, given appropriate reinterpretation through recent philosophy, allows for a combination of emotion and cognition that can achieve focus, learning and memory through art. I have argued that double noesis allows for simultaneous perspective-taking on the same events, allowing for a fuller, subtler and emotionally stronger understanding of a given set of events. Finally, I  have argued that dramatic tension is the element that most allows for the engagement of the participant in such a way as to produce this effect. In using drama to teach curricular materials, the more general, meaning-oflife questions discussed above are always present. They may not be strong. Drama in the curricular classroom may well involve very small-scale activities, lasting twenty minutes or even less. The net result may be practice in the curricular material – but the possibility of going further is always there and is part of using drama in class. For all that, in the curricular classroom, one must teach the curriculum. Process drama has great potential for history, because the subject itself is about the significance of events, and there are important kinds of significance that can be explored effectively using process drama. Literature, barring much lyric poetry, is very often about the significance of events, but the structuring of literary works themselves deals with this. One may certainly use drama to explore literary works, but it must be in such a way as to reinforce the study of the text and the significance of the text. Drama must not replace the study of the

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text itself. There is no element of drama internal to science and mathematics, but drama may be used to investigate the significance of the subject as a whole and of particular parts of the subject. It is part of being an educated person to know the significance of close reasoning and precise measurement, for example. In language education, process drama may be used to explore the significance of the subject and to provide language practice in meaningful context. There is also, however, a very strong place for scripted theatre in language education because it provides rich, meaningful input, examples of correct usage in an emotionally meaningful context. To state the last point in another way, it provides correct examples of language with dramatic tension. It is highly beneficial to language students to engage in dialogue with a text in a second language, to create personal, original meaning while retaining an intense awareness of rich and correct use of language. My most general conclusion is that drama education should build significance, both in drama directed to emancipation and in drama for curricular learning. I think Bolton and Boal were right to see that this growth of significance leads to growth of agency and that the ability to make decisions is an important part of the growth of agency. But I think they were wrong to restrict their understanding of participant action to actions taken within the fiction, actions taken from character intentions. When participants are part of making decisions about aesthetic form, deciding how to stage a scripted play, how to interpret a role, their agency also grows. Tzachi Zamir helps us to see that the self-conscious action of the performer, as an independent artist, is also significant to the subjectification of the participant in dramatic art.

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Index Abuhamdeh, Sami 124 acting betrayal vs. expression (Collingwood) 158–9 Boal on 71–2 existential amplification (Zamir) 66, 70, 73, 84–6 language education 113, 114–15, 128–9 play text and (Zamir) 76–7 aesthetic offering (Zamir) 77–8, 88–9, 159, 179 aesthetic vs efferent reading 40–1, 121–2 aesthetics (definition) 3–5, 23–35 aesthetics and education 32–4, 43–4, 58–61, 81–6 affect aesthetic experience and 10 affective aspect of theatre (Boal) 69–70, 80–1, 151 art and 8–9, 43, 158–9 audience and 87–8 discipline and 61 dramatic tension and 162, 170–2, 174 fictionality of (Walton) 164 learning and 42–4, 58–62, 110 process drama and 149, 168 psychomotor cortex and 57–8 reading and (Rosenblatt) 40–1 reflexivity and 71–3 Thompson on 92, 171–2 affective appraisal (Robinson) 8–10, 43, 162, 163–4, 184–5 Afitska, Oksana 110 Althusser, Louis 153, 177–8 amplification, existential (Zamir) 66, 70, 73, 84–6, 147, 179 Aristotle 67, 75–6, 78, 90 Armstrong, Paul B. 8, 12, 38–9, 47–50, 52–4, 57, 58–9, 140 artist (identifying) 88–91 artwork 15 aesthetics and education 24–5, 159

Boal on 149 definition, for education 9–12 doubleness in 139–40 Goodman and Ingarden on 41–2 language in 114–15 liquid modernity, in 175, 185 attention, psychology of 37–42 audience 9, 10, 90, 183 Boal on 75–6, 78, 152–3 comparable to actor 50, 52–5, 56, 57–8, 70, 138 disinterested contemplation 122–3 metaxis 136–7 not passive 78–9, 138 participation 65, 89–91 props, interpretation of 140–4 response of 7, 52–5, 56, 57–8, 139, 154, 161, 166, 179 Zamir on 70 autonomy, de facto vs de jure 181 Aziz-​Zadeh, Lisa 51–2 Baddeley, A. D. 59 Bakhtin, Mikhail 179 Balaban, Ceylan Z. 59–60 Balibar, Étienne 178 Barthes, Roland 39–41, 42, 44, 121 Bauman, Zygmunt 14, 91, 175–8, 181 Bear Game 52, 64, 97–8, 119, 142, 182 affect and 48–9, 144 dramatic tension 97–8 educational value of 49–50 generative principles and 44–6 harmony and dissonance in 48–9, 152 metaxis and 45–6 noesis and 142 pragmatic enclave 119 Belliveau, George 107 Benson, Ciaran 124–5 Berleant, Arnold 119, 124–7, 133 betrayal vs expression 149–50, 158–9 Biesta, Gert 21

198

Index

Bingham, Charles 21 Blair, Rhonda 8 Blanchot, Maurice 27 Boal, Augusto 9, 34, 155, 176 affect 68, 79–​81 career 64–​5 catharsis 67, 75–​6, 78, 90, 150 forum theatre 65, 75 interpretation of texts 156–​8 Marxism (purposes of drama education) 2, 68 metaxis 45–​6, 79–​81, 136, 145, 146, 151–​4, 183 oppression 60–​1, 64–​5, 176, 178 reflexivity 71–​2, 73, 149–​50, 151–​4, 159 scripted theatre 74–​6 spect-​actors 65, 68, 75, 170 subjectification 70–​1, 186 tension, dramatic 72, 161, 166, 167–​8 body–​mind 31 Bolton, Gavin 22, 34, 61, 76, 78–​9, 85, 92–​ 3, 111, 178, 183 artistry of the teacher 81–​4, 114 career 65–​6 collective subjective meaning 69–​71, 149, 170 dramatic tension 83–​4, 161, 162, 164, 168–​71 explanation (vs. living-​through), 87–​8 history of drama education 2, 15 Langer 168–​9 learning theory 67, 108 literary education 102–​4 living-​through, existential 66, 70, 73–​4, 87–​8, 91, 101, 182 metaxis 80–​1, 146 performance 74 props 84, 148–​9, 162 puppetry 90–​1, 176–​7 purposes of drama education 2, 68–​70 reflexivity 72–​3, 147–​9, 159 scripted theatre 74, 77, 100, 171 subjectification 68, 186 Bradley, A. C. 156–​8 Bradley, B. P. 59 brain see neuroscience Brecht, Bertolt 64, 71, 86, 152 Brinda, Wayne 104–​5, 118 Bruner, Jerome 165–​6

Bullough, Edward 119, 123, 126 Bundy, Penny 85, 124–​5 Calvert, Dorys 8 Carkin, Gary 109 catharsis 67, 75–​6, 78, 90, 150 Certo, Janine 104–​5, 118 Chang, Shuei-​may 155 Chinese people, culture 96–​7, 115, 117, 136, 154–​6, 167, 178 code 50–​1 cognition aesthetics and 4–​5, 8, 10, 38, 43, 57 affect and 5–​6, 32, 42–​4, 57–​8, 59–​61, 66, 67, 71–​3 art and 1 attention and 38 Boal and 79–​80 Bolton and 82–​4 education and 10, 59–​61 embodied 5–​6, 34–​5, 57–​8 story and map 86–​7 and passim see also cognitive monitoring cognitive monitoring (Robinson) 8, 43, 48, 164, 169–​70 collective subjective meaning (Bolton) 69–​70, 149, 170 Collingwood, R. G. 7, 149–​50, 158–​9 communication Boal 72 Dewey 19, 21, 24, 31 Kao and O’Neill’s spectrum 74, 108 language education, in 107–​8, 109–​10 non-​verbal 50–​1 Conroy, Colette 15 consensus 20–​1 conventions, theatrical literary education, for 100, 102 metaxis, reflexivity and 44–​6, 144–​5 pregnant events and 166–​7 process drama and 72 props and 54–​5 time, space and 69–​70 Cook, Henry Caldwell 2 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 124–​5 Damasio, Antonio 5–​8, 43–​4, 51, 59, 159, 170, 174, 182 Davis, David 66

Index De Toro, Fernando 50 Deci, Edward L. 123 DeCoursey, Matthew 2, 54–​5, 116, 139 democracy 16–​23 Dewey, John 38, 67, 69, 70, 84, 88, 184–​5 aesthetics (an experience) 3, 5, 24–​5, 30–​4, 173, 182 body–​mind 31, 35 career 15–​16 curriculum 22 democracy 19–​20 education 2, 19, 21–​3 Dickinson, Rachel 98 directors, directing actors and 90, 159 process drama and 82, 103 teaching and 67, 112, 148 discipline artistic endeavour and 101, 112 doubleness of 46–​7, 61 learning and 105, 106, 109, 112, 113, 131, 148–​9 preparation of artists 85 process drama in 104, 109, 148–​9 disembodiment (Zamir) 70–​1, 78, 86 disinterested contemplation (Kant) 4, 119–​27 distancing 130–​1 distribution of the sensible (Rancière) 3, 9–​11, 23–​4, 26, 31, 33, 37–​8, 48, 59–​61, 64, 67, 92, 15, 149, 151 Dolan, Jill 183 Dorion, Kirk Robert 106 double noesis 137–​52 passim. definition 137–​9 drama, purposes of 68–​71 dramatic quality, intrinsic (in school subjects) 98, 100, 106, 114 Drinko, Clayton D. 8 Dufrenne, Mikel 173 Eagleton, Terry 100–​1 Eco, Umberto 50, 137 efferent vs aesthetic reading (Rosenblatt) 40–​1, 42, 100, 121–​2, 138 Elam, Keir 50, 138 emancipation 11, 186 artistry and 23–​4 definitions 18–​19, 63 education and 18–​19, 32–​3

199

Ibsenism and 155 Rancière on 18–​19, 23–​4, 32–​3, 179–​80 self–​efficacy and 115–​17 solid modernity and 177 embodiment acting and 77, 78–​9, 92, 112, 150, 183, 184–​5 artwork for education 9 audience and 50–​6, 57–​8 cognition 3, 5–​6 meaning and 38, 51–​2 reading and 55–​7 emotion see affect engagement, aesthetic 124–​7, 131–​3 equality 17–​19, 23–​4, 32–​3 Equus see Shaffer, Peter Ewing, Robyn 85 experience, an 24–​25, 173 explanation 17–​19 Faeth, Matthias 7, 44, 170 Falletti, Clelia 8 Fels, Lynn 107 Felski, Rita 154 fiction, fictionality 44–​5, 48 Finlay-Johnson, Harriet 15 Flaubert, Gustave 26 Fleming, Josephine 85 Fleming, Michael 138 focalized vs distributed attention 6, 39, 41, 58, 81, 121, 138 focus attention 37, 39, 41, 47, 121 contemplation 121, 125 dramatic 96 performance, in 85 Folkard, Simon 59 Forster, Michael N. 21 forum theatre (Boal) 65, 75 Franks, Anton 15 free play of imagination and understanding (Kant) 4–​5 French language (subject) 112–​14 Freytag, Gustav 173–​4 Gallese, Vittorio 52 Girod, Mark 34 Goodman, Nelson 41–​2 Granger, David A. 33 Greimas, Algirdas 138

200

Index

Gumbrecht, Hans 92 Guyer, Paul 3–​5, 29–​30, 38, 131, 163 Hamilton, James R. 8, 55, 67 basic theatrical understanding 123, 126, 132 drama education 102 play text, artistic use of 77, 114, 157 harmony vs dissonance 47–​50, 57 Heathcote, Dorothy 2, 9, 22, 65, 67, 99 artistry and 82–​3 Man in a Mess 96–​7, 132–​3, 168 purposes of drama education 97 reflexivity and 72–​3, 170 respect for learner 18–​19 see also Mantle of the Expert Hegel, G. W. F. 16, 21, 30, 67, 71, 156 Heinlein, Robert 176 history (subject) 98–​100 Holmes, Edmond 2 Huizinga, Johan 45 Hsu, Liang-​Fong 109 Hu Shih 155 Husserl, Edmund 31, 137, 139 Ibsen, Henrik 154–​6 imagination Bear Game 44–​9 Bolton 83–​4 distancing and 130–​2 drama and 7–​9 dramatic tension and 174 Kant on 4–​5 metaxis and 151–​2 performance and 87–​8 sociological 175–​6 theatrical, in reading 55–​7 Immordino-​Yang, Mary Helen 6–​7, 44, 59, 159, 170 improvisation 9, 57–​8 Bolton on 66, 164 liquid and solid modernity 184 theatre course, in 135 vs scripted theatre 73–​9 Ingarden, Roman 42 interpretation (of text) 75–​7, 138, 154–​8 intersubjectivity, primary 52–​3 intonation 56–​7, 129, 172 Jacono, Victor 8 Jacotot, Joseph 17, 19–​20, 22–​3, 90

James, William 16 Johnson, Mark 5, 9–​10, 15, 32, 34–​5, 38, 58–​9, 173–​4 Kahneman, Daniel 42–​3 Kant, Immanuel 3–​5, 119–​27 Kao, Shin–​Mei 74, 76, 108–​11, 161 Kelly, Philippa 158 King Lear see Shakespeare, William Koskela, Hille 60 Kott, Jan 101, 156–​8 Krashen, Stephen 109–​10, 114 Krasner, David 8 Kreitman, Norman 120–​1, 122 La Harpe, Jean-François de 27 Lakoff, George 5 Lambert, Alan 96 Langer, Susanne K. 165–​6, 168–​70 language education 17, 22–​3, 107–​15, 172 Laokoon (statue) 162–​5 Lear, Jonathan 78 LeDoux, Joseph 6, 8, 42–​3 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 162–​4 Lewinsohn, Joan 59 Lieblein, Leanore 157 Lightbown, Patsy M. 110 Lin, Wei-​yu 155 literature (as subject) 100–​6, 172–​3 literature (philosophy and theory of) affect and reading 8, 40–​1, 43, 47–​9, 55–​7, 121 defamiliarization 47–​8, 151 narrative structure 165–​6, 173 nature of the literary text 41–​2, 179 power of the literary text 27–​9, 177–​8 reader as free 39–​40, 179 living-​through, existential 66, 70, 73–​4, 87–​8, 91, 101, 182 Lu Xun 154–​5, 158, 178 Lyster, Roy 110 Macbeth see Shakespeare, William Macherey, Pierre 178 Mantle of the Expert 97, 99–​100, 106–​7, 168 maps, mapping 60, 86–​7, 135 Martin, John 51 Marxism 2, 68, 152–​4, 177–​8 Metal-​Detector Walk 39–​40, 93, 121, 125, 146, 182

Index metaxis 45–​6, 79–​81, 135–​54, 182–​3 modernity, liquid vs solid (Bauman) 91, 175–​7, 181 Morton, Joy 166 motivation, extrinsic 117, 119–​33 motivation, intrinsic 115–​17, 119–​33, 159–​60 Nanay, Bence 38 neurons, mirror 52–​4 neuroscience, brain 1, 5–​9 aesthetics and 8–​9, 38–​9, 43–​4, 47–​9 semantics and 51–​5 see also neuropragmatism; Damasio, Antonio; Immordino–​Yang, Mary Helen; Johnson, Mark; Aziz-​ Zadeh, Lisa neuropragmatism 15, 34–​5 (see also Johnson, Mark) Nicholson, Helen 86–​7 Noddings, Nel 19 Nurse Jackie 184 Nussbaum, Martha 78 O’Neill, Cecily 96, 97, 105, 114 dramatic tension 111, 161 Langer and 168–​9 language education 108–​11 pre-​text 66, 102–​3 scripted theatre, on 74, 76 O’Toole, John 81 Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) 56–​7 oppression 60–​1, 64–​5 Pain, Rachel 60 Parkin, Alan J. 59 Peirce, Charles Sanders 16 perception see attention, psychology of performance see productions, audience Phillipson, Sivanes 116 Piaget, Jean 67 Piazzoli, Erika 108 Plato 16, 17, 26 play, playfulness 30, 45–​50 playwriting 10, 184 possibility 119 artwork for education 9, 11, 175, 185 Boal on 80 Boal, Bolton and Zamir on 66–​71, 83–​6, 88, 90–​1

201

curricular learning and 95, 100, 106, 107, 113, 117–​18 emancipation and 18–​19, 27, 63 Rancière on 27 Rancière vs Dewey on 21–​3, 31–​3 somatic marker and 43–​4 pragmatic enclave (Schaeffer) 6, 119 pregnant event 166–​7 Prendergast, Monica 183 pre-​text 66, 102–​3, 169 Price, Ron 166 principles, generative 44, 143–​5 process drama 65–​6, 96–​8, 108–​11 (see also Bolton, Gavin; Heathcote, Dorothy; and O’Neill, Cecily) productions decision-​making and 75–​6, 170–​1 existential living-​through in 88 language education and 111–​12 literary education and 100–​1 philosophy of 55, 73–​9, 157–​8, 179 self-​efficacy and 116 Strengths of 183–​4 Theatre of the Oppressed and 75, 89 props 53–​5, 84, 139–​46, 148–​9 Proust, Marcel 28 Pugh, Kevin J. 34 puppetry 74, 76, 90–​1, 171, 177 Rancière, Jacques 2–​3, 61, 92 aesthetics 23–​4, 25–​7, 29–​33 audience (spectators) 78 career 15–​16 consensus 20–​1 democracy 16–​21, 83 distribution of the sensible 3, 9, 11, 31, 33, 37–​8, 48, 59–​61, 64, 67, 92, 106, 135, 149 emancipation 18–​19, 63–​4, 88–​90, 116 explanation 17–​19 language education 17, 22–​3 subjectification 20–​1, 70–​1 Raquel, Michelle Reyes 112 Reason, Matthew 51 reflexivity 71–​3, 79–​81, 135–​60 régimes of art (Rancière) 25–​9 rehearsal emotionally significant 183 existential amplification, as (Zamir) 70, 73, 77–​8, 88

202

Index

for revolution (Boal) 2, 150–​1 language education 111–​12 playing as 49–​50 Theatre of the Oppressed, in 75 Thompson on drama as 92 Religious, mystical language Boal 81, 150–​1 contemplation 120–​1 Dewey 25 Rancière 28, 34 Remland, Martin S. 50 Reynolds, Dee 51 Ricoeur, Paul 178–​9 Robinson, Jenefer 9, 10, 43, 150, 159, 164, 184 Rosenblatt, Louise aesthetic vs efferent reading 40–​1, 42, 100, 138 Certo and Brinda use 104–​5 change of perception 59 Kant and 121, 123, 131 language education 172–​3 Ricoeur and 179 theatre and reading 56–​7 Ryan, Richard M. 123 Säfström, Carl Anders 18, 21 Saito, Kuzaya 110 Saltz, David Z. 8 Sato, Masatoshi 110 Saussure, Ferdinand de 50 Schaeffer, Jean-​Marie 184–​5 aesthetics vs theory of art 30 aesthetics, model of 6, 38–​42, 58, 81 change of perception 59 pragmatic enclave 6, 119 Schelling, Friedrich 16, 29–​30 Schlegel, August 16, 28 science (subject) 34, 106–​7 scripted theatre 66, 164, 171, 179, 186 curricular learning 172–​3 imagination 87 language education 108, 111–​15, 172 literary education 100–​1, 172–​3 strengths of 183–​4 vs improvisation 1–​2, 9, 73–​9, 90–​1, 177 Scruton, Roger 119, 124–​6 self-​efficacy 115–​17 semiosis vs noesis 137

semiotics 50–​1, 137–​8 Shaffer, Peter 135–​46 Shakespeare, William 57, 74, 77, 108, 152 King Lear 66, 156–​8 Macbeth 54, 83–​4, 139, 160, 170 teaching 100–​2 The Tempest 138 Shepard, Aaron 100 Shklovsky, Viktor 47–​8, 151 significance affect and 42–​4 Bolton on 82–​3 Dewey on 31–​3 drama education as building 99, 106–​7, 111, 117–​18, 159–​60, 175–​86 dramatic tension and 173–​4 metaxis and 136–​7 situation vs event 83–​4, 164 situation, dramatic 10 curricular material 100, 103–​4, 114–​15, 117–​18 dramatic tension 163–​4 process drama 96, 103–​4 situation vs event 83–​4, 164 skilled intuition 6–​7, 44 Smith, David Woodruff 137 Snake Walk 42–​4 dramatic tension and 161–​2 educational value of 43–​4, 60, 99, 105, 113 existential value of 64, 182 involuntary focus 124–​5 universality of 49, 122 somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio) 5–​6, 43–​4, 59, 159, 170, 174, 182 Somers, John 98–​9 Spada, Nina 110 Spanish language (subject) 108–​9, 111 spect-​actors (Boal) 65 actors and spect-​actors 74–​6, 89–​90 dramatic Tension and 166 oppression and 68, 86–​7, 153 subjectification and 151 spectators see audience Spinrad, Norman 176 Stanislavksy, Konstantin 64, 71, 86 Stern, Daniel 35, 173–​4 Stewart, John Robert 51, 137 stimulus 66, 102

Index Stroll 39 aesthetic reading and 40–​1 curricular learning and 99, 105 disinterestedness of 121 significance of 64, 182 snake and 44 structure, dramatic Bolton on 81–​2 dramatic tension and 168–​70 props and 139 vitality affects and 35, 173–​4 stultification 17–​18 subjectification 20–​1 subtext 55–​7 Sumara, Dennis 104 Suvin, Darko 152 Tam, Kwok-​kan 155 Tanke, Joseph J. 26 teacher-​in-​role 96–​7, 128–​9, 168 Tempest, The see Shakespeare, William tension, dramatic 10, 57, 81–​2, 161–​74 passim Terrell, Tracy D. 109–​10 Thompson, James 92, 171–​2 Three Looms Waiting 18 totalitarianism 91, 176–​7 Trent, John 116 understanding (in Kant’s sense) 4–​5, 8

203

Vega, Lope de 72, 79 vitality affects (Stern) 35, 173–​4 Vygotsky, Lev 45, 67, 108, 112 Wagner, Betty Jane 72, 96–​7, 108, 132, 161 walks 39–​40, 42–​5 Walton, Kendall S. 44–​5, 164 Webb, Stuart 110 White, Gareth 78 Winston, Joe 101–​2, 124 Wollheim, Richard 139 Woodruff, Paul 8, 67, 122–​3, 125, 126, 132 Zamir, Tzachi 8, 61, 67, 92, 111–​12, 147 acting 78–​9, 100 aesthetic offering 77, 88–​9, 159, 179 audience 87–​8 career 66 dialogue, with text 156–​8, 179 existential amplification 66, 70, 73, 77–​ 8, 85–​6, 147, 179 interpretation of texts 76–​8, 91, 156–​8, 171, 179, 183 metaxis 84–​6, 146 possibilitiy 70 reflexivity 73, 84–​6, 92–​3, 146, 159 rehearsal 76–​8 scripted theatre 76–​8, 91, 100, 171, 183 subjectification 70, 186 Zimmerman, Cheryl Boyd 110