Session Information
29 SES 01 A, Theatre and drama techniques in educational research
Paper Session
Contribution
In April 2023, a new edition of the prestigious theatre festival Theatertreffen der Jugend opened in Berlin. Seven youth theatre productions invited from various regions of Germany were presented to an international audience of theatre practitioners and experts – the topics ranged from feminism and far-right populism to sustainability (Berliner Festspiele, 2023). Within this, almost every theatre production dealt in some way with social transformation processes through and with digital media technologies. Thus, a trend became apparent that can currently be observed throughout the entire European theatre landscape: 'The digital' is finding its way into theatre (Leeker et al., 2017).
However, it is not self-evident what is understood as 'the digital' in theatre. While some discourse positions understand 'the digital' as playing with technologies on stage, others locate it, for example, in a certain aesthetic or in the lifeworld of the performers (Traulsen and Büchner, 2022). One reason for this diversity of interpretations is our social condition, which can be understood as postdigital. In this postdigital condition (Jandrić et al., 2023; Macgilchrist, 2021), digital technologies have become an integral part of our everyday lives that an ontological distinction between digital/analogue or online/offline no longer seems meaningful (Ralston, 2023). The growing field of postdigital studies aims to analyse these complex entanglements to understand "human relationships to technologies that we experience, individually and collectively" (Jandrić et al., 2018: 896). Following this, a close look at educational contexts has been initiated recently (Fawns, 2019; Jopling, 2023) which also affected arts education research by asking how digital technologies affect contemporary arts as well as students’ lives and learning (Jörissen, 2020).
Within this discourse, theatre in education seems to be a prolific object of analysis, as it bears "the potential to experience and understand digitalization more comprehensively in the context of aesthetic processes and performances than would be possible with purely cognitive means" (Jörissen and Unterberg, 2019: 8, transl.). Thereby, German school theatre plays a unique role in the European arts education, as it is institutionally established as an almost nationwide school subject with a high degree of student participation regarding creative and thematic codetermination in the production of scenes and performative practices (Kup, 2019).
An analysis of school theatre productions can – according to the basic premise of this paper – reconstruct the meaning-making and self-positioning practices of their young performers concerning the topic of the performance as well as their attitudes and affects towards 'the digital' itself. For this analysis, adopting a sociomaterial perspective appears particularly fruitful, as it, like postdigital theory, posits a fundamental interweaving of digital and non-digital phenomena (Selwyn, 2023). In this way, the perspective decentralises human agency and understands social and technological actions as co-constitutive (Gourlay, 2021).
Accordingly, our paper asks, firstly, how 'the digital' is produced performatively and aesthetically in German school theatre productions at the Theatertreffen der Jugend?; and secondly, which of the performers evaluations and positionings towards the postdigital condition can be reconstructed? In this way, we aim to precisely describe postdigital performance strategies in contemporary youth theatre, to improve the conceptualization of postdigital theatre in education (Büchner and Traulsen, 2021). Furthermore, our paper aims to ascertain knowledge about how young participants in arts education take a stance towards the postdigital condition. Although the empirical investigation of this paper is situated in Germany, the research object and its analysis extend beyond this scope and hold significance for the broader European arts education discussion, as the lived experiences of adolescents and postdigital trends like social media or the datafication of daily life transcend regional and national boundaries.
Method
In order to investigate our research questions, two performances of German school theatre were analysed. Both performances took place at the Theatertreffen der Jugend 2023 – a national youth theatre festival funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. With its focus on being "a place of learning where young theatre makers can negotiate their working methods and […] are encouraged in their individual, artistic forms of expression" (Berliner Festspiele, 2023), rich insights into current trends of the European youth theatre scene can be gained. As the festival can be defined as a place where current discourses on youth theatre and theatre in education condense, it points beyond its local situatedness and towards the general European arts education landscape. In the performance ERWIN OLAF RE:WORKS 21 students interpret pieces of the digital artwork of Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf and perform them in various scenes. This production is characterized by digital projections of these pieces, which are playfully altered by digital editing, morphing, and glitching as well as by a live DJ who controls sounds directly on stage. In the biographical performance UnGeformt seven students negotiate conflicts between them growing up and societal expectations. Determining for this play are powerful group scenes with all adolescents performing together in form of choral speaking, dancing and (inter-)acting with minimalistic requisites on stage. Video recordings of both performances were used for the analysis. For the analytical procedure, a phenomenologically oriented performance analysis was used, which allows the examination of performances in the entirety of their characteristics (Roselt, 2019). The performance analysis was expanded to include an explicitly sociomaterial perspective in order to capture the complex interplay of human and non-human actors on and off stage. Through this sociomaterial lens, theatrical effect is produced by the circulating agency of various entities that are social, technical or material in nature (Ernst, 2019). The first step of the analysis was the identification and documentation of moments in which 'the digital' was performatively or aesthetically present in the respective productions. Secondly, these moments were categorised and generalised into three different dimensions of how 'the digital' is produced. Thirdly, performative strategies were derived to substantiate the three dimensions and to capture performative characteristics of contemporary youth theatre. Lastly, hypotheses on how these strategies relate to their young performers' meaning-making and evaluation processes were generated.
Expected Outcomes
The (preliminary) sociomaterial performance analysis shows that 'the digital' is produced in both productions on three different dimensions: (1) the fundamental localisation of 'the digital', (2) the performed mediality and (3) the performance infrastructure. On each of these dimensions, different performative strategies were identified. These are understood as differently located practices on three spectrums of performative practices: 1. Localisation: exhibit <-> report 'The digital' is either exhibited on stage in the form of digital artefacts (digitally produced music, digital photo and video editing) or it is reported on from off stage experiences (personal experiences of performers in dealing with the postdigital condition). 2. Mediality: overwrite <-> reenact 'The digital' is either overwritten in its mediality on stage (performers inscribe themselves with their bodies and actions in photos and videos projected onto the stage and thus overwrite their mediality) or its mediality is reenacted on stage (performers simulate media formats such as advertising films). 3. Infrastructure: being guided <-> being accentuated 'The digital' guides the performance either very actively and governs the performance sequences (personified by the DJ and through conspicuously setting music or lighting cues) or accentuated the action sequences (through subtly setting music or lighting cues). With regard to the positioning practices of the performers in relation to the postdigital condition, a (preliminary) hypothesis can be stated: the performance strategies on the left-hand side of the three spectrums suggest a rather positivistic-affirmative attitude towards 'the digital', while the strategies on the right-hand side point to critical-reflexive perspectives. This would allow conclusions to be drawn as to how theatre in education can be considered together with knowledge practices and stance formation of its young participants. In this sense, developing and applying performative strategies is closely linked to reflecting on and forming attitudes towards the postdigital condition.
References
Berliner Festspiele (2023) Theatertreffen der Jugend. Available at: https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/treffen-junge-szene/theatertreffen-der-jugend (accessed 2 December 2023). Büchner F and Traulsen SJ (2021) ,Postdigitales Schultheater’. Einladung zur Gegenstandserkundung. Zeitschrift für Theaterpädagogik (78): 13–15. Ernst W-D (2019) Scenography and Actor-Network Theory : Analytical Approaches. London: Methuen Drama, pp. 183–197. Fawns T (2019) Postdigital Education in Design and Practice. Postdigital Science and Education 1(1): 132–145. Gourlay L (2021) There Is No ‘Virtual Learning’: The Materiality of Digital Education. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research 10(1): 57. Jandrić P, Knox J, Besley T, et al. (2018) Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory 50(10): 893–899. Jandrić P, MacKenzie A and Knox J (2023) Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives. In: Jandrić P, MacKenzie A, and Knox J (eds) Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives. Postdigital Science and Education. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 3–9. Jopling M (2023) The Postdigital School. In: Jandrić P (ed.) Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 1–6. Jörissen B (2020) Digital Nature - Wie Digitalisierung all unsere Lebensbereiche verändert. Schultheater theater:digital: 5. Jörissen B and Unterberg L (2019) Digitale Kulturelle Bildung. Bildungstheoretische Gedanken zum Potenzial Kultureller Bildung in Zeiten der Digitalisierung. KUBI Online. Epub ahead of print 2019. Kup J (2019) Das Theater der Teilhabe: Zum Diskurs um Partizipation in der zeitgenössischen Theaterpädagogik. Berlin Milow Strasburg: Schibri-Vlg. Leeker M, Schipper I and Beyes T (eds) (2017) Performing the Digital: Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures. Digital Society. Bielefeld: transcript. Macgilchrist F (2021) Theories of Postdigital Heterogeneity: Implications for Research on Education and Datafication. Postdigital Science and Education. Epub ahead of print 15 May 2021. Ralston SJ (2023) Towards a Theory of Postdigital Parity. In: Jandrić P, MacKenzie A, and Knox J (eds) Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives. Postdigital Science and Education. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 33–49. Roselt J (2019) Phänomenologie des Theaters. In: Phänomenologie des Theaters. Brill Fink. Selwyn N (2023) Afterword: So, What *Is* Postdigital Research? In: Jandrić P, MacKenzie A, and Knox J (eds) Postdigital Research: Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives. Postdigital Science and Education. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, pp. 295–298. Traulsen SJ and Büchner F (2022) ‹Postdigitales Schultheater›: Eine Kartografie zentraler Akteurinnen des Diskurses ‹Theater und Digitalität›. MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung: 331–362.
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