Theatre as Metaphor and Performative Learning

The theatre in education does not only act as an instrument. A strong analogy may be drawn between the experience offered by education and that offered by theatre. Viewing theatre as a metaphor for education implies drawing attention to an ambivalent relationship and a crucial element of pedagogical experience. A theatre workshop enables us to acquire a new familiarity, an art, a mindful presence and the ability to reflect competently about ambivalent structure of educational experience. A group of academic students, guided by a research in adult education and a colleague who is a dancer and a choreographer, produced a “pedagogical” interpretation of the story moving from a text from the historical tradition of western drama, re-writing it, composing a new text that emerged from the peculiar perspective of what that text communicate nowadays to their sensibility. Therefore, this ‘polyphony of voices’ constructs a dialogical Self that interprets the text and begins to reflect about the educational “resonances” that its peculiar collective re-writing produces at the intersection with the lives and the learning biographies of the students. The theatre workshop becomes an experience of performative learning