|
|
My intention throughout is to argue for the importance for young people of regular, habitual attendance of live performances, as essential for their social, cultural, political, and emotional development. Gathering the voices of those who agree with me, who join with me in chorus to argue for the relevance, and even the dominance (for better or worse), of performance and spectatorship in contemporary society, is the first task. Against a backdrop painted in this introductory chapter of a world immersed in spectacular but mostly mindless drama and driven to perform (or else), I go on to create a “counterperformance in curriculum” (see Blackadder, 2003, and this work, pp. 19–20). This counterperformance is rooted in the fields of aesthetic philosophy and performance theory, each of which brings deeper understandings of the nature and significance of spectatorship.
To begin, I offer a chapter-by-chapter overview of this collection in a way similar to that of a play synopsis offered in a theatre program, to assist a theatregoer through the transition from actual to possible worlds.
The curriculum theory of AIP is rooted in the theories of contemporary aesthetic philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989), Paul Ricoeur (1989), Paul Thom (1993), and James Young (2001). These philosophers delineate the qualities of spectatorship in live performance: presence; witness; play; sharing; self-forgetfulness; continuity of self, playing attention, interpretation, and criticism; and opening to the world. Audience in the performing arts is distinct from general discussions of audience in aesthetics and thus requires a particular understanding of how this type of audience functions in the process of experiencing performance. Traditional aesthetic philosophy tends to focus on the primary work of art—the dramatic text, the musical score—and positions the performance of the work as secondary to the text, an interpretation only, not a work of art in itself. The performing arts remain an under-examined area of aesthetics, and so it becomes necessary to adapt more general aesthetic theories to fit the emerging curriculum model of audience education and aesthetics in performance. As shall be suggested in chapter 1, performance challenges audiences in ways that expand horizons of expectations, develop perceptual abilities, and potentially create change in both cognitive and affective ways.