With this issue, "RiDE" begins a new occasional series of short informational pieces on archives in the field of drama and theatre education and applied theatre and performance. Each instalment will include summaries of several collections of significant material in the field. Over time this will build into a readily accessible annotated directory…

Contact Theatre is an Arts Council of England-funded theatre on the campus of the University of Manchester, in the north of England. From its re-opening in 1999 until the end of 2008, it was led by Artistic Director John McGrath who created a programme of theatre performances and projects specifically geared to young people (between the ages of 13…

When we speak of quality in drama education, we apply different educational and aesthetic criteria. For example, improvised drama practices such as process drama, are closely associated to John Dewey's constructivist philosophy. What makes a drama qualitatively "good" within such a framework differs radically from criteria that are familiar in…

In September 2008 the author created an encounter between herself and Rick Walker, the Director of Cartwheel Arts, a small community arts company in Rochdale, in the North West of England. As one of the three founding workers of what was then Cartwheel Community Arts in 1984, she hoped to create a conversation which recollected or traced some of…

This address was given as the final-day keynote of the Sixth International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) in Sydney, 2009. Using the Institute's title as his theme, O'Toole briefly surveys the growth of drama education research of the last two decades, and the changing landscape of practice and research. He then conducts an…

The centre of this article is a critical description of the development and production of "Everyday Theatre's" performed pretext, called "replay@timeout", including a detailed account of the devising process and the programme's content. The programme is located within the history and traditions both of theatre in education (TIE) and process drama,…

This essay investigates performance events that feature actual refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, but in instances where presence and embodiment are mediated and made ambiguous. My focus is a fashion show by Catalan designer Antonio Miro, who uses refugees from Senegal as models, and Christoph Schlingensief's public art project "Foreigners…

This essay examines Michael Winterbottom's 2002 film "In This World," which follows the journey of two Afghan migrants from Peshawar to London. Winterbottom's preparation involved travelling from London to Peshawar and then in reverse overland as far as Istanbul; he then returned to Peshawar and filmed the same journey using two non-professional…

In order to understand the complexity of mimesis and dramatic playing, and to perhaps acknowledge a great variety of play forms and modes in theatre art and drama education, one may look beyond hegemonic and highly restricted understandings of mimesis in arts and society. This article will suggest different models of mimesis that provide possible…

Dutch participatory community-based theatre has thus far been largely text-based and quite apprehensive of abstract site-specific performance, which it regarded as the product of "outsider gazing" and exploitative of local residents. Quite recently, the two veteran Dutch community-based companies Stut and RWT were forced by extraordinary…

The happy ending is that The Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah has arrived at a clear statement of aims and objectives, and the long story is the 20 years of theatre making within the field of theatre in education, involving moments of clarity followed by periods of complete confusion as to why we were doing what we were doing. The question which…

"Tsalani Bwino" in the Chichewa language is a farewell term which translates as "I am going, you are staying--go well in peace." This article reviews the author's working relationship with Hope One World and SOS Children's Village, Malawi during the period 1999-2004, where she conducted workshops in educational drama methods. The discussion…

This paper seeks out the gaps between localised accounts of drama's efficacy in terms of producing transformations in students' behaviours and sense of identities and the theoretical accounts of such transformations offered in the textual discourses of the field of Drama in Education. Drawing on a range of post-colonial and emancipatory discourses…

Describes the Community Arts and Education Partnership, a community-system arts and literacy program for students at all grade levels. Notes that in this program, professional community artists and generalist classroom teachers delivered a sequential, integrated curriculum to over 500 students of diverse ethnicities. Concludes that literacy gains…

Notes that Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) has afforded support to educators and parents who want to see their children as equals no matter in what area of ability they develop competence. Explains the usefulness of Gardner's approach, based on Kantian notions of the power of mind to give order to the world. Discusses the…