Method and madness: de/colonising scholarship and theatre research with participants labelled mad
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469566 , vital:77268 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2017.1326805
- Description: This article discusses a long-term theatre project that I run with mental health care users and staff in a forensic psychiatric hospital in South Africa. I argue that the values underpinning the project align with those of Mad Studies, a field that is located as an emerging academic discipline within disability studies. The article seeks to problematise the conceptual frameworks available to a researcher working within theatre and disability in the global South. As a researcher, I may choose the framework of ‘madness’ as part of a social justice research stance. However, in a South African context of little to no psychiatric survivor/consumer activism, this may not in any way be adopted, understood, or claimed by any of the people who suffer ‘madness’ and with whom I create theatre. This article seeks to provoke questions around applied theatre disability research and the potential for research practices to de/re colonise.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469566 , vital:77268 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2017.1326805
- Description: This article discusses a long-term theatre project that I run with mental health care users and staff in a forensic psychiatric hospital in South Africa. I argue that the values underpinning the project align with those of Mad Studies, a field that is located as an emerging academic discipline within disability studies. The article seeks to problematise the conceptual frameworks available to a researcher working within theatre and disability in the global South. As a researcher, I may choose the framework of ‘madness’ as part of a social justice research stance. However, in a South African context of little to no psychiatric survivor/consumer activism, this may not in any way be adopted, understood, or claimed by any of the people who suffer ‘madness’ and with whom I create theatre. This article seeks to provoke questions around applied theatre disability research and the potential for research practices to de/re colonise.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Applied theatre research. Radical departures
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468527 , vital:77087 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1085255
- Description: This book is part of the Applied Theatre series, which presents scholarship on different foci around applied theatre practices. The seven case studies of how applied theatre practices can be framed as research methodologies are practically and theoretically useful for students, practitioners and scholars engaged in community-driven, socially engaged theatre work. The book argues a particular approach to arts based research which offers alternatives to traditional research tools such as ‘the interview’ (which often result in participants giving a researcher what they think they want to know or hear) and provides a range of aesthetic research methodologies that aim to harness the language of theatre and performance as an empowering and resistant research tool.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468527 , vital:77087 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1085255
- Description: This book is part of the Applied Theatre series, which presents scholarship on different foci around applied theatre practices. The seven case studies of how applied theatre practices can be framed as research methodologies are practically and theoretically useful for students, practitioners and scholars engaged in community-driven, socially engaged theatre work. The book argues a particular approach to arts based research which offers alternatives to traditional research tools such as ‘the interview’ (which often result in participants giving a researcher what they think they want to know or hear) and provides a range of aesthetic research methodologies that aim to harness the language of theatre and performance as an empowering and resistant research tool.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Disturbing masculinity: gender, performance and ‘violent’ men
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468537 , vital:77088 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1011859
- Description: This article examines a theatrical and social performance by focusing on an open-air festival where a prison theatre group performed. It explores the interplay between the sanctioned violence of the state, in which I became implicated, and the use by the actors of gender performances to disturb identity construction. I explore the ways in which an artistic project that I thought of as resistant to hierarchies and the status quo can suddenly become part of the hegemony and related violence it seeks to resist. The article frames the analysis of the performances by connecting theories around the politics of recognition with applied theatre processes. I argue that the theatre group used performance to negotiate an alternative politics of recognition. I also draw on Judith Butler's use of Hannah Arendt's scholarship on the political importance of appearance to locate the personal and political significance of bodily presence and visibility in public spaces. I suggest that the processes involved in creating theatre and performances, rather than the issue or content of the theatre, are personally and politically significant, particularly in negotiating an alternative identity and recognition for black men labelled violent.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468537 , vital:77088 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2015.1011859
- Description: This article examines a theatrical and social performance by focusing on an open-air festival where a prison theatre group performed. It explores the interplay between the sanctioned violence of the state, in which I became implicated, and the use by the actors of gender performances to disturb identity construction. I explore the ways in which an artistic project that I thought of as resistant to hierarchies and the status quo can suddenly become part of the hegemony and related violence it seeks to resist. The article frames the analysis of the performances by connecting theories around the politics of recognition with applied theatre processes. I argue that the theatre group used performance to negotiate an alternative politics of recognition. I also draw on Judith Butler's use of Hannah Arendt's scholarship on the political importance of appearance to locate the personal and political significance of bodily presence and visibility in public spaces. I suggest that the processes involved in creating theatre and performances, rather than the issue or content of the theatre, are personally and politically significant, particularly in negotiating an alternative identity and recognition for black men labelled violent.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Narrative/therapy and an apartheid story: audiences, ethical witnessing
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469601 , vital:77271 , ISBN 9781443862363
- Description: This book explores the use of drama or theatre texts about, as ap-proaches to, or methodologies for, interventions in conflict and post-conflict contexts. It maps the role of drama/theatre in the centre and in the aftermath of overt and direct conflict, traces how the relation-ship between drama/theatre and conflict is shaping the socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic landscapes of these contexts, and engages with drama/theatre as methodologies to address or forge new rela-tionships around conflict. As such, it deals with the transformative abilities of drama/theatre in contexts where conflict or violence is overt or covert in its effects, expressions and modes of social control in a range of geographical constituencies. It includes chapters pre-dominantly from South Africa, but also from rural Nigeria and New Zealand, reflecting work on conflict in prisons, tertiary and secondary education, cities, villages and families. It also contains two new origi-nal play scripts, both resulting in acclaimed performances: Hush, on family violence in New Zealand, and The Line, on xenophobia in South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469601 , vital:77271 , ISBN 9781443862363
- Description: This book explores the use of drama or theatre texts about, as ap-proaches to, or methodologies for, interventions in conflict and post-conflict contexts. It maps the role of drama/theatre in the centre and in the aftermath of overt and direct conflict, traces how the relation-ship between drama/theatre and conflict is shaping the socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic landscapes of these contexts, and engages with drama/theatre as methodologies to address or forge new rela-tionships around conflict. As such, it deals with the transformative abilities of drama/theatre in contexts where conflict or violence is overt or covert in its effects, expressions and modes of social control in a range of geographical constituencies. It includes chapters pre-dominantly from South Africa, but also from rural Nigeria and New Zealand, reflecting work on conflict in prisons, tertiary and secondary education, cities, villages and families. It also contains two new origi-nal play scripts, both resulting in acclaimed performances: Hush, on family violence in New Zealand, and The Line, on xenophobia in South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
Dramatic spaces in patriarchal contexts: Constructions and disruptions of gender in theatre interventions about HIV
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469555 , vital:77267 , https://www.proquest.com/openview/93d2aa0dfa29d4a6e6329d9e41808447/1?pq-origsite=gscholarandcbl=51375
- Description: Ca n t h e a t r e m a k e a d i f f e r e n c e , and if so, how? The research on which this essay was partly based intended to show how discrete moments of engaging young people through theatre can catalyse them into questioning gendered assumptions which drive mythologies, stigmas, and prejudices relating to HIV. This is based on my belief as a practitioner that applied-theatre approaches can create potentially transgressive spaces, a series of artistic transformations, where questions about entrenched stories and identities can be asked – particularly about what it might mean to be a man or a woman in an age of HIV. Jonothan Neelands has framed the overriding, nagging question I have: “What is more difficult to know is whether these artistic transformations can be said to also affect the broader socio-cultural domain.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469555 , vital:77267 , https://www.proquest.com/openview/93d2aa0dfa29d4a6e6329d9e41808447/1?pq-origsite=gscholarandcbl=51375
- Description: Ca n t h e a t r e m a k e a d i f f e r e n c e , and if so, how? The research on which this essay was partly based intended to show how discrete moments of engaging young people through theatre can catalyse them into questioning gendered assumptions which drive mythologies, stigmas, and prejudices relating to HIV. This is based on my belief as a practitioner that applied-theatre approaches can create potentially transgressive spaces, a series of artistic transformations, where questions about entrenched stories and identities can be asked – particularly about what it might mean to be a man or a woman in an age of HIV. Jonothan Neelands has framed the overriding, nagging question I have: “What is more difficult to know is whether these artistic transformations can be said to also affect the broader socio-cultural domain.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
The role of theatre and embodied knowledge in addressing race in South African higher education
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469590 , vital:77270 , https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.593620
- Description: This article examines the role of theatrical performance as a means of addressing the embodied and spatio-temporal manifestations of race and racism within South African higher education. As part of Jansen's proposal for a post-conflict pedagogy in South Africa, the article argues for the development and inclusion of embodied knowledges as an appropriate means of addressing issues of diversity and social transformation on South African campuses. Through a case study of one theatrical production aimed at tackling issues of diversity with incoming first year students at Rhodes University, it is argued that it was the embodied processes that the student performers in the production did that enabled them to interrogate the complexities of power and identity. The article suggests a move from intellectualised and abstracted engagements with race towards pedagogical methods that involve embodiment that, in this case, facilitated significant shifts in thinking about race and racial privilege amongst white students.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469590 , vital:77270 , https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2011.593620
- Description: This article examines the role of theatrical performance as a means of addressing the embodied and spatio-temporal manifestations of race and racism within South African higher education. As part of Jansen's proposal for a post-conflict pedagogy in South Africa, the article argues for the development and inclusion of embodied knowledges as an appropriate means of addressing issues of diversity and social transformation on South African campuses. Through a case study of one theatrical production aimed at tackling issues of diversity with incoming first year students at Rhodes University, it is argued that it was the embodied processes that the student performers in the production did that enabled them to interrogate the complexities of power and identity. The article suggests a move from intellectualised and abstracted engagements with race towards pedagogical methods that involve embodiment that, in this case, facilitated significant shifts in thinking about race and racial privilege amongst white students.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
‘Now we are real women’: playing with gender in a male prison theatre programme in South Africa
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469579 , vital:77269 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2013.787262
- Description: The use of sexual violence as a means of power and control within the South African prison system has been well documented. Sexual violence is intimately linked to the gendering of roles, such that rape and coercive sex is used as a brutal means of imposing a feminised identity; a violent enactment of who penetrates and who gets penetrated. Within this context, this article aims to examine both the performative and performed notions of gender and sexuality in relation to a prison theatre project located in a medium-security male prison in South Africa. I situate myself as a white feminist working within a black, all-male context, and examine moments from our theatre-making when men assumed feminised or female roles, and gender was actively and deliberately played with in an uncensored, open way. This article aims to analyse the relationship between the deliberate performance choices within the theatrical frame and the performative notions of gender and sexuality that are played out external to the theatrical moment. I question when and how prescribed gender scripts that dictate an aggressive and often violent masculinity might simultaneously be enacted and violated through theatrical performance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2013
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/469579 , vital:77269 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2013.787262
- Description: The use of sexual violence as a means of power and control within the South African prison system has been well documented. Sexual violence is intimately linked to the gendering of roles, such that rape and coercive sex is used as a brutal means of imposing a feminised identity; a violent enactment of who penetrates and who gets penetrated. Within this context, this article aims to examine both the performative and performed notions of gender and sexuality in relation to a prison theatre project located in a medium-security male prison in South Africa. I situate myself as a white feminist working within a black, all-male context, and examine moments from our theatre-making when men assumed feminised or female roles, and gender was actively and deliberately played with in an uncensored, open way. This article aims to analyse the relationship between the deliberate performance choices within the theatrical frame and the performative notions of gender and sexuality that are played out external to the theatrical moment. I question when and how prescribed gender scripts that dictate an aggressive and often violent masculinity might simultaneously be enacted and violated through theatrical performance.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2013
Writing and performing change: the use of writing journals to promote reflexivity in a Drama Studies curriculum
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468549 , vital:77089 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2007.9687857
- Description: What is the role of Drama Studies within the university? What is ‘the university’ and what purpose does it serve? Curzon-Hobson (2002: 181) maintains that ‘if one is to claim anything about the essential nature of the roles or values underpinning higher education, it can only be that it has become a site of increasing flux, ambiguity and inconsistency’. The very concept of ‘university’ and ‘academic knowledge’ has radically shifted with the development of postmodern thinking. ‘The notion of authoritative knowledge has been permanently undermined, for a postmoderist perspective suggests that all knowledge claims are local, partial and contextually specific’ (Luckett 2001: 54). Globally, universities are increasingly required to justify their existence, and we are witnessing a move towards ‘performativity’ (Lemmer 1998), as ‘disciplines are called upon to demonstrate their use-value in the global market’ (Barnett 2000b: 257). The South African context is no different. If, as many scholars have argued, the function of higher education has shifted so that the valued product of a university degree is not so much the quality of learning but the qualification gained (Race 1999), what is the place of the transient abstract texts of the discipline of Drama?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2007
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/468549 , vital:77089 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2007.9687857
- Description: What is the role of Drama Studies within the university? What is ‘the university’ and what purpose does it serve? Curzon-Hobson (2002: 181) maintains that ‘if one is to claim anything about the essential nature of the roles or values underpinning higher education, it can only be that it has become a site of increasing flux, ambiguity and inconsistency’. The very concept of ‘university’ and ‘academic knowledge’ has radically shifted with the development of postmodern thinking. ‘The notion of authoritative knowledge has been permanently undermined, for a postmoderist perspective suggests that all knowledge claims are local, partial and contextually specific’ (Luckett 2001: 54). Globally, universities are increasingly required to justify their existence, and we are witnessing a move towards ‘performativity’ (Lemmer 1998), as ‘disciplines are called upon to demonstrate their use-value in the global market’ (Barnett 2000b: 257). The South African context is no different. If, as many scholars have argued, the function of higher education has shifted so that the valued product of a university degree is not so much the quality of learning but the qualification gained (Race 1999), what is the place of the transient abstract texts of the discipline of Drama?
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2007
Writing, identity, and change : a narrative case study of the use of journals to promote reflexivity within a Drama Studies curriculum
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Drama -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa Drama in education Scholarly publishing Academic writing Reflection (Philosophy) Playwriting
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1845 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004384
- Description: The study adopts a case study examination of three student reflective joumals written about class and field based applied Drama experiences over one year. The journals were written as part of a curriculum outcome to develop reflective practice, for one Drama Honours paper (Educational Drama and Theatre) at Rhodes University Drama Department, South Africa. Based on a narrative inquiry approach, the study documents the changes in identity, discourse, and representation of self and other, which emerge through the journal writing process. The research analyses how identities are constructed through reflective writing practices, and how these identities might relate to the arguments for the development of reflexivity. The development of reflexivity is seen as integral to contemporary educational policies associated with lifelong learning, and the skills required of graduates in South Africa's emerging democracy. These policies centre on means of preparing students for a world characterised by change and instability, or what Barnett (2000) has termed a "supercomplex world". The research findings suggest that journal writing within a Drama Studies curriculum, allows students to construct subjectivities which support Barnett's claim that "the main pedagogical task in a university is not that of the transmission of knowledge but of promoting forms of human being appropriate to the conditions of supercomplexity" (Barnett, 2000b: 164). In addition, the development of different writing genres within a Drama Studies curriculum allows students to develop disciplinarily relevant ways of discussing and researching artistic processes and products. A reflective journal is a potential site for students to interrogate and construct emerging identities which enable them to negotiate diversity, thus preparing them for their lives beyond the university.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
- Authors: Sutherland, Alexandra
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Drama -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa Drama in education Scholarly publishing Academic writing Reflection (Philosophy) Playwriting
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1845 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004384
- Description: The study adopts a case study examination of three student reflective joumals written about class and field based applied Drama experiences over one year. The journals were written as part of a curriculum outcome to develop reflective practice, for one Drama Honours paper (Educational Drama and Theatre) at Rhodes University Drama Department, South Africa. Based on a narrative inquiry approach, the study documents the changes in identity, discourse, and representation of self and other, which emerge through the journal writing process. The research analyses how identities are constructed through reflective writing practices, and how these identities might relate to the arguments for the development of reflexivity. The development of reflexivity is seen as integral to contemporary educational policies associated with lifelong learning, and the skills required of graduates in South Africa's emerging democracy. These policies centre on means of preparing students for a world characterised by change and instability, or what Barnett (2000) has termed a "supercomplex world". The research findings suggest that journal writing within a Drama Studies curriculum, allows students to construct subjectivities which support Barnett's claim that "the main pedagogical task in a university is not that of the transmission of knowledge but of promoting forms of human being appropriate to the conditions of supercomplexity" (Barnett, 2000b: 164). In addition, the development of different writing genres within a Drama Studies curriculum allows students to develop disciplinarily relevant ways of discussing and researching artistic processes and products. A reflective journal is a potential site for students to interrogate and construct emerging identities which enable them to negotiate diversity, thus preparing them for their lives beyond the university.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2005
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