The ensemble domesticated: Mapping issues of autonomy and power in performing arts projects in schools

Abstract

This article, originally presented at Discourse, Power and Resistance in April 2014, draws on my current research, within the national Shakespeare Schools' Festival programme, exploring emerging issues of autonomy and power. Theatre education projects have been positioned as an emancipatory endeavour, often drawing on the rhetoric of 'the ensemble' as a pedagogic approach. Yet, as I will argue here, notions of this approach's emancipatory potential does not always sit easily within existing normative education structures. Recent education resources, such as the Education Endowment Fund's Teaching and Learning Toolkit, suggest arts education projects can be understood as finite 'interventions' with a known set of outcomes. This, I want to argue, 'domesticates' the ensemble, flattening and masking the complexity of this approach. I suggest therefore that an ensemble-based project such as Shakespeare Schools' Festival could be more usefully seen as a pedagogic space, which is populated, activated and made sense of in a myriad of potential ways by its participants in their particular contexts.

Theatre and drama education and populism: The ensemble ‘family’ as a space for dialogic empathy and civic care

“…I was particularly interested in exploring how SSF's instruction to teachers to create a 'playful ensemble' (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2014) with their casts was enacted within a mainstream UK secondary school. As research into the delivery of participatory arts projects in schools suggests, this is a complex and discursive process (Galton, 2010;Thomson et al, 2010Thomson et al, , 2012 which can encounter resistance (Araki-Metcalfe, 2008;Stinson, 2009), rejection (Adams, 2010) or 'domestication' of the arts project in line with existing school processes and values (Neelands, 2004;Kitchen, 2015).…”

Regulated time and expansive time in primary school mathematics

“…The EMP was a collaboration between the Complicite Theatre Company and EMP explored how aspects of Complicite's ensemble practice could be interpolated with a strand of critical mathematics education that stresses relational pedagogy (Boylan 2018) and spacious mathematics (Angier and Povey 1999). Recently, steps have been taken to conceptualise an ensemble or rehearsal room pedagogy (Kitchen 2015;Neelands 2009) in the context of drama education. These conceptualisations emphasise the pro-social -the ensemble providing a sense of togetherness -and improvisation plus, linked to this, playfulness.…”