Dramas of Persuasion

Written by Sally Harrison-Pepper – This article is from AIM Issue 1 (released December 2022).

Spending a career in academia may have been an accident, a curse, or more likely a miraculous work of serendipity.

I was a terrible student in high school, hostile to rote learning, exams and grades. I was repeatedly told I was “not college material.” I even failed third grade. So, and why not, I found a career in theater, performance art, and improvisation.

My path to the ivory tower began when I sensed there were some foundational cracks in the 1970’s theater work I was doing. It felt incomplete, unfulfilled, as if the meaning and value of traditional theater was missing something, or was at least misdirected. But what? My quest to find what I did not yet understand had begun, a quest based upon “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Somehow, this unconventional learner nevertheless managed to get degrees in Comparative Religion and then in Anthropology. While these were useful foundational steps, I still knew “That’s not it.” And then, a random stroll through a bookstore revealed the touchstone to my quest: Richard Schechner and Mady Schuman’s book: Ritual, Play, and Performance: Readings in the Social Sciences/Theatre (1976). “This,” I thought, “is it. This is my goal.”

Schechner and Schuman’s book, with its array of powerful essays on Habit, Ritual and Magic (Schaller), Ritual and Performance in Everyday Life (Birdwhistell), Shamanism, Trance and Meditation (Anisimov), Desert Rituals and the Sacred Life (Grotowski), even The Chest Beating Sequence of the Mountain Gorilla (Lawick-Goodall), and many more, prompted me to track down Schechner, and then manage to study and work with him at New York University.

Soon, beyond the rigorous theoretical materials at the center of Schechner’s work, I was also given opportunities to learn with many of the distinguished theater makers in his circle, from Augusto Boal to Eugenio Barba to Jerzy Grotowski and more. In this way, the idea of combining social science theory and performance practice began to take root.

My journey with Schechner concluded with yet another mostly-unsought degree, a Ph.D. in Performance Studies, which ultimately landed me in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University in 1988. Recognizing the eclectic skill set of their new colleague, they quickly assigned me to an area they called “Creativity and Culture.” Soon learning that I was determined to combine theory and practice, social science and performance in my courses, my colleagues enthusiastically supported me. Many even participated in the array of interdisciplinary courses I created. Their support and willingness to defend me against a more conservative, rule-bound administration enabled me to develop the methodology I came to call “Dramas of Persuasion.”

As I sought to develop, defend and secure my teaching methods, I discovered many supportive interdisciplinary materials. My notion of combining theory and practice in the classroom was given additional academic validation, for example, by Victor and Edith Turner, who had published the results of a methodology they called “performing ethnography” in The Drama Review in 1982.

Victor Turner, an anthropologist, had sought ways to introduce his students to ethnographic accounts of varying cultures by adding performative experiences that would “aid students’ understanding of how people in other cultures experience the richness of their social existence.” He and Edith Turner devised workshops in which students could “try on” behavior and get kinetic understandings of “other” sociocultural groups (1982: 34).

I also admired Barbara Myerhoff’s work on secular ritual, in which she described how rituals are embodied—literally learned in the body—as behaviors or actions that gradually shape one’s views or attitudes. In Myerhoff’s view, “Action is indicated because rituals persuade the body first; behaviors precede emotions in the participants” (1977: 199).

As an unconventional learner myself, I knew it was especially important to undo the enforcement of students as passive learners. Paulo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), called such passive learning a “banking” model of education, in which instructors place their knowledge into supposedly empty student receptacles. I instead focused on “critical doing” (Grady, 1992: 15), combining challenging theoretical and analytical course materials with performative and experientially based experiences designed to generate kinetic experiences of the often-abstract concepts we ask students to think, talk, and write about.

Engaging both the head and the heart of students lets them experience their learning within themselves in more profound and meaningful ways than the readings alone could possibly provide. Thus, a course on Women and Theatre, with a wide array of readings in feminist theory, also included improvisational exercises designed to give bodily experiences and illuminate issues of power and gender for further study and discussion.

One of my earliest experiments took place in a course I created on “Ritual, Play, and Performance.” I began the course with a focus on play, and assigned readings on play from Johan Huizinga, Gregory Bateson, Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi, and more. When students arrived in class they were invited to actually play an array of childhood games.

Students had read that play stands “quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but still absorbing the player intensely and utterly” and that it “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner” in Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1955). In the classroom we played a game of Red Light, Green Light, led by my colleague Gene Metcalf. Before class, I had asked him to cheat (at times quite obviously), and yet the game proceeded without challenge. In the discussion afterward, I asked students why they had tolerated Metcalf’s ridiculous demands and rulings.

One student reminded us that Huizinga had said a cheater who pretends to be playing a game will often be allowed to play simply so that the other players can preserve the play world and their community of players. Another student brought out her copy of Huizinga’s book and noted that play “demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it ‘spoils the game,’ robs it of its character and makes it worthless” (32). Students soon realized and agreed that they tolerated Metcalf’s cheating because it “averted a disruption of the game’s order.” They had experienced Huizinga’s idea that maintaining the rules of order that make play possible were more important than challenging a cheater. And they realized that they had fun making this discovery.

The idea that learning theoretical material could actually be enjoyable amazed many of these first-year students. “I had so much fun in the class,” one student remarked, “that I couldn’t believe I was in college… After the experience was over, I looked back at how I had experienced [Csikszentmihalyi’s] flow while trying to get a plastic object out of a cardboard box without buzzing the metal on the side. The game of Operation for ages 5 and up helped me to understand flow. Can you imagine that? I couldn’t until that day.”

A colleague at Miami University, educational theorist Peter McLaren, shared his ideas, described in Schooling as Ritual Performance (1986) as conceptual links between ritual and education, and confirmed the links I repeatedly found in my classrooms. The experiential workshops provided a dynamic cultural arena for the exploration and presentation of issues important to a particular course, yet the necessary expressive behaviors for learning about a wide range of subjects—from history to physics to economics—already existed in classrooms. Experiential activities simply helped students use their bodies as well as their minds as important interdisciplinary tools.

Performative pedagogy thus offers ways to locate and provide deep learning opportunities throughout the curriculum. A collection of relatively simple exercises, informed by theory, can connect students to the transformative “freedom” that Freire advocates in his pedagogy. It can prove that students’ bodies contain vital tools for learning in meaningful and memorable ways. As Myerhoff said, “Action is indicated because rituals [and classrooms containing rituals] persuade the body first.”

After publishing several articles about my pedagogy and receiving a few years’ worth of outstanding student evaluations for my eccentric work in the classroom, I received Miami University’s “Teacher of the Year” award in 1993. As part of the award, I was asked to give a presentation, which I (wrongly) assumed would be for the students and alumni who were part of the ceremony. I thought about potential speeches and rejected each of them — speeches would be the opposite of why I was receiving this award. So, I decided I would have the gathered students play a game, and chose a card game in which students put playing cards on their foreheads, without looking at the number, and then wander around as if they are at a party, giving clues to each other about one another’s numbers. It is a game that reveals notions of hierarchy, status, stereotyping, even tolerance and oppression, in often profound ways, in both the playing and the debrief afterward.

When I arrived at the ceremony, I immediately realized that there were, in fact, no students in the audience. Instead, I saw the new President of the university, a man I had not yet met; the Provost, who was also relatively new to the university; several Deans and department chairs, and even the new football coach (a revered position at our Division I university). And there I was, with a deck of cards and no prepared remarks. Fear was followed by “Hey, this is why I received this award. So, I’m going to make them play this game!” I explained the process and distributed the cards, certain that this game would not go over as usual, but nevertheless convinced that it was why I was there.

I watched as the President drew an Ace and put it on his forehead, and breathed a sigh a relief. He was going to have a good time. The new football coach drew a Deuce. Oh boy… this should be interesting. Fortunately, all in attendance were soon gleefully engaged in the game. As I strolled around the room, watching and doing a bit of coaching, I saw the President, with that Ace on his forehead, march up to the new coach and say, while looking at the coach’s Deuce: “Well, you’re just lucky to be here, that’s all,” and walk away. The coach’s perplexed expression indicated he was likely thinking “Was that the game, or did he really mean that?” The Provost, with a six on her forehead, was clearly frustrated. In the debrief afterward, she said “I’d rather have been a low card, or a high one. I hated being a middle card” — useful information for future dealings with a key decisionmaker and funding-provider at the university. There was, in fact, much to process in the debrief, and it all turned out well. Future support and awards from the President-withan-ace and the Provost-with-a-six continued until I retired in 2015.

Author's Note:

You can find more detailed discussions of these courses and activities in my articles, Dramas of Persuasion: Utilizing Performance in the Classroom in the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 2, 1991 and Dramas of Persuasion: Performance Studies and Interdisciplinary Education in Theatre Topics, Volume 9, Number 2, September 1999

Works Cited:

Bateson, Gregory

1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler Publishing Company.

Boal, Augusto

1979 Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979.

Caillois, Roger

1968 Man, Play, and Games. Revised edition. Translated from the French by Meyer Barash. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

1975 Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1975.

Freire, Paulo.

1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum

Grady, Sharon

1992 “A Postmodern Challenge: Universal Truths Need Not Apply.” Theater 23.2: 15–20.

Huizinga, Johan

1955 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

McLaren, Peter

1986 Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Myerhoff, Barbara G.

1977 “We Don’t Wrap Herring in a Printed Page: Fusion, Fictions and Continuity in Secular Ritual.” Secular Ritual. Ed. Sally F. Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff. Assen, Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 199–224.

Schechner, Richard and Mady Schuman, editors

1976 Ritual, Play and Performance: Readings in the Social Sciences and Theatre. NY: Seabury Press.

Turner, Edith and Victor

1982 “Performing Ethnography." TDR: The Drama Review 26.2: 33–50.

About the Author: Sally Harrison-Pepper, PH.D.

Sally Harrison-Pepper, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies, Theatre, and Women’s Studies at Miami University of Ohio. She is the author of Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York City’s Washington Square Park (University Press of Mississippi, 1991) and is also the creator and editor of a Performance Studies series for the University Press of Mississippi.

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