Drama Education, the Body and Representation (or, the mystery of the missing bodies)

Abstract

Abstract Despite the fact that drama education relies on bodies and the body as the main means and form of mediation, there is very little in theories and ideas around drama in education which raises the body as an object of study and as a problem. This paper is concerned with raising some questions about the body in the theory and practice of drama education. In drama classrooms the body is the pre‐eminent form of representation. The ‘scripts’ of improvised drama are formed and inscribed in and by the individual and social bodies of the drama student. The body combines and orchestrates the communicative resources of speech, gesture and act. How can we begin to describe learning processes in terms of what the body signifies through speech, gesture, posture, relative positions of one body to another? In an age where there is global trade in televised bodies in places where the classroom is populated by bodies of learners who are formed in diverse cultural backgrounds, what kinds of learning happen when the...