Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

This thesis investigates the role of drama in the intercultural education of young people. It considers the relationship between the fields of drama education, intercultural performance and ethnography. The drama curriculum is explored as a site of intercultural learning and performance pedagogy. The thesis also examines the place of ethnography as an embodied, participatory practice in intercultural drama pedagogy and performance research. The study is placed in a context of international exchange and cultural pluralism, and is framed by debates about intercultural performance and the appropriation and representation of cultural narratives. This investigation of interculturalism within the drama curriculum is grounded in an ethnographic study conducted in Melbourne, Australia in a multicultural secondary school community. The study documents the experiences of approximately forty young people who participated in an African drama and performing arts project called ‘The Gods Project’. ‘Jean’, a Kenyan performing artist who was undertaking a two-year residency in the school, led the intercultural performance project. Participants were involved in drama and performing arts workshops, an ‘African’ creative arts camp and a performance of a play, The Gods are not to Blame, by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi. The interpretative account of the project draws on ethnographic data from the first year of Jean’s residency in the school and six months of intensive fieldwork in the second year of her residency. It also includes longitudinal data that was collected from a group of participants up to four years after the project. I collaborated with Jean and with a group of senior students, who volunteered to be ‘student co-researchers’, to record and analyse the diverse experiences of participants in The Gods Project and to interpret its educational, social, and aesthetic impact within the school context. Jean’s pedagogy of intercultural story telling within the drama classroom and her role as a ‘cultural guide’ throughout the project was explored. As a participatory ethnographic researcher, drama educator and ‘assistant director’, I worked alongside Jean and the students as they played with, talked about, resisted, created, adapted, subverted, embodied and performed intercultural performance texts. Drawing on Turner (1982) and Schechner (1988), I conceptualised The Gods Project as an intersecting social and aesthetic drama. The phases of ‘social drama’ and ritual were used as a framework for the data analysis and as a structure for the narrative account of the project. Turner’s concepts of the ‘liminal/liminoid’ and ‘communitas’ were applied to the participants’ experiences at the creative arts camp and within the workshop and performance space. ‘Dark play’ was identified as the young people’s response to the difficult social drama they were involved in; their subversive play provided a way to engage with the ‘strangeness’ of the cultural material and the play’s ‘dark’ story and themes. The participants’ dramatic play informed the emerging aesthetic drama and facilitated their intercultural meaning making. The students’ efforts to make sense of and interpret a performance text embedded in a Yoruba context resemble the task of an ethnographer attempting to understand and represent socio-cultural experiences. The study demonstrates that through a process of collaborative ‘intercultural reflexivity’, ethnography can enhance intercultural drama education. The pedagogical features of The Gods Project are related to Turner’s concept of performance ethnography and the role of a ‘cultural guide’ in intercultural teaching and learning is highlighted. With the guidance of their Kenyan teaching artist many of the young people engaged with different socio-cultural perspectives, actively explored new cultural performance conventions and art forms, and experienced the complexities of intercultural representation. The study reveals evidence of significant social, personal, intercultural and artistic learning outcomes for participants within this school-based performance project. However, the study also reveals the difficulties and challenges of implementing an innovative intercultural project within a school context. It demonstrates that kinaesthetic, playful, embodied and performative experiences are central to intercultural teaching and learning.

The clinical diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (APA, 2013) include difficulties with social communication and social cognition. Decades of autism research have been devoted to developing and implementing social skills training programs, some of which include drama as an instructional strategy. This dissertation project set out to contribute to that body of research, creating and testing a social skills program that used drama based on fictional stories to provide examples of social behaviour choices. The critical analysis of the research findings, using ethnographic methodology and the dual lenses of weak central coherence theory (Frith, 2003) and context-blindness theory (Vermeulen, 2012), extends the clinical, medical model of autism to create a por[trait of authentic, forthright individuals who are concerned with issues of social justice, who learn by making analogies to build context, whose conversation is associative and collaborative, and who stepped into the fictional worlds of the story-dramas and into the minds of the characters with empathy and commitment. The Story Wheel curriculum is built on Northrop Frye’s archetypal literary theory (Anatomy of Criticism, 1957) using the dramatic conventions approach of applied drama (Neelands & Goode, Structuring Drama Work, 2015) as a pedagogical strategy. Each of the four archetypes – romance, tragedy, irony, and comedy – are represented by three workshops based on Western literature, chosen to align with the culture and knowledge base of the participants, for a total of twelve drama workshops in the research project. This dissertation includes the curriculum outline, the literary choices, and recommendations for drama practitioners to create a successful and inclusive experience for their autistic participants. / Graduate

This research started as a quest to understand better the ethics of doing Theatre for Development/Applied Theatre with under-served, marginalized and vulnerable populations especially in post-conflict zones in the Global South. As a theatre practitioner-researcher from Africa who has lived and worked in post-conflict zones, I was interested in fostering appropriate ethical protocols for arts-based practices for social engagement, advocacy and social justice. Thus, in this dissertation, I focus on two concepts in applied theatre practice: participation and ethics. I examine how participation can be re-conceptualized in applied theatre practice and focus on the ethics around conducting research among vulnerable populations especially on refugees and internally displaced persons. On participation, I use existing case studies from various fields to argue that participation in community engagement and socially-engaged art practices can become a tool to reposition voices on the margin to the centre in order to unsettle centres of power. However, for this to happen, participation needs to engage a communicative action that is both epistemic and ontic in its approach. An epistemic discourse provides a way of seeing the world while an ontic discourse provides people with a way of being in the world. The former is a ‘theoretical’ discursive practice that is fundamentally epistemological, and the latter is an ‘embodied’ praxis that is fundamentally ontological. I examine the famous Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Kamiriithu Community Theatre project in Kenya and Michael Balfour et al’s refugee project in Australia to foreground this new thinking on verb-oriented and noun-oriented notions of participation. On ethics, I raise a series of critical questions around interventionist or humanitarian performances. It is hoped that these questions will deepen discourses in applied theatre practice and further challenge practitioners to rethink why we do what we do. Using narrative inquiry, I glean lessons from my field research facilitating drama workshop among secondary school students who have been internally displaced due to an ongoing socio-political crisis in Nigeria. I also reflect on my other applied theatre experiences in Canada and Sudan. I propose an ethical practice that is built on relational interaction. In the context of working in post-conflict zones or in places of war, I argue that precarity becomes a determining factor in framing the ethics of practice. The questions around ethics are raised to also draw attention to decolonizing ethical practices. Finally, I articulate the connection between participation and ethics in that participation becomes a tactic to ensure that applied theatre researchers/practitioners conduct their work in ethical ways. This is because through participation, concerned communities can challenge unethical practices and transform the research to create outcomes that are beneficial. Thus, as an example of reflective practitioner research, the projects in this dissertation offer opportunities to examine critically how participation has been conceptualized and the need for a decolonizing understanding towards ethics in applied theatre practice especially in post-conflict zones. / Graduate