Dramas of Persuasion: Performance Studies and Interdisciplinary Education

Eleven years ago, I was hired as the sole “theatre person” in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University of Ohio. ¹ I am, however, a performance theorist—a person trained in Performance Studies at New York University. Yes, I might direct a play from time to time or even create a performance piece, but I am primarily interested in widening students’ visions of performance. Within the academic setting, I try to show students how performance and performative thinking can illuminate complex theoretical ideas in new ways and to demonstrate how performance can become an interdisciplinary foundation for a host of intellectual issues.

In my classroom work, I seek ways to include experiential learning as an educational and intellectually rigorous process—one that can usefully operate within a variety of discourse communities. Far too often, our students come to us as passive learners, trained to submit to what Paulo Freire has called the “banking” model of education, in which instructors place their knowledge into supposedly empty student receptacles. Freire envisioned an alternative educational process founded on “ ‘the practice of freedom,’ the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (15). My work, inspired by Freire, is based on the conviction that every human being is capable of looking at his or her world in thoughtful and meaningful ways and that, given the proper tools, education can foster greater awareness.

As a theorist trained in performance studies, theatre, and anthropology, I believe that the methodological tools of performance studies analysis, combined with the experiential tools from theatre training, lead students to infinitely deeper and wider understandings of the human community. An embodied pedagogy offers opportunities for students to gain concrete experiences of their world and provides ways for them to think about that world. As Sharon Grady, a practitioner of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, observes:

[Students] may be made more acutely aware of the constructedness of what it is they are doing [in group-generated role-playing]. By contrasting roles and points of view . . . students are encouraged to reflect on their experience within the drama. Through this notion of “critical doing,” self-consciously constructed drama experiences have the additional potential to point to and expose the constructedness of both subjective experience and societal institutions in a rather unique way.

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I employ a series of classroom techniques that I’ve come to call “dramas of persuasion”—a performative and experientially based methodology that integrates theory and practice as well as the cognitive and emotional components of learning. Essentially, my techniques focus on generating kinetic experiences of the often abstract concepts about which we ask students to think, talk, and write. A unit containing readings in feminist theory, for example, may be accompanied by improvisational exercises designed to illuminate issues of power and gender. A series of readings on play may be followed by a workshop in which students actually play. My dramas-of-persuasion pedagogy thus engages both the head and the heart of students, enabling them to experience their learning within themselves.

In my university teaching, I’ve found that the necessary expressive behaviors for learning about a wide range of subjects—from history to poetry to physics to economics and beyond—already exist in the classroom. Students’ bodies contain vital tools for learning, and experiential activities simply help students to use their bodies and minds in meaningful and memorable ways. I have discovered, in using such experiential learning modes, that when students are physically engaged, deep learning occurs—a kind of learning that can activate key transformational moments. Performance theory and performative pedagogy locate and provide such learning opportunities in a broad spectrum of courses and educational settings. I’ve offered courses that examine: (a) theories of interpretation and representation; (b) comparative cultural systems of communication; (c) issues of drama and communication, with attention to the broader areas of expressive behavior, such as ritual, play, or ceremony; and (d) relationships between politics and art.

Student responses to courses with performative activities have been remarkably...