Dancing into a critical process drama

Abstract

This article describes the critical process drama framework and highlights its potential to disrupt the status quo through an agenda of exploration and wonder. Generated through arts-based research exploring process drama as an enactment of critical pedagogy, the cumulative case study drew upon a document analysis of Cecily O’Neill’s Seal Wife workshop and exploration of the ‘mantle of the expert’ dramatic inquiry form. Developed to enact critical process drama, six key concepts – hope, aesthetic, agency, agitation, action and ambiguity – operate as an interwoven and reflexive framework to inform drama practice. Dynamic, relational and essential, these six concepts enact the theories of critical pedagogy and process drama as dialectical, improvisational approaches committed to transformation and social justice. As educators and artists, we cannot dance forever in the imagination or plod along hopelessly in reality. Through critical process drama participants, can operate critically in new worlds and significantly between worlds. We need to travel between and transform through transitions. In the crack between the light and dark we can dance and dance and dance.