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.