Exploring Oceans or Just Following Drain Pipes in Teaching Drama

Students sometimes say they want to teach Drama.

I'm not sure what they mean ...

Plumbing and drainage is a crucial part of building and city infrastructure. It can't really function without effective engineering and construction. It is largely hidden and requires very high levels of architecture, engineering, maintenance and highly skilled technicians and trades-people to ensure the effectiveness of its on-going operation. In effect it is critical for civilization. Its utilitarian form serves both an obvious and less obvious function; obvious function might be to provide drinking water or to remove sewerage from domestic locations; less obvious functions might be to support quality of life functions that require aesthetic and moral and ethical considerations! Water through drainpipes, through to the ocean and to the rainfall can be seen as being inter-connected. And so it is with art, living and survival. Drama, being part of an artform, interconnects utilitarian human functions with perception, expression and communication.

Elementary Drama Drain Pipes

Drama is about linking body, mind and perhaps that thing referred to as consciousness. The body has physical mechanisms for nourishing itself and eliminating waste. When considered with the mind, the body also has ways to process emotions, perceptions and sensory experiences. Can we learn to understand this process? And then maybe shape it into form? So when people talk about Drama, I'm really never sure what they mean. In many ways the key elements of it are really hidden; like the drains and pipes easing the flow of essential water under city! The glib reciting of "elements of drama" that teachers will promote after some superficial education in Drama will not sufficiently or adequately indicate the form.

And sure, the elements of the stage and theatre are certainly part of the practical shaping of drama expression. Like the drainpipes and plumbing, specific knowledge is necessary to give shape to expression and communication. But this begs the question of the very nature of the kind of expression and communication being attempted. Are we simply teaching by having students follow the drain pipes of physical usage? The "practical" person might say "YES". The philosophical will say "maybe"?

Step Back in Time

But let's step back a few paces before continuing!

When Drama became recognized as a separate subject from English or even Theatre as a cocurricular subject in schools in the 1970s, it drew on the works of people such as Brian Way, Peter Slade, Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton and later in Australia from people such as Brad Haseman, Bruce Burton and John O'Toole.

One of the most significant contributors was Dorothy Heathcote who drew on some of the processes suggested by Brian Way. The ideas of role play and Drama as a means for engaging with the self and with the world beyond psycho-drama or mainstage theatre took a strong hold over the advocates of Drama as a powerful education tool. The term "Process Drama" became a kind of mantra. While it has largely died out in Australia, it still has impact in parts of the world where it is practiced.

The approach as identified by America's Lincoln Centre, can be summed up here:

"Process is the purpose. According to theater scholar and educator, Cecily O’Neill, process drama begins with “a task to be undertaken, a decision to be made, or a place to be explored.” The teacher and students create an imaginary world and work to address challenges or events through dramatic improvisation. So there is no written script." (The Kennedy Centre)

The emphasis in Australian education on ranking students and assessing them according to reductionist criteria has all but wiped out the 1970s to the 1990s focus on Drama as a wholistic process. Most Drama Teachers new to the profession will be totally unaware of the concept of "Process Drama" and its main strategies. Ironically, Haseman and O'Toole, having begun within this domain, have all but obliterated the concept of Process Drama from the vernacular of Drama Education. And of course, there is some good reason for this!

But more on this shortly.

An essential element in Drama as a subject from the 1970s onward was the notion that the physical body linked to creative imagination was the centre of work. Drama was the phenomenological centre of education and personal enquiry into life and existence! The child as participant worked in-role with the teacher and other students to discover significant and life-affirming aspects of life's many shades from the dark to the light of recognition and experience.

This relied on the teacher to expose their own limitations while working in-role to also enroll the students into situational scenarios that might be explored while stepping in and out of role; stepping out to reflect on what had transpired in the role-play. Heathcote coined the expression "Mantle of the Expert" to highlight and focus a powerful educational tool. The obvious empowering of children to be experts holding it over the teacher in role cannot be quantified.

ECDP

I remember very fondly the work of my time at La Boite Theatre with The Early Childhood Drama Project (ECDP) in the late 1970s. Under the leadership of Phil Armit and La Boite Artistic Director, Rick Billinghurst, there were some amazing explorations in theatre and education that probably were never fully realized in later years. The incorporation of play into artistic form was incredible. It had nothing to do with mainstage theatre experience or promotion. Yet it created experiences where people were confronted with decisions based on ethical reasoning and moral efficacy ... and remember such decisions were from 4 to 6 year-olds!

The skilled adult actors used characterization; however they worked in role with children who were basically playing and yet were able to grapple with quite complex issues.

So what was going on there?

Art Liminal

The participants were playing. They had no trouble jumping between the make-believe and the reality of their roles. That was natural for them. They weren't thinking of elements of theatre or the artifice of theatrical form. They just were!

Thirty years later, I came to understand the concept of liminality in art and theatre. But that was not on our radar in 1977 - 79. Had it been clear to us then, some of the problems of Process Drama and the related areas we explored might have been reduced.

When I worked in Canberra, I used some of the Dorothy Heathcote techniques and approaches with Stage Coach Theatre School in the mid 1980s to 1994 (not to be confused with the current International Stagecoach drama schools). It meant going into role as both character and Narrator of contexts, situations and story lines. It meant also stepping out of role to provide time for reflection and where-to-next when working with participants. It meant working with "inner-form"; a concept completely unknown in community theatre environments. I would be asked why not put our work on the Playhouse Stage? How absurd! The Stage Coach students were, in the main, not your ego-centric prima donnas that schools cherished and promoted to main roles in school productions.

Much of the work back then asked "what if"? The answers came in play mostly. The teacher / director was less a person outside of the form but rather a figure within it; yet one that was able to step outside and call time-out to reflect on where things were going. The teacher / director worked in-role with students and participants. This is probably a major difference with the current modes of Drama teaching and practice. Teacher in-role is now relatively rare. It is mostly a role of giving feedback and assessment!

Form and Process

So returning to the present, what is Drama now? You want to teach Drama? So what do you expect to do?

Teach plays? Basically be a school based Acting School? Or perhaps teach Drama games and be a glorified child-minding centre? Or perhaps sort out the psychological damage people have done to students by being a Pscyho-Drama therapy place ... while still giving grades for achievement within the academic system??????

The problem with Process Drama was that there was little attention given to the participants understanding of the demarcations between reality and play. In Canberra, I learned of instances where Process Drama achieved the opposite of what was intended. Students not seeing the boundaries of the art experience from the real were left traumatized by experiences of well-meaning process drama activities that were meant to stimulate awareness. In some instances, it failed to realize that most people were in sociological straitjackets and couldn't be shaken by using some of Artaud's principles that involved liminal experimentation. The liminality was, in these cases, problematic.

Yet people want to use Drama to evoke understanding. O'Toole and others moved from Process Drama techniques which were virtually impossible to asses. They advocated a system involving clearly advanced "elements of drama" to provide a system with boundaries that could provide teachers with clearly marked systems for assessment and reduction of experience into rubrics of quantifiable information.

The easiest way through this was to teach theatre. Plays provided the answer to evading the personal construction of reality to one provided by writers. In some ways the world of Process Drama was lost.

But form and process were thus combined!

Curriculum documents from the senior secondary curriculum and the Austalian Curriculum pertaining to Drama in the ACT are of little help in this. Both are so vague while ignoring advice from practitioners. They have politically tied Drama to Arts education and made it seem as if all arts fields were really just varient on ONE! Perhaps whoever is calling the piper's tune is being placated by the very people who should be standing up to the value of Drama education.

Dance, Music and Drama teachers might easily teach their various techniques to channel students into the drain pipes of technique and tunneled achievement. But what of the oceans out there that call for adventures in art and exploration? Must we stay in the drain pipes? Teaching specific techniques that will be outdated within twenty-years? Techniques we quantify as current practitioners but have students playing to us for approval and acceptance? Giving high grades to students whose techniques achieve teacher directed choreographies?

What about beyond the field? Beyond the known and into the ocean of possibility? Are we facilitating that?

Can we define the form through which we work? Or are we reliant upon the specifics of the past? What can our students take from us as processes for their own lives and creative activity? Are we venturing on the oceans of possibility or simply following the drain pipes of known necessity?

So what is meant by "Drama" when someone says they wish to teach it?

WHAT?

Joe Woodward 1 Jan 2023

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Under the Light movie

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Touch Me, I Surrender, I'm Detached

Image by 1tamara2 from Pixabay

Whatever happened to Jerzy Grotowski's sacrificial "holy actors"? Perhaps they must be found in order to reinvigorate the power of touch in acting!

What is on the mind of a student of acting and drama when entering a workshop? Is it the notion of exploration with others? How to be an effective actor / communicator / artist? Even how to become famous in an ego sense? NO!

Probably none of the above!

What is most on the mind of many students of acting and drama when entering an acting workshop or beginning intense working on rehearsal scenes is the notion of "consent"! and the fear of being touched; fear of exposure!

Consent, Detachment and Surrender

The PH D Dissertation on Gregory Hippolyte Brown (2019) on "Blurred Lines Between Role and Reality: A Phenomenological Study of Acting" explored "how acting roles might influence an actor during times on set shooting a movie or television series as well as their personal life after the filming is finished."

The dissertation considered: "Blurred lines between a fictitious acting role, character embodiment, and an actor’s on and off-screen realities were explored during this investigation." The dissertation discussed the complex relationship between the role, the real and aftermath. And this is the elephant in the room for student actors, directors and teachers.

I suggest an integrated approach to rehearsal and workshop processes is necessary to facilitate an artistic process that will be both safe and artistically sustainable and even necessary. It implies stated and implied agreement on consent while offering the sometimes paradoxical and dialectical need for personal and artistic detachment while surrendering to a process.

The Private Self and the Object

Like it or not, once within a performance space either on a stage, on a street or the screen, the actor is no longer a private person.

The privacy of one's own emotions and sensibilities is not something that can be taken to the performance space. In effect the actor objectifies an entity, a character or an ideal; depending on the style or purpose of the performance. So this needs to be totally clear for the student actor as it is for the professional actor.

Any action that is NOT part of the role, function or objectivity of the performance in its duration has no place. So an actor using the facility for performance and preparation for performance in a way that is personal, personally gratifying or in any way extraneous to the performance is potentially a betrayal of trust and has no place in theatre or the screen.

The actor in effect sacrifices the personal self for the audience to witness an objective self relating to the demands of the production.

However, there is complexity in all this revolving around the personal dramaturgy that embraces the relationship between the actor and the act. This is complex and cannot be simply argued in terms of "consent" or fixed rules on engagement that some theatre companies and film processes might suggest.

A further complication is the dramaturgy of the director that is brought to bear in the development of a work.

So while the separation of the private and objective self is an essential element in a production, there are perplexing and paradoxical aspects at work.

Presentation and Representation

OK!

We can pretend that, as actors and directors, our personal desires, agendas and experiences of life have little to do with what we create. PRETEND! is the operative word! In effect these desires, agendas and experiences and, add in our genes and DNA, have all to do with what we create on a stage. Because these are so invasive in our work, in some respects we must work to see them as obstacles to effective performance. However, by obstacles they also provide much of the energy needed in preparation and presentation of performance.

In Brechtian style theatre and other forms of political and social concern theatre, the actor is sometimes encouraged to allow their true feelings to be made known; allowing their own predispositions to obviously permeate the way the presentation is made. The actor, is still presenting an object unless there is a break in performance and the actor steps apart and talks honestly as the actor with the audience. This happens rarely. However, it can be effective if used sparingly.

In most screen work and for a majority of stage work, actors are representing characters who are often very different from themselves. Even when they appear to be close, the actor attempts to create a psychologically consistent character with a life that is believable; with objectives, intentions, actions, motivations etc that lie within the framework of the production. In short, this representation is an object quite separate from the individual person playing role.

Creating this representation is complex. The actor will use much of their experience of life and "what if" questions and highly developed skills of observation and processing of relationships to be used as tools for this sculpting and shaping of a work. Just as a painting by an artist utilises so much the artist, so too much the objective reality of a character may well be drawn from the actor. However, like the painting, the act on stage or screen is an object quite separate from the actor.

This simple fact of utilising tools to create representations or presentations in front of audiences is probably one of the most contentious areas of modern perform arts. It is one that requires most care and careful consideration from directors, actors and all those concerned with producing a work before an audience.

Routines, Rituals and Boundaries

Very necessary consideration then needs to be given to providing processes that safeguard creativity and safeguard the persons charged with creative output.

There are boundaries all around us. Maps provide geographical boundaries. There are hierarchical boundaries in business, professions and sport. The demarcations between one point and another are very real and usually put there for some good reason. Over-stepping boundaries can be a major concern. The Berlin wall created a boundary between two ideologies. Trying to straddle the two could get you killed. Boundaries are not always there for the best interests of people. They may well be there to protect elites and power structures.

However the very notion of a boundary is useful. In creative activity it can be the saviour of one's sanity and the protector of one's physical and emotional health.

As a general rule when students enter my classes as they have done over the past twelve or so years, they step in with silence into a circle and adopt a neutral stance. They are to take in what is around them and try to ascertain the mood of their colleagues. When there is a sense that everyone is focused and ready for work, they begin on impulse a random walk through the space. In many classes, they can adopt some of Meyerhold's stick balancing exercises to further train their minds and emotions to step beyond whatever emotional baggage they bring with them to the class and focus on ONE point at a time.

While most students have little idea of where this ritual can take them, most students will feel that it helps them concentrate and focus on the class work. However, in effect they are using boundaries of their own creation to shape their connection with their work as student artists, as artists and as participants in a collaborative venture. They use a routine to separate from whatever emotional thing has them captured in a kind of emotional straitjacket at the time. Of course, some students find ways to evade this. Some will deliberately come late to class to avoid this seemingly unnecessary routine; others will ask if they can sit out and sulk because of their narcissistic obsession with their own emotions. Others just resist the whole notion of "surrender" to the larger objective of their work and find ways to subvert the routine.

Mind you, such students should never be cast in theatrical productions.

Limitations on the Ego and Scaffolds for Release

Routines, rituals and boundaries are limitations on the ego. But they are also scaffolds for release of real creative energies. While an actor is dependent on a director, the actor cannot truly create truthful or meaningful performances. While a director needs to intervene at all points in a process, that process is obsolete and is simply a platform for a mimesis; a stale reproduction of what has gone before.

Routines, rituals and boundaries are the essential elements in truly creative, innovative and responsive process for creation and presentation. So we ask "what is the actor's process?" What is the director's process? Steven Berkoff argued that sometimes it takes time to work out process. But without it, there is nothing.

The key to effective performance is the ability to objectify and detach. It means that all involved need to accept the boundaries that separate the personal from the objective. It means a process of making concrete and describable boundaries between the personal and the objective need to be evident, clear and enforceable. If that means directors, actors with-hold personal interactions in the work space; then so be it!

When an actor steps into the workspace, they become objects of the work; objects of the role and the task at hand. In short, there is a degree of sacrifice that must be offered.

Sacrifice and Offering in Performance

In the real world we know that when people have a really close connection with each other, then much of this is irrelevant. The intuitive and the impulses that drive creativity might well be over-ridden by the bonds that might be achieved by artists working with each other over long periods of time. The Beatles, for instance didn't need to question each other for "consent" in making jokes about each other. On the other hand, a teacher and a student need to acknowledge the boundaries of physical contact just as a doctor and patient need to recognize those aspects where touch needs consent. The same applies between actors, actors and directors and even between performers and audiences.

Where boundaries have been blurred, we can see many highly publicized cases over recent years where people have really suffered. We can see that it is possible the familiarity one party had with the other was not necessarily reciprocated. I believe this may have been the result of blurred professional lines between the notion of the OBJECT becoming confused with the PERSONAL. The liminality within the boundary itself can be of utmost concern. The question arises as to where one point ends and the other begins; especially during a performance. However for strategic purposes in setting up strictures for working on developing and presenting creative product, strict processes need to be in order. Our work doesn't need the kind of events that occurred where one party's assumption about the boundaries for functioning both on and off stage was quite different to the other party; think of the Craig McLachlan and Geoffrey Rush incidents.

The Space Substance

There is a simple exercise we do to reinforce the boundary between the Object and the Personal. It begins in a simple circle, sometimes marked out with bamboo sticks, where students / actors practise crossing over into the space substance to simply contact it. (See Viola Spolin's "Space Substance" exercise). It requires the actor to focus outside the self; to imagine and interact with the space as if it were a substance of incredible qualities. The space walk itself starts as the actor steps across an imaginary line; a point of departure from the personal self into the objective self of the space. Then the actor returns to that personal space on crossing back over the line away from the space.

The Compelling Sculpture Exercise

Then another key exercise I use is the Compelling Sculpture exercise. This exercise derived from a workshop run by an amazing Dancer whose name I have forgotten. She used the bamboo in a different way to the way I use it. However, the roots of the exercise are the same. The actor stands while in the circle of peers and begins with neutral stance. They take the bamboo stick and at some point respond to the music and enter the space. The crossing from personal to objective space must be a deliberate act. However, there is liminality in the fact that the entrance cannot be preplanned and must be a spontaneous act at the time of action. The actor compels attention by filling the circular acting space with variations in tempo, duration, body shape and finding moments of sculptural extravagance to shape one's body in the space. There are moments of compelling sculpture that must dissolve and then allowing the actor to find an extravagant exit from the space. There is no room for introversion or physical anxiety. It is out there.

Rituals for Detachment and Safe Process

Each of these rituals form a small part of a larger process to alert, illustrate, practise, protect and release the actor and the actor's potential for creative work; whether in performance or in developing material for shaping into performance. Rehearsal rituals for student actors, community and professional actors are an essential element in forging strong processes for creative output. Some professional actors will admonish such a suggestion. Many, if not most, amateur actors feel such work is a waste of time as they already have all the answers and processes they need!

I suggest we come back to Grotowski's concept of the "sacrificial" and the need to sacrifice ego in order to reveal something more objectively discovered and created than that which is the result of ego and technique. It requires rituals and processes that separate the personal from the objective. It requires the ability of a Director to be objective in offering observations of an actor's work. It requires that actors treat each other actor with total professional and objective respect going beyond the personal relationships that might or might not build.

Finding the objective line in a creative process is far more than having an officious Stage Manager or Managerial officialdom intrusions in a process. It is establishing ingrained and embedded processes that reinforce and make explicit the necessary detachments, scaffolds, routines, rituals and boundaries for the working up of an artistic and creative product.

Artificial use of consent strategies and the current trend of having someone watch over the "intimate" scenes on camera and stage are worthy attempts to assure a process of psychological and physical safety for all participants. This, however, is an unfortunate bi-product of where there have been no strategies in place to achieve the personal/objective boundaries within processes of working. Not all actors and directors are "holy" and not all adhere to any notion of ethics or ethical behaviour. This is a situation we must change.

Joe Woodward

Have you seen this?

Over 62,000 people will have now viewed the DTC movie "Under the Light" by the evening of Sunday 31 Dec 2022. If you haven't seen the movie, "Under the Light" or haven't seen it right through to the end, then click on HERE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoKKhaxLXw8

Have a look at Shadow House PITS provocations here:

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/abhorrence-of-religion-culture-and-arts

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/statistical-insanity-in-act-education

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/shakespeare-s-contemporary-rarely-produced-play

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/post/why-teachers-fear-the-trojan-women

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Statistical Insanity in ACT Education

Heartbreaking statistical stabbing of students in their hearts via the ACT Senior Educational System

While the ACT senior Education system prides itself on having the best outcomes in the country, there is a dark underbelly that most people are probably unaware of ... Did you know it is statistically almost impossible for two students doing the same exam, with the same marker but from different schools or cohorts to get the same score for exactly the same results on a test? Even with the SAME PERSON MARKING! Suppose both students from different cohorts got 79%. Once the consideration of the cohorts and school group are considered in scaling, the same students would receive vastly different results. One may receive 85% (for example) while the other receives 60%. The ACT educational statistician will find all sorts of statistical reasons why this is satisfactory and even obligatory. Are most parents aware of this as their children are sent off to various schools? Does this figure into their voting patterns when electing governments on educational grounds?

IF you doubt my assertion, then check it out with the BSSS. They will give you a round-about way of saying yes it is correct ... then they will add "BUT" ... AND ... the statistician will explain why it is necessary for the poor bugger whose score goes from 79% to 60% is a statistical necessity for the common good ...

In such a case, the statistician cannot blame teachers for marking the poor bugger with the 60% or elevating the "good" student to 85% when the teacher gave both students 79%. However, in most instances where scores drop in the scaling process, the teachers are blamed for marking too easily or for setting tasks which don't appropriately measure real academic skills. School Administrators might also be blamed for getting some aspect of this system slightly wrong in the estimates of averages.

The indicator of a student's worth is only partially determined by their actual output and results. The final outcome is determined by statistical algorithms that have little to do with the reality of their assessment.

If you doubt this, then let's look at a specific example.

A student of Performing Arts where there is a total cohort of 19 students receives a final score from his teachers of 58%. His grades and scores for his individual assessment tasks were slightly below those received in his English classes which scaled within range of his actual achievements. But he came out with a 58% score that might have been higher except he blundered in one of the assessment tasks. The 19 students were subject to statistical scaling around a fairly low mean score; however many did well and improved on their previous scores meaning that the mean for the group was well above what historically had been allocated for these 19 students. Now, our 58% student who scored slightly less in his tasks than he did in English has his score scaled down to 29%.

29%

29% on his report card! 29% less than most notional zero scores! 29% for a student who actually did something and contributed a competent and at times a very significant level of work. 29% ??? and of course it is the teachers' fault for marking the group too easily ... Yet almost all the scores on each task were less than the scores given to the same students in English with a larger cohort ... This might well be a fictional story! However it says it clearly what is happening in the ACT. Small cohorts are decimated. Small group moderation isn't allowed any more.

Imagine you are that student in that family and you have 29% on your report card when your teachers gave you around 60% ??? This is statistical stabbing in the heart of students by a heartless and Dalek inspired reductionist system that ignores the person in favour of a number.

Trinculo 24 November 2022

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