Participactor, -student

Here goes - a new blog every couple of months, not so bad I guess. Bad.

I had some trouble deciding whether this one belonged here or in my Icelandic blog on education - it landed here and will therefore be

well at least in English.

I recently had a very interesting artistic and spiritual experience participating in Djöfulgangur, a piece of participatory theatre by the group Kviss Búmm Bang. I have been looking around to see if anything resembling Larp is ongoing in Iceland, and this is the closest I could come.

This will not be a blog on the piece which was very interesting.

Anyways - I asked them afterwards about where their inspiration came from and they mentioned Augusto Boal and his Theatre of the Oppressed, he coined the term in the title. An interesting interview with that fascinating character here above.

Finally in connection with my work on my master's thesis on games in education I discovered a little system by Icelandic education theorist Gerður G. Óskarsdóttir where she analysis classroom work according to the level of teacher vs. student control and correspondingly whether projects are open ended or have single given solutions.  Finding in Icelandic schools a huge predominance of teacher control and closed assignments. Naturally.

Now - I wonder why when very strong tendencies in art, theatre and education point towards increased democratisation and power to the audience / student -  traditional art contexts, theatres and schools remain so thouroughly autocratic for the most part? And (very ironically) participatory forms are avant garde and in some sense form a kind of elitist minority on the fringes of both the world of art and education?

I have some ideas, but still it is mind blowing that a hundred years after Dada and Dewey things have not really changed that much....

More in two months.

Or less.

Or more.