Drama Workshop Research Articles

Behavioural and weight status outcomes from an exploratory trial of the Healthy Lifestyles Programme (HeLP): a novel school-based obesity prevention programme

ObjectivesTo assess the behavioural and weight status outcomes in English children in a feasibility study of a novel primary school-based obesity prevention programme.DesignExploratory cluster randomised controlled trial of the Healthy...

Staff's perception of abuse in healthcare: a Swedish qualitative study

ObjectiveThe study aim was to apprehend staff's perception of abuse in healthcare (AHC) after an intervention based on ‘Forum Play’, and make comparisons to preintervention interviews and interviews with male...

An enquiry of ‘Every3Days’ a drama-based workshop developing professional collaboration for women experiencing domestic violence during pregnancy in the South East of England

Objectivethis exploratory work examined and assessed the experiences of participants (n=90) using an interactive drama workshop to facilitate the planning and understanding of multiagency working around domestic violence during pregnancy. Designa descriptive research design was utilised to collect data from field observations, participant reflective feedback sheets and semi-structured telephone interviews. Participantsparticipants invited to the workshop originated from a wide range of backgrounds including health and social care, criminal justice and the third sector. All participants were invited to complete the reflective feedback evaluation form. To enhance the comprehensiveness of the enquiry, semi-structured interviews were also conducted with 10 of the participants. Findingsshared themes emerging from the data analysis included improved awareness of the consequences of domestic violence; greater understanding of multiple professional roles including the policy context and enhanced skill development. However, participants questioned the extent to which this approach impacted upon longer term practice and policy development. Key conclusionsby centring attention on the emic perspective of women themselves, the drama approach developed professional's awareness, relationships, understanding and skills. Nevertheless, drama can be an expensive education tool. It is therefore essential that further research explores the longer term impacts on practice and outcomes for women that include cost–benefit analysis.

A pilot project of school-based intervention integrating drama and language awareness.

To help immigrant and refugee adolescents experiencing a severe academic delay cope with adversity, a school-based intervention combining drama workshops and language awareness activities was piloted in two classrooms. A qualitative analysis of participant observations was performed and the Strength and Difficulty Questionnaire and its Impairment Supplement was administered before and after the intervention. The observations were carried out in two Montreal high schools serving an underprivileged neighbourhood of immigrants, involving two classrooms of underschooled adolescents (n = 27) and two classes of similarly underschooled adolescents chosen among other teachers interested in the intervention, who accepted to participate as a comparison group (n = 28). The adolescents shared their experiences of adversity and felt empowered by the workshops. Self-reported impairment decreased in the intervention groups. The protective effect of creative language activities for immigrant and refugee youth should be further investigated.

Process drama: the use of affective space to reduce language anxiety in the additional language learning classroom

This paper describes a research project designed to find out what happens when process drama strategies are applied to an advanced level of additional language learning. In order to answer this question, the author designed and facilitated six process drama workshops as part of a third-year course of Italian at a university in Brisbane, Australia. Results indicated that through the medium of role, authentic contexts and dramatic tension, participants in the study were able to engage in the target language producing more spontaneous communication. Results also revealed that the affective space generated by process drama was beneficial in reducing a degree of language anxiety in some of the participants.

Language Learning Through Socialization: DiversifiedUse of a Self-Access Center

Through the establishment of interactionally rich environments, conversation rooms and self-access centers encourage attendees to be extremely competent and resourceful language, cultural and social learners. The following paper outlines four unique yet contrasting aspects of one such self-access center—the English Resource Center at Saitama University, Japan. In the first section, a brief history of the Center is provided, outlining its socially situated learning community. The second section details a special event occurring in the Center, which prepares students for formal academic presentations in foreign institutions. The Center's Drama Workshop is discussed in the third section, focusing on the linguistic and cultural growth that participants experience as they each experiment with their own developing English identity. Finally, the fourth section quantitatively analyzes attendees' English proficiency gains by comparing examination results over time. All in all, the differing interactive contexts of this self-access learning center work together in unison, strongly supporting linguistic growth and cultural development.

The development, feasibility and acceptability of a school-based obesity prevention programme: results from three phases of piloting

ObjectivesTo develop a school-based obesity prevention programme and evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and the planned definitive cluster randomised trial.DesignThis was a three stage pilot involving six...

Evidence, theory and context - using intervention mapping to develop a school-based intervention to prevent obesity in children

BackgroundOnly limited data are available on the development and feasibility piloting of school-based interventions to prevent and reduce obesity in children. Clear documentation of the rationale, process of development and content of such interventions is essential to enable other researchers to understand why interventions succeed or fail.MethodsThis paper describes the development of the Healthy Lifestyles Programme (HeLP), a school-based intervention to prevent obesity in children, through the first 4 steps of the Intervention Mapping protocol (IM). The intervention focuses on the following health behaviours, i) reduction of the consumption of sweetened fizzy drinks, ii) increase in the proportion of healthy snacks consumed and iii) reduction of TV viewing and other screen-based activities, within the context of a wider attempt to improve diet and increase physical activity.ResultsTwo phases of pilot work demonstrated that the intervention was acceptable and feasible for schools, children and their families and suggested areas for further refinement. Feedback from the first pilot phase suggested that the 9-10 year olds were both receptive to the messages and more able and willing to translate them into possible behaviour changes than older or younger children and engaged their families to the greatest extent. Performance objectives were mapped onto 3 three broad domains of behaviour change objectives - establish motivation, take action and stay motivated - in order to create an intervention that supports and enables behaviour change. Activities include whole school assemblies, parents evenings, sport/dance workshops, classroom based education lessons, interactive drama workshops and goal setting and runs over three school terms.ConclusionThe Intervention Mapping protocol was a useful tool in developing a feasible, theory based intervention aimed at motivating children and their families to make small sustainable changes to their eating and activity behaviours. Although the process was time consuming, this systematic approach ensures that the behaviour change techniques and delivery methods link directly to the Programme's performance objectives and their associated determinants. This in turn provides a clear framework for process analysis and increases the potential of the intervention to realise the desired outcome of preventing and reducing obesity in children.

Rewriting the ‘Duchess of Malfi’

This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production. This article addresses issues of text adaptation in full-scale ESL drama production. After choosing to present Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, participants in the English Drama Workshop at Padua University set about the task of adapting the play in order to make it more suitable for a group of non-native speakers of English acting in front of an audience made up predominantly of non-native speakers. Substantial changes were made during the adaptation process: as well as cutting and simplifying the text, certain characters were eliminated while others were doubled (or rather tripled) and one scene was totally rewritten. When implementing these changes, the group had to take account of both the student-actors’ linguistic competence and the size and composition of the cast, most of the members of which were female. It is argued that text adaptation in ESL drama is not only a way of creating a more appropriate product, but also greatly enriches the process leading up to the performance. The students gained deeper insights into the text and were also able to achieve a strong sense of ownership of the final production.

El Güegüence, post-Sandinista Nicaragua, and the Resistant Politics of Dancing

Folk dance fulfills a particular function in the survival of communal memory. Community history and identity live through the animated body. But in the case of El Güegüence, Nicaragua's hybrid Spanish-Nahuatl dance-drama, many feel it is a contested tradition with a contested set of significations. Within that contestation, communal memory is fractured and ruptured in ways that produce a unique and dynamic discourse.In this paper, I will focus on Irene López's reworking of El Güegüence as the dance piece El Gran picaro. López has been criticized for altering the “authentic” dance tradition, a criticism she answers by pointing out that the original dance was lost when only the artifact of the dramatic text was preserved. López's reworking functions as collective memory and as an act of restored tradition, an invention meant to stand in for the original as faithfully as the inventor can imagine.I will also examine the redeployment of El Güegüence by groups who have embraced the figure and the act of dancing the masked drama as an expression of the subaltern, the marginalized, and the closeted minority identities within the context of the national culture, specifically Grupo Relajo, with its playful workshops built around the popular story. Ultimately, El Güegüence represents an artifact of the erasure of dance and, by extension, the indigenous body. Both López and Grupo Relajo, through their staging, resurrect the body of the indigenous Other and create a vehicle for the body to move in resistance to such erasure.

Genetic testing in a drama and discussion workshop: exploring knowledge construction

In this pilot project, drama was used to situate genetic testing in a social and cultural context – that of the family. The drama was used to stimulate discussion about social issues relating to genetic testing, such as who has the right to know the results of the test and whether participants would want to know their ‘genetic future’. A 10-minute, open-ended drama was developed as stimulus for a further 40-minute discussion-based workshop that focused on the issues that someone considering having a genetic test might face. The drama was performed to groups of 20–60 secondary school students. These larger groups were broken down into groups of four to 10 for the discussion aspect of the workshop. Seven drama workshops were delivered to 16–19-year-olds in Bristol, Reading and Southampton. A total of 240 students participated in the workshops. The project found that the drama discussion workshop format prompted students to develop their learning about the social issues surrounding genetic testing, with an increase in comprehension and scientifically appropriate use of language and concepts over the course of the workshop. The project also found students learned socially, as a group, using the discussion time to develop their arguments and scaffold knowledge with their peers on to that delivered in the workshop.

A Cage of Voices

“I have a stomach full of words, but I just can’t say them” is a statement often uttered by migrant women in contemporary China. Using this as a point of entry, this article explores the paradoxical role that the Dagongmei’s Home, a Beijing women’s organization that promotes the rights and interests of female migrants, plays in producing identities for its members and in channeling their voices into the public arena. The Dagongmei’s Home is both a site of articulation and a cage that limits and contains the marginal voices of migrant women. By “hailing” its members into subjectivity as the dagongmei (working sister), the organization empowers these women to speak in otherwise closed spaces. However, since the women can only speak as dagongmei, they end up reproducing the state’s discourse of modernization. Nevertheless, a community-based drama workshop set up by a British woman in collaboration with the Home becomes an unlikely site of resistance as migrant women break the script of strong women sacrificing for the nation’s economic development, thus doing dagongmei subversively.

Culture and Identity in Rural Africa: Representation Through Literacy

Recently throughout Africa, there has been an increase in mother tongue primary education in minority language communities. There are many reasons for justifying this innovation, one of which is that local cultures are strengthened by mother tongue literacy. This paper examines the link between literacy and culture through the outcomes of a series of drama workshops carried out in a rural school in Eritrea where mother tongue education had been introduced in 2000. By using a Freirian approach, the children were encouraged to identify and discuss the issues of most concern to them. The dramas were performed in front of the community and discussed. This enabled us to identify the choices of language that the children made, the genres that they could already use and their own attitudes to their mother tongue. We were also able to identify more clearly the nature of the link between literacy and culture and suggest possible ways in which this could be further investigated and developed.

From Play to Art—From Experience to Insight

This article investigates the role of play and playlike activities (imagination, art) in developing and using symbolic tools. We understand processes of development of symbolic tools as coordination between two types of relationships: the subject–object relationships and the subject–subject relationships. This coordination begins when a new, playlike frame of activity is introduced in the interaction. The imaginary frame of activity changes relationships between the participants. Furthermore, the imaginary activity frame may enter into interaction with the out-of-play activity frames (“reality” frames). Structures and relationships built within the imaginary frames are then used to shape the actual understanding of the world (subject–object relationship) as well as the interpersonal relationships and identities of the participants. Introduction and further development of imaginary frames is a recursive process that takes place on different but related time scales: from microdevelopment through ontogenetic development to cultural development. Our project was designed to demonstrate some of the key moments that occur in the symbolic construction, in an “untangled” manner. To that effect, we designed a drama workshop to outline and illustrate processes that take place at the point of introduction of a new, imaginary frame and at the point when this imaginary frame begins to interact with the out-of-play frames. The aim of the workshop was to magnify each stage in construction of semiotic tools by “walking” professional researchers through a series of playlike activities.

Reporting the Right Thing An Outline and Reflection on a Drama Workshop Exploring Media Bias in Reporting the News

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Performing responsibility: ethical ‘know‐how’ through drama facilitation

I explore, and reflect on, the everyday ethical practices of drama facilitation. Rather than being a set of principles I apply, ethics emerge as I respond to situations that arise in a drama workshop. Their significance calls for understanding workshop facilitation as a space of containment. This offers the possibility of transforming personal and social being through the tensions and possibilities of interactive activities and conversations. To illustrate, I reflect upon an experience in a high school where an exploration of racism led to my learning from (and through) facilitation practice. Using a hermeneutic process of interpretation and interrogation that draws on the work of German philosopher Hans‐Georg Gadamer, I explore how I moved beyond ethics to ethical know‐how.

Emotional expression and regulation in a school-based drama workshop for immigrant adolescents with behavioral and learning difficulties

The construct of emotion regulation (ER) has received considerable emphasis in developmental psychology, with growing interest in the possible association of dysfunctional ER with various forms of child and adolescent psychopathology. However, the empirical study of emotions often entails their abstraction from the immediate context – particularly, from interpersonal and social variables having a pivotal role in the origin and modulation of emotive processes. In this study we used a school-based drama intervention with special class, immigrant adolescents with behavioral difficulties as a real-life context for the study of forms of emotional expression (EE) and strategies of ER using qualitative methods of analysis. Our findings suggest some impairment in EE and ER in this study sample. In addition, we observed difficulties accessing a range of emotions appropriate to a variety of circumstances, anger being the predominantly expressed negative emotion. Hypotheses drawing on issues of immigration and marginalization were raised to explain this finding. In general, the drama process seemed to help emotional expression and awareness and to foster a transformation of emotive processes in the sense of a “collective ER.” The importance of teacher awareness of students’ dominant emotional state and its potential impact on learning was emphasized.

Connectedness and Citizenship: Redefining Social Integration

Connectedness and Citizenship: Redefining Social Integration

Du jeu des identités à la transformation de réalités partagées : un programme d’ateliers d’expression théâtrale pour adolescents immigrants et réfugiés

Migration during adolescence represents a challenge for the youth who need to simultaneously work through the multiple losses associated with the migratory journey and adapt to a young adult status. The drama workshop program described here was designed to facilitate the adjustment of newly arrived immigrant teens. The aim of the program is to make it easier for adolescents to adjust to their new environment through creative group work around identity issues. The program also seeks to improve intergroup relations in multiethnic schools. The workshops are inspired both from playback theater and from Boal's form theater which emphasizes the collective transformation of the singular experience. The qualitative assessment of the program effects on the adolescents suggests that the workshops constitute a safe space of expression, in which the team and the ritual nature of the play hold the participants. The workshops facilitate the representation of the multiplicity of values in the adolescent world and invite them to reconsider the way in which they interact, with their environment, without splitting between "us" and "them," but rather creating solidarities around issues of social justice. The workshops also address the life transformation associated both with adolescence and migration and help the elaboration of the losses linked to the migratory journey and the construction of a hybrid identity.

The Drunkard's Revenge, and: Love's Labor (review)

THE DRUNKARD'S REVENGE and LOVE'S LABOR. Adapted and directed by Sekine Masaru from William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Performed by Roma Kyogen, Japanese National Tour, 2005. This report describes the current attempts by a Japanese no expert to incorporate kyogen techniques into traditional Shakespearean and Italian comedies. Sekine Masaru, drama scholar and no master of the Kanze school, has written about the works of Yeats and Zeami, and directed no style Western drama for international students at the Yeats Summer School Drama Workshop in Sligo and the Drama Center at the University College in Dublin (Sekine 1985, 1990). In 1998, the Japan Foundation sponsored his visit to the Japanese Division of the Faculty of Eastern Studies at the La Sapienza College of the University of Rome. There he trained faculty and students to perform Boshibari (Tied to a Stick) and an adaptation of Kinoshita Junji's Yuzuru (Twilight Crane) in Italian. Since then, Sekine has been melding Italian comedy and kyogen. In 1999, he adapted Carlo Goldoni's Coffee House (1750) into kyogen style, producing it at the Drama Kan Theatre at Waseda University under the title of Wakadanna no Tobaku (The Young Master's Gambling). Around the same time he turned to Shakespearean comedies based on Italian sources, attempting to kyogen-ize them for his classes at Waseda University. Thus his work is a unique project that explores the interface of comic character type, physical theatre, and the cultural capital of Shakepeare in intercultural theatre flows. (1) Sekine returns to Rome every year, using his apartment as a kyogen training studio for Italian students majoring in Japanese studies. The students who volunteer are amateurs in drama, so, although interested in Japanese culture through Japanese animation and popular culture, they had difficulty reading and pronouncing the language. Sekine had to start by instructing them how to read the medieval kanji characters, flatten their dynamic intonation to make their Japanese more natural, and then teach them the undulating rhythms of kyogen declamation. This was the beginning of the Roma Kyogen Ichiza, or Piccola Compagnia di Roma La Sapienza. On 1-2 April 2004, Sekine produced Yopparai no Shikaeshi (The Drunkard's Revenge) and Sakai no Shonin (The Merchant of Sakai) at the Japanese Culture Center in Rome, cast with six students from Roma La Sapienza. The Drunkard's Revenge, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, was in Japanese, while The Merchant of Sakai was in Italian. In that autumn Roma Kyogen Ichiza toured the National No Theatre in Tokyo, as well as to Saitama, Wakayama, and Kyoto, producing Drunkard's Revenge for Japanese audiences. Nearly three thousand people viewed the touring performances. In March the following year, the troupe produced their new play, Koi no Honeori (Love's Labour), in Rome, touring in autumn to Fukuoka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka, Yokohama, and Tokyo. The 2,500 spectators for the autumn tour and coverage by five different television crews attest to the interest these performances generated. This review covers the 2005 Kyoto production, held at the Kongo No Theatre. The plot of Drunkard's Revenge closely follows a subplot of Twelfth Night. Drawing on some Western slapstick, yet remaining faithful to kyogen style and structure, the actors managed to create an amusing short comedy from Shakespeare. In Drunkard's Revenge, Yamashiro no Kami (the drunkard hero, equivalent to Sir Toby Belch) with his friend Noto no Kami (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), and Kaede (Maria), lady-in-waiting to Princess Ayu (Olivia), gain revenge on insults by Kinoshita Taizen (Malvolio) by having him dress in strange kimonos and engage in fights until Princess Ayu realizes the trick. The play ends with Taizen chasing Yamashiro off stage. Here we see a meeting of kyogen's tricky servants and pompous lord with Shakepeare's plot pattern, topped off by the typical kyogen ending: exit pursued by master. …