Drama Worlds

Drama Worlds examines the complex improvised event called process drama and identifies it as an essential part of today's theatre. Cecily O'Neill considers process drama's sources and its connections with more familiar kinds of improvisation: the texts it generates, the kinds of roles available, its relation to its audience and dramatic time, and the leader's function in the event. She provides examples of several process dramas and identifies dramatic strategies and characteristics. The explicit associations between theatre form and process drama make O'Neill's approach accessible and its purposes and possibilities easy to understand, particularly to those working in actor training and theatre. Teachers and directors alike will discover effective ways of initiating and maintaining the drama world, achieving a significant dramatic experience for all participants.

One of the greatest dramatists of all time, Shakespeare, recognized that dramatic action was not limited to the stage. Now, in Drama and Intelligence, a work firmly rooted in developmental drama, Richard Courtney is the first to examine dramatic action as an intellectual and cognitive activity. Courtney explores the nature of those experiences we live "through" and which involve us in what is termed "as if" thinking and action.

Interactive drama is more than just a new breed of entertainment software. As different research projects have shown, these systems can also be used for pedagogical and therapeutic purposes. The goal of these systems is to teach sophisticated problem solving skills by allowing the user to interact with compelling stories that have didactic purpose.One of the main attractions of narratives, independent of the medium in which they are presented, is that they elicit emotional response in their audiences. They have an affective impact and only engineers and authors who understand how the emotion system works can create an engaging story world. This work proposes that an interactive drama based on a model of the user’s affective state should be able to provide a truly immersive user experience.It becomes evident that research on interactive drama technology, especially with emphasis on affective modelling, is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour that draws - and has to draw - from many different disciplines.

The Routledge Companion to Drama in Education is a comprehensive reference guide to this unique performance discipline, focusing on its process-oriented theatrical techniques, engagement of a broad spectrum of learners, its historical roots as a field of inquiry and its transdisciplinary pedagogical practices. The book approaches drama in education (DE) from a wide range of perspectives, from leading scholars to teaching artists and school educators who specialise in DE teaching. It presents the central disciplinary conversations around key issues, including best practice in DE, aesthetics and artistry in teaching, the histories of DE, ideologies in drama and education, and concerns around access, inclusivity and justice. Including reflections, lesson plans, programme designs, case studies and provocations from scholars, educators and community arts workers, this is the most robust and comprehensive resource for those interested in DE’s past, present and future.

In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World—one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom. Audiences in London eagerly watched the royal slave, Oroonoko, tortured on stage, while audiences in Charleston and Kingston were forbidden from watching the same scene. Audiences in Kingston and New York City exuberantly participated in the slaying of Richard III on stage, enacting the rise of the "people," and Native American leaders were enjoined to watch actors in blackface "jump Jim Crow." Dillon argues that the theater served as a "performative commons," staging debates over representation in a political world based on popular sovereignty. Her book is a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.