The Process of Play Production as an Instrument for Developing Collective Leadership Through Presencing.

Abstract

This article examines play production in drama education as a relational presencing field in which collective leadership emerges as a function of shifting ontological conditions. Drawing on Theory U, social presencing theater, and the ontological scholarship associated with the International Journal of Presencing and Leadership in Complexity, the study reframes leadership as an emergent field phenomenon arising from ontological changes in the underlying ground of perception, attention, and relational awareness of participants. Within this framing, presencing is understood less as a technique or developmental skill located in individuals, more as a transformation in the source condition from which experience, meaning, and action arise. As participants engage in rehearsal and performance processes, habitual ego-based orientations are temporarily suspended, enabling a shift toward ontologically-attuned perception through the field in which agency becomes distributed across the ensemble. Observations from play production illustrate how leadership emerges momentarily through individual as well as relational coherence within the field. However, this coherence is shown to be inherently fragile, repeatedly disrupted by institutional pressures, ego reactivation, and temporal constraints, leading to oscillations between field coherence. The article argues that drama education serves as a kind of learning laboratory of ontological instability, where collective leadership continuously enacts, dissolves, and reconstitutes itself. In doing so, it deepens an ontological view of the social field by demonstrating how presencing operates as a generative condition for leadership emergence within embodied, time-bound creative human systems.