by Anna Santucci (Phd Candidate, Brown University)
The theatre, sum of all languages, helps make dialogue possible.
If I do not understand the word, I understand the gesture;
if not the gesture, the sound; if not the sound, the silence;
if not the silence, the tone; if not the tone, the movement.
If I understand none of that, I understand the whole,
which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Our communication is rational, aesthetic and sensory;
conscious and unconscious. The mind also speaks through the senses.
(Augusto Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, 116-7)
In many ways, the classroom has a lot in common with theater: it is a place of vision, understanding, communion, learning, and collaborative creation. Research on drama in education in general, and in more recent years on drama in foreign language and culture teaching in particular, has been constantly growing; engagement with the theater and performing arts has repeatedly been praised for promoting embodied learning, facilitating the dissolution of cognitive barriers, fostering cooperation among students, stimulating critical thinking, and supporting the development of trans-cultural competence. In my research and teaching practice, I strongly advocate performance-based teaching of language and culture at all levels of the curriculum, from improvisational and culturally meaningful participatory activities for the beginner classroom, in which students fill information gaps and create meaning together through both verbal and non-verbal communication, to full-fledged theatrical productions for the advanced classroom.