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Writing as Performance: Using Performance Theory to Teach Writing in Theatre Classrooms

In her 2003 Theatre Topics article “Writing Intensive Courses in Theatre,” Alisa Roost compellingly argues that “[w]riting is one of the best tools we have to develop student-centered, active learning courses that combine critical thinking, student passion, and specific content into wellstructured, exciting courses” (231). Two years later, in College Composition and Communication, a top journal in the composition and rhetoric field, a collective of leading composition scholars call for “a changed understanding of the relationship between performance and composition” (Fishman et al. 241). These separate thoughts on writing in theatre courses and performance in writing courses energize my enthusiasm for the potentially powerful alignment of performance and composition theory in the theatre classroom. I am a doctoral candidate in theatre and dance with a master’s degree in English and seven years of experience teaching at the college level, including four years of teaching composition and one year teaching theatre history. As a performance scholar, dramaturg, and educator with a commitment to writing, I’m deeply invested in interdisciplinary work seeking to combine theory and practice at the crossroads of composition and performance. After all, how can undergraduate theatre students rigorously practice their chosen aspects of the art form without practicing the critical thinking (and in most cases, research) skills that writing requires?