Rich context example 2: Recording our lives – documentary theatre
Each context elaboration is coded, using the summary notation recorded with each arts strand. A bold strand code indicates a dominant strand in the given context. If both or all codes are bolded, they are considered to have equal weighting in the given context.
Relationships and connection
The contexts for learning outlined below make links to the
drama key concept of relationships and connection.
Possible context – exploring our lives
(CI, PK)
- Students select stories, articles, or photos from a week’s newspapers that reflect a range of issues (in society or the local community) related to teenagers and young adults.
- Share stories from students’ own lives that connect in some way to any of the selected material from the newspapers.
- Use drama conventions to explore important aspects of these stories, for example tableaux, spoken thoughts, slow-motion moments of conflict.
Possible context – Too Much Punch for Judy
(PK, CI, DI, UC)
- Read Mark Wheeler’s one-act play Too Much Punch for Judy. This hard-hitting documentary-styled drama tells the harrowing tale of a young woman who kills her sister in an alcohol-related road accident.
- Examine how the play takes real events, interviews, and photographs of the event, combines these with drama conventions, and creates documentary theatre.
- Discuss the links between what happens in the play and students’ and teacher’s own lives and experiences.
- Discuss the impact this play may have on an audience.
- Interview community members, friends, and family on their experiences, feelings about, and understandings of drink driving. Some possible options for discussion could include responsibilities, (for example, to a group, to oneself, or to whānau), peer pressure, and guilt.
- Share this material with the class.
- Create a short scene, in the style of Too Much Punch for Judy, based on material gathered.
- Share the short scene with the class.
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Embodiment and performance
The contexts for learning outlined below make links to the
drama key concept of embodiement and performance.
Possible context – work-shopping performance skills
(PK, CI)
- Explore physical theatre, ensemble performance, and the use of chorus through a series of classroom/workshop exercises and games.
- Use the skills learned/developed through the workshops to perform scenes from Too Much Punch for Judy by Mark Wheeler (or another play in this style).
Possible context – creating short documentary plays
(CI, DI, PK, UC)
- Using interviews and research into a community, a historical or social event, or an issue, create short plays in the style of documentary theatre.
- Perform these plays for an audience including the local community and those whose stories and experiences have been documented.
Possible context – performing documentary plays
(PK, CI, UC)
- Perform one documentary play, or a selection from several, for an audience.
- Use drama technologies to communicate important messages, highlight moments, as a form of commentary, and to enhance mood and focus.
- Take on the roles of actor, director of a scene or scenes, sound, lighting, audiovisual, costume, set designer, and technician.
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Reflection, challenge, and transformation
The contexts for learning outlined below make links to the
drama key concept of reflection, challenge, and transformation.
Possible context – research documentary theatre
(UC)
- Compare to documentary film and note the specific features of this form of theatre.
- Make links with Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, epic theatre and The Living Newspaper, and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed (See Notes, below).
- Discuss the role of documentary theatre and its impact on an audience.
Notes
Bertolt Brecht
1898–1956. German poet, playwright, theatrical innovator. Epic theatre uses conventions that disrupt audience engagement in realist theatrical illusion. Drama is considered a forum for social/political debate.
Learn more:
Encyclopædia Britannica - Bertolt Brecht
The Living Newspaper
Dramatisions of facts about current events, problems, and issues and ideas for change. Living newspaper began in Russian with the Bolshevik revolution. As with epic theatre (Piscator, Brecht), it breaks away from realism. The Federal Theatre Project introduced Living Newspaper in the United States in 1935.
Learn more:
Encyclopædia Britannica - Living Newspaper
Augusto Boal
1931–2009. Brazilian dramatist, creator of theatre of the oppressed in which spectators become performers and act out solutions to social problems.
Learn more:
Encyclopædia Britannica - Augusto Boal
Possible context – considering the impact of documentary theatre
(UC)
- Read or view a selection of documentary theatre plays. (See the following source notes for support.)
- Discuss their impact on the audiences they were written for and the impact of these plays in our world today.
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Possible documentary plays include:
• The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman
• Verbatim by William Brandt and Miranda Harcourt
• David Hare’s Black Watch and others
• Hush created by Stuart Young, Hilari Halba, and Fiona Graham.
Notes
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Arts and health: Hush
Renee Liang talks to director Stuart Young about Hush – verbatim theatre, which explores family violence in New Zealand.
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Version 1.0
Sydney-based Version 1.0 is an ensemble of artists who make performance through collaboration, investigating, and also enacting democracy. Their devised performances use innovative theatrical strategies to engage with significant political and social issues.
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Urban Theatre Projects makes and presents performance works, inspired by real people and their lives. Grounded in a social and political context, UTP work grapples with what it is like to live in urban Australia and how this connects with the rest of the world.
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Last updated May 26, 2023
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