When I joined the Shiv Nadar University’s TEST (Theatre for Education and Social Transformation) programme in June 2015, I had already been teaching at a school for three years, and had several years of conducting drama workshops behind me. Yet, this was the first time I was entering a structured training course in the field. What could it have to teach me, I wondered. Plenty, as it turned out.

Drama, for most people, is about having a fun experience, playing games and letting out their energies in a fantasy space. A number of parents are keen to have their children join a drama class because they believe it will enhance the child’s confidence. But this is a very limited picture of drama. At the very outset, allow me to distinguish between two often interchangeably used terms — Theatre-in-Education (TiE) and Drama-in-Education (DiE). I use TiE to refer to the field of dramatic performances and theatre workshops by adults and for children. DiE, on the other hand, is about drama that finds its way into the classroom, on the sports field, in staff rooms and board rooms and prisons; often used as a technique, and sometimes invisibly, to enable deeper engagement with the topic at hand. Unlike theatre-in-education, drama-in-education is not aimed at performance. The gamut of non-production-based dramatic practices is often clubbed together under applied drama.

Drama in the non-performative space works through explorations, through ‘being’, rather than ‘doing’; and its aim, as underlined by Dorothy Heathcote, is “to expand [the participants’] awareness, to enable them to look at reality through fantasy, to see below the surface of actions to their meaning” (BJ Wagner, Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium ). The National Curricular Framework (NCF) recognised the value of having an integrated drama programme in its position paper on the arts, and clearly emphasised that training in the arts, including theatre, ought to be made mandatory until grade 10 ( Position Paper on Arts, Music, Dance and Theatre , 2006). However, it also recognised one major problem with getting this implemented: drama teachers in schools are trained in their own disciplines, but not as educators. For several years now, experts in the field have been calling for training for teachers of drama for children, and several states across India have recognised the importance of drama in contributing towards the holistic development of students, and its therapeutic value for those with developmental challenges. Even in the area of TiE, despite the fact that there are now quite a few TiE repertories in India, there is just a single school where one can train to be a practitioner. NSD’s Tripura TiE Wing has, since 2012, offered a one-year diploma in TiE only to students from the North-East, and claims to be the only school in Asia to offer such a course.

The crucial aspect of applied drama as defined by Heathcote and her peers is that it can be practised by a regular academic teacher exploring a regular academic subject, or an NGO worker working with victims of domestic abuse. It is a technique that uses the tools and methods of drama to enrich the exploration, to enable mining into the topic and to find an emotional connect with it. It is strongly oriented towards analysis and reflection, which Heathcote sees as “the only thing that, in the long run, changes anybody”. Drama is the only medium that allows the explorer to step in and out of the created fantasy world at will and to retain both emotional connect and detachment at the same time. Heathcote explains this: “I am the tree. I see the tree. I am inside the tree.” (Dorothy Heathcote, Pieces of Dorothy )

In my own practice, this has translated to drama classes where we have explored the history of communication and sustainable transport design with upper primary classes. We have used forum theatre to reflect on our understanding of diversity — a topic that children had initially decried as ‘boring with a capital B’, for the way in which it is approached in the social science syllabus. By the end of four sessions, the module was over, but their thirst for exploration was not. During the school’s integrated learning through the arts week, The Story of Indigo came alive for middle-schoolers as it was explored entirely through theatre (teacher-in-role), music and art. Actor and drama teacher Maya Rao designed the TEST course (the first such course in a university), aiming to train teacher/actors who would be able to take applied drama into different social scenarios. She has also worked on the design of the B El Ed course at Delhi University and the new, revamped BEd course. However, she deplores the lack of trained teachers to implement these courses. “We have drama practitioners,” she says, “but not people trained in pedagogy. Many practitioners lack an understanding of applied drama, because they are unfamiliar with the literature in the field.” TEST aims to bridge this gap by combining academic rigour with the discipline of performance. Having felt the life-changing and lasting impact of drama-in-education, Rao moved away from the NSD TiE Company, with which she had worked since its formation in 1986. “It was like a drop in the ocean,” she says. “There is too little being done in the field of applied drama.” Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who has worked with NSD’s TiE Company for many years, shares that people not just in cities, but even in the remotest of villages, value drama because it preserves local cultural forms while giving them the scope to explore new areas of learning. Clearly, a strong demand for drama as a learning medium exists in this country. The question is, are we doing enough to respond to it?

(Manjima Chatterjee is a playwright and drama teacher at Shiv Nadar School, Noida)

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