The author reviews the 2021 production of James Baldwin’s play, The Amen Corner, as directed by Whitney White at Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. After situating the experience of engaging with Baldwin’s art through a constructivist approach to art-based education and learning design, the piece turns to considering the impact of various interpretive materials and the director’s artistic vision in the production. White’s decision to include an epigraph in the production leaves a notable impact, particularly in conversation with Baldwin’s essays, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” and “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”
model is that of ‘Arts Education’ whereby the (visiting) artist is seen as a teacher helping participants to ‘develop’ to a higher stage of competence and achievement (within certain parameters). A third, and potentially more useful one is that referred to as the ‘Collaboration’ or ‘Client-led’ model where there is a degree of acceptance of the legitimacy of the perspective of the person identified as a ‘problem’. This is related to my own work which tries to go beyond these definitions and find ways to re-validate those people who have been defined as ‘invalid’ by
: ‘while dance educators may be attempting to “free” students through an arts education based on the techniques of modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, whose techniques offer an expressive means to communicate art, they may not be aware of how power actually plays out in the dance classroom’ (Green 2002–3: 120). Green places Graham and Cunningham outside of her otherwise grim reading of technique as repressive. She reads their technique as a way to bring the inner subjectivity towards a communal, shared space. This critique enables us to 19
education, employment or training (Abraham and Busby, 2015 ). The impact of Clean Break’s work has been far-reaching – not only for the individual women who have worked with the company but in shifting public understandings about gendered inequality across a network of organisations in arts, education, criminal justice, the voluntary sector and government who have partnered with it. In addition to this necessarily less-visible work, Clean Break has, over the last four decades, made a significant contribution to contemporary British theatre through the commissioning of
’, foreword. 46 The practice employed by Alexander of rehearsing from 11 until 2 is 92 The social and theatrical realm confirmed by Mason (1935: 24–5) and Dolan, ‘A Chronicle of Small Beer’, p. 66. References Barnes, Kenneth (1958), Welcome, Good Friends, London: Peter Davies. Bolton, Gavin (2007), ‘A History of Drama Education: A Search for Substance’, in Liora Bresler, ed., International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 45–62. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice