Habits of creativity: agency and children’s drama practice in imaginary play and elective classes

Abstract

Children engage in embodied, imaginative performance in two fundamental ways: universally in socio-dramatic imaginary play and selectively in elective performing arts classes, which, for most children who enjoy drama, happen outside the education system. In play, self-actualised, peer-to-peer agency dominates: in drama classes, agency is often asymmetrically negotiated with adults who are drama practitioners. My current research project uses qualitative methods, mainly semi-structured one-to-one interviews, to explore the phenomenological insights of children into the tension between creative agency and collective creativity and how the fluidity between play and structured drama offers children the potential to mitigate this tension. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the concept of habitus as a reference point, I examine how children’s creative habits forged in play, such as the heavily agentic elements of liminality, roleplay and transformation together with a playful, prosaic capacity for productive flow that marginalises ‘failure’, can form a productive congruence with structured drama. Just as the theory of practice emphasises agency as a dynamic, action orientated process, I find that children’s creative cultures frame agency as a matrix of continual negotiations which enable a robust, productive peer-to-peer dramatic creativity, but which can also accommodate a complex interrelation with asymmetric agency. In the wider theatre training context, whether for children’s classes or vocational training, a balance between respecting and enhancing the qualities and creative habits that students already have with meeting their developmental needs and wants may be beneficial in enhancing the collective creativity at the heart of theatre performance.