Writing Everyday Theatre: applied theatre, or just TIE rides again?

Abstract

The centre of this article is a critical description of the development and production of Everyday Theatre's performed pretext, called replay@timeout, including a detailed account of the devising process and the programme's content. The programme is located within the history and traditions both of theatre in education (TIE) and process drama, as well as contemporary practice in applied theatre. The author demonstrates that the principles and practice underlying all the decisions, aesthetic, pedagogical and logistic, consciously sprang from, and occasionally differed from, these interwoven and complementary traditions, in a complex blend. The opportunities given to the team, and some of the strengths of the programme, are identified, along with some of its constraints, weaknesses and casualties. Together with the company's director, the author identified the programme's essential aesthetic and pedagogical principles, and these then had to be realised through negotiation with the company since the programme was group-devised. How the content and activities for the interactive audiences emerged, and how they relate to those principles and the sponsor's briefs forms the main story of this article, embedded in the wider context of applied theatre and TIE.

Keywords:

• theatre
• Applied Theatre
• drama
• education
• audience

Notes

1. Ramesh disappeared after Dr Penny Bundy worked as a dramaturge with the programme 18 months after its inception. The double role of Ramesh as both player and fixer of the game was dropped so that each teacher actor simply became a competing gamesmaster asking for help to win the game. The theatrical linking is now done by the separate gamesmasters as they show the students how to play the game.

2. The research was a month-long study of the Everyday Theatre programme in action in the Far North of New Zealand conducted by Dr Chris Holland. Details of this research inform her article in this issue (Holland 2009).

3. In later years Everyday Theatre developed and delivered a more sophisticated adult and community version of the programme. This was presented on more than 50 occasions over the five years of the project. It also developed an ethno-drama performance of the programme to show to adult groups.