ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, the words ‘participant’ and ‘percipient’ have been used with closely synonymous meanings. The word ‘actor’ has also sometimes been invoked, particularly when other writers have been quoted who come from a background of conventional theatre practice or theory. To recapitulate the distinctions: the word ‘percipients’ refers to the totality of real people directly involved in a dramatic or theatrical event-all those who perceive it at first hand, the people within the context of the medium:
• playwright • actor • participant • director • audience
It is more appropriate to regard them not as distinct individuals but merely as distinct functions which, depending on the processuality of the genre, may be simultaneously shared by some, most or all of the percipients. For example, in a drama in education such as Nuclear War, referred to in chapter 4, the students took control of the subject matter as playwrights, negotiating the narrative and the focus both outside the dramatic action and by intervention within. They took participant roles as the characters for considerable periods, though not specifically as actors, for there was no audience for them to communicate with beyond the other
participants. They were audience of their own action, as their journal entries testify.
