Walking, Talking, Performing in Place: Learning from/with/on the Land

This autoethnographic essay describes an ambulatory workshop with fellow graduate students, a walking tour to remote parts of campus where we paused to consider writing prompts and to create short performative sketches highlighting the nature of our relationships to the land around us. In this reflection on our “walk and talk,” I consider how teachers and students co-create what we learn together, the mysteries of engaging in interactive drama and poetry methods, and the performative ways in which we might come to know the places where we live and work more intimately and more imaginatively.

The Medium is the Message: The Screen Life of the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1962*

For decades, the iconic image of the Cuban Revolution has been set in Havana's ‘Revolution Square’, with thousands of Cubans thronging to hear Fidel Castro speak. This portrait undergirds a primary assumption about the Revolution: that many Cubans came to embrace it by basking in the euphoria of Fidel's live presence. For the Revolution's crucial early years, this article proposes that we should reimagine this archetypal conversion experience, setting it not only under Cuba's hot sun in an hours-long rally but also in front of a television (or radio) set. From 1959 to 1962 and beyond, the interactive drama of revolutionary conversion would be constantly staged and actualized on the small screen. The early years of the Cuban Revolution thus offer a compelling window onto political life lived with and through television.

The Musical Butterfly Effect in Until Dawn

The interactive drama, a relatively unexplored area of multimedia music discourse, combines elements of film and video game to provide its audience and participants an evolving experience. Because contemporary works of the medium incorporate further innovations that expand the plethora of branching options, the viability of each narrative path and its potential ending necessitates a flexible analytical model for narrative discourse. Music, if it shares the ability to participate in the narrative, must likewise possess this sense of malleability for the work, as its presence or absence in the presented (selected) pathway is not predetermined but remains in a state of potential at all times. This sense of narrative potential for music is a special quality inherent in the interactive drama, allowing for the filmic and ludic qualities of form and function to remain simultaneously “present” and “absent” in a given narrative and provide critical commentary on the events at hand as well as the overall prospective paths that exist in the web of options. Using the interactive drama Until Dawn, this article will explore the concept of narrative potential through three different musical elements that range in their comparative functions to traditionally filmic or ludic roles and their articulation to the underlying narrative. Regardless of supposed function, the music of Until Dawn reveals that narrative form and function of film and video game cannot be differentiated or simply synthesized, but fully appreciated as a unique form of the interactive drama on the multimedia continuum.

Forum-theatre technique to foster creative and active problem solving: A resilience-building intervention among in-service teachers

This paper introduces the results of an evaluation of the Forum-theatre workshop method, which was designed within the framework of a resilience-building intervention. About 230 in-service vocational school teachers in Canton of Ticino participated in the study. A mixed-methods research design was applied to investigate potentialities of the Forum-theatre technique in generating a better understanding about interpersonal conflicts at school while fostering active coping strategies. Data were collected by means of participatory observation and a self-reported questionnaire. The findings indicate a perceived positive impact in terms of proactive participation, critical awareness and activated reflectivity. In addition, the interactive drama technique encouraged participants to activate a dialog between multiple perspectives, thus enlarging the perceived spectrum of possible actions during relational conflicts. The paper concludes with implications for creativity and resilience research.