Participation is at the heart of what we’re doing on this module. This is not only because it’s a central idea in drama/ theatre/ performance studies, but also because a large portion of your assessment will require you to demonstrate how effectively you have participated on the module. For this reason, I wanted to take a minute to outline what we mean by this term, and to ask you to think a bit more about what it might mean to you. But there are a lot of big ideas contained within this, so (for now) I’ve decided to break it down into 3 different aspects of participation which are particularly relevant to this module.

1. Participation and performance. Participation is central concern for contemporary theatre-makers because it opens up the possibility of rethinking the performer/audience relationship and invites activated spectatorship. It is a term which is also often used to describe the work that theatres do to try and find new audiences — for example, by working with schools or community groups — in Newcastle, Northern Stage has a Participation team devoted to doing just this.
2. Participation in higher education. Similar to theatre and performance, participation in the university is often linked to widening participation agendas, like our own Partners initiative. But here in the School of English we also think about it in terms of how students are taking part in their own learning processes. You may have come across the ‘university is like a gym’ metaphor which is often used to describe undergraduate studies (i.e. you can pay for your membership, but you won’t get fitter unless you actually go along and use the equipment). The logic behind this metaphor may indeed be flawed. Still, taking part in an academic community seems to me to be a small but powerful way of resisting the individualist, consumerist forces working on higher education.
3. Participation and society. In democracy, participation is understood to be a fundamental principle. And yet this also presents a paradox because participation is often low — i.e. many people don’t use their vote — and so it is also a major challenge to democracy (Chilambo, 2007). This is a very real concern for all of us. As I’m writing this post, the question of Brexit is thoroughly unresolved and the whole event has raised questions about what has happened to our democracy, and whether a people’s vote or final say referendum would give the people of the UK more or less of a say in what happens next. These are issues concerned with what constitutes participation, and whether or not it is essential to democratic process.

Let me be clear: it is the first two aspects of participation that we’re going to be most concerned with on this module — I’m not suggesting we can resolve the many, complex problems thrown up by Brexit with the work that we do on SEL1031! But it is useful to consider how some of the issues we think about in relation to drama, theatre, and performance can model or lend insight into real world scenarios. After all, much like the socio-political world, theatre is a public forum: it is an event, in which real people and objects are presented to other people in a shared space.