Seeing Possibilities Through Precarity Using Process Drama

• In Event: Dreaming the Possible: Exploring Global Worlds and Micro-Ecologies Using the Pedagogies of Drama

Abstract

PURPOSE AND OBJECTIVE:
While the Greek economic crisis over the last decade has produced a ‘new normal’ for the Greek people, the young people we met during our visit have never known an economically unprecarious time. In addition, the growing refugee crisis unfolding most profoundly in Greece, has created a new sense urgency among young people about their social inheritance. When all seems hopeless, how do young people come to hope? What are their practices of care for others and self? This paper focuses on a public school in an Athens suburb and examines how the applied drama practices of ensemble-building and collective devising can open up new understandings about what it means to imagine ahead differently.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
This paper uses the work of American performance studies scholar Jan Cohen-Cruz (2006) as a theoretical frame. According to Cohen-Cruz, story- as told through theatre- is the most potentially powerful form of social intervention and is a critical way to generate new knowledge through group interaction. The stories created by young people often juxtapose celebration and subjugation in complicated ways inviting critical engagement from those who witness them.

METHODS/DATA SOURCES:
The paper will draw on the data collected during the research team’s visit to Athens, Greece in March 2017 where we observed 22 students engage in an ensemble-building and collective devising process. We will specifically focus on the process drama work, carried out by the PI and the local researcher, that facilitated an activity with a suitcase being packed by a refugee leaving their home, drawing on the young Greek students’ ideas about “the other”. We will also include data from focus group interviews with the youth who reflected on the pedagogies, key informant interviews, field notes, and artefacts.

RESULTS:
The young people we encountered offered nuanced views of what it means to be in crisis. They resisted being seen as precarious despite the increasingly difficult conditions that shape their quotidian realities. Through the drama work, and in our conversations with them, we would learn that precarity is not one thing. It is, rather, a complex set of micro and macro factors, including internalized and problematic notions of identity from mainstream media. Exploring ‘real-life’ issues “in-role” helped facilitate a youth knowledge base of ideas, practices, and responsibilities about encountering “the other” and bringing about desired change.

SIGNIFICANCE:
While such work ‘in-role’ may not change the material realities for these young people, such pedagogies do invite young people to speak their truth and to represent their affective understandings in an embodied way. Against the more traditional backdrop of schooling in Greece, and of schooling amidst a refugee crisis where schools are now regularly used for housing ongoing waves of refugees, we witnessed a powerful counter-pedagogy that invited young people to tap into resources of understanding and generosity and uniquely speak back to the pervasive discourse of desperation, loss and scarcity.

Author

• Rebecca Starkman, University of Toronto - OISE