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These interactions are most often effective within the form of the performance itself (dramatizing for drama, dancing for dances, “musicking” [Small, 1998] for music, etc.) and happen in a three-part structure: preperformance, performance, and postperformance. The preperformance phase is preparatory and predictive in nature, exploring themes, issues, and ideas that will be seen onstage through group improvisation and sharing, preferably including performers as audience or coparticipants to some, or all, of this activity. The performance phase challenges students to perceive and interpret in creative and imaginative ways that highlight the importance of their presence and participation. The postperformance phase involves processes of interrogation and response, again, preferably including performers.
Finally, in chapter 6, AIP curriculum can be seen as consisting of six key qualities or characteristics. It is aesthetic, improvisatory, performative, political, social, and critical in nature. Placed within education and society as a whole, as considered in the conclusions offered in chapter 7, this curriculum offers the possibility for young people to become more efficacious and proficient, both as performers and as spectators. It also offers potential teachers of this AIP curriculum new and unique ways to interact with students, curriculum, and culture, beyond the four walls of a school, or the fourth wall of performance.
Circling back to where this study begins, the haiku suite presented in the prologue reveals my stance and bias in relation to my topic. I have what might be called a protheatrical prejudice (see Barish, 1981, on the antitheatrical prejudice) as my background and experience in theatre lead me to contend that both creating theatre and attending it are inherently educational, complex, interartistic processes that are always some kind of reflection—whether accurate or distorted, reactionary or revolutionary—of ourselves and the world we live in. While I have spent much of the past 20 years as a drama educator in both theatres and schools, I am also a practicing actor and director, and these aspects of my own experience greatly inform the writing in this collection. In addition to this, I am a lifetime theatregoer, and my love of theatre and the practice of regularly attending theatre has enriched my life and this inquiry in immeasurable ways.