Drama Tuesday - Knowledge and Learning (Part 2)

How do you know what you know about drama?

From the 1970 Edition of the Pears Cyclopaedia, I was fascinated to read again, the Introduction to Contemporary Theatre. It presented a very English centric version “confined to plays produced before a live audience”. But I remember reading (and re-reading) page after page. 

It’s interesting to wonder how many of the ideas that shaped my own drama education practice find their roots in these particular words. I do still have a bias for “live theatre” even in a world where there are multiple versions at our fingertips on streaming services.  

The Cyclopaedia does present a limited vision. So much so, that it might explain my insistence upon Australian theatre and a focus on Australian theatre and playwrights that became important to the ways I developed. Why, for example, I took the first offering of Australian Literature at UWA when it became available in my last year of studies (very late in 1973 – unbelievable that it was this late in an Australian University).

As I noted, the limits of knowledge are often dependent on the sources of our knowledge. Whoever curated the section on theatre in the Pears Cyclopaedia presented one view. Obviously there are many others.

But this musing prompts to me wonder: 

• What are the sources of your knowledge about drama?

• What limits your knowledge? And what empowers it?

• What are your thoughts and responses to these extracts from the 1970 Introduction to Contemporary Theatre?

What significance can the modern audience be expected to find in such spectacles as squalid garrets and basement, characters most unrealistically bursting into song, old tramps changing hats, or a young man trying to teach a set of weighing machines to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. 

These are some of the questions that trouble the playgoer, and since they are not always easy to answer it may be helpful first to consider what is the 

Function of Dramatic Art.

It is not the function of art to make a statement but to induce an imaginative response. and the spectator receives not an answer to a question but an experience.

Drama., like the other arts, gives expression to that subtle and elusive life of feelIng that defies logical definition. By feeling ls to be understood the whole experience of what It feels like to be alive - physical sensations, emotions. and even what It feels like to think.

This flux of sensibility cannot be netted down in logical discourse. but can find expression In what Clive Bell, when discussing the visual arts, called " significant form.'' Susanne Longer in her book, Form and Feeling,  has developed Clive Bell's concept, arguing that al artistic form is an indirect expression of feeling. The artist, be he painter, poet. or dramatist, create an image a form that gives shape to his feeling and it Is for the sensitive recipient to interpret its significance.

The especial province of drama, as was pointed out by Aristotle, Is to create an image, an illusion of action, that action " which springs from the past but is directed towards the future and is always great with things to come." 

The Therapeutic Effect of Drama.

One of the achievements of serious drama is to create an image that will objectify and help to resolve deep human conflicts.
It is noteworthy also that drama. can be fully appreciated only in a public performance, a social event demanding the cooperation and understanding between author, players, and audiences.

The Constituents of Drama.

Drama Is a complex art in that It uses two very different kinds of Ingredient or material, one speech, the literary constituent. the other the gesture, movement, and confrontation of actors on an actual stage.

The Ritual Element

While speech and the confrontation of actors are essential to full drama, there is an element that has sometimes been neglected and that is ritual  perhaps the most primitive and evocative of all.

Drama Tuesday - Knowledge and Learning (Part 1)

 How do you know what you know?

I’ve been thinking this week about the nature of knowledge and its role in learning. 

This rather philosophical turn of mind has arisen, because I have been sorting through some very old books in preparation to send them off to the Save The Children Annual bookstall. 

In my family when I was growing up. My mother had a copy of the Pears Cyclopaedia, 60th Edition (1950) . This was an annual publication that brought together in 992 pages of very fine print some key ideas about the  world. There were sections about prominent people, history, a Gazetteer and a rather quaint 1940s Atlas of the World. English Dictionary, Synonyms and Antonyms, Classical Mythology, Health and Beauty, and sections on the new fangled Radio, Television and Radar. The publication was originally produced by the Pears soap company. 

As well as the original one, over the years, I gathered a number of other editions (including a birthday present from Phillip). Sadly annual publication ceased a few years ago before I throw them out,  I have taken the moment to fun through the rice paper thin pages and look at the nature of the way that we looked at knowledge then and now. Given that my mother in 1950 was living in isolated country Western Australia, this was obviously a treasured source of knowledge. Though, of course, the world of the Pears was narrower and coloured by British eyes. Even when I was growing up and buying my own copies of these publications, the world was narrower.

There was the time, and it’s in my life time at knowledge was contains mostly in books and, of course, word of mouth, person-to-person sharing of ideas. We relied heavily on libraries and these sorts of books. I still have fond memories of the chief librarian of University of Western Australia, and of course his team and the way they brought their version of knowledge to us but we always were presented with a curated knowledge  chosen for us by others. Similarly, with our views of the world through newspapers and media.

Even in these days of so-called instantaneous knowledge of our fingertips on the computer keyboard, recent events in the world of politics in the USA and elsewhere remind us that we are always presented with someone’s point of view. Or, to put it another way, we need to filter the world by considering multiple points of view. Access to billions of bits of knowledge, does not necessarily make us wiser.

Quaint. But of interest to our wood cartographer grandson, William. 

Hence my questions about the value of knowledge and the sorts of knowledge that matter. There has been a relatively virulent debate about “learning facts”. As a school student, we learnt all the Squares of numbers 1-39. We learnt lists of Masculine and Feminine nouns – Aviator and Aviatrix, for example (something that would shock our feminist friends). And there is an argument that we should not “burden” our minds with trivia that are good only for Pub Quiz nights.

But there is a counter argument that with our some knowledge, we are limiting our responses to the world as it rises up to meet us. Or rather, we need to reconsider learning in terms of applying knowledge, or “useful knowledge”

What is your construct of knowledge and knowing and its role in learning?

Read more in Part 2.

Drama Tuesday - Boal and Forum Theatre

 At one level Forum Theatre is easy to define – as a practice.

In Forum Theatre, actors perform a short scene based on an event involving oppression. Spectators are encouraged to suggest and enact solutions to the problem in the scene. Image Theatre and Forum Theatre require skilled facilitators, called Jokers, to mediate between the actors and the spectators. (https://www.britannica.com/art/Forum-Theatre) 

But it is important to see Forum Theatre in context.

Boal (1931-2009) was an activist with a commitment to political, economic and social change influenced by his own life circumstances and exile. He developed in a climate inspired by writers in Brazil and South America such as Paulo Fiere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The intent of Forum Theatre was political, social and personal change through directly addressing significant issue and pursuing change and revolution. 

https://prezi.com/zqwxj3zqskeq/augusto-boal-and-the-forum-theatre/ 

In the drama context, Boal builds on the rhetoric and practice of Brecht. Forum Theatre sets out to actively disrupt what Boal saw as the status quo of power relationships in theatre, notably the passive and “oppressed” audience. He challenged the power positioning of the actor, the script, the director and therefore, the audience. 

• The actor is supplanted by the spect-actor – an activist audience empowered to change the text and the outcomes of the dramatic action

• The director becomes the Joker – disempowered as dictator and neutered as “objective though contradictorily could still be manipulator puppeteer

• The text is changeable, reformable at the point of uttering, not just improvisationally but shaped shifted

In short, Boal’s purpose was revolutionary and radical.

Boal (and others) embed Forum Theatre as one of a series of innovations of form such as Image Theatre, Legislative Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Newspaper Theatre, Rainbow of Desire. They are all, in turn, build on a concept of freeing the body through games designed to engage and empower. 

Boal in Australia 

Boal was a keynote speaker at the IDEA 1995 Congress in Brisbane. He was a celebrity presence in that event and “played to packed houses” who all wanted to be part of the excitement. 

I have distinct memories of watching the session late in the afternoon from the choir stalls of QPAC. Boal had insisted that the curtain be dropped on the stage and that the whole session took place on the stage. The vast stage was packed with people and Boal worked with a team of actors who had been working with him during the week of the congress. The action was played out and the substitutions of spect-actors made. 

There was an enthusiastic buzz of excitement. Boal received the “rock star” treatment.

Thinking about Forum Theatre today

There are many enthusiasts. A simple Internet search reveals many examples both within the drama classroom and beyond in development contexts. It is useful to make the connections between Boal’s application and the ideas of Brecht (e.g. 1964). 

There are questions to be asked about the ways that strategies such as Forum Theatre are applied and can be applied. While the techniques can be superficially used, it could be a disservice to the vision Boal (and others) had and continue to have for an empowered and different audience. 

But there is fascinating potential for deep engagement through Forum Theatre and Boal’s other strategies.  It is important to engage with the underlying construction of identified oppression and move beyond shallow playing out of first world angst.

Bibliography

. Augusto Boal: theatre of the oppressed. (2001). In B. Burton (Ed.), Living drama (pp. 240-247). South Melbourne, Vic.: Pearson Education Australia.

Boal, A. (1993). Theatre of the Oppressed (C. A. McBride, Trans.). New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow of Desire. The Boal method of Theatre and Therapy. New York: Routledge.

Boal, A. (1996). Politics, Education and Change. In Drama, culture and empowerment (pp. dk-dk). Brisbane: IDEA Publications.

Boal, A. (2011). Juegos para actores y no actores. Barcelona: Alba.

Brecht, B. (1964). A Short Organum for the Theatre. In J. Willet (Ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, 1st ed. (pp. 233-246). New York: Hill and Wang.

Foreman Friday - Masks

 The mask in drama has its double in life. 

This is something I wrote in reaction to a comment from a Year 11 student.

—

 The Mask I Wear

This mask I wear can be so claustrophobic – it closes in all around me, enveloping me, inhibiting me. It cuts me off from all outside contact. It determines how I must behave and allows little freedom. God help me if it ever becomes moulded to the real me.

Its there so often that I sometimes feel that very little would be needed for the graft to take and I’d be stuck with it.

The expectation of you, the student, for me to act in some specific way, the ideas you pick up about me from someone I taught last year, your conception of how a teacher should behave, all are pressing me against my  will, into this idiotic mask.

Why should the mask be more effective than me?

Maybe the only reason I wear it is because, much as I like to, I don’t trust you. Its much easier to allow you to rip into my mask, make fun of it, laugh at it, and to degrade it, because I know that it is only a mask and that I am safely hidden camouflaged, protected. 

Perhaps the times I get so upset are when I’ve accidentally allowed my mask to slip and your barbs strike home at me.

I wish the mask wasn’t necessary. I wish I could trust you with me. Life would be so much easier. Instead of being mask to mask we’d be face to face – for I’m sure that you, too, hide yourself behind a false façade.

John Foreman Albany SHS 25.6.80

—

 I find it interesting to revisit this piece of reflective writing of the inexperienced teacher that I was back then.

The further I went in my teaching career I found there were groups, classes where there was more of Me. Part of that I guess was the development of that ‘trust’, part was being more comfortable with who I was in front of a class.

That trust in the students to treat me with, I guess, respect came more readily from my Drama classes. And that is perhaps because I gave far more of myself in those classes. Much of what we did was a shared journey. 

Do you see me or the mask?

Early on I was a step ahead of the kids. Later I was putting my heart on the line in the scripts I wrote, and the classes grabbed them and happily ran with them. And of course, once there was success before an audience students were vying to be in the class, especially at City Beach. In the rapidly shrinking school I wound up with two classes in Year 10 and a double cast Panto.

At Armadale SHS there was one student who refused a role because he didn’t believe the play was achievable. He was the first to approach me afterwards and admit he was wrong. I found it difficult to trust him with a role later.

There were, of course, some classes – in English, or HASS, or Multi-Media, where a version of the Mask was evident.

Commedia masks from John M Foreman collection

Put your face on…

So, whilst that mask I wore was metaphorical, it was, for all intents and purposes, real. And needed.

Many masks can be ephemeral. 

Robin reminded me that my Mother and most of her generation (the females, at least) would never leave the house without ‘putting her face on’.

This ‘mask’ was what she considered a better version of herself, one that she was happier to show the world. Some women would never leave the house, or even the bathroom, without applying their make-up. 

Has anything changed in the past sixty, seventy years?

Make-up has changed. As have the ‘masks’ that some apply.

As a long-time lover and collector of masks, when my old email was inundated with spam, I invoked an Italian version in my new address; mymaschere.

What are the masks you wear? In Life? In teaching? In drama teaching?

Which masks do you reveal in drama teaching?

Drama Tuesday - A Call To Action

The Reykjavik Manifesto

Being mindful of the goals, strategies and action items of the UNESCO Seoul Agenda’s Goals for the Development of Arts Education and acknowledging the principles expressed in the Frankfurt Declaration and the Winnipeg Declaration,

We understand that Drama/Theatre Education 

• is a powerful, creative process and subject for multi-dimensional learning in formal, non-formal and informal education; a platform for inclusivity and decolonisation; venue and methodology for research; an agent for enhancing health and wellbeing, and

• introduction to this art form, including drama in education and diverse theatre traditions around the world, and

• opportunity for enhancing social awareness, empathy and collaboration and personal and community development, and

• platform for expression and action on matters of local, global and intercultural concern such as Peace, Sustainability, Equality and Economic empowerment.

We, the participants at the 9th IDEA World Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland under The theme “Drama for All, Drama for Tall and Small” meet in the context of drama in the changing world.

We pledge our commitment to raise awareness to contribute to the implementation of the objectives and practice of Drama/Theatre Education.

We call upon all levels of government to make official legislation to support this materially, and in spirit, to ensure equitable access to high quality Drama/Theatre Education for all children, youth and life-long learners as part of a full, human education.

8th July 2022

Drama Tuesday - ATYP 2023 Education Program announced

The ATYP slogan always brings a smile

 I have posted before about ATYP. and happy to do so for 2023

https://atyp.com.au/education/ 

https://issuu.com/atypinfo/docs/2023_digital_learning_brochure 

The 2023 Education program has been launched. The notion of a “full service” support package for drama teachers in schools is welcome and worth supporting. 

Like many other youth theatre companies, ATYP offers  productions and workshop program (as it has done so over a long sixty year history). What is exciting is the extension of these sorts of activities to reach a wider audience and participation.

Innovations like Theatre Packs, on-line workshop videos and On Demand videos of past productions provide resources that can enrich drama classes and students and inspire teachers.

Theatre Flat Pack

Inspired perhaps by the IKEA flat pack phenomenon, the ATYP Flat Packs are production packages of their library of commissioned plays. Yes, you need to pay for them but the packs are comprehensive. There are plays for Secondary and Primary.

  ATYP ON Demand 

Not just a response to COVID-19 isolation, the ON Demand component of the package provides opportunities for teachers to engage students with contemporary youth theatre performances from the ATYP repertoire. Fully supported with relevant activities and workshops.

Check out what’s on offer

There are also Workshop videos that are useful. 

Drama Tuesday - A Time for Giants

The challenges for teachers facing change

The playwright José Rivera in the introduction to Giants Have Us in Their Books tells of his four year old daughter’s observation 

“if we have giants in our fairy tales, then giants must have us in theirs!”. 

Imagine how giants would tell their children of this moment in the history of arts and culture education in Peru. 

Take a moment to dream of arts and culture becoming the work of every teacher, becoming the fabric of every lesson, becoming the living testament of every young person. Imagine how arts and cultural actions embody learning. Imagine how introducing an embodied change in arts and cultural curriculum opens possibilities beyond what we can imagine. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is a process where bodies affect other bodies and are transformed((1987 [2012])). In short it is a human process – a people focused transformation.

Of course, there are and will be challenges. 

In the ancient stories of many cultures, we are told to be afraid of giants. They were the villains of the story. But the biggest giant of the moment is the fear of change. Fear is a basic human emotional response. Change is about leaving behind our comfort zones and facing complexity, uncertainty and doubt – and I see this in my teacher education students when they are faced with the concepts of teaching the arts themselves. I begin by recognising that for many of my students, overcoming fear of change needs acknowledgment of stress and finding ways of managing stress. In part I do this by chunking information, translating the edu-speak and jargon, by relating experiences to authentic situations. I have learnt through working as a curriculum change leader that there is a need for structure and tools; but most importantly, there is the simple but complex recognition that change is about people. Change for us all is a journey not a destination and curriculum change is (hopefully a guided journey. Fear of change can be about the unknown; it can be about fearing failure; and it can be about fearing success. 

To get past moments of fear we need to remember that enacting an arts and cultural education curriculum is a time for us to be giants. The concept of an arts and cultural curriculum is a big idea – a giant idea – and it does not need timidity or apology. Shout from the rooftops. Create a storm of interest and passion. Lead the change. Become the change.

Our pedagogy leads the way for managing change.

We must be true to our principles for arts education.

The research I have done about Arts Education (e.g. Pascoe 2013; Wright, et al. 2006) has identified that the markers of quality are founded on principles of: 

• student identity and agency – their sense of becoming;

• co-construction of meaning and learning;

• learning environments that support creativity, imagination and innovation; and,

• seeing students (and teachers) as artists and audiences.

Therefore leading teachers towards successful arts teaching needs us to address these same principles. 

If these are the principles of arts and culture education for students then they should be the principles for engaging teachers. Let me put them again as questions for us who lead the enactment of arts education:

• How do we help teachers in every classroom find their own identity, develop their own voice and agency, help their own sense of becoming?

• How do they co-construct with other teachers meaning making arts education for themselves and their students?

• How do we provide supportive learning environments?

• How do we help teachers see themselves as artists and audiences?

Becoming the curriculum change we envision is about understanding the specific pedagogies of the arts – the specific ways that we learn the arts through embodied learning, through practical, hands on ways, through ways that seek to integrate and make connections. 

There is a time for giants.

In the 2015 Perth International Arts Festival, the Royale de Luxe Giants visited. They walked the streets of this modern city and set a tumble of excitement. Thousands of people poured into the streets to watch, to walk to be with the Little Girl and the Diver. In the beating summer heat they laughed and maybe even cried a little on the journey of the giants. Most importantly, they embodied the idea of imagination and wonder. It was a big event that caught fire. 

Just as we are as individuals in a process of becoming, arts and culture education is in a similar process of becoming. What emerges will not be fixed of static but richly evolving, richly possible. And who are the people to make that happen – keep happening? 

You know the answer. 

Roar, roar like giants – for arts and culture education. 

http://static.prnasia.com/pro/media/201502/perth/p2.jpg

Bibliography

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987 [2012]). A thousand plateaus. London, Continuum International Publishing Group.

Pascoe, R. (2013). Dynamic Markers for Arts Education in Schools. International Yearbook for Research in Arts Education 1 | 2013. E. Liebau, E. Wagner and M. Wyman. Münster, Waxmann: 47-62.

Wright, P. R., R. Pascoe, J. Dinham, J. MacCallum, K. Grushka, T. Church and A. Winteron (2006). From Behind the Mask: Revealing Visual Education. Research Report to The National Review of Education in Visual Arts, Craft, Design and Visual Communication. Perth, CLCD, Murdoch University: National Review of Visual Education.

IDEA DAY 2022

Drama Tuesday - Samovila

  Samovila in Bulgarian and Serbian legend are mythic creatures in the woodlands, mesmerising male passersby with their songs and dances. Some believe they are daughters of the Thracian goddess Bendis. They are are immortal keepers of nature with an affinity for fire. They have the power to bring about drought, burn a farmer's crops, or make cattle die of high fever. It is said that, when angered, a Samovila (sometimes called Samodiva) can change her appearance and turn into a monstrous bird, capable of throwing fire at her enemies.

From these traditional folk stories, Second Year actors at WAAPA with their director Bagryana Popov, weave a mystical retelling in the Roundhouse Theatre @ WAAPA ECU. 

I love this kind of theatrical storytelling. Evocative and imaginative use of lengths of fabric, voices, movement shaping a succession of characters and stories. Theatrical and satisfying. Strongly physical theatre incorporating folk dances – wonderful training for these young actors. An Eastern European sensibility realised through the diverse talents of this group of actors in their first public performances near the end of their second year of study. Simple use of props but mostly skilful use of bodies and voices. Strong sense of ensemble and committed, focused performances. Simple set, great use of the levels and entrances of the theatre with lighting to match the mood. Wonderful evocative singing. 

I would go to see it again for the richness and colour. 

Drama Tuesday - Flowering in unlikely places

 There are many characters in my teaching career but one of them I remember with  mixed feelings was the Deputy  Principal of Western Australian Secondary Teachers College.

Somewhat typically of my generation we found his leadership was blustery and bureaucratic and not always warmly accepted. Intolerant lot we were, I know. But there is one story about him that continues to  endear him to me. 

https://visit.museum.wa.gov.au/greatsouthern/school-room

If still from the deserts the prophets come  (A.D. Hope Australia)

Early in his career - so the story goes - he was a teacher in what in Western Australia were called “one teacher schools”. That’s a school out in a rural community where all of the students are taught in one class. All ages from the youngest to the oldest (remembering of course that the age of leaving school was somewhat younger in those days). If you are familiar with the Anne of Green Gables stories, you may remember a similar school was featured.

As the single teacher of the school the person I’m talking about decided that he would mount a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This involved all the students in the school. The littlest students, in homemade costumes stitched together from flour sacks by willing mums, were the guards on the battlements of Elsinore. The production was staged in the school room with rudimentary lighting and makeshift scenery put together in woodworking Friday afternoon classes the hammering alongside the line memorising. The roles were shared across all the students according to their capacities but everyone, including the teacher, had roles. 

Maybe rough and ready. Maybe not the Bell Shakespeare. But, according to legend, it had energy and verve. And heart. 

When you think about all the incidental applied learning and the bringing together of community involved, there’s a kind of rough magic to the teaching. 

Edward’s Boys ensemble in the 2013 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, directed by Perry Mills. Photo by Gavin Birkett, courtesy of Edward’s Boys.

Let’s not over romanticise this. It’s the sort of thing that happened in the straightened years after the Second World War when there was a flood of returned soldiers and airmen adjusting to the recovery years. This story seems incongruous with the image I have of clashing impatiently with him in his role as Deputy. But we should give credit where credit’s due. 

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth (Shakespeare, Henry V Prologue) 

Cambridge University Press

978-1-108-81023-4 — Performing Early Modern Drama Beyond Shakespeare Harry R. McCarthy in the Elements in Shakespeare Performance series

This story came to mind today as I read about a contemporary drama production project in the King Edward VI Grammar School (KES), reputed to have been attended by Shakespeare. Over time within the school there’s developed a theatre project known as Edward’s Boys dedicated to  ‘striving to explore the repertoire of the boys’ companies’ under the direction of the school’s deputy headmaster, Perry Mills. Edward’s Boys is an amateur troupe composed entirely of pupils (aged 11–18) from the school which has been in continuous operation since 2008. They have performed at the grammar school in Stratford on Avon, as well as on tour in venues as varied as Oxford college dining halls, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, St Paul’s Cathedral, a chapel in Montpellier, and a ducal  palace in Genoa. “These productions constitute the largest corpus of early modern boy theatre in performance available for examination by twenty-first-century scholars.”

The focus of this company is a range of early

modern dramatists such as Marston’s The

Dutch Courtesan and Antonio’s Revenge, extracts from Lyly’s Endymion and Mother Bombie, Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and, Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho!. They also have produced Shakespeare’s Henry V

As McCarthy observes,

“these unique productions had been distinctly shaped by the company’s institutional context and their development of a vigorous, contemporary performance style … in the hands of Edward’s Boys, early modern drama becomes a site of sport and play, of physical experimentation, and of exploring contemporary boyhood.”

There is something quaintly and quintessentially English about the notion of exploring the early repertoire built on a company of “scholar actors” in the spirit of the companies of boy actors in Shakespeare’s times.

It’s also inspiring. And thought provoking.