Foreman Funnies - Pranks

The ‘Last Night Prank’ is a staple of repertory theatre. You read about them often enough. Robin Pascoe has some doozies he might share one day (from the Merredin Rep Club).

I witnessed a couple in the Albany Light Opera Company: Mikado – Koko’s ‘little list’. The actor in the role never learnt it, always read it. On the last night, the name of a local celebrity was added. The actor read it flawlessly, the chorus broke up. 

In Puss in Boots, one character was to present the queen with a small bush. He’d been working on his farm that afternoon and brought in a twenty-foot sapling. (How did he get it upstairs and backstage?) The ‘bush’ stretched from one side of the stage to the other. 

There was a few that happened in school productions once I started teaching Drama. 

In Dust in the Air, one character sat on a throne for the entire second act. Just before lights up, someone slipped a packet of frozen peas onto the seat.

In our Cyrano, the character of ‘Chris’ had to read a letter on stage. Sitting in the balcony I noticed cast members in the wings watching intently. I looked at Chris as he opened the letter. “Don’t read it!” I thought. He knew the lines. 

He read it. And cracked up. Thankfully he didn’t read it aloud.

After The Mysteries, where a disgruntled crew member took the Third Shepherd’s gift of a tennis ball for the baby Jesus, and the cast member tearfully substituted an apple, I was adamant that there would be no more pranks in my productions. 

From then on I always advised cast members to check any hand props, especially folded paper before going on stage. I was guilty of a sort of prank in one show where two girls had to take a paper bag with two cream buns onstage and eat them. 

The final night I replaced one bun with a matchstick – layers of puff pastry, jam, and cream. They checked their prop before entering. Onstage, the inevitable happened. The matchstick exploded. The second girl ad-libbed, “You’re such a pig, Monica.” 

I cracked up backstage. 

But I don’t believe it is fair to young performers to put them in the situation where they may be embarrassed by someone else.

Yes, audiences love those obvious stuff-ups on stage. But in the end, I want my students, my young performers to be able to do their very best, and to do justice to the script…

Questions about inclusion for Drama Teachers in contemporary times

A teacher found a beautiful and compassionate monologue based play written and performed by an aboriginal woman . It provided interesting acting challenges for her students. They had to make strong physical, vocal and movement choices. They had to use their dramaturgy skills to contextualise their choices to embody the role. It was accessible and relevant. She presented it to them to workshop acting, dramaturge and director roles. 

The 12 girls in her class responded well to the challenge. She didn’t notice the looks exchanged between the 5 boys in her class.

As a reflective teacher, she was interested to read her student journals.

Some students questioned using a text that provided acting roles only for a single female character. Other students discussed the appropriateness of asking non-aboriginal actors to play an aboriginal character. Her one indigenous student who comes from a Western Australian Noongar identity, asked about playing a role based on Murri life.

The teacher began to question her assumptions. The text was theatrically compelling and offered challenges for her students. But she also realised that her focus on theatrically strong moments for her students maybe problematic.

The question of appropriation of culture is interesting, particularly in the week when it’s announced that on The Simpsons, characters of colour will no longer be voiced by white actors ("The Simpsons stops using white actors to voice non-white characters," 27 June 2020). Is it appropriate for non-aboriginal actors to portray indigenous roles? As drama educators we have come a long way from Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface (1965, check it out on the Internet). 

It’s interesting if you think about it. If we extended the logic, could any Australian actor ever portray an Irish character or a character from Ibsen or Chekhov or Shaw where the roles are so deeply imbued with a national identity? It may be inappropriate for a caucasian actor to reach into the makeup kit to portray an Asian or Indian character but where is the line to be drawn?

We could ask questions of other plays that, for example, portray abuse of women. What are the implications of studying A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams, 1947) and the portrayal of Blanche and mental breakdown? And Stanley’s treatment of her?

If you extend this line of argument, are there any plays but the most innocuous that can be studied by drama students? There are some who would argue that school drama needs to be neutralised. The spirit of Thomas Bowdler lives on in contemporary times. ( Bowdler gives us the term bowdlerise which means to remove material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective.) And many teachers tell of choices of self-censorship when it comes to choosing texts for students to work with. 

What are your thoughts?

Where do you draw the line in the sand in the choices you make as drama teachers?

What are appropriate texts(see interesting discussion in Lambert, Wright, Currie, & Pascoe, 2016)?

Bibliography

Enoch, W., & Mailman, D. (1996). THE 7 STAGES OF GRIEVING. Brisbane: Playlab Press.

Lambert, K., Wright, P. R., Currie, J., & Pascoe, R. (2016). Performativity and creativity in senior secondary drama classrooms. NJ Drama Australia Journal, 40(1), 15-26. 

The Simpsons stops using white actors to voice non-white characters. (27 June 2020). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/27/the-simpsons-stops-using-white-actors-to-voice-non-white-characters

Williams, T. (1947). A Streetcar Named Desire: [a Play.]. New York, NY: New American Library.

The challenge for all of us as arts educators

In Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (2019), there is a powerful reminder of the way that arts education is seen in popular culture (in the UK but shared by many similar Western societies like Australia). Charlie is somewhat reluctantly seduced into participating in a summer production of Romeo and Juliet being staged in his dull suburban community. Used to hanging out on the fringes of his blokey school crowd, Charlie is not a fan of the arts and like his boy mates, is quick to sardonically dismiss and deride drama (though he is secretly reading Dostoyevsky). Here is Charlie’s view about the arts in education.

If there was such a thing as a theatre bug, then I was immune. The problem wasn’t acting. I was happy to watch people pretending to be other people in films and TV that I sucked up indiscriminately. But all the elements that were supposed to make theatre unique and special – the proximity, the high emotion, the potential for disaster – made it seem mortifying to me. It was too much, too bare and artificial.

 Then there was the whiff of pretension, superiority and self-satisfaction that clung to all forms of ‘the arts’. To perform in a play or a band, to put your picture on display in the corridor, to publish your story or, God forbid, your poem in the school magazine, was to proclaim your uniqueness and self-belief and so to make yourself a target. Anything placed on a pedestal was likely to be knocked off, and it was simply common sense to stay quiet and keep any creative ambitions private.

Especially for a boy. The only acceptable talent was in sport, in which case it was fine to strut and boast, but my talents lay elsewhere, very possibly nowhere. The only thing that I was good at, drawing – doodling actually – was acceptable as long as it remained technical and free of self-expression. There was nothing of me in the still life of a peeled orange, the close-up of an eye with a window reflected in it, the planet-sized spaceship; no beauty, emotion or self-revelation, just draughtmanship. All other forms of expression – singing, dancing, writing, even reading or speaking a foreign language – were considered not just gay but also posh, and few things carried more stigma at Merton Grange than this combination. (p. 150-151)

It is useful to reflect on the explicit and underlying issues captured here. Peer pressure; deeply inculcated values of what is important; personal preference all play a part. But Charlie is no orphan in sharing these perceptions. 

Having spent a life time in drama and arts teacher education, I have often speculated about what holds back successful implementation of arts curriculum in schools.

Apart from the general levelling effect of the Tall Poppy Syndrome and the self-deprecating avoidance of ‘showing off’, we see in schools combinations of fear of failing, quests for perfectionism and misunderstandings about the purpose and nature of arts curriculum. Most telling are the misconceptions about arts education (only for talented and ’special’ people; ‘I don’t have a creative bone in my body’; not core curriculum; time filling; something for Friday afternoons after the real learning). I am reminded of our friend who asks again and again but what is there to learn about acting and singing? 

How do we change deeply-held perceptions and prejudices?

What are the misconceptions about The Arts in schools that you see?

The lack of understanding (ignorance even) from gaps in teachers’ own arts education, compound reluctance and reinforce resistance to implementing arts curriculum. What are the game changers that we need for arts education to be successfully taught and learnt by all young Australians? 

Nicholls, D. (2019). Sweet Sorrow. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

Teaching Drama teachers through stories

One of the powerful ways we have of learning about teaching drama is through the stories that are told about our field. From the first drama teacher education reader I compiled I included examples from young adult fiction that included descriptions of what happens in a drama workshop or class. Thanks to long-time friend John Foreman, a chapter from King of Shadows (Cooper, 1999) provides a useful description of a drama workshop in a time slip story that links the contemporary Shakespeare Globe Southbank with Shakespeare’s time and theatre. Earlier this year we gave John a copy of Sweet Sorrow (Nicholls, 2019) which features the reluctant participation of Charlie in a summer production of Romeo and Juliet as he pursues a romantic interest in a girl. What’s interesting is the tongue in cheek and jaded adolescent view of drama workshop activities that somehow seduce Charlie into participating in drama when he has scoffed at it. As insiders in the drama education bubble, it is useful to be reminded of the ways that our world is viewed by outsider/insiders. In the chapter called The Name Game Charlie recounts:

We played Catchy-Come-Catch and the Parrot Game. We played Follow My Nose and Scuttlefish and Fruit Bowl. We played Anyone Who? And Orange Orang-utan and Zip, Zap, Zop and Keeper of the Keys, then Chase the Chain and Panic Attack, That’s Not My Hat and Hello Little Doggy and while the others laughed and jerked and threw themselves around, I strived for an air of world-weary detachment, like the older brother at a children’s party.…

But it’s hard to remain cool through a game of Yes, No, Banana and all too soon we were shaking it out again, shake, shake, shake, and then getting into pairs and pretending to be mirrors. (p. 77)

Academic descriptions of drama workshops are mostly procedural. Stories, on the other hand, allow us to imagine possible versions of ourselves and are powerful role modelling. 

We are always looking for more examples of shared stories of drama teaching and learning.

What are your favourite stories about drama workshop experiences?

We would love to hear them when you share them.

Cooper, S. (1999). King of Shadows. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books.

Nicholls, D. (2019). Sweet Sorrow. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.

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Drama Tuesday - The words that we use to teach drama are important.

The drama teacher says to her students, lets play a drama game!

The simple term drama game carries with it meaning.

On the one hand, a word like game implies a sense of fun and possibility. Games are playful and entertaining. Games also have rules and structures that help us extend learning beyond this particular minute into the future, because once you’ve played the game you can play it again and extend and explore possibilities.

But you can also, depending on your context and culture, see games as frivolous, time filling and time wasting. Some see games as the opposite of learning - we go out from the classroom to play time while in class we study and focus on what’s important. Also, games can be seen as competitive, pitting player against player in order to win, to come out on top.

The people who advocate for the term drama games often do so because it encourages a sense of engagement, focus and commitment. 

Are there useful alternatives? 

I prefer to use terms like drama activities or drama exercise.  Or if needing to use the term drama game to explain and qualify how I use it. 

What this short thought reminds us is that the language we use matters. Language defines thinking and concepts. Rather than simply adopting accepted usage, we need to think purposefully about what we say and do as drama teachers.