Learning from experience

First published in 1932, John Dewey’s Art as Experience has provided the touchstone for subsequent debates about the importance of art in pedagogies built on learning from experience. One of his central contributions to education was to describe the activities of making and receiving art as interwoven, advocating that experiences of the arts are ‘enhancements of the processes of everyday life’ (1932, 12). Experience entered the educational lexicon, newly articulated by Dewey as an aesthetic practice that is both personally enriching in quotidian life and unities society in pluralist democracies.

Changing cultural and social circumstances have brought renewed questions about the political and educational value of experience. In an experience economy, in which theatricalised consumers are lured to spend money, it can no longer be assumed that experience is inevitably counter-cultural or democratic. Furthermore, the concept of experience has been open to critical scrutiny, in which binaries between activity and passivity, production and consumption, process and product have all been tested. Yet experience remains a central tenet of drama education and applied theatre, with renewed attention paid to what experience means in practice, and how it might be conceptualised.

The articles gathered in this issue are striking in that they all reflect the changing lexicon that surrounds questions of experience. Questions of memory, identity, veracity and the ‘real’ resonate through this issue, with authors challenging readers to join them in thinking through what experience of the theatrical or performative event means in an era in which representation, truth and authenticity have become increasingly contested. Authors in this issue open new questions, reasserting the urgency of debating experience in ways that have not been fully recognised in our field since the mid-twentieth century faith in universal truths was acknowledged as partisan and culturally located. Simple equations between experience and learning are tested and nuanced throughout this issue, with different emphasis placed on the ways in which the arts encourage lived and everyday experience to be foregrounded and represented.

Margaret Ames opens the issue with a thoughtful and touching account of her work with Cyrff Ystwyth, a dance-theatre company that includes colleagues with learning disabilities. Ames acknowledges devised theatre with people with disabilities is often seen as a form of self-expression, a perception that, in her long association with the company, is fraught with assumptions. Rather, Ames argues, there is space for considering how failure as a ‘contemporary theatrical strategy’ can expose ‘the impossibility of representation, as a vehicle for understanding an experience of living with learning and physical disabilities as unrepresentable’. Ames offers a detailed and sensitive analysis of the language patterns of Carwyn, a participant who was interested in developing a performance in which he ‘passed’ as non-disabled, and how his vocalisation alludes to the trauma of his past experience. The performance, Twenty Years in Hospital, enabled him to narrate and explore his story which, Ames argues, goes ‘beyond self-expression’ by bringing private experience into the public realm and producing new knowledge in the process. By articulating his experience, the audience became implicated ‘in a new relationship with disability, medical intervention and trauma’. After the production, Carwyn left the company, an act that Ames recognised as an act of completion: ‘He finally did what he had intended and nothing more was to be done, that is, he had communicated and narrated his personhood’.

Ames’ article might be usefully read alongside the study undertaken by Kathleen Gallagher and Kelsey Jacobson. Gallagher and Jacobson interrogate ways in which the ‘real life’ is represented and understood by young theatre-makers. Their research demonstrates how choices of dramatic and theatrical form encourage a range of contested or multiple truths to be represented, which, they suggest, move ‘beyond aesthetic practices that privilege a singular narrative truth’. There is a social and political dynamic to their practice, in which Gallagher and Kelsey found that young theatre-makers engaged with complex ethical questions. Rather than focusing on what they describe as ‘stage realism’, young theatre-makers in school classroom can be invited to contest the narrowness of dualistic thought in their work and find ways to ‘fragment, refract, and multiply the real’. This form of theatre is socially generative, they suggest, as it is ‘capable of holding antagonistic thoughts within the same space’. Gallagher and Jacobson’s inquiry brings together complex thought about representation, experience and questions of the ‘real’ in ways that are urgent. A central pre-occupation with the ‘real’ and with the ways in which experience can be multiply understood is also explored by Colette Conroy, Sarah Jane Dickenson and Giuliana Mazzoni. Their article makes the claim that ‘Theatre projects which work with participant autobiographies take on the responsibility of articulating the perspective as a truth’. They address questions surrounding the representation of experience, asking questions about the veracity of memory from different disciplinary perspectives, with Dickenson’s playwriting process with young people as a central theatrical focus. What emerges is a nuanced and complex reading of memory and theatricality, and like Gallagher and Jacobson, a concern with the efficacy of exploring the world from multiple perspectives.

Questions of experience and artistic representation often lie at the heart of analyses of drama and theatre education. In her analysis of young children’s regular outings to the theatre, Emma Miles is concerned with an expanded relationship between learning and experience. Her thoughtful article offers a detailed reading of the events that surround the performance at Polka Theatre in London which, for her three- and four-year-old research participants, was an important aspect of the experience. Travelling by bus, the routines of play and sandwich-eating all contributed to their feelings of belonging and their excitement and anticipation of the event. Miles comments that the children’s experiences did not conform to adults ‘hierarchies of interest’ that places the performance at the ‘pinnacle experience’ of the day. Her sensitive and careful ethnography suggests that, for the children, ‘otherwise extraneous factors of bus journeys, play and eating, but part of a day that combined the unfamiliar and the becoming-familiar in a rich and stimulating tapestry of experience’. This may be humbling for theatre-makers, Miles suggests, and offers a timely reminder of the power of a deeply engaged ethnographic researcher to observe the world from the children’s perspective and acknowledge the importance to them of the full experience of visiting a theatre. It is experiencing the whole event, and not just the performance, that makes memories.

Daphna Ben-Shaul is also concerned with the learning environment, and how creative and artistic experience disrupts its meanings. This article documents and interrogates the ways in which a university campus can be re-imagined through performance art, a process that creates a ‘campusphere’. Ben-Shaul is interested in the relationship between identity-formation and experience, arguing that the project moved between ‘subjective experiences and reactions to the organising systems of the campus’. Her experimental ways of working redefined social relations on campus, allowing for new narratives to be constructed. Cipo Marunda-Piki captures some of the relationship between narrative and memory in a piece for the Points and Practices section. Writing from Zimbabwe, Marunda-Piki makes a thoughtful case for understanding the ways in which narratives hold power, and how this relates to English-language learning. The question of power and authority is also addressed by Naphtaly Shem-Tov in the final article in this issue. Taking Shifra Schonmann’s work on initial teacher training as inspiration, Shem-Tov advocates improvisation as a way of thinking through the complex experience of learning to teach. Taking an empathetic approach to a pre-service teacher who was struggling with self-confidence enabled Shem-Tov to consider how distinctions between role, character and personality might assist her in constructing a professional identity as a teacher.

Throughout this issue, questions of experience provide a place to grapple with the dynamic between art and learning in ways that are centrally important in the twenty-first century. The contemporary lexicon, with its focus on co-construction, multiplicity and relationality, invites us to think through some of the ethical and pedagogical challenges facing young theatre-makers, young audiences, artists and teachers. In each article, light is shed on how this might be achieved and illuminates how the depth of engagement with research participants might open new understandings and knowledge. This recasts Dewey’s exhortation to ensure that experience is at the heart of learning for the twenty-first century, and in ways that reassert the primacy of the everyday.