Dialoguing to make meaning: drama, dialogues and dialogicality in a continually developing field

This bumper edition of NJ considers the role of drama and theatre in developing and/or extending our understandings of culture and identity in a world where we are talking more and more about a global culture. The following articles share a matured thinking about our work, with an increasing emphasis on dialogue and the development of our own critical reflective processes as we strive to enhance understanding of our practice in diverse contexts.

Many of us have recently attended 2018’s IDIERI in Auckland with the theme The Tyranny of Distance. It is interesting that Juliana Saxton’s closing keynote at IDIERI 2015 is still very pertinent to this edition’s theme. She explores the inherent difficulties in ‘extending oneself beyond one’s own culture’. Saxton uses a concrete example from her own practice with Carole Miller to demonstrate Michael Apple’s (1992) concept of saturated consciousness. She suggests that dialogue in action may help us become more able to adapt to each other and find different ways of doing, being and becoming.

Penny’s Fallling, from David Megarrity and Bridget Boyle, shares a 3-year journey of collaborative theatre developments and many moments when the ‘penny dropped’. This article is rich with advice for those of us who work in collaborative creative development projects. Jack Shu, moves our attention to Hong Kong, sharing his research on the effect of a series of forum theatre workshops on members of a community that have been impacted by gambling addiction. These workshops were, as Boal (1979) would have it, ‘rehearsal for revolution’.

In her article Beyond ethnodrama: Exploring nursing history and identity through scriptwriting as research, Sue Davis demonstrates the value of scriptwriting as a methodological approach. She moves our attention into nursing culture to explore both a critical point in nursing history and the development of nursing identity. Her article has much relevance for how drama educators might collaborate with theatre practitioners and workers in other fields to create scripts of their own lived experiences.

In Dialogicality and teaching process drama, Tuija Viiret uses a case study research approach to consider the practice of three drama teachers. She analyses their process drama practice in light of theorists, Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin. This article will be of particular interest to drama educators who wish to interrogate their own practice, particularly in the management of drama processes. Gerry Boland offers a detailed interpretation of Dorothy Heathcote’s perspectives on role-shifted discourse, and the didactic focus of ‘living history’. In Many mickles make a muckle… he notes that both Heathcote’s classroom drama work and ‘living history’ performances present issues as problematic situations, encouraging both risk and dialogue with participants/audience.

Amy Perry returns us to our cultural theme. She focuses on contemporary Australian productions of Shakespearian plays to examine Australia’s emerging sense of cultural and national identity with Surfing the New Wave: Shakespeare with an Australian Accent.

At a time when our understanding of literacy is again attracting much controversy, Madonna Stinson suggests that is timely to consider our understanding of the concept of ‘drama literacy.’ She considers how we might facilitate our development of this concept in light of a new Australian curriculum. She invites us to join the conversation.

Finally, we are pleased to share Abbey MacDonald’s review of the third edition of Education in the Arts, edited by Christine Sinclair, Neryl Jeanneret, John O’Toole and Mary Ann Hunter. This has become a staple text for many of us, and MacDonald commends the scope and new material in this latest edition.