Teaching Postdramatic Theatre PDF Download

This thesis explores the potential of a process drama-based Applied Theatre practice, Drama Education, to respond to postnormal times. Specifically, I examine how Drama Education can encourage young people who do not identify as refugees to critically encounter and challenge right-wing populist rhetoric and xenophobic representations of refugees in a hyper-technological world. As we are confronted with the so-called global refugee crisis and increasing public ressentiment towards " ̃foreigners' in the face of international Islamist terror, right-wing populist movements incite processes of excluding Others, especially as they are propelled by rapid advancements in social media and mass communication. In order to undertake this exploration, I examine the history of Applied Theatre and the pedagogical approach of Critical Multicultural Education. This examination leads me to conceptualise, carry out, and analyse a Drama Education workshop in my home country Germany. I employ Applied Theatre As Research as a set of methods to generate qualitative data together with my participants. My methodology of Reflexive Interpretation, ontologically and epistemologically anchored in a Critical Poststructuralist paradigm, allows me to critically analyse my own reflective-analytic engagement with my practice. This analysis throws light on how the creative process of translation can act as an innovative methodological tool. As kaleidoscopic prisms, acts of translation can shatter normalised perspectives by multiplying im/possibilities of meaning. My discoveries lead me to propose that fostering social responsibility and critical citizenship in the 21st century requires a Postdramatic Pedagogy fit to respond to postnormal times. A Postdramatic Pedagogy regards the entire Drama Education workshop as a performance event of autopoietic feedback loops. Interplays between principles of dramatic theatre (representation, mimesis, and theatricality) and elements of postdramatic theatre (presence, poiesis, and theatReality) can catalyse critical empathy, which, in turn, has the potential to propel the deconstruction of attitudes and behaviours in metaxic moments of f(r)iction. In these ephemeral moments, learners consciously experience themselves as occupants of the realms of reality, theatricality, theatReality. These moments are not devoid of emotion but acknowledge the significant roles of both catharsis and critical thinking in learners' explorations of how stages of signification and politics of representation operate.