"TIE [theatre-in-education] lets children come to know themselves and their world and their relation to it. That is the only way that they can know who they are and accept responsibility for themselves. TIE is carrying out the injunction of the Greeks who founded our democracy and our theatre: they said know yourself - otherwise you are a mere consumer of time, space, air and fodder."
(Bond 1994: 3)
The basis of the work is the use of theatre as a tool for learning. TIE companies employ actor/teachers working with one class at a time. This is critical to the work we do which is highly participative, requiring the highest teacher-student ratio possible, and it distinguishes TIE from any other form of theatre, including young people's theatre.
In TIE learning is not instrumental but conceptual, using the power of theatre to resonate with our own lives in order to reach new social understandings about the world we inhabit, to explore the human condition and behaviour in order that it may be integrated into young people's minds and in doing so, make them be more human by, as Bond states above, allowing them to know themselves.
"And, because such things concern the processes of social and human interaction, the domain particularly of drama and theatre in education, real understanding is a process of coming to understand: we cannot 'give' someone our understanding. Real understanding is felt. Only if the understanding is felt can it be integrated into children's minds, or anyone's. Resonance is the starting point of the integration process. The resonance of something engages us powerfully; that is, affectively. But, significantly, it also engages us indirectly with that which it resonates. Resonance is not authoritarian; yet it's an offer you cannot refuse!"
(Gillham 1994:5)
Gillham's understanding that resonance is not authoritarian but "an offer you cannot refuse" connects directly with how the plays of Edward Bond work with their audience.
A distinctive feature of theatre is the distance it provides. In theatre we do not encounter real life but reality through a fiction. TIE utilises this to draw young people in. The fictional context means that the learning material is subject to the child's control, they can engage with the absolute guts of the situation in safety.
The most distinctive feature of TIE however is participation. In all of our work the theatre or performance element is a part of a whole programme. There is often work before a performance, in between scenes and episodes and, or, after. The participatory element is sometimes integrated even further into the structure with a much more fluid boundary between the two different modes of audience and active participant. Participation will often relate to the use of a role and there is always a task, a purpose to it for the class. (For example, the play element of the programme concerns the death of people in a village as a result of contaminated water. The children are in role as investigators for the UN whose task is to produce a report which will bring those responsible for contaminating the water to account and set up a more accountable and efficient means of water purification). The task is a way of encoding their learning. Being able to engage in this way enables the participant to bring their whole selves to the TIE programme, it matters to them, and they are not watching it but are in it. But by utilising the distance that fiction provides, as referred to above, the participants are protected into the world of the fiction. The physical manipulation of the TIE programme has all the characteristics of learning in real life.
