This thesis examines the relationship between narrative and meaning in young people’s dramatised stories and how social meaning is generated in community performance. It is an investigation into drama performance projects with culturally diverse teenagers in an inner city secondary school in Melbourne between 2004 and 2006. The methodological approach is reflective practitioner and case study research involving field based data collection. The study investigates the relationship between narrative content and socio-cultural meaning, the dynamics between performers and audience and the power relations between the teacher-artists and young people. / I conceptualise the drama workshop as an intracultural ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) in which young people explored their emergent, hybrid cultural identities. This space was generated through a dialogic pedagogy based on Freire’s theory (1998) and an analysis of power structures underlying the work. / The centre of this thesis is an analysis of young people’s use of narrative to construct and negotiate the meanings of their dramatised stories. I have used narrative theory to inform and develop a drama process, drawing on the work of Bruner (1996) and Winston (1998). This approach enabled young people to develop complex, local meanings in their plays. / The young people used character to experiment with their personal narratives of identity and to develop dramatised stories containing moral messages that both reflected and commented on their local context, critiquing both their school subculture and the wider society. The plays were eclectic in form and reflected young people’s aesthetics and sense of ‘reality’. / In performance, audiences saw the performers simultaneously as fictional characters and as themselves. This complex dual awareness led audiences to infer a relationship between the dramatised story and the performers, generating ‘performative reflexivity’ (Turner, 1986) a state in which both audience and performers entered into deep reflection on social values.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245520 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Kelman, David Robin |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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