ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how reality, inside and outside of the theatre, can be observed and performed through a specific communicative quality termed fictionalization. Fictionalization is a way of dealing with ‘the real’ as imagined and created rather than as a referential reality. This makes the term relevant in creative learning processes and in a variety of practices within art and education, where playing with the senses and challenging habitual perceptions is used.
On the basis of two cases - a theatre performance and a drama in education design - we intend to analyse how fictionalization can expose a performative approach to education, and how it can subsequently contribute to the idea of learning as performative. By applying philosopher Jacques Rancière’s ‘aesthetic regime’ and theatre scholar Josette Féral’s concept of performativity to the cases, we aim to illuminate how fictionalization can provoke a governing way of sensing, and thus distribute a performative approach to meaning-making and learning processes.
