Backyards and Borderlands: Some reflections on researching the travels of adolescent girls doing drama 1

Abstract

This paper discusses an international research study that explores the way middle secondary girls manage 'girl-friendly' drama processes. This paper argues that narrative based drama methods offer girls an enactive space to explore their lives through the art form of drama whilst offering opportunities to travel through and play with the workings of culture, gender and identity. Case study narrative research in drama enables the researcher and participants to 'play in the backyard' of their own particular communities, to stage the important stories of real lives in real lived contexts. Through the processes of storying and devising we can invite the lived experiences of participants into the dramatic process and in doing so gain insights into how individuals travel through their worlds. Such an approach can affirm and celebrate the particularities of our lives. The drama classroom becomes an important site for renewal as new ways of seeing, performing and being unfold, where the boundaries between the lived and the possible are blurred, where students use the drama to play at the borderlands of identity and develop a sense of self and gender esteem. The research at the centre of this paper highlights the way dramatic process can give us the space to play in our own backyards and known worlds, whilst venturing to new lands with new vistas and possibilities.

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