Editorial

Welcome to issue 25.2 – the first open edition of RiDE in 2020 and the start, I hope, of another successful decade in the life of this journal. Being at the beginning of a new 20s decade, many have questioned whether this will be roaring like the previous century’s. My guess is that we are unlikely to witness the type of celebratory abandon that was a feature of that interwar period, with our roaring less carefree and more likely to be sceptical and angry. If the 1920s heralded the Jazz Age, I wonder whether our more jaded 2020s will launch any such dynamic art with equivalent legacy. Are we going to discover new artistic forms and some new dance steps to help us through the multiple challenges that face us? Of course, any colleagues out there who think they’ve found the Jazz of the twenty-first century, we’d love you to write about it for RiDE first! New Jazz or not, the articles across this edition demonstrate a rich range of creative practice that couple the joyful with the critical, and hopefully herald the health of a creatively engaged response to our world that will be part of the decade ahead.

I am privileged to be writing this editorial from Delhi, where I have been visiting a friend who wrote the extraordinary book on the communal violence in Gujarat called The Anatomy of Hate (Laul, 2018). She is developing a new initiative in the state of Uttar Pradesh working with perpetrators of anti-Muslim violence. An ‘initiative’ that she insists is not a ‘project’ but a life commitment to move and work in India’s most populous region. In the context of Modi, muscular Hindu nationalism and the violence that has beset that state, this is an astounding intent that has made me reflect on what a similar commitment would look like within my home context of the Brexited United Kingdom. While not necessarily located in the heartlands of Brexit, some of the most impressive arts programmes I have witnessed recently have a similar ‘anti-project’ sensibility. They are about a long-term commitment to relationships between individuals and groups from which a variety of micro-responses then emerge. A project implies a pre-set objective and clear beginning and end, whereas arts built on relationships combine their means with their ends and allow the unexpected to stand alongside the planned.

The multiple articles in this edition on different forms of drama education often exemplify this type of non-project project – where the longer-term relations between teachers, their students and the schools where they work, demand a concern for shifting pedagogies and approaches which are not realised within a time-bound format. Hadipantelli’s desire to see an embodiment of virtues in teaching practice or Athanaeses and Sanchez’s exploration of the use of Shakespeare in diverse classrooms both demonstrate this focus on complex processes. Similarly, Bird and Donelan are concerned with what they call interactive ethnographic performance as an enhancement of a pedagogical process as are the excellent Points and Practices articles from Irugalbandara and Campbell on Sri Lankan drama teaching and Marunda-Piki on the uses of drama in managing noise and silence in the Zimbabwean drama classroom. The project is not the thing – and analysis here explores both micro- and macro-initiatives that impact across multiple moments in the life of a class, a school or a training programme.

The article by Marneweck on the Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade has a similar approach as it documents a long-standing relationship between a South African town and artists, and the gradual shifting ecologies of a programme of artistic commitment. The nuances of the history of racial injustice and inequality in this context are expertly related here through a puppet parade that shifted and changed its focus over time. The political insight of this article is matched by the first three articles in this edition, which are all concerned with the relations between theatre practice and political action or responsibility. The touring of a performance exploring the Israel/Palestinian conflict and how we make demands on the response of the audience or bystander, the political demands and ambitions of community play as realised in the context of austerity Britain and the role of allies in disability arts, each in very different ways are asking about the scope, limits and complexities of acting in solidarity within arts programmes and between the arts and its contexts. The attention to the demands posed by different forms is echoed in Shu’s analysis of the ethnodrama conducted with problem gamblers and their families in Hong Kong. All these pieces demonstrate RiDE shifting thematically and geographically, but also tackling common issues of how drama is applied within diverse societies in these early days of the 2020s. And this is not in the instrumental sense, the sticking plaster sense of application, but that sense of the hard graft of applying oneself to ensure that drama, theatre, and performance are tightly connected, imbricated and inextricably bound into the societies in which it operates.

Freisleben-Teutscher and van Vuuren’s article here is the second article from South African colleagues in this edition. It explores the complexities of running a postgraduate theatre programme across multiple sites and how online learning can meet the challenges of continuing theatre’s need for embodied engagement. Its title – how to catch a flying pig – is a fitting metaphor for both the analysis that it makes, but also for a broader question in how we capture the rich dynamics of arts processes in our writing. The hardest part of my time editing RiDE to date has been how to respond to the different methodological approaches used by researchers. While we accept pieces from multiple disciplinary perspectives and with different methodological approaches, amongst the editors and reviewers we often struggle most with those that use experimental or quasi-experimental design. I admit that when I get an article that contains multiple equations and numbers, my heart sinks somewhat. While, of course, these articles might be accepted, I know that we have a suspicion that this might not be our preferred way to catch a flying pig. The point to make is that this is a debate we would like to have, and in writing this, I am issuing a challenge to prove us wrong.

In the final chapter of her book, Laul acknowledges that the victims of the 2002 violence in Gujarat were tired. They were ‘tired of being asked to tell the story of their victimhood over and over again’. Rather than them coming up with more stories, they felt that it was the perpetrators who needed to be challenged. ‘Don’t look at us’ they said to her ‘We’re done talking. Look at them’ (2018, 213–214). Her move to Uttar Pradesh is her response – to engage with the communities that have consistently voted for the authoritarian populism that dominates Indian politics and it could be argued dominates many contexts internationally. In light of the terrible anti-Muslim violence that flared across Delhi in the weeks after I wrote the first draft of this editorial, that response seems even more prescient and impressive. Perhaps the 2020s, then, won’t roar, but have a quieter more measured timbre where following Laul’s lead we start to forge new forms of engagement with diverse communities that are not those who are traditionally asked to tell their stories. This might demand new models of allyship, to use Hadley’s term, or a realignment of what it means to be a bystander, to use Hunt’s. Of course, if this is not a roar, I don’t yet know what it sounds like. But as Marunda-Piki struggled with drama’s role in cultivating noise and silence in her classroom, I’m confident we can find a noise or perhaps a quiet determination to continue to find a place for the arts in our deeply conflicted world.