Drama Education, the Body and Representation (or, the mystery of the missing bodies)

Abstract Despite the fact that drama education relies on bodies and the body as the main means and form of mediation, there is very little in theories and ideas around drama in education which raises the body as an object of study and as a problem. This paper is concerned with raising some questions about the body in the theory and practice of drama education. In drama classrooms the body is the pre‐eminent form of representation. The ‘scripts’ of improvised drama are formed and inscribed in and by the individual and social bodies of the drama student. The body combines and orchestrates the communicative resources of speech, gesture and act. How can we begin to describe learning processes in terms of what the body signifies through speech, gesture, posture, relative positions of one body to another? In an age where there is global trade in televised bodies in places where the classroom is populated by bodies of learners who are formed in diverse cultural backgrounds, what kinds of learning happen when these bodies perform improvised drama? In what ways do the roles of the social actor (the school student, the person) and the dramatic actor (the student, the person involved in dramatic activity) interact to give access to a range of representational resources? In approaching these questions around the body as a form of representation, the paper draws on recent cultural theory from the fields of philosophy, social semiotics, drama and theatre, applying them to a transcript of a soap opera made by school students.