Dramagirls' Worldcraft: Teaching-Artist Platforms for Spectacle Theatre

Drawing from six-months of action research with spectacle theatre-makers in Chicago, this study explores multimodal, expeditionary practice of teaching artists who apprenticed girls through Redmoon Theatre's Dramagirls program. Concepts of new literacy design and aesthetic experience illustrate teaching in socio-semiotic and material worldcraft, set in motion via intermedial, expeditionary platforms: Imaging, Games, and Dramatizing with Objects. Ethnographic, arts-based analysis of discourse scenarios reveal an emerging aesthetic playground, where teaching artists afford girls imaginative schema to construct socio-semiotic material, felt realities and cultural affinities for a girls' utopia. As this hybrid form of theatre is seldom explored as an aesthetic literacy context, Dramagirls' worldcraft offers pedagogical models for significant youth designs and inquiries.