Feeling the Promise? The Affective Appeals of Theatre Program Websites

The co-authors of this article analyze the websites of post-secondary drama, theatre, and performance studies (DTPS) in Canada as spaces of promise, featuring recurring patterns suggestive of the plural notions of “value” active in theatre education today. In an analysis of text and images from seventy-three websites gathered from 2020 to 2022, they identify three key patterns: be anything, change the world, and find family and home. These make affective appeals to prospective students and make claims for what happens in spaces of teaching and learning in our field. Taken together, such claims may make implicit promises about professional outcomes; they may also work to obscure material realities, for instance, the realities of actual career outcomes for students in the precarious labour market of the arts or of lingering challenges in pedagogy or curricula that do not fit the stories being told publicly. The authors aim to raise critical questions about how theatre programs frame value and support further research in the area.