Performative Arts & Pedagogy: A German Perspective

Abstract

Theatre pedagogy involves professional theatre educators putting on theatre with non-professional actors, conveying to them the art of theatre both in terms of production and reception, initiating learning processes and thus enabling the development of aesthetic, social and individual skills, which include the ability to reflect on theatre education from different theoretical perspectives. This understanding of the concept is to be situated within the context of the “aesthetic turn” of the 1990s, which followed on from the dominant role that in the preceding period had been afforded to personality development, collective learning processes and the passing on of political awareness. Functional applications are not to be excluded here, such as sociocultural application, theatre for personal development processes, social interventions and foreign and second language acquisition, although the difference between the art of theatre as an aesthetic field and theatre methods as a tool used within social, mental or learning processes should still always be kept in mind. The term “applied theatre” also is appropriate in this context, whereby application is understood in terms of usefulness. Theatre educational work usually takes place within projects that aim at the presentation of the results of the working process, that is, in the form ...