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The art of stillness

The efficacy of drama education and applied theatre tends to be predicated on activity. Active learning is a pedagogic principle and ‘activism’ has long been regarded as necessary to effect social change. Stillness, by contrast, is associated with passivity and docility, as if to be still is to be compliant and submissive. Historically, of course, the emphasis on active learning and activism was developed in response to the industrial economies of the twentieth century, where rote learning prepared young people for the routines of factory labour, and activity was regarded as an alternative to the hierarchical social structures that accompanied it. Active learning was turned into firm pedagogic principles which must be maintained, particularly in the face of politically conservative arts education agendas, and activism has an important role in maintaining social democracy. Post-industrialism has, however, introduced a different set of agendas and social conditions, in which time has been commodified, the injunction to be ‘active’ has become assimilated into neoliberal discourses of self-care and self-entrepreneurship. New technologies and faster moving capital mean that life has speeded up. Speed theorists have subjected the pace of everyday life to critical inquiry, with influential interpretations offered by Paul Virilio, Zigmunt Bauman and Jeremy Rifkin (amongst others), suggesting in different ways that it is mobility, movement and speed that defines contemporary social privilege. Activity is no longer necessarily counter-cultural or resistant; it is also one of post-industrial capitalism’s most important and valuable assets. It is time to reassess the art and politics of stillness. Geographers David Bissell and Gillian Fuller describe stillness in political terms as ‘a gesture of refusal’ (2011, 4). Their illuminating edited collection offers an analysis of the ways in which stillness might be conceived as a form of resistance; it is a conceptual space where new ways of being can be contemplated. Stillness is not, they suggest, an alternative to mobility, but integral to it: