Conscientising Cultural Performance: Theatre-Making Amongst Event-Specific Popular Audiences

The late Paulo Freire's ideas about conscientisation (conscientizão) represent an innovation in educational practice that has much to say to practitioners of educational drama. This is especially the case for those who, through process drama, attempt to reorder power relations between educators and educands via adroit use of diverse role conventions in order to facilitate different modalities of critical dialogue. But is learning and teaching concerned with theatre production as straightforward and unproblematic as the technical literature concerned with mainstream theatre production would suggest? This discussion proposes that one of the ways in which we can better understand ' and continually renew ' the theory and practice of theatre and drama in education is to make stronger efforts to connect it with other significant educational innovations of our era. The paper examines how Freire's ideas about conscientisation could help to redefine the ways in which pre-professional adult theatre-makers might engage the well-known phases of theatre production when the project at hand concerns the creation of original entertainments for event-specific popular audiences.