Mystery Play: Exploring Students’ Perceptions of Devising James McKinnon (bio) Genesis: Devising and Learning “Why devise? Why now?” In the decade since Theatre Topics raised these questions, they have become more urgent, especially in the context of postsecondary drama and theatre studies. Devised performance1 regularly appears in international festivals and on prominent stages, such as the National Theatre in England, and has been integrated into secondary drama curricula in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere; several universities have even begun to offer concentrations or degrees specializing in devised performance.2 As such, university drama and theatre departments cannot ignore or marginalize devising as an alternative practice; however, it is not always clear what students actually learn from it. As a relatively new field, devising literature is often preoccupied with defining its object. Discussions of the pedagogical benefits of devising often reflect a broader tendency to define it in opposition to scripted or traditional dramaturgies. Alison Oddey’s influential Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook delineates devising as “an alternative to the dominant literary tradition” (4),3 and authors since Oddey have followed her in describing devising “in terms of a response to representational theatre” and emphasizing its distinctions from the hierarchical, authoritarian, and textocentric practices of “representational” or “traditional theatre” (Perry 2011, 64).4 Devising is often portrayed as representing “artistic democracy” and offering “freedom” (Oddey 9, 4) from the “hierarchical structures of power linked to text-based theatre,” which places “the playwright and then the director at the forefront with the general objective of ‘serving the play’” (Perry 2011, 65). As a democratic process, devising is seen to promote collaborative skills, “build community, and counter individualism” (Wessels 2012, 54). Moreover, insofar as autocracy and textocentricity are as much features of traditional classrooms as of traditional theatre, Mia Perry (2011, 64–67) and others regard devising as consonant with the ideals of critical, postcritical, and feminist pedagogies. If “traditional” theatre, like Pablo Freire’s “banking” model of education, threatens to reduce student-actors to lowly drones with little to do but memorize lines and follow directions, then devising, by contrast, can liberate students from dictatorial directors and fixed texts and empower them with creative agency. As a liberatory model, devising offers students opportunities to “engage in . . . cultural production” rather than passively consuming cultural products (Schirle 99); to dispel the assumption that the teacher-director has all the answers (Ingulsrud 88); and to experience an “increased sense of ownership” and “awakening of their . . . social consciousness” (Brian 3, 7). Nevertheless, few authors investigate whether students realize these benefits, although Anne Wessels and Virginie Magnat have used the experiences of devising participants (in Magnat’s case, her own) to identify factors that cause negative outcomes.5 Crystal Brian’s otherwise inspiring analysis of a collaboration between war veterans and undergraduates working with the text of Antigone nevertheless concludes that it was “difficult” or “impossible” to evaluate “whether [devising] had any long-lasting impact on the students” (11). I argue that such evaluations are not only possible, but [End Page 181] vital. In the absence of rigorous evaluations of devised theatre as a learning activity, some authors have expressed skepticism about whether its pedagogical potential is realized in practice (Heddon and Milling 5); but most importantly, knowledge about how students experience devising can help practitioners, educators, and students define and achieve their learning objectives and align the work we do with the results we hope to achieve. This essay works toward such an assessment of devised theatre, narrowing the question “Why devise?” to “What makes, or might make, devising a valuable learning activity?” In particular, I hope to add to the growing body of literature on devising and learning a perspective that is often absent from the discussion: that of the learners. To do so, this essay investigates how eighteen undergraduate theatre majors experienced the risks and rewards of devising at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW).6 They were invited to participate in a research project documenting their process, which all of them accepted; the project was attached to THEA 301 (“Company”),7 a production course restricted to senior theatre majors at VUW. From July through October...