Writing as Performance: Using Performance Theory to Teach Writing in Theatre Classrooms
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In her 2003 Theatre Topics article "Writing Intensive Courses in Theatre," Alisa Roost compellingly argues that "[w]riting is one of the best tools we have to develop student-centered, active learning courses that combine critical thinking, student passion, and specific content into well-structured, exciting courses" (231). Two years later, in College Composition and Communication, a top journal in the composition and rhetoric field, a collective of leading composition scholars call for "a changed understanding of the relationship between performance and composition" (Fishman et al. 241). These separate thoughts on writing in theatre courses and performance in writing courses energize my enthusiasm for the potentially powerful alignment of performance and composition theory in the theatre classroom. I am a doctoral candidate in theatre and dance with a master's degree in English and seven years of experience teaching at the college level, including four years of teaching composition and one year teaching theatre history. As a performance scholar, dramaturg, and educator with a commitment to writing, I'm deeply invested in interdisciplinary work seeking to combine theory and practice at the crossroads of composition and performance. After all, how can undergraduate theatre students rigorously practice their chosen aspects of the art form without practicing the critical thinking (and in most cases, research) skills that writing requires?
Several engaging and innovative articles exist in theatre and performance studies journals and essay collections. Readily available evidence reveals a rising trend toward finding creatively rigorous uses of theatre and performance concepts to help theatre students develop writing proficiencies that heighten and complement the array of analytical, physical, other intellectually and artistically creative skill-sets requisite to serious study and practice in theatre.1 Now is an ideal time—with composition theorists increasingly open to the idea of performance's importance in the writing classroom—for theatre educators to take an even more active role in reimagining efficacious ways of bringing writing into the theatre classroom.
Recently, composition scholars have begun to ask how theatre/performance practices can inform and enrich writing pedagogy beyond simply using performance vocabulary as a metaphor for writing practices. The above-mentioned article in College Composition and Communication convinces me that a conversation is already in place in composition studies about this very question of performance and writing pedagogy's crucial points of intersection. Written in part by Andrea Lunsford, a preeminent leader in the field of composition pedagogy, "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" carefully considers the potentially profound impact that the deployment of performance techniques (not simply theatrical/performance terms) in relation to writing can have on students' abilities to write in multiple contexts for multiple audiences. Lauding the relevance of theatre to the writing classroom, Lunsford and colleagues build a convincing case that theatre and performance constitute forms of literacy that can enliven and improve students' writing skills. Encountering this article compels me to ask: How can theatre educators take up the exciting prospects that "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy" raises? How can we more actively invite writing—and composition theories—into the theatre classroom as a partner in theatre students' academic and artistic development? [End Page 139]
In this article, I consider how understanding and situating writing as performance in the theatre classroom (rather than performance as an end result of—or a way to evaluate—writing) might begin to answer questions such as these. Imagined and approached as performance, writing can encourage theatre students to explore their own fields of interest and expertise dynamically through an intersection of both artistic and intellectual channels. In the pages to follow, I will relate a somewhat failed attempt I made at integrating writing into a theatre-history classroom as an entity separate from (and only metaphorically linked to) performance. Using that experience as a springboard, I will explicate some elements of performance theory that share practical and philosophical goals with composition theory. These opportune sites of intersection will then allow me to imagine classroom exercises in which performance and writing rely on one another for their fullest investigation and expression.
