The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the relationship between social skills and dramatic arts. In an effort to explore and eventually eradicate the negative problems plaguing today's generation, this study sought to question youth who may have grappled with social and communicative problems during their matriculation in…

A meditation on drama practice from an artist in Canada. My university students are preoccupied with damage and trauma. There are paralyzing obstacles to working across differences that were useful for a time but no longer serve a robust solidarity. The stories we collect, tell and re-tell ourselves to prepare for a 'never again' are stifled if…

Using Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (1985) playmaking structures, students in an undergraduate education course, Educating for Social Justice, developed forum plays--brief improvisational scenes designed to provoke discussions of power imbalances. The plays focused on "gay rights," a topic the participants self-selected through…

The current heightened sensitivity around history, colonisation and the aftermath of the socio-political and cultural ethos of the world can create in many people the fear of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. This fear can affect the ability to imagine and play in certain learning settings, especially in devising performances, socially…

Individuals who make up society interact and communicate with their social environment. While the healthy realization of this communication enables the individual to live in harmony with the community, in the opposite case, the individual cannot communicate with their environment and may face many problems in both professional and daily life. This…

This article examines the creation and reception of "The Stream You Step In," a digital series co-produced by Outside the March for University of Windsor students and performed live over Zoom in 2020. While Zoom is assumed to be a care-less medium, we argue that it offers new, altered modes of caring through its disruption of boundaries…

This study investigated the translanguaging practices of 12 students and a teacher rehearsing a German play as part of an extra-curricular UK university theatre group comprising different European nationalities. Our aim was to understand how these practices support foreign language and literacy development in the context of a script-based,…

In this commentary, summarized from a recent interview, the author shares insights and memories from a career devoted to drama and performance studies. He enthusiastically recounts events, initiatives, and collaborations that have helped sustain his lifelong passion for performance.

Research in language learning indicates that process drama (PD), an educational approach where students and teachers work in and out of role to explore themes and issues, can be well suited to the Japanese higher education (HE) context. Despite the benefits highlighted in the literature, PD remains a niche approach to language teaching and…

The dramaturgical method has been used to analyse teaching and didactic contexts, but the method is not adequately described or established in such contexts. In this article we use dramaturgy as a lens for describing and analysing teaching. The teaching examples are taken from a professional workshop where student teachers and their instructors…

This essay offers an approach to teaching a canonical dramatic literature-based theatre history class while also teaching students to question and resist the canon's ideological traps. The author models the use of French philosopher Jacques Rancière's concept of the emancipated spectator and American educational theorist Joyce E. King's concept of…

Beginning in the 1980s, and throughout years of employment on Broadway and beyond, I was an unwitting participant-observer to scenes of sexual harassment in musical theater dance workplaces. I experienced being a target of sexual harassment, not as trauma, but as an uncomfortable and accepted aspect of the employment landscape. The…

Although systemic racism has always been a persistent problem in university theater training (Community of BIPOC Theatremakers, 2020a), heightened calls for action began in the late spring and early summer of 2020. In July 2020, some 300 BIPOC theater-makers drafted and signed an open letter to the theater industry at large (Community of BIPOC…

This essay analyzes student experiences of studying all-female and non-binary cast Shakespeare productions in the Seattle area, including upstart crow collective's "Richard III" and The Fern Shakespeare Company's "Much Ado About Nothing." I draw on my teaching of the experimental work of these regional companies in an…

How do archives start and who are they for? The Caribbean Social Forum, based in Woolwich in the Royal Borough of Greenwich, London, are currently considering these questions as they look to preserve the stories of over 600 Caribbean members who the media have framed as 'the Windrush Generation'. The paper argues that co-created projects, where…