Play/Drama in Language Teaching in the North East Context

Traditionally, "drama," "theatre," and performance are developed as a specialized form of scripting that surpass a whole constellation of events that are concrete and immediate. According to the anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-83), a drama is a unit of social process which arises out of a conflict situation. A drama falls within the confines of a ‘cultural genre’ as it generates and sustains folk, oral as well as "high" culture, with much wider application. For Turner, a drama retrieves its raw materials from the society and incorporates these elements in new combinations. Thus, drama is a useful word to describe some basic shapes of human behaviour. Moreover, it can be termed as a redressive action too, that ranges form personal advice and informal mediation or arbitration to formal juridical and legal machinery, and also to the performance of public ritual. A range of activities which may initially seem to have little connection, such as a trial, football match, a carnival, a tragic chorus, can thus be linked together as elements of redressive mechanisms they are all behaviours designed to make something happen to perform a function.