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Toward a Grounded Dramaturgy: Using Grounded Theory to Interrogate Performance Practices in Theatre for Early Years

Research on theatre for early years is polarized, either delving deeply into an assumed but unproven dramaturgical praxis, or providing anecdotal, often contradictory diktats of limited practical use. It could be argued that no coherent dramaturgy has yet been described in a genre barely three decades old; as David Pears (1971, 29) notes, “practice nearly always comes first, and it is only later that people theorize about practice.” This article explores how an early-years dramaturgy (meaning a contextual exploration of composition, whether artistic, technical, or theoretical) could be formulated from current practice by employing the grounded theory method.