|
|
Certainly, this study is deeply connected to a personal and long-term commitment I have had to the theatre in all its many guises: adult, children’s, youth, local, global, professional, popular, educational, classic, contemporary, mainstream, and fringe. This collection, therefore, contains transparent expressions of my firm (if often shaken) faith in the transformative, healing, educational, communal, sociopolitical, and ritualistic power of live performance. This is the autobiographical soil that contains the seeds of my inquiry, expressed most directly in the poetry to be found throughout these pages.
Freeing the Captive Audience: Seeing Ourselves Seeing
Following this brief overview, I shall now examine the backdrop to this study, the frame that holds it in place, the theme that supports its variations. This is the white noise constantly hissing behind our contemporary First World culture: the dramatized world (Williams, 1975) and the performative society (Kershaw, 1994). In demonstrating the necessity for education to pay curricular attention to performance and the skills involved in active spectatorship, it is first necessary to show that the world we live in, and the world we create in schools for young people to occupy, are very different, and, in my view, increasingly out of joint. Therefore, I begin with the works of performance and cultural theorists Raymond Williams (1975), Baz Kershaw (1994, 1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2003), and Jon McKenzie (2001) as they describe a world that is immersed in drama and engineered by performance. Next, I examine how audience has been theorized in two other related fields: audience studies and theatre history. Then, in my conclusion, circling back toward audience in aesthetic education, I trace what some key philosophers of arts in education have to say (or to not say) about the importance of live performance.
Each of the fields of audience studies, audience history, performance studies, and art education, in varying ways, takes the view that in our contemporary “global village,” all the world really is a stage, and that we citizens are becoming, more and more so, merely players—or, worse than this, that we are merely passive watchers of players.