Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wessels, Anne

Titel

Plague and paideia: sabotage in devising theatre with young people

Ist Teil von

• Research in drama education, 2012-02, Vol.17 (1), p.53-72

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This ethnography, completed by the classroom teacher in a publicly funded secondary school in Mississauga, Canada, explores issues of conflict and sabotage that affected a devising project with suburban young people. The processes of devising generated ethnographic data that included a play script and videotaped rehearsals and performances. As well, individual interviews were conducted at the start and the end of the project. Excerpts from these student interviews are juxtaposed with ethnographic field notes to furnish multiple perspectives. Although the sabotage cannot be linked causally to the devising, this conflict worked to poison the social relations in the devising processes and created serious obstacles to the work. Using the theory of Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze as analytical tools, this sabotage became a form of 'paideia' that catalysed a useful reconsideration of our devising practices. Artaud's written correspondence with poetry editor, Jacques Riviere in 1923-4, demonstrated an unwavering commitment to opening up the seemingly intractable rules of the French literary establishment of the time. Deleuze too, railed against sedimented bodies of knowledge and processes, advocating experimentation, inventive and affirmative means to create new work in new ways. This theory offers much to the analysis of the conflicts witnessed in the ethnography as sabotage becomes a call for multiplicity and a more rhizomatic structure for devising.