Dramatic Interactions in Education

Vygotskian and Sociocultural Approaches to Drama, Education and Research

Susan Davis, Beth Ferholt, Hannah Grainger Clemson, Satu-Mari Jansson, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Susan Davis, Beth Ferholt, Hannah Grainger Clemson, Satu-Mari Jansson, Ana Marjanovic-Shane

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472576903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Dramatic Interactions in Education draws together contemporary sociocultural research across drama and educational contents to draw out implications for researchers and practitioners both within and outside the field. Drama is a field for which human interactions, experience, emotional expression, and attitude are central, with those in non-arts fields discovering that understandings emerging from drama education can provide models and means for examining the affective and relational domains which are essential for understanding learning processes. In addition to this, those in the realm of drama education and applied theatre are realising that sociocultural and historical-cultural approaches can usefully inform their research and practice. Leading international theorists and researchers from across the UK, Europe, USA and Australia combine theoretical discussions, research methodologies, accounts of research and applications in classroom and learning contexts, as they explore concepts from Vygotsky's foundational work and interrogate key concepts such as perezhivanie (or the emotional, lived experience), development of self, zone of proximal development.

Part I

Vygotsky, Drama, Perezhivanie and the Unity of Development

1

Dramatic Interactions: From Vygotsky’s Life of Drama to the Drama of Life

Michael Michell

Introduction

The greatest challenge a reader of Vygotsky’s works faces is gaining an understanding of his theoretical system as a whole. Such understanding is an ‘architectural’ one that requires tracing the foundations and development of his theoretical concepts, identifying the relationships between them, and interpreting them within the argument structure in which they are expressed. In this respect, Vygotsky’s theoretical system illustrates his notion of scientific knowledge as an organized system of abstract concepts, general propositions and dialectical thinking (Vygotsky, 1987), an interconnectedness Karpov (2005) identifies as the key to understanding Vygotsky’s work as a whole.

Moreover, Vygotsky’s system of thinking was itself in a continual state of evolution (Yaroshevsky and Gurgenidze, 1997). The development of his cultural psychology over the last decade of his life reflected the same internal change dynamics that he used to describe the self-transformational structures and processes of his object of study – the psyche. Understanding Vygotsky’s developing thought therefore rests on knowledge of the status and chronological periods of his text production, critical to assessing the meaning and significance of his work as a whole.

There have been long-standing issues of the completeness and chronology of his six volume Collected Works (Vygotsky, 1987–1999), access to unpublished material, defective original texts, and poor editing and translations (van der Veer and Yasnitsky, 2011a,b). This situation has led Dubna Psychological Journal to collect and make available online Vygotsky’s complete works and invite translation, analysis and commentary on these texts from international scholars (Yasnitsky, 2012a). In this context, a textual-historical analysis and reassessment of Vygotky’s work based on an ‘archival revolution’ (Yasnitsky, 2010) is currently taking place in the recovery, reconstruction and publication of his texts. Initial analysis of new texts, notebooks and published and unpublished material made available from the Vygotsky family archives is giving new insights into the development and trajectory of Vygotsky’s thinking and has located the origins of some of his later mature theories in his early texts (van der Veer and Zavershneva, 2011a,b; Vygotsky, 2010; Zavershneva, 2010a,b,c, 2012). With this understanding has come a new appreciation of the periodization of Vygotsky’s work; the importance of his early writings on literature, theatre and art, and their influence on his later mature theories in his last and most productive period 1932–34 (Gonzalez Rey, 2011; Miller, 2011; Yasnitsky, 2012b), following his ‘cognitive, instrumental period’ of the second half of the 1920s. Understanding of the evolution of Vygotsky’s thinking therefore requires an understanding of this periodic structure, bookended by his literary themes and preoccupations.

This chapter explores the lesser known connections and interactions between Vygotsky’s life of drama and his psychology by employing a ‘textological’ approach to Vygotskian studies (Yasnitsky, 2010). It draws on recent developments in the recovery and publication of Vygotskian texts, in particular a first-time translation of Vygotsky’s 1922/23 weekly theatre reviews, and aims to identify important connections that framed his theory of the sociocultural development of human psyche as a ‘drama of life’.

Before becoming a psychologist in Moscow in 1924, Vygotsky’s doctoral thesis on Hamlet formed the centrepiece of his 1925 work, The Psychology of Art. Two key ideas are fundamental to understanding his drama and psychology – the dialectic and the emotions. In The Psychology of Art, Vygotsky applied Marxian-Hegelian dialectics to understand a psychology of art animated by contradictions or collisions of literary form and content, and reader affect and intellect, to produce the transformational aesthetic-emotional release (synthesis) of catharsis:

Aesthetic experience is the product of the influence of form on content, more specifically, of their collision in the work of art, the collision of the contradictory emotions generated by each which produces the annihilation of feeling, transforming the nature of the affects to produce the emotional release known as catharsis.

(Lima, 1995: 418)

Vygotsky identified this cathartic, ‘aesthetic reaction’ (West, 1999: 53) as the mechanism by which art works on the human psyche; the literary text is the source and stimulus of aesthetic affect; and art itself functions as ‘the social technique of emotion, a tool of society which brings the most intimate and personal aspects of our being into the circle of social life’ (Vygotsky, 1925/1971: 249). While the concept of ‘catharsis’ does not appear again in Vygotsky’s work, the role of the dialectic and the emotions move to centre stage in his evolving account of the drama of psychological development.

Vygotsky’s Life of Drama – Our Monday Theatre Reviews

From 1917 to 1924, during the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and civil war, Vygotsky lived and became a prominent cultural leader in his native town of Gomel. As well as organizing forums on classical and modern literature, he was head of the theatre section of the Gomel Department of People’s Education, where he took an active part in selecting the theatre repertoire, directing plays, and writing and editing for the theatre section in the Gomel newspaper Nash Ponedel’nik (Our Monday) (West, 1999), with some 67 of his theatre reviews originally published between 1922 and 1923 (Yasnitsky 2012c). It is apparent that he saw himself as a cultural agent, mediating the audience’s experience and critical understanding of new and old theatre:

It has always been my calling to build up ‘an air bridge of criticism’ between the audience and the stage … but not to put a stamp of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, not to give diplomas of talent or mediocrity, but to help the spectator to build his own critical perception of the performance – ‘The Author of Theatre Reviews’, Our Monday, #28

(Vygotsky, 1923/2012: 172)

Vygotsky’s cultural mission of giving praise to ‘the minor poetry of ephemeral, sweet, small, local art’ (Vygotsky 1923/2012) was just as important for Gomel’s ‘16 candles of the provincial stage’ (Vygotsky 1923/2012) as for the established urban centres of Russian theatre. The early years of the Russian Revolution affected all aspects of society, art and culture, accelerating developments in drama and introducing a new theatrical language. For Vygotsky, mastering this new theatrical language was essential to being able to break away from the artistic constraints of the old culture. This artistic revolution made Vygotsky’s role as a ‘facilitator’ of the audience’s understanding of the new language all the more necessary:

To express new ideas, new art has to master a new language. What happened before us is like an echo of the search for a new theatrical language. Every form of art, including the theatre, is in its essence a language, a form to express new ideas. It takes time to understand this language. Spectators may fail to comprehend it at once, so this process should be facilitated. The very fact that this new language takes us away from the flatness of a suffocating culture and spirit of the last century, entirely justifies using it – ‘The First Swallow’, Our Monday, 32,

(Vygotsky, 1923/2012: 174)

The reviews are necessarily brief, typically half to one-and-a-half pages in length. First, Vygotsky typically locates the play – its plot, characters, themes and performance style – in the context of the original literary meaning (‘essence’), reflecting his strong cultural historical approach to artistic analysis and appraisal. Second, Vygotsky typically evaluates the production – its acting and staging – from the perspective of how well it realizes the meaning and dramatic potential of the original play. Here, Vygotsky draws heavily on a ‘Stanislavskian template’ of organic as opposed to representational acting as his main criteria of theatrical success.

To understand Vygotsky’s theatre reviews, an understanding of the concept of perezhivanie as the deep onstage psychological connection between character, actor and audience, promoted by contemporary theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, is essential. As the ‘genuine penetration of a psychic state in a represented character’ (Carnicke, 1998: 149), perezhivanie conveys the ‘inner life of the character’ through the actor’s ‘communication of that life onstage in an artistic form’ (Stanislavski, 2008: 19). With perezhivanie, the actor convincingly ‘lives the role’; without it, the actor merely ‘plays the part’. The hallmark of Stanislavski’s system is this distinction between organic acting (experiencing) expressing ‘inner truth’ and representational acting (pretending) reflecting ‘theatrical falseness’ (Gillett, 2012: 2). While organic acting grasps universal depths of human experience, representational acting reflects ‘stock-in-trade’ acting conventions such as merely reciting lines and mechanical clichés for indicating feelings.

This Stanislavskian binary pervades all Vygotsky’s reviews. His review of the Red Torch Troupe’s choice of dated repertoire at first appears unpromising, however:

… our theatre succeeded in getting real sparks of artistic theatrical life out of these cold flints. Both original literary works were adequately translated into the dramatic form of stage performance. After the first performance of the Moscow Studio, I wrote, ‘that it seemed, that the very life of a soul, not just its image, was torn open, disclosed for the audience; the same psychological insight, the same full...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword Vera John-Steiner
• Introduction: Vygotsky, Sociocultural Concepts and Drama in and for Education Susan Davis, Hannah Grainger Clemson, Beth Ferholt and Satu-Mari Jansson
• Part I Vygotsky, Drama, Perezhivanie and the Unity of Development
• Part II Sociocultural Insights into Learning through Drama
• Part III The Dynamics of Meaning Making through Drama Processes in the Classroom
• Part IV Practice and Research Inspired by Sociocultural Approaches to Drama, Education and Learning
• Index