How To Destroy the Arts in Education

Image by Engin Akyurt

The clever bureaucrat's guide to bypassing the powerful arts lobby and achieving peaceful annihilation ...

If you are an Education bureaucrat, chances are you have never heard of "The persecution and assassination of Jean Paul Marat; as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade" ... or Peter Brook's production of Marat/Sade. So you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKHGUnehDp4

I suggest all Education bureaucrats and arts practitioners have another look at this ancient masterpiece film of a theatre production by Peter Brook from a play by Writers: Peter Weiss (play), Geoffrey Skelton (English translation) and staring Patrick Magee, Clifford Rose, Glenda Jackson and Ian Richardson.

The Lessons from Clifford Rose as M. Coulmier in Marat Sade

Clifford Rose as asylum's director, M. Coulmier in Marat Sade

Aspiring bureaucrats attempting to achieve the annihilation of the Arts in Education need to study Clifford Rose's excellent performance of M. Coulmier in Peter Brook's film of Marat Sade.

The actor achieves an exceptional balance of patience, suave endearment, loyalty to the program, reassuring diction and intonation at every point. He is able to assure the guests in the Asylum that they are safe while confronted by the bizarre and erratic inmates who are presenting the play. He has an even handed approach to dealing with the potential crises points within the work. He smiles as he speaks.

One could well imagine his Coulmier being a guest presenter at a Professional Development day for teachers during downtime in a school. No doubt he might begin his session with a statement like this:

"I know how difficult it is for you sitting here today when you all have such pressing and planning tasks to do. I assure you, I really appreciate your willingness to have me. I know what it is like. I used to be a teacher like you and know how demanding your classwork can be. I thank your school administration for having the foresight ... blah di blah di blah!"

You know the speech! That one given before "sharing" pedagogical methods for all teachers to use while actually boring everyone at the session to death. Luckily that obscure PH D allowed the person to get out of the classroom and so sparing students from also being bored to death!

Artists and arts educators as irascible inmates

Coulmier is only too aware of the problematic nature of his task in encouraging creativity within the inmates of the asylum as well as controlling the situation. It takes supreme confidence in one's abilities to do this. So the aspiring bureaucrat needs to do plenty of personal and professional development workshopping and study to build this necessary confidence. Their use of language for sharing perceptions and experiences with like-minded colleagues is of utmost importance. So the implementation of training workshops providing common ground is essential. This can then apply to the aspiring underlings within the institutions which serve their needs.

The aspiring Coulmier recognizes the power that can be unleashed by emotional and neurotic artists and arts educators. Coulmier has been burnt by this power in the past and so has learnt much to harness it like electricity; seeing the arts as a conduit for personal and political power sourcing while containing it within neatly positioned power outlets, similar or analogous with power outlets in a kitchen. Coulmier knows that if the water isn't too hot, the artists would be too blindfolded and alienated to ever really identify the strategies being used for this containment.

And he lets them scream and hop about like kangaroos on hot coals; but he knows they will never emerge from their cultural and personal incarceration. Their antics become a source of jokes over drinks with his bureaucratic colleagues who share the common language and surety that goes with confidence and certainty. The surreptitious rolling of the eyes at a public forum where some crablike arts-person dares to question some bureaucratic truism. Coulmier has all the credibility and his eyes signal that the crab trying to creep out of the crab-pot is just naïve and lacking any awareness.

System of a Dalek and Dalekism

So far, we have discussed the process of annihilation strategies on a micro level. However, these will only work if supported at a systems level concerning the macro universe of arts and education processes that seem to work independently of the best efforts of Coulmier or his adherents. To really follow through in neutralising and even destroying the practices and processes of the arts and education, one has to consider policy and procedural considerations at a macro level.

The most obvious signs and notable strategies for achieving this can be seen in:

• removing government specific "Arts" departments and ministeries (eg. The Morrison Government’s decision to abolish the Department of Communication and the Arts and merge it into a super department called the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications)

• removing or substantially reducing funding to arts training institutions (eg.

• amalgamating arts training departments with other areas such as cultural studies or humanities within institutions

• downgrading arts subjects within the schools and education system

• demolishing arts specific tertiary training of teachers in universities

• making arts training inaccessible for potential students by increasing tertiary fees

• merging arts subject specific areas within ever increasingly widened fields of study

• developing processes of reduction to measure and quantify arts processes and achievements

• making arts curricula in schools vague and controlled by bureaucrats so as to control the assessment of such programs by said bureaucrats and to limit the input of challenges ...

Oh, and Coulmier would probably list a few other points. But I note with sadness that in the ACT each arts subject once had its own framework through which courses would be developed. There was a wide range of choice within units that could be offered in ACT schools. Along with my Drama teaching colleagues, I remember developing a Drama Framework in the early 2000s that suited the particular field of study and that offered a wide range of potential differentiation. It later became a Drama and Dance Framework and recently an Arts Framework. Coinciding with this movement was a growing vagueness within the subject areas. There was a loosening of language definition and a gradual ambiguous shape to all areas covered. In effect, course definitions within the new framework have merged to the point of meaningless platitudes.

Instead of a vibrant culture of challenge and even levity, the bureaucratic strategies would seem to reduce all meaning to the level of Daleks devoid of empathy and feeling. The intelligence of feeling is long past being even a vague priority for arts education.

The Reductionist Paradox

However, the power of the bureaucracy is increased. Assessment of individual accomplishment is no longer determined by content knowledge, empathetic acknowledgement and the application of practical demonstration, but rather by semantic interpretation and postmodern stipulation. A new Arts framework in the ACT presents a number of courses without any real defining differentiation between its limited number of courses on offer; in effect exactly the same content might be used in each course while only needing to change some of the semantics and nuances that pertain to each one.

This could easily be studied as Anthropology rather than Drama and one wonders if this isn't the ultimate aim of the instigators of the frameworks. Basically Coulmier could smile and proclaim the progress being made by way of instilling arts everywhere rather than having it as an elitist academic subject. Its demise from the very notion of academic rigour in favour of more abstract and semantic codification and labelling would leave the very idea of in-depth study as an absurdity.

The mantra of "content is dead" echoes some of the thinking from the early 1970s. The vague and semantic aspect of the framework leaves all expertise open to claims of it being only culturally relevant with any attempt to broaden its context being chauvinistic and at worst culturalist and even racist. Critical and creative thinking is thus defined by imposed dictates rather than through investigation and even personal and cultural challenges.

This thinking becomes paradoxically reductionist. It deliberately fosters superfluous written detailing of even the minutest aspects of selected content to overarching semantics that would seem to quell the accountability urge that is so strong in bureaucratic circles.

Coulmier is a master of charting, graphing and sequencing. The reduction of concepts to ludicrous and time-consuming scope and sequence written evidence of business detail is simply a means to prevent the exploration of precisely what Drama, Dance and Music, along with the visual arts, can actually do. The silence engendered by time to reflect, be still and engage with the world cannot be written up as part of a sequence. It is rather an embedded existence that needs intuitive and wholistic BEING. Where can Coulmier find this?

By reducing the arts down to this reductive process, it will eventually provoke the question of WHY and when the answers become uncertain and unclear, the very question transforms into WHY NOT ... why not cut the whole thing and simply replace arts education with other areas that do the anal retentive and controlled learning much better.

So there! Prospective producers of Arts Education annihilation ... I hope this has been a valuable lesson! Mind you, I doubt there is anything here people don't already know ...

Joe Woodward

Stream or download DTC feature movie "UNDER THE LIGHT":

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

A Wake for the Trojan Women

"The Trojan Women" adaptation from Euripides' "The Trojan Women"

On ANZAC DAY 1983 165 women were arrested

in Sydney having marched under the banner of

women against rape in war.

It was a collective group called Sydney Women Against Rape Collective. It was formed in the early 1980s in memory of women, all women, who were raped in wars. What began in Canberra in the late 1970s reached its height of protest in the early 1980s. After the 1984 ANZAC DAY protest march in Canberra, Victorian RSL President Bruce Ruxton claimed, “If one looked at them, I wonder how rape would be possible.” Some male commentators suggested the women should be pitied because they were not "endowed with any sexual attraction whatsoever."

(https://makinghistoryatmacquarie.wordpress.com/tag/women-against-rape-in-war/)

So while this alone would be a fascinating subject for a play, at a deeper level it gives rise to our cultural denial regarding war, female sexuality, male and female misogamy, rape as a war crime and the shadow of reductionism surrounding virginity as a commodity. And we must see this in light of Australian and twenty-first century postmodern and traditional cultures. Who or what are the gods of our social construction of reality? How can they be revealed? Is this the prerogative of art and theatre? How is this related to education and contemporary entertainment vehicles such as popular music and theatre as presented by young people?

So how to proceed in order to develop our production of "The Trojan Women"?

A WAKE

Euripides wrote "The Trojan Women" for its first performance in 415 BC. It has had at least fifteen major productions (including film versions) of it over the last hundred or so years. I am currently working on a production with DTC in Canberra as a theatre cinema hybrid involving cinematic and live performances. In many respects, it is a Wake. Not the most fun of events ... though strangely an ironic celebration of lives lost; revering the ghosts of often heroic figures who were dehumanised, raped, murdered and forgotten. And it is a necessary event.

Bust of Euripides

As Meryl Streep commented when asked what was her role as an actor, she responded with:

"I am the voice of dead people. So I'm the interpreter of lost songs ..." Naturally an audience will ask: "But what's in it for me?"

So if we are giving voice to dead people who suffered and were forgotten, can this relate to contemporary sensibilities and experience? If it can't, then chances are the play will only serve to enhance the prejudices of a coterie of "theatre snobs" who care little for the content but all for the recognition of themselves as being somehow above those plebs who simply wouldn't understand! The fallacy of "high art" being only appreciated by those in the "know" should not be a justification for presentation of a work that needs to touch the hearts and souls of those living in today's world. This isn't Disney and it's not designed with an M rating for five-year-old spectators. But it needs to excite the imagination while allowing each audience member their own doorway into the universe it creates and activates.

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL EFFECT OF A WAKE

If you have attended a good Wake after the death of a relative or friend, you will know how the sadness and uncontrollable feeling of loss is somehow transformed into a new recognition of loved ones, friends and new relationships. The transformation of extreme emotions through sometimes wailing or crying or howling or simply drinking oneself into a stupa at the bar paid for by the close relatives of the deceased; those conversations about the one who passed and the choices of music that permeate through the space ... are they all somewhat surreal and yet transformative! The arguments that are inevitable and the illicit

emotions that stimulate forbidden relationships somehow transform and lead to those emotional infections that may have lasting consequences. Sometimes for better or worse!

But the Wake is a real event unlike a Rave party or an after-party following a show: such parties might celebrate death but without the real sacrifice that has occurred to initiate the Wake. So with this in mind, I see the development of Euripides' most significant play in light of contemporary sacrifice, death and celebration giving way to renewal: a WAKE!

BILLIE EILISH, AND CONTEMPORARY RECONSTRUCTION

Developing such an event will call for a reconstruction of the original "Trojan Women" text. If we seek a contemporary tragic feeling, nothing is more relevant than the music of Billie Eilish. Her voice, music and intonations create, what Arthur Miller called the "tragic feeling"; though I doubt Eilish would have ever heard of such an expression ... and certainly not related to her music! She evokes a sense of tragedy and loss in almost everything she does and this is what makes her so powerful and appealing; the appeal is to the youth who sense a feeling of disconnection or ennui. The appeal of the bad guy with the female voice saying "bruises on both my knees for you" is part of the ironic and dialectical relationship between desire and danger that is part of the Eilish deep knowledge that defies current agendas and descriptions. The tragedy isn't the event; rather it is the inevitable!

Gerd Altmann, woman-g10dac295b_1920

The difference with Euripides is that no female character has any real choice. Twenty-first century Narcissism and Euripides might seem to collide, yet they link with sounds and sentiments that can travel through time into ancient sensibilities. If in our production, we can find a way to forge this link, we can make a difference. Eilish's music is essentially different from almost everything around it; yet it touches the hearts of so many. Why? I can't answer that, but it is something real and substantial ... even if time proves it to be fleeting ...

I would like to hear some of Eilish's music in the production; however I feel that copywrite restrictions would apply and prevent it. This said, there is a young composer who is attempting to reproduce something of the tragic feeling contained in Eilish's music. I am confident we can thus produce a contemporary sensibility within the work that will reach audiences.

The point is that Eilish is a real inspiration. The music forces us to recontextualise Euripides and the translations of his work.

THEATRE OF RITUAL AND EVALUATION

While very influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht, our work must elevate the human spirit while recognising the darker and more insidious elements that all of us have to cope and grapple with. People might say our production focuses on too much darkness. Yet within every social contract and social construction, there is light and shade.

Critics of this notion should look to the Catholic Mass! The elevation of a man beaten and ritualistically slaughtered under Roman rule and then forced to re-enact this deadly slaughter with a suggested rising from this moment is the very basis of Christian and Christian educational premises and ritual. This ritual is repeated hundreds of thousands of times every day throughout the world.

To somehow then suggest it is wrong or misplaced that our focus on such a dark element in human history and psyche as revealed by Euripides with "The Trojan Women" and then enacted by young people is somehow uncalled for or even wrong is absurd and suggests a neurosis on the part of the people making the criticism. This is what needs treatment. Fundamental to theatrical and artistic expression is the notion of going deeper into truth and deeper into the reality of culture and history. Only by this can art and theatre have any real effect on our cultural and social activity.

Creator: Manan, Behind the scene and towards a poor theatre, The Daily Star, 25 Nov 2017

Yet we must acknowledge that there are those amongst our families and social acquaintances who would suggest that people considering the inherent attitudes to rape in war and even in social situations is somehow off-limits for revealing through artistic presentation. There are those who would propose that all art should serve in Vespasian's Colosseum; it should provide distraction and spectacle that takes away human empathy and replaces it with thrills and base instincts; a kind of cultural pornography without the sex!

GROTOWSKI AND THEATRE OF RITUAL

Grotowski's poor theatre serves as an inspiration and starting point in achieving our aims. To bring historical and distant themes close to the audiences experience, we are trying to bring the actor and the audience into a very close proximity. The time period of our work is NOW! The moment of its creation is the setting and the theme. NOW! By changing the actor/ audience dynamic alone, we provide not only context but also content. Just imagine for a moment what the actor is going through when the audience is up in their face and critically examining what might be going through the headspace of the actor?

Even the use of cinematic techniques will not diminish this intimacy. All our pre-filming of scenes will be echoed and resonated through heightened performance on the stage. By integrating professional actors and tertiary trained students of performance, the humanities and arts along side college aged student performers, our work will seek to enhance the creative openness of youth with studied and challenging perceptions. All of this will be encased within the recognizable rituals of a Wake, of a recording studio and of playing on an Australian beach ...

While COVID19 casts its own sense of death and anxiety over the very notion of performance and entertainment, we are all thrown into the chaos of ancient gods: COVID19 being a god of itself; governments being the lesser gods and servants of the prime god; the Media being creators of themselves as gods of fakery and illusion; the statistician being the god of all knowledge; and the climate being the dual god of destruction and favour ... and there are many more that the Greeks might have created and embraced. The actor is then the conduit through which the gods speak. As in the Japanese NOH, the actor is more than a presenter. Rather the actor is the mouthpiece of the gods and all they represent. In Grotowski's paradigm, the actor is an offering of the body and spirit for the very well-being of the audience. This is achieved through rigorous rituals of self-effacement and body/mind discipline.

AND NOW FROM HERE

To become the voice of dead people and to accurately evoke a sense of deep awareness for, not only the real Trojan Women, but also for all the victims if insidious attitudes leading to crimes against humanity in war, our production must first sink into the deep knowledge and spirit of the very notion of ethical guidance. This is not a semantic game. The straitjacket of ego and vanity is secured tightly for all of us. The blindfold of our cultural inheritance is well fastened. It was with this awareness that Euripides wrote works that irritated and defied the society that spawned him and his creations. Yet buried within the semantics of the texts can be found both the seeds and remains of understanding and actions that can be discovered in anthropological excavations.

And this is where we are ... This is our task ...

"The Trojan Women" adapted from "The Trojan Women" by Euripides, directed by

Joe Woodward will be presented by DTC in The Old Chapel Studio, Daramalan, 23 - 30 April 2022.

3 January 2022

Subscribe to Shadow House PITS:

https://www.shadowhousepitswrite.com/subscribe

So Why Am I Crying?

The Guardian: Lindsay Kemp: 'His life on stage was his most intense reality' | Lindsay Kemp | The Guardian

Paul's house was haunted. Jerry and Andrea slept in the bed and I slept on the floor. But during the night, Andrea woke up with a start as she felt hands around her neck trying to strangle her. I noticed the curtains flowing like in the moving "The Haunting". Paul had warned us his Neutral Bay house was haunted. But we were young and took such thoughts with a healthy scepticism. My brother was staying in a different room with his then fiance, Mary, whose back was playing up after the ten hour drive from Brisbane. Next morning Paul asked if we noticed anything strange during the night. Well ... Later that day we met up at the Glebe New Arts Theatre (Cinema) in Glebe to see a mysterious show that Paul had insisted we should drive down to Sydney and see. This moment was to be the turning point in my life.

Theatre as a life changer

It was November 1975. I had been teaching in a one-teacher school in south west Queensland. The world of Glebe Point Road and The New Arts Theatre (or Cinema) was a universe away from that little school. And stepping past half naked guys banging drums and walls in the foyer covered by naive yet violent crayon drawings made me imagine some asylum thing going on for real. What the fuck were you leading us to Paul? I was genuinely terrified!

The theatre auditorium was lit by ultraviolet lights and the stage had billowing smoke being pumped on to it as loud sounds filled the packed theatre. Then it started. I couldn't believe how loud the music was and how extreme the sexual images were as the masturbation extravaganza began. I was shaking. The brutality of the physical suggestions soon merged into a grotesque beauty I have rarely seen or experienced on a stage. The magic of transformation then merged with my studies and thoughts on the social constructions of reality studied at Uni. I felt the transforming power of a theatre than made no attempt to placate my very straight understanding of society, existence and reality. And I knew this is where I wanted to be ... I felt I needed to challenge my own stereotypes of vision.

Lindsay Kemp

It was Lindsay Kemp's production of "Flowers" based on the Jean Genet novel "Our Lady of the Flowers" that changed everything for me. I could never go back to teaching in a Primary School or even exist as a teacher following some defined curriculum. I swore I would never teach in a school again. Mind you, I did teach in a school for much of 1976.

In the following year, I was at a party with my brother, John. At this party, another old school colleague, Sean Mee, told me of a job at La Boite Theatre that might interest me. And life went on from there ... I got the job and started at the theatre in January 1977.

It took years of working in theatre and then later teaching Drama in a Secondary College to really grasp what Kemp actually did and what emanated from him. The only person I knew of on the historical influential stage that had anything of his power and style was Kazuo Ohno, one of the founders of Butoh. While I have no idea as to whether Kemp ever had any knowledge of Ohno's work, the simplicity and intensity of movement was evident in the work of both. Yet both artists emerged from totally different social, cultural and artistic settings while both were inspired to create from the life and work of Jean Genet.

I was fortunate enough to work with a Butoh teacher in the 1980s and I began to place into context some of the experience I had of Kemp. This combined with workshops on Meyerhold run by Stephen Champion and other teachers working in similar vein, including from Don Asker of Human Veins Dance Theatre, some patterns in theatre processes began to emerge.

There was one Lindsay Kemp exercise that I adapted and still use today at the start of new projects and new semesters of classes. I believe it opens up so many doors to processes from participants who simply needed to let go. My students would recognize it as the "Silly Face / Silly sound" exercise!

My interest in Artaud, Butoh, Meyerhold and a number of various more esoteric exercises and techniques trace their genesis to that one experience of Lindsay Kemp's "Flowers". Peter Brooke's work gave me a paradoxical structure or framework through which to identify experience and potential experience within theatre; while all the while, Brecht was whistling in the backstage.

So why am I crying?

That week-end at Paul's place and the visit to Glebe Point Road had such unexpected ramifications. The ghost that played around the bedrooms of that night has been replaced by many ghosts since. Lindsay Kemp's death only became known to me because Paul contacted me out of the ether on Saturday. Paul was the bass player in our band from the 1960s. And we talked about that event from November 1975. It prompted me to do a search on Lindsay Kemp; only to discover he died at the age of 80 three years ago.

How many theatrical experiences might people have that link with their own social and family situations? A theatre event isn't just a night out! It is an invitation to dance with ghosts and the sometimes terrifying worlds that are beyond our limited experiences. Whether it is for a "Flowers" or a "Caucasian Chalk Circle" by Brecht, the event has potential to resonate in ways that cannot be foreseen.

So my "crying" is a metaphor. I'm not shedding sentimental tears. Rather my body is literally shaking from the immense power unleashed by the uncertainty of a stirred up psyche. Perhaps we forget or refuse to acknowledge theatre as the secular equivalent of the wicca, the religious sacrifice, the transformational ritual that has power to touch and affect the real world! The crying is for standing in trepidation of where this recognition leaves me now.

Joe Woodward