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"Master" versus "Servant": Contradictions in Drama and Theatre Education
by Shifra Schonmann
Mr Jourdain: You mean to say that when I say "Nicole, fetch me my slippers" or "Give me my night-cap" that's prose? My basic claim is that our young field—drama and theatre education—feels old. Are we being stifled by applied drama and theatre, so that it has put real obstacles in the way of broadening the horizons of the field? I know that by asking this question I risk setting myself up as a living target for all those who maintain that applied theatre is the "hot" and the appropriate concept in the field. For more than twenty-five years now, we have been working with our students in teacher education departments and with children in schools in the manner of applied drama and theatre, but we have named it differently. It is as if we had been speaking the language of applied drama and theatre for twenty-five years—and we did not know that this was the case. (It reminds me of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain who suddenly discovers that he has been speaking prose for the past forty years.) I would like to make it very clear from the outset that my claim is not against applied drama and theatre; it is a claim for another proportion (balance) between the instrumental function and the artistic-aesthetic function of our drama and theatre work in education.
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