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International Journal of Children’s Spirituality

Vol. 7, No. 3, 2002

Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum


JOE WINSTON
Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL. UK.
E-mail: j.a.winston@warwick.ac.uk

ABSTRACT The Ž eld of drama and moral education has been given some theoretical
attention in recent years but little if any theorising has been applied to the area of drama
and spiritual education. In UK schools, however, the spiritual education of children is seen
as one of a school’s core functions and a spiritual dimension has often been important in the
global history of drama and acting. Various and con icting deŽ nitions of spirituality and
approaches to spiritual education exist. In this article, I begin with an attempt to make
connections between these approaches and recent epistemologies of drama education. I
then outline a possible theoretical framework for deŽ ning spirituality, in uenced largely
by anthropological and cultural studies, and exemplify it by drawing upon examples
from existing practices in the Ž elds of theatre and educational drama. I then conclude
by speculating as to how these ideas might Ž nd practical expression within a drama
curriculum.

Introduction
Drama’s potential contribution to the social and moral education of children has
long been assumed in many UK schools but only recently has the nature of this
potential been systematically theorised (Winston, 1998; Edmiston,1996). Any simi-
lar attempt to theorise drama’s contribution to the spiritual curriculum faces greater
challenges. Although many RE specialists have long recognised the contribution that
arts-based approaches can make to their pedagogy (Hay [with Nye], 1998; Erricker,
2000), re ections upon the spiritual dimensions of their teaching are very rare in the
literature of drama education (see Alcock, 1992, for an exception). There are a few
published examples of lessons, particularly at primary level, that advocate the use of
drama as an aid to RE teaching but theoretical engagement with the nature of
spirituality and its role in the curriculum from a drama perspective tends to be
absent. In attempting the beginnings of such an engagement, my intention in this
article is to explore the territory from within the cultural practices of drama and the
possible epistemologies of a drama curriculum rather than to offer various drama
strategies as a methodology for RE teachers to make use of. This is not to deny the
validity of such pedagogical approaches but to afŽ rm that, as with the moral, cultural
and physical aspects of the 1988 Act, the spiritual dimension of schooling should be

ISSN 1364-436X print; 1469-8455 online/02/030241-15 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1364436022000023248
242 J. Winston

articulated throughout the curriculum; and to propose that, within such an ethos,
drama can make a unique contribution. With the planned proliferation of specialist
secondary schools in the UK, including those which intend to concentrate on the
Performing Arts, some theoretical underpinning of this nature is surely timely for
British educationalists as well as of general, international interest.

Ideology, Spirituality and Drama Education


The concept of a spiritual rather than a speciŽ cally religious dimension to schooling
was Ž rst expressed in the UK in the 1944 Education Act and was re-enforced in the
subsequent acts of 1988 and 1994. The ambiguity of the term spiritual and
the semantic and ideological debates that have surrounded it have been well
documented (see, for example, Wright, 1998; Erricker, 2000; Copley, 2000). Rather
than attempt to deŽ ne the spiritual, I shall later seek to locate it in relation to drama
practice—to Ž nd for it some conceptual space rather than to Ž x its meaning.
This cannot be done, however, without Ž rst positioning the con icting ideologies
of drama education in relation to those that have underpinned the debate on
spirituality.
In his survey and critique of contemporary spiritual education in England and
Wales, Wright (1998) concludes that, despite a wide variety of emphases, a broad
consensus currently exists both in theory and in practice as to the teaching of
spirituality. At its heart, he argues, this consensus opposes the modernist curriculum
now pervasive in UK schools, a curriculum that emphasises social utility, vocational
value and wealth creation at the expense of the emotional, spiritual and creative
needs of children. Wright points out that the inclusion of the term ‘spirituality’ in the
1988 Act provided a foothold to engage in mainstream educational debate for those
who still aspire to the now marginalised progressive/romantic view of the curricu-
lum. Allied to this Romantic position are those who enter the debate from a
postmodern perspective as each begins in opposition to the excesses and failures of
rational modernity. He states that among them: ‘There is common agreement that
the areas of human activity that re ect most accurately this spiritual dimension of
experience are those of the expressive and creative arts’ (ibid, p. 40).
According to Wright, then, there is a potential alliance between the aims of arts
education—drama included—and spiritual education when apprehended through
the ideology of romantic progressivism. Not surprisingly, perhaps, there is evidence
to support this in the writings of those drama educators who exerted most in uence
in the 1960s and 70s. Peter Slade (1954) promoted a form of child drama distinct
from adult theatre, characterised by qualities of absorption and sincerity and capable
of being ‘of exquisite beauty and … a high art form in its own right’ (ibid, p. 7). As
Lewicki states, ‘in him, issues like child-centredness, self-expression, spontaneity
found their practitioner, admirer and defender’ (Lewicki, 1996, p. 41). Under-
pinning Slade’s epistemology, as with all progressives, is the prioritisation of emotion
over reason. Also evident is the Romantic idealisation of the imagination and of
artistic expression, where aesthetic creativity triumphs over rationality as the gateway
to absolute forms of truth and reality (see Patison, 1999, p. 6). Followers of Slade
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 243

developed their own in uential forms of practice rooted in progressivism. Way
(1967) deŽ ned the purpose of educational drama in terms of human development:
transcendent terms such as concentration, sensitivity, imagination, creativity and
self-awareness, at the heart of his writing, chime readily with the current consensual
approach to spiritual pedagogy that Wright comments upon. Similarly, one can
envisage both Slade and Way nodding in agreement at the taxonomy of spiritual
values listed by Beck (1991) and Evans (1993) that include the so-called universals
of ‘awareness, wonder, gratitude, hope, energy, gentleness, basic trust, self-
acceptance’.
If later in uential theorists/practitioners such as Bolton (1979) and Heathcote
(see Wagner,1979) ushered in a more interventionist approach to drama teaching,
one which emphasised moral learning, it was still very much founded upon the
underlying spiritual agenda of progressivism. This form of drama, known as ‘drama-
in-education’ is still highly in uential and bases its practice Ž rmly in creative
improvisation and child-centred approaches with truth, authenticity and self-
expression among practitioners’ commonly stated aims. Hornbrook (1989) based
his critique of drama-in-education precisely upon this underlying progressive ten-
dency and urged a return to a form of drama teaching that recognised its cultural
heritage and found its epistemology within the traditions of theatre practice. This
response can be interpreted as in line with the modernist ideology of the National
Curriculum, an attempt to re-deŽ ne the drama curriculum in terms of visible and
rational forms of knowledge. However, it was criticised by many as a return to more
culturally conservative values, where the texts of playwrights who contribute to the
canon of high culture take curricular priority over the actual social and cultural
needs of children and young people. Such an ideology has its own spiritual subtext
and is the legacy of Matthew Arnold.
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) is generally recognized as the pivotal Ž gure in
developing the concept of the spiritual and moral importance of high culture as the
central, civilising aim of education (Collini, 1994; Copley, 2000). Arnold wrote of
the ‘inward spiritual activity’ of culture, of its power to humanise ‘… having for its
characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy’
(1960, p. 64). In his writings we Ž nd the source of the fusion of spiritual, moral and
cultural values that persists in the wording of the 1988 Act and that persists, too, in
the words of in uential conservative (as opposed to radical) critics of the current
Labour government’s modernistic tendency. Arnold’s famous dictum that education
should consist of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (cited in Collini, p. 65)
has been echoed by the ex-chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, when
criticising what he sees as the narrow utilitarian vision of New Labour.
Eagleton (1983) argues that, recognising the decline of organised religion, Arnold
essentially saw high culture as a new form of secular religion. It is certainly true that,
like Hegel, he saw a need for a general renewal of spirituality, one that would
re-connect with the populace as a source of ‘joyful and bounding emotion’. Hence
his desire for a national culture that could be accessible, shareable and common,
achievable through mass education, to ‘make the state more and more the ex-
pression … of our best self, which is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable and
244 J. Winston

contentious and ever-varying, but one, and noble, and secure, and peaceful, and the
same for all mankind’ (cited in Collini, p. 91). Such idealistic political afŽ nities
reveal the in uence of Rousseau as well as Hegel on Arnold’s thought, and, although
his legacy is embraced today more by traditionalist rather than progressive educa-
tionalists, his late Romantic aspirations often strike harmonic chords with the
current spiritual consensus. His rejection of utilitarian values, of puritanical strict-
ness in favour of Hellenistic spontaneity and enlightenment, and his overall empha-
sis on sweetness and light, on the positive force for spiritual good that engagement
with the arts can afford, are examples of this. There are profound differences,
however. He believed that the arts could fortify and console, animate and energise
through engagement with the spiritual qualities of great works rather than through
creative self-expression. In such a vision, sensitisation to the robust classics of
drama, the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare and the like are understood to be the
sources of the spiritual energies that bind us in a shared culture. According to
Arnoldian thinking, nurture into a tradition rather than liberation through self-
expression is the gateway to spiritual development.

Re-locating the Spiritual Dimension of Drama Education


The different perspectives on spirituality evident within the sphere of RE can, then,
be identiŽ ed in the Ž eld of drama education; a broadly progressive/relativist stance
is critiqued by a perspective arguing for the induction of children into a speciŽ c
tradition that embodies communal, spiritual values that are culturally learned. In the
Ž eld of drama education, however, these values remain ideologically implicit and
unarticulated, hidden within a debate that has concentrated upon cultural and
political issues rather than any spiritual dimension. In recent years, the fractiousness
that characterised this debate for much of the 1980s and early 1990s has receded as
drama educators have more and more turned to new sources of theory and new
perspectives on practice. Critical theory, post-colonial and feminist perspectives
have gained in in uence as have, in particular, anthropological and cultural theories
of theatre and performance as found in the writings of Richard Schechner, Victor
Turner and Clifford Geertz. In proposing my own taxonomy of spiritual experience
in the Table below, I have drawn largely from cultural and anthropological studies.
It is intended to act not as an authoritative list but as a working framework
illustrative of how drama and performance practice can enable spiritual experience.
Following Geertz (1993) and, to some extent, Hay [with Nye] (1998) it begins from
the premise that the propensity for spirituality, like language and play, is a human
universal, an unŽ nished part of our nature, completed only by culture. It takes note
of Wright’s argument (1996) that the contemporary debate on spiritual education
tends to emphasise its personal and inward signs as opposed to its communal and
outward signs and that this imbalance needs to be addressed. Although engaging
mainly with the experiential/expressive dimension of spirituality it also remains
aware of the need for children to know about the forms of spiritual expression
shaped by different traditions. It therefore provides room for re ection, to draw
upon knowledge as well as experience; and it concludes with a particular reference
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 245

to the darker areas of spirituality, often absent from the educational debate. The
primary job of a drama teacher is, of course, to teach drama, not RE. My hope is
that the framework offered here might indicate how the one might complement
rather than service the other.

Locating spiritual experience to inform a drama curriculum

· Spirituality implies transcendence, mystery, something beyond the purely material, the
purely here and now; heightened awareness, a sense of wonder, of ‘uplift’.
· Spiritual experiences often involve communion with ‘a spirit’, something other and
mysterious, perhaps sacred—for example shamanistic possession, poetic in-spiration,
receiving the Eucharist;
· Spiritual experiences often lead to a sense of harmony between mind and body, self and the
world, individual and community; the response may be personal (tranquillity, peace,
balance) or social (joy, laughter, dancing);
· Spirituality usually implies wisdom rather than knowledge, an ability to understand and live
with paradox and ambiguity;
· Transformation—of space, time, presence and consciousness—is often at the heart of
spiritual experience;
· Symbol and ritual are central to the communal languages of spiritual traditions and these
often involve performance;
· Spiritualities address some of the fundamental human questions that remain mysterious, that
connect with but go beyond the moral and the ethical (the deity; creation; the afterlife; why
there is grief, sorrow, loss);
· Spiritualities have a dark and uncomfortable dimension to them.

Spirituality implies transcendence, mystery, something beyond the purely material, the
purely here and now; heightened awareness, a sense of wonder, of ‘uplift’
Coles (1992) makes use of Winnicott’s concept of a ‘transitional space’ to help our
understanding of children’s articulation of spiritual concepts. Hay deŽ nes this as:
the all-important realm between illusion and reality in which many of
the most signiŽ cant human experiences, such as creative and religious
impulses, appear to Ž nd expression both in childhood and adulthood.
(op.cit, p. 46)
Coles is, however, unhappy with the term illusion to characterise spiritual experience,
tending as it does to privilege its ‘opposite’, concrete reality. It is from a similar point
of dissatisfaction that Richard Schechner critiques the western archetype of reality
when analysing the religious performance of the Ramlila in India. In contrasting
it with the eastern concept of maya-lila, a view of reality as consisting of multiple
layers made porous through play, he offers an alternative to the western either/or
dichotomy. We are mistaken if we perceive social reality as somehow objective and
immutable when it is for the most part culturally constructed and consequently open
to change. It is through play, he suggests, and speciŽ cally through performance that
we transcend one reality and enter into other possible realities. Viewed in this way,
the ‘illusion’ of theatre can be seen to provide us with spiritual experiences and
246 J. Winston

understandings that are no less real than those of everyday life, the patterns of which
are equally culturally constructed.
Such philosophical considerations and ambitious aims may at Ž rst seem somewhat
removed from the everyday commonplaces of a drama lesson. Nevertheless, drama
does provide one of the very few spaces in the curriculum for children to engage with
alternative realities, to invent, enact and re ect upon them and to become emotion-
ally engaged within them. Aristotle, the Ž rst theorist of drama, speculated upon the
mystery of theatre and how it was able to stir the emotions profoundly through
catharsis, an experience of fear and pity, woe and wonder. Similarly, the literature of
drama-in-education often displays an aspiration to guide children into experiences of
awe and wonder through a carefully structured pedagogy (e.g. Edmiston, 1996). At
primary level, teachers may concentrate on creating environments where such
spiritual experiences become possible. I recall an example from when I was a head
teacher. A Year 5 class transformed their room into another world, using lights,
music, cloth and sculpture. The teacher noticed one boy sitting quietly in a corner
at the end of the day after class had been dismissed. She read in his personal journal
the following week how he had wanted to linger in this world he had helped create
and had walked home uplifted, still imagining himself to be within it.
However, education is not simply about providing experience but about inculcat-
ing the means by which experience can be understood and articulated. We have all
perhaps experienced the power of theatre to uplift, to inspire wonder; but we come
to know through study and practice how such theatre is crafted in order to arouse
these responses. The human desire to experience transcendence and mystery can
leave us vulnerable and the story of the Nine o’clock service in ShefŽ eld, UK, is a
recent, salutary reminder of this [1]. The appeal of the service was its theatricality
and the desire of its minister, Chris Brain, to pay £900 in order to lease the stole
worn by Robert de Niro in The Mission for his ordination service remains a telling
metaphor. The Nazis, too, knew how to use performance in order to arouse
powerful communal emotions, no less spiritual for the darkness at their heart. An
education in theatre can alert children to the ways in which powerful spiritual
feelings can be aroused within them for manipulative purposes. By asking the boy to
consider how they had brought this world into being, what speciŽ c qualities the
music and the coloured lighting added, I would argue that the aforementioned
primary teacher was empowering his spiritual experience through a pedagogy of
dramatic literacy.

Spiritual experiences often involve communion with ‘a spirit’, something other and mysteri-
ous, perhaps sacred—for example shamanistic possession, poetic inspiration, receiving the
Eucharist
In her anthropological study of the role of theatre and ritual in the lives of the Senoi
Temiar people of Malaysia, Jennings writes of a tiger seance where a charismatic
shaman performs a healing dance. She comments:

The Temiars believe that the shaman then actually changes into a tiger …
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 247

They insisted that they had seen the tiger’s claws disappear from the ends
of the shaman’s Ž ngers as the seance ended and the lights went up. (1995,
p. 168)

During the dance the shaman is possessed by the spirit of the tiger. The two entities
fuse and the performance is witnessed by those who know how to read it, who can
therefore testify as to its authenticity or ‘truthfulness’. To consider the shaman’s
dance in such performative terms enables us to see the parallels with an actor’s
performance on the conventional, western stage. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Ian
McLellan’s Richard III, the very terms of referral signal the fusion of one body with
another and the critics—those who know how to read the portrayal—make judg-
ments as to whether it is convincing or not—as to whether they have, in fact, ‘seen
the claws of the tiger’ during the performance.
Rather than to separate possession from acting, then, it is possible to position both
along the same continuum. Like possession, acting or taking on a role is a form of
communion with someone or something other than ourselves that can only be
witnessed through our encultured bodies and in a form that can exercise power over
the attention of the witnesses. For those with a religious faith, the person possessed
is often thought to be giving voice to truth when they speak. In western secular
culture, this persists in the concept of inspiration. For the Romantics, including late
Romantics such as Arnold, as well as for the Temiar people, this form of inspiration
provided the artist (or shaman) with a spiritual, health-giving role. Wordsworth’s
poetry was seen by Arnold to embody ‘a force greater than himself seeming to lift
him and to prompt his tongue … in certain matters of profound importance,
healthful and true’ (cited in Collini, p. 106). When an actor is judged to have given
an ‘inspired performance’ it carries a similar sense of having reached a higher form
of truth, of having stirred profound emotions in ways that, according to Aristotle, are
socially and spiritually health-giving.
The implications for a drama curriculum are complex but signiŽ cant. There has
been growing interest in shamanism in performance theory and in some university
courses and it is to be expected that future drama teachers who are trained to
consider acting as a form of possession may well re ect this in their teaching. I
personally know of two such teachers who talk of ‘possession’ as one of the highest
qualities by which they evaluate the authenticity of a student’s performance. Here
we engage with another continuum, one that positions this form of acting at one end
and a Brechtian form of acting at the other. Brecht was critical of any form of theatre
that stirred the emotions of the audience at the expense of their intellect. For actors,
he advocated that they represent emotions rather than actually feel them, placing
what Counsell terms a ‘gestic split’ between character and actor, between the tale
and its telling (1996, p. 96). He would certainly have agreed with Blau’s warning: ‘If
it becomes easier for actors or performers or shamans to be possessed it becomes
harder for them to be intelligent’ (1976, p. 22). The self-conscious adoption of a
mask rather than any transcendence of the self typiŽ es this Brechtian form of acting.
I have argued elsewhere about the  aw in such dichotomies, typical as they are of
a modernist tendency to separate emotion from reason in order to privilege the latter
248 J. Winston

(Winston, 1998). However, in any educational programme, we cannot go very far


along the road of eschewing the intellectual dimension of feeling. Nor when we plan
such programmes are we dealing with emotions in the abstract. Themes explored in
drama are chosen to guide children through emotions that we judge to be apt or
right in some sense, whether joy, compassion, tenderness, anger or contempt. In the
words of Bernard Williams:

If … education does not revolve round such issues as what to fear, what to
be angry about, what—if anything—to despise, where to draw the line
between kindness and a stupid sentimentality—I do not know what it is.
(cited in Mackey, 1993, p. 255)

By way of a brief illustration, let us consider an example of the potential health-


giving nature of such experience in terms of the liberating possibilities, in spiritual
as well as social terms, offered by this communion with something ‘other’ through
the mask of role. I recently worked on a drama of the Frog Prince with a class of
Year 1 children. At the conclusion of the work, in role as the Princess and using a
glove puppet to represent the Frog, I was experiencing great difŽ culty in managing
to kiss it, prince or no prince, and asked for volunteers to show me how. At one
point I heard the two class teachers gasp. Only afterwards did I learn that one of the
Ž rst volunteers, a little boy, had hardly ever spoken and had never contributed
anything voluntarily since starting school three months earlier. He had kissed the
frog puppet and the class had applauded.
This example could be examined in purely psychological terms. However, it is
interesting to consider it in the light of Hay’s concept of a spirituality founded upon
‘relational consciousness’ (op.cit, p. 144). Hay uses this term to theorise what he
sees as a fundamental biological tendency that drives human spirituality. He accepts
Heidegger’s concept that we are, as human beings, fully immersed in being before
ever we begin to analyse it into this and that, subject and object. Hence a child has
an implicit sense of social belonging that underlies an entirely natural impulse
towards altruism. Drawing upon the work of the anthropologist William Durham
(1991), Hay sees modern individualism as a powerful cultural phenomenon that
works against the natural condition of relational consciousness. This is very similar
to the Aristotelian concept of orexis, one I have used elsewhere to explain the power
of drama to create a cultural space where the relationship between self and other can
fuse in order to bring about understandings that are at once rational and emotional,
moral and spiritual (Winston, 1998). Thus drama can contribute to a spiritual
curriculum by providing, in Hay’s terms:

a context of ritual, communal narrative … and social teaching which both


focuses attention on and gives concrete expression to spiritual insight.
(ibid, p. 158)

If we view the example of the little boy in the Frog Prince drama in this light, we can
argue that something of spiritual as well as social signiŽ cance happened here, not
only for him, but for his classmates and teachers as well.
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 249

Spiritual experiences often lead to a sense of harmony between mind and body, self and the
world, individual and community; the response may be personal (tranquillity, peace,
balance) or social (joy, laughter, dancing)

Many see a Christian tradition that has prioritised the soul over the  esh, with
indeed the one being the enemy of the other, as the conceptual ancestor to
Modernism and its privileging of mind over body. Certainly the dominant theories
of acting within the twentieth century west have re-enforced such a split, privileging
the ‘inner’ over the ‘outer’ life of character. Stanislavski’s system and Strasberg’s
method were both systems of acting that struggled to Ž nd an external form (through
the actor’s body) to express an internal, uniŽ ed reality (the character’s psyche). Both
saw the fusion of body and mind, actor and character, as a site of struggle and as the
principle skill of the actor. In many of the actor training schools that are their legacy,
however, it is through exercises that are essentially intellectual in nature—script
analysis, emotional recall—that this fusion is sought, work on the body being largely
ignored (see Zarilli, 1995, p. 12).
Eastern traditions of acting are different and, through the in uential work of
Grotowski, Barba and Schechner, they have begun to exert an increasing in uence
over western performance practices, particularly in university departments and in
the non-commercial theatre. The inner search for an essential, uniŽ ed self is absent.
In its place, the actor begins and ends with the body. In the words of Scott, the
Asian actor’s body is ‘creative in the manner of a musical instrument.’ He adds:
‘where the actor in the West uses his body to represent reality, the Asian actor’s
body becomes reality’ (cited in Zarrilli, ibid, p. 79). The Asian actor strives for ‘a
total psychophysiological engagement of the bodymind/spirit’ in performance’
(Zarilli, ibid, p. 79). For Grotowski and Barba, this led them to adopt training
techniques that ‘equally engaged the actor’s mind (psycho) and body (physical) in
a ‘total’ intensive engagement in the moment’ (ibid, p. 74).
Before considering the signiŽ cance of this for a drama curriculum it is worth
emphasising that both eastern and western traditions, although very different in
approach and method, still aim for the harmonic fusion of mind and body in
performance. Christian spiritual experiences that deŽ ne the prioritising of the soul
are nonetheless performative in nature, determined and felt through the body—the
body at prayer, or in spiritual ecstasy, for example. So too with Stanislavskian acting
practices. The actor seeks the gesture or movement that will not only represent the
emotion but also help her feel it. But I would argue that it is eastern models of actor
training that could offer much to a spiritual curriculum, involving as they do bodily
exercises, physical discipline, meditative and yogic practices. In learning to ‘visual-
ise’ their breathing, to ‘think’ through parts of the body other than the brain,
children could approach a spiritual balance within a curriculum that privileges
mental skills over other forms of knowledge.
Whatever form a drama curriculum may take in a school, however, its potential
for building and celebrating community through performance is perhaps the most
recognizable and least problematic way in which it can be understood to contribute
to a spiritual curriculum. In a pluralist society, school productions can take on a
250 J. Winston

particular signiŽ cance and become a secular arena for celebration and the experience
of communitas, the spontaneous feeling of joy and togetherness that those involved
in a production can Ž nd overwhelming at its culmination. Mackey (1993) provides
us with a vivid account of such an experience and comments on the ‘true sense of
community’ felt by the students involved ‘seemingly unattainable in the real world,
however devout the aspiration’ (p. 253). She acknowledges that the ‘essence of the
magic’ was difŽ cult for the students to explain but was clearly felt and articulated
through superlatives and statements of wonderment. One girl, however, Sara, was
able to testify later not only to her own growth in ‘self-conŽ dence, love, affection
and comradeship’ (p. 254) but also to an increased ‘clarity of vision’ as to how she
would wish her society to be, one that could re ect the communal values she had
vividly experienced.

Spirituality usually implies wisdom rather than knowledge, an ability to understand and
live with paradox and ambiguity
Reinhold Mokrosh (1998) has proposed that religions differ from sects as the latter
work with a ‘linear logic’ and the former with a ‘paradoxical logic’. In other words,
sects deal only with certainties while religions deal with paradoxes. In a similar vein,
we might argue that an education in drama has as a major spiritual aim the
development of wisdom through this kind of paradoxical logic. It can work towards
this not only through the stories it engages with but also through the particular form
this engagement takes.
Cockett (1997) has argued that the stories explored through drama have more
signiŽ cant educational beneŽ t if teachers use them to seek out problems rather than
to solve them. Rather than attempt to resolve dilemmas, usually with a moral
dimension, dramas should help children explore and get to know them in all their
complex particularity. The child taking on different roles, the actor playing different
characters and the child witnessing either of these thus share a common potential
aim; to attain an understanding of emotional, moral and spiritual perspectives other
than their own through the pattern of lived experience and re ection that is the
prerogative of drama. Such work can provide a major contribution to what Hay
(op.cit, p. 163) proposes as the four prime responsibilities of spiritual education:
helping children to keep an open mind; exploring ways of seeing; encouraging
personal awareness; becoming personally aware of the social and political dimen-
sions of spirituality. Such a task, as Hay points out, is the reverse of indoctrination;
it is an opening up not a closing down, a learning to understand and live with
difference and ambiguity.

Transformation—of space, time, presence and consciousness—is often at the heart of


spiritual experience
The anthropological links between ritual and theatre have been thoroughly investi-
gated by Turner (1982) and Schechner (1988, 1993). As with ritual, dramatic space
and time is liminal, separated from ordinary space and time; and, at its centre, are
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 251

the transformative acts of the performer. Schechner has pointed out that rituals have
an efŽ cacious function whereas theatre’s primary purpose is to entertain. He does,
however, argue that there is a continuum (or, to use his metaphor, a ‘braid’) that
links ritual and theatre, in which purposes of efŽ cacy and entertainment can
intertwine; if the shaman can entertain as well as perform a spiritual, health giving
function, so too can the actor. Alfreds has expressed what this spiritually efŽ cacious
function of the actor might consist of. He writes:
The actor, by transforming himself [sic] and therefore transcending him-
self, conŽ rms that untapped potential within us all to understand and
express ourselves beyond our apparent abilities … Performance can create
life-giving energy; the actor can transfer his vitality to the audience. In an
idealised sense, the actor becomes a sacriŽ cial victim who undergoes the
enactment of pain and joy to celebrate our common humanity. (1980,
p. 13)
So the ability of the actor to transform herself has a sacriŽ cial quality that can bring
about a transformation within our consciousness; the acts of sadness and tragedy we
witness need not leave us depressed or in despair. Rather can they become, in some
spiritual sense, sources of nourishment and enrichment, celebrations of our common
humanity.
Exposure to good, live theatre—not the same as the reading of ‘good’ plays—can
permit children to beneŽ t from the joy and celebration of our common humanity, as
deŽ ned by Alfreds. Limiting their exposure to the safe and the cosy, or to Theatre
in Education programmes that are too straightforwardly didactic, will not work on
the spirit of the child in the ways that Alfreds is advocating. Recent research by
Jackson (2001) conŽ rms the capacity for children to delight in the playfulness of the
actor, to be uplifted by a theatrical experience despite a very downbeat ending. In
his research, the play in question dealt with the problems of teenage pregnancy from
the perspective of a young father. In one scene, a ‘ ashback’ that the children
particularly enjoyed, the principle actor played the baby of a teenage father. The play
concluded with the cycle continuing, he himself becoming a teenage father. The
research showed that the children’s enjoyment of his performance detracted neither
from their appreciation of the play’s serious intent nor from its potential to in uence
their future decisions. If the character’s fate was a source of tragedy, the actor’s
playfulness was a source of joy, the one capable of enriching their emotional
response to the other.

Symbol and ritual are central to the communal languages of spiritual traditions and these
often involve performance
The spiritual beliefs of a culture are enshrined within its stories and when these
stories form the content of a performance tradition, as they often do, the rituals and
the symbols of this tradition are often displayed within them. Drama thus provides
an ethnographic space to learn about spiritual traditions through their performative
use of ritual and symbol. The work of Brahmachari (1998) illustrates how this can
252 J. Winston

be done through Indian dance and John Hammond (2001) has described how he
has enacted sacred rituals such as a Jewish passover in the classroom to help children
understand the emotional rhythm and play of their symbols. In my own work, I have
used the story of Savitri and Satyavan (Jaffrey, 1992) to explore, among other
themes, the ritual and symbols of a Hindu wedding.

Spiritualities address some of the fundamental human questions that remain mysterious,
that connect with but go beyond the moral and the ethical (the deity; creation; the afterlife;
why there is grief, sorrow, loss)
In an interesting aside to her study, Rebecca Nye comments upon how, when
interviewing a number of ten year-old children, many of them showed a surprising
level of awareness about reincarnation, despite the fact that there were no Hindu
children in the class (Hay [with Nye], op.cit, p. 125). She traces the source of this
interest to the popular soap series Neighbours, which had been recently running a
storyline on the issue. Though rather humorous, the anecdote nonetheless illustrates
the fact that dramatic stories can become a potent source for bringing fundamental
issues into the public domain. The ‘big’ questions can provide potential content for
drama work at all levels. At primary level, children might explore the idea of an
afterlife within a drama centring around the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians whereas,
at secondary level, performance texts from different traditions provide rich opportu-
nities to explore spiritual themes. The study of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, for
example, can only be enriched by an appreciation of Christian ideas of penance and
redemption, while performed extracts from the Ramayana illustrate Hindu beliefs
concerning the nature of evil and our relationships with the Gods.

Spiritualities have a dark and uncomfortable dimension to them


This Ž nal dimension is, I suggest, an important corrective to liberal and progressive
educational discourses that over-emphasise the benevolent, the harmless and the
uniform within spiritual experience. Wonder and fear are close allies, as Aristotle
argued; rituals can be used for oppressive as well as celebratory purposes; and
transformations resulting from spiritual encounters are as liable to be unsettling and
challenging for the individual as well as enlightening. Spiritual traditions deal with
issues such as destruction, blood sacriŽ ce, the meaning of suffering, the nature of
evil. As Salman Rushdie has said about his book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, even
very young children know when the dark aspects of life are absent from their stories
and they miss them. The recent phenomenon of Harry Potter is further testimony to
children’s desire for stories that deal with rather than avoid dark spiritual concepts.
Such darkness has always been a fruitful area for drama. Euripides’ The Bacchae,
though one of the earliest studies, remains one of its most potent illustrations and
we can Ž nd numerous further examples such as Peter Brook’s adaptation of the
Mahabharata and the work of the French playwright Jean Genet. Drama can make
a particular contribution to the spiritual curriculum as a space where its darker
themes can be explored in safety. It can, too, provide a time for social dreaming, a
Drama, Spirituality and the Curriculum 253

space for the expression of what Nietszche called the ‘hectics of the spirit’ lest the
relentlessness of institutionalised schooling leave our young people ‘too weary of life
even to dream’ (1994, p. 104). And if we Ž nd some of their dreams dark and
discomforting, we must remember the transformative potential of drama, its power
to lighten as well as enlighten, to be playful and serious at one and the same time.

Conclusion
Throughout this article, I have argued for the cultural and educational potential of
drama’s contribution to spirituality in terms of experience and development but
have not attempted to present a coherently structured vision of a drama curriculum.
Given its loose relationship to the National Curriculum, the nature of a drama
curriculum can vary greatly from school to school in the UK alone. However, the
argument above does allow for some generalisations to be made, some indicators as
to what a drama curriculum cognisant of its spiritual potential might create space
for.
· A balance of practice and re ection, performance and response to performance.
Students should not only be given opportunities for dramatic experience of a
broadly spiritual nature but also need to be empowered to articulate and under-
stand these experiences;
· An understanding of ritual as performance and of the relationship—but also the
distance—between drama and ritual. Drama is as distinct from ritual as teachers
are from priests. Attention to the intellectual dimension of feeling as well as the
emotional dimension of cognition can preserve this equilibrium.
· Attention to non-western as well as western traditions of performance can open
up new pathways not only to performance but also to embodied spiritual experi-
ence through physically disciplined approaches to acting;
· Drama can stimulate an understanding of the self in the other and the other within
the self. Such dramatic empathy, experienced either as actor or as audience, can
be seen to hinge upon the spiritual concept of relational consciousness.
· The content covered in drama should allow for spiritual learning of an inter-
cultural nature. This can include learning through non-western performance
traditions, through the enactment of non-western stories such as the Ramayana
and through the performance of religious ritual and symbol within carefully
constructed dramatic contexts.
· Teachers should be prepared to take risks and should not over-protect children by
avoiding the dark and disturbing aspects of spiritual belief. Post September 11,
this is all the more crucial as an educational aim.
Nothing proposed here is alien to much good practice that goes on within schools
already. However, it does imply two additional and very obvious requirements. First
of all, the provision of time and space for children to experience, think, re ect,
dream and speculate together, however difŽ cult this may be to achieve within the
pressured urgency of a curriculum dominated by objectives, standards and testing.
Secondly, we need teachers who value the connection between drama and spiritual-
254 J. Winston

ity, who can approach it robustly and with conŽ dence; hence the need for the area
to be theorised and for such theory to be related directly to practice. This has been
an attempt to begin the process, but is only a beginning.

Notes
[1] The Nine o’ clock service drew upon new age religious tendencies and included a strong
element of theatricality (coloured lighting, dancing) as well as rave music. It was intended to
appeal to young people and was the work of a religious group based in a Church of England
parish in ShefŽ eld, UK. It ran from 1988 until 1995, when sexual scandal discredited its
minister and chief organiser.

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