‘Is that what you really want?’: a case study of intracultural ensemble-building within the paradoxes of ‘urbanicity’

Abstract

Ensemble-building is a practice within drama education that is understood to be a powerful metaphor for democratic living. However, this ongoing work in classrooms also demands that teachers understand and enact a broad, interrelated range of knowledge, skills, and values that support participants’ encounters with conflict and representations of change. In this sense, ensemble-building is not simply about getting along, but embodies an ‘intracultural’ practice of ‘living together’ while learning and using creative strategies for ‘fighting together’. In this qualitative case study of ensemble-building as an intracultural practice we present the key forms of knowledge, skills and values that two teachers enacted to create conditions for trust and knowledge production with a group of African American students at a racially segregated urban secondary school and a collaboration between this group and multi-ethnic and multi-racial university students in a theatre arts programme. Their work, and the work of ensemble, we argue, is shaped by and within the intersections of ‘urbanicity’ where urban life is recognisable and lived beyond the boundaries of urban centres through the paradoxical conditions of rigidity and creativity, stability and mobility, and anonymity and visibility.

Keywords:

• ensemble
• urban education
• drama educator
• anti-oppressive

Notes

1. Danielle was one of 20 teachers selected to participate in this programme that focused primarily on the active interpretation of Shakespeare's plays with primary through secondary students. Danielle was not an English teacher and was new to the idea and practice of drama in education. She focused, therefore, on the experience of working together as an ensemble, which is a foundation for drama work, but not the central goal for the Royal Shakespeare Company/Ohio State University partnership.

2. All student names are pseudonyms.