New Directions in Theatre S.

1 total work

Theatre Praxis

by Stephen Cockett, Anthony Frost, Dorinda Hulton, and Et Al

Published 30 October 1998

This collection of essays is a discourse on a variety of practices that, by recognizing their clearly rooted and often diverse ideologies, we may term "praxis". The challenge here is that no practice may claim an ideological innocence, appealing to some vague transcendental natural state of existence. Every action we take in the theatre/drama studio is informed by and informs our understanding of what we are and what we may become. One of the problems when we encounter practical work in the context of the university Drama department is its uneasy relationship with the more conventionally accepted disciplines. Often the answer has been in the form of a retreat into subjectivity and mystery denying the place of practice in the material world. Each of the essays in this volume challenges that perception, but all of them challenge it in very different ways. What they do have in common is a rejection of the idea that learning is a passive activity. Drama, the text argues, exists to draw attention to the activities of human beings through the action of women and men enacting their experiences of the world in which they live. It contends that to practise is to theorise, and to theorise is