In this paper, the authors argue for novel, less mimetic, ways to harness "the real" in drama practices. They study particular youth theatre-making practices in a Toronto secondary classroom, both successes and failures, to make the case for an untethering of "the real" from realism's representational aesthetics. They further…

The study on which this paper is based examined the experiences of students in order to develop a theoretical and empirically grounded account of the dynamic social forces of inclusion and exclusion experienced by youth in their unique contexts of North American urban schooling. The ethnographic scenes, organized into four "beats,"…