{"id":686,"date":"2014-07-30T03:37:38","date_gmt":"2014-07-30T03:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/?p=686"},"modified":"2014-07-30T03:37:38","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T03:37:38","slug":"theatre-to-help-firms-deal-with-workplace-bullying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/2014\/07\/30\/theatre-to-help-firms-deal-with-workplace-bullying\/","title":{"rendered":"Theatre to help firms deal with workplace bullying"},"content":{"rendered":"

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‘In the Red Corner’ is a play about workplace bullying written by Dr Margot Edwards.<\/p>\n

Feelings and emotions are often marginalised in the rational world of business, but Massey University\u2019s expressive arts and business programmes hope to change all that with the development of a play about workplace bullying. Dr Margot Edwards, a senior lecturer with the School of Management, wanted to create an effective intervention for dealing with bullying at work. Instead of producing the usual seminar, she decided to write a play. \u201cI wanted to actually create something interactive to get people thinking in a different way about how bullying makes people feel and what the reasons behind it might be,\u201d Dr Edwards says.<\/p>\n

\u201cA play allows people to have a discussion about the characters and their behaviour, without accusing a colleague. It also allows you to reflect on your own experiences and how they made you feel. We all remember those scenes in our head when the boss came in and shouted at us, for example, and we think \u2018I wished I\u2019d said this\u2019 \u2013 you can use those experiences to effect change.\u201d Now Dr Edwards is teaming up with the university\u2019s theatre studies programme to get her play, titled \u2018In the Red Corner\u2019, ready for performance. Students from the Massey University Theatre Society will workshop it through an open reading in the Albany campus\u2019 state-of-the-art Theatre Lab tomorrow.<\/p>\n

School of English and Media Studies lecturer Dr Rand Hazou says the project is a great opportunity for the business and expressive arts programmes to collaborate. \u201cThe reading will be part of the students\u2019 creative development and we\u2019ll hopefully bring some clarity to Margot\u2019s ideas and what she\u2019s trying to achieve,\u201d he says. \u201cPlays always sound different when they are read out loud so we will help Margot to see and hear how her words come alive and give insights into how it can be redrafted and improved.\u201d Dr Hazou says the play fits well within the tradition of applied theatre, which he has a particular interest in. \u201cWe introduced a new Applied Theatre paper here at Massey last semester \u2013 it looks at theatre applied outside conventional performance spaces as a way of bringing about social change. \u201cWhen Margot told me she had written a play about bullying and she wanted to develop it so it could be presented in workplaces to spark discussion, I thought, \u2018Great, this is exactly what I\u2019m interested in \u2013 theatre with a real-life application that tries to bring about change in the way we see things.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018In the Red Corner\u2019 is set in the fictional Blackrock General Hospital and shows the interaction between a bullying director of nursing and a nurse union representative. The content is inspired by the research findings of one of Dr Edwards\u2019 PhD students whose thesis looks at workplace bullying in nursing. \u201cThe researcher, Kate Blackwood, interviewed both nurses and management in hospitals and they are all really desperate for research that can lead to effective interventions,\u201d Dr Edwards says. \u201cHospitals are high pressure workplaces so the impact of bullying on a person\u2019s mental state in that environment can lead to serious mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr Edwards says she first began to think about writing plays after using role play when teaching leadership skills.\u201cRole-playing can bring an idea alive \u2013 it might put students on the spot and make them feel awkward, but that\u2019s what life is like. We\u2019re always looking for ways to flip the classroom \u2013 I mean, who wants their lecturer to put up a slide that says here\u2019s five things you should know about leadership?\u201d Dr Hazou agrees: \u201cThe expressive arts afford different ways of knowing. If you stage something like a play, it opens up different types of spaces in which people can engage and discuss, which is what you need if you want to bring about cultural change.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are already plans to perform \u2018In the Red Corner\u2019 at a harassment workshop later in the year and Dr Edwards hopes customised versions of the play will be taken into workplaces where bullying is known to occur. She says her hope is that workers \u201cwalk out of the room as different people to when they walked in.\u201d Down the track, both Dr Edwards and Dr Hazou would like to see Massey offer the services of an acting troupe to businesses, with theatre students being paid to perform thought-provoking plays in workplaces around the country. \u201cIf there\u2019s a gap there and Massey can play a role in filling it, fantastic,\u201d Dr Hazou says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  ‘In the Red Corner’ is a play about workplace bullying written by Dr Margot Edwards. Feelings and emotions are often marginalised in the rational world of business, but Massey University\u2019s expressive arts and business programmes hope to change all that with the development of a play about workplace bullying. Dr Margot Edwards, a senior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,101,1,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-albany","category-events","category-expressive-arts-subject","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}