Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre

Brief Encounters between Disciplines and Cultures: An Analysis of the Dramaturgical Quilting Bee

26 Brief Encounters between Disciplines and Cultures: An Analysis of the Dramaturgical Quilting Bee Carly Halse In 2007, the UK-based gay rights organization Stonewall published a document titled “The School Report,” designed to highlight and tackle homophobic bullying in schools. Alarmingly, it revealed that 65 percent of young lesbian, gay, and bisexual pupils had experienced homophobic bullying in their schools.1 A year later, I participated in a London-based Theatre for Social Justice Institute collaboration between Fringe Benefits, the Central School of Speech & Drama,2 and Gendered Intelligence. The Institute set out to tackle this widespread homophobic behavior and language. The participants developed the script for a “25-minute piece of theatre on LGBT-related issues” eventually titled Brief Encounters, which toured secondary schools throughout the United Kingdom.3 In the first workshop, it became evident that members of the Institute group were hugely diverse not only in terms of age, gender, physical ability, culture, and sexuality but also in terms of their various chosen disciplines.4 Facilitators, teachers, writers, actors, directors, applied theatre students, researchers, administrators, a psychologist, a legal advisor, and a vocal coach were all in attendance, along with many young people from the London area, both queer and straight. Overall, approximately fifty people participated. We were a multidisciplinary group, but what role, if any, did interdisciplinarity play in our work? Interdisciplinary work, which has been hailed as the key to solving complex research questions and issues, “occurs when the research question or problem has no compelling home discipline [and] requires the contribution of several disciplines” (Lattuca 117). The task of creating a play to address homophobic behavior in Brief Encounters 27 schools certainly presents this kind of complex challenge and would, therefore, seem to call for an interdisciplinary approach. But was that, in fact, how the project was facilitated? By analyzing some aspects of Fringe Benefits’ devising methodology, with particular reference to the London Institute, I will evaluate in this essay whether we can consider this process an example of interdisciplinarity. Additionally, I will discuss whether the intercultural transposing of this American process into a British community was embraced and effective. Interdisciplinarity in the Work of Fringe Benefits Fringe Benefits’ approach to facilitating relies on collaboration between individuals and seeks “to integrate the contributions of several disciplines” (Kaufman, Moss, and Osborn 6). Defining the group’s work as interdisciplinary can be problematic, however, simply due to the variety of meanings of “interdisciplinarity.” In order to assess the process, I will use the definition of “pure interdisciplinary form” as provided by S. R. Epton, R. L. Payne, and A. W. Pearson. The form is defined as a process in which “the elements of the task are carried out within a single organizational-unit consisting of the practitioners of the disciplines necessary for the completion of the task. The members of the unit share the responsibility for integration of individual contributions into a coherent whole” (Epton, Payne, and Pearson qtd. in Lattuca 13).Within the Institute process, there is a clear “shared space” where disciplines can contribute their varying methods, language, and knowledge toward a final project. Rather than work in groups defined by discipline, we worked as a unified group with the rules of the Institute guiding us. Democracy as Methodology Throughout the Institute, democracy was fundamental to giving voice to each individual and furthering the script. It provided a clear structure and equal opportunity for each person to put forward his or her own body of knowledge or discipline. Rather than use a hierarchical structure with a director making decisions, Fringe Benefits uses a collaborative “artistically democratic collective” (Oddey 42). Norma Bowles refers to this process as a “Dramaturgical Quilting Bee,” a phrase that denotes a multilayered, multiparticipant process that leads to a quantifiable outcome, in this case our play (16).5 Democracy is essential to developing and tailoring this “quilt.” Dudley Cocke suggests Carly Halse 28 that “the vitality of democracy itself . . . rests on the participation of not just a few, but many.” In order to achieve the goal of the Institute, a variety of individuals need to contribute their perspectives, talents, and expertise (172). By using a democratic process, participants can, from the tangled threads and scraps of historiography and knowledge offered by each individual, vote which pieces they would like to sew into a final product. A continual voting process allows the text to be tailored gradually until, theoretically, a...