Women and Creativity: Networking Through Drama

Abstract

As opposed to other subjects in the Arts and Social Sciences, there does not seem to have been the same extensive questioning of universal assumptions about human behaviour and emotions within Drama as an academic discipline. To some extent, a belief in a common universality of human experience has its roots in modern acting practice, particularly with the widespread application of rehearsal exercises developed from the work of Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski. Here, through a long process of improvisation based on imaginative, emotional recreation, it is assumed that the actor can enter fully into a character that, in terms of its cultural background, is perhaps very different from her/his own, that experience is somehow universally translatable. In avant‐garde theatre, too, interculturalist practices (for example, the borrowing of oriental ritual patterns and the use of multi‐ethnic casts in the work of practitioners such as Eurgenio Barba, Peter Brook and Richard Schechner) have led to a homogenising, and in many cases distinct westernising, of individual cultural behaviours.