nd@nationaldrama.org.uk

This article argues that a key inheritance from German Tanztheater to British physical theatre is methodological rather than stylistic: a devising logic that treats the performer as a thinking subject and uses individuality as compositional material. It re-reads DV8 Physical Theatre through this lineage, emphasising risk and performer authorship as rehearsal principles rather than reducing DV8 to a hybrid genre label. The article then addresses a persistent reception problem in mainland China, where DV8 has often been classified as ‘dance theatre’ or ‘modern dance’, encouraging work-centred interpretation of recordings while marginalising rehearsal method. In response, it proposes a practice-led model of questionnaire-led devising for drama training. Here, written prompts operate as generative constraints (not verbatim sources) and are translated into embodied tasks, improvisational material, and a repeatable rehearsal score. The article shows how scoring (fixing parameters while keeping controlled variables open) enables repetition without homogenisation, making ‘performer as thinker’ teachable and revisable.

Borma Tbaqbaq – Il-Lingwa tal-Kċina: Neocolonialism and the Oppression of Women is a practice-as-research project that attempts to investigate the parallels between patriarchal dynamics and the perpetuation of colonialism as manifested and portrayed in an original bilingual performance. The research question is explored from the perspective of the three female writers and performers of this theatrical piece. By interviewing these three women about the creative process of how they embodied these parallels through the rehearsals and performances, the research demonstrates and analyses how the depiction of these parallels can be conveyed powerfully and poignantly through the theatrical medium. The theoretical framework that influenced this process is rooted in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, particularly the works of seminal authors such as Sara Ahmed,  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,  Leela Gandhi and bell hooks. The article also foregrounds the pedagogical implications of this project and proposes a workshop that can be applied within an educational setting.

Dorothy Heathcote’s work is sometimes divided into two phases: an early period characterised by ‘living through’ drama and a later phase associated with Mantle of the Expert. This article challenges that division by arguing for continuity in her ongoing concern with drama as ‘man in a mess.’ From her earliest formulations to her later Mantle work, the ‘mess’ was not merely personal crisis but the disturbance of social norms through which a community’s structures, and values become visible. Drawing on close analyses of key episodes, the article proposes that Heathcote consistently practised a drama-as-anthropology: an enacted ‘thick description’ of human action under pressure. Participants in the drama function simultaneously as artist-creators and quasi-ethnographers, shaping and interpreting signs within the evolving fiction. Moments of ‘new awareness’ emerge, not from unmediated immersion, but from disciplined attention to sign and significance in the art form.

This article argues for reclaiming Futurist theatrical techniques as powerful, contemporary tools in the secondary drama classroom. While acknowledging Futurism’s fascist, misogynistic origins, the study adopts a framework of critical recontextualisation, focusing on adapting its performance strategies—sintesi (very brief plays), illogic and simultaneity, heightened actor–spectator interaction, and scenographic experimentation—for ethical, reflective, and critical exploration of students’ own urban environments. Drawing on Guy Debord’s notion of the dérive and psychogeography, students undertake guided ‘drifts’ through their city as stimuli for performance.
This article argues that Futurist performance techniques, recontextualised through ethical critique and psychogeographic practice, offer highly effective strategies for creative urban inquiry in drama education.

Primary-secondary school transitions are an ongoing process involving pupils moving from one educational establishment (primary) to another (secondary), and changes to their interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships. This evaluative case study discusses aspects of two sessions within a series of five drama workshops. These workshops were devised as part of a wider research project investigating the use of drama to support pupils’ primary-secondary school transitions within one Scottish local authority. Multiple and Multiple-dimensional Transitions theory alongside drama conventions were used to conceptualise, theorise and plan the workshops. As such, the paper draws upon educational drama, drama conventions and primary-secondary school transitions literature to discuss and reflect on the process of devising and implementing the drama.

While the Expressive Arts curriculum aims for a holistic approach to drama, the weight given to its individual components is skewed. Since the implementation of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) this research is the first to focus on primary teachers’ perspectives on theatre arts technology (lighting, set, sound, props, make-up and hair, and costume), as both a pedagogic tool and component of performance. Exploring the unequal p‘arts’ of the drama curriculum, the study identifies a significant curricular imbalance: the single mention of theatre arts technology in the primary level drama descriptors stands in direct contrast to the nine collective mentions of performance-based skills (voice, movement, and role play). Drawing from a larger mixed-methods study the research surveyed 83 teachers across diverse primary demographics using a 32-item questionnaire which was analysed via descriptive statistics and inductive content analysis.