The ensemble domesticated: Mapping issues of autonomy and power in performing arts projects in schools

Abstract

This article, originally presented at Discourse, Power and Resistance in April 2014, draws on my current research, within the national Shakespeare Schools’ Festival programme, exploring emerging issues of autonomy and power. Theatre education projects have been positioned as an emancipatory endeavour, often drawing on the rhetoric of ‘the ensemble’ as a pedagogic approach. Yet, as I will argue here, notions of this approach’s emancipatory potential does not always sit easily within existing normative education structures. Recent education resources, such as the Education Endowment Fund’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, suggest arts education projects can be understood as finite ‘interventions’ with a known set of outcomes. This, I want to argue, ‘domesticates’ the ensemble, flattening and masking the complexity of this approach. I suggest therefore that an ensemble-based project such as Shakespeare Schools’ Festival could be more usefully seen as a pedagogic space, which is populated, activated and made sense of in a myriad of potential ways by its participants in their particular contexts.

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