The Educational Significance of Performative Dramaturgy and a Case Study

This study examines the outcome-oriented limitations of text-centered creative education and proposes performative dramaturgy as a theoretical and practical framework for reconceptualizing education as an event rather than a system of production. Traditionally, dramaturgy has aimed at structural coherence and textual completion, and in educational contexts creative writing has often been understood as the production of refined results. Such an approach reduces education to a manageable and measurable process, excluding uncertainty and ethical risk. Drawing on the conditional and process-oriented characteristics of devising dramaturgy, particularly as practiced by Forced Entertainment, this paper reconstructs the concept within an educational context under the term performative dramaturgy. Rather than referring to a specific aesthetic, performative dramaturgy functions as an analytical framework that separates education from the logic of achievement and production. Connected with Gert Biesta’s notions of the ‘beautiful risk’ of education and subjectification, it explains how performative practice can become an event in which learners are exposed to the call of the world and compelled to respond. Through the analysis of reading theatre practices and texts generated from these performances, the study demonstrates that performative dramaturgy repositions creative texts as provisional and relational responses rather than finalized outputs. Creative work unfolds through a triple movement: exposure through reading the text of the other, reconfiguration of its residue into a new text, and de-ownership as the new text is read again by others. Within this iterative structure, education is transformed from the accumulation of achievement into an event of response and responsibility. Ultimately, performative dramaturgy is not a technical solution to the crisis of creative education but a practical strategy that reintroduces uncertainty and ethical risk into the educational scene, enabling education to be rethought as an event of subjectification.