Editorial

As I read through the articles that make up this first open issue of 2021, I am impressed by their diversity of context, scope of ideas and perspectives, different geographical settings, and the age range of participants and collaborators in the projects they describe. I hope you agree that they demonstrate the positive and varied nature of our field. It is also really pleasing to be featuring Anika Marschall’s article on Akira Takayama’s urban theatre practice. She was the winner of the 2019 postgraduate essay prize for the UK and Ireland’s Theatre and Performance Research Association (TAPRA). Issue 26.2 also includes other researchers who are publishing with us for the first time, scholars from at least six different countries, and then colleagues who return to the journal with new work. This is all the good news!

There is also a different overriding response as I read through these pieces that are prompted by writing this editorial in early March 2021 in the middle of the UK’s 3rd coronavirus lockdown. I have seen these pieces develop over many months, in the frequently challenging process of peer review – for which I thank authors for their patience and reviewers for their generosity. However, in re-reading them now, I could not help myself checking off each one with the phrase ‘you can’t do that now’. A playback performance in South Africa – can’t do that now. Youth theatre in Canada – can’t do that now. Face to face nurse training in the UK – can’t do that now. Of course, this comes from the jaded outlook of a person in UK that has seen spectacular inadequacies of the government’s response to Covid 19 and also the horrendous inequalities that the virus has exposed. But it is also perhaps a symptom of the overriding sense that the arts and education – the two major areas of concern for the RiDE journal – have been impacted particularly acutely by the events of the last year. It is also a more prosaic recognition that the previously unremarkable act of being in a room with others, that basic practice that is central to those involved in our community, has been so completely curtailed.

But you all know this! And perhaps more on the virus is the last thing you want to read in an editorial. What I believe this issue demonstrates, along with the new essays that have been arriving in the last few months, is that our community of scholars and practitioners continues to develop research, to write, to think hard about the pressing issues of our field – and continues to innovate on the topics that we are prepared to consider. While in our previous issue we had articles that directly responded to the pandemic, it is both interesting and somewhat of a relief that in this issue we have no article that deals with it directly. So rather than my somewhat dispiriting can’t do that now, the refrain should be isn’t it amazing that we did that. Working with young people in an improvisation programme to explore their motor creativity, documenting the theatrical understanding of pre-schoolers, exploring hope with youth more often predisposed to seeing the world through a dystopic lens and then developing audiences as participants in vital public discussions – all these indicate that drama and theatre play vital and life-enhancing roles in animating and sustaining the way we live together. Yes, curtailed now – but the RIDE journal continues to provide a forum to analyse and celebrate the richness of our field.

I had the good fortune to speak to an online audience of the Applied Theatre working group of TAPRA in February 2021. I was presenting my research on ‘care aesthetics’ and noting how the different one-to-one relations that many of us have maintained through lockdown – with partners, children, mentees, family members, students and so forth – might be a new focus of Applied Theatre in times of social distance, and limited opportunities for group-based practice. I suggested we should borrow from the highly skilled, and beautifully realised, one-to-one performance work of artists such as Adrian Howells, to think of ourselves now as one-to-one applied theatre practitioners.¹ If applied theatre was often hidden from view, in prison chapels, hospital wards, classrooms and refugee camps, maybe the hidden one-to-one work many have done during lockdown is the new site for an applied practice. In relation to care aesthetics – which, in brief, is an account of the art and craft of looking after and out for each other – many of the one-to-one relations we engage in, I would argue, can be explored in an aesthetic register. I currently volunteer as a mentor for children with designated special educational needs, and these amazing young people ensure my meetings with them are co-created experiences that have a sense of creative style and energy (without any claim to the particular skill of my own input!). This mentoring work could, therefore, be considered as my one-to-one performance practice.

One piece of feedback to my talk came from colleague and board member of the RiDE journal, Dee Heddon. She noted how her friend Adrian Howells, the subject of a remarkable book she and Dominic Johnson edited in response to his sad death (2016), both performed care in a beautifully crafted way, and yet also desperately needed it. She rightly noted how the art of caring for others does not automatically return to an experience of nourishment for the carer – it can also exhaust and deplete. So, while I am serious that many of us who have been involved in multiple one-to-one caring relationships during this period should be encouraged to value that work for its artistry – for it to be considered part of our ongoing commitment to an artistic practice that is integrated into everyday life – we also need to take Dee’s intervention seriously. Caring for others – however beautifully executed – can forget the necessity of receiving care for ourselves. Care is at best a reciprocal art form.

To this end, I hope all colleagues read this issue without any sense of pressure for things we should be doing, and without too great a sense of loss about what we can no longer enjoy. I wish all well and hope that through the difficult period of the pandemic and in the months to come, we all find time to value our everyday relations for the small acts of artistry they contain, but also find time for the necessary art of attending to the care for ourselves.

Notes

1 A point also made by Caoimhe McAvinchey in her piece in this journal on ‘one to one' work with elders in a process she refers to as ‘authentic intimacies’ (2013, 369).