18 May 2011 -

During my recent rant about education I was preparing an application to Awards for All to develop Community Role Plays. I believe drama which has been systematically relegated to the bottom of the curriculum is a medium which should be at the centre of education as a medium for learning. Equally, I feel it’s important that schools and the wider community connect so I’ve devised a programme that challenges the present status quo. Read our Spring –Summer newsletter to see if it’s something you might want to be involved in.

I hope the project will just be the start and that, in the not too distant future, we will see public Community Role Plays that in turn influence the way we see Community Plays. I see this as a part of the development of the Social Actor.

I’ll come back in future blogs to the role of drama in education but first I thought it important to explain simply what I mean by Community Role Play, drama in education, what it can do and what might it might look like.

Drama is the ability to identify and connect with other people and other worlds; it is a natural device we use to help us in our understanding, to find meaning and to come to terms with life. It’s an essential part of our survival equipment. We employ it every day as a means of coping and preparing for significant experiences.  We project and rehearse in our minds a pending interview or a potentially difficult encounter; we re-live our responses to quarrels and break ups; we practice a good story to impress our friends. Most of us have the capacity to identify and some level of empathy. It is necessary for building and sustaining relationships. Those that don’t have it we would regard as severely damaged or psychotic, fragile or dangerous.

Educational drama aims to create qualitative experiences that deal with feelings and meaning and prompt us to reflect, to think and philosophise. In terms of empathy, drama puts us midway between all that has happened before and now. It assumes that we have something in common with everything that has ever happened and everyone who has ever been. Educational drama techniques aren’t restrictive to school education. Claque uses them in our community play research and it is part of the process of ‘finding a play’ that’s significant to a community – what I call ‘the drama search’.

I recently came across notes on a drama search I did with a community play research group in Sheerness. It is either a transcript or notes I made of the session at the time. Either way, I have added notes in an attempt analyse what my thinking might have been to prompt the activities. It’s the simplest way I can think of to demonstrate role play in the context of drama. This session was part of the process that led to my writing the Isle of Sheppey Community Play – The Floating Republic.

In a sounding for the Isle of Sheppey one characteristic of the island was identified as the islanders resistant to main land authority. I asked researchers to come up with a local event, past or present, that had a potent connection to resisting authority – they suggested the Nore Mutiny.  Inspired by the example of their comrades at Spithead, the mutiny at the Nore, off  Sheerness,   began on 12 May 1797 when the crew of the Sandwich led by Richard Parker, a former naval officer and French sympathiser, seized control of the ship. Several other ships followed, but the mutiny began to falter and eventually ended as the others ships gradually slipped away.

Leader of the Nore Mutiny, Richard Parker is arrested, The Isle of Sheppey Community Play, The Floating Republic

The purpose of the drama search was to better understand and identify with events of the mutiny.

To see how the drama search panned out and read my notes, click here or visit our Theatre Games page.

…and please feel free to leave any comments you have below.