The Pleasure of the Drama: A New Materialist Approach to Boundaries in Dorothy Heathcote's Conventions for Dramatic Action

Abstract

This article investigates how drama organises bodies in space to generate human subjectivity that is open to ‘other’ experience, while safeguarding participants’ imaginative and emotional wellbeing. The paper explores how the boundaries at the Theatre of Dionysus distributed power between stage and auditorium by giving the active gaze to the auditorium and the active voice to the stage, so that each side needed the perspective of the ‘other’ to function as a unity. The paper uses Bruno Latour’s critique of Modernism to argue that when modernist theatre practitioners dismantled this hybrid structure, they took the vitality of ‘other’ experience—the pleasure of the drama—out of their performance practices. When Dorothy Heathcote liberated drama from the constraints of the theatre space by taking it into the classroom, many took her work to be part of poststructuralism’s broader, boundary-breaking, revolution. But the paper argues that this understanding fails to grasp the dramatic integrity of Heathcote’s practice, resulting in applied theatre practices that ignore the validity of ‘other’ experience; or that blur boundaries between self and other to risk confusion, coercion, and psychological harm. The paper offers practitioners interested in ethical relationality a new materialist reading of Heathcote’s ‘33 Conventions for Dramatic Action’ (1980/2015). One which shows how contemporary practitioners like Tim Taylor maintain Heathcote's boundaries; to allow postcolonial schoolchildren, to quote Donna Haraway, to 'take difference seriously'.