The ensemble domesticated: Mapping issues of autonomy and power in performing arts projects in schools

Shakespeare School’s Festival: An ensemble endeavour

The notion of the theatrical ensemble as a model for theatre education pedagogy has become a popular rhetoric in recent years, particularly with organisations working in active, theatre-based approaches to teaching Shakespeare. These include The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), though their Learning Performance Network (Thomson et al., 2010), Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, through collaborative student performances (Banks, 2014), and also Shakespeare Schools Festival’s (SSF) annual nationwide school performances of abridged Shakespeare texts in professional theatres, which is the focus of this article. As I discuss, this notion of ensemble pedagogy draws on its theatrical heritage to conceive of a collaborative, emancipatory approach to Shakespeare education. In this article I explore how this idea has been conceptualised within the wider world of education – a world which is increasingly audited, and results focused (Holligan, 2010; Thomas, 2009; Wright, 2012) – and within projects such SSF, resulting in what I will suggest is a ‘domesticated’ conception of the approach. With reference to observations in my recent case study of schools participating in SSF, I will suggest that issues of power and of autonomy, particularly teacher autonomy, are ignored in this domesticated conceptualisation, despite, as examples from the SSF case studies show, being pertinent for participants. I will therefore offer an alternative conception of ensemble pedagogy projects as a pedagogic space, rather than a finite intervention, in order to take account of these issues. Finally, I briefly explore what the implications of this change in emphasis might be.

The research context

SSF is the UK’s largest youth theatre festival, enjoying recent receipt of £140,000 of Department for Education funding (Merrifield, 2012) with an avowed remit to work with a wide variety of schools, introducing a ‘new generation’ to Shakespeare in professional theatre spaces (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2012). The programme consists of casts of pupils from across the country undertaking a Shakespeare production, directed by a teacher and performed in a professional theatre with other local schools. SSF as an organisation provide teacher training, student workshops and ongoing support. There is an emphasis on ensemble approaches throughout this process; participating schools are encouraged to take an explorative, collaborative approach to the project, reflecting the aim that the festival is a ‘community celebration’ (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2013a).

For the broader purposes of my research, four schools were approached to participate as case study schools, on the basis of being perceived as open to the notion of a long-term research collaboration. The aim was to work with study sites, which represented the variety of schools which take part in SSF, the cases comprising a primary school, an all-girls’ secondary school, a special educational needs (SEN) secondary school and an inclusion secondary school.

Within the scope of this article initial observations from the research will provide only brief examples for my conceptual argument, hence I do not offer a detailed methodology. Suffice to say each case study was carried out within a broadly ethnographic tradition, with teacher interviews and student focus groups providing sources of data alongside observational field notes. Each school was followed throughout the SSF process, from initial training to their completion of the project.

Ensemble pedagogy

The notion of ‘ensemble’, or ‘ensemble pedagogies’ as it appears in drama and theatre education literature, is an idea popularised by the RSC artistic director Michael Boyd and conceptualised within theatre education scholarship by Jonathan Neelands. However, the performance ensemble, and in particular the notion of the ensemble theatre company, has a much longer lineage. At a UK Equity and Director’s Guild conference on the topic, the following definition was given: ‘Ensemble theatre occurs when a group of theatre artists (performers, artistic directors, stage management and the key administrative staff) work together over many years to create theatre’ (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004: 3). This broadly describes the way of working common to professional theatre, from Shakespeare’s companies of players in the sixteenth century through to the actor-manager companies of the nineteenth century. Well-known twentieth century examples of ensemble companies include Joan Littlewoods’s Theatre Workshop and Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. It is a way of working which continues today although, particularly in the UK, it has become less popular due to the increased commercialisation of theatre and the move to director-led theatre (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004).

At the same conference, Michael Boyd, as the then recently appointed artistic director of the RSC, put forward ideas which have shaped the notion of ensemble as we now talk about it in theatre education. Boyd’s keynote speech announced his intention to return the RSC to the commitment to ensemble under which it had been founded by Peter Hall, influenced strongly by Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004: 14). In his speech he charted the link between the reduction of ensemble working and the increasing individualism of Western society, and thereby made the argument that collaborative theatre practices can ‘gift’ to the audience a sense of reconnection:

Outside the doors, we’ve never had more cause to realise the grave importance of our interdependence as humans and yet we seem ever more incapable of acting on that realisation with the same urgency that we all still give to the pursuit of self-interest. Theatre does have a very important role because it is such a quintessentially collaborative art form. That gift of collaboration to the audience – and (potentially, yes) to the outside world – is a very precious one. (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004: 18)

In terms of a practical approach to work, what Boyd is talking about here is the value of time and practice, both in the sense of repeating skills and disciplinary practice, as seen in his emphasis on patience and rigour. This approach, he argued, is profoundly connected to the quality of relationships between ensemble members, which in turn affects not only the quality of the artistic output, but the potential of that output to speak to and prompt changes in the wider social world. Boyd’s model, it is worth noting, does not focus on the nature of the theatrical work itself. Boyd’s notion of ensemble is defined by an approach to working, not by a particular content or product.

Neelands, a theatre education scholar and practitioner who has worked closely with the RSC, has drawn this idea into the theatre education sphere. In a 2009 paper he outlined how the theatrical ensemble has the potential to become a powerful pedagogic approach, picking up on Boyd’s 2004 question: ‘Can an ensemble … act in some sense as a … better version of the real world on an achievable scale which celebrates the virtues of collaboration’ (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004)? Neelands argues that it can, describing his experience as a participant observer in the RSC’s Histories Ensemble rehearsal room, being struck by the similarities between the ensemble as a professional and educational space. Like Boyd, he emphasises the tolerant, trusting cooperation engendered and the possibilities for engaging in both artistic and social meaning-making. Again, his reflections focus on the approach to the work, not its content, and he emphasises the primacy of ongoing, developing relationships. While Boyd does not especially focus on the particular role of an ensemble director however, Neelands makes explicit that a pedagogical ensemble requires the ‘uncrowning’ of the teacher and an aspiration at least to distribute some power among the group (Neelands, 2009a: 183). Here links are made between this process of becoming a ‘self-managing, self-governing, self-regulating social group who co-create artistically and socially’ (Neelands, 2009a: 182) and the democracies of Ancient Greece. Through McGrath’s work on the role of theatre within a democratic society, Neelands, while recognising that the qualities of ensemble learning are not particular to drama, nevertheless continues Boyd’s argument that the quality of theatre as an essentially participatory experience makes it a key context of ensemble endeavour. This notion of participating in that ‘simple conceit’, gives the art form a privileged place when considering the value of ensemble pedagogy.

Via this connection, and through highlighting Leadbeater’s (2008) work on the primacy of educational relationships, Neelands’ argument is clear: by working in an active, collaborative, explorative way, ensemble theatre as a pedagogy can become a model for not only acting artistically, but also acting socially in the wider world. As Neelands acknowledges, this idea is not a new one, nor one unvisited since the Ancient Greeks: ‘From Ibsen to Brecht to Boal, Brock and Bond one can trace a faith that through artistic transformations of the stage, society itself can be changed’ (Neelands, 2009b: 8). It is perhaps the South American dramatist and educator Boal who adds the most to Neelands’ conception of the ensemble as an emancipatory pedagogical endeavour. The originator of approaches such as forum theatre, which has become a cornerstone of theatre education practice, Boal’s aim was to create inclusive, community-led forms of theatre ‘not only to understand reality, but to transform it to our liking’ (Boal, 2006: 7). Hence, participation in ensemble-orientated theatre education projects is seen as having the emancipatory potential to connect with some of the most deeply held aims of education: to help create a more equitable future society.

However, as Neelands sets out, the emancipatory potential of ensemble pedagogy is not straightforward. It is described as a ‘living practice’ (Neelands, 2009a: 180) which emphasises above all the unfinished and processional natural of both the social world and ourselves (Neelands, 2010). In this way, ensemble pedagogy is not a particular and finite promise of change, but a pedagogy of possibility, of fluidity; a pedagogy – in Freire’s terms – of hope (Freire, 2000). Though Neelands draws on McGrath’s conception of the democratic, participatory theatre, he nevertheless highlights it as an ‘idealised abstraction’ (Neelands, 2009a: 181) and one that must be realised in the lived reality of the drama classroom or student rehearsal space.

Yet, despite the necessary contextualised lived reality, this notion of the emancipatory, transformative power of theatre remains a compelling one. It is also, in many ways, a traditional one; as Neelands notes elsewhere, there is a long-standing tradition within Western modernist aesthetics of positioning theatrical and artistic experiences as either personally or socially ‘transformative’ (Neelands and O’Hanlon, 2011: 248). This notion of the transformative can become particularly potent when combined with the cultural capital of the plays of Shakespeare. Neelands and O’Hanlon, in an exploration of the RSC’s flagship education project the Learning Performance Network, argue that the ensemble approach particularly chimes with the teaching and learning of Shakespeare. Specifically, Neelands and O’Hanlon emphasise here that an ensemble approach may not necessitate a full process of rehearsal and production; in an educational context this may be a drama workshop, or series of workshops which employ collaborative ‘rehearsal room’ approaches to exploring the text.

They contrast this with the common practice in schools of studying extracts of the plays as literary passages, and argue that when Shakespeare’s work is instead explored as a theatrical text, using the ensemble strategies of the rehearsal room that these active modes allow, students co-construct their own understanding of the plays (Neelands and O’Hanlon, 2011: 243). The suggestion is that, as robust and rich theatrical texts, Shakespeare’s plays both necessitate and facilitate students making their own ‘interpretative choices’ as dramaturges. Evidence from a survey carried out by the RSC showed that this approach can engage more young people ‘who are unlikely to have Shakespeare as part of their cultural birthright’ (Neelands and O’Hanlon, 2011: 245). Furthermore, the connection to the democratising change potential which Boyd claimed for the ensemble is argued in the suggestion that, through making active ‘interpretative choices’ within the rehearsal room, students may become empowered to make more engaged social choices in the world beyond it, including ‘about who they might become or how the world might be re-imagined’ (Neelands and O’Hanlon, 2011: 248).

In this way the ‘transformative’ potential of an ensemble approach to teaching Shakespeare can be seen as two-fold: first it can afford an active, accessible pedagogy through which all students, whatever their ability or socio-cultural background, are able to co-construct their own understanding of the works of Shakespeare. Furthermore it offers a model for social, democratic engagement, which has the potential to be applied in the wider world. However, in relation to both the educational and social transformative potentials, Neelands’ work highlights the risks associated with committing to ensemble pedagogies, suggesting that, within school contexts, engagement with ensemble pedagogy ‘often requires the taking of extraordinary risks for all involved’. These include challenging normative power structures, appropriating space, opening up creative decisions, and making themselves visible and vulnerable through this process (Neelands and O’Hanlon, 2011: 247). Yet, it is often the idealised potential rather than this risky reality which is forefronted in theatre education discourse, particularly as it appears to circumnavigate some of the implications of dominant cultural capital inferred by the continuing ‘bardolotry’ in our educational and cultural spheres (Lighthill, 2011). Thus, several theatre education organisations concerned with Shakespeare have taken the RSC’s lead here and, either implicitly or explicitly, invoke the notion of ensemble pedagogy in their practice.

For SSF, while the word ‘ensemble’ itself is not prominent on its website or initial print promotional material, its teacher training and resources emphasise an ensemble way of working. Notes from the 2013 initial teacher-training workshop emphasises the development of a ‘playful ensemble’. In the 2014 teacher-training workshop document, SSF emphasises that this approach can empower participating students, encourage risk-taking in rehearsals, unlock students’ creativity and increase their feeling of ownership over the play (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2014b). This idea is initially framed, as with Neelands and Boyd, in the importance of a collaborative, explorative approach to rehearsals. Teachers are prompted to see themselves as ‘collaborating with your pupils and encouraging them to feel an ownership of the play’ (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2013b: 1). To this end, SSF suggests an approach beginning with open-ended games and exercises, which allow the casts to explore the possibilities of their chosen text and develop their own responses. The teachers are also explicitly discouraged from creating their own detailed ‘blocking’ or plans for performance; instead, the emphasis is on experimentation and collaborative development, with SSF emphasising that ensemble games can lead to ideas for staging (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2014b).

In this way, there is a further strand to SSF’s notion of ensemble working, one not explicitly highlighted by Boyd or Neelands, which frames ‘the ensemble’ more as a convention of staging, what Boyd terms ‘ensemble playing’ as opposed to ‘ensemble companies’ (Equity and Directors Guild of Great Britain, 2004: 15). Thus several of the exercises offered in the 2013 workshop notes go on to emphasise ways into group or choral movement. This chimes with artistic elements teachers are encouraged to consider throughout the training, such as: multi-roling and group-roling (i.e. one person playing different characters and groups playing one character); the creation of physical sequences, music and sound effects using the whole cast; and having the whole cast on stage throughout the performance. Cast workshops with SSF practitioners continue this approach, and on the performance day feedback given to casts by SSF organisers specifically praises ‘good ensemble’ productions, i.e. productions which avoid having ‘star turns’ and give all students an equitable space on stage through the use of such approaches (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2013c: 2).

This, I would argue, on the one hand represents a logical and pragmatic translation of the principles of ensemble working to an in-school project which trains teachers who are often coming to theatrical directing for the first time. SSF productions are mounted in a variety of ways in schools, ranging from selective after-school drama groups to English, drama or primary class groups. As such, casts are regularly as large as 30, and this equation of ‘the ensemble’ with ‘the chorus’ in SSF’s training events and documents provides valuable and practical theatrical approaches for managing a cast of that size. However, in emphasising this, what is notably absent from SSF’s rhetoric of ensemble is the democratic, emancipatory element highlighted both by Neelands and Boyd. Though there is a strong notion of community through the emphasis on the festival as a celebration ‘of cultural heritage and youth creativity’ (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2012: 5), this celebratory focus does not seem to allow for the uncovering or troubling of broader social questions. Thus, we begin to see a shift of focus from the notion of ensemble pedagogy as conceived in theory and as framed in practice through school-based theatre education projects such as SSF.

‘Black box’ evaluation: The ensemble domesticated

There is a danger that artists reinforce normative relations because they act as one off bubbles where they are perceived as limited outside interventions. (Pringle, 2008: 47)

I would suggest this change in focus relates not only to translating the notion of ensemble pedagogy into pragmatic teacher training. More particularly, the nature of the current UK education system allows the emancipatory, democratic potential of ensemble approaches to theatre education projects such as SSF to be frequently ignored and therefore minimised, due to the system’s overwhelming focus on measurable outcomes when evaluating cultural education offers such as SSF. This dominant model of educational research, practice and evaluation has been referred to as the banking model (Freire, 1972), the deficit model or medical model (Hargreaves, 1997; Holligan, 2010; Thomas, 2009; Wright, 2012). Each of these terms emphasises the same thing: an ontological understanding of knowledge as a pre-ordained information, delivered by teachers and received by learners who arrive into the education system deficit in knowledge. The better the mechanism, the educational product or ‘intervention’ by which this knowledge is delivered, the more knowledge students will retain. Therefore, it is understood and assumed that the value of an educational product can be ascertained by measuring students’ knowledge levels before and after the intervention is delivered.

Delamont terms this understanding of education evaluation the ‘black box’ approach, referring to the lack of interest in opening the “‘black box” behind the closed [classroom] door’ (Delamont, 2014). Although she is speaking of educational research in the 1960s and 1970s, in recent years there has been a distinct swing back to this understanding of education as a process of ‘interventions’ measurable by pre- and post-testing. While there is not the space here for a detailed analysis of this phenomenon, it was led initially by the ‘what works?’ approach to education research adopted by New Labour (Hargreaves, 1997), and continued under the current coalition government. The epidemiologist, Ben Goldacre, has advocated randomised control trials as the ‘gold standard’ of educational research (Goldacre, 2013). A key example of this is approach in practice is the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Teacher Toolkit (Higgins et al., 2014). Again, as an academic work of quantitative meta-analysis it deserves its own full critique elsewhere, but for the purposes of this article it is sufficient to explore the toolkit as an almost archetypal example of the ‘black box’ approach to education evaluation which Delamont describes. The Teacher Toolkit is a live online tool offered by the EEF, giving a broad metric of impact for a variety of education interventions, also ranking them by average cost. This metric was developed from statistical meta-analysis and systematic reviews of educational studies in relevant areas. EEF representatives argue that the toolkit should not be used in a divisive way, stating ‘The evidence it contains is a supplement to rather than a substitute for professional judgment; it provides no guaranteed solutions or quick fixes’ (Higgins et al., 2014). However, the discourse is clear: when selecting educational ‘interventions’, ensuring the most value for money, as measured by effect sizes and expressed as months of additional progress, is paramount.

Thus, for projects such as SSF, I would argue there is little choice but to engage in the language of this dominant paradigm of assessment and express your benefits within these terms. The key effect this has is to domesticate the notion of ensemble pedagogy by shifting the focus away from the pedagogic processes of collegiate relationships, developed with regular artistic practice over time, and onto the educational impact or outcomes.

There are key ways in which SSF as an organisation appears to resist this extrinsic expression of ‘impact’. The SSF website makes use of frequent narrative and visual accounts of the project which seem focused on presenting the experience of SSF within different schools accounts; a typical example reads:

When he was chosen to play the leading role of Macbeth in his school’s 2012 production, many were concerned on whether Ben would be able to overcome his speech impediment for the performance. For years, Ben’s stammer had affected his self-confidence.

By providing a safe and supportive atmosphere in rehearsals, Ben’s fears were soon replaced by confidence and enthusiasm. And by the performance his stammer had completely vanished.

Mark Shenton, Ben’s teacher and director, was astounded at the transformation. (Shakespeare Schools Festival, 2014a)

There is also the implication within several of the narratives of the miraculous nature of the SSF project. This is echoed in a quote from SSF patron Phillip Pullman, also published on the website:

The power of theatre to change the lives of young people who take part is familiar to any drama teacher. When you add the greatest genius of the stage, and give children the chance to inhabit his immense characters and dramatic situations in a setting where the highest professional standards are a matter of daily practice, the result is almost miraculous. (Pullman, 2014, emphasis mine)

This domestication, this unproblematisation of the lived reality of ensemble pedagogies within the ‘black box’ approach to value, focusing on outcomes and mystifying process, therefore glosses over the complex, risky and resistant elements of the approach. I would argue therefore that in drawing focus away from this inherent risk, the ‘black box’ expression of ensemble pedagogies’ ‘impact’ ignores these elements, which are not only valuable within themselves, but are actually responsible for the observed positive effects. Thus the results seem ‘miraculous’ in addition to being finite, measurable and predictable. Furthermore, what is lost is the strong emphasis that Neelands and Boyd place on the potential for emancipatory change, seeded within ensemble practices. Although there is an emphasis on the celebratory and unifying capacity of the festivals, the emancipatory, democratic ensemble pedagogy is more radical than as presented by SSF in its evaluation statistics, stories and training documents.

Through the case study schools I worked with, I found that the more radical, risky and change-orientated elements of ensemble suggested by Neelands and Boyd were indeed present. I would therefore suggest that when the ‘black box’ model emphasises a domesticated, rather than full-throated and risky ensemble pedagogy, the participants of projects such as SSF do not always find their experiences in line with the domesticated ‘billing’. For example, this was seen in students struggling to adjust to a creative atmosphere where they cannot be ‘wrong’, but also cannot be ‘right’; at one school, students consistently phrased creative offers as questions, keen to elicit approval from the teacher; or, for example within the primary school, in teachers having to justify rehearsal time at the expense of literacy sessions to their senior leadership teams.

For the remainder of this article, I will argue that when the ensemble becomes domesticated it is issues of power and autonomy, particularly around the teacher or ensemble facilitator, which are left unconsidered. However, within the case study schools I worked with, it became clear that these issues remained incredibly salient for the groups involved.

The ensemble as destabilising normative school power

A cultural arbitrary prevails because it is the expression of the interests of a ruling social group, which must be internalised by those subjected to it in such a way that these very power relations, and the dominance of the ruling group, remain concealed. (Adams, 2010: 684)

The consideration of discourses of power in schools is self-evidently a broad topic, which can be given only a partial consideration within the scope of this article. My focus here is on the negotiation of normative and alternative power structures as suggested by an exploration of ensemble pedagogies. The work of Adams (2005, 2010), though concerned with contemporary rather than performance arts, nevertheless, through its focus on collaborative work, suggests a reading of ensemble pedagogy practices which focuses on their radical and marginal nature. This nature, he argues, by necessity reveals and disrupts the dominant power structures that normative schooling relies on in reproducing the status quo. Adams’ thesis is that creative arts practices are inherently difficult to integrate into schools because of their ‘socially contingent character, which threatens to disrupt the ideological underpinnings of orthodox school practice’ (Adams, 2010: 683).

Adams’ understanding of school power is essentially a Bourdieuian one, drawing on Bourdieu’s argument that the dominant power structures within schools – and by extension within society – are maintained by their naturalisation. Adams suggests that creative and collaborative arts pedagogies contrast, make visible and therefore question these dominant power structures. He further suggests that these ‘points of destabilisation’ challenge the authority of the teacher (as embedded in the dominant power structure) and throw up what he calls ‘regulatory dilemmas’ for the teacher engaged in such practices. In this model, the collaborative, ensemble approach to teaching and learning is a radical departure from the normative power structures of the school context and creates an exposing and reshaping of those power structures, which the teacher is then forced to attend to. In this conception of school power structures and ensemble pedagogies, the teacher can be seen as operating on a precarious axis, having to balance the normative role of ‘teacher’ with the potentially more radical requirements of ‘ensemble facilitator’. Adams’ implication seems to be that the rift between these roles is very rarely bridgeable, with the dominant school power structures inevitably reasserting themselves. The result is that collaborative arts endeavours remain marginalised. Further, he argues that any which do manage to become central and ‘legitimate’, such as those supported by specific government policy initiatives, become ‘compliant’ ‘instrument[s] of neoliberal discourse’ (Adams, 2010: 686): i.e. domesticated.

I suggest Adams’ proposition here is too simplistic. Normative pedagogies within schools cannot usefully be seen as monolithic and static ecologies, as they are presented here. I would argue that rejecting the notion of the ‘black box’ intervention model of schooling necessitates a similar rejection of the notion of schools as finished and homogeneous organisations. The relations of power which are made visible through ensemble working cannot be as simply mapped as: ‘arts equal resistance/good’ and ‘schools equal conformity/bad’, but are more multifarious and subtle. When Foucault speaks of discursive regimes of power, his terminology is plural: ‘power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations’ (Foucault, 1978: 94). It is perhaps more useful therefore to take the view of Thomson and colleagues, who argue that these normative approaches can more usefully be seen as ‘default pedagogies’. ‘We know the default is just that. It is not necessarily exactly what happens, it is a fall back model which is regularly and systematically overridden’ (Thomson et al., 2012: 11).

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the collaborative model of working which ensemble pedagogies offer will frequently differ from a school’s usual practices and policies, and will always to an extent cause eddies and tensions. And the implications of this – the complexities and potential risks thrown up in particular for the teacher, as balanced between the extant demands of those normative practices and policies and the new, negotiated practices introduced through ensemble pedagogies – need to be recognised. The tensions born of conflicting power structures, as Adams suggests, cannot be ignored. On the contrary, they become central.

An example of these power conflicts at work arose within the secondary inclusion school case study. In this context I observed several sources of normative power being invoked in the classroom/ensemble context. The school operated under a strong behaviour management policy, with a variety of structures pertaining to lesson planning. In this case, the class taking part in SSF was the GCSE drama cohort, rehearsing during their lesson time. The teacher, citing the behavioural and educational needs of the group during interviews, reproduced the strong, normative school framing of lessons throughout the rehearsal process.

A final source of normative power became the text itself. SSF produces 30 minute edits of the plays for participants to perform, using truncated but original Shakespeare text. Within the teacher training, the emphasis is on this text as a particular interpretation of the original play, to be edited and reinterpreted by participants as required. However, through this school’s use of activities such as comprehension tests, and an emphasis on a formal theatrical rehearsal process of read-throughs and ‘blocking’ (director-led setting of the action), the Shakespeare text was reproduced within the classroom as an immovable object of ‘high culture’ to be lived up to, rather than played with.

Of course, any longitudinal case study deserves a more thorough and nuanced presentation than this, but I suggest that the above demonstrates that when dominant power structures and prevailing cultural norms of school (i.e. test-led curricula) are reproduced as naturalised in the ensemble context by the teacher, this gives the ensemble minimal ‘space’ to operate in. This tension was played out in the context of this school, with the unfortunate result that the cast disengaged with the play to such an extent that they did not reach the final performance.

This case had many of the hallmarks of being potentially another of SSF’s success stories, providing an opportunity for ‘disaffected young people’ to re-engage with Shakespeare in the celebratory view of their school and community. Yet the project became utterly untenable. Again, there were myriad factors at play in this process, but here I want to argue this serves to show that ensemble projects cannot be seen as a finite ‘intervention’, producing results defined by and existing within dominant school power structures. Rather, it is a process which makes visible and potentially reshapes and resists these structures. As in this case, the teacher becomes a conduit for these multiple and competing demands and must find a way to manage them while also undertaking an element of ‘decrowning’, which Neelands emphasises is vital for the creation of authentic ensemble pedagogy.

Therefore I argue that the domesticated model of ensemble pedagogy is lacking, because it does not allow us to recognise and navigate these points of tension. At its worst, it feels as though the ‘black box’ model of ensemble is not clear to teachers about how potentially risky and difficult the essential process of recognising and renegotiating positionality to ‘default’ pedagogies within the ensemble approach can be. The process of teacher ‘decrowning’, which Neelands places as central to ensemble pedagogy, is therefore not a singular and finite action, as the language of interventions suggests, but rather an ongoing and negotiated process, involving a high level of teacher autonomy.

Autonomous ‘decrowning’

Drama of course, by itself does nothing, it is only what teachers do with drama that makes the difference. (Neelands, 2009b: 4)

The ‘black box’ model of education positions ‘interventions’ such as SSF within a medical framework; as a pill to be taken or balm to be applied to measurable positive effect. But if we reject this domesticated understanding of ensemble pedagogies and rather see projects such as SSF as a pedagogic space to be occupied in specific and contextualised ways, then we are required to look at the primacy of human relations. Neelands’ work urges us to go beyond easy rhetorics of ‘transformation’ and ‘miracles’ within drama education. He suggests that if we recognise the active, change-orientated, socially embedded work which can occur in collaborative theatre education, then ‘miracles’ (such as those described on the SSF website) cease to be magic.

The work of Tam neatly punctures this notion of ensemble, or drama, pedagogies as a miraculous intervention, through a comparative study of two teachers undertaking parallel drama projects in Hong Kong (Tam, 2010). Comparing two teachers carrying out the same role-play activities, Tam shows that drama work can be carried out both well within the normative bounds of school power structures, but also in more collaborative and open-ended ways. This undermines the notion of ensemble pedagogy work as an intervention or product to be applied. To make sense of this, Tam uses Bakhtin’s notion of carnival (i.e. a time and space in which normative power relations are subverted and the popular rules of the ‘marketplace’ reign (Bakhtin, 1984) as a defining framework for conceptualising the collaborative, open-ended drama classroom. Tam maps this onto her case studies, defining the carnivalesque classroom as one where: the teacher is ‘decrowned’; where multiple languages are included and recognised, both discursively and literally; the body is ‘unbounded’, both in student contact and movement about the classroom; there are teacher-sanctioned laughter and jokes; and ‘imaginative violence’ (i.e. grotesque, taboo content) is evoked by the students and sanctioned by the teacher.

Tam’s account emphasises the relinquishing of control on the part of the carnivalesque classroom teacher. However, this is not just a question of what teachers’ concede the students to bring, a passive relinquishing of power. As Tam has it ‘In the drama classroom, the teachers’ power is vital to both the emergence and the authenticity of the carnival images … The shift in the power relation between the teachers and the students is intricate’ (Tam, 2010: 182). Thus, I would argue the activity of the teacher within ensemble pedagogy is a more subtle and autonomous interpretation of role than a simple ‘decrowning’.

The body of research which has grown up around the Creative Partnerships UK arts education endeavour has looked closely at the role of the creative, collaborative teacher. Galton’s case study of practitioners from a variety of artistic backgrounds, working in long-term school projects, maps the personalised, contextualised and developing approach taken by these practitioners (Galton, 2010) and indicates higher levels of risk-taking in the pedagogic approach of practitioners within Creative Partnership projects. This risk-taking often took the form of activities much larger or ambiguous in scope, or unstructured in scale, than the students were typically familiar with. In this way, there was frequent treatment of students as co-learners, and Galton observed that practitioners tended to draw on their experiences of working in small artistic communities in this respect. Perhaps most relevant here was an observed greater willingness to draw on and share personal experiences in their work (Galton, 2010: 367).

Thus Galton’s presentation of the creative practitioner as a risk-taking co-learner, sharing personal as well as professional identities, suggests a ‘decrowning’ of the teacher, but also a greater personal presence of the teacher. In this way, ensemble pedagogy, while being focused on the active and collaborative engagement of the students, is still a highly autonomous process for teachers and practitioners. By not having to ‘be there’ as a formal teacher or authority figure, teachers open themselves up to ‘being there’ as a person in other, broader senses.

Yet these broader senses of personal identity which Galton observed do not imply a simplistic releasing or relaxing; he describes a dynamic, developing process by which practitioners offer and invite personal and emotional information relevant to the task or project, and are also able to adapt techniques of pedagogic scaffolding and direct instruction as relevant for the students and context. This I would argue echoes the role of the teacher in ensemble projects such as SSF, balancing a complex and shifting role, managing a relinquishing of power and a sharing of a broader ‘non-school’ identity, while also managing contextual expectations, norms, and scaffolding tasks as needed. For example, the teacher in the primary school case demonstrated this autonomous negotiation of roles. I observed during rehearsals that she would use clear linguistic cues of changes in tone and pitch to move from a more authoritative role, giving clearly scaffolding instructions, to a more excitable and collaborative role, positioned in the thick of the group, both giving and responding to suggestions in quick succession. Thus we can see this role is a highly active and autonomous one.

In the Creative Partnerships report The Signature Pedagogies Project, Thomson et al. (2012) map a similar set of pedagogic approaches common to creative practitioners in their case study. They noted that the work of practitioners in school tended to be inclusive, with a genuine commitment to student choice and agency; echoing Tam, they highlight the importance of the ‘absurd and carnivalesque’ in the practitioners’ approach. Furthermore they note a focus on the lived/present experience of the classroom, contrasted with ‘default’ pedagogies, which they argue focus excessively either on students’ prior learning, or future attainment. Finally, like Galton, they notice activities are often challenging in scale or ambition.

However, in addition to characterising the pedagogic approaches of the creative practitioner, Thomson et al. map the qualities of the pedagogic space they argue such projects occupy. These pedagogic spaces are presented as comparable with Habermas’ concept of a ‘life world’ (Thomson et al., 2012: 13) and defined by what they term sociality, ‘the ways in which people live together and find a place within a community’ (Thomson et al., 2012: 12). They nevertheless do not position these spaces as whole, clearly bounded insertions into normative school pedagogy. What they observed within their research does not seem to bear out Pringle’s fear of ‘one-off bubbles’ (Pringle, 2008), but rather suggests these spaces as defined by their hybridity, mobility, permeability and flexibility. Thus, these pedagogic spaces are seen as constantly developing and refining themselves in response to the developing sociality of the group, and to their embeddedness in the broader school context (Thomson et al., 2012: 12).

Another potential conceptualisation of such pedagogic space would be Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which he defines as ‘something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault, 1984: 46). He describes how these spaces can juxtapose ‘in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault, 1984: 48) and are at once both isolated and impenetrable. Hence the ensemble could be described as a heterotopic space, which is both distinguished from, and inextricably linked to its school context.

Thomson et al. suggest that to ask whether and how teachers can deliver arts pedagogies is a naïve question, which works only at the level of practice. SSF’s focus on the creative content of performance work when conceptualising the ensemble is such an example of focusing on the ‘how’. Thomson et al. argue the successful and full inclusion of arts approaches, such as ensemble pedagogy, is a question not just of practice or content, but also of framing and purpose (Thomson et al., 2012: 47). It is these questions of the framing and purpose of ensemble pedagogy that arise through conceptualising it as a spatial process, invoking as it does issues of contextualised power and control, which go unanswered and even unasked in domesticated, ‘black box’ models of ensemble pedagogy.

In summary, ensemble pedagogy, defined by both Boyd and Neelands as a shared commitment to practice over time which prioritises collaborative relationships both within and beyond the creative endeavour, has become a common motif in theatre education projects such as SSF. However, the current ‘black box’ conceptions of education, focused on ‘interventions’ and ‘output’, see a domesticated view of ensemble pedagogy prevail, one which conceptualises the approach as an educational product or intervention, and as such focuses on the pedagogical content definitive to the ensemble product. However, when we see the ensemble as a domesticated intervention, the issue of normative and competing power structures within schools which the approach invokes are not forefronted. When we see the ensemble as a domesticated intervention, teachers’ active, autonomous role in its creation is minimised. This has the potential to deny the autonomous and risky truth of these approaches to teachers participating in endeavours such as SSF. In the schools I worked with, teachers frequently spoke of the project as an ongoing and changing space in which both they and their students could develop; the project lead teacher at the SEN school in particular spoke of the incremental and ongoing development for herself, her staff and especially the students in returning to SSF year on year, commenting:

[The] main thing is … to continue with the impact it’s had on students who’ve previously been involved, to build on what they’ve already done … because it’s been going on in the school for so many years and they’ve watched the older ones do it and then they come up and they’re part of it … it’s something that they would miss if it wasn’t there” (Teacher, SEN school, 2013)

Implications

Therefore, the question becomes if and how it might be possible to begin to de-domesticate the ensemble through bringing to the fore this spatial understanding within the current intervention-focused education landscape, and what the implications of this change of understanding may be. Neelands has suggested that the key to valuing the alternative space offered by ensemble pedagogies is to be found in actually celebrating its marginality. He recognises that while this ‘may seem cruel [to ensemble practitioners striving for recognition] … there is something in the lonely hut or mobile building reserved for drama in the borderlands of the school landscape that appeals’ (Neelands, 2004: 35). While I would agree it is difficult to conceptualise how a full-throated, undomesticated understanding of ensemble pedagogy can be embraced in the current education system, I would also suggest that there is an ease and simplicity to remaining in an antagonist alternative camp. Further, I would suggest drama education as a field of practice, and ensemble pedagogy in particular, has gone beyond this position of marginality. SSF alone has grown since 2000, when eight schools performing over two nights, to 2014 with 1150 schools performing across the UK. While this expansion and consolidation may be on the back of its success as translated into the ‘black box’ language of interventions and outcomes, nevertheless, as my case studies seem to indicate, teachers and schools are welcoming the lived process of these complex, risky ensemble spaces. Thus I would argue this as an opportunity not to marginalise ensemble pedagogies, but to trade on the admittedly domesticated discourse of success afforded by the ‘black box’ understanding, to reassert a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the approach. The theatre education scholar Saxon asserts that ‘in our desire to get through the door, we can be distracted. In our anxiety to be heard, we can learn others’ language and sometime forget the power of our own’ (cited in O’Toole, 2009: viii)

Therefore, in order to de-domesticate the ensemble, there is a need to share this ‘language’, the language of space over intervention and relationships over impact. I would argue finding ways of sharing this language would be relevant, not just for those explicitly following an ensemble pedagogy approach, or those in theatre education, but for all creative, collaborative and emancipatory education approaches. How might this sharing of language come about? Galton suggests that a way forward here might be through rejecting both top-down and bottom-up approaches to curriculum reform in this area, which he argues have done little to enhance the position of collaborative arts practices. His alternative is to instead look to embed this model of a disruptive yet welcomed creative space through a ‘seed corn’ approach to curriculum change. Through sustained dialogue with small groups of teachers, allowing them to reflect not only on their own pedagogical practice, but the role of the arts and artists in society (Galton, 2010: 327). I would suggest, through its sustained and growing relationship with an increasing number of schools, SSF is ideally placed to go beyond the easy, domesticated notions of ensemble and support teachers engaging in the sustained and reflexive dialogue which Galton describes. Through such sustained dialogue, there is the potential to move closer to a spatial understanding of ensemble pedagogy work, which allows a celebration of the complex, resistant and risky experiences which such approaches invoke. In this way, I would argue such projects can move closer to Boyd’s simple but beguiling original suggestion, that openly creating and responding to art, together, over time has the power to produce robust relational bonds, with emancipatory potential.