Patrick Finn & Marilyn Potts: Performing Citizenship: Upstaging Instrumentality in the Academy

This paper examines how citizenship might offer new models for thinking about the dramatic arts in higher education. Over the past year, we developed and team-taught a senior acting and performance stream at St. Mary’s University College. Our school – a small liberal arts institution – is committed to carving out a unique identity in the Canadian academic environment. While trying to help shape that identity, we confronted a number of challenges to remind us of our separate status within the academy. The implementation of a dramatic arts program requires special space, rules and funds: drama can at times inhabit an alien position from which it can be difficult to establish a functional identity. We challenge the rhetoric of instrumental education and assert that the dramatic arts – besides offering social, cultural and political benefits – match their fellow citizens…even when dealing with core instrumental concepts such as leadership, interdisciplinarity, and teamwork.