‘Many Mickles Make a Muckle’ – Role-Shifted Discourse, Restored Behaviour and the Radical in Performance

ABSTRACT

Dorothy Heathcote’s perspectives concerning ‘role-shifted discourse’ within what she latterly called ‘Model 1: Drama used to explore people’ exhibits a strong alignment with the didactic purposes of ‘living history’ performances at heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Kershaw’s ‘points of process’ concerning the ‘radical in performance’ are introduced as a proposition for analysing and reconceptualising both the character of ‘living history’ performances and the fundamentally radical nature of Dorothy Heathcote’s pioneering innovations for drama-based learning and teaching. This line of ‘theoretical/conceptual’ inquiry offers new propositions about intersections between Dorothy Heathcote’s insights concerning role performance within ‘the drama frame’ and Schechner’s perspectives concerning the dramatic tensions that reside within what Turner identified as ‘liminoid’, threshold-crossing experiences for participant/observers of ‘living history’ performances at museums and heritage sites.

KEYWORDS:

• Dorothy Heathcote
• process drama
• role performance
• living history
• ‘restored behaviour’
• ‘radical in performance’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. More recently, I have noticed that this whimsical sounding expression was used to name an episode of Turn: Washington’s Spies (S3E6). In this instance, the writers have General Washington using the expression; and, it turns out that as President, Washington used this precept by way of advice when writing to a new manager of his farms at Mount Vernon (Thompson 2004, 21).

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Gerard Boland

Gerard Boland, PhD (Newcastle, Australia) is senior lecturer in theatre/media in the School of Communication & Creative Industries, Charles Sturt University – Bathurst. He has worked as an educator, performer and director in a variety of Australian and overseas contexts, including primary, secondary and tertiary settings, conferences and festival events. He studied physical comedy with Carlo Mazzone-Clementi at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Blue Lake, California (1980–1982), wood sculpting, leather mask fabrication and commedia dell’arte performance with Antonio Fava in Reggio-Emilia, Italy (2012), and drama in education with Dorothy Heathcote at the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (1982–1983). He is a recipient of two Australian Learning & Teaching Council (ALTC) citations for teaching excellence, in 2007 and 2010.