"Writing for the theatre is at its best an act of transgression - and as teachers of playwrights, we should encourage our students to step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out. I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream theatre is to keep the peace. Our job, as teachers, is to encourage new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth to power. Think seriously about the word en-courage: What are we giving our students courage to do, exactly? Not just entertain. Rarely do students of drama enter the classroom with what we might call, for lack of a better term, "original minds." Surely their originality, their agency for questioning and considering, is there, but it has been dominated and subdued by a culture that amplifies individuality over community, profit over peace, property over human need. For we live in a culture that is hostile to creativity and original thought that does not serve capitalism, empire, and the most virulent by-products of those forces: racism, homophobia, classism and sexism." (Playwright Naomi Wallace delivered this paper at York St. John University in England, in collaboration with Palatine and the Center for Excellence at York St. John, in October 2007 /pdf) (via Noises off: Lessons in teaching theatre)

- See: theater

:: note :: ... a wonderful debate with many links ...

11:39:26 PM     comment []   . .    Open firefly