Reading Performing Arts In Education From A New Materialism Perspective: The Prison Theatre Example

In this paper, we reflect on artistic languages in the field of education from a new materialism perspective (Hood & Kraehe, 2017). First, we focus on the performing arts, arguing that, read through this lens, they can become resources for re-thinking and enacting educational practice as "affirmative", that is, as having the capacity to generate the desire for an alternative present and prompt a profound metamorphosis of the subject as an embedded and embodied subjectivity (Braidotti, 2012). We examine how adopting a new materialism stance allows scholars and practitioners of education to view the performing arts in education as performative practices: an ongoing intra-activity (Barad, 2003) of material and discursive, human and non-human elements. This perspective also draws attention to the entangled networks of heterogeneous actors that materially refigure educational institutions. Second, we further explore these concepts based on an example of how art has materially come into action at the ‘C. Beccaria’ Youth Detention Center in Milan. Citing the outcomes of a case study on the impact of a theatre laboratory inside the prison, we illustrate how building a door, that is to say, materially opening up the theatre to the outside community, and the performative activity carried out in mixed laboratories (composed of young detainees and peers from the community), have transformed the delivery of education within the institution. The model of re-education emerging from the theatre project is laying the ground for an alternative and more experimental approach: the young detainees are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in a system of signs and meanings (Thompson, 2000) that are different to those of prison life, and which, materialized and translated into the here and now (O’ Connor and Mullen, 2011) of everyday life, make it feasible for them to enact new ways of taking part in the world. In sum, we show how the theatre programme subverts the underlying logic of the prison rehabilitation model which, albeit couched in pedagogical rhetoric, continues to rely on a ‘correctional’ approach aimed at inducing socially conforming behaviours, often making solely instrumental use of rehabilitation activities (including prison theatre) (Balfour 2004). Thus, theatre work as a performative practice lays the ground for ‘challenging’ the notion of re-education and developing a broader concept of prison as a place of culture and social inclusion. References Balfour, M. (2004), Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice. Bristol: Intellect. Barad K. (2003), “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter”, Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28, 3: 801-831. Braidotti R. (2012), Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti, Columbia University Press. Hood J. & Kraehe A.M. (2017), Creative Matter: New Materialism in Art Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Art Education, 70, 2: 32-38. O' Connor, P., Mullen, M. (2011), Prison Theatre: Letting the Light in to Disciplinary Relationships, NJ, 35:1, 133-145. Thompson, J. (2000), Bewilderment: Preparing prisoners for 'real' work in the fictional world of prison, Community, Work & Family, 3:3, 241-259.