Decolonizing Curriculum: Teaching the Twenty-First-Century Dramatic Canon

Abstract

I have been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in play-analysis, developmental dramaturgy, adaptation and new play creation for almost two decades. Trained within structural and semiotic approaches to text and performance analysis with emergence of what David Barnett calls “postdramatic theatre texts” (2008:14) and recent calls for decolonizing curriculum, I found myself at a philosophical and theoretical crossroads. This article summarizes my teaching practice and philosophy as inflected through decolonial methods. It argues for our need to teach students to simultaneously position every dramatic text within the critical lens of structural play-analysis and their historical/cultural contextualization or dramaturgical concretization (Vodička 1975). The twenty-first century dramatic texts I teach are often located within the postdramatic European theatre and performance canon (Lehmann 2006), as well as within postcolonial and Indigenous traditions of storytelling. The three plays I chose as my case studies— Arabian Night (2003) by German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, Bintou (2002) by Koffi Kwahulé, a Côte d’Ivoire writer living in France, and Burning Vision (2003) by Marie Clements, a Canadian Metis theatre artist—constitute the core of my syllabus for a graduate course in dramaturgy.