teaching as an act of transgression

"Writing for the theatre is at its best an act of transgression - and
as teachers of playwrights, we should encourage our students to
step over the line, redraw the line, erase the line, even multiply
the lines so that we sit up, step forward, strike out.
I believe the job of mainstream culture and mainstream
theatre is to keep the peace. Our job, as teachers, is to encourage
new writers to break it, to disrupt the lie, to speak truth
to power. Think seriously about the word en-courage: What
are we giving our students courage to do, exactly? Not just
entertain.
Rarely do students of drama enter the classroom with
what we might call, for lack of a better term, "original minds."
Surely their originality, their agency for questioning and considering,
is there, but it has been dominated and subdued by
a culture that amplifies individuality over community, profit
over peace, property over human need. For we live in a culture
that is hostile to creativity and original thought that does not
serve capitalism, empire, and the most virulent by-products
of those forces: racism, homophobia, classism and sexism."
(Playwright Naomi Wallace delivered
this paper at York St. John University
in England, in collaboration with
Palatine and the Center for Excellence
at York St. John, in October 2007 /pdf)
(via Noises off: Lessons in teaching theatre)

- See: theater

:: note :: ... a wonderful debate with many links ...