Creativity and Drama Education

Abstract

The claim is often made that drama is a creative enterprise and that participation in drama can foster creativity. Determining whether and in what way this may be the case poses challenges, however, as the term creativity is ambiguous in several ways. For one thing, it can be applied to a number of different referents. We speak of creative persons, as in “Tom Stoppard is a creative playwright,” creative processes, as in “Tom Stoppard thinks creatively,” and creative products, as in “Arcadia is a creative play.” In addition, there is a particular ambiguity when the term creativity is applied to the arts. The arts are, by their nature, creative in the sense that they involve activities of actual creation – of paintings, music, dances, dramas, and artworks of various sorts. Thus, by engaging in the arts, one is being creative almost by definition. That cannot, however, be all that is meant by the arts being creative since it is commonly thought that some art processes and products are more creative than others and that certain ways of teaching the arts in general and drama in particular are more likely to foster creativity. We usually mean more by creativity than simply engaging in creative activities, since we distinguish among the products of these activities in terms of their creativity. Not all creations are equally creative.

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