Theatre as Methodology or, What Experimentation Affords us

Abstract

What would constitute a theatre methodology in social science research? Since the completion of my last study in drama classrooms in Toronto and New York schools, I have given much thought to the process of research and its relationship to the processes of improvised drama. In our collaborative qualitative research with young people in schools, we took methodological liberties. In my dictionary, a ‘liberty’ is defined in eleven different ways; my favourite is: “The ability to move without being limited by something such as tight clothing or lack of space”. In other words, we dispensed with our tight clothing, that is, a finely–tuned research question about the pedagogies of drama and their relationship to questions of community and social cohesion in heterogeneous schools, and entered into fictional worlds with youth, so that we could better understand what mattered to them and how their imaginations were engaged in being and creating in the place called school. School, as we had conceived it though, was a too– small and insignificant space. ‘Space’, as Sherene Razack (1998) has argued, “determines who belongs to the nation state and who does not” (p. 367). If space is the ultimate arbiter, as Razack suggests, it was time to use our space, to transform it, as theatre does, to examine it more closely. Like good drama practitioners, we shed the research garb at strategic moments, and instead let the engagement in the improvised moment lead us. In what follows, I will attempt to take hold of what engaging in theatremethodologically– affords the qualitative researcher.

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