Archiving and reporting on the arts is just as important as the execution of artistic practice by itself.
The archival and recording of theatrical work may not be a part of creating the actual work, but it makes sure that theatrical happenings live beyond their ephemerality.
Careful recording and detailed reflections are extensions of the creative process behind any performance, educational program or workshop, and can become valuable learning resources for the entire field.
At TEFO, we’ve always been thinking about how to fulfill our responsibility to develop ourselves as a networking and consulting organization for other practitioners in this field, and we hope that the principle of “Shared Knowledge” can continue carrying us forward in this work.
Thus, we are continually working to strengthen our online database’s ability to gather, organize and preserve applied theatre practice here in Hong Kong, so that our field’s research, records and archives can inspire present and future generations of applied theatre practitioners.
Please note that our English database is still under construction, and there may not be as much content as our Chinese database. For more resources, please visit the Chinese version of our website.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Conference 2015 Undercurrents: Unearthing Hidden Social and Discursive Practices | DaTEAsia Vol. 5
I was propelled to review the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Conference 2015 partly because of my trainings in both cultural studies and drama education, and partly because of the few amazing drama and theatre works presented in the conference.
This fifth IACS Conference was organized by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society in collaboration with University of Indonesia and Airlangga University. The three-day conference drew together more than 350 scholars and practitioners from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan to share their practices and to discuss and analyze urgent issues emerging in Asia.
Story, Play and Enchantment: The Importance of Drama for Children in the Early Years of Education | DaTEAsia Vol. 5
This article is based upon a keynote address I was invited to give at the “International Conference for Drama Education for Young Children” which took place at Nanjing Normal University in June, 2014. In addressing the theme of the conference – Drama, Dream and Children – I chose to refer to two practical examples. My intention was to provoke some thinking about specific ways that drama can contribute to children’s social, moral and language learning, not in any exhaustive way but by drawing attention to some important considerations. In particular I wished to focus on the kind of drama work young children enjoy and are capable of and the crucial role of pedagogy in enabling this to happen.
Launching into Drama as a Pedagogy of Hope | DaTEAsia Vol. 4
The presentation draws on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of hope (1992) and his belief that we need hope in the way “a fish needs water”. In this book Freire charges us with the task to “unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be”. Living through the first part of the 21st century has included us in many experiences that we may consider challenges to hopefulness. Madonna proposes drama as a pedagogy of hope and suggests our role, today and tomorrow, is to work in drama alongside our students to imagine, to hope, to empathise, and attempt to understand ourselves and others.
Entangled Identities: Drama as a Method of Inquiry｜DaTEAsia Vol. 4
This paper tells the story of using process drama to “create spaces to encourage multicultural conversations” in response to the “ever increasing globalisation of education”. A little over ten years ago Ackroyd and Pilkington redesigned and implemented a drama work, the purpose of which was to provide a drama for children to challenge essentialist assumptions and actively construct their own identities in the UK. Following the work of Ackroyd and Pilkington, the purpose of this study was to use drama as method to generate data through exploring and listening to children in a postcolonial situation. I tell this methodological story drawing on Clandinin and Connelly’s three dimensional inquiry space as a framework and weaving the children’s small stories throughout as they travelled with me; in and out of a fictive world.
Learning to Write Critically: Drama as Pedagogy and the Implications for Cultural Criticism｜DaTEAsia Vol. 3
This paper analyzes the role and use of drama in engaging students with the work of cultural criticism, as it is practised in the educational settings of critical writing under the Liberal Studies curriculum within Hong Kong senior secondary schools. Drawing on action research conducted at the site of a local secondary school, we explore the pedagogic potentials of dramatic intervention for the exercise of cultural analysis and critical writing in class, and examine students’ dialogic thinking, engagement and communication among themselves, and with their target readers outside of the classroom. By mediating the process of critical composition we review the multiple dimensions and uses of criticism in the pedagogic space opened for and through writing. At the end of this experimental study on the work of drama in cultural criticism as writing, we discuss the implications such pedagogy may have for critical writing education at schools.
A Preliminary Inquiry into the Theory of Applied Drama｜DaTEAsia Vol. 3
Applied theatre has been widely articulated and performed in Taiwan in recent years. Several advocates and participants acknowledge theatre efficacy in terms of its capability to relate to and even create a dialogue with real life. Accordingly, this paper has three purposes: firstly, to grasp the construct of applied theatre through a literature review of the definitions, descriptions, and interpretations by relevant institutes, practitioners and scholars; secondly, where the impact and efficacy of theatre practices is concerned, to consider the nature of theatre so as to lay the theoretical foundation for applied theatre; lastly, to reflect upon the challenges and possibilities of applied theatre.
