Theatre and Learning [1 ed.] 9781443882057, 9781443872423

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Theatre and Learning

Theatre and Learning Edited by

Art Babayants and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey

Theatre and Learning Edited by Art Babayants and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Art Babayants, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7242-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7242-3

In Memory of Luella (Lou) Massey 1953-2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Contributors ................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xvi Theatre and Learning: Unwillingly Searching for Tensions .................... xvii Art Babayants and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey Part I. Reflecting Introduction ................................................................................................. 2 To Entertain and Surprise: Reflections on Theatre and Learning George Belliveau Chapter One ................................................................................................. 6 Chasing Change: Drama Education, Applied Theatre, Space and the Ecology of Social Change Kathleen Gallagher Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Difficult Knowledge in Theatre for Young Audiences: Remembering and Representing the Holocaust. Belarie Zatzman Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50 Moving Mountains: “Becoming” a Teaching Artist Mary Anderson Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 71 A Sociocultural Approach to Theatre Productions for Second Language Learning Michelle R. Raquel

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Part II. Risking Introduction ............................................................................................... 94 The Three C’s of Risk-Taking in Theatre Education. Monica Prendergast Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 97 Hidden Pedagogies at Play: Street Youth Resisting within Applied Theatre Amanda C. Wager Chapter Six ...............................................................................................115 Using Learner-Centred Method to Address the Pedagogical and Creative Challenges of the Classroom Production James McKinnon and Ralph Upton Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 138 Reconsidering Good Intentions: Learning with Failure in Education and the Arts Mia Perry (Images: Rohan Reilly) Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 153 Risk, Theatre and Learning Suzanne Osten in Conversation with Heather Fitzsimmons Frey Part III. Re-Imagining Introduction ............................................................................................. 162 Re-Imagining, Learning, Unlearning Barry Freeman Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 166 Affective Atmospheres: Performative Pedagogies of Space Helen Nicholson Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 185 Groundwork: Chinese Theatre, “World Theatre”... Beyond? Teaching Cross-Cultural Narratives of Theatre History, Theory and Performance Antje Budde

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Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 209 Cellular Intimacy in Digi-Boalian Theatre Cassandra Silver Chapter Twelve ........................................................................................ 223 Re-imagining Possibilities through the Very Young Rhona Matheson and Lynda Hill in Conversation with Heather Fitzsimmons Frey Index ........................................................................................................ 231

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig 2-1: The Children’s Republic. Photo credit: Cylla von Tiedemann Fig 2-2: Hana in School. Photo credit: Teresa Przybylski Fig 2-3: Hana at Auschwitz with suitcase. Photo credit: Teresa Przybylski Fig 2-4: Ishioka on her search. Photo credit: Teresa Przybyski Fig 2-5: Script 6. Photo credit. Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy Fig 2-6: Signature 7. Photo credit: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy Fig 2-7: Anne with pen. Photo credit: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy Fig 2-8: Boy with hands up. Photo credit: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy Fig 4-1: L2 learning from sociocultural perspective Fig 4-2: Components of production process Fig 4-3: Phase one theatre activities Fig 4-4: Summary of phase one production process Fig 5-1: Cardboard Brainstorms Fig 5-2: Cardboard Brainstorms Fig 5-3: Davina and Craig rehearsing Fig 5-4: Mid-scene Craig decides to leave to “wash his hands” Fig 7-1: Astrid. Photo credit: Rohan Reilly Fig 7-2: Success vs. Failure Fig 7-3: The Bridge. Photo Credit: Rohan Reilly Fig 7-4: Trust Me. Photo credit: Rohan Reilly Fig 7-5: Drowning. Photo credit: Rohan Reilly Fig 7-6: Black Valley. Photo credit: Rohan Reilly

CONTRIBUTORS

Mary Elizabeth Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Wayne State University in the United States. Her research explores dimensions of popular participation in performance, focusing on placemaking, teaching artistry and reflective practice. She has written essays for journals such as Research in Drama Education (RiDE), Teaching Artist Journal, International Journal of Education and the Arts and Body, Space & Technology. Her monograph, Meeting Places: Locating Desert Consciousness in Performance, is a meditation on place-based performance practices in the Australian Central Desert. With Doug Risner, she co-edited Hybrid Lives of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre Arts: A Critical Reader (Cambria, 2014). Art Babayants is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. His thesis research looks into the practice of actors learning to perform in their nondominant language(s). He is also the founder and the artistic director of The Toronto Laboratory Theatre, an open creative collective that focuses on the projects that invites combinations, often unorthodox, of theatre practice and theatre research: www.torontolab.org George Belliveau is Professor of Theatre/Drama Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His research interests include research-based theatre, drama and social justice, drama and L2 learning, drama across the curriculum, drama and health research and Canadian theatre. His scholarly and creative writing can found in various arts-based and theatre education journals, along with chapters in edited books. His most recent book Stepping into Drama: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Elementary Classroom is published by Pacific Educational Press (2014). Antje Budde is an Associate Professor and the current Associate Director (graduate) at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS) at the University of Toronto. Between 2005 and 2012 she was cross-appointed with the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Antje studied at Humboldt-University in Berlin and at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. As both a scholar and artistic practitioner she integrates her research interests in both arenas of knowledge

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production based on curiosity, playfulness, collaboration, experimentation and concerns for social justice. Her main interests are cross-cultural experimental theatre, performances of queer feminism, digital culture in and through performance, media politics and cultural communication. Heather Fitzsimmons Frey is a director, dramaturge, and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. Her dissertation research examines girlhood identity and reimagining their possible futures through at-home theatricals in middleclass Victorian England. She has published in Canadian Theatre Review and Youth Theatre Journal and has a chapter in Nationalism and Youth in Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2014). She is editing an anthology of theatrical performances created for young people in unconventional ways called Ignite (Playwrights Canada Press, 2015). Barry Freeman is an Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Barry is an Executive Editor of Theatre Research in Canada, Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review, and has two ongoing book projects: Staging Strangers: Theatre & Global Ethics, and Why Theatre Now: On the Virtue and Value of Canadian Theatre in the New Millennium, a collection co-edited with Kathleen Gallagher. Kathleen Gallagher is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, conducting research in urban schools. Her books include, Why Theatre Matters: Urban Youth, Engagement, and a Pedagogy of the real (University of Toronto Press, 2014); The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times (University of Toronto Press, 2007) Drama Education in the Lives of Girls: Imagining Possibilities (University of Toronto Press, 2000). Her edited collections include: Why Theatre Now: On the virtue and value of Canadian theatre in the new millennium (forthcoming with Barry Freeman); Drama and Theatre in Urban Contexts. (with Jonothan Neelands, Routledge, 2013); How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates (with David Booth, University of Toronto, 2003), The Methodological Dilemma: Creative, Critical and Collaborative Approaches to Qualitative Research (Routledge, 2008). James McKinnon is a theatre scholar, director, and educator and is Programme Director of the Victoria University of Wellington Theatre Programme. His research focuses on adaptation, particularly contemporary

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appropriations of canonical classics, as well as the pedagogical applications of adaptation-based dramaturgy. His work has appeared in recent issues of Theatre Research in Canada, the Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, Canadian Theatre Review, Teaching Learning Inquiry, and the recent anthology Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations. At VUW in 2011, he teaches courses in dramaturgy, modern and postmodern drama, and dramatic theory and criticism, and has directed two original theatre productions: Shit Show (2012), inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and Mystery Play (2013), derived from the English liturgical plays and other sources. Rhona Matheson is the Director of Starcatchers in Scotland. She studied Scottish History and Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow graduating in 1999. She has worked with 7:84 Theatre Company (Scotland), lookOUT Theatre Company, and Wee Stories, a company specialising in storytelling theatre for children and families. In 2006, Rhona was appointed the Project Manager of the pilot Starcatchers project based at North Edinburgh Arts in Muirhouse, Edinburgh. Since then, she has driven the development of Starcatchers’ work, including the facilitation and delivery of 9 residency project based in a range of arts and community settings, producing more than 25 productions which have toured to venues across Scotland, the UK and internationally and working with colleagues to pioneer programmes of Creative Skills Development for Early Years Practitioners. She is regularly invited to speak throughout the UK and internationally about early years theatre and arts. Helen Nicholson is Professor of Theatre and Performance at Royal Holloway, University of London where she specialises in applied theatre and contemporary performance. Helen is co-editor of RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, and the author of several books in applied and educational theatre including Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (second edition, 2014) and Theatre, Education and Performance, (2011). Helen is currently leading a major research project on Amateur Theatre. Suzanne Osten is a Swedish, multi-award winning director and writer of theatre and film, for adult and child audiences. Between 1975 and 2014 she was the artistic director of Unga Klara, an innovative theatre company for young people whose controversial works include Medea’s Children (Medeas Barn), co-authored by Per Lysander, and Babydrama with AnnSofie Bárámy. Her work has raised the status of theatre for children worldwide. Among her many honours, she received an honorary doctorate

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from Lund University (2002), an ASSITEJ medal (2002) and a Swedish government medal (2014). Mia Perry is the Research Director at the ecl foundation and visiting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Her work is positioned in the intersections of education, the arts, and philosophy. Mia’s background ranges from community theatre in rural Ireland, to training and scholarship in Dublin, Moscow, London, and Vancouver, and theatre practice, teaching, and research in varied contexts in Ireland, Canada, and Scotland. Previous to her current position, Mia was an Assistant Professor in applied theatre and arts education at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. She has published widely in the areas of post structural research methodologies and drama and theatre education. Monica Prendergast is Associate Professor of drama/theatre education at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her co-authored and edited books with Juliana Saxton, Applied Theatre (2009) and Applied Drama (2013), have both received the Distinguished Book Award from the American Alliance for Theatre Education. Her research interests include audience education and spectatorship, performance studies in education, and utopian thinking in drama education and applied theatre. Monica's work has appeared in many key journals, edited collections and research handbooks in her interdisciplinary fields. Monica's current funded research involves codesigning a performance studies curriculum for secondary level students. Michelle Raquel is a Senior Lecturer at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She has directed and co-directed numerous theatre productions at both secondary and tertiary levels including The Tempest and Disney’s Aladdin Jr. Publications include “Theatre Production as a Language Learning Environment for Chinese Students” in Drama and Theatre Education in Asia, and (with Sivanes Phillipson) “The enhancement of socially constructed concepts of learning in a theatre production” in the International Journal of Language, Society and Culture. Her PhD thesis investigated second language learning of HK tertiary students engaged in a theatre production of Living with Lady Macbeth. Rohan Reilly is a landscape photographer based in West Cork, Ireland. Smooth compositions, clean lines, and strong shapes characterise Rohan’s work. He works primarily in black and white, a first step away from reality and into an otherworldly atmosphere. His images evoke senses of serenity, solitude, melancholy, hope and wonder, or a combination of these whilst still

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retaining an earthy and organic feel. He is widely recognised as one of the best b/w photographers in Ireland and has won many international awards. His work has been published in the Sunday Times, the Irish Independent and numerous magazines, and has been exhibited in Ireland and the UK. Cassandra Silver is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Her SSHRC-supported dissertation project explores the application of interactive technologies and video games in live performance. Before undertaking her current program, she completed her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the Universities of Ottawa and Alberta, respectively. She steps away from her writing to teach, recently at the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, and for creative work, like her latest projects at Toronto’s Summerworks and the Ottawa Fringe Festival. Ralph Upton completed his Honours BA in Theatre Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2008. In the same year he formed Binge Culture Collective, who make rough-edged, non-narrative devised work. Their website is www.bingeculture.co.nz. He is a tutor, director and workshop leader in the Victoria University Theatre programme. In 2015, Ralph and Binge Culture will travel to New York to perform at La Mama. Amanda C. Wager is an Assistant Professor at Lesley University, where she prepares teachers to integrate the arts within TESOL and literacy education. As an educator and researcher she has used drama and theatre while working with diverse populations of children, youth, and adults within formal and informal learning environments. She has presented and published internationally on her research interests, which include feminist pedagogy, applied theatre, drama-in-education, youth studies, civic engagement, and additional language learning. Amanda’s passion lies in building safe spaces in which individuals can creatively and critically co-construct pedagogy. Belarie Zatzman is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University. Zatzman’s research focuses on theatre for young audiences; history, memory and drama education; artistic practices and identity; narrative inquiry; and Holocaust education through the fine arts. Publications include: “Canadian Jewish Performance”— the first collection of criticism on Jewish performance in Canada (2013); “Drama Education and Memory” (Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education, 2011); and “Fiftyone Suitcases: Traces of Hana Brady and the Terezin Children” (Canadian Theatre Review, 2009).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to everyone who presented, performed and shared in the dialogue at the Festival of Original Theatre 2012 (F.O.O.T. 2012) that inspired this publication, and to those who made the festival run smoothly. Special thanks go to Lois Adamson, Karen Gilodo, Michelle MacArthur, Hillevi Berg Niksa, Stina Wikström and Lydia Wilkinson. We are also immeasurably grateful to our peer reviewers who commented on early drafts of the chapters. Thank you, Bruce Barton (University of Calgary), Nikki Cesare-Schotzko (University of Toronto), Drew Chappell (California State University, Fullerton), Diane Conrad (University of Alberta), Ellen Kaplan (Smith College, Northampton), Ann KiplingBrown (University of Regina), Doug Patterson (University of Omaha), Jane Heather (University of Alberta), Ric Knowles (University of Guelph), Marc Richard (Sheridan College, Oakville), Jan Selman (University of Alberta), Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou (Brandon University). Last but not least, our biggest thank you goes to all our authors for their contributions to this volume and to Caroline Reich for her phenomenal proofreading and editing efforts.

THEATRE AND LEARNING: UNWILLINGLY SEARCHING FOR TENSIONS AN ALMOST UNNECESSARY INTRODUCTION BY ART BABAYANTS AND HEATHER FITZSIMMONS FREY

Art: When in June 2013 I was visiting my sister’s family, residing in Moscow, Russia, I couldn’t help but seize the opportunity to see as much theatre as possible. June is the time when the famous Moscow International Chekhov festival is in full bloom and thousands of theatre-goers fill local theatre venues. My sister has two kids, who were 9 and 7 at that point, and I, a theatre scholar and theatre lover, felt it was my utmost responsibility to take them to the theatre. Moscow, one of the theatre centres of the world, has more than 160 professional repertory theatre companies, and most have their own theatre buildings—sometimes two or even three. The number of amateur or semi-professional companies is next to impossible to calculate. The range of theatres that target young audiences is no less impressive: anything from “academic” (which means professional or “of high calibre” in the local theatre lingo) puppet theatres, musical theatres to drama theatres is on the offer. Luckily, late June is the time when theatres tend to conclude their seasons for the summer break, which made my choice far easier. On the very last day of its season, the Gorky Moscow Art Theatre1 was showing its almost ageless creation: Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, one of the original directors of which was none other but Konstantin Stanislavsky himself. What an incredible opportunity it was to see a production originally conceived in the times of early Modernism! This spectacular, even opulent, two-hour long production of a highly complex Symbolist play turned out to be interesting and engaging, despite the visibly worn-out set and costumes. How does an adult measure engagement? Perhaps, by the amount of labour s/he should put in in order to keep the minors busy. My nephew, who, as I suspect, suffers from a mild form of ADD, was able to keep himself in his seat for two straight hours without causing any major destruction to either the theatre building

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or the theatrical process unfolding on stage. He empathized with the characters, he lived through the plot—my cunningly devised comprehension questions that I posed post-show—confirmed his full understanding of the story. My niece wasn’t able to take her eyes off the stage either. There was no direct audience interaction, no cheap tricks of forcing the audience to “decide the fate of a character” and no simplistic moralizing at the end of the production. In fact, the Stanislavskian fourth wall couldn’t have felt any stronger. The acting was on a par with regular professional Moscow productions oriented toward adults. It was almost impossible to conceive how a show that had hardly changed in a hundred years, when performed in an entirely different sociocultural context, could enthral, engage and entertain adults and children alike. More importantly, it had sufficient teaching-learning potential. Being a theatre scholar, who is supposed to be proverbially bored by most live performance, I also managed to enjoy the production and learn something from it. For instance, I learned through direct experience what Stanislavsky and Sulerzhitsky’s first attempts to stage symbolism could have looked like. A unique, nuanced and highly enjoyable lesson in theatre history that one would not be able to receive from any books, courses or conferences! A few months later, back home in Toronto, I was invited to see another production that was billed as theatre for young audiences (TYA). For the purposes of brevity and ethics, I will omit the name of the company and the title of the show. Suffice it to say, I left the theatre utterly unimpressed. Not only did I learn nothing, I felt incredibly betrayed and annoyed, as I observed the swarms of school kids flocking out of the theatre and discussing things completely unrelated to the stage production they had just witnessed. A lot of them were yawning, too. If there was any learning that happened in that theatre it was that “theatre is boring.” This completely unscholarly and possibly superficial observation of mine corresponds well with the question that many of my non-theatre friends pose to me over and over again: “What is it that you find in the theatre that we don’t?” Sadly, my friends’ childhood and sometimes adult memories of TYA (and not only TYA) are often marred by stupefyingly dull shows which commonly use a condescending tone. After those traumatic theatre experiences, my friends have a right to ask why they should go to the theatre ever again. It is anguished questions like these that urged us to propose a conference focusing not on the obvious positive connections between theatrical activity (of any kind) and the process of learning, but more on the problems, tensions, ruptures, failures and difficulties that learning through theatre, learning about theatre and learning for theatre may

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involve. Instead of hearing how successful this or that show or this or that applied theatre project was, we were more interested in how the actual learning was happening and what stumbling points were encountered by those involved. We wanted to question what “success” meant, especially in the fields of theatre and drama education, applied theatre and TYA. The conference, officially called Festival of Original Theatre (F.O.O.T.)2 and thematically centred on the idea of Theatre and Learning, took place in February 2012 at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and attracted about two hundred participants from seven different countries, but mostly theatre educators, scholars and practitioners living and working in Canada. It also included two academic keynote speakers (Kathleen Gallagher and Helen Nicholson) and one artistic keynote speaker (Suzanne Osten), all of whom were kind enough to contribute to this volume, too. The participants enjoyed four days of workshops, conference papers, performances, round table talks, communal lunches and informal conversations. In a way, Heather and I were trying to create a Vygotskian collective zone of proximal development—a space of potentiality where everyone could advance their knowledge or skill level to heights unreachable without the help of peers. They also experienced moments of subversion and instances of uneasiness and tension, some of which, just as we hoped, became potential precursors to learning. As the conference progressed, more and more tensions emerged: an artist refused to be constrained by the academic genre of paper presentation and turned her presentation into a film demonstration followed by an uneasy and lengthy discussion with the audience. An applied linguist attending the conference confided in me that she had been deeply disappointed by what is generally called research in applied theatre and how it was presented at the conference. Two education professors begrudgingly protested against an attempt by two other professors to restrain a highly diverse web of applied theatre practices to a seemingly neat and highly coherent classification. As it turned out, we also had some learning to do. It is the F.O.O.T. participants that taught us to be more disruptive and more critical of our own choices. We originally conceived our conference comprised of neat packages that followed many commonly acceptable research themes: TYA, applied theatre practices, learning from performance, learning to perform... And then we discovered that we, the mildly bored theatre scholars, could be as engaged by “babydrama”, an artistic practice that our artistic keynote, the Swedish director Suzanne Osten introduced. The very concept of TYA—a theatre that should be age-specific—crumbled before

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our own eyes as we observed both six month old babies and their parents transfixed by a screening of a theatrical performance unfolding at Osten’s Unga Klara theatre in Stockholm, Sweden. Later on, the imaginary wall separating applied theatre from “real” theatre came down, too, shattering our hope to find any cohesion in the complex relationship between theatre and learning. As theatre professionals reflected upon their experimental work and the learning that they had to do along with their audiences, it became clear to them and to us that they were also doing “applied” work. We were certainly not the first to share that sentiment. Kathleen Gallagher in her conversation with Canadian theatre artist Ann-Marie MacDonald mentions: “I have never been particularly convinced by theatre education as a genre, divorced from the larger tradition of theatre in general” (247). Why, then, do we need to separate those artificially created but widely acceptable constructs if we can find deeper and more interesting connections that can describe our contributors’ work? Luckily for the reader, this volume does not follow the conventionality of our original thinking. First of all, it isn’t even the ubiquitous conference proceedings but rather reflections on the conference and reflections beyond the conference. Some contributors to this book (such as James McKinnon, Ralph Upton, Antje Budde and Michelle Raquel) did not present their papers at F.O.O.T. 2012. However, we felt that their work would add to the variety and complexity of the discussion or, rather, discussions, presented here. Similarly, the two interviews with theatre artists that we added to the volume were not technically part of the original conference, yet, they were a necessary addition in that they offered the artists’ perspective on their own learning as well the learning of that their collaborators and audiences had to do. We also tried to challenge the North American and/or Anglophone bias, which is commonly present at North American conferences—and, in all honesty, we have to admit we could have done a better job on that front: an obvious near-failure that we are not afraid to recognize. I would argue that we probably showed better results at achieving some sort of diversity in terms of academic genres presented in this volume: the reader will notice that some contributions tend to lean more to position papers (Helen Nicholson), some to provocation papers (Antje Budde), some to reflection papers (Kathleen Gallagher) and some are more in line with more conventional research reports (Michelle Raquel). This non-uniformity is itself an act of reflection on how one should write about intersections of theatre and learning. Last but not least, we managed to avoid the suspicious predictability of the research strands that our conference was designed upon, such as

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‘applied theatre’, ‘practice-based research’ and TYA. Instead, this volume looks into the instances of learning for/through/within theatre through three different themes: reflection, risk and reimagining. It does that without assuming any simplistic connections between learning and theatre, because, as we ourselves learned, learning does not necessarily happen in a theatre and theatre is necessarily conducive to learning. Heather: We offer “Reflecting” as a lens to think about the first papers in this collection because the definitions evoke the conflicted tensions in thinking about theatre learning. Thinking in a profound way about experiences and ideas is significant, but it is also relevant to note that reflecting can also mean “to embody or represent (something) in a faithful or appropriate way” and “to throw back (heat, light or sound) without absorbing” (Oxford). The notion that “reflecting” can mean something akin to “absorbing” but also something like “bouncing back” is an evocative way to address the work the scholars have done in this chapter. Sometimes their work allows readers to see a reflection of theatre practice and learning like a clear image in a mirror, held up for all to see. In other cases the pondering is personal, infused with the scholar’s own ideas and reflections about theatre and learning. Risking is often framed in a negative sense: “the possibility of endangering,” “acting in such a way as to bring about an unpleasant or unwelcome event,” “incurring the chance of unfortunate consequences by engaging in action” (Oxford). Risks that are real may not even have widely agreed upon benefits (jumping out of an airplane without a parachute springs to mind). Yet, researchers, educators and theatre practitioners all encourage risk-taking. Wrestling with the positive potential of risk-taking in terms of theatre and learning, these scholars and artists even consider some negative consequences of risk-taking and try to evaluate those consequences within broader goals related to learning through theatre. We offer “Re-Imagining” as our final chapter heading. If “imagine” means to form a mental image or a concept of something, then, critically speaking, “re-imagine” must mean to re-interpret that image, to find new ways of understanding what we think we already know. In order to “ReImagine” scholars and artists may have to follow in the footsteps of Patti Lather and “get lost” or “unknow” what seems to be true. We view this process of “unknowing” as a productive way to re-approach the apparently obvious relationship between theatre and learning, and to acknowledge the inherent tensions between theatre and learning. Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance argues for communal theatre experiences as a way to “inspire moments in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and

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with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential” (Dolan 164). Some of our authors, in the spirit of Jill Dolan, find “hope in the theatre,” but others acknowledge anxiety that cannot be easily soothed. For millennia, human beings have feared, dreamed about, imagined, and relied upon the potential power of theatre to influence, to educate, to empower, and potentially corrupt. Survey courses of theatre history regularly point to Plato’s passionate recommendation that actors and poets be exiled from utopia, but, he concedes “we ought to point out that if the kinds of poetry and representation which are designed merely to give pleasure can come up with a rational argument for their inclusion in a well-governed community, we’d be delighted” (Klosko 179). Plato emphasises the significance of play in learning (d’Angour 294; 307) and the phenomenal power of the spell of poetry. But he feared it too: theatre can incite passion and can be critical of society, and these would be awkward in Plato’s rational utopia. While their utopian visions of the future differ radically, both Dolan and Plato suggest that experiences made possible through theatre can have powerful learning potential-the tensions come from what is taught and what is actually learned; and the power dynamics inherent in who is actually teaching and who is learning. By being honest about the highly complex and potentially powerful relationship between theatre and learning, we believe that the writers in this book invite readers to ask themselves difficult questions about their own artistic and/or pedagogical practices, and about their own assumptions regarding binaries such as what theatre can, cannot, should, or should not do; and also about a wide open vista of utopias where reflecting, risking, and re-imagining could make space for theatre and learning “maybes” and “mights.”

Works Cited D’Angour, Armand. “Plato and Play: Taking Education Seriously in Ancient Greece.” American Journal of Play 5.3 (2013): 293-307. Dolan, Jill. “Utopia in Performance” TRIC 31.2 (2006): 163-173. Gallagher, Kathleen and Ann-Marie MacDonald. “Intellectual passions, Feminist Commitments, and Divine Comedies: a Dialogue with AnnMarie MacDonald.” How Theatre Educates. Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars and Advocates. Eds. Kathleen Gallagher and David Booth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 247-267.

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Klosko, George. The Development of Plato’s Political Theory, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Lather, Patti. “Getting Lost: Critiquing Across Difference as Methodological Practice.” Methodological Dilemma. Ed. Kathleen Gallagher. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 219-231. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Web. 1 May 2014.

Notes 1

Gorky MHAT (Moskovsky Khudozhestvenny Akademichesky Teatr imeni Gor’kogo) is considered the successor of the original Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) established by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Its repertoire mostly consists of productions that made the original MAT popular and its mandate is stated as a ‘return to Stanislavsky’. Gorky MHAT was established in 1987 after a conflict that occurred in the MHAT troupe and eventually led to the division of the MHAT theatre company into two: the Chekhov MHAT and the Gorky MHAT. The latter occupies a new building on Tverskoy Bulevard, while the former performs in the original MAT building on Kamergersky Lane. 2 The Festival of Original Theatre (F.O.O.T.) is a long-standing tradition at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. The official website of the department’s Student Union, which organizes the festival, states: “Started in 1993, F.O.O.T. is an annual, student run conference and arts festival produced in conjunction with the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama and the Drama Centre Student Union. Its goal is to create a discussion between scholarship and praxis. The structure of the festival varies from year to year. Past programs have combined academic conference papers, panel discussions, readings of plays in progress and original theatre performances”. In 2012, Art Babayants and Heather Fitzsimmons Frey became artistic directors of the 20th anniversary edition of F.O.O.T., which took place on 2-5 February at the Robert Gill Theatre, University of Toronto.

PART I. REFLECTING

INTRODUCTION TO ENTERTAIN AND SURPRISE: REFLECTIONS ON THEATRE AND LEARNING GEORGE BELLIVEAU

The impact of theatre often rests on an audience being entertained (by ideas) and surprised (by the unexpected). Through thoughtful reflections and attention to detail, the authors of the four chapters that follow describe theatre endeavours that both entertain and surprise. Each author guides us inside creative processes, highlighting critical links between theatre and learning. They write about the theatre work in a manner that is very open and honest, fearless of pointing to failures, challenges and surprises within the events, as such resisting heroic narratives. Their reflections on the theatre projects invite pedagogical questions, nudging the reader into the conversation in a dialogic fashion. What could have been done differently? What would I do next time? How might we imagine the future? These questions are continually present in each of the chapters, which offer spaces for the reader to question their own practice and approach to theatre and learning. The ephemeral nature of theatre poses a challenge for writers to fully describe, in that what is witnessed within a live performance can never be completely re-captured. Traces, glimpses and insights can be offered, but are only shadows of what occurred. The following chapters depict specific theatre spaces and events in Toronto, Hong Kong, and Tasmania, to shed light on particular shadows that continue to linger. Each author takes a unique approach to lead us through the respective theatre events, always keeping the notion of theatre and learning front and centre within their reflective writing. Complex and sensitive content is addressed in the authors’ depictions, supporting how and why the arts can be applied (ethically) to engage in conversations about diversity and injustice. Kathleen Gallagher’s theorized chapter “Chasing Change: Drama Education, Applied Theatre and the Ecology of Social Change” provides rich insights on her collaborative projects with researchers, schools,

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refugee youth and professional artists in Toronto. She reflects on three performance-based examples (i.e., The Middle Place; student monologues responding to The Middle Place; devised piece with Roma youth) from her five-year study that closely address her inquiry on what theatre for social change means. She critically reflects upon the possibilities of theatre to make change, in the worlds of the audiences and artist/creators/participants of the theatre pieces. Each project addresses sensitive issues experienced by marginalized populations, and as such Gallagher speaks of an aesthetic distance used by participants and artists to engage with potentially traumatic experiences. Key learning moments emerge in this reflective and aesthetic distance between the real (difficult personal history) and imagined. This theme of imagining the future, which is informed from past knowledge and lived experiences, is clearly foregrounded in Gallagher’s piece and resurfaces in different manners in the other three chapters. In “Difficult Knowledge in Theatre for Young Audiences: Remembering and Representing the Holocaust” Belarie Zatzman invites the reader to reflect upon three plays for young audiences: Hannah Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic; Emil Sher’s Hana’s Suitcase; Wendy Kesselman’s The Diary of Anne Frank. She closely reflects on the depth and richness of each text but more importantly on the aesthetic theatricalization offered by the creative artists involved in the respective Toronto productions. She shares her own visceral experiences of witnessing the power of these performances, describing vivid stage moments and highlighting symbolic props and visual images used in the productions. The reflective voices of artists involved in creating the Holocaust plays are represented in the chapter as they share their vision and approaches to the difficult content within the scripts. Through her engaging and heartfelt narrative, Zatzman helps us better understand the possibilities of theatre as a space for learning, remembering past atrocities, and imagining a more informed future. In “Moving Mountains: Becoming a Teaching Artist” Mary Anderson reflects on her one-year artistic journey in Tasmania as she choreographed a theatre piece with diverse community artists. Her personal and reflective narrative describes both the challenges and successes she encountered while learning to be a “guest” teaching artist in a new environment. She describes how the rigid structures and aims of the funding grants are juxtaposed with their objectives, which include trying to meaningfully and sensitively integrate refugee communities inside the Mountain Festival. Anderson’s honest and descriptive reflections provide the reader with vivid insights into the complexities of being a teaching artist, an academic and a “guest” inside a diverse community project abroad.

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Part I Introduction

Finally, Michelle Raquel takes the reader to a Hong Kong tertiary classroom in her chapter “A Sociocultural Approach to Theatre Productions in L2 Learning.” She shares key learning moments her students experienced during the rehearsal process and staging of Living with Lady Macbeth. Using Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development as a theoretical approach to learning, she traces how working towards a formal production, with a scripted text enables learners to scaffold their learning of English as a second language. Her reflections on the systematic study highlight moments of surprise, where unexpected learning occurred for the students during the theatre-making. The four authors remind us of the possibilities of theatre to stimulate participants and audiences to see the world and learning in new ways. They also illustrate how the art form of theatre can be highly pedagogical without necessarily being didactic or un-engaging. In their own unique approaches, each author speaks to the importance and value of reflecting on the process and productions during or after the event. In many ways the reflective elements become key parts of the work and experience. The theatre events are stimuli that lead to critical reflection, and possible little change (Balfour 2009: 347). The artistic endeavour and reflections work hand in hand to engage participants and audiences into the learning and considerations of future possibilities. Another important feature of the four chapters lies in how the respective theatre events honour the art form of theatre. Theatre education (and its many iterations) thrives in various forms, but one of the ways it can reach and touch participants and audiences perhaps more significantly is when equal attention is paid to the craft/art of theatre-making and the pedagogical intents. Anthony Jackson (2005) shares his perspective on the aim of theatre-makers to balance the instrumental and artistic without compromising either (105-106). He suggests that an over-emphasis on the artistic or the pedagogical can limit the potential of theatre for learning (106). The aim to entertain ideas and be surprised by the unexpected rests in theatre events that honour the art form along with its pedagogical objectives (Prendergast and Belliveau: 206).

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Works Cited Balfour, Michael. “The Politics of Intention: Looking for a Theatre of Little Changes.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14.3 (2009): 347-359. Jackson, Anthony. “The Dialogic and the Aesthetic: Some Reflections on Theatre as a Learning Medium.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005): 104-118. Prendergast, Monica and George Belliveau. “Poetics and Performance.” Reviewing Qualitative Research in the Social Science. Eds. Audrey Trainor and Elizabeth Graue. New York: Routledge (2012): 197-21

CHAPTER ONE CHASING CHANGE: DRAMA EDUCATION, APPLIED THEATRE AND THE ECOLOGY OF SOCIAL CHANGE KATHLEEN GALLAGHER

Canadian feminist philosopher Lorraine Code (2006) describes ecology as: [A] study of habitats, both physical and social where people endeavour to live well together; of ways of knowing that foster or thwart such living; and thus of the ethos and habitus enacted in the knowledge and actions, customs, social structures, and creative-regulative principles by which people strive or fail to achieve this multiply realizable end. (27)

In this chapter, I work through some ideas about social change, social and economic justice, and theatre’s potential role in that complicated work. To begin, six robust propositions: i) theatre for change is a movement or impetus across several different genres of theatre-making that involves inherent risk, often has ambitious goals, and whose impact should be unapologetically measured on at least three scales: the social, the pedagogical, the artistic; ii) the practices of change-driven theatre should be locally determined and responsive to the ecology of the stories being explored; iii) its practices should also understand that spatial relationships (between audience and actors) always imply broad social relations that are dynamic and open to change; iv) theatre for change creates cultural change, which is the necessary antecedent to public policy change; v) the critical but nebulous role of “the real”—the actual stories of real people— in applied theatre must be considered on pragmatic, ethical and theoretical levels; vi) “the real” of theatre must also be put to work, provoke the imagination, and challenge the artistic and ethical cul-de-sac of the literal. As sources of illustration for the above-cited propositions, I will draw from my ethnographic research projects and my theatre practice, using

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three different populations of people engaging in applied forms of theatre. These three diverse groups (professional theatre artists, Toronto high school students, and Roma refugee youth) produced work in three very different spaces: two professional theatres, a high school classroom, and a drama studio, respectively. As Doreen Massey argues, “spaces are processes” (55) and therefore the qualities of spaces in which theatre is created become important considerations in any attempt to understand the value of making theatre for social change. One of the major ethical and artistic issues practitioners inevitably face in such “chasing change” work is to decide how the idea of “real” or “true” personal stories should be handled both aesthetically and socially. It has been my experience in working with young people and theatre that “reality” takes on particular import. If a story is “true’, it has a kind of credibility that fictitious stories do not seem to have. But does our privileging of “real stories” make imaginative discourses more elusive? Because applied theatre-making often builds from the “real” stories of its makers, the affordances and/or limitations of “the real” remain a persistent question in any analysis of such work. Furthermore, in the drama classroom and in the drama studio where we worked, young people were entrusting us with precious personal stories. Applied theatre practitioners must, therefore, ask such difficult questions of the place of the real in creative work and be especially wary of the glorification of “reality’, and the ways in which such a rarefying of “the real” may inhibit theatrical exploration and expression. The following three illustrations of different theatre-making built from “the real” will illustrate many of the ethical and artistic questions applied practitioners need to face.

Illustration #1: The Middle Place: An Ecology of Artist-Spectator Relations The Middle Place was built from the “real life” stories of shelter youth who engaged in drama workshops with Project: Humanity, a not for profit organization that raises awareness about social issues through the arts.1 It is a piece of Verbatim theatre taken from Project: Humanity’s work with a youth shelter in Rexdale, an inner suburb in the north western quadrant of Toronto. Verbatim as a genre uses the actual words of people, often in direct first-person address or testimonial style, to raise issues relevant to a particular community and to activate broader social engagement. The Middle Place verbatim theatre produced by Project: Humanity had a similar social vision. As a call to its audiences, the creators hoped that the voices of disenfranchised, though resilient, homeless youth would set in

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motion a communal response to the circumstances of poverty enveloping their lives, what Jan Cohen-Cruz describes as a “social call, cultural response” (68).2 Alan Dilworth’s direction of the play featured multiple “turnings”.3 The set designed for the production consisted of a raked oval of light; characters turned into and out of the space, which denoted the shelter space, a gesture repeated throughout the play. We took these gestures of turning as symbolic representation of the play’s attempts to turn towards its spectators, inviting and inciting them to turn towards the “others” of the play and those “others” they may encounter elsewhere. The recurrent turning gesture of the piece is complicit with the public pedagogy and politics of the play, in its efforts to incite an actual communication and create, in my view, an ecology of givers and receivers. Code expands the point: [E]cological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about the environment; it generates revisioned modes of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency which pervade and reconfigure theory and politics alike. First and foremost, a thoughtful practice, thinking ecologically carries with it a large measure of responsibility—to know somehow more carefully than singlesurface readings can allow. (24)

The “turning towards” initiated by the play continued back in the classroom when students responded to the call by turning to one another and generating an ecology, or thoughtful practice, of engaging with each other’s stories. Brecht’s desire for social engagement through theatre, as well as his aesthetic and political interest in gesture as representational, has particular relevance for our exploration of Project: Humanity’s political and educational efforts, as well as their artistic choices. In a true turning towards theatre and learning, Project: Humanity created spaces for public and aesthetic pedagogy in two theatres. One was the stage on which the minimal set for the play (designed by Jung Kye Kim) was placed. The second was comprised of the lobbies and stairways of both theatres that Project: Humanity curated with “orbit” programming, “orbit” here referencing the pedagogical and artistic efforts surrounding the production. The company called this aspect of their public pedagogy the “Urban Youth Experience.” The curated spaces included a photo installation with enlarged photographs of the particular shelter where they had run theatre workshops and conducted the verbatim interviews, a display of art works created by shelter youth, and an audio installation of the out-takes of verbatim interviews that were not included in the final

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script. The company designed, and made available to the audience, a brochure mapping city resources for the homeless and, at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, they opened the post-show stage to other community groups engaging issues of homelessness through theatre. Another significant aspect of the orbit programming was the company’s crafted post-show talk-back sessions with their audience. With the intention to disrupt regular theatre-going habits and expectations, the creators imagined these multiple forms of broad public pedagogy to extend the experience of the play. Playwright Andrew Kushnir wanted “to have the audience sit in the play a little bit past the curtain call. And that was the concept behind everything.” What we also experienced as spectators of the play and of the curated theatre space was that the company was engaged in a kind of ecological experiment. It was transforming space in order to make it intentionally relational. Code writes simply that, “ecological thinking is about imagining, crafting, articulating, endeavouring to enact principles of ideal cohabitation” (24). The characters depicted by the actors had, first, to turn towards the interviewer in the play, Andrew Kushnir playing himself, then to each other, and also to the audience in lively talk-back sessions The audience opened up to the play and illustrated the ways in which they turned towards its ideas and its aesthetic. And importantly for our research with the youth back in the schools, we watched the young people take their theatre experience back to their classrooms and respond artistically to the call issued by the play, by using the experiences of their own lives to open up a conversation with each other about their challenges and victories as youth in complicated socio-economically disadvantaged contexts.

Illustration #2: Back to the Drama Classroom … As the high school students—our research participants—watching the play at Theatre Passe Muraille experienced this powerful symbol of opening up and connecting, in the play, what came to the foreground in their own monologue sharing back in the classroom was the way in which a conception of turning towards, embedded in the pedagogy and the choreography of The Middle Place, opened up a difficult conversation about their own personal experiences of exclusion. In lively but difficult exchanges, they drew from their own lives to share stories about their own experiences of social marginalization. Their teacher helped to facilitate the talk by introducing a set of drama practices that had youth using theatre to reveal themselves but also to turn towards one another in brave, but not uncomplicated ways. Their solo-written monologues were subsequently

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developed into scenes in which classmates filled out the contexts of the individual monologues by creating the spaces and secondary characters of the stories. As many drama teachers and theatre practitioners understand well, theatre chasing social change often walks a fine line between sensationalism and discovery. Salverson criticizes the literal translation of “stories of injury” by others as reductive and potentially re-violating (1999, 35). She argues that theatrical performance has to go beyond naturalistic repetitions of trauma and aesthetically transform that testimony. We witnessed attempts at these kinds of transformations of traumatic stories in the classroom, where students chose to work with the difficult material of their lives in monologue development and then with each other as they collectively “staged” their writing. This was a developmental process in which the students first mined their stories and created monologues; then, they workshopped their monologues, inviting others to create the “world” the monologue was pointing to. These collaborative scenes slowly moved further and further away from the literal as they aimed to create the details and the sensations of the context in which the story had first been experienced. As ethnographers watching this pedagogical space, we observed that the drama teacher constantly moved between the aesthetic and the social. Ms S’s drama class was a space where students’ personal stories mattered. When we asked the students why they chose to share such personal stories, they talked about the powerful experience of seeing The Middle Place, as well as the inviting pedagogical space created by the teacher after seeing the play. Asad (new immigrant student from Kenya) explained that he decided to share the actual text of his refugee claim with his classmates as his monologue. He felt comfortable sharing because everybody else had been open about his/her personal stories and difficult life experiences: Um, my monologue, I never wrote the monologue ‘cause I wrote it also to present about my case [as a refugee claimant], so it’s like reflecting on my image back … explain about where I came from, it’s like a disaster place where I came from … and it’s like inside my body—so it’s like I have decided to give it out. At first I didn’t want to give it out to school, but … everyone [in this class] … shares … I decided let me share my, in my heart, to the school to share what people go through … so … sure, my monologue it’s about my entire life, through ups and down to Canada.

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Asad didn’t watch others perform his monologue, as in playback theatre. Instead, he directed its performance and took the role of actor and narrator within the scene. The teacher’s choice to include other students who would act as an ensemble for the monologues did help to avoid the naturalistic re-creation of trauma. Another distancing device included the students using stylized gestures—recalling Brecht’s gestus—to communicate the story, taking distance from the naturalism about which Salverson (1999) warns. For example, in the performance of Asad’s monologue, the students raised their hands as if celebrating their arrival in the safe city of Mombassa but then—turning directly to the audience, arms raised, eyes widened—their gesture took on new meaning as they were approached for money by opportunistic police. Jenn Stephenson suggests that in these moments, trauma and living unite: “the telling of past trauma allows the event to come into being. Telling and living coincide” (102). But the manipulation of the traumatic life experience through collective and abstract gesture allowed the scene to communicate anew, giving Asad and his audience the distance they needed to appreciate the theatrical expression of a deeply personal event rather than to simply relive it. In an interview with Asad, he explained that he’d made a choice to share and wanted others to know his struggles in the hope that fewer people might encounter such problems. What was also compelling was his desire to speak frankly and to expose the problems in his life, in all their complexity, through a process that would ensure their “visibility,” an outcome cited by others as significant in itself, as in Burn et. al.’s (2001) work with head injury patients and the politics of visibility. The risk of being exposed, in their case and in ours, is outweighed by the importance placed on finally being seen, on having one’s story heard. When we “chase change” through theatre, there is always inherent risk. Youth can lose their sense of boundaries and drama classrooms can offer up the promise of “safety” without being able to deliver because we can never guarantee such safety for multiply-positioned youth. But speaking an emotional truth to others, being visible, and making something artistic of past difficult experiences made this work worth the risks, we ultimately decided as researchers. This view of the experience as “worth the risk” was shared by many of the students we interviewed in the classroom and youth we interviewed in post-show interviews after The Middle Place productions at Theatre Passe Muraille and Canadian Stage. But, we are cautious about making generalizations from these interviews and know that there may have been regret lurking or unmet expectations for some youth.

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Illustration #3 Roma Youth: An Ecology of Participants’ Histories Code argues that ecological thinking fosters “the development of a productive ideal of responsibility, rooted neither in individualism nor in an implausible volunteerism …” (24). Our work4 as theatre practitioners with Roma youth tried to grasp this notion of collective responsibility, beginning first with the young people’s histories from Hungary so that we might instil a collective sense of responsibility for what might come next in their new homes in Toronto where their families had sought refugee status. In this section, I will draw in Salverson’s work further to make sense of some drama work we created together, director Alan Dilworth, the Roma youth, and myself. But I will add to this two other significant theoretical voices—Michael Balfour and Doreen Massey—in my attempts here to deconstruct what may be going on when we “chase social change” through theatre.5 Because of significant local media attention in the Roma community over the past year we became aware of the social and educational experiences of Roma youth and their families whose refugee claims were being rejected at an unprecedented rate in Canada. These families were being sent back to Hungary, from where they had only just escaped endemic persecution and violence.

Through years of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, targeted by both sides in the Bosnian and Serbian wars, hundreds of thousands of Roma became victims of ethnically-motivated violence. They experienced police brutality, neo-Nazi violence, forced sterilization, and political silence while imprisoned. We took the decision to work with this community and to explore their experiences theatrically in order to communicate these experiences to a broader public. Our hope was that we could use the power of the university to find an audience of the power elites inside and outside school systems, and to lend our voices and resources to the Roma community’s pleas to the Canadian government to stay in Canada. We engaged in Code’s ecological thinking here so that distant histories might “[infuse, shape and circulate] throughout social-material-intellectual affective environments” (28). Clearly, the goal was ambitious, although we tried to resist the impulse to fasten too much “emancipatory” agenda on to our creative work together. Another fraught proposition … but social change through theatre is like this. It isn’t neat, it isn’t unproblematic; it always involves differentials of power and is frequently controversial. So, in the face of such ambition we

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took seriously Balfour’s arguments about the politics of intention and a “theatre of little changes” (2009, p. 347).

What Alan and I imagined is that we would start with stories of “home” (Hungary, for all of them) and arrive at “Toronto” to move the stories into the current moment where our imagined invited guests (school board officials and local politicians) might have the greatest chance of intervening. Alan believed that the audience would need to know something of where the young people had come from if they were to understand the gravity of their claims for asylum. A long and painful afternoon ensued, as stories repeated one another with increasing horror and starkness. I found myself unable to speak at one point and barely able to hear another story of violence and persecution inside and outside schools in Hungary, told with unsettling frankness, first by the youth and then in English by our Hungarian translator. Wary of the potential of re-traumatizing the youth in our efforts to “understand where they came from” and aware also of the fine line we were walking between theatre and therapy, we heeded Salverson’s (2001) call to work outside literal translations with stories of injury and rely on the collective possibilities of theatre-making when approaching such difficult stories. The stories were often stark and simplistically translated so that the nuance was hard to hear. But, it was also true that these were un-nuanced stories. Being hit by a teacher with a book in the back of the head when you are eight years old is not subtle. Having a Molotov cocktail thrown at your house, then having your father shot by police as he tried to flee the fire, leaves little room for perspectives and counter-narratives. These are the stories we needed to find a way to work with. We therefore made two important decisions: i) we would find a way to share the narration of the stories among multiple story-tellers and ii) we would proceed without props of any kind. Bombs, books, violence, all seemed too graphic and literal so we decided, in the interest of taking some distance from the rawness of the stories and pragmatically heeding Salverson’s call for the abstract translation of the literal, to tell the difficult story by talking the audience through the actions and plot, gesturing the details of properties, and sharing the telling of a story through a multiplicity of narrators. This approach had the added benefit of allowing the students to collaborate with English vocabulary, easing the considerable tension of speaking in a new language. It went something like this: Student A: “School in Hungary” (she stands as though at a desk and begins speaking to her classmate).

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Chapter One Teacher: “I am the teacher”. (turns to “sssshhh” talking girls. They continue talking. Again, “ssshhhh’.) Teacher: (walking behind talking girl at desk she says, to audience): “This is a book” (and raises her hand, demonstrating to audience. She then gestures to hit the back of the student’s head. The student’s head falls forward, as she bends at the waist, then, raises her head and says …) Student: “I bang my head on the desk”. Teacher: “Go home, dirty gypsy”.

This last phrase was a refrain we heard in many youth stories so it had a kind of echo through their performance. I never became entirely comfortable with the constant re-articulation of the phrase even though they told us that this is what is said and this is what they would hear repeatedly, from teachers, the police, and the general public. At times, in the improvisational work, it seemed an almost playful transgression. “Playing” the role of the oppressor offered some power. They played with this identity in ways that seemed useful in terms of releasing some of the discomfort we were all feeling. But the sheer repetition of the phrase troubled me and by the third day of rehearsal, the repetition seemed, from my observation, to become less performative; it took on a reality we all felt a little uneasy about. The question of how “real” we wanted to be, therefore, came to the fore. The fact that multiple narrators shared the story and also that oppressor/oppressed characters moved seamlessly through each other’s stories helped somewhat. We were not replaying individual people’s traumatic stories, with them as protagonist-victims in each vignette, yet the sheer repetition of such “stories of injury” was discomfiting. The telling, however, was justified—by them and by us— through making regular reference to the ultimate desired outcome of the piece: to arouse strangers to action on their behalf. They knew their stories were serving an important end, but Alan and I were both concerned that the sheer repetition was taking a toll. Some of their transgression, laughter and dialogue in Hungarian with each other seemed at times like a tactic to reclaim their personhood in the face of so much performed “abuse’. In these moments Ric Knowles’ caveat about the cultural imperialism endemic in so much intercultural exchange in the theatre seemed to amplify our own related concerns (2010) Other scenes, unlike the one just described, were entirely played out in Hungarian with no attempt to make the words understandable to the audience. In these scenes, collective and sometimes abstract movement also created some distance from the literal telling of the story. These

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Hungarian moments throughout the performance, seemed to hang in the air somewhere, a space in between where the youth were, emotionally, and where the audience was; a strained communication, leaving the audience less certain about, and less comfortable with, their “role’. This shift in where the power was situated was a necessary move in the drama, without which we would have risked simply replaying the desperation of the youth while positioning the audience with all the power and creating a naive call for them to make change happen. While that might have been desirable, we were also interested—artistically and politically—in inviting the audience to think about what relationship they might have to these stories and what responsibility they might have to them now that they had been shared. Late in the development of the work, Alan came to the idea of a “message in a bottle’. It was partly a response to how insistent the youth had become that people hear their stories and help them remain in Canada. That plea took on increasingly desperate tones the longer we worked with them. I worried that we were saddling theatre, again, with impossible outcomes and, worse, making promises to the youth that we could not guarantee. And yet, I shared their hope, their sense of possibility. Towards the end of the performance, the students brought small slips of paper to people in the audience and, locking eyes with them, said, “Open it” as they backed away to their position on the “stage’, a simple space in the middle of the floor. Audience members opened the paper, which read: “We MUST stay in Canada.” And then the actors individually repeated the Hungarian word for “do you understand?” “érted?” eyes still fixed on their audience member. In the foreground of my thoughts about our efforts was Code’s (2006) ecological thinking, which usefully interrupts the victim-saviour narratives. Ecological thinking “conceives of human interventions throughout the world, both physical and social, as requiring sensitivity to, and responsibility in relation to, specificities of diversity and detail, placing respect above mastery, preservation before control, understanding for what is and has been before predictions of what might be” (32). Recalling also Doreen Massy’s understanding of spaces as processes, we were attempting in our performance to create a space and make choices that would render absolutely clear that their spatial relationship—audience and actors—implied broader social relations that are dynamic and open to change. The theatre space became a meeting place, a conversation, an articulated moment (Massey 1994) that we hoped might invoke imaginative thought or action. Recent scholarship in applied performance has taken up notions of space, location, and sociality in ways resonant with

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the work we engaged in. Mackey and Whybrow, in tracing the emergence of site-specific art, speak about a new movement in art that recognizes the viewer’s position of contemplation of the artwork as both active and contingent, placing an emphasis on a generative, participatory spectator (pp. 3-5). These are not new ideas, but such an activated spectator is precisely what our own thematic emphases on the spaces and stories of the past, and those as yet incomplete, were invoking. Massey (2006) also writes about the myth of the shrinking world, an idea that is perpetuated by the powerful she argues, and presents us with the illusion that we know the world and each other much better than we do. This impulse can dangerously mask difference, material conditions, and power relations, while limiting opportunities for recognizing spaces of conflict and potential growth; it becomes difficult, she argues, for alternatives to be developed and easy for tentative attempts at alternative ways of doing things to be defeated. Our theatre space attempted a kind of response to this concern and illustrated a very small opening of the space for an as yet uninitiated conversation. At the start of our work, we did not know each other at all. We did not share a language, a culture, a citizenship, a social location, or a history. But there we were, at that moment, in Toronto, in a relationship. How would we begin to communicate? Another way to characterize the work we undertook or the “chasing change” we engaged in, is a kind of community engaged public pedagogy. Applied theatre is very well positioned to take up this call, as communication within communities and across boundaries is its modus operandi. Making theatre is, in many ways, a much riskier form of communication than holding a protest or signing a petition because applied theatre’s implicit pedagogy is relationship-building. In our experience with the Roma youth, the sharing of raw stories through a translator, as virtual strangers, was a fraught proposition from the start. So why did we do it? What Cohen-Cruz offers to our theorizing about this work is the notion that policy change has limited effect without cultural change. While the school board officials might have responded positively to petitions or calls from the community to better support the Roma refugees in their schools (i.e., the students shared one HungarianEnglish dictionary in a classroom of 25), what they needed to experience was a cultural response. Our small theatre performance offered them a space in which to witness together, to feel a relationship to one another and to the stories they heard. As with The Middle Place (illustration above), our discoveries, our “turning towards” the Roma youth stories in our theatre-making became the starting place for other “turnings”, other

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potential openings for an audience who was also invited to contemplate their relationship to the stories shared, not simply to find solutions to the problems presented. Our performance guest list included, the Director of Education for the Toronto District School Board, key Members of Parliament and those from the opposition parties, The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, two immigration and refugee board judges, members of the media, academics, activists and community members. We did not get as much response as we had hoped, which was disappointing because the youth we worked with cared primarily about speaking to those people who might be in a position to positively affect the outcome of their refugee claims. However, although the Minister did not come, nor did the Director of Education, there were members of the Director’s inner-city advisory board present with whom the youth made contact following the performance and that connection resulted in a subsequent presentation made by the Executive Director of the Toronto Roma Centre to members of this advisory council, who, in theory, could bring information and recommendations back to the Director. Of pertinence to this advisory group were the stories surfaced through the drama process about their sometimes positive but more often negative experiences in one secondary school and two elementary schools, in the Toronto neighbourhood where the Roma have settled. A modest outcome, given our ambitions, but at least the stories had a life beyond our small performance that may ultimately result in some solidarity from the school board and improved experiences of schooling for the Roma students.

The Problem of “The Real”: A Reprise David Hare wrote, “Journalism is life with the mystery taken out. Art is life with the mystery restored”. This perspective suggests that we are not simply reporting on issues of relevance nor are we engaged in a straightforward equation of social improvement or personal therapy through theatre. We are instead using our creativity to re-pose a problem, to find in it more than we thought we understood, to benefit from the perspectives of others in our sharing of it, to afford theatre the possibility of re-calculating what is at stake, for whom and where we are situated as active players in the unfolding story that is “real life’. The unhampered aesthetic and the clear pedagogy of Project: Humanity’s The Middle Place provoked a turning towards the uncomfortable realities of our shared social context. From our ethnographic perspective, the play effectively initiated a social discourse about responsibility to, and representation of, shelter youth, and incited an experience of theatre-making among young

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people in schools that deepened the act of spectating and creating, moving them somewhere closer to ecological thinking in their own communities. Returning to the problem of “the real” and what we mean by it, how consciously we think about its constructed nature, I have found the work of feminist physicist Ursula Franklin to be of particular use. Franklin (1999), a long-time critic of dominant, masculinist scientific narratives and practices, offers a very useful framework for deconstructing our conceptions of “reality’. For Franklin, there are four kinds of realities: vernacular, extended, constructed/reconstructed, projected. She describes Vernacular reality as “the bread and butter, soup, work, clothing, the reality of everyday life” which is both “private and personal, but [it is] also common and political” (28). Extended reality is “that body of knowledge and emotions we acquire that is based on the experience of others” (28). Constructed or reconstructed reality “comes to us through works of fiction to the daily barrage of advertising and propaganda” (28) and this kind of reality can become archetypal rather than simply representative. Finally, projected reality is “the vernacular reality of the future” (29). As I reflect now on our conversations and our drama explorations with the Roma students, it seems clear to me that all four kinds of realities were operating simultaneously and complexly. When we moved, on day three of our work together, into their current Toronto stories—mostly stories of school but some of difficult experiences with opportunistic lawyers claiming to help the students’ families with their refugee claims, but simply robbing them of hard-earned money and doing very little to ensure the success of their claims—we found ourselves in a proximal relationship between vernacular and projected (vernacular of the future) realities. For the youth, the work accomplished by the “real” stories, the detail and “bread and butter” of their lives was shared for one purpose only: to catalyze a projected reality that might help them escape the social and educational limbo in which they felt trapped. In this way, “the real” was there to provoke the imagined; it was its primary purpose. And once “the real” had this kind of goal, it served also to release “the real” from the sensationalism I worried would dominate the artistic work. Their stories were horrendous; there is no question about that. But using their stories in the interest of an imagined vernacular of the future, putting their stories to work, released us from the pressure of truth-telling, a burden that, in my experience, can limit the artistic possibilities and potentially re-inscribe the trauma of the stories. If the stories, instead, are meant to connect our past to an imagined future, we can privilege that relationship over the compulsion to “get it right’, which often leads the work towards the literal—an artistic and ethically dangerous cul-de-sac.

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Making Engaged Theatre for Change: Thinking Reality, Ecologically Ecological thinking … focuses as closely on the exemplary possibilities of knowing other people-in everyday and social scientific contexts-as on those traditionally derived from knowing “facts” about the world. (Code 60)

As we moved from explorations of personal story, from selfrepresentation to a kind of cultural performance, we tried to find that everprecarious balance between the statements and political desires of the performance and the artistic choices that might best communicate them. Both Alan Dilworth and I longed for more time, a precious commodity that was simply not available. And when one induces theatre into community action, the time frames and desired outcomes also shift. Cohen-Cruz argues that the “follow-up” becomes equal to, or even more important than, the performance, wherein the performance then positions audiences as witnesses rather than spectators (81). Through this experience, an important relationship has been created with the Toronto Roma Centre and through them we will continue to follow the school experiences and refugee claims of the Roma youth and their families. Resonant here, however, is Rustom Bharucha’s critique of intercultural exchange in the theatre. Bharucha (2000) argues that all (theatre) exchanges between the globalized world and the developing world are predicated on uneven distributions of power and wealth (2000). This is also eminently true of our relationship to these forced migrants from Europe. There was an element of cultural exchange between us, as North American theatre/academic workers and Roma youth, but it was precisely our power that they sought to rally behind their claims for safe haven. Our role was clear. However complicated the relational space, we proceeded with this rather singular focus. In a final analysis of our work, I do not think that we created a powerful piece of theatre, although there were some strong moments. We needed more time to experiment, more pedagogical scaffolding, and more understanding of a community we knew little about at the outset. At the end of the performance, the audience was subdued; although some did ask the youth about how they created the vignettes they shared. Nobody asked anything about the stories of abuse and persecution in Hungary; these were clearly beyond conversation. But they did ask what the youth thought schools could be doing better in Toronto, a safer question that perhaps afforded some agency. The final measure of “success” for me, however, became how the students understood their work with us. While working

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with their “true stories” remained very important, the facts of the account came to matter less than their emotional resonance within and beyond the group. In the end, I do think the youth found a theatrical language to speak truths—emotional truths—and through that process rekindled a hope that there might be a cultural response, from distant strangers, to their call and one that might position them more strongly in their upcoming refugee hearings. Whether professional theatre, classroom monologues or drama studio experiments, “a theatre of little changes” is worth striving for. Michael Balfour proposes eschewing big claims of social efficacy, suggesting instead the need for a discourse that can better articulate the interdependence between aesthetic imperatives and the possibilities of social engagement (2009 347). In the face of immense social problems like youth homelessness or the plight of international refugees, we might also welcome the accidental, the unanticipated, the playfulness, and the aesthetics of theatre-making, releasing ourselves, others, and applied theatre from the weighty burden of social transformation. Trusting a creative process, as we attempted to do with our Roma youth, as Ms. S did with her drama students in her classroom, and as the creators of The Middle Place also did in their drama work with homeless youth, we arrive at something slightly less ambitious perhaps, but also more likely to meet with some kind of success in its own terms.

Works Cited Balfour, Michael. “The Politics of Intention: Looking for a Theatre of Little Changes.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 14:3 (2009): 347-359. Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, London: The Altone Press, 2000. Burn, Andrew, Anton Franks and Helen Nicholson. “Looking for Fruit in the Jungle: Head Injury, Multimodal Theatre and the Politics of Visibility.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 6.2 (2001): 161-177.Web. 13 Nov. 2010. Code, Lorraine. Ecological Thinking and the Politics of Epistemic Location. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Engaging Performance: Theatre and Call and Response. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Franklin, Ursula. The Real World of Technology. (Rev. ed.). Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1999.

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Gallagher, Kathleen. “Roma Refugee Youth and Applied Theatre: Imagining a Future Vernacular.” NJ (National Journal of Drama Australia) 35 (2011)1-12. Gallagher, Kathleen, Anne Wessels and Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou. “Verbatim Theatre and Social Research: Turning Towards the Stories of Others.” Theatre Research in Canada. 33.1(2012): 24-43. Hare, David. “On Verbatim Theatre.” The Guardian 17 April 2010. Knowles, Ric. Theatre and Interculturalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Kushnir, Andrew. Personal interview 10 Nov. 2010. Mackey, Sally and Nicolas Whybrow. “Taking Place: Some Reflections on Site, Performance and Community, Research in Drama Education.” The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 12.1 (2007): 1-14. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. —. OU Radio Lecture 2006: Is the World Really Shrinking?” OpenLearn. The Open University. 15 November 2006. Web. Middleview, Asad. Personal interview. 11 Jan. 2011. Salverson, Julie. “Transgressive Storytelling or an Aesthetic of Injury: Performance Pedagogy and Ethics.” Theatre Research Canada, 20.1 (1999): 35-51. —. “Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and Erotics of Injury.” Theatre 3.13 (2001): 119-25. Stephenson, Jenn. “The Notebook and the Gun: Performative Witnessing in Goodness.” English Studies in Canada 34.4 (2008): 97-121. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982.

Notes 1

The larger ethnographic research project upon which my reflections on the play The Middle Place, and my analysis of the drama work carried out by high school students who had seen the play, is a five-year ethnographic study (2008-2013) titled, Urban School Performances: the Interplay, through Live and Digital Drama, of Local-global Knowledge about Student Engagement (USP). 2 In a paper published in Theatre Research In Canada (TRIC)—Gallagher, K., Wessels, A., Yaman Ntelioglou, B. (2012). Verbatim Theatre and Social Research: Turning Towards the Stories of Others. Theatre Research in Canada. 33(1): 2443—research team members and I theorize Cohen-Cruz’s notion of “social call, cultural response” as a kind of turning towards. I would like to thank my coauthors, Anne Wessels and Burcu Yaman Ntelioglou for their contributions to ideas that have fed this chapter. When I use the plural “we” voice in this paper, it is this

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team of researchers and our collaborative efforts to which I am referring. I would also like to thank TRIC for their permission to reference some of those earlier ideas in this chapter. 3 A brief clip of the play, The Middle Place, that offers a sense of the turning gestures that so captivated us, can be found at: http://www.themiddleplace.ca. 4 In this illustration, I am referring to some collaborative drama pedagogy that director Alan Dilworth and I engaged in with the Roma youth. 5 Some of the following is excerpted from a previously published piece: Gallagher, K. (2011). Roma Refugee Youth and Applied Theatre: Imagining a future vernacular. NJ (National Journal of Drama Australia). 35:1-12. My gratitude to the journal for permission to include this work.

CHAPTER TWO DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE IN THEATRE FOR YOUNG AUDIENCES: REMEMBERING AND REPRESENTING THE HOLOCAUST BELARIE ZATZMAN

“Zakhor”: Remember. The Hebrew word for remember stands as a provocation to undertake a performative act; to fully engage in the act(ion) of remembering. Indeed, I speculate that it is through “performance” that one can remember. To create and curate aesthetic acts of remembrance in representing the Holocaust is the focus of much of my research and teaching at York University. Given the myriad ways in which “aesthetic experience enhances the pedagogic values” of Theatre for Young Audiences (Adamson 176), here are but a few of the questions which guide this inquiry: How might we meet the difficult knowledge (Britzman “If the Story Cannot End”) of the Holocaust in the landscape of Theatre for Young Audiences [TYA]? How might we wrestle with the complexities of remembering and representing the Holocaust through aesthetic practices? How might Holocaust memory and memorial in TYA serve as call and response (Cohen-Cruz 2010), in a process that foregrounds shared histories as well as productive differences (local, national, global) amongst artists, teachers and students? Hannah Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic (2010), Emil Sher’s Hana’s Suitcase (2006), and Wendy Kesselman’s The Diary of Anne Frank (1997) each attend to the pedagogical and aesthetic project of memory, in their efforts to unfix the past and inform the personal and public present, both critically and creatively. These scripts offer young audiences opportunities to excavate and witness textualized identities and histories of individuals or communities. However, the provocation to rememberagainst loss and against forgetting-is fraught: we are asked to imagine that

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which we can never know (Horowitz 223); to recognize that the retrieval of narratives of loss or survival can only ever be partial; and that we are inevitably working in the spaces between documentation and the (im)possibility of knowing. In the three productions highlighted here, the designers and directors labour to meet these powerful paradoxes; they respond to the scripts’ traumatic events through inventive scenographic strategies, while at once endeavouring to awaken our sense of empathy and learning through acts of imagination and embodied memory. Central to the process of engaging in memory work1, are artists and audiences’ capacities to attend to sometimes unexpected sites and artifacts, interviews, documents and other ephemera; and their willingness to reinscribe events/issues/sites/histories, in the present (Seixas 2004). Remnants—partial or incomplete documentation—offer the possibility of examining the material conditions through which to mediate visible and invisible histories. The Children’s Republic, Hana’s Suitcase and The Diary of Anne Frank each stage “traces or fragments of autobiographical telling…stand-ins for life stories and auto/biographical practices…” (Kadar 223-24). A violin can offer a record of resistance, melodies played in spite of unrelenting and wretched daily life in the ghetto (The Children’s Republic); a suitcase can stand as a marker of experience that remains beyond language (Hana’s Suitcase); and a diary can document the writing and re-writing of the self, in confinement, for an imagined public (The Diary of Anne Frank). Each trace serves as a rich resource for representing narratives of loss and displacement. Indeed, Pierre Nora (1989) has suggested that “any place, object, action, or condition” is a potential realm of memory,” in the recovery of identity (Langford 5). Following Kadar, it becomes clear that even deportation lists might be read as if they were traces of biographical accounts: deportation lists from the Warsaw Ghetto for Janusz Korczak and the orphanage children (August 1942), from Theresienstadt/Auschwitz for Hana Brady and her brother (May 1942) and from Westerbork/Auschwitz/Bergen Belsen for Anne Frank and her sister (September 1944). “[F]ragments of texts and traces of memories can communicate the quality of difficult knowledge” (Kadar 228), powerful sources from which these TYA productions create artistic forms to represent and remember the Holocaust. To be present to the call to “remember” [zakhor] and its concomitant obligation, “do not forget” (“lo tishkach”) (Artscroll 177), is to be implicated in the task of witnessing. However, given the generational distance that characterizes contemporary TYA, how do we support young people (and their teachers and families) in remembering and witnessing almost 70 years after the Shoah? Marianne Hirsch has theorized the notion

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of postmemory, and distinguishes “postmemory from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (Family Pictures 22). Characteristically, postmemory represents the experiences of those “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the previous generation, shaped by monumental traumatic events that resist understanding and integration” (Hirsch 12). While firmly rooted in the experience of the Holocaust, postmemory has also come to describe the difficult legacy of other cultural or collective traumas (9); accordingly, postmemory now also signals a space of remembrance, broadly wrought, in which empathy and imagining can actively carry us toward remembering and inscribing the suffering of others, as an ethical turn. The complexity of responding to narratives about the Holocaust lies in the awareness that even while the Theatre for Young Audience house can be understood as a transgenerational space of remembrance, we are “[t]oo late to help, utterly impotent”; nevertheless, we “search for ways to take responsibility for what we are seeing, to experience, from a distance, even as we try to redefine, if not repair, these ruptures. This is the difficult work of postmemory” (Hirsch 26). Julie Salverson references Simon and Eppert, who explain that the act of bearing witness is “neither natural nor inevitable, and demands (but does not secure) acknowledgement, remembrance and consequence’; in turn, she frames the obligation to remember in terms of a process she has named “foolish witnessing” (247). Grounded by Levinas’ seminal work on attending to another as ethical practice, Salverson articulates the responsibility, courage, and risks inherent in encountering others. Witnessing is a process which must emerge from “an insistence on engagement based in availability and the willingness to step forward without certainty. If the “goal is relationship, not success”(246), how might one begin to undertake the difficult work of witnessing in The Children’s Republic, Hana’s Suitcase, The Diary of Anne Frank and other TYA representations of the Holocaust? I have helped create study guides for all three of these productions, and in designing guides and workshops for professional theatres in Canada, I have attempted to meet the obligation to witnessing by re-telling and reperforming testimony, deliberately locating audience/participants at the intersection of history, memory space and artmaking. I am committed to structuring the relational as fundamental to the staging of stories across the fluid generational and temporal boundaries of postmemory (Zatzman 35). Finally, consider the following questions which address the reciprocity of theatre and learning in representing and remembering the Holocaust: How do we help foster the relationship young people establish with the

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historical past through The Children’s Republic, Hana’s Suitcase and The Diary of Anne Frank? Beginning with middle school students (generally grades six and above2), how do we balance Theatre for Young Audiences’ “need for hope and happy endings even as… [the performance] teaches us a very different lesson about history” (Kertzer 253)? I invite you to enter the aesthetic, pedagogical and narrative layers and fissures of these three Canadian Theatre for Young Audience productions, as they each struggle to represent the complexities of the Holocaust for young audiences.

The Children’s Republic Hannah Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic remembers and retells the history of Janusz Korczak (born Henryk Goldszmit), a Jewish pediatrician who was renowned as an educator, a writer and as a passionate advocate for children’s rights. “I didn’t want to go on prescribing aspirin for poverty, so I founded the orphanage. That way, I could treat the whole child, the soul.” (Moscovitch Act I:4). The orphanage reflected Korczak’s progressive philosophies in practice, and included a children's court and legislative body called the “Children’s Republic” (of the eponymously-titled play), run by the children themselves. In 1940, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Nazioccupied Warsaw, Korczak and his Jewish orphanage, Dom Sierot (“The Orphans’ Home”), were relocated inside the Warsaw Ghetto (Lifton 253283). Korczak and his co-director of 30 years, Stefa Wilczynska, managed to maintain the orphanage with meagre rations and with the help of (adult and children) smugglers, despite “extreme deprivation and rampant illness” (Palmer 3). In August 1942, Janusz, Stefa, their nine staff, and the 192 children of the Dom Seirot orphanage were marched to the Warsaw Ghetto’s Umschlagplatz (German for “collection” or “deportation point”), from which they were deported to Treblinka (an extermination camp north of Warsaw), where they were all murdered. Famously, Korczak’s commitment to the children was so great that he eschewed offers of refuge for himself, not wanting to abandon them, even in the face of death (Yad Vashem). This is the bleak landscape into which playwright Hannah Moscovitch beckons us.3 Moscovitch has specified that the four young people in the script are to be played by teenagers, not adults representing them. She has crafted “traumatized silences” (Nestruck) and terse dialogue for the children, whose voices are often “stifled for fear of revealing too much” (Kaplan), allowing us to begin to glimpse the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust with and from young audiences and performers. Director Alison

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Palmer and designers Camellia Koo and John Gzowski stage tropes of childhood even as they frame a profound sense of loss. The punctum that wounds here—felt from the opening moments of the production—are the sounds of children playing. We hear the kids even before we first catch sight of them; their laughter and voices ring out, and for but a few brief moments, the joyful languages of childhood are normalized. Consequently, when the young people first spill onto the stage in the opening scene, their lively sounds and movements are positioned against the darkness of the “simple, stark set…looming over the action” (Nestruck).

Fig 2-1: The Children’s Republic. Photography: Cylla von Tiedemann

Koo’s set is characterized by its architectural reference to a pre-war period doorway, and by the wall of a building roughly indicated by a long expanse of brown butcher paper. On the downstage left floor, written in chalk, both place and time have been marked: “Warsaw 1939.” With pieces of chalk in hand, the children launch into what is an enduring activity of childhood-they use the chalk to map out the lines of a hopscotch game on the actual boards of the stage. Chalk is a quintessential artifact of childhood and as such, the ubiquity and familiarity of their hopscotch game stands in terrible juxtaposition to the shattering world we know, from the present, is about to descend upon these young people. I

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watch, with my heart increasingly caught in my throat, as the chalk hopscotch boards and drawings begin to smudge and fade each time the characters cross the stage. We are witness to what will be the erasure of childhood and the very lives of these children. The chalk marks are transformed into indexes of an irretrievable past, remnants of childhood, and unexpected, porous and poignant representations of memory. The audience is left with the uneasy sense that we are witness to Warsaw itself being trampled and erased. As traces of children’s voices are made visible in this disturbing and theatrical “realm of memory,” the aesthetic experience of theatre has represented the difficult knowledge of this narrative brilliantly, and all before a single word of dialogue has been uttered. As the lights come up on Act II, we discover that time and place have once more been marked on the boards of the stage: the chalk writing now reads “Warsaw 1942.” Three years have passed and, with a shock of recognition, we realize that we are now actually within the confines of the Warsaw Ghetto itself. The young people enter, en masse, once again with chalk in hand. They run to take up positions along the length of the building and, with their backs to the audience, each begins to write graffiti with their chalk on the wall. We try to follow their handwriting—to take in the information they are recording for us—though we can hardly read fast enough. Israel, Misha, Mettye and Sara each move quickly and there is a sense of urgency as they mark memory at different points along the brown paper wall. They write, variously: “400,000 Jews are restricted to 1.3 square miles”; “They’re sealed in with a brick wall and barbed wire”; and simply, “The Warsaw Ghetto” (Moscovitch Act II:42). Suddenly, in an astonishing and completely unexpected moment—the kids cease their writing and begin to forcefully rip sections of the brown paper down off the set! It is an incredibly potent action. The children have documented “the new restrictions that confine them to the ghetto. They then partially deface them, in a silent sequence infused equally with desperation and defiance” (Cushman). Thus, in an instant, we become witness to the very rupturing of the children’s world in visceral and material terms. As the ripping down of the paper begins, one wants to call out, “Wait-we have not finished reading about your lives, your history—Stop!” But the war is inexorable and we are utterly taken aback by the action of tearing. It is a theatrical provocation to imagine, learn and remember. The now exposed architecture beneath the ripped paper stands as a representation of both the beleaguered orphanage’s ruined building and of the brick and barbed wire walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. The stage has been transformed before our eyes and the now war-torn, bullet ridden structure imprisons its inhabitants

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and haunts our witnessing of Korczak’s narrative. From within the “ruins of memory” (Fink 3), this Theatre for Young Audience piece offers “a show that teaches without ever once stooping to preach” (Coulbourn). In Moscovitch’s imaginative re-telling, we witness Korczak’s fight “to protect his orphans from the disease and starvation” but discover that he in turn “ends up relying on their support” and courage (Kaplan 2011). Finally, in its aesthetic and pedagogic framing of the difficult knowledge of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Children’s Republic offers its young audiences traces of Korzcak and the children that reverberate and inform the present, even now: Korczak’s Declaration of Children’s Rights contributes directly to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Tarragon’s The Children’s Republic Study Guide).

Hana’s Suitcase An empty brown suitcase. 1930s. Worn. There is a name and a date printed in white paint on the outside: “Hana Brady. 16 May 1931. Waisenkind” (Levine 2002; Sher 2006).

Hana’s Suitcase, as a trace of the autobiographical, narrates the search for a waisenkind (orphan) named Hana, one ordinary child amongst a million and half Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust. This seemingly intimate and modest story has become an international phenomenon, and like the other TYA plays discussed in this chapter, Hana’s Suitcase has found a remarkable place in contemporary memory. It has been translated into more than 40 languages, and to date, Hana’s Suitcase has appeared in various media forms (chronologically): a radio program, a TV documentary, a book, a play, a film and an interactive website. The play has been produced in Canada, USA, Israel and the Czech Republic.4 Each of the six variations of Hana’s Suitcase features one of the many ways in which Holocaust narratives might be remembered, represented and circulated. Each mediation offers its audiences distinct aesthetic conditions through which to respond to the difficult knowledge of the Shoah; and each serves as a compelling pedagogical tool with which to examine the particular impact of Hana’s story. The actual suitcase—Hana’s suitcase—was an artifact sent from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum to Fumiko Ishioka, director of the then new Tokyo Holocaust Centre in 2000.5 The suitcase itself prompted questions from the Japanese children when they first encountered it: “Who was Hana?” “Where did she come from?” “What happened to her?” (Levine 5). Urged on by the children in Tokyo, whose imaginations were

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captured by the unknown/unspoken/silenced story of the suitcase and its young owner, Ishioka embarked on a journey across Europe to solve the mystery of Hana’s suitcase.6 Young People’s Theatre’s artistic director Allen MacInnis staged the powerful double narrative of Hana’s trace against the Japanese children’s discoveries: “Only gradually do they come to recognize the horror and sheer helplessness” of Hana’s circumstances; consequently, Hana and her family are initially only “silent presences” (Cushman 2011). Howard Rypp of Nephesh Theatre, who directed the first Israeli production in 2011, explained that he was "blown away by the dramaturgy…as the Japanese learn more and more about Hana, and get closer and closer to her, it becomes less stylized and more natural and real. That's really excited me theatrically.

Fig 2-2: Hana in School. Photography: Teresa Przybylski

The roles gradually interchange as the play progresses, with the Brady family members becoming corporeal characters, while the Japanese turn into ethereal spectators” (Sher “Stage Plays”). Critical theory suggests that the “use of a matrix narrative, or frame story, set in the present is a productive technique found in Holocaust fiction for children. Generally, the main character is a contemporary child with whom the reader can

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identify” (Tal 4). As such, Sher’s script exemplifies how theatre and learning enrich one another, insofar as the playwright chose to counterpoint Hana’s historical trace against her contemporary reception. Sher explained his pedagogical and artistic choices for one pivotal domestic scene in Hana’s Suitcase, which communicated the difficult knowledge about Nazi restrictions imposed on the Jewish people in Czechoslovakia after March 1939. Sher translated the double framing of memory aesthetically, and in so doing, produced a scene that serves as a profound site of embodied (post)memory: Theatre can present two narratives simultaneously in ways that challenge our notions of time, history and geography. And so it was that I decided to reflect the two worlds of Hana’s Suitcase – wartime Czechoslovakia and contemporary Japan – and show how the former can shape the latter. …For example, there is a scene in the second act where [Hana’s father] Karel Brady returns home as his family is about to sit down at the dinner table. He has bad news: a series of stringent rules that have been imposed on Jews. The two Japanese children sit down at the table as if they were in the Brady home and not living in Japan sixty years later. A question posed by one of the Japanese children is answered by Karel Brady as if it was asked by his own daughter. Temporal boundaries dissolve on stage: past and present are braided but never blend, and young audiences can see how theatre can bridge the gulf that separates the here-and-now from the thatwas-then. Characters’ trajectories can be juxtaposed; misinformation can collide with the truth. (Sher in Zatzman, 2008 32).

Sher and MacInnis responded to the challenge of witnessing and representing Hana’s trace by reaching “tentatively and resonantly across the performative bridge of imaginative projection” (Liss 132), as they skilfully framed the past within the conditions of the present in this excellent piece of TYA: For the purposes of the play, the [dinner table] scene distils family life– dinner is about to be served–only to see one family forever shattered a short while later. There is an intimacy to the scene that makes the presence of Akira and Maiko all the more poignant. They are interlopers in the scene but take part in it as if they were invited guests. In the end, I sought a moment that would offer a seamless way to bring two children from Japan into a Jewish home sixty years before and the creative path I tread led me to the universal experience of breaking bread with one’s family. The scene’s impact, I believe, springs from the juncture where breaking bread and bearing witness merge. And so a play about the Holocaust ends on a positive note: the last image of the play is of a Japanese girl pretending she

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Questions posed unexpectedly from both within and outside of the frame of the play position us as witness to the witnesses (Felman and Laub, 1992 58), alongside Akira, Maiko and Fumiko. Significantly, Felman and Laub identify the witness as an active participant and an “enabler of testimony,” one who is “party to the creation of knowledge” (15). Thus, we might read both the fictional children on stage, and the children and their parents/teachers in the TYA house, as secondary witnesses through whom the “narrator (the survivor) reclaims his[/her] position as a witness” (85).7 Evidence of the ways in which theatre and learning enrich one another can also be found in the representation and retrieval of Hana’s story as made visible by designer Teresa Przybylski’s evocative and sophisticated set. She, too, referenced the double framing of Hana’s Suitcase by staging the two worlds of the play-the modernity of Japanese interiors and the winter landscapes of Czechoslovakia-within a single set. Przybylski created enormous shoji rice-paper screens that served as the entrance to the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Centre—and with a dramatic change of lighting transformed to become the doors of the train carrying Hana to Auschwitz. Przybylski established the historical context of Hana’s Suitcase through the representation of “the barbed wires of the ghettos and concentration camps,” expressively rendered to include “water and tear drops attached to the lines” for its young audiences (Przybylski 17). Przybylski found form for the retrieval of Hana’s trace by fabricating disconnected paper surfaces that inhabited the sky in Act I, eventually merging “to become a projection surface for many photographic images” (17). “As the pieces fall together we, heartrendingly, see photographs of the real Hana and her happy family [projected]…We see all this with the wrenching knowledge that we are watching the beginning of an inexorable march to the gas chamber” (Maclean 2006).

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Fig 2-3: Hana at Auschwitz with suitcase. Photography: Teresa Przybylski

The remnants of childhood in Hana’s Suitcase are also represented and remembered through the projection of drawings that Hana created when she lived in Kinderheim (“children’s home”) L10 in Terezin.8 Unspeakably, only the drawings Hana produced have survived.9 An extraordinary collection of children’s drawings and poems recorded between 1942 and 1944 in Terezin, entitled I Never Saw Another Butterfly, stands as yet another provocation to remember (Volavkova 1993). Sher’s script also documents the work of artist and teacher Freidl Dicker Brandeis, who secretly taught the children in Terezin. Freidl tells Hana: “Don’t be afraid to draw what you see”; “Think of space”…“The space that isn’t here.” And when the children lament that “No one will ever see the drawings we’ve made,” Freidl retorts, “What counts is that we have made them” (Sher 56-57). My own postmemory experience of the children’s artwork in Terezin is a belated one. I have just returned from my first trip to Terezin and Prague with Classrooms Without Borders where I finally witnessed the children’s drawings directly. Photographs of the Terezin drawings have long served as touchstones for my arts education projects. The artwork I stumbled upon in Prague’s Memorial of the Victims of Nazis in the Pinkas Synagogue was an unexpected and vivid

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Fig 2-4: Ishioka on her search. Photography: Teresa Przybylski

encounter. I found myself standing in front of a glass case, alone in the crowded space of the Pinkas’ small museum. Before me were two pieces of art that I recognized from I Never Saw Another Butterfly. I could see clearly the glued bits of paper, one on top of the other, carefully layered. There in the edges and folds and creases of the paper was the hand of the child. Until that moment, I had not realized that the photographs, with which I had so often worked, had so flattened the images; I had not seen the layers of art-making and time. Standing before these pieces of art— these traces of the autobiographical-in the glass case in Prague, I suddenly realized that I had never read the images in terms of their moment of making-the very gesture of gluing and placing each precious bit of paper down on the surface to create the artwork. Without warning, I was beside the child-profoundly moved, transported back and forth between my moment and hers. And, silently, I wept. In deliberating about the relationship between theatre and learning in representing difficult knowledge about the Holocaust, we are reminded that “[a]rt constantly challenges the process by which the individual person is reduced to anonymity” (Appelfeld in Volavkova ix). Through our TYA encounter with Hana’s Suitcase we discover that the “gentle traces of the children in

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the Terezin concentration camp continue to be, by their scope and impact, an expressive testimony in our day” (Vaclav Havel in Volavkova 104).

The Diary of Anne Frank (Mr. Frank bends down, picks up Anne’s diary lying on the floor. He steps forward, the diary in his hands.) “All that remains”. (Slowly he opens the diary. The image of Anne’s words fills the stage. Darkness.)” (Kesselman, 2001 69)

In The Diary of Anne Frank, the trace of the autobiographical is marked, of course, by Anne Frank’s iconic diary. Scripts10 for The Diary of Anne Frank are based upon the translation and publication of Anne’s diary, which she wrote (and revised) during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands: “Mr. Bolkestein, our Cabinet Minister, speaking on the Dutch broadcast from London, said that a collection of diaries and letters would be made after the war. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a novel called “The Secret Annex”. It could be based on my diary. I’ll start revising it tomorrow!” (56).11 Anne was 15 years old when she died of typhus (March 1945) in Bergen-Belsen (a German concentration camp), only a few weeks before the British liberated the camp on 15 April 1945 (USHMM). Her diary was first published in 1947 and there have been three subsequent editions.12 Our encounter with both the young woman and her writing is mediated by a complex set of temporal issues. Deborah Britzman has suggested that Anne Frank’s diary can be located within three distinct time frames: "the time of the writing [of her diary], the time of finding and publishing the diary, and our own time of pedagogical engagement" (Lost Subjects 114). Britzman’s analysis allows us to wrestle with the complexities of remembering and representing the Holocaust through The Diary of Anne Frank, even as it underlines the diary’s function as call and response. Contemporary encounters with Anne have provoked artists, teachers and students to imagine, mediate and/or contest the complex history of creation that has become an inherent part of the Anne Frank legacy (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler 1-24). Indeed, the very unfinishedness of Anne’s diary has created a myriad of temporal and imaginative engagements, representations, and alternate endings.13 The Diary of Anne Frank continues to be renowned as an enduring point of entry from which to address the Holocaust with and for young audiences internationally. Thus, it will come as no surprise that numerous professional productions of The Diary of Anne Frank have been mounted across Canada over the

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past 15 years, including at the Stratford Festival of Canada, Stratford, Ontario (2000); Manitoba Theatre Centre, Winnipeg (2003); Artsclub, Vancouver (2005); Neptune Theatre, Halifax (2006); TheatreAquarius, Hamilton (2009); Segal Centre for Performing Arts, Montreal (2007); and Shakespeare in Action, Toronto (2010). One exemplary production of The Diary of Anne Frank was staged by Young People’s Theatre [YPT] in 1996.14 Young audiences were able to identify with and imagine their relationship to Anne’s experience, even while the production staged the critical context within which to locate Anne’s life in hiding, as well as the systemic conditions that gave rise to her murder in Nazi Germany. YPT’s Diary asked its audiences to bear witness to the painful circumstances of the diary’s writing and its discovery, and as such countered the (too frequent) tendency to reduce Anne’s narrative to one “capable of transcending or even redeeming the very history that cut her life so short” (Britzman 36).15 Once again, it is upon the aesthetic decisions that I wish to linger in order to highlight the productive and resonant ways in which YPT’s production sutured the theatrical and the pedagogical. The director of YPT’s The Diary of Anne Frank, Leah Cherniak, asked us to remember that in this telling “we are not living but rather re-living personal and collective memory,” and so she established a framing device in which the “significance of memory is reflected in the colours that have been selected for the set and costumes. Everything in the play will remind people of an old photograph” (Cherniak 13) and “reflect the hidden away quality of the pages of an aged diary and the secrecy of the hiding space” (Dean 13). Set and costume designer Charlotte Dean evoked “the cramped, limited space of the hiding place” which allowed young audiences to witness the growing 16-year-old Peter having to “duck to get through the doors, and the residents…negotiate around a very cramped narrow stairwell, typical of the centuries-old architecture in Amsterdam” (13-14). The “elaborate, three-tier set—like a fading photograph” (Chapman) was “designed with enough realism to tell the story, and enough abstraction to tell the story theatrically. It is the theatrical element that creates a more visceral level of storytelling—and it includes sound, image, feeling, abstraction” (Cherniak 13). Cherniak’s approach to directing The Diary of Anne Frank is particularly significant in light of contemporary deliberations which speak to the ‘Anne Frank phenomenon’ and caution us about the danger of positioning Anne as an archetypal victim (e.g., see Langer, Cole, Ozick); we are also counselled to recognize the diary’s distance from many of the horrific atrocities of the Shoah—lest we risk staging The Diary of Anne

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Frank only in “the ethnographic present of Anne endlessly making her entries” a stabilizing move that “seems to preserve the wish to keep her safe in hiding” (Britzman 121). Conceptually, Cherniak was committed to “making use of slides…in order to support what is going on in the world outside the Secret Annex. The images of what life was like before, plus what is happening to other people outside will be juxtaposed with the action on the stage" (13). To facilitate this contextual process, the production included beautifully integrated projection screens, so that the set was able to serve as a structure within which to frame photographs as well as the sounds of Nazi occupied Amsterdam. Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy’s haunting projection design plan functioned as the fulcrum for linking the theatrical and pedagogical forms of remembering and representing Anne’s story. Borzovoy describes how the design team gathered four types of images that bled “through the decaying walls” of the set in order to create the world of the play (Borzovoy E-mail). The first sets of images produced for YPT’s Diary were interstitial slides, which used no imagery except for the texts themselves. These slides were created in period font, and covered the historical time of the diary, between 1942-1944. For example, the months spent in hiding came up on the screen, and made the chronology of the scenes clear; and fragments of Anne’s diary appeared on the screens–these were produced in the same look and feel as the rest of the texts. (Borzovoy Interview)

Fig 2-5: (left) Script 6. Fig. 2-6: (right) Fig 2-6: Signature 7. Photography: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy

Anne’s trace—in the form of her signature—was also represented, in order to “personalize her” and “it was through the trace of her handwriting that we attempted to bring the human dimension of a living person up onto the screen” (Borzovoy Interview).

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The second group of images were devoted to “exploring the time before the war, when the eight individuals hiding in the Secret Annex had full lives that one might not otherwise have known about.” As such, these images made available traces of family histories for The Diary of Anne Frank’s “double circles of audiences” (Schonmann 44)—the parents/teachers and children who so often share the Theatre for Young Audiences house: The projection screens were like windows that gave the audience the ability to look into the past and to examine family snapshots. Mr. Frank, an amateur photographer, had a pre-war Leica camera he had used extensively to photograph his daughters Anne and Margot Frank during their happy childhood in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, so we had a great resource from his family photos – from Anne at the beach with family, to playing with her friends, and at school.

Fig 2-7: Anne with pen. Photography: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy And so through these photographs, we have a window into the history of Anne and her family and we get portraits of the people in hiding in the Secret Annex. The goal was to build a rapport with the audience and the images helped to support the recognition that Anne’s was a typical family, and that she herself was a typical young girl playing with friends and doing homework. Family history is received through these family groupings of photographs. (Borzovoy Interview)

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The third set of images—the “windows to the soul”—offered young audiences “glimpses into the lives of children”. These photographs were selected “because of their ability to convey something of what children’s experiences were like during the war. Through a facial expression or a gesture or through their body posture, we glimpse their experience of the horror and the hopelessness”. Through the representation of “phantoms or ghostlike imagery of children, these ‘windows to the soul’ projections focused on the internal experiences of people–mostly children-living outside of the Annex and suffering in the Holocaust. The images of the young people of that period gave us a sense of the humanity of that terrible time and the photographs speaks volumes” (Borzovoy Interview).

Fig 2-8: Boy with hands up. Photography: Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy

The final set of projections for YPT’s The Diary of Anne Frank offered an environmental sense of the world outside the Secret Annex. These “windows onto the world” projections were comprised of photographs of the soldiers whom the Annex residents would have heard in the streets, or the aircraft they would have heard flying overhead. Other images were designed to help document the moments of terror they felt hearing sounds below the Secret Annex; for example, there were slides depicting doors or images looking down into stairwells-each image evoked the feeling of the constant threat–as the

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This final set of images also incorporated more poetic pieces. For example, some slides depicted images of branches with no leaves to suggest “the essence of the moment and an impression of world outside”. The broader context of the Shoah – into which Anne would be thrust once she and the other residents were betrayed – was referenced by projections of the infamous iron sign above the main entrance of the Auschwitz death camp "Arbeit Macht Frei" (“Work Sets You Free”);16 they “provided a window into the more external reality of that moment in time, enriching viewers understanding of the world in which Anne was living, not just the experience inside the Annex” (Borzovoy Interview). Borzovoy’s process began by working with hundreds of images that had been curated by the design team, and through the use of a sophisticated computer program, he created an imagery “score”, not unlike a musical score, in which he “orchestrated the slides, placing them against specific texts, or movements, or scene changes, and refining the images to respond to the mood and the pace of the scenes throughout the production” (Borzovoy Interview). In conversation with the artistic team, they collectively determined where to “break away the edge of the frame so that the images were woven into the set—as such, the deliberately ragged edges of the set blended directly into the technology, allowing ghost-like images to appear and disappear into the set, complete with music and sound effects, all working in relation to what the actors were doing on stage to enhance or extend the dialogue or action of the play” (Borzovoy E-mail). No wonder this extraordinarily powerful use of projections has remained etched in my memory since the YPT production was mounted in 1996! This finely layered production beautifully exemplified the ways in which theatre and learning enrich one another, in shaping imaginative, embodied, documentary and pedagogical encounters for remembering and representing the Holocaust in TYA. Finally, Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy shared the ethos and impact of working on YPT’s The Diary of Anne Frank: Of all the productions that I have worked on, this particular work holds a most special place in my heart. Beginning with the life-changing experience born as the result of diving so deeply into the horrors of the Holocaust; visiting the Holocaust Centre, speaking with survivors, and

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spending weeks on end researching the imagery and stories that have been left behind like grave markers. I have seen things that no one should every have to see, and I will never forget. I will never forget the children. The production became an example of creative collaboration done right, as under Leah Cherniak's direction the design team was able to assemble a scenic environment that was truly evocative of the extraordinary times. I knew the projected images must bleed through the decaying walls exposing the phantoms of those who must not be forgotten, as would the world beyond Anne's little apartment hideaway. There was no separation between the superbly created set, sound and lighting designs, as all elements seamlessly blended into a singular and moving statement. Sitting among the hundreds and eventually thousands of young people in our audiences during those months of 1996 was a profound honour for me as an artist. To know that Anne and the phantoms emanating through the walls of her apartment were to yet be remembered by this new audience, was of greater satisfaction than any award or recognition could ever be. (Borzovoy Email)

Clearly, Leah Cherniak took the time to ensure an incredibly collaborative, layered production: she “asked the cast, near the end of the rehearsal period, to come up into the audience and watch the show-to experience the play with the imagery, the lighting and the sound”. Borzovoy explained that Cherniak specifically “asked the actors to imagine themselves being there with it. Tanya Jacobs, who played the mother, sat beside me and cried. She turned to me and said ‘I’ve never seen anything as unbelievably moving’. It was a completely unified collaborative production in which every element was woven together to create a moment. It was very special.” (Borzovoy E-mail).

“Present Pasts” Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic situates us wholly within the historical past, where memories of Korczak and the children are invented or reimagined. In The Diary of Anne Frank scripts, the performance of memory is framed by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, with whom we witness Anne’s narrative through recall. In Sher’s Hana’s Suitcase, we are witness to a double narrative in which both past and present are represented, deliberately woven together so that the form of the telling reflects its pedagogical heart. From the performative traces of children in The Children’s Republic, to the materiality of the diary as ephemera and as artifact, to the suitcase which, too, performs traces of the autobiographical, each play makes visible the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust, and establishes particular temporal relationships to its young audiences. Each

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of these scripts—and their “present pasts” (Huyssen 21) – has wrestled with the complexities of remembering and representing the Holocaust; and each has provoked an array of public engagements. In conceptualizing the complex intersections between the historical, the aesthetic, and the personal in remembering and representing the Holocaust, I assiduously attempt to position my practice as an aesthetic of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), insofar as it obligates me to raise persistent ethical, political, and aesthetic questions. Consequently, I am directed to the extended spaces of performance, where the afterlife of Theatre for Young Audiences can be negotiated and nurtured (Reason 111117). There in pre and post show spaces—in talkbacks and workshops and study guides—teachers and artists can attend to the rupture that is the Shoah across audiences, generations, and contexts.17 Robust reciprocal relationships connecting theatre and learning can facilitate students’ encounters with the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust by helping them to “construct knowledge about the world together as they participate in challenging, open-ended, imaginative, intellectual, and artistic pursuits from various perspectives” (Lundy 7). Erika Hughes suggests that we can invite “multiple perspectives and viewpoints about history and difference” into the extended spaces of performance in order to make “positive contribution[s] to youth Holocaust drama and to the lives of those who witness it” (61).18 Maja Ardal, former artistic director of Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre underscores the power of TYA “to question, and to invite our audience to question with us” (196). Indeed, “the successful [TYA] Holocaust play succeeds in challenging its audience by asking them to face tough questions and grapple with the difficulties of interpersonal and institutional cruelty and violence. It can also supplement historical instruction and, perhaps in the best instances, serve as a kind of living memorial to those who suffered” (Hughes 61). The Children’s Republic, Hana’s Suitcase and The Diary of Anne Frank each respond to Walter Benjamin’s oft repeated warning—a caution which grounds my own questions and commitments: "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns, threatens to disappear irretrievably" (225). Ultimately, these Theatre for Young Audiences productions resist historical closure by critically engaging with the difficult knowledge of the Holocaust, and in so doing, open the possibility of “behold(ing) the world somehow differently” through theatre (Booth 22). Kertzer offers one final provocation: “Why people attend theatre about historical atrocity and what they do after the performance, are what matters” (vii). Her call to action challenges us all—artists, teachers and students—to gather our courage to engage in practices of

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remembrance, even when we “cannot ultimately know the consequences of our best efforts to act, to witness” (Salverson 253).

Works Cited Adamson, Lois. “Why Bring Students To The Theatre? An Exploration of the Value of Professional Theatre for Children”. M.A. Thesis. University of Toronto, 2011. Web.16 January 2013. Ardal, Maja. “Theatre for Young Audiences and Grown-up Theatre.” How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates. Eds. Kathleen Gallagher and David Booth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 191-197. Print. Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. Print. Booth, David. “Towards an Understanding of Theatre for Education.” How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates. Eds. Kathleen Gallagher and David Booth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 191-197. Print. Borzovoy, Laurie-Shawn. “Archival photos for YPT's The Diary of Anne Frank.” Message to the author. 7 July 2013. E-mail. —. Personal interview with author. 14 July 2013. Britzman, Deborah P. “If the Story Cannot End.” Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. Eds. Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg and Claudia Eppert. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Print. —. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. New York: SUNY Press, 1998. Print. Brubacher, Erin; Belarie Zatzman, et al. The Children’s Republic Study Guide. Tarragon Theatre, Toronto. Tarragon Theatre Education and Outreach, 2011. 1-36. Web. 28 September 2013. Chapman, Geoff. “Moving Human Story Retold for Teen Audience.” Review of The Diary of Anne Frank. Toronto Star, 20 April 1996. Print. Cherniak, Leah. “Notes from YPT Director.” The Diary of Anne Frank Study Guide. Young People's Theatre, Educational Services. Toronto, 1996. Print. Coulbourn, John. “The Children’s Republic Review.” The Coulbourn Collection. QMI Agency. 18 November 2011. Web. 8 February 2013.

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Cushman, Robert. “Theatre Review: The Children’s Republic is Best Canadian Play in a Long(ish) Time.” National Post. 20 November, 2011. np. Web. 28 September 2013. —. “Summoning Darfur’s Frightening Reality: Two Plays Tackle Issues of Genocide.” National Post. 18 March 2006. Web. 28 September 2013. Dean, Charlotte. “Notes from YPT Designer.” The Diary of Anne Frank Study Guide. Young People's Theatre, Educational Services. Toronto, 1996. Print. Fardell, Patterson; Belarie Zatzman, et. al. Diary of Anne Frank Study Guide. Young People’s Theatre, Toronto. Young People's Theatre Educational Services, 1996. Print. Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition. Eds. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989 and 2003 (Rev.). Print. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Fink, Ida. A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Trans. Madeline Levine and Francine Prose. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. Print. Goodrich, Frances and Albert Hackett. The Diary of Anne Frank. Adapted by Wendy Kesselman. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 2001. Print. —. The Diary of Anne Frank. New York: Random House, 1956. Print. Guertin, Nancy and Aida Jordão with contributions from Belarie Zatzman, et al. Hana’s Suitcase Study Guide. Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People Educational Services. Toronto, 2006. 1-20. Web. 7 June 2013. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust photographs and the Work of PostMemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism. Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2001, 5-37. Web. 3 July 2013. —. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2 (Winter 1992-93): 3-29. Web. 2 July 2013. Horowitz, Sara. Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction. SUNY Press, 1997. Print. Hughes, Erika. “The Holocaust in Contemporary Drama and Performance for Young Audiences”. Youth Theatre Journal 25.1 (2011): 51-62. Web. 10 April 2013. Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia”. Public Culture 12.2 (2000). 21-38. Web. 28 September 2013.

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Kadar, Marlene, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault and Suzanna Egan, Eds. Tracing the Autobiographical. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Print. Kaplan, Jon. Review of The Children’s Republic by Hannah Moscovitch. NOW. 24 November -1 December 2011. Vol. 31 No. 13. np. Web. 8 February 2013. Kertzer, Adrienne. "On the Other Hand: The Paradox of Holocaust Theatre." A Terrible Truth: Anthology of Holocaust Drama. Vol. I. Ed. Irene N. Watts. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2004. iii-xiii. Print. —.‘‘‘Do You Know What ‘Auschwitz’ means?’: Children’s Literature and the Holocaust.’’ Lion and the Unicorn 23.2 (1999): 238–256. Web. 7 July 2013. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara and Shandler, Jeffrey, Eds. Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2012. Print. Langford, Martha. Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Print. Levine, Karen. Hana’s Suitcase: Original Story. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2002/2006. Print. Lifton, Betty Jean. The King of Children: The Life and Death of Janusz Korczak. American Academy of Pediatrics, 2005. Print. Liss, Andrea. “Artifactual Testimonies and the Stagings of Holocaust Memory.” Between Hope and Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma. Eds. Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg and Claudia Eppert. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Print. Lundy, Kathleen Gould. Teaching Fairly in an Unfair World. Markham: Pembroke Publishers, 2009. Print. Maclean, Colin. “‘Hana’s Suitcase’ Gives Face to Holocaust.” Jam! Showbiz Theatre 4 Nov. 2006. Web. 7 June 2013. Moscovitch, Hannah. The Children’s Republic (2010). Unpublished script. Print. Nestruck, J. Kelley. “The Children’s Republic: Orphans Under the Gun”. Globe and Mail. 17 November, 2011. np. Web. 17 July 2013. Nicholson, Helen. “Re-locating Memory: Performance, Reminiscence and Communities of Diaspora.” Applied Theatre Reader. Eds. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston. New York: Routledge, 2009. 268-275. Print. Palmer, Alisa. “Director’s Notes.” The Children’s Republic Study Guide. Tarragon Theatre Education and Outreach. Toronto, 2011. 1-36. Web.

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Przybylski, Teresa. “Designer’s Note.” Hana’s Suitcase Study Guide. Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People Educational Services. Toronto, 2006:17. Web.7 June 2013. Reason, Matthew. The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre. Staffordshire: Trentham Books Limited, 2010. Print. Scherman, Nosson and Meir Zlotowitz, Eds. The Complete Artscroll Siddur, Ashkenaz Edition. Brooklyn, New York: Mesorah Publications, 1987. Print. Salverson, Julie. “Taking Liberties: A Theatre Class of Foolish Witnesses.” Research in Drama Education13.2 (2008): 245-255. Web. 13 May 2013. Schonmann, Shifra. Theatre as a Medium for Children and Young People: Images and Observations. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Print. Sher, Emil. Hana’s Suitcase on Stage: Play. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2006. Print. —. “Stage Plays.” Emil Sher. Emil Sher, 2007. Web. 8 June 2013. Tal, Eva. “How Much Should We Tell the Children? Representing Death and Suffering in Children’s Literature about the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. 18 June 2007. Web. 18 July 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). www.ushmm.org. Web. Volavkova, Hana, ed. I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. 2nd edition. New York: Schocken, 1993. Print. Yad Vashem. www.yadvashem.org. Web. Zatzman, Belarie. “Fifty-one Suitcases: Traces of Hana Brady and the Terezin Children.” Canadian Theatre Review, 133. Winter 2008. 2837. Web. 7 June 2013. —.“The Monologue Project: Drama as a Form of Witnessing.” Eds. Kathleen Gallagher and David Booth. How Theatre Educates: Convergences and Counterpoints with Artists, Scholars, and Advocates. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 35-55. Print.

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Notes 1

Helen Nicholson has provided a comprehensive analysis of embodied practices of memory in her own work and reminds us of the scope and promise of “re-locating memory” (2003). She positions the performance of memory as both political act and social justice response (2009); and she prompts me to consider “the different ways in which memories are shaped and reshaped performatively” (269), in learning for/with/from young audiences. 2 A good guideline for beginning a study the Holocaust is generally Middle School; however, this decision must be contextually driven, informed by the lived experience of the students with whom one is working. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example, suggests that “[s]tudents in grades six and above demonstrate the ability to empathize with individual eyewitness accounts and to attempt to understand the complexities of Holocaust history, including the scope and scale of the events. While elementary age students are able to empathize with individual accounts, they often have difficulty placing them in a larger historical context.” The USHMM suggests that “Elementary school can be an ideal place to begin discussing the value of diversity and the danger of bias and prejudice. These critical themes can be addressed through local and national historical events and can be reinforced during later study of the Holocaust.” The USHMM has also created a special exhibition Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story which “introduces students in grades four and above to the history of the Holocaust, chronicling real events based on the experiences of Jewish children from Germany. Its multimedia approach was carefully designed to provide late-elementary school students an introduction to this history rather than an in-depth examination.” (www.ushmm.org/educators/teaching-about-the-holocaust/age-appropriateness). Similarly, Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies has created curricular materials for Elementary students (ages 9-12), for Middle School students (ages 13-15); and for High School students (ages 15-18), respectively (www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/lesson_plans/index.asp). 3 The Children’s Republic was mounted at the Tarragon Theatre, 8 November to 18 December 2011. The creative team included: Playwright Hannah Moscovitch; Director Alisa Palmer; Set and Costume Designer Camellia Koo; Lighting Designer Kimberly Purtell; Sound Design and Music, John Gzowski. It was coproduced with Tarragon and Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company. Note: other scripts based upon Janusz Korczak include Erwin Sylvanus’ Dr Korczak and the Children (1957); David Greig’s Dr Korczak's Example (2001); and Jeffrey Hatcher’s Korczak's Children (2003). 4 Hana’s Suitcase was originally mounted by Young People’s Theatre (alternately named Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People) 30 September to 19 October 2006, and was remounted 18 April to 21 May 2010. YPT’s 2006 creative team included: Playwright Emil Sher; Director Allen MacInnis; Assistant Director Stewart Arnott; Dramaturges Nancy Guertin and Stephen Colella; Costume and Set Designer Teresa Przybylski; Sound Designer John Gzowski; Lighting Designer Andrea Lundy. Book by Karen Levine. In addition, Hana’s Suitcase has had two Canadian tours (2006; 2007), and international productions

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(www.emilsher.com/stage/hana/index.htm). For its reception in Israel and Prague see “Hana’s Suitcase Best Production the ASSITEJ annual prizes for excellence in theatre”. www.jewish-theatre.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=3595. Hana’s Suitcase variations include: “Hana’s Suitcase”. CBC Radio, 2001 (Karen Levine, producer). “Hana’s Suitcase: An Odyssey of Hope”. CBC TV, 2004 (Joe Schlesinger, reporter). “Inside Hana’s Suitcase” (Larry Weinstein, film director) 2009; and “Inside Hana's Suitcase Online”, 2009. 5 In 1984, Hana Brady’s suitcase was part of a touring exhibition of artifacts sent by the Auschwitz Museum to England. In a terrible irony, the warehouse in Birmingham—in which all of the Auschwitz artifacts were stored—was burned down in a deliberate act of arson set by neo-Nazis, and all of the suitcases were destroyed. Auschwitz created the replica of Hana’s suitcase because there were so few suitcases left behind by children who were murdered by the Nazis, in order to continue to highlight children’s narratives. This was the suitcase that was sent to Tokyo from Auschwitz in 2000. However, it was not until 2004 that Ishioka and the Brady family discovered that the suitcase was a replica (“Hana’s Suitcase: An Odyssey of Hope” CBC TV: April 2004). 6 For a full analysis of Hana’s Suitcase, see “Fifty-one Suitcases: Traces of Hana Brady and the Terezin Children” (Zatzman, 2008). 7 For an interesting examination of forms of witnessing, see Caroline Wake (2009). 8 Terezin or Theresienstadt [German for Terezin] was a Nazi ghetto-concentration camp in Czechoslovakia (24 November 1941-9 May1945). It served as a “transit camp for Czech Jews whom the Germans deported to killing centers, concentration camps, and forced-labor camps. Of the approximately 140,000 Jews transferred to Theresienstadt, nearly 90,000 were deported to points further east and almost certain death. Roughly 33,000 died in Theresienstadt itself” (USHMM). 9 See the Brady family website for images of Hana’s Terezin drawings (www.hanassuitcase.ca/?p=174). Artist and Bauhaus-trained designer Freidl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) taught art to the children in Terezin in secret (Goldman-Rubin, 2000). See also I Never Saw Another Butterfly (1993). 10 For example, see Wendy Kesselman’s adaptation of Goodrich and Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank (2001); Goodrich and Hackett The Diary of Anne Frank script (1956); and Meyer Levin’s original radio play dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary (1952). Also see Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (1995) for the complicated history of bringing the script to the stage. 11 “On March 28, 1944, the spring before she was captured, Anne heard a broadcast from London of the Dutch underground Radio Oranje. The Education Minister of the Dutch government in exile, Gerrit Bolekstein, asked all citizens to keep documentation and, if possible, diaries, which would help in writing history after the war and in bringing war criminals to justice. Anne re-read her diary, making revisions while continuing her writing in the hope that it would bear witness.” (www.annefrank.org/).

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Since its original 1947 publication in Dutch, The Diary of Anne Frank has appeared in numerous editions, each providing greater context and material excluded from earlier publications. For example: The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, (1989); The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition (1995); and The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition (2003). Anne’s Jewish identity, her charged relationship with her mother, and her curiosity about her developing sexuality, for example, had all been minimized in earlier versions of the published diary and scripts. 13 For an excellent examination of the many manifestations of Anne Frank across a range of media (including theatre, film, television, visual art, music, and literature) see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Shandler’s Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (2012). 14 The Diary of Anne Frank at YPT ran April 13 to May 18, 1996. The creative team included playwrights Goodrich and Hackett, director Leah Cherniak; set and costume designer Charlotte Dean, lighting designer Steven Hawkins, projection designer Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy and sound designer Todd Charlton. Note: it would be ten years before YPT would produce another Holocaust drama, Hana’s Suitcase, which has also become an important introductory narrative for young audiences. 15 Characteristically, such productions might advertise their season with Anne’s now-famous line, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart” (AII:67), which is too often taken out of context. The original diary entry from which this line is drawn was dated Saturday, 15th July 1944. Anne and the other residents were arrested only a few weeks later, after two years in hiding in the Secret Annex: “It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again." 16 In addition to Auschwitz, the iconic "Arbeit Macht Frei" [Work Sets You Free] sign appeared in several other concentration camps, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Theresienstadt (Yad Vashem). 17 For example, see Moscovitch’s The Children’s Republic Study Guide at the Tarragon Theatre (2011) http://tarragontheatre.com/pdfs/education/studyguides/2011-2012/SG-childrens-republic.pdf; Sher’s Hana’s Suitcase Study Guide at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People (2006 and 2007) www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/HanasSuitcase-SG web.pdf; and Goodrich and Hackett’s The Diary of Anne Frank Study Guide at Young People’s Theatre in 1997 (print). 18 Erika Hughes offers a fascinating and detailed examination of the representation of TYA Holocaust plays across national boundaries, referencing the United States, Germany, and Israel, respectively (2011).

CHAPTER THREE MOVING MOUNTAINS: “BECOMING” A TEACHING ARTIST MARY ELIZABETH ANDERSON

Tasmania. My heart. A thousand tiny needles of love and loss sewn up under my skin with fine threads – silken threads [eyelashes, a baby’s hair] – running a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand miles between where I am here, now, and where I was there, then…

Preamble It is not easy to write about a place you left. It is not simple to write about a person you were. In this essay, I would like to try writing about both of those things in order to better understand the kind of learning that took place during a community performance in Hobart, Tasmania in 2008. Or, rather, perhaps this is simply an essay about distance. I have in mind an idea of who and where I was at that time, and I have in mind an idea of who and where I am now: spots on a map, temporal and spatial. This writing wishes to crawl back inside the distance between those spots. In 2008 I was an American Ph.D. student in Hobart, supported by the Fulbright program that, among other things, sends U.S. students abroad and brings international students to the U.S. for year-long periods of intellectual and cultural exchange. It is one of the best things I think this country does. I received the scholarship because I wrote a proposal describing my dissertation research on site-specific community performances in Australia, and articulating the significance of conducting research on Hobart’s biennial Mountain Festival. And all of that was true and good. But I’m going to tell you something now that I’m not supposed to say: the real reason I was in Hobart was because I wanted to get lost. I wanted to lose my way—disappear—and Tasmania was tiny and remote enough (in my imagination) to allow that to happen. I will proceed now to tell you the story of my work with the Mountain

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Festival—how a particular performance came into being and how, in my estimation, it failed in a useful way. When I write that it failed in a useful way, I mean that it (inadvertently) invoked a “poetics of failure,” producing a state of “psychic and existential uncertainty” made manifest through the exposure of a particular “structural vulnerability” at work in the performance-making process (Bailes xvii). To this end, with regard to such performances that take the chance of “getting things terribly wrong,” I invoke Della Pollock, who explains that “where there is error, there is possibility” (246). Pollock suggests that, in instances such as these, we might elect to substitute consideration of “the pleasures and power of improvisational error for anything like ‘failure’ to do things right” (247). This corresponds well with the thinking of John Baldacchino, who recommends that we embrace art’s “groundless forms of meaning” which are “beyond product and process” (244). Cumulatively, then, I am remembering (backwards) into an abyss of pastness that sits very presently in my body, but which (let’s face it) is entirely out of my reach. I reach back in this way, taking encouragement from Sally Mackey, whose retrospective analysis of a performance event from her distant past prompted her to revisit the way in which she and her students archived the event, creating a series of “sites of memory” through objects and artifacts. And I reach back in this way, taking guidance from Anne Brewster, who advocates for a kind of a reflective narration that “literalizes a post-retrieval idea of memory” in which writing “is not an instrument of the retrieval of stored information” but instead is “characterized as a technology of memory, and memory as tekhne, writing” (397). Inspired to uncover the paradoxical and aporetic aspects of this event from my past–how it contributed to my “becoming”—I will draw on fragments of reflective writing throughout the essay. This will be a performative, reflective, polyvocal story…

Here, Now: 2013 I am an Assistant Professor in my penultimate year on the tenure track. For the last four years, I have been engaged in a qualitative study of teaching artists in theatre and dance, based on survey data (n=172) and indepth questionnaires (n=20)1. The dissertation led to the job and this study (one hopes) will lead me towards tenure. Along with my co-PI Doug Risner, I have been motivated to carry out this research in order to learn more about teaching artist preparation and training, the kinds of environments in which teaching artists work, the populations that they serve, and the challenges that they face in doing their work.

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A teaching artist, for the purposes of this study, is defined as “an artist, with the complementary skills and sensibilities of an educator, who engages people in learning experiences in, through, or about the arts” (Booth 11). More particularly, those who self-identify as teaching artists in this study are engaged in what would be considered “community-based” work in theatre and dance. Whether an “artist in residence” teaching a ballet class in an underserved K-12 classroom, or an applied theatre practitioner facilitating dramatic improvisation workshops for post-combat military personnel, the common thread among the practices of various participants is the link between arts experience and community engagement. As a researcher, I have been taught to perform a particular kind of objective stance when I review the data that we have collected. However, I must confess that frequently when I am listening to a participant during an interview, or reading a narrative that a survey respondent has written, I encounter descriptions of what could be my own experience. The most familiar, the most resonant sentiments, for me, seem to emerge when participants are describing the early part of their career—a first job, a first experience—which revealed to them how unprepared they felt, in spite of extensive formal education in their artistic discipline2: I felt pretty unprepared for my first job as a teaching artist. I just came across an old note I wrote during that time and it read something like, I know how to teach technique class but I am unclear how to connect our course work with the students’ lives and experiences outside of our classroom. [A]ta loss as to how to create a positive movement experience that is meaningful and relevant for students with no previous experience with dance. [For my] work with high-risk youth I was not prepared at all. This work was part of Americorps and they basically dropped me off at a school and said, “Do your thing.” This was dangerous for both me and the children involved (Anderson & Risner 6). Concerns about how to teach “technique” in a way that connects with students’ “lives and experiences outside of the classroom” and how to create positive, relevant and safe experiences for diverse populations are emergent themes in these comments, and others like them. Study participants experience an uncomfortable juxtaposition between the training that they received prior to their work as teaching artists—training that often primarily emphasized an understanding of one’s art form—and the demands of the institutions and environments in which they were placed. The experiences described by these participants are examples of what Peter Woods refers to as “critical educational events” in teaching and

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learning (2). Often occurring during the early period of one’s career— “one’s initiation into teaching”—Woods explains that such experiences have the potential to exert a transformative impact on the work of the teaching artist in the long run (2). Critical educational events are instrumental in helping learners “become person” (Woods 2). These survey participants’ experiences bear a striking resemblance to my own experience in Hobart. Through reflection on this experience, perhaps I might uncover some of the complexities of learning, as it occurs for the early-career teaching artist. Hobart’s Mountain Festival developed a series of community-based performances between 2004 and 2008 that involved creative collaborations between local, established arts practitioners and communities of African refugees recently settled in the area. Festival artists navigated existing community arts funding schemes in order to develop theatrical performances designed to celebrate the presence of these refugee communities in Hobart, with significant influence coming from the Commonwealth designation of refugee populations as emerging communities3. For the 2008 Mountain Festival production of Moving Mountains, I served as the choreographer. It was an accidental thing, really. Happenstance. The woman who was supposed to choreograph the piece got a job in Melbourne. So there was a hole in the line-up. And here I was, already involved with the Festival because of my dissertation research. And the Fulbright was covering all of my expenses so I would be: free. In my discussion, I am particularly interested in illuminating the ways in which community performance practice “constructs relationships across professional contexts with varying policy, value and practice imperatives,” and so the “methods of research and practice itself are also subject to multiple pressures” (Hughes et al. 186). I had “just enough” experience to make my way. For several years I had been a guest artist visiting K-12 classrooms, providing school teachers and children experiences in the arts: making puppets, creating devised plays based on fairy tales, adapting Shakespeare plays. To this extent, it is important for me to communicate the way in which my status as a guest in the Mountain Festival environment was amplified. I had been a guest before–a guest in all of those classrooms–but never a guest quite like this. A guest in another country. A guest in another culture. A guest in a labyrinthine festival structure. As James Thompson explains, teaching artists are almost always guests in the communities in which they work. Their work is often temporary, and furthermore their “guest-hood is a carefully negotiated position that is acutely sensitive in relation to the histories of colonialism

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and exploitation” (Thompson 9). This position can make critique particularly difficult, both during and after a project, given that the teaching artist does not share a common home and often does not share a common context with participants. In my case, as an American graduate student studying abroad in Tasmania on a Fulbright scholarship, I shared a common context neither with participants nor with the artistic team with which I worked. Moreover, my Fulbright project was centred on my participation in the Mountain Festival—one of the letters of support for my application came from the festival director himself. Accordingly, as I relate my experience of events below, it is important not only to frame these encounters in terms of the learning that occurred as part of my initiation into teaching, but simultaneously to demarcate my status as an international traveller who was visiting Hobart for only a year, being hosted dually by the Mountain Festival as well as the University of Tasmania. Furthermore, the relationships forged in the context of the Mountain Festival are constructed in conversation with the constitution of “community” as a “site of values, of fetishized identities, of culture” which is mythologized and, as Miranda Joseph explains, “romanticized” as being autonomous from capital (72). Seeking to get underneath or in between the rhetoric that shaped our work and the practices that we carried out, I am also seeking to understand how the making and performing of Moving Mountains existed in tension between the expectations laid out in government funding schemes and the on-the-ground reality of staging a performance about “island community.” I will first draw out the narrative and conclude by raising questions about the efficacy of reflection on such critical educational events. Tasmania. Little island. Little mound of rock and flesh and gothic strangeness. Peculiarity. A run to the top of a mountain ends abruptly when I lose the path. A girl dies while hiking Mt. Wellington. Goes up there by herself, not knowing the territory. Takes a swim and freezes. But I do a google search and I can’t find the story, so perhaps it is a lie, a myth. Another one of many. Tasmania is a magnet for such things.

Moving Mountains: The Performance In the middle of March in 2008, a crowd of over 200 people gathered at the entrance to the Prince's Wharf Shed #1, which sits on the edge of the harbour in Hobart, Tasmania. A relic of a time when Hobart was a more active commercial port, the Shed is now a disused storage facility sandwiched between the thriving shops and galleries of Salamanca place and the waters of the Derwent River that carry in the likes of the

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Australian Antarctic Division's craft Aurora Australis and the many North American cruise ships and naval ships that call on the shops and cafes at Salamanca. On this day the crowd was all local—primarily loyal fans of the biennial community-based celebration of place called the Mountain Festival, now in its fourth iteration. The Shed was the site selected for the festival's community performance. Like each previous Mountain Festival, this year's festival was composed of professional events that featured hired artists showcasing their own sculpture, film and live performance, as well as community events that employed professional artists to facilitate arts experiences for groups of local volunteer participants. A group of parents and friends and colleagues stood at the entrance to the shed, to be taken on a journey to the other side of the shed space. A team of adolescent girls playing scientists-dressed in white hooded coveralls and black plastic spectacles, making authoritative notations on clipboards-narrated a story of the birth of a mountain. As the scientists' story grew in detail, the audience came to understand that it was not just any mountain, but their local mountain, Mt. Wellington, that was the centre of the drama. Accompanied by abstract dance choreographed to found-object instrumental music, performed by a chorus of 50, the audience was taken on a meandering tour that revealed the shed as the container for a clinical reflection on Mt. Wellington's health and wellbeing. We were in this post-industrial space because, in this fictional story of Mt. Wellington, we were standing on the edge of an environmental apocalypse. Sentimentality ran high as the scenes worked through the shed's spaces: a multi-generational group worked a giant white butcher-paper bird puppet and kept him hovering in slow motion at a wide doorway that opened onto the Derwent waters; a dozen children on bicycles whizzed past the audience to redirect their attention to what was behind them; a group of dancers inspected the concrete floor and tin roof ceiling for evidence of alien life, only to discover that they were surrounded-by each other. Young children’s drawings were projected onto shadow screens, which were ripped down to reveal taiko drummers4, who penetratingly pounded the apparent end of the piece. However, when the drummers finished, and the audience—very familiar with the taiko group—applauded at the expected time, the characteristic tones and rhythms of hip-hop music emerged from the sound system. The taiko drummers, who had been placed at the very end of the shed, still some 50 meters from where the audience stood, had already taken their bows and began to casually pack up. And yet the performance

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was not yet finished. The scientists stood at the edges of the crowd, clearly still in character and not rushing forward for a curtain call. A moment went by. And then another. Still another. And then four young African women from the Glenorchy Young Women’s Multicultural Group walked forward, three in trousers and one in a denim flared miniskirt, all wearing black polo shirts printed with the logo "girls r cool" in hot pink. There was enough similarity in their outfits to render their apparel as costume, and a few of them wore matching bright blue stage makeup. Eight beats into their emergence from the sidelines, they began to execute movements in time with the song that was playing over the loudspeakers-Sean Paul's Shake That Thing-though something was amiss. Their movements were mechanical and subdued. They were performing choreography, but they weren't really present in the space. One or two minutes into the song, the volume diminished and the women made their way back to the sidelines. The performance continued with a final scene in which the scientists— young white women from a local private school—spoke in terms of taking collective responsibility for the environmental problems identified in the script, ending with the lines: "So we'll make it right? ... We'll make it right” (Kruckmeyer 9). A school choir costumed in a litter of colours, styles and periods sang a capella harmonies. And finally there was the long, extended curtain call. It was immediately apparent that we, the artists responsible for making this community performance5 had not made it right. There had been substantial magic-moments of conceptual clarity, where the script rang true and the music and spectacle effectively supported the mood. The audience had participated diligently-picking up on cues and moving through the space and providing appropriate responses. But the audience feedback immediately following the piece made it clear that something had ruptured that magic. The most diplomatic response, from an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Tasmania, was that the piece was "overly conceptual." The most pointed accusation came from a high school dance teacher whose students had participated in the choreography. "You know that uncomfortable feeling you get after a performance? The cringe factor. All I could think was...tokenism." The summit of the Mountain, so dry and arid, so cold. It’s all about the wind up there. The wind lives up there. And you are just visiting. A momentary encounter with the (super) natural. A recognition of how tiny, how frail, how flailing your little body is. I can barely stand to visit the Wikipedia page. Lest it diminish–draw away from, detract, or in any way lessen–the thing that is that place somewhere deep in my body, underneath

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my eyes, below my ears, subterranean.

Retracing Steps Moving Mountains was a performance purportedly interested in teaching participants and audience members about the potential impact that global warming might have on the local island ecology. The publicity for the production and the subject matter of the script indicate that the performance is concerned with generating a place-based response to a looming environmental crisis by bringing together various constituencies that constituted Hobart’s “island community.” Examining the language used to apply for grants in the grant proposals for Moving Mountains, “community” was defined as: the science community; the migrant resource centre; local city councils; local schools; and government agencies. The idea driving the project and the grant that was written to develop the project was that Moving Mountains would lead to developmental outcomes for communities and to community building. Development amounted to the cultivation of performance skills and confidence among school and community youth groups, with the possibility of assisting with the creation of ensembles with ongoing performance outcomes. Further, a primary objective under the heading of "community building" in the grant language was the development of relationships between communities that would "encourage racial harmony, cooperation and communication between groups," with a special emphasis on local African refugee communities and their support organizations. Within the environment of competition for community arts resources, the Mountain Festival has sought to carve out a niche for itself particularly through projects that have been conceived by local musician and Mountain Festival Music Director Michael Fortescue. For community projects like Moving Mountains and the projects that preceded it in earlier iterations of the Mountain Festival, such as Woodpiece (2004) and Windpiece (2006), there are three tiers of funding regularly sought-Commonwealth funding, state funding and local funding.6 At the time of the Mountain Festival’s search for support, at the Commonwealth level, there was the Festivals Australia program, administered through the Australian Council for the Arts, and there was the Living in Harmony program, administered by the Department of Immigration and Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA). The state and local funding for efforts on the scale of the Mountain Festival is significantly less and so these programs are rarely the primary focus of any search for support, as most festival projects would not be feasible with this level of funding, alone.

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It was only as recently as 2004 that the Mountain Festival realized that it wanted to pursue projects that included African refugee populations in Hobart. Michael Fortescue had been voluntarily instructing a group of African adolescent boys at a high school in the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy and invited them to participate in his composition Woodpiece, which was staged for the 2004 Mountain Festival. Subsequently, Fortescue conceived of Windpiece for the 2006 Mountain Festival, which would be a major festival initiative that would record the stories of migration of scores of refugee groups who had come to Tasmania from locations in Africa and place the stories to music. For this, Fortescue and the Mountain Festival secured funding from two programs managed by the Australian Arts Council, on the platform that Windpiece would include these African "emerging communities," highlighting their voices and talents in the context of a community performance that could perhaps even lead to employment.7 The attempts at including the African refugee populations in the context of Mountain Festival productions have born consistently mixed results. Some of the outcomes can be attributed to the festival's dependency on a limited range of grants. The concomitant competition for resources ultimately splits the services that are possible in these community arts contexts and, further, often confuses the objectives of any particular project. Before funding was sought for Moving Mountains-before Moving Mountains even had a title and was simply referred to as “the community arts project for the 2008 Festival”—there was a sensitivity to the problems associated with these grant-driven schemes for inclusion and a concern that, in some respects, Windpiece had lost sight of the intent of inclusion because Windpiece organizers had overestimated their own capacities. As a project that was documenting personal narratives and then editing them into a script for performance with live instrumental accompaniment, it was perhaps overly ambitious, given that no one on the artistic team had undertaken such a task in a previous project. The work ended with a degree of disappointment from the artistic team members and from community participants alike, many of whom felt that the piece, in some respects, lacked artistic merit and also failed to accurately represent any of the participants' stories. In visioning what inclusion would look like for Moving Mountains, festival organizers wanted to avoid some of the problems involved with Windpiece, but were still committed to pursuing funding for including designated “emerging communities.” As the choreographer for the project, I met with the mandate for inclusion with a particular trepidation, only

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because I felt that collectively we lacked a clear sense of what inclusion meant in this context or why it was important to the festival, to this particular project, or to the potential participants. While I was eager to include anyone who wanted to be included in the work that would become Moving Mountains, the repeated insistence that we had to “include the African community in the dance” seemed problematic. And yet the major grants had already been written and submitted, complete with a list of non-profit organizations with whom the artistic team would collaborate in order to elicit participation from African refugee communities. Letters of support had been submitted from the organizational leaders within those non-profits. And an "African Cultural Liaison" had been appointed to help facilitate these connections: Samuel Adideran, graduate student in agriculture at the University of Tasmania, the festival director's colleague, and the primary point of contact for Windpiece. I was both relieved and inspired when, during a festival planning meeting in November, Samuel revealed that several of the groups upon which we had depended for “the African participation” had, since the 2006 production of Windpiece, professionalized and were now asking for $250 AUD compensation in order to contribute to the new 2008 project. This professionalization I viewed as a good sign. The Windpiece grant language had indicated that the project was about highlighting the skills and talents of African refugee groups with the hope that participation might lead to employment opportunities. The news of professionalization was also encouraging in the sense that we might be one step further away from the risk of what might become tokenistic representations in this new project. Working with a professional group would mean integrating their work into the larger production in a professional manner, characterized by a more shared sense of power in the collaboration. And yet the Mountain Festival flatly refused to negotiate with these groups, insisting that it did not have the funding to compensate any of the “community” artists.8 The imperative for “African participation” in the dance portion of the developing project consequently disappeared entirely until February of 2008, approximately four weeks before Moving Mountains was to be staged. The artistic director for the project, Kirsty Grierson, who had worked previously on the Glenorchy City Council's (GCC) Works community arts festival, had contacted the GCC about Moving Mountains and was connected with Youth Officer Angela Pate and the social group that she facilitates for adolescent women: the Young Women's Multicultural Group. The potential participation of this group—which was largely composed of young women who had recently moved to Tasmania from locations in Africa9—solved a number of problems that festival

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organizers saw in Moving Mountains. Most notably, it filled the void that was “African participation” at a time in which festival organizers were under particular pressure, having received the Festivals Australia grant, in which they had articulated that Moving Mountains would actively engage stated “emerging communities.” Until Kirsty made contact with the Young Women's Multicultural Group, Moving Mountains had no representation from any designated “emerging communities,” as our contacts—for instance, at the migrant resource centre—had not led to any realizable connections. Through the month of January, I had been devising the choreography for Moving Mountains as if it would be performed by students enrolled in a dance class at Elizabeth College, a co-ed public school for students in grades 9-12. This was the only group that had committed to the dance portion of the project thus far. Furthermore, as a group they were quite advanced in terms of dance technique and choreographic processes. I came in with a handful of exercises that helped the students generate choreography individually and in small groups (physical experiments and prompts that were then elaborated upon by each dancer) and we created a shared choreographic language that I then compiled, arranged and ultimately set upon the group as a whole. By the time the Young Women's Multicultural Group became involved in February, another dance class from the private school Collegiate, serving girls in grades 7-12, had been added to the project. Midway through February, students from Elizabeth College and Collegiate were already learning the choreography, which was built from movements and phrases that students at both schools generated. And the participation of the Young Women's Multicultural Group was contingent on a number of factors that I would not learn until our first meeting. Upon meeting the young women for the first time, in the company of Youth Officer Angela Pate and Moving Mountains artistic director Kirsty Grierson on the second floor of the Glenorchy City Council office building, I became aware that the participation of the members of the Young Women's Multicultural Group (YWMG) was voluntary, and that that first meeting was to become a negotiation about the terms of participation. Some of the obvious differences between the participation of the YWMG and the students at Elizabeth College and Collegiate became apparent right away. The students at the two schools were already enrolled in a dance class-an elective course that, in the case of Collegiate, was by audition-and the instructors had designed participation in Moving Mountains as a class requirement. In the case of the YWMG, Angela and Kirsty wanted to create as safe a space as possible for the young women to

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make decisions about their comfort in participating. Accordingly, by the end of the first meeting, we had all agreed that the young women would give only a single rehearsal a try and that they would collectively determine how to proceed from there. Further, participation would involve learning some choreography and sharing some choreography and that the young women would be allowed to choose their own music and their own performance regalia. This, again, was by design. Angela reckoned that even a single rehearsal experience would be “good” for the young women, who she described as having difficulty making commitments or attending the YWMG meetings regularly. Allowing the young women to choose their own music and their own costumes and contribute to the choreographic process was understood to be an exercise in endowing them with agency. One of Angela's primary objectives in creating the YWMG was about helping to generate confidence in the girls as individuals and as a group. The Young Women and I subsequently met the next week for our first rehearsal, for which they brought their CD's and wore their YWMG “girls r cool” polo shirts, which they had earned by attending a certain number of group meetings. We danced and I tried to highlight the “having fun” aspect of the experience, keeping in mind that the girls were under no obligation to continue with any further rehearsals and that the most significant aspect of their participation in the project might simply be their attendance at a single rehearsal. The terms of our encounter were, in this sense, remarkably different from the terms laid out for the students at Elizabeth College and Collegiate, where participation in all rehearsals and the final performance was required. I structured the rehearsal as a “call and response” experience–in which each member of the group was invited to share a short choreographic phrase that would be repeated and in some cases modified or developed through repetition by the group. The philosophical and even the formal premises upon which this creative process was based were not entirely unrelated to the process for Elizabeth College and Collegiate. At all sites, “generative” choreography was created based on the way individual bodies responded to prompts. The huge difference was the way in which choreographic material was elicited from the different groups. Whereas the students at Elizabeth College and Collegiate received somewhat standardized prompts that I had created based on the themes of the project, the Young Women’s group received prompts catered to their expressed interests, musical preferences and the social dance gestures and phrases that they brought to rehearsal on their own. Because we were listening primarily to rap and R&B music from the U.S. and Australia, much of the choreography that was shared was hip-hop

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and jazz oriented. But these familiar movements from popular culture were complicated by choreographic patterns that the women explained they had learned at parties and from dancing with their friends. While I introduced many of my own choreographic phrases for consideration, most of what I shared was designed to build upon and complicate the rhythms and gestures that the women had already authored. As the young women danced and switched CDs and danced some more, seeming to enjoy themselves and the exchange, I began to speculate as to how I could include their names in the final program as having contributed to the choreographic process, regardless of whether they would elect to become performers in the final piece. The point, in my mind, was about some sort of recognition of their contribution—not because I felt that I was under any obligation, but because I realized that perhaps just attending this rehearsal would be a significant step for these young women and that Moving Mountains should be about honouring that kind of courage. The young women enjoyed themselves and committed to one more rehearsal—just one more, no commitment to the final production yet. Because the group only met once a week, this meant that we could anticipate a total of two more rehearsals before the final performance, if the girls were still anticipating that possibility. In the subsequent rehearsals, the group selected the choreographic phrases that they found most enjoyable, and we began to create relationships between the phrases, ultimately rendering a final piece that reflected movement patterns generated by all of the group members. The time limitation was not necessarily an obstacle. However, in the two subsequent rehearsals, some of the most significant aspects of the group's infrastructure collapsed. At rehearsal number two, we learned that Angela, the group leader, had gone on vacation-and would be on vacation until after Moving Mountains was over. This we had not known at the outset. Just before the third and final rehearsal, I learned that the educational support teacher who usually provided transportation for the young women after the group's meetings (ESL Instructor Susan Redpath) was having her car repaired, and so this left a big question about how the girls would get home, given that I had no means of transportation other than the Metro bus system. It was just before this third and final rehearsal that I almost decided that the Young Women's Multicultural Group simply did not have a place in Moving Mountains. The young women had lost their primary points of connection. Further, with the loss of Angela was the loss of the snacks upon which they depended for the extra time that the group required. And with the loss of transportation, I was very nervous about sending thirteen-

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year-old girls out into the Glenorchy evening to make their way home on their own, unsupervised. The deciding factor, however, outweighed these others. The girls had made so much progress, had been so courageous and reliable in attending the rehearsals and seemed to be having such fun. I did not want to be the single person responsible for excluding them from the final performance simply because some logistical challenges had been presented. Interestingly enough, so few of the members of the YWMG attended the final rehearsal that feeding and shepherding them home via public transit became quite manageable. We all ate at McDonald's and took the bus home together, as they told me stories about the countries where they had lived before arriving in Tasmania, about their professional ambitions, and about their passion for hip-hop singer Chris Brown. All were very excited that I was from the United States because this meant that perhaps I knew how they could get in touch with Chris Brown to ask if he would come to Tasmania to perform. We discussed the various grants that might be available to fund such a performance. The day of the final performance of Moving Mountains was the only day that the young women had access to the Prince’s Wharf Shed #1 on the Hobart harbour: the venue for the performance. Because transportation was an issue for the members of the Young Women’s Cultural Group, we had made provisions for a carpool for them. But this also meant that they were the only group of community participants who would not have family present in the audience. They arrived an hour later than all of the other dancers and gestures to include them in the provisional backstage spaces that we had created were mostly unsuccessful. There were at least a hundred people milling about in the hours preceding the performancemany from different groups but who, on that day, somehow seemed to be one, as they all wore their disposable white coveralls in the hours preceding the performance. Because the final performance produced the recognition that we, as an artistic team, had failed to effectively include the Young Women's Multicultural Group-I knew that it would be even more important to have a series of follow-up encounters with all of the participants. My first opportunity to see the young women again was during their drumming performance during the Hobart City Council's Harmony Day celebrations. Their educational support teacher, Susan Redpath—who had been in attendance at the first two Moving Mountains rehearsals—was also the drumming group supervisor, and rehearsed with the girls during school hours for performances at school functions and other public events like Harmony Day. On this occasion and on subsequent occasions while

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visiting Cosgrove High School, where most of the young women were students, my intent was simply to reconnect and recognize the girls' work. They had little to say about Moving Mountains, with the exception of one woman, who stated that “the other dance was cool” (referring to the choreography performed by the students from Elizabeth College and Collegiate) and that they (meaning the YWMG) “didn't know the choreography.” The participation of the Young Women's Multicultural Group in the performance of Moving Mountains begs the question of what to do about the matter of exclusion as it occurs in community arts performances-ofinclusion. Arguably, on a strategic level, on the early-stages grant writing level, the Mountain Festival could have had a clearer notion of what it was trying to accomplish with the inclusion of “emerging communities.” On a tactical level, it is easy to see how community arts practitioners, working with limited means and trying to carry out the perceived mission of a larger endeavour, are vulnerable to competing forces that can significantly sidetrack even a unified strategic vision. When I went to Tasmania I was thirty. Thirty: not knowing what that meant yet. Thirty: wearing a denim skirt from home and black boots I bought in Melbourne with a clicking wooden heel and thinking I would never come back. To America, that is. I would go away and be absorbed into the igneous rock crevasses and eucalypts. Into the soil that stinks of moisture– dampness in perpetuity–and the year-round possibility of snow and the coarse grain of unidentifiable decaying biota. Into the ghosts of imprisoned women in factories. I would become in-between-time. Where the fresh water of the River Derwent meets the salt of the Tasman Sea.

Conclusion Peter Woods explains that critical events in teaching and learning have four significant functions in that they: 1) promote education; 2) can be critical for teacher change; 3) have an important “preservation and confirmatory function for teachers;” and 4) can be critical for the profession as a whole (2-3). Significantly, Woods notes that we cannot know that any particular educational experience has been “critical” until it has ended and we reflect on the event. To that extent, it is only through reflection—or, a retrospective analysis of my work and its impact—that I have come to appreciate the value of this particular experience, personally and professionally. Ultimately, a series of imperfectly translated systems of logic were consistently at work in the development and iteration of Moving

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Mountains. One of the foundational components behind the logic of Moving Mountains was the perception that public performances, by virtue of bringing people together, are necessarily inclusive of all those in attendance. The Mountain Festival understands itself as being composed out of the efforts of an “island community” —a community formed within a circumscribed island spatiality that is perceived to be inclusive by virtue of its own circumscription. Working within this perception of community as being formed within a circumscribed space, Moving Mountains tried to enact this same logic in its inclusion of the Young Women's Multicultural Group. Moving Mountains, the third in a series of community arts events designed to promote and perform inclusion in Hobart, thus brought to a head the extent to which this logic of inclusion may not actually be effective. In this final case, the logic of inclusion in performance was manifest as offensive through a superficial gesture to recognize difference via the display of four young African refugee women without any attempt to meaningfully integrate them into the overall iteration of the final project. And yet this outcome was, in many respects, the opposite of what we had wanted. My role as a “guest” in this environment, as well as an early-career teaching artist, meant that I was consistently walking a fine line between being a student and being a teacher. I was literally a student at the time– completing work on the final case study for my doctorate–and funded, in part, because of the support that I had garnered from the Mountain Festival organizers. So, in many respects, I placed myself within the structure and organization of the Mountain Festival in order to learn about its operations. At the same time, I was invited to contribute to the making of a performance, and to lead several groups of youth in the capacity of “teacher.” I tasked myself with learning the expectations of the Festival, while simultaneously trying to adapt or translate those expectations into my day-to-day encounters with Moving Mountains participants. The affective result is reminiscent of the two narrative statements that I shared at the top of this chapter from the early-career teaching artists, who felt “unprepared,” “unclear,” and “at a loss” when they were “dropped” into a complex situation which had potential to be “dangerous” for those involved. Paolo Freire writes that “reflection–true reflection–leads to action” (66). Phillip Taylor expands upon this perspective, explaining that Freire developed the word “praxis” in order to demonstrate the way that action and reflection are interdependent in educational processes: Praxis is powered by an agenda, a desire to push us to reflect upon our own practices, refine our theoretical leanings, as a step towards acting on and

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My particular process of reflection in this essay, conducted five years after Moving Mountains had finished, challenges me to “reconsider what it is [I] expect or want from an art-based activity” (Robertson 122). Further, the reflective practices of community-based teaching artists raise questions not only about our expectations regarding the arts, but also “what it is we want from communities” (Robertson 122). Placing Woods’ ideas regarding the function of critical events in teaching and learning into conversation with these ideas of “praxis,” I would like to suggest that early-career teaching artists are frequently operating in a kind of “future perfect” tense, characterized by a phrase something like, “I will have done this work differently next time.” Trapped within the confines of organizational expectations, and a lack of practice in communicating one’s own expectations, the early-career teaching artist often experiences an absence of voice or strategic power. The potentiality is there for both expression and intervention, but because there is perhaps no training program that can adequately prepare a teaching artist for her first experience, which is further complicated by the “guest” status of most all teaching artists, a facilitator in her first position is caught in the liminal space between student and teacher. This future-perfect stance is also implicitly encouraged by the ways in which ideas of reflection and “praxis” have become embedded into much of the work of community-based practitioners. The very notion of praxis, itself, is predicated on the assumption that one will reflect afterwards about one’s actions in the present, in order to enact a different outcome in the future. As Dorothy Heathcote explains, “a common root all teachers have to grow is reflective power” not only within themselves, but within their students, as well (123). In other words–the future-perfect stance is encouraged not only for practitioners, but for participants. As pointed out by Schön (1983), Moon (1999) and others, cultivating a sense of reflection-in-action can promote a sense of the “on-goingness” of practice and the interrelationship between various projects. In fact, participants have reported feeling that reflective time following a project is “just as important as being part of the actual project itself” to the extent that they are able to make “connections to their own lives” and gain a “deeper understanding and awareness of the process that they had been part of” (Terret 343). I would therefore like to suggest that, although I feel there was little I

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was capable of doing to change the circumstances involved in the making of Moving Mountains, the single thing that I feel I could have done but did not do, was to organize more formally a process of reflection for all three groups of youth participants. The informal follow-up that I conducted with the young women could have extended into something much more substantial–our discussions could have led to the generation of another performance or even simply a series of dance workshops, which they seemed to enjoy. Eliciting reflection among participants can, nonetheless, represent particular challenges. As Penny Bundy explains, in some cases, reflection requires a necessary distance (achieved through the passage of time or through dramatic representation) in order to “open the way…for reflection that might not otherwise be available” (239). Liselle Terret advocates for the integration of reflective processes throughout an arts activity, ensuring that her own role as facilitator is “shared and negotiated with the group” (341). That said, this sharing and negotiating of leadership within the group presents its own challenges, as Terret explains: I remember some of the participants actually saying that they had spent most of their lives learning to ‘know-their-place’ and to only talk when told. Other participants said that they had learned to be silent and that it was less confrontational to just say yes. (341)

The reflective teaching artist is continually challenged to reflect on processes of reflection, exploring alternative modalities of assessment, looking for growth and development amongst participants, even while remaining cautious to avoid “evangelised reports of personal victories in making miracles happen against all odds” (Neelands 47). It would seem that the art of the teaching artist includes “virtually continuous reflective time,” described by Pamela Burnard, in which the teaching artist places “reflection at the heart of the creative process” (3). So if this paper essentially constitutes a “note to my former self,” which, by extension, is a note to any past or future teaching artist embarking on a first position, I suggest that embracing Burnard’s idea of placing reflection at the heart of the creative process might not only enhance the experience—and perhaps even the quality of the outcomes— for teaching artists and participants, but might also slow down what can sometimes be a rather frantic process of assemblage. Stretching out time by taking time to reflect in between sessions, and in between projects is not only good practice, good praxis, but also perhaps a strategy to bridge the gap between the present and the always already in place “future perfect” in which the mistakes of today will be corrected tomorrow.

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Works Cited Anderson, Mary Elizabeth and Doug Risner. “A Survey of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre: Implications for Preparation, Curriculum and Professional Degree Programs.” Arts Education Policy Review, 113.1 (2012): 1-16. Print. Bailes, Sarah Jane. Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. London: Routledge. 2010. Print. Baldacchino, John. “The Praxis of Art’s Deschooled Practice.” JADE 27.3 (2008): 241-260. Print. Booth, Eric. “Seeking Definition: What is a Teaching Artist?” Teaching Artist Journal, 1.1 (2003): 5-12. Print. Brewster, Anne. “The Poetics of Memory.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 19.3 (2005): 397-302. Print. Bundy, Penny. “The Performance of Trauma.” Eds. T. Prentki and S. Preston. The Applied Theatre Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 2009. (233-240) Print. Burnard, Pamela. “Rethinking the Imperatives for Reflective Practices in Arts Education.” Eds. P. Burnard and S. Hennessy. Reflective Practices in Arts Education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. 2006. (3-12) Print. Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Ltd. 1993 [1970]. Print. Heathcote, Dorothy. “Drama as a Process for Change.” Eds. L. Johnson and C. O’Neill. Collected Writings on Education and Drama – Dorothy Heathcote. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1984. (114-125). Print. Hughes, Jenny with Jenny Kidd and Catherine McNamara. “The Usefulness of Mess: Artistry, Improvisation and Decomposition in the Practice of Research in Applied Theatre.” Eds Baz Kershaw and Helen Nicholson. Research Methods in Theatre and Perofrmance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2011. (186-209). Print. Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 2002. Print. Kruckmeyer, Fin. Moving Mountains. Unpublished play manuscript, 2008. Print. Mackey, Sally. “Of Lofts, Evidence and Mobile Times: The School Play as a Site of Memory.” Research in Drama Education, 17.1 (2012): 35-52. Print

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Moon, Jennifer. Reflection in Learning and Professional Development. London: Kogan Page Ltd. 1999. Print. Neelands, Jonothan. “Miracles are Happening: Beyond the Rhetoric of Transformation in the Western Traditions of Drama Education.” Research in Drama Education, 9.1 (2004): 47-56. Print. Pollock, Della. “The Performative ‘I’.” Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 7 (2007): 239-255. Print. Robertson, Gwen. “An Art Encounter.” Eds. P. Kuppers and G. Robertson. The Community Performance Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 2007. (110-123) Print. Schön, Donald. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books. 1983. Taylor, Philip. The Drama Classroom: Action, Reflection, Transformation. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer. 2000. Print. Terret, Liselle. “Who’s Got the Power? Performance and Self Advocacy for People with Learning Disabilities, London.” Eds. T. Prentki and S. Preston. The Applied Theatre Reader. London and New York: Routledge. 2009. (336-344). Print. Thompson, James. Digging Up Stories: Applied Theatre Performance and War. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2005. Print. Woods, Peter. Critical Events in Teaching and Leraning. London and Washington, D.C.” The Falmer Press. 1993. Print.

Notes 1

Most of the study’s participants work in the United States (n=155) – the rest work in Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the United Kingdom. 2 The majority of respondents have received substantial training in their discipline both in formal degree programs as well as through professional experience in dance and theatre. In terms of advanced academic preparation, participants had completed a bachelor’s degree (84%); master’s degree (55%); doctorate (20%); and certificate program (9%). Sixteen percent attended a professional school or training program in dance or theatre; and three percent attended university but did not graduate. When asked to describe their primary professional experience in dance or theatre, participants indicated the following: professional actor (17%); director (11%); choreographer (11%); professional dancer (8%); member of a professional dance company (11%); member of a professional theatre company (9%); member of a professional dance/theatre company (3%). No professional experience was reported by 5 percent of participants. Significantly, the category with the highest percentage of response (24%) was “primary professional experience not listed among the survey’s selections.” These respondents specified a number of diverse roles in professional and community-arts settings including:

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freelance playwright; director; lighting designer; dramaturge; stage manager; solo performer; improvisational performer; circus performer; multi-disciplinary artist; arts administrator; professor; studio owner; and others. 3 See Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. Annual Report 2001-2. Canberra: Australian Government Publication as well as Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Annual Report 2007-8. Canberra: Australian Government Publication. 4 The word taiko means “drum” in Japanese. For the performance, an ensemble of amateur instrumentalists, who were part of a recreational taiko drumming group, performed a brief piece with traditional Japanese taiko drums and dressed in Japanese regalia. 5 The artistic team that developed Moving Mountains consisted primarily of a playwright, an artistic director, a composer/conductor, and a choreographer (myself). The artistic team was advised and directed by the Mountain Festival board as well as a team of science professionals from the University of Tasmania. In addition, there were teams of adult performers (all musicians and a few puppeteers) and teams of youth performers (including the “scientists” who were middle school-aged young women from a local private school, two groups of dancers from the private school as well as from a local public college, and the smaller group of dancers from the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy – who appeared only in the final scene discussed in this performance). 6 Private sponsorship is becoming an increasing necessity, but for the Mountain Festival, this is still new territory and not one of the "big three" upon which the organization depends. 7 Of the major funding that it sought for Windpiece, the Mountain Festival was denied only the DIMIA Living in Harmony grant. Interestingly enough, Glenorchy City Council - just a few kilometres outside of the Hobart city limits - did win the DIMIA grant to initiate its own "Diversity: We Are Who We Are" campaign, which was largely interested in highlighting and celebrating the presence of African refugee community members. "Diversity: We Are Who We Are" was organized primarily as a series of interventions in the public schools that would be documented by a professional photographer and rendered into posters that would hang on the interior and exterior walls of Tasmanian public transit buses. As the Glenorchy City Council won the DIMIA Grant just as the Mountain Festival won the other two major grants for Windpiece in 2006, festival organizer Chris Cooper contacted the council to see what opportunities might exist for collaboration, only to be refused, in a characteristically divided and regionally competitive moment. 8 The distinction here is between the “professional” artists, which the Mountain Festival organized had already “hired” to facilitate the creation of the community performance, and the “community” artists, who were expected to participate as performers voluntarily. The distinctions are quite fuzzy because the majority of the “professional” artists waived their fees as in-kind donations to the festival. 9 The young women in the group were originally from Eritrea, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.

CHAPTER FOUR A SOCIOCULTURAL APPROACH TO THEATRE PRODUCTIONS FOR SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING MICHELLE R. RAQUEL

Introduction Most people assume that theatre productions are beneficial for second language (L2) learning. In fact, studies on L2 learning through the use of scripted texts and full-scale theatre productions have claimed that a product-oriented drama approach is effective because it allows students to use the target language in meaningful communicative situations (Smith 6; Via 118). Performance further requires study of the narrative structure of the script, memorisation, learning characterisation, rehearsal, and finally performance in front of an audience. These theatre activities immerse learners in the target language, which allow them to acquire the target language naturally (Ryan-Scheutz and Colangelo 382). This happens because performance focuses learners on language use instead of language form (Hayati 211). Also, since play scripts are usually written in spoken grammar, this also gives students an example of authentic text (i.e., how native speakers would use the target language in interactions to manipulate dramatic situations) and therefore improves students’ pronunciation of initial and final consonants, stress and intonation, body language, and expressive ability (Miccoli 127; Bernal 27). Finally, performance of scripts exposes learners to contextualised vocabulary, idioms, and grammatical structures (Dodson 167; Donnery 29). These studies claim that L2 learning through theatre occurs because the process of preparing for performance develops students’ ability to produce contextualised communicative utterances through the performance of embodied language (Babayants 86; Lys et al. 209). Interpreting text and intensive rehearsals decrease physical inhibitions, increase concentration,

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and develop intercultural awareness (Fonio 25). Furthermore, rehearsals promote L2 learning because constant repetition, negotiation of meaning, and use of the L2 in informal situations develops L2 self-confidence, L2 motivation, and learner autonomy (Moody 148; Mattevi 15). However, performance of scripted texts have been criticised and considered a superficial learning activity because they are believed to be teacher-controlled language activities that have very limited opportunities for authentic communication (Kao and O'Neill): These closed and controlled drama techniques are useful for learners at the beginning level when they do not possess sufficient knowledge about the target language to deal with uncertainty. However, the pre-determined features of these activities restrict learners from progressing to higher levels using the target language (5).

Furthermore, some believe that scripted texts foster mechanical rote memorisation, imitation, repetition/recitation, and focus on accuracy rather than meaning, which do not foster students’ motivation and creativity. They reject scripted drama as a useful approach to L2 learning because they think scripted performances do not create dramatic tension and that tension only comes from students’ efforts to be accurate from reading aloud or memorisation (Kao and O'Neill). A significant point of contention in the use of scripted text for L2 learning is the structure of theatrical rehearsals for performance. Current practices to prepare for an L2 theatre production have relied on standard procedures as established by theatre practitioners. Although rehearsal activities vary significantly because directors and scripts are different, rehearsals almost always start by studying the text extensively, learning individual roles/characters, and then multiple rehearsals. If the production is part of a course, there could be additional activities that are dependent on course objectives or assessment criteria. These factors would make it seem that having a strict, rigorous framework for structuring for rehearsals seem almost impossible, It has also resulted in existing research and textbooks that offer guidelines on setting up a production to prioritise the final performance. L2 learning has become a by-product of the process because these textbooks and studies were only able to draw parallels between theatre activities and educational and/or L2 learning pedagogy (e.g., communicative language theory, task-based learning theory) (e.g., Maley and Duff 1; Wessels 3). To date, there has not been a systematic approach to the process of preparing a theatre production from an L2 theoretical orientation. My study aims to determine the feasibility of structuring rehearsals for a theatre production to adhere to principles of L2

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sociocultural theory to promote L2 development simultaneous with performance objectives.

L2 Learning from SCT Perspective From a sociocultural perspective, a second language (L2) is a sociallyconstructed artifact not considered just an object to be transmitted from expert to learner, but rather a tool that is appropriated and transformed in the process of mediation. It is the object and the tool used to become part of the L2 social world/context and the tool used to regulate one’s thinking. It is the medium through which development of higher psychological functions such as memory, perception, attention, and thinking happen within a social setting (Vygotsky Thought and language 141; Lantolf Sociocultural theory and second language learning 13).

Fig 4-1: L2 learning from Sociocultural Perspective

Interaction triggers the development of higher psychological functions because there is a dialectical movement of sociocultural meanings from

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one plane to another–first in the interpsychological plane (through otherregulation or mediation with the help of others), and then in the intrapsychological plane (through self-regulation or self-mediation). This process is also called externalisation and internalisation because the L2 is externalised (verbally used) by the learner to interact with the social world and internalised when they use the L2 to gain conceptual knowledge (Lantolf and Appel 1). Mediated activity is central to Vygotsky’s theory of learning. Vygotsky introduced the concept of zone of proximal development (ZPD) to indicate the gap whereby learner development occurs with appropriate support provided by a mediator. Vygotsky defines the ZPD as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers” (Mind in society 86). Thus, a ZPD activity is any interaction between an L2 learner (or learners) and an expert or artifact where an L2 learner’s actual L2 ability level and potential L2 ability level become observable (Lantolf and Thorne 263; Poehner "Group dynamic assessment: Mediation for the L2 classroom" 474). The mediation experience within the ZPD allows the learner to externalize and internalize during socially mediated activity. Mediation in the intra-mental plane happens when the learner uses private speech (i.e., speech to oneself) in L2 self-mediated activity. Private speech could be in the form of imitation, solitary language play (manipulation of words but addressed to oneself; includes breaking up words or sound play), vicarious response (responses to questions not directly addressed to the learner), repetition, the use of L1, private journal writing, and, reading aloud (Gánem-Gutiérrez 338; Ohta 14). Mediation in the inter-mental plane happens when an L2 learner interacts with L2 artifacts (e.g., books, films, songs) or engages proficient L2 speakers or peers (experts) in collaborative dialogue. This process allows learners to identify gaps in their L2 ability and either bridge this gap themselves or require the assistance of a significant other (Swain 102). If developmentally appropriate mediation is provided, L2 learning occurs. Mediation in the inter-mental plane best occurs when learners actively engage an L2 expert in purposeful collaborative dialogues (Lantolf and Appel 9). Dynamic assessment (DA) is a systematic way of thinking about ZPD activity in terms of assessment and teaching as a dialectic activity (Lantolf and Thorne 327). It is a qualitative assessment method grounded in Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory which allows one to consider an assessment activity as simultaneously a teaching activity; the teaching-

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assessment activity becomes an L2 learner-expert interaction to bridge the gap between current and potential ability. A DA activity initially occurs when learners are tasked to do an activity that is within his/her ZPD. If a learner requires assistance to complete the task, a mediator (L2 expert or peer), steps in and provides assistance. For assistance to effectively promote L2 learning, Poehner (Dynamic Assessment 167) proposed an interactionist DA model so that learners can be profiled and L2 development can be traced from one task to another. It allows for a systematic investigation of ZPD activity by observing learners as they go through stages of task completion. The following principles of DA, however, must be observed: (a) mediator-learner dialogue must have elements wherein there is intention of promoting learner development; (b) the learner must have the freedom to respond to mediator intervention; (c) interactions should be coherent in that they are progressive and not stand alone activities (i.e., they must increase in level of complexity to allow the learner to transfer or reconceptualise previous knowledge and demonstrate transcendence); and (d) the objective of the interaction should be the negotiation of meaning and the internalisation of conceptual knowledge (Mohammad, Mortaza and Firooz 896; Poehner "L2 dynamic assessment and the transcendence" 325; Poehner "Dynamic assessment as a dialectical framework" 255). Thus, any ZPD activity that observes these principles is a DA activity. The discussion above illustrates how L2 learning from an SCT perspective is a dialectic inter-mental and intra-mental process. The process of internalisation and externalisation of the target language through mediated activity, like DA, socialises learners into the L2 social context and consequently its semiotic systems. Mediation in the ZPD is the key activity that promotes L2 development and experts and learners can use a variety of forms of mediation to trigger externalisation and internalisation of L2. My study aims to determine to what extent a theatre production can be structured to provide multiple opportunities for mediation in the ZPD. More specifically, it aims to determine what theatre activities can introduce students to acting concepts and simultaneously develop L2 proficiency. This is part of a larger study that aimed to identify how students learn a second language through theatre.

Methodology To ensure validity and reliability of results, data were collected from multiple sources and results were triangulated across these sources (Yin 127). The following data were collected: video recordings of rehearsals,

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researcher’s field notes, pre- and post-production in-depth interviews, director and participant journals, and focus group discussions. NVivo 9 was used as a tool to analyse the data because it allowed for multi-modal data analysis. As suggested by Miles and Huberman, an interim analysis of the data was conducted regularly by coding, writing reflective memos about the codes, and pattern coding within subcases and, if applicable, across subcases. Coding was done using latent content analysis using standard procedures for creating and refining categories and themes (Patton 452).

Results and Discussion My study explores the extent to which rehearsals for a full-scale theatre production can be structured to adhere to principles of L2 sociocultural theory and subsequently promote L2 learning concurrently with theatre skills learning. More specifically, it investigated the rehearsal process of a theatre production of Rob John’s Living with Lady Macbeth performed by Hong Kong Chinese tertiary students. The study aimed to determine elements of this theatre production that facilitated and provided affordances for L2 learning. Every year, one of the tertiary institutions in Hong Kong provides funding to support students in their English proficiency development and to foster whole person development. Seventeen students participated in the production: eight were Hong Kong locals whose native language was Cantonese, six were from Mainland China and spoke Mandarin, and three were bilinguals from other countries (Malaysia, Canada, and India) whose first language was English. All students belonged to education programmes: one in the Chinese Education programme, one in Physical Education, and the rest were in the English teaching programme. Fourteen of these students were actors and three signed up to be in the technical team. There were two directors, Dr. Matthew (Matt) DeCoursey, who only spoke English, and myself. This mix of nationalities brought about a combination of English and non-English speaking people and so while students would mostly use Putonghua (Mandarin) or Cantonese to communicate with each other, the medium of communication of this production was English. It is important to note that neither directors were professional actors nor were they professional acting teachers. However, our combined experience gave us sufficient expertise to direct the production and lead this project. We did not intend to train students to become professional actors rather we hoped that students could learn the basic principles of

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drama and ttheatre so theey are equippeed to handle similar projeccts in the future as futture English primary p or secondary teacheers. Thus, we did some background reading on sociocultural s theory t and D DA but becausse not all students aree interested inn teaching theeatre in the fuuture, we did not alter rehearsal acctivities to acccommodate th his objective. It is also imp portant to note that sim milar to otherr theatre produ uctions for L22 learning (e.g., RyanScheutz andd Colangelo 382; 3 Fonio 25 5), there weree no specific language learning objectives but raather L2 learniing was suppoosed to occur by virtue of the fact thhat students will w be perform ming in the targget language. We estim mated we needded six month hs (Sept. 20100-Feb. 2011) to prepare for the prodduction. Whilee this could be b considered a lot of timee invested for a one aand a half hoour play, we felt that thiis length of time t was appropriate to complete the t project ob bjectives. Becaause most stu udents did not have forrmal theatre orr drama backg ground, we allso decided to structure the productiion process innto three phases: teaching ttheatre basics,, building a theatrical interpretationn of the textt, and rehearssals (see Fig gure 4-2). Number of hhours spent on o each phase is indicated iin brackets. This T paper will focus oon rehearsalss during the recruitment aand first phasse of the production.

Fig 4-2: Com mponents of Prodduction Processs

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Recruitment Phase Students were asked to complete a pre-task that served as both a diagnosis of their acting skills and their English ability. They were given two texts to read aloud, a monologue and a dialogue. These two tasks were chosen because these skills are required for the performance of the main script. Students were informed of the task and given copies of the script before they came to the pre-task session. The dialogue, A Possibility, was taken from a book of short dialogues for teens (Allen 1). This script was chosen because the characters and plot had flexibility in interpretation. Both men and women could also play the characters in the text. To perform this dialogue, students were allowed to choose their own partners from amongst the group of students that showed up for recruitment. The directors asked students to give two performances: (a) perform the dialogue as they understood and interpreted it and (b) perform the dialogue with character personalities given by the directors (i.e., students were asked to perform the same text but with character variations that were deliberately the extreme opposites of their interpretations). For example, if the students had said that they performed the text as two best friends, the variation would be two sisters who do not like each other very much. Students were also asked to explain how they interpreted the text and characters in the dialogue after each performance. Students were given 15 minutes to prepare for a two-part task. After the dialogue performances, students were asked to perform a monologue. The monologue was used to evaluate students’ potential to communicate a narrative to an audience. The monologue was taken from Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry 33). This monologue was chosen for the pretask for three reasons: (a) it contained a narration where students could use their voices to make sense of the logic in a text; (b) the narration gave emotional significance in that the scene of a child being injured was easy to picture and easy to identify with intuitively; (c) students were challenged as to how far they could show such emotion in their way of speaking; and (d) the speech gave clues as to the learners’ ability to create and understand a character not explicitly defined by the script. Similar to the dialogue, each student was asked to explain his or her interpretation of the text after each performance. The recruitment phase allowed directors to diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses in acting and in English. Having two different tasks allowed directors to assess what students get do on each task and across the two tasks. Asking students to perform the dialogue with two different kinds of characterisation allowed directors a chance to determine students’

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dramatic ability (i.e., if they understood characterisation and perform accordingly). Asking students to verbalise their interpretations of the texts provided insight into their conceptual knowledge of the text, acting, and performance. As an activity on its own, these activities provided insight into learners’ current ZPD ability however they are not ZPD activities as Lantolf ("Dynamic Assessment: The Dialectic Integration of Instruction and Assessment" 64) and (Poehner Dynamic Assessment 31) would define because assistance was not provided to help learners complete the task. At this stage of the production, the learners did not know each other and so were reluctant to provide assistance to another. Mid-productions interviews also indicated that students thought the recruitment phase was a screening process in that their performance would determine whether or not they would be part of the production. This miscommunication of task purpose could have caused students to feel nervous and consequently affected their performance.

Phase One: A Possibility The directors believed that just as an athlete would train to master a skill, actors must also train to develop individual acting skills. During this phase, students were given two scripts to perform to demonstrate their acting ability. Each lesson would build on an acting skill previously learnt and their performance would be assessed on the skill just learnt together with the previous skill learnt. Students were also told that they had to keep a journal about the rehearsal experience throughout the production process. The first five rehearsals were dedicated to direct instruction of Stanislavski’s system of acting (or realist acting) whereby actors were trained to use their real life experiences, thoughts, and emotions when they perform scripted text (Benedetti 109). The directors used the theatre activities in Figure 4-3 to introduce students to these acting skills. The first script that students were required to perform was the same text used in the pre-production task (A Possibility). This text was chosen as the students’ first scripted performance because we felt that the students would be more comfortable working on a text they were already familiar with. It was also quite short (about five minutes), had simple characters and a straightforward plot, giving students freedom to explore their creativity. The language of the text was also simple and contemporary which we hoped would not distract students from the task of learning dramatic skills.

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Fig 4-3: Phase One Theatre Activities

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In this phase, we divided three-hour rehearsal sessions into two parts– acting lessons and performance. We always started with a warm-up exercise to prepare the body and the mind for acting (i.e., stretching exercises to prepare the body physically, and voice exercises to strengthen actors’ articulation and projection). We also thought that performance of this script would be a great opportunity for them to apply the skills they had just learned. For this performance, students were asked to choose a different partner from their recruitment performance. They were given one hour to prepare and also had a choice of preparing in small or big groups. Students were also informed that the directors were available for help. After each performance, we asked the audience (other students) to comment on the performance. We also gave feedback on the positive aspects of the performance and notes on what they can do to perform better in the future. Students’ positive reaction to this rehearsal is exemplified through Harry (a pseudonym): Then, we pair up in two. I meet a new friend, coz the script we have read before, I can handle it better, and I can express my feeling in a more natural way. Even though there are some parts that I have to improve (e.g., blocking action of the character), I have a better sense in acting. I don’t know English in the first lesson, I don’t know what you’re talking about actually. When you say “relax, relax”, I don’t know the “organ” [body part]? I just know you say “relax relax…” Betty? She’s next to me and she translate it to me. It was ok. In this course, I want to improve my English. Although I am very afraid to speak in English, I have some chances to speak with directors and my classmates. I hope I can talk more in English, I can speak English brave, I can speak English fluently. It’s my dream! Go ahead!!! - Harry, Chinese language education major student, low English proficiency but has theatre background

The self-assessment indicates that Harry thought that he had given a better performance compared to the one during recruitment. Although not perfect, he felt that the performance was better mostly because he already knew the text and so his focus was on his acting skills. He himself noted the areas he could improve on such as physical movement. The comment above also indicates that he found initial rehearsals difficult because of his low English proficiency. At the beginning, he required a friend to translate what was said. The experience did not deter him from improving his

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English through theatre and he looked forward to working with cast members of the production in English. This verbalisation indicates that the task and theatre activities in this phase of the production were appropriate to develop Harry’s ZPD because Harry was able to recognise gaps in his acting skills and consequently worked towards closing these gaps. He was able to close these gaps with the help of his partner and the acting lessons that the directors provided. This ZPD activity provided opportunities for internalisation and externalisation of the L2 (Swain 102), and because the activity was done in the context of a theatre production rehearsal, the conceptual knowledge transformed was both the L2 and the acting skill. This interview extract, however, also shows that in this phase of the production, using English as the medium of instruction had a potential negative impact. The English immersion environment of rehearsals could put students off the activity altogether especially those with lower levels of English. It seems that the learning environment is more suited to students with high motivation to learn English or to be in the production. At this stage in the production, the directors were also more concerned about targeting group ZPD rather than individual ZPD and so were not able to provide assistance. Although group ZPD provided multiple opportunities for mediation in the intra-mental plane (e.g., mental rehearsal, vicarious response, solitary language play) (Gánem-Gutiérrez 338; Ohta 14), perhaps given more time, they could be more sensitive to individual needs of students at this early stage of the production.

Phase One: Dog Accident Radio Play The next couple of rehearsals were focused on physical movement and use of voice (see Fig 4-3). Students were asked to demonstrate comprehension of these acting skills is a text entitled Dog Accident (Saunders and Rook 1). It is a one-act play set in a city street sometime in the late afternoon. Four friends are rushing to catch a movie but on their way, they run into a dog that was run over by a car. They have a discussion on whether they should help the dog or just leave it. This discussion reveals much about how they think and feel towards each other and towards the helpless animal. As the discussion ensues, more is revealed about the characters until eventually two of the friends leave. The story concludes with the other two characters staying with the dog until he dies. We asked students to do two versions of this play–a radio play (use of voice only) and full performance of the play (with physical movement). We decided to use a longer text to teach the use of voice and character

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development so students could work on a full play instead of just a scene; they could visualise a whole play–see the beginning, middle and end of a play that will help them visualise how characters can change as the play progresses. We also selected this script because it was a naturalistic play similar to the first script but involved more characters. Similar to the first text, the script also uses colloquial language and the characters could be played an/or interpreted by either gender. The rehearsal for the radio play was divided into three parts–direct instruction, rehearsal time, and performance. One hour was devoted to direct instruction of voice techniques such as articulation, projection, and expression (intonation, stress) to develop character. Students were then given 30 minutes to rehearse for their radio play and one group was asked to perform to end the rehearsal. Below is an extract of how we tried to teach students develop characterisation and use their voices expressively. Matt: What's your character? Irene: I think he's a little bit detached. Not as affected as Alex. And he wants to be more scientific… but he can’t. Matt: Why are you friends with these people? Irene: We are going for a film? Matt: What’s that? Irene: We are going for a film. Matt: Ok… that's right… but you mean these are your friends and you've known each other a long time. - Irene, English language education major student, high English proficiency and has theatre background

When Irene was asked to articulate her interpretation of her character (lines 1-2), she could only give a general idea of the backstory of her character. Irene’s responses revealed that she could identify her character’s personality but it was a very vague concept. The directors prompted her to have a more concrete concept by asking her to verbalise the relationship of her character to the other characters in the play (line 3). Her response, however, was still unclear (lines 4-6) and so Matthew assisted her by giving her an example of an appropriate answer (line 7). To determine whether the group had understood the point that the directors were trying to make, the group was asked to attempt the task again but to only perform the first two pages of the script. Despite the demonstration of what the directors meant by having more expression, the directors noted no change in Irene’s performance. Irene herself realised the difficulty of the task and expressed this in her journal:

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The questions that the directors asked Irene during the feedback session indicated that the directors conceptualised acting as first, having a clear image of the character in the actors’ head. Then, the actor uses his body and voice to portray this character. Irene’s journal entry however reveals that she was focused on the use of her voice. Despite the demonstration of her group mates and the assistance given by the director, she was not able to improve her performance. Her attention was still focused on the use of her voice to act. It seemed that there was a gap between the directors’ understanding of Irene’s problem and Irene’s perception of her problem. In the directors’ evaluation, Irene was weakest at conceptualising her character but it seems that Irene perceived the problem to be with her use of voice rather than her conceptual understanding of the character. The excerpt is an indication that at this stage of the production the directors were attempting to assist students to understand what characterisation through collaborative dialogue however the assistance that the director was giving, in the form of questions, did not help to scaffold the concept for learners as what would be required if this was a DA activity (Mohammad, Mortaza and Firooz 896; Poehner "L2 Dynamic Assessment and the Transcendence" 325). Although there was an attempt to be more sensitive to individual needs and provide individual assistance, the assistance led to frustration because the student felt that learning gap to cross was almost insurmountable. Perhaps given more time, the directors could work on providing more scaffolding through graduated prompts.

Phase One: Dog Accident Full Scene Performance After all the students performed their radio play, we taught them how to use the words in the script and physical expression to create a character. Each group was asked to demonstrate their progress of developing their characters through tableaus. Groups were assigned which gender roles to play (e.g., four men, four women, or two men and two women) but given the choice of which event in the script they wanted to portray. Each group was asked to go on stage one at a time to show their tableau while we took photos. After all the groups presented, the photos were projected on the

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screen and students discussed within their groups how to improve their tableaux. They presented again and the rehearsal ended with the photos projected on the screen while students silently took down notes on how to show characterisation through their bodies. Finally, the students were asked to incorporate all that they have learned about acting through a full performance of a short extract from Dog Accident. We emphasised that we wanted to see a performance with clear characterisation through the use of voice and physical movement. We also explained to the students that we were asking them to perform this short text so that they would be equipped with the skills to interpret the final script on their own in the future. Students were given one hour to prepare. We did not require students to memorise the script (although some did) so as to focus their attention on acting with their bodies and their voices. After the preparation time, each group presented, and again, each presentation was followed by feedback from the directors. I loved the photos–looking at myself act… because it made me understand how different when you are in the show, at the audience’s perspective, so different. Actually I have to say, rehearsals didn’t help me that much in language or in building up confidence. But it does offer me a real opportunity to learn drama, to really, to treat this seriously, and learn about acting. - Erica, English language education major student, high English proficiency but has no theatre background Yeah, in last lesson, in the script I know how to read those words. But when I speak the line, and my group mate will tell me “oh, this word should be, it’s not ‘my’ [falling intonation], it’s ‘my’ [rising intonation and stressed] and the tone. Actually I have some difficulties in that [pointing to Acting–building relationships with other characters on the PowerPoint slide]. Sometimes I don’t know… I know the lines and when I read they respond to me but sometimes I don’t know what they’re talking about. I can’t give a good emotion and I can’t give a good reaction to them. And sometimes I have to look at my scripts, and this is too long and not in the character. I think the drama course is good for me because it has been three to four years I haven’t do it. When during this practice, I think it is useful and I feel like to be an actor. Also, I don't speak English in class and here, we get to use English a lot. Talking to other people… reading… - Harry, Chinese language education major student, low English proficiency but has theatre background

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Again, the theatre activities that the directors initiated provided multiple opportunities for inter-mental and intra-mental ZPD activity. Having photos taken provided opportunities for students to do selfassessment of performances. Preparing for the final show, which required group interaction, created opportunities for collaborative dialogue. However, the extracts above also demonstrated how learners with different L2 proficiency and theatre experience could experience the learning activity differently. Because Erica already had a high level of English proficiency, her efforts were focused towards learning acting. In contrast, performing a more complex text with multiple characters presented Harry with more challenges to overcome. The assistance that the peers provided also seem unhelpful because they were focused on stress and intonation but Harry was struggling with listening. Despite these limitations, the 15 hours spent on this phase of the production seemed to have had positive impact. I really don’t know how my English changed. I just think during three-hour rehearsal, after these three hours, a whole English lesson, my language system has been changed. But now I can’t find any exact evidence of improvement in (my) English, but I can feel it I think. Because after every rehearsal, my atmosphere has been changed because when I go to sleep, I often speak English in my dream. I can’t see any evidence in real life but I can feel it. - Josie, English language education major student, low English proficiency and has no theatre background

Josie’s account above describes the impact of rehearsals on her English. She felt that as a whole, rehearsals had given her an opportunity to be in an environment where she was forced to use the target language and thus had made her feel more comfortable with the language. Apart from confidence, the account describes how the production experience facilitated internalisation to more than just gaining conceptual knowledge but to one that was deeper and more personal. Phase 1 rehearsals made her see how English is more than just a tool for communication but as a personal resource that is linked to her cognition and emotion. Below is a summary of Phase 1 rehearsal activities (see Figure 4-4).

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Fig 4-4: Summ mary of Phase One O Production n Process

Phase 1 of this produuction processs demonstrateed that similarr to other studies on thheatre producction for L2 leearning (e.g., Lys et al. 209 9; Moody 148; Ryan-S Scheutz and Colangelo 38 82), L2 learniing naturally occurred mmersed in the through theaatre productioons because students s are im t target language whhen they readd the script, understand u it, interpret it, memorise m lines, and fiinally, perform m it. The proccess also provvided opportu unities for students to work collabooratively, imprrove pronuncciation, L2 co onfidence, L2 motivattion, interculltural awaren ness, and prroduce conteextualised communicattive utterancees through embodied e peerformance siimilar to studies suchh as Dodson (1167) and Foniio (25). Care m must be taken n, though, to account ffor groups of students s with varied L2 prooficiency levels. In this case study, it was clear that t students with w lower L L2 proficiency y required additional aassistance to work w with thee whole ensem mble. Fortunately, they had a strongger motivationn to learn about theatre, whhich motivated d them to work harderr on their Engllish. L2 learnning occurred in this phasee of the theattre production n because interaction oof inherent eleements of a th heatre producction such as directors, actors, the script, rehearrsals, and stag ge performannce triggered multiple, naturally occcurring ZPD D activities; the t scripts w were the L2 artifacts, directors annd peers were the experts, and a theatre acctivities were the ZPD activities thaat mediated L2 L internalisattion and exterrnalisation. Rehearsals R in phase onee were potenttially effectivee L2 learning environmentss because (a) learners were almost pressured to use English all the time, (b) peers and directorrs were expeected to supp port learners in L2 acting g and (3) feedback w was automaticcally considered constructtive. Thus, rehearsals r initiated L22 learning because learneers had multtiple opportu unities to

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experiment with the language and subsequently realise gaps in their English. Rehearsals were understood to be an environment where practice and experimentation with the target language was encouraged. What sets Phase 1 rehearsals apart from other rehearsals in other studies is that the results of this study determined that there were multiple ZPD activities that qualified as DA activities. Rehearsals became opportunities for directors to assess and provide instruction to help the learners become better actors through collaborative dialogue. They also adjusted their support based on their assessment of the learner’s capability and learning needs. Although some interactions could be better and assistance could be more systematic, these interactions have the makings of a DA activity because they were simultaneously assessment and instruction situations, which aimed to promote learner development. Furthermore, L2 learning occurred in this phase of the theatre production because learners had opportunities to demonstrate L2 development through the productions tasks within the rehearsal environment. According to Poehner ("L2 Dynamic Assessment" 325), tasks should be coherently structured to provide opportunities for learners to demonstrate development. This phase required three kinds of performances: A Possibility, Dog Accident–radio play and Dog Accident– full scene performance. Thus, learners developed acting skills because the tasks that they completed throughout this phase were also coherently structured like a DA programme. This quality of transcendence of tasks provided affordances for L2 learning in this learning environment because the graduated complexity of tasks and activities provided opportunities for learners to demonstrate development in dramatic skills and L2 skills by applying skills learned from previous tasks to more complex and demanding tasks. L2 learning was further facilitated by the performance of scripted texts of increasing levels of difficulty. As found in Moody (142), scripts provided affordances for L2 learning by virtue of their function in the project. In this project however, the scripts provided more learning opportunities because when the directors decided which final script to perform (Living with Lady Macbeth), we structured dramatic tasks within the production to build up their acting skills. Students first performed A Possibility, a 5-minute two-character scene. Then they performed Dog Accident, a 15-minute scene with four characters. Increasing the length of the text and having more characters to interact with required more acting skills. Thus, the final script, LWLM, meditated L2 learning because it served as an L2 artifact that initiated all other L2 learning processes in the learning environment.

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Conclusion My study demonstrated that similar to other L2 studies from a sociocultural perspective, a theatre production is an effective L2 learning environment because it can provide multiple opportunities for L2 development in the ZPD. If rehearsal activities can be intentionally structured as a DA programme to provide multiple DA opportunities, I think L2 learning in this phase of the production could be further enhanced. I realise, though, that the success of having DA interactions is dependent upon directors who make each interaction an assessment and teaching opportunity to develop L2 through acting. The results of my study also indicated that it was the transcendent quality of ZPD activities that provided students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate L2 development simultaneous with L2 dramatic ability. The risk, however, of structuring rehearsals in this manner is the time required to create assessment-teaching opportunities while preparing for a production. The results of this study showed that phase one, which was focused on introducing theatre skills, required 15 hours of rehearsal time. Although this is a short amount of time within the six-month time frame, this could be considered a luxury that most theatre productions do not have. In addition, this production was unique in that there were two directors, which enabled us to work with smaller groups of students. A solution for theatre practitioners who direct a show alone and wish to have more DA activities during rehearsals could be to work with shorter texts or to spend time training students how to assist each other during rehearsals. Students could also be made to explicitly write in their journals how their previous performance had impacted their current performance. This strategy would not only trigger internalisation but also focus students’ attention on development. An area of future research might be to investigate the nature of these mediations (i.e., implicit-explicit) and which forms of mediation develop L2 dramatic and language skills. As a director, phase one of this theatre production certainly made me realise how much Hong Kong Chinese students maximise L2 learning opportunities, especially from new learning environments. Although phase one rehearsals focused on development of acting skills, students quickly created L2 learning opportunities by virtue of the fact that students had to work with native speakers and because they had to perform English texts. This implies that if this were a credit-bearing course, having specific L2 learning objectives (e.g., specific grammar points, vocabulary words) could be highly challenging. The L2 learning objectives of this production

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were quite broad and so were not an issue. If specific L2 objectives were required by future productions, perhaps DA interactions could focus on developing skills that could be measurable, such as oral skills or literacy skills. Focus on developing L2 would also be enhanced if students had similar L2 proficiency levels.

Works Cited Allen, Laurie. Two-Character Scenes for Teens. Colorado Springs: Meriweather Publishing Ltd., 1996. Print. Babayants, Artem. "Acting and Second Language Pragmatics: Pedagogical Intersections.” MA thesis. University of Toronto, 2011. Web. Benedetti, Jean. The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting, from Classical Times to the Present Day. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Bernal, Penny. "Acting Out: Using Drama with English Learners." English Journal (High school edition) 96.3 (2007): 26-28. Print. Dodson, Sarah L. "The Educational Potential of Drama for ESL." Body and Language: Intercultural Learning through Drama. Ed. Gerd Bräuer. Vol. 3. Westport, CT.: Ablex Publishing, 2002: 161-206. Print. Donnery, Eucharia. "Testing the Waters: Drama in the Japanese University EFL Classroom." Scenario 3.1 (2009): 17-35. Print. Fonio, Filippo. "Stuffed Pants! Staging Full-Scale Comic Plays with Students of Italian as a Foreign Language." Scenario 6.2 (2012): 1827. Print. Gánem-Gutiérrez, G. A. "Repetition, Use of L1 and Reading Aloud as Mediational Mechanism During Collaborative Activity at the Computer." Computer Assisted Language Learning 22.4 (2009): 32348. Print. Hansberry, Lorraine. Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage Books, 1958. Print. Hayati, M. "Take 2. Act 1: Feeding Two Birds with One Scone! The Role of Role-Playing in Teaching English." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 5.2 (2006): 209-19. Print. Kao, Shin Mei, and Cecily O'Neill. Words into Worlds: Learning a Second Language through Process Drama. Contemporary Studies in Second Language Learning. Stamford, Connecticut: Ablex, 1998. Print. Lantolf, James P. "Dynamic assessment: The dialectic integration of instruction and assessment." Language teaching 42.3 (2009): 355-68. Print. —, ed. Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.

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Lantolf, James P., and Gabriela Appel. "Theoretical Framework: An Introduction to Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research." Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research. Eds. James P. Lantolf and Gabriela Appel. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1994: 1-32. Print. Lantolf, James P., and Steven L. Thorne. Sociocultural Theory and the Genesis of Second Language Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print. Lee, Irene. Personal interview. 10 Oct. 2011. Li, Josie. Personal interview. 18 Oct 2011. Lys, Franziska B., et al. "Performing Brecht: From Theory to Practice." Body and Language: Intercultural Learning through Drama. Ed. Gerd Bräuer. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2002: 207-32. Print. Maley, Alan, and Alan Duff. Drama Techniques: A Resource Book of Communication Activities for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. Mattevi, Yvonne. "Using Drama in the Classroom: The Educational Values of Theatre in Second Language Acquisition." Diss. Stony Brook University, 2005. Print. Miccoli, Laura. "English Through Drama for Oral Skills Development." ELT Journal 57.2 (2003): 122-29. Print. Miles, Matthew B., and Michael A. Huberman. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. Print. Mohammad, Bavali, Yamini Mortaza, and Sadighi Firooz. "Dynamic Assessment in Perspective: Demarcating Dynamic and Non-Dynamic Boundaries." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 2.4 (2011): 895. Print. Moody, Douglas J. "Undergoing a Process and Achieving a Product: A Contradiction in Educational Drama?" Body and Language: Intercultural Learning through Drama. Ed. Gerd Bräuer. Westport: Ablex Publishing, 2002. 135-60. Print. Ohta, A. S. Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. Print. Patton, Michael Quinn. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2002. Print. Poehner, Matthew E. "Beyond the Test: L2 Dynamic Assessment and the Transcendence of Mediated Learning." The Modern Language Journal 91.3 (2007): 323-40. Print. .

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—. "Dynamic Assessment as a Dialectical Framework for Classroom Activity: Evidence from Second Language (L2) Learners." Journal of Cognitive Education & Psychology 8.3 (2009): 252-68. Print. —. Dynamic Assessment: A Vygotskian Approach to Understanding and Promoting L2 Development. PA: Springer, 2008. Print. —. "Group Dynamic Assessment: Mediation for the L2 Classroom." TESOL Quarterly 43.3 (2009): 471-91. Print. Ryan-Scheutz, Colleen, and Laura M. Colangelo. "Full-Scale Theater Production and Foreign Language Learning." Foreign Language Annals 37(3) (2004): 374-89. Print. Saunders, James, and Robin Rook. Playforms. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.ersity Press, 1997. Print. Smith, Stephen M. The Theater Arts and the Teaching of Second Language. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984. Print. Swain, Merrill. "The Output Hypothesis and Beyond: Mediating Acquisition through Collaborative Dialogue." Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Ed. James P. Lantolf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000: 97-114. Print. Tan, Erica. Personal interview. 18 Oct. 2011. Via, Richard A. "The "Magic If" of Theatre: Enhancing Language Learning through Drama." Interactive Language Teaching. Ed.Wigal M. Rivers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987: 110-23. Print. Vygotsky, Lev S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Print. —. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Print. Wessels, Charlyn. Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print. Wong, Harry. Personal interview. 18 Oct. 2011. Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2009. Print.

PART II. RISKING

INTRODUCTION THE THREE CS OF RISK-TAKING IN THEATRE EDUCATION MONICA PRENDERGAST

In my undergraduate drama education courses, I tell students that before any genuine dramatic process can happen in their classrooms what I call "The Three C's of Drama" must be in place. Cooperation, Communication and Concentration are the basic skill areas students develop over the first weeks when working through drama. These skills help to create a classroom ensemble that can then begin to take ownership of the curriculum; a dramatized and living curriculum co-constructed by teachers and their students. Community, Creativity and Collaboration become yet another set of Three C's that move into the next phase of drama-based explorations. As I read through the chapters that make up this section, focused on the overarching topic of Risk, a new set of words began to emerge in my mind: Connection, Commitment and Collapse. It seems to me after taking in the bracing dose of reflective practice offered by the authors in this section—that the kinds of risks drama and theatre educators enter into almost every day involve these words and related risk-taking processes. Amanda Wager and her colleagues engaged in an applied theatre project with a highly vulnerable population of Vancouver street-involved youth and their mentor survivors. Applied theatre projects with vulnerable populations are often subject to an understandable lack of disciplined commitment due to the nature of participants' lives. In projects of this kind, to actually reach a point when something is ready to be performed is a victory. Yet the theatre product itself plays a very secondary role, in my view, to the more important role of Connection. The risk Wager faces in her work is the risk to connect with those whose lives may feel and be very different from her own. Here I make no assumptions about Wager's past history, about which nothing is revealed, but rather her situation at the time of the project. Wager worked with these youth and their mentors as a

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graduate student and academic researcher, which is a significant class distinction from her participants. Reaching across this social divide through theatre-making offers a remarkable opportunity for all involved to find ways to connect. Listening to the stories shared, honouring and respecting them without judgment, translating them into scenes, monologues and scripts, all provide tangible rewards to facilitators, researchers and participants despite the many ways this project could have conceivably failed. James McKinnon and Ralph Upton risked challenging their theatre production course students to commit to a devising/adaptation process that was new to them—high wire acrobatics without a net—and course instructor McKinnon ended up taking a greater risk in removing himself from the process. Commitment to a scripted theatre-making process is considerable; commitment to performance creation from a scripted source is even more demanding. It is quite easy to read through a reflective practice case study such as McKinnon and Upton’s and consider all the ways the course might have/should have gone to smooth the path for both instructors and students. Grounding students in devising praxis rather than offering an overview of Shakespeare adaptations may have helped in this regard. And Ubu the King as source material is yet another level of risk, given the inherent strangeness of Jarry’s play that may feel very alien to students. Ultimately, hindsight is not very helpful here and despite these pedagogical caveats what unfolds in this chapter is an honest and forthright account of a difficult experience, as most devising projects are. I admire McKinnon’s risky decision to step out of the group process and his power-over positions as instructor and director. And I also admire the frank discussion of the inhibiting aspects of mandatory institutional evaluation. In the end, these students shaped and performed a piece on their own terms, which can absolutely be viewed as a success. McKinnon and Upton's chapter gives us a refreshing dose of frankness in reflecting on a flawed process, but one from which we can all learn. Suzanne Osten’s work with her Swedish theatre company Unga Klara combines the elements of commitment and connection that lie within risktaking. Her commitment to creating aesthetically and intellectually rich theatre for babies, children and adolescents is evident in this interview. Her insistence that we are all capable of accessing and practicing art—no matter how ‘ordinary’ our lives, or the social class we inhabit—is commendable. The deep connection Osten and her company make with audience members, families, schools and young people is a model for how similar companies can function in mindful and authentic ways. Osten’s conversation with Heather Fitzsimmons Frey allows the possibility for

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readers to recommit and reconnect with what we in theatre education and/or applied theatre cherish as core values. If the demanding work we do is not for young people, for an audience, and for a better world, then it is not risking enough. Next comes Collapse (for us all, finally). Mia Perry invites us to stare with her into the abyss at what at times faces any theatre artist/educator: The possibility and experience of failure. I have also written on the topic of failure and misperformance and was drawn into Perry’s chapter that so resonates with my own interests. Perry offers a provocative argument in favour of failure as both a creative and educational experience. Her survey of artists and companies that make productive use of failure in their aesthetics pushes readers to rethink over-simplistic notions of Success=Good and Failure=Bad. Considering how success is measured via standardized curricula, teaching approaches and tests in education is a more than worthwhile critique that resonates well with McKinnon and Upton’s case study. I am grateful to Perry for introducing me to glitch art, an art movement interested in technological glitches as sites for artmaking. In these ways, and many more, artists are following Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic lines of flight that embrace failure as beneficial parts of the process. From a theatre education perspective, what can be learned through the reconceptualization of failure? At the very least, Failure could become a potent topic to address in our classroom practice with students. Exploring how failure and success play out in their own educational and personal lives would allow young people some critical agency and potentially deeper understanding of essential false constructs that underpin capitalist culture (Winner Takes All). It might also make for some great (yes, successful) theatre.

CHAPTER FIVE HIDDEN PEDAGOGIES AT PLAY: STREET YOUTH RESISTING WITHIN APPLIED THEATRE AMANDA C. WAGER

Over the fifteen years that I have been doing drama work as a classroom teacher with marginalized children and adolescents in public schools and their surrounding communities, I have found that an element of resistance is a natural part of the created learning environment. Youth express resistance in many different forms: ambivalence, aggression, desire, silence, play, repulsion, humour, failure, ridicule and absence (to name a few ways I characterize youth resistance). This element of resistance can range from weak to overwhelming in practice: ignoring others, arriving late or not at all, constantly interrupting, employing improvisational tangents, refusing participation, asking to participate more, continuous joking about, throwing things, and/or expressing oneself with harsh words. In my experience as a drama educator resistance can often indicate moments that lead to comfort and critical thought, possibly even changing the direction of youths’ thoughts or action. Youth resistance prompts me to question if “resistance” is a necessary part of pedagogy in order for learning to happen. Youth resistance within the Surviving in the Cracks (Wager et al.) popular theatre project, which I will explain in detail within this chapter, was so strong that participants shut down and came very close to quitting. This would have led to an abandonment of the theatre project as a whole. Because of the consistent occurrence of youth resistance during rehearsals, I am asking here how resistance drives youth and why? Also, what is learned through resistance, specifically in applied theatre? Within this chapter I aim to use the Surviving in the Cracks popular theatre project as an example of youth resistance and applied theatre, analysing and articulating how resistance

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led to moments of comfort and furthered their critical thinking, independent thoughts and actions.

Surviving in the Cracks: Popular Theatre with Street Youth Surviving in the Cracks is the title of a play that originated from a youth-led popular theatre project by Vancouver Youth Visions Coalition & the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Partnerships in Community Health Research. Popular theatre, an applied theatre practice, best describes the type of theatre method the youth employed for the production. It is commonly understood to be a politically-motivated, community participatory theatre form that involves specific communities in identifying, examining, and taking action on matters that it believes need change (Conrad; Prentki and Selman; Little). All of the participants/actors for this project were youth who had at some point, or were currently, living on the street. The participant-written play tells the story of the closures of the Vancouver underage safe houses, where three of the youth participants had once lived. The history of the underage safe houses began in 1994 when the British Columbia provincial government created the underage safe house program as part of a community action plan to help sexually-exploited street youth ages 13 to 15. The three Vancouver underage safe houses were intended to be “a voluntary youth-centred service intended to provide short-term protective accommodation on an emergency crisis-intervention basis to primarily high risk youth” (Ministry 1). These homes were a safe and stable retreat from the dangers that youth faced living on the streets, such as working in the sex trade or selling drugs. In 2004, due to lack of governmental funding, the underage safe house program closed. With only a two-week notice the provincial government, citing fiscal re-organization, shut down all three Vancouver underage safe houses. Unfortunately, with the closures many youth lost safe, stable housing. The youth took action by creating Vancouver Youth Visions Coalition (VYVC), a street-involved youth-run NGO, whose members marched to Vancouver City Hall on March 31, 2004 in protest of the closings. As a result, the City of Vancouver asked the British Columbia provincial government to reinstate funding, but the province did not respond and the safe houses were not reopened. In 2008, still with a driving passion, three VYVC youth leaders— Davina, Fraggle and Trevor—partnered with university researchers in UBC’s Partnerships in Community Health Research (PCHR) to write a

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literature review on the underage safe house closures and the resulting impacts on youth. Through collectively writing this review, the VYVC youth leaders generated the idea to create a collaborative, participatory research and dissemination project in the form of a theatrical production, which they then named Surviving in the Cracks. The youth and four UBC researchers chose theatre as their medium because their objective was to invite members of the Ministry of Children and Family Development to the production and to reach a wider audience, bringing awareness to the troubles that street youth face without safe and stable housing; their ultimate goal being the reinstatement of the underage safe houses. Having no script-writing or acting experience, the three youth leaders and four UBC researchers invited me to be the Artistic Director/Researcher of the production. The research team of five UBC graduate students (myself included) and three VYVC youth leaders conducted the youth-led study. Research funding came from PCHR and other non-profit Vancouver-based youth organizations, providing the VYVC youth leaders-who covered roles such as leadership, researcher, babysitter, actor, script-writer, stage managerwith a part-time income, while the other youth actors were paid $20 per hour of rehearsal (approximately four to six hours of rehearsal per week). During the first week of rehearsals, the VYVC youth leaders recruited approximately 15 street youth, but only five1 committed to attending the six months of rehearsals on a weekly basis to participate in the final production. Of these eight youth (three VYVC youth leaders and five youth actors), there were three female and two male First Nations youth (one female was half South Asian) and one female and two male White youth between the ages of 16 and 25. All participants came from working class or lower backgrounds and had been or were currently part of B.C.’s Child Welfare system living in foster care (five youth were living in foster homes at the time). Three of the participants have children (a total of six children under 10 years of age) and a babysitter needed to be present at every rehearsal. The five UBC researchers, who were not paid, were between the ages of 20 and 35; the two female and two male graduate students were White and one male was Japanese-Canadian, while I am a White Dutch-American. Besides myself, all of the researchers and participants were born in other parts of Canada and had moved to Vancouver. I had previously lived in Chicago for four years working as a public elementary school teacher, but was born and raised in Los Angeles and Amsterdam. All youth leaders, participants and director/researchers acted in the final performance, with the exception of one female participant who had missed various rehearsals due to a pregnancy she did

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not initially know about when she committed to the project. Of these youth, only one had previous secondary school acting experience and a high school diploma. Surviving in the Cracks utilized an abundance of drama methods and multimodal literacies to represent the youth movement, which included improvisations and playbuilding; scripting narratives from youth journals and collaborative oral storytelling; and integrating raw footage of past protests and participant interviews into the performance. The first three months of rehearsals were dedicated to creating a script and doing drama activities, such as role-plays, improvisations, character-building, journaling and meditations, with the youth so that they would become more comfortable performing and explore ideas to collaboratively write the script. Rehearsals took place the majority of the time in an adult shelter in downtown Vancouver, on Sunday afternoons. During the fourth month I facilitated the writing of the script with the youth leaders as well as three scenes that were scripted from one of the youth actor journals by two UBC researchers. In the last two months we added more rehearsal times on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and used meeting rooms in the basement of a downtown hospital. After a total of six months of script creation and rehearsal, we held two public performances: one at an adult shelter in downtown Vancouver on June 18, 2009, and another the following evening at Ironworks Studio (www.theironworks.ca/events09_June.htm). Although the process was challenging, youth post-production interviews reflect that the community formed and the impact that the project had on the youth was powerful and positive. Audience feedback was inspiring and motivational from the one production we were able to fund. However, the production had no impact on reinstating the underage safe house program. Ministry officials were invited to the production, but none attended. The audience members were family, friends, community members and social workers. The data in this chapter emanates from this team-run project. My primary data sources are the script, rehearsal footage, and post-production interviews. Reviewing this data, I sought pedagogical moments during rehearsals that reflect when youth resisted writing and rehearsing in the applied theatre project. Within these moments, I analyse for instances of resistance and question what this resistance did for the youth and why it is important to theatre and learning.

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Theoretical Framework: Resistance, Power and Pedagogy “The words, opinions, and sense-makings of marginalized youth remain underrepresented in educational research.” (Loutzenheiser 111)

My desire throughout this chapter is to explore the theatre project through a critical youth studies methodological lens of “desire-based” research (Tuck 416), which draws on the complexities and power dynamics of the youth and researchers’ everyday lives emulated through self-determination and contradictions. This approach focuses on the youth creations and possibilities rather than on the damage that occurred in their past, which can further promote marginalization of these youth. Historically, the damage needs to be recognized and honoured, but the focus needs to be taken away from youth leaders’ and participants’ trauma narratives and instead address possibilities seen through the youths’ desire to create and perform a theatrical production in front of public audiences. Youth resistance is subjective and means different things to different people. My own interpretation of resistance places resistance as always being in relation to something else; it does not happen in a vacuum, it is relative to the expectations put upon youth. These expectations can be expressed by authority figures or institutions that often exert power over youth (i.e. teachers, parents, school, members of society or institutions). My focus is on looking at how this authority affects youth learning within the space of an applied theatre project and how this can reflect on education in general for youth, as I believe that learning takes place in many different facets of our lives. The following subsections further articulate the lens through which I view resistance, specifically in regards to pedagogy and power.

Resistance & Pedagogy Feminist pedagogue Patti Lather describes pedagogy as “the condition and means through which knowledge is produced” (qtd. in Nicholson 38). As a feminist pedagogue and critical youth scholar, I put emphasis on the conceptual shift from youth as “future citizens,” to youth as “present civic actors” (Ginwright et al. xx), and consider pedagogy as experience, which is always in-the-making for children, youth and adults (see Best; Ellsworth). These experiences happen in multiple places and spaces of our everyday lives: a classroom, a home, the playground, a museum, a theatre space, a hospital, on the street, etc. We—children, youth, and adults—are

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constantly taking in information and learning from our environments, both individually and collectively. Feminist pedagogy is based on the idea that dimensions of power are always at play within the learning environment and there is a need to address and challenge forms of patriarchy. Similar to many feminist scholars (see Davies; Ellsworth; Grady; hooks; Lather) my initial study of pedagogy began with critical pedagogy, a social educational theory rooted in the experiences of marginalized people. Feminist and critical pedagogy emphasize that all people should be regarded as conscious beings and that learning consists of cognitive acts rather than the transferring of information. Within Surviving in the Cracks, these cognitive acts were created through the medium of drama. Further intertwining pedagogy and theatre, the foundation of popular theatre is based on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed along with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Freire, conceptualizing literacy pedagogies, and Boal, conceptualizing public drama and theatre initiatives, created and wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Theatre of the Oppressed respectively in the seventies as a response to political and economic circumstances developing in rural communities of Brazil. My feminist pedagogical work with youth in the theatre has reflected that resistance often “produces, prompts, or prevents” critical thought and action (Tuck and Yang 526). In contrast to Paul Willis’ classic resistance and reproduction theory that describes “youth resistance” as reproducing and resisting any upward class movement for youth, Tuck and Yang and fellow scholars in a special journal issue of Youth Resistance Revisited, challenge readers to “think about youth negotiations of educational injustices in ways that defy the ubiquitous dichotomy of reproduction or resistance” (523). These scholars argue that ideas surrounding youth resistance are grounded in colonial perspectives of teleological resistance theories with the end purpose being that of improvement or progress; such as from savage to civilized or unschooled to educated or oppressed to liberated (522). Building off of the philosophical ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, Tuck and Yang describe non-teleological resistance theories as “messy,” “unfixed,” and “always taking shape,” while “understand[ing] that change happens in ways that make new, old-but-returned, and previously unseen possibilities available at each juncture” (522). Throughout my time working with the youth in Surviving in the Cracks, I found resistance led to moments that shaped their pedagogical experiences. These moments of resistance forced us to stop, breathe, and take a closer look at how these small or large acts of resistance unfixed our, my, or the greater community’s expectations of the play. In this way,

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my research supports and furthers non-teleological resistance theories, such as Ginwright, Noguera and Cammarota’s “youth development as resistance”, which articulates the connection between youth development and youth resistance to social injustice and argues that “sociopolitical conditions, collectivity, youth agency, and youth rights must be at the foreground of any conceptualizing of youth development” (qtd. in Tuck and Yang 524).

Resistance and Power Youth cultures, such as those of street-involved youth, are shaped by histories, migration flows, and diasporic shifts (Dillabough and Kennelly 2). They navigate through discourses of authority, such as zero tolerance, surveillance cameras, and continuous policing in neighbourhoods, schools and cities (Gallagher The Theatre of Urban). All of these moldings contribute to youth resistance, an overarching characteristic found within critical youth studies and relate to the reasons that the VYVC youth organization protested the safe house closures and chose to create a theatre performance to advocate for their reopening. The core of critical youth studies lies within the boundaries of power and authority, and how these two aspects influence research being done and disseminated with children and youth (see Best; Cammarota and Fine). The VYVC youth organization and creation of the theatre project was a resistance to the Ministry’s safe house closures, but in this chapter I focus on the many moments during the six-month creation of Surviving in the Cracks where youth showed resistance to activities such as doing warm-ups, memorizing lines and rehearsing the script. Often these moments of resistance are accompanied by power and authority shown from or between the UBC researchers, youth leaders and youth participants. Paying attention to these instances, I am inquiring about how resistance and power might relate within this applied theatre project. Surviving in the Cracks: Analyzing and Articulating Youth

Resistance within Applied Theatre Within this section I share some analysis of Surviving in the Cracks data, focusing on pedagogical moments where points of resistance are apparent. In line with the theoretical perspective that I bring, I look at points of resistance in terms of pedagogy and power. Data is taken from field notes during rehearsals: the first rehearsal is early in the process when the youth demanded a script be written, the second and third

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rehearsals are one month prior to the final performance. Data is also taken from post-production interviews that were conducted a month and a year after the final production.

Analysis: resistance & pedagogy After the first two months of rehearsals doing community building, seeing cast members come and go, and initial scene and character brainstorming through journaling and improvisational exercises, the youth demanded that a script be written by the youth leaders and myself. This resistance to the continuation of prior-planned rehearsals was a call to action for the writing of the script. By resisting future rehearsals from taking place, the youth dramatically moved the production forward, prompting the space and time for the creation of the multiple youth stories needing to be told. During the meeting where the youth articulated their demands for a script, the entire cast then collaboratively brainstormed and created an outline for the play (see Images 1 & 2), as indicated by a researcher below in his field notes: Amanda brought along a pile of cardboard and markers. We spent the entire time in a circle around the cardboard throwing out general and specific ideas about the play. From a process perspective, it seemed to be quite a useful exercise for everyone - it was a very participatory way of getting the youth to see how individual experiences could 'fit' into the overall story we are aiming to tell. (Field notes. 3/22/2009)

The resistance to the planned improvisational activities for the day led to pedagogical moments of critically thinking about the formation and maintenance of youth homelessness, while collectively creating an outline for the script by incorporating multiple youth stories.

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Fig 5-1: Cardboard Brainstorms

Fig 5-2: Cardboard Brainstorms

Image 1 and 2: Cardboard Brainstorms The next all-cast rehearsal was cancelled so that the three youth leaders (Davina, Fraggle, and Trevor) together with two of the five university researchers (Laura and myself) wrote the play based on youth journals and stories. Researcher: Are the scenes you wrote from your personal experience or people you know? Youth Participant: Personal experience.

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Chapter Five Researcher: So three scenes made it into the play from your own personal experience. Youth Participant: Yeah, they did it from journals. And all three scenes that I wrote in my journal made it into the play. And it’s pretty empowering actually that my story is kinda out there.

Once rehearsals resumed, the cast did a reading of the entire script, making various edits usually specific to language used on the streets. It was agreed upon that nobody would play “themself” in order to not relive the situation. Due to the fact that many of the cast members resisted memorizing their lines, the script was rarely performed as written line-byline; interpretation and improvisation were ever present. Participants’ reasons as to why they did not memorize their lines were mainly due to time constraints (no childcare, school, work) and lack of interest. This resistance to line memorization can be seen to have given the youth a space to retell each other’s stories depending on how they re-interpreted them in that moment. The youth were able to rethink, re-enact, and observe each other’s histories and narratives. They could change the historical situation through improvising different lines and reactions than we had initially written. This was a type of pedagogy where the youth critically thought about and embodied each other’s experiences of living or working in the safe house, surviving on the streets and working as social workers for the child welfare system. Through role-play the youth explored different outcomes through the use of drama. The two evening rehearsals took place between 5pm and 8pm in the basement of a local urban hospital. In rehearsal data filmed from the small confined conference rooms, I observed that moments when the youth seemed comfortable and safe were when they did these independent improvisations during the rehearsals of scenes without being told any instruction other than, for example, “Let’s rehearse Scene 6.” For instance, Craig and Davina role-play an extensive improvisation during the “Squat Scene.” They add in an imagined story about how they climbed up into the squat and where they had been the previous morning. While in role as squatters, other cast members join the conversation and there is complete focus and participation from all actors in role within this imagined scene. These improvisational moments happen throughout all rehearsals, but increased the more familiar the youth became with the script and comfortable with each other. They are reflective of the youths’ imaginations, comfort levels, and trust with their own improvisational abilities while working with each other. However, they can also be seen as an act of resistance to the written script, to the facilitator “on book,” and to

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the cast members who memorized their lines. In a sense, they are an interruption to the continuation of the scene since those who knew their lines could not continue “on book” in the newly improvised scene. For those improvising, this interruption created a deeper sense of comfort in the real and imagined space of the theatre.

Analysis: Resistance and Power Leadership circulated between the youth leaders and the director/researcher (myself). In the second rehearsal two youth leaders were present. Youth circulated power and did not rely on the facilitators for all decision making to co-construct elements of the play. At times the director/researcher acted in role for absent cast members while a youth leader facilitated the rehearsal. The youth took humorous pleasure in this process and teased each other, while at the same time demonstrated mutual respect through different modes of address, such as gestures and silences. Craig, the youngest cast member (16 years old), demonstrated the most acts of resistance throughout the rehearsal process. He briefly comments on his own acts of resistance during a post-production interview when he says, “My least favourite [moment] would have to be showing up late, hung over and getting told what to do”. Often his resistances were seen as interruptions and I, along with other cast members and researchers, were very frustrated by his behaviour. In the second rehearsal, Craig got into a disagreement with Fraggle (youth leader) about needing to leave early. Following this disagreement, we did a warm-up activity that involved throwing hacky sacks. Craig intentionally started throwing the hacky sacks at Fraggle (instead of to Fraggle). After Fraggle became increasingly frustrated and Craig made fun of her, I explained to him that he was not being respectful and he walked to the side of the room, sitting down angrily while yelling at me. A few minutes later I tried to invite Craig back to the warm-up circle and Davina (youth leader) said, “Craig when you feel like you can be productive and come back to the group and join in with everything that we are doing, just stand up and come back, ok? Thank you.” Craig looked up to Davina. He often looked to her for support. His facial reaction to this comment was calm and appreciative. We then did an articulation activity and Craig (from his seat) yelled to me, “That’s not even right Amanda! You don’t even know what the words are!” I asked him for help and he added in a bunch of new articulation exercises to our warm ups, such as “unique New York.” The cast repeated three different exercises after Craig. Through Craig’s acts of resistance, the power relations moved from me to Davina to me again and to Craig. His

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resistance to the warm-up and disrespect towards Fraggle challenged the members and leaders of the group, but also prompted other new and useful practices in our warm-up activities creating a space for Craig’s leadership. This brought a new level of comfort, confidence and participation from Craig for the remainder of the rehearsal. Craig reflects on his experience of doing the play below: Researcher: What has this experience meant to you? Craig: Well, it really changed my view on life. Researcher: How so? What are you going to remember most about this experience? Craig: Team work works.

The majority of acts of resistance throughout the rehearsals were in the form of interruptions to the play process. As with the example above, Craig often wanted attention and support from Davina and would act out and stop the rehearsal process in order to get it. Other resistances to rehearsals continuing were by youth on their cell phones, cast members’ kids running in and out of the room (there were usually six cast members’ children between the ages of two and nine being babysat in a nearby room during rehearsals), hospital announcements (“CODE WHITE”), jokes being made, and from youth continuously adding on lines or comments to the play script. Another form of resistance was youth bickering, as demonstrated here: Davina: I think that the social aspect of [the play] stands out because there was like a lot of social interactions that happened and it was pretty consistent and surprisingly it went well actually because the group of kids that we have, I know that there was like lots of like annoying moments but it still went amazingly well for that category of kids, if that makes sense. Researcher: Did you consider the rehearsal process and the whole play process safe or unsafe? Davina: Safe …Cause, um, the participants felt relatively safe with each other most of the time and there was like small tiffs but they seemed to diffuse quickly.

The youth consistently picked on each other. Picking on each other seemed to be a way that the youth created deeper or, in some ways, more shallow relationships. It often felt comforting and at times felt chilling. For instance, Craig and Davina were challenged to focus while rehearsing the

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last and most difficult scene where Craig’s character was coercing Davina’s character to stay at his house in order to take sexual advantage of her. Below is transcribed film footage from a rehearsal of the scene: Craig (in-role as Matt): You’re pretty hot. Davina (in-role as Vanessa): Actually I think I should probably get going. First bus is leaving soon. Craig (in-role as Matt): (sweetly) No you should just chill with me for a little bit. I will get you where you need to go after. [We all start laughing because of how polite Craig is acting. Scene stops.] Director: Craig you are being so nice! Fraggle (Youth Leader): Channel your inner douche-bag, man! Let’s go! Davina (Youth Leader): I know you have some! (Group laughter.)

In this example, Davina and Fraggle supported and directed Craig through this scene by “picking on him.” Craig and Davina consistently resisted rehearsing this scene because of the sexual theme and power dynamics between the two actors (Davina was Craig’s mentor, yet Craig was supposed to abuse Davina in this scene). Fraggle telling Craig that he is a ‘douche-bag’ and Davina agreeing about this brought humor to the moment, creating a much more comfortable environment for Craig to rehearse his most uncomfortable role in the play.

Fig 5-3: Davina and Craig rehearsing.

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Absences and lateness had the effect of resistance throughout the entire production. In the interview below, Trevor expresses how he questioned whether youth were going to show up to the final production and how proud he was of Craig for being present in the end: And it’s the same with say Craig, the lack of interest that he showed through the process and even to the product…I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to show up [to the final performance], especially Craig. And to see Craig show up, um, I think to me was just like probably the proudest moment cause I think that out of everyone I think he did the best job.

Although there is no way of knowing when the absences or latenesses were purposeful resistances, subconscious resistances, or just interferences from other aspects of the youths’ lives, these events led to many frustrations and disagreements over how much a cast member should get paid when they only showed up for part of the rehearsal. It also created different dynamics depending on who was present for each rehearsal. I consider these resistances a form of power because they would stop what we were doing and focus all of our attention towards the person who was resisting. During certain rehearsals, resistances were continuous, leaving much space for laughter, frustration, and discussion. Researcher: What would you say you are going to remember most from this experience? Angela: The ups and downs. Dragging myself there when I really didn’t want to be there and laughing a lot…Yeah. I was really kinda shut in for a while. I was really shut in. So this kinda built a bit of community.

Fig 5-4: Mid-scene Craig decides to leave to “wash his hands”

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The humorous resistances often led to deep community building, while other, more frustrating resistances led to power struggles, mentorship, and youth/director/researcher-leadership. Resistance, in general, was the norm.

Dramatic Pedagogical Spaces of Resistance Within Foucault’s thinking on power, he points out that although there is no general grand theory that explains how power works in multiple sites, “where there is power there is resistance” (95). Foucault explains that power is everywhere; it is neither positive nor negative; it is a part of love and pedagogy. Within the rehearsal process, power was negotiated and unpacked in multiple ways between the youth participants, youth leaders, and director/researcher. These moments of power relations are evident by the acts of resistance that followed. I can characterize the drama work with these youth as a mixture of complete chaos and humour. Towards the last few weeks of the rehearsal process, due to many acts of resistance, there seemed little chance for a comprehensive performance to occur. There was much doubt from all involved. But in spite of this seeming chaos, pedagogical practices and knowledge were being constructed collaboratively. In collaboratively creating a safe space, the youth participated in an informal educational drama process in much the same way students might participate in drama class in the context of formal schooling. As often is found in formal schooling, resistance was often evident, promoting and prompting new directions, thoughts, comfort levels and actions. Although the safe houses were not reopened, in post-production interviews all eight of the youth expressed how participating in the play created a strong sense of community and that they would do it again, even unpaid. Many of their post-production interview responses, like the youth leaders below, express how even the ‘ups and downs’ of the play were moments that they would remember as being part of the community that was built. The whole process. I think the process was, I think it was interesting and I think it was a huge eye-opener. Not only because of what the outcome was, but I think of the fact of being involved from stage one to say stage five and being able to have a voice and, um, just to see the process of it from you know doing the lit review to you know, um, to doing the journals and coming together and just looking at, you know, what part of it we want to include, you know, and then to actually go through it and to write the script and the long process that that took and then the rehearsals and the struggles that we had with the rehearsal. I think for me, um, I think a lot of us just

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Chapter Five would never have had the opportunity to be able to do something from beginning to end and so I think for a lot of us to actually be able to say, you know, that we created the play from beginning to end, that we created the script, we did the rehearsals, we did, you know, the set, we did everything. You know, it’s a huge accomplishment for a lot of the youth that were involved. And I think that there is some youth that really blossomed and there was some youth who, you know, yeah there was conflict, um, you know, but you know that comes with, that comes with being together almost every day for six months…

My intentions in writing this chapter have been largely influenced by my belief that drama affords possibilities for working across differencesthrough acts of mimesis, resistance, and critical questioning-leading to deeper understandings of self and other and the liminal spaces between self and other. With no previous script-building or acting experiences, the youth risked much in the exploration of themselves and their collectivehistorically, culturally, socially, spatially, pedagogically, and collaboratively—in creating and performing their collective stories in front of public audiences. I hope that this chapter may lead to more risk-taking with youth where resistances are recognized as spaces to create new directions and possibilities within theatre and learning.

Acknowledgement I would like to acknowledge, with great respect and gratitude, my coresearchers within this project, the youth leaders and university researchers: Davina Boone, Jennifer Dixon, Trevor Coburn, Dr. James Frankish, Justine Goulet, Dr. Jeffrey Masuda, Laura Nimmon, and Sean Nixon. Also, Greg Masuda for his documentary footage and support.

Works Cited Angela. Personal interview. 11 June 2009. Best, Amy, ed. Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Print. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Print. Boone, Davina. Personal interview. 2 July 2009. Cammarota, Julio, and Fine, Michelle, eds. Revolutionizing Education: Youth Participatory Action Research in Motion. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Coburn, Trevor. Personal interview. 11 October 2012.

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Conrad, Diane. “Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3.1 (2004): n. pag. Print. Craig. Personal interview. 2 July 2009. Davies, Bronwyn. A Body of Writing 1989-1999. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 2000. Print. Dillabough, Jo-Anne, and Jacqueline Kennelly. Lost Youth in the Global City: Class, Culture and the Urban Imaginary. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Places of Learning: Media Architecture Pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2005. Print. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1990. Print. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder & Herder, 2007. Print. Gallagher, Kathleen. The Theatre of Urban: Youth and Schooling in Dangerous Times. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Print. Ginwright, Shawn, Noguera, Pedro, and Julio Cammarota, eds. Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Grady, Sharon. Drama and Diversity: A Pluralistic Perspective for Educational Drama. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000. Print. hooks, bell. Teaching Critical Thinking. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Lather, Patti. “Post-Critical Pedagogies: a Feminist Reading.” Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. Eds. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 120-137. Print. Little, Edward. “Towards an Aesthetics of Community-Based Theatre…Part ll: Avoiding the Missionary Position.” Dramatic Action: Community Based Theatre in Canada & Beyond (2006): 1-9. Web. 20 March 2011. Loutzenheiser, Lisa. “Working Alterity: The Impossibility of Ethical Research with Youth. Educational Studies 41.2 (2007): 108-127. Web. 16 Jan. 2012. Masuda, Greg. Filmed raw rehearsal footage. 11 June 2009. Masuda, Jeff. Fieldnotes. 22 March 2009. Ministry of Children and Family Development. Standards for Safe House Service in British Columbia. Oct. 2002. Web. 4 Nov. 2010. Nicholson, Helen. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

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Prentki, Tim, and Jan Selman. Popular Theatre in Political Culture: Britain and Canada in Focus. Portland: Intellect Books, 2000. Print. Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.” Harvard Educational Review 79.3 (2009): 409-427, Web. 16 Jan. 2012. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Youth Resistance Revisited: New Theories of Youth Negotiations of Educational Injustices.” Youth Resistance Revisited. Spec. issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24.5 (2011): 521–530. Web. 27 Jan. 2012. Wager, Amanda, et al. Surviving in the Cracks. Unpublished script, Vancouver Youth Visions Coalition in Collaboration with Partnerships in Community Health Research. University of British Columbia, 2009. Print. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Print. Youth participant. Personal interview. 2 July 2009.

Note 1

All names of the five youth participants are pseudonyms.

CHAPTER SIX USING LEARNER-CENTRED METHODS TO ADDRESS THE PEDAGOGICAL AND CREATIVE CHALLENGES OF THE CLASSROOM PRODUCTION JAMES MCKINNON AND RALPH UPTON

This essay confronts the pedagogical challenges of the classroom production: that is, a university course primarily focused on producing a play…or a play produced as university coursework. This particular juxtaposition of “theatre” and “learning,” perhaps most common where theatre studies evolve within a humanities or liberal arts-oriented framework,1 raises numerous ethical, aesthetic, and pedagogical dilemmas. Chiefly, for the purpose of this essay: how can we ensure that the classroom production embodies education as a liberatory practice—“the practice of freedom,” as bell hooks puts it—rather than, as hooks argues is more often the case, the reinforcement of domination (hooks 4)? More specifically, the classroom production raises questions like: Is the goal to make art or to learn? What do students learn in such a context? What should they learn? What about the role of the teacher, who is typically also the director—a title charged with troublesome connotations? In the first term of 2012, the authors, and the students of Theatre 302 (“Conventions”) at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), tackled these problems headon, as collaborators on a production based on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. This report describes how we—that is, lead author and Theatre 302 course instructor James McKinnon, and co-author/course mentor Ralph Upton2— tried to develop a learner-centred, liberatory pedagogy for the classroom production, in order to encourage autonomous learning and creative collaboration. This essay first considers some pedagogical issues in classroom theatre production, then describes the strategies we used to foster student-centred learning and encourage the students to take creative

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leadership. We then evaluate our methods by examining data gathered from two focus groups, pre- and post-course written surveys, and the authors’ own observations. As Keith Sawyer observes, creativity happens “in the hard work of execution.” Indeed, one of the course objectives was to experience this, and thereby to dispel the myth that creative products are created by individual geniuses in bursts of inspiration (Sawyer 21). This report looks at the messiness of “doing” by focusing on process. The authors also attempt, throughout, to consider and foreground our roles as self-styled “collaborators” on the project. To what extent did we succeed in creating an environment conducive to learner-centred teaching, especially in regards to one of its key precepts, the “balance of power” in the classroom —or in this case, rehearsal room (Weimer 8)? The answers are complex and “soft,” given the variation of attitudes and experience among the 17 students and two co-authors, but this report will identify some evidence that we hope will stimulate readers seeking their own way through similar challenges.3

Background The implicit conflict between creative and pedagogical ideals in a classroom production is eloquently summed up by one of our students (not a member of the THEA 302 course, but part of the same cohort) in a reflective essay published in the VUW student union’s magazine: 1. You will not be taught how to act. There is no assignment that grades you on your acting ability. 2. The above fact will cause problems in practical papers. Students are very aware of what their performance should or could look like, and will become conscious that they lack the skills to do it. Similarly, lecturers trying to polish their productions will give acting advice to their students. If this isn’t kept in check, the true (gradable) learning objectives of the paper are forgotten. (Price)

Price ranks these at the top of his list of twenty “Things I Learnt about Studying Theatre at Victoria University.” He diagnoses the problem aptly: our humanities-oriented program does not teach “acting,”4 and we cannot fairly assess students on skills that we do not teach them. But we do offer production-based courses, which culminate in widely-advertised public performances, and students and staff naturally want to create work of a high standard. The result, as Price suggests, is that anxiety about reaching

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a high aesthetic standard may overshadow course learning objectives. In addition, students often express anxiety or frustration about what we are assessing, if not acting. Instructors often address this problem by assigning essays and presentations; although practices vary too widely to make confident generalizations about a “traditional” method of evaluating classroom productions, a review of archived VUW Theatre course outlines confirms that essays and oral presentations account for 60%-80% of the grade in most “production” courses. But then students complain—and educational research confirms—that if students are asked to spend over 200 hours working on an activity, that work should be assessed in a way that explicitly links the work performed to the desired learning outcomes.5 But how? In vocational training contexts, individual performances can be evaluated in relation to (relatively) objectifiable standards expected of a professional performer, but it is much more challenging to assess performance in a way that aligns with the learning outcomes of a humanities degree — broadly defined, at VUW, in terms of three “graduate attributes”: creative and critical thinking, communication, and leadership or autonomy. At the end of the process, students may not be at all certain what their grades are based on, and this uncertainty leads to behaviours that are contrary to the development of creative agency and autonomy: in the absence of clear criteria for meeting the expectations of the 30-40% “contribution to performance” mark, students often concentrate their efforts not on learning, but on doing what appears to please the instructor, to get a desirable grade. This problem is often compounded by others. Outside the classroom, theatre is typically made by collaborators who consciously choose to work together, usually based on previous experience and/or common aesthetic or political objectives (such as are laid out in a company’s mandate, for example). Classroom productions, by contrast, bring together people with little or no previous history, who may share nothing other than the fact that they enrolled in the same course. The choice of play—usually made by the instructor, long before the course convenes—is based on projected enrolment, and the relatively few plays that can accommodate large casts are mostly historical, canonical (e.g. Shakespearean, Greek, etc.) dramas, dominated by white, male characters (and concerns). Although crossgender casting can be a powerful creative and pedagogical strategy (see Jonas, e.g.), it becomes problematic when its use is mandated by “pragmatic” factors, and compounds the difficulties faced by students already anxious about their insufficient training.6 These practices make classroom productions susceptible to reproducing the hierarchies and habits of domination so thoroughly critiqued by Boal,

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Freire, hooks, and others. Most problematically, they put too much emphasis on the agency and authority of the instructor/director. This usually begins with choosing and casting the play, but as Jonathan Cole notes in another essay that grapples with this problem, there are numerous other ways “in which the traditions of directing (evident in many points of agreement among directing textbooks) continue to promote models that emphasize the controlling protocols of production” (Cole 195). Directors are widely viewed as the source of a production’s “creative vision,” and the centre of authority in the rehearsal hall, where directors “give direction” and actors “take direction.”7 If anything, classroom productions make students more dependent on the teacher/director, for the reasons Price points out above. In addition, most students are already habituated to what Freire called the “banking” (or transmission) model of learning, which reduces them to “passive receptors of narrative information” and instructions from the teacher/director (Jonathan Cole 194). The students in our class, for example, were accustomed to “learning” by listening to lectures, copying notes from PowerPoint slides, and reconstituting the information therein into essays. Thus, there is a strong potential for an activity ostensibly oriented to equipping students with skills in creativity, criticality, and autonomy, to be thoroughly undermined as students instead apply themselves to carrying out the director’s creative vision.

Objectives and Methods Our objective was to break the habits of the teacher/director-centred classroom production and embrace an approach to production based on learner-centred and constructivist educational theory. To this end, we consider how to develop a learner-centred approach in the context of the classroom production, focusing on key factors identified by Maryellen Weimer: the function of content, the balance of power/the role of the teacher, and responsibility for learning, which we refer to as “taking ownership.”8 We hoped these methods would enable the students to develop creative and critical autonomy—to see themselves as creators, not as the conduits of a director’s vision or a transcendent text—and to experience creativity not as the product of spontaneous individual insight but as the incremental outcome of a collaborative process. We also carefully considered “evaluation purpose and practices” (Weimer 16), but to keep to a manageable length, this essay focuses on the students’ experience of the creative process rather than assessment. Generally speaking, we addressed the problem of assessing performance by asking students to document their contributions to the production,

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which made the object (and objectives) of assessment transparent. First, students collaborated online by posting and discussing ideas for the show in a blog. Students’ contributions were assessed as evidence of creative, critical, and collaborative skill, as well as contribution to the performance. Second, they documented and reflected on their experience of the creative process in a journal, which was assessed (in relation to the instructor’s observations) as a document of contributions and as evidence of developing a habit of reflective practice (a key element of both Kolb’s learning cycle (A. Y. Kolb and D. A. Kolb) and of creative development in general). These two assignments made up 70% of the final mark.9 Students were recruited as research participants on the first day of classes, and the project and its goals were explained using an information sheet (approved by the Victoria University human ethics research committee), to obtain informed consent. Data was gathered from two principal sources: first, a series of two written questionnaires, the first of which was answered at the beginning of the course, and the second after it was over. Second, shortly after the end of the course, co-author Ralph Upton, who had mentored the students but was not involved with assessment or marking, conducted three group interviews. Qualitative research methods were favoured for two reasons. First, the course learning objectives focus on creative and critical thinking skills, which, research suggests, may be domain-specific and difficult or impossible to measure in universal terms (Sawyer). Second, we were primarily interested in the participants’ perspectives of the impact of the experience on their values, beliefs, and skills. The questionnaire was selected because it served a practical learning purpose as well as a datagathering purpose. Students responded to questions asking them to define and discuss their beliefs about creative and critical thinking, and related topics. In addition to providing a benchmark against which responses to the second questionnaire could be measured, the responses fuelled an early class discussion, through which students developed a metacognitive awareness of the learning objectives of the course. As a method, focus group interviews were consistent with one of the course’s points of emphasis, that creativity is most often the product of collaboration (not, as is often imagined, the spontaneous inspiration of individual genius). Small groups produce richer, more detailed responses because they test and build on each other’s responses, particularly when they are discussing a project which they had just created together. The participants’ common experience also reduced their inhibition to speak: the semi-structured interview with a trusted mentor and peer (Ralph) felt less like a clinical research process than a gathering of old friends. In addition, the group interviews

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complemented the individual questionnaires, which allow lengthier, more considered responses, but are limited to individual perspectives. Both methods, moreover, reinforced the key course message that what the students do and say is important.

The Role of Content: Ubu Roi and Creative/Critical Process Scholarship on teaching and learning is generally critical of teaching which views “content” as knowledge marshalled by the teacher and transmitted to the students, because when teaching and learning consists of transmitting/absorbing content for its own sake (as facts to be memorized for an exam—or lines for a play), long-term learning outcomes are dismal.10 For this reason, the content of THEA 302—including the play at the heart of the course—was treated as a means to an end, not the end itself. The course was ostensibly an investigation of dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare, building to a production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896). But the instructor and the course outline clarified that its primary objective was to give the students an opportunity to experience creative authority, not to learn facts about the play that explain why it should be revered as a masterpiece. In fact, Ubu Roi was chosen as the primary content precisely because it is not a conventional masterpiece. Although a famous fixture of the Modern canon, its fame was guaranteed not by its aesthetic beauty, linguistic refinement, or philosophical brilliance but, on the contrary, by its performative opposition to conventional aesthetic values, which provoked a riot at its 1896 premiere. In addition, it poses serious challenges to contemporary, Anglophone performers. Its notoriously scatological vocabulary, designed to shock Parisian audiences in 1896, is now more drole than shocking—coarser language and more risqué content is now commonplace not only on the internet but even on commercial television (Pa Ubu himself would flinch at an episode of Kitchen Nightmares!). Therefore, the performers soon discovered, they would have to make decisions about how to treat the material: If they wished to create a performance that approached the frisson of the original production— whether in respect for Jarry’s perceived intentions or following their own avant-garde tendencies—they would have to adapt or appropriate it, or use it as raw material, in the way that Jarry himself appropriated elements of Macbeth. The problematic status of the text became clear during our boisterous first read through around a circle of desks in our classroom. There were

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many misreadings, mispronunciations, and confusion. The translation, dating from the mid-60s, added another layer of mystification for the students because of the figures of speech employed. The students generally agreed that performing the text (as received through Connelly or our other translations) would be unpalatable because it was too dated and idiomatic, and perceived that to perform Ubu “faithfully” would reduce it to a quaint curiosity or museum piece. At the same time, the text was presented to the students by James— perhaps too stridently—as a thing of low intrinsic worth, in an attempt to counter the students’ tendency to assume that any text chosen by a university instructor to be examined in a classroom must be a hallowed object (“Look–don’t touch!”). The idea was to allow the students to use the text rather than serve it. The students were encouraged to be irreverent, because as Bakhtin writes, irreverence is much more conducive to learning than reverence: “laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can [...] examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world […], clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it” (Bakhtin and Holquist 23). Responses to the first questionnaire (written around the same time as the first read-through) suggest that this irreverent attitude helped students come to think of themselves as creative and critical agents rather than the conduits of a playwright or director’s “vision.” Can you think of a particular problem that you had to think critically about? J: […] we’re trying to find ways around this horrible script, and trying to make it fresh and new, but still make it make sense. [“Pre-treatment Questionnaire”]

In interviews several months later, students reaffirmed that they had been encouraged to view the playscript as a problem to be solved, but not to be invested with a great deal of reverence. I’m interested in how the fact that it was an adaptation affected the way you approached doing this show. C: When we did our presentations I did it on adaptation, just sort of Linda [Hutcheon’s] theory of adaptation, but I never felt as though it was a big deal, because we didn’t look at the text, because it was like, this is the skeleton of the text, we’ve read it, we know it, let’s just do what we want...

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I: Maybe because he said it was shit- he was like, ‘it’s a shit text...’11

Some reflections in the focus groups, however, suggest that we were too quick to dismiss the play’s intrinsic aesthetic value. We were talking in the last group about how central the text still wasbecause you began the process with James telling you that the script was really bad right? Did you feel like you were able to take the play in different directions? J: Yeah I do. B: Absolutely, but I think a solid understanding of the script would have guided us toward the direction we wanted to go, whether that’s closer to the original script or way, way away from it.

Some students evidently came to appreciate Jarry’s text on its own terms, and regretted that it was initially presented to them as the halfbaked fantasy of a notorious absinthe addict. This could suggest that James went too far in downplaying the significance of the text at the outset, but it is not possible to know what would have happened if the text had been framed differently. In any event, the irreverent approach to an already irreverent text was effective in spurring an experimental attitude. Immediately after the readthrough, a great many ideas were talked through, such as staging the piece in promenade, or transposing the plot to alternative times and places. One student remarked of this period, “at that stage we still had so many different possibilities and so many different places we could go, which was really exciting. Just having the freedom was really cool” (E). In other words, the central content—Jarry’s Ubu Roi—was not framed as an example of creative genius to be faithfully revived; rather it became the framework for the students to investigate adaptation as a creative process, and the raw material upon which they would feel it was not only permissible, but necessary, to undertake creative experiments of their own. As John Schmor writes, “[d]evising can offer a rich field for scholarly, artistic, and technical experimentation as well as raise fundamental aesthetic and critical questions which the average theatre major might not otherwise encounter” (Schmor 262).

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Balance of Power: The Conventions of the Unconventionals For liberatory pedagogue Paulo Freire, shifting “the locus of the learning process from the teacher to the students…overtly signifies an altered power relationship” (Aronowitz, qtd. in Weimer 9). In order to give the students the opportunity to experience creative authority and autonomy, it was necessary to shift the balance of power. This was difficult, because even though the students expressed resentment about not being meaningfully challenged, all of us had been habituated to processes in which the teacher/director makes most of the important decisions and the student’s obligation is to perform tasks set out by the teacher. All parties experienced the constant temptation to slip back into comfortably familiar—even if unsatisfactory—roles. Students who complained about how easy it was to pass theatre courses found the alternative frightening, and the instructor, too, found it surprisingly difficult to negotiate the border between taking control and abandoning the students. A number of strategies were implemented to establish a more equitable balance of power and encourage the students to assert creative control. Although THEA 302 is called “Conventions”—a catch-all title that allows discretion in determining the content and theme of the course in a given year—it broke many familiar conventions of both play production and classroom learning. Instead of being assigned readings, the students were able to direct the path of inquiry by choosing from an array of reading materials and possible seminar topics. Each student experienced leading the class twice, and they chose their own topics for those presentations with consultation and support from the instructor. Since the number of possible topics was vast and unpredictable, there was no possibility of creating the illusion that the course consisted of an orderly, pre-existing body of knowledge that could be “learned” in 36 hours of lectures. Students constructed their own meanings and connections between the presentations, which covered topics ranging from Symbolism and Alfred Jarry, to Shakespeare adaptation, to Bakhtin’s ideas of carnivalesque literature. Presentation topics that generated high interest were pursued further on a class blog and in rehearsal. One unforeseen consequence was that an early exploration of bouffon clowning methods, became the aesthetic backbone of the performance. One of the students’ first and strongest choices was to perform the play in the roles of a bouffon chorus, which they called The Unconventionals. Thus the course quite unexpectedly diverged from its ostensible focus on Shakespeare adaptation into an exploration of bouffon clowning.

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This “unconventional” attitude extended to rehearsal. James and Ralph declined the title of “director,” and there were no auditions, because (though they are an accepted practice in our program) they seemed incompatible with the goal stating students should identify and pursue their own objectives, rather than be plugged into a directorial concept. Instead, we spent several rehearsals doing read-throughs and experimenting with individual scenes, and ultimately offered the students roles based on 1) their expressions of explicit interest, and 2) their demonstrated level of enthusiasm and confidence at that point in the process. Students performed both performance and production roles that reflected their personal inclination. In spite of these measures, everyone found it difficult to resist the powerful tendency to rely on the authority of the instructor/director and/or the text. Although “fidelity” was not one of our objectives as a company, we did generally agree that authenticity was important: we wanted the play, whatever it was, to look, sound, and feel like something we made, not like our attempt to revive a quaint relic of the fin de siècle. Yet even though many students had expressed explicit interest in making or “devising” original performance, most had no idea what to do with the text, if not recite it—the one thing we had agreed we did not want to do. To combat the tendency to default to the received text, we alternated between two translations and used them as the basis for improvisational experiments, a method also intended to help the students distinguish the action of dramatic plot from the words in the text (perhaps because of their experience in literary analysis, as students in a School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, they are naturally inclined to read texts for “meaning,” not action). Although this method produced useful results, it was not explained clearly enough, and many students found it the opposite of liberating. One student later recalled, “I was so nervous to put [the text] down, like I did not want to put it down” (“I,” Focus Group). More problematically, as Ralph observed, because it focused on individual scenes, it did not help the group discover an overriding objective: what were we doing with Jarry’s play and why? Who would want to see this? When the traditional goal of “serving the text” was removed, there was no immediate purpose there to take its place. One student described the process of adaptation like this: J: I think for me, the script, changing the language was a critical thing, trying to find ways around this really old fashioned language from a 12 hundred years ago, the way they were speaking, and trying to make that same language somehow work today. I think that was the main thing for me, was trying to find through-lines between the language make it work. I

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think that, to me, was probably the biggest critical thing for me. But again, that was probably a merge of creative and critical.

The default position, in other words, became tweaking parts of the play “to make it work” rather than reimagining the whole. In addition to the feeling of being lost without a text to memorize and rehearse, the students felt a strong impulse to defer decisions to an authority figure. In spite of James’s explicit statements that he had no intention of imposing a particular creative vision, and that the students were meant to take creative control, some students either did not have that impression of the work, or lacked the self-efficacy to put it into practise. So although one student’s reflection shows the impact of this promise of shared creative authority… E: […] I remember in the first lesson he said this is... you can take this where you want to take it. He pretty much said “this is your project.”

… other students evidently did not hear that message… C: I think he expected us... he didn’t really tell us from the beginning that this was our project.

… or simply did not believe it, and assumed that there was some sort of hidden agenda: G: And on top of that, it wasn’t collaboration, like we didn’t choose the script, so he obviously chose the script, so he had some sort of vision in mind […] whatever [it] was [was] never presented to us... 13

In focus groups, discussion returned again and again to what James “wanted” or “expected”, a sign that simply directing students to be independent is not enough. One is reminded of Graham Chapman in The Life of Brian, exhorting his disciples that “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anyone!” In fact, the students’ respect for James as an academic, which often comes up in the focus groups (sometimes approaching a sense of intimidation), seems to have heightened their suspicion that he was looking for a “right answer.” When we declined impose a vision autocratically, no other decisionmaking process emerged, and after the initial, joyful stage of free invention, the process began to stall. Ralph observed the rehearsal process meander for its first half-dozen weeks. Decisions were made without a sense of real ownership from the group, there seemed to be a lack of

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investment on the part of the performers, and key decisions were continually deferred: G: […] if you don’t have a clear idea for what you want the show to be yourself, then it’s very easy to just go along with someone who does. But I didn’t have anything to offer myself, so you just go with it...

Would the performance use Ubu to satirize local conditions, or remain universal? Was it set in New Zealand or Poland? Would there be songs, or not? Ideas would surface, but then disappear, unless someone—usually James, at this point—intervened. A: I remember, we were just sitting in class, […] and I remember everyone just throwing these cool ideas, and Bridget actually wrote down a whole list of them that we didn’t even use. Because like you said, there was no process of actually selecting which ones we all liked together. [Emphasis added.]

In theory, idea generation need not be separated from evaluation and selection. In improvisation, sequential models of creativity theory must be abandoned; a buzzing group will be constantly inventing and evaluating, and "one cannot identify a temporarily distinct evaluation stage" (Sawyer Group Creativity 320). Another way to consider the issue is in reference to Edward Necka’s constant (rather than step-by-step) model of creativity, in which goals and “tentative structures” interact, becoming more compatible and closer together (121) as the process continues. Simply put, a scene may be performed, then assessed in reference to the goal of the production. Then, an action in the scene may be preserved by virtue of its sympathy with the goal—or the goal itself may be reconsidered in light of what was made. At the least, such a process will yield negative information: “that’s not it.” The process described by students, however, illustrates how the absence of a clear goal meant that the structure of the piece did not have an impetus to develop holistically in any direction. On the other hand, students later agreed that having a “theme” imposed too early in the process wouldn’t have helped them to feel ownership. In discussing alternatives, one student proposed a model where the goal comes from the performers: G: I’m not trying to advocate him prescribing his own vision, and we just following that. I just mean if it’s something where we’re going to have complete freedom to make whatever we want in a collaborative way, then I think that should be stipulated from the start. Where it’s like, we’re going to make something, go read the text, come back in like a week, with

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whatever interests you about it, and we’ll make something based on that together...

As the comment above suggests, the participants found it difficult not to defer to the authority of the authority figure in the room, and this prevented them from arriving at a vision on their own. As the performance dates inched closer, anxiety about the lack of a shared creative vision manifested in declining morale. Some students began to display poor rehearsal etiquette, to the chagrin of others, who expected James to play the role of rule enforcer. A dilemma presented itself: if the instructor did nothing, the show would likely fail; but the wrong intervention would undermine the fundamental learning objectives of the course and betray our faith in the students’ abilities to solve problems themselves. Another way to help may be to remove ourselves from this stage, to remove the pressure of trying to please us. As Cary Mazer wrote of her own experiences teaching dramaturgy: “[e]ven in creative activities, students submit work with the assumption that the marker knows more than they do” (136). To break the prevailing creative impasse without sacrificing the course’s pedagogical and aesthetic ideals—and with considerable apprehension—James announced to the students that he would be “stepping away” from the creative process. He would remain available for “on-demand” troubleshooting and consultation, and continue to attend production meetings and otherwise facilitate their activities, but otherwise leave the actors to their own devices in the rehearsal room. The students found this experience unsettling. At the beginning of the course, one of them spoke of having being told that university would be “sink or swim,” then discovering it to be more like a wading pool. But now that they had truly been thrown into the deep end, the initial reaction ranged from betrayal to terror. H: Having it happen so suddenly threw me, and I was terrified, and it threw me in the sense of, well, I don’t really know what we’re doing. Like the concept really of the show still hadn’t appeared for me, so I was like “what I don’t know what we’re doing, how can you do this,” but then it sort of developed.

Ultimately, however, all parties agreed that the outcome was not only positive, but vital. Both focus groups were asked to identify times when they perceived a creative ‘buzz’ in the company, and both groups identified the moment when James “left” as key.

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And in the other focus group: J: I think the biggest buzz the group got as a whole was when James left us to our own devices, and we had a big love circle up at [the rehearsal space], and we all...we just talked about what was worrying us and where we were going, and from there on it seemed to come together a lot better, there was a big group dynamic suddenly; whereas before, it seemed to be quite individual.

This comment reveals how—even in a course based on creative collaboration with classmates—students may experience the learning process primarily in terms of the individual interaction with the teacher (who evaluates and grades their assignments). The predominance of individual assessment leads students to overestimate the importance of teachers, while omitting the possibilities for (and effective processes of) collaborative creation: C: Like we got so used to working with a director with [second year courses] 204 [and] 203, we’ve always had this guidance, and then we were thrown into this position where we didn’t know whether we could take charge or make decisions for ourselves.

Having the instructor out of the picture, or at least out of the foreground, opened the door for true collaborative creation to begin. Commenting after the experience, most students felt that when the instructor/director stepped back, it gave them both the space and the “kick in the pants” that they needed. Now they had to look to each other, rather than have decisions made for them. They felt that prior to this they did not feel a great sense of ownership of the work. After the course they did: I loved that it was a “choose your own journey” as opposed to a more traditional production course, because it gave me so much more ownership of the piece. It is really cool that [ideas] I came up with were actually in

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the play, which may not have happened if I was in a more traditional course, because it would have all been pre-set for me. We were all minidirectors in the performance which gave everyone an equal level of hierarchy to stop rehearsal and let everyone know if something wasn’t working or not. [F, Post course survey]

Another positive side-effect of the “directorless” rehearsal room was the alleviation of fear and inhibition, which the students had not been fully conscious of until it was gone. A second shared creative period was identified, again when James was out of the room—he had allotted two hours for the group to work on their own. Students freely improvised with their bouffon characters. What happened? G: I think we fed off each other, like genuinely for once, like the first person that started it off, whoever started first, Martin, yeah, started feeling around for a bouffon character and ended up finding a character that he didn’t want, which is just as good as finding one that you do, and then he would continue to interview people as that character, so it was just a cumulative effect of everyone sort of feeding off each other and laughing and it was quite light-hearted as well. A: And there was no expectations, like, we could explore and do what we felt was natural. […] I sort of feel like if James had been there, I would have been a bit intimidated.

Students spoke of “expectations” and “pressure” that come from having an instructor in the room and remarked that “there needs to positive energy for there to be creative energy.” H: I think we got used to asking each other’s opinion rather than going straight to James, like asking, if we did something, “What do you guys think?” Rather than “James, can I do this?” Like [there were] a couple of occasions when that didn’t happen, but in general it did work.

One student described having James enter a rehearsal room at a creative moment: I: I froze up, I was like, “Fuck, we haven’t got a result here, we’re still playing,” and I was like, “Please go away!” G: […] You have a responsibility to impress...

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Often all that is needed is to allow students to work through scenes on their own, quite literally get rid of ourselves, who can often be the “voice saying no.”

“Taking Ownership”: Responsibility for Learning Critics of the traditional, teacher-centred classroom frequently charge that it makes students dependent: “they depend on the teacher to identify what needs to be learned, to prescribe the learning methods, and finally to assess how well they have learned” (Weimer 15). The classroom production, too often in our experience, differs only in that it makes the student more eager to please the teacher—because as mentioned above they depend on the director to ensure that they don’t look foolish in public—and less inclined to focus on learning objectives, because many of them, frankly, are less interested in what they’ll learn than in the opportunity to get credit for doing a play. (As Price observes in items six and seven on his list of twenty he learned studying theatre at Victoria University, as a theatre student you may “develop an understanding […] that far exceeds that of other arts students,” but “if you don’t, you’ll still pass. Easily.”) The ultimate objective of the measures described above—to shift the balance of power to the students and to frame the course content as “a problem to be solved,” not a “work of art to be faithfully represented”—was to encourage the students to develop creative autonomy and take responsibility for their own learning, rather than allowing them to adopt a comfortably passive position of taking direction. While this work commenced at the outset, when students were asked to identify individual learning goals, and was reinforced by assignments which asked them to reflect on these goals during and after the creative process, comments from the focus groups and questionnaires clearly indicate their awareness that the instructor’s decision to “step back” was a powerful catalyst. In the absence of a clear authority figure, collaborative creativity really started happening: K: At that stage as well, people started asking each other for help as well. Like, remember at that stage [H] was like “I have no idea what my character is guys, just can you help me out a little bit?” And that’s when it started to be like; Ok, we can have a part in everyone else’s characters as well, it’s not just me by myself making my character, and then I’ll come on the day and show you and no one else has a say[...] Do you guys agree with that?

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[General assent] B: That was a really good turning point for me as well, because I had no idea who my character was, so to be able to ask everyone else how they felt about my character, and how their character felt about my character helped a lot.

After the initial fear and resistance, the discovery that they truly were on their own led the students to make critical decisions about the show. A truly learner-centred atmosphere began to take hold, and the course learning objectives were reached organically. K: Yeah, it was good, like we took ownership of it for ourselves. And that’s when stuff actually started to get done, and we all sort of got to a point where it was, yes, this is our show, we’re going to make it awesome and it’s not up to anyone else to make it good but us.

This collaborative attitude was applied more broadly too. Here a student discusses how collaboration engendered more and better ideas, by virtue of having a wide sounding board in the form of trusted collaborators. O: The main thing I like was when, if I had an issue with something, I could ask the whole group, and […] get like three or four things back, about how you could do something differently, or how something is working or isn’t working.[…] [O]ne day I talked to [H], and I hadn’t really talked to [H] that much before, and she actually gave me some really good ideas. And like I think just because we’d all gotten used to working together so much, that you felt freer to talk to everyone about stuff, and you didn’t think they were going to be like, “Oh, I’m not really friends with you so I’m not going to give you feedback.”

This student’s discovery—that his or her peers are as valuable a source of support, ideas, and learning as the instructor—indicates that a key learning objective has been reached, much more effectively and organically than by us simply transmitting the idea directly. Once the students had the time and space to establish their own working processes and work out their interpersonal issues, the authors were able to return to the room without upsetting the new balance of power. We played the roles of third eye, consultant, scene doctor, or trouble-shooter, rather than “director,” helping them get the best out of their work without taking over the driver’s seat. From this point on, the production—now titled Shit Show14—began to take form rapidly, gaining further momentum after we revealed that the

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University had pulled its logo from their publicity material (which, like everything else, they made themselves): before it was even completed, their creation was exerting an effect on the real world! The central problem, “what is this show about?” became clarified, as the students began to discuss their creative differences directly: some of them felt that there was no redeeming moral purpose behind all of the coarse and often disturbing humour. One observer of the scene voiced these concerns: C: It was just at that point in the play I was, and it was fine, it was just, I had my this idea of...confronting the audience, but not knowing why or how or where or... it was again, why are we putting on this rape scene? I mean I hate it, I can’t watch it, I remember […] cringing at it. [...] I had an issue with just...why? Why would we put that on?

Others felt that the show was purposefully critiquing society’s tacit endorsement of prurient voyeurism, pointing out that network television regularly shows the same or worse content, but frames it in such a way that the viewer is allowed to feel moral superiority while seeking pleasure from watching horrific or humiliating acts (particularly in crime dramas and reality shows). A new crisis emerged: “How can we resolve this?” The group had reached what Lyotard calls a differend: any resolution would necessarily favour one argument and silence the other. But instead of trying to resolve the issue to give the appearance of aesthetic consistency, they built the conflict into the show. The group’s aesthetic and ethical crisis in effect became the play’s climax, a “breakdown” within the performance itself, in which performers dropped both their bouffon and Ubu characters. The result was a very “live,” very awkward scene in which attention was drawn to the appropriateness of the action, rather than letting it just be something that is washed over. The question: why adapt this scene became the subject of the scene itself. This discovery—and finding ways to make it “live” every night—excited the students, and also brought them into close contact with the course’s learning objectives: O: For me that climax scene, like every night, was an exercise in creative and critical thinking, because I wanted to make it better every night, but how to make it better wasn’t always clear. So every night I did it I would go home and think about what worked and what didn’t work and then like how I could do it again the next night.

A student described the process of creating that scene: G: [Those discussions] were the most interesting thing that had happened in the space, just listening to everyone talk about why they did or didn’t

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like it...the room just felt amazing. Just very charged, and someone said, why don’t we just put that on the stage?…[I]t was just an organic thing.

The students thereby made the profound discovery that creative collaboration does not entail (as they had often assumed) avoiding or suppressing conflicts between collaborators. In the final outcome, group conflicts—which early in the process the students avoided and expected the instructor to arbitrate—became a creative strength. O: I feel like that part of the play […] gave the whole thing some sort of actual meaning and value, because without that, I do feel like overall it would have been some sort of disappointment, and we were just putting on some silly show just to shock a whole bunch of people […]. But with that, it showed we’re not just trying to do that, […] we actually do have an opinion about what we’re doing, and we are trying to something different, it’s why we took this course.

The comments indicate how carefully the students considered their responsibility to the audience—and the presence of the audience is one element, unique to the classroom production, that makes sure there is something to be responsible for. The other vital element is that students feel what they’re presenting is theirs, rather than that they are just doing what a director has told them. The focus groups and surveys give the overwhelming impression of a sense of ownership of the show—and the recognition that this sense was initially missing. This changes the meaning of the performance: A: I suppose that’s because, like, we were a collaborative group, whereas other companies have the director that does everything, sort of thing, so if the show fails it’s on their head. But in this case it was on all of us.

One student drew a distinction between the classic theatre workshop (THEA 204) the year before. Whereas s/he felt that there was a clear association between the 204 scene and its (non-student) director, s/he believed the audience of and Shit Show wouldn’t make this association. Another student replied, “I think in general they’d say it was James’s, but we know.”

Conclusions Whatever the audience may have thought, Shit Show showcased the students’ creative autonomy in all its variety. In addition to transforming Jarry’s well-worn play into an original and genuinely provocative show,

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the students (including three Scenography students assigned to THEA 302) designed and created their own set, lighting, costumes and make-up; they wrote songs and learned music (including one memorably vicious Brechtian musical critique of their university experience); and they conducted the administrative tasks to make it all happen relatively smoothly. We cannot discuss all these elements in detail here, but it is certain that many of them would not have come to light if we had followed the “Conventions” of classroom theatre: that is, to rehearse and perform a classic text with a conventional “director” at the helm. The students’ comments suggest that shifting the balance of power away from the instructor, and framing the dramatic text as the means to an end rather than the end itself, enabled them to experience creative autonomy, develop collaborative skills, and take responsibility for learning—and to clearly articulate how they did so, both in the comments cited above and in their journals of the experience. This is not to say that the process was smooth: indeed, as many students pointed out, the very awareness of how close we came to disaster made the feeling of triumph that much more powerful. The process raised serious ethical concerns about the line between “relinquishing control” and “abdicating responsibility.” The instructor’s decision to cede the rehearsal hall to the actors, for example, could have backfired if the students had interpreted it as a stunt or a histrionic gesture of rejection, or if they had in fact lacked the creative and interpersonal skills they needed to respond positively. This decision was taken with great apprehension, and would not work in every situation or with every group. Moreover, this “near miss” calls into question a troubling tendency of classroom theatre production in general. Both authors have observed that theatre productions, whether conventional or devised, almost invariably hinge on a crisis point where blue sky dreaming and open process meet the need to make decisions in order to deliver the product. From a pedagogical perspective, it is tempting to suggest that there must be a way to avoid exposing students (and ourselves) to this kind of trauma—and at the very least, it is dangerous to assume that trauma is a necessary catalyst to learning (particularly since there can be trauma without the learning). On the other hand, the students made it at the outset clear that they were sick of low expectations and low stakes, and the high stakes made the learning experience all the more powerful for them. So, moving forward, we ask: how can the instructor of the classroom production exert control in ways that enable the powerful, positive outcomes of experiential learning, but mitigate exposure to traumatic negative outcomes? Can we use our

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authority productively without reinforcing the students’ habitual dependence on it? The notion of a being in control as a director is in many ways a pleasant illusion in any case, however. One student simply took matters into her own hands: I: I remember James always being like to me, “You have to put this in, you have to put this in,” and we never did because I didn’t like the idea-I just kept on ignoring him.

As censors and authorities have for centuries found to their frustration, in the end, the performers will do what they like.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, and J. Michael Holquist. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, 1981. Print. Biggs, John. “Enhancing Teaching Through Constructive Alignment.” Higher Education 32.3 (1996): 347–64. Print. —. “What the Student Does: Teaching for Enhanced Learning.” Higher Education Research & Development 18.1 (1999): 57–75. Web. 25 June 2013. Biggs, John, and Catherine Tang. Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does. 4th ed. Open University Press, 2011. Print. Cole, Jonathan. “Liberatory Pedagogy and Activated Directing: Restructuring the College Rehearsal Room.” Theatre Topics 18.2 (2008): 191–204. Web. 7 Jan. 2013. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Kolb, Alice Y., and David A. Kolb. “Learning Styles and Learning Spaces: Enhancing Experiential Learning in Higher Education.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 4.2 (2005): 193–212. Print. Mazer, Cary M. “Dramaturgy in the classroom: Teaching undergraduate students not to be students.” Theatre Topics 13.1 (2003): 135. Print. Price, Jonathan. “Some Things I Learnt About Studying Theatre At Vic.” Salient. Web. 9 Jan. 2013. Ramsden, Paul. Learning to Teach in Higher Education. Routledge, 2003. Print. Sawyer, R. Keith. Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006. Print.

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—. Group Creativity: Music, Theatre, Collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Schmor, John Brockway. “Devising New Theatre for College Programs.” Theatre Topics 14.1 (2004): 259–273. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Treleaven, Lesley, and Ranjit Voola. “Integrating the Development of Graduate Attributes Through Constructive Alignment.” Journal of Marketing Education 30.2 (2008): 160–173. Weimer, Maryellen. Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice. 1st ed. Jossey-Bass, 2002. Print.

Notes 1

In conservatory-style acting schools and BFA programs, which have an explicit mandate to train professional theatre skills, the notion of learning by doing theatre is less complicated. At the other end of the spectrum, there are campuses where theatrical productions exist (whether in the presence or absence of a formal degreegranting drama or theatre program) but are extra-curricular. This essay focuses on the issues that arise from creating a play with a class of students and assessing their work in terms of humanities-based learning objectives. 2 James is a member of the faculty in the VUW Theatre Programme, and Ralph is an alumnus and founding member of Binge Culture Collective, a prominent Wellington-based devising company. 3 Student comments printed herein are taken from transcripts of focus groups conducted after the course, and from questionnaires written at the beginning and after the conclusion of the course. Respondents gave informed consent for their comments to be used in this context, and their identities have been protected. To further protect anonymity and confidentiality in respect to the student/teacher relationship, focus groups were conducted by co-author Ralph, who mentored students on the production, but had no role in marking and assessment. 4 In theory we do not offer acting instruction because it is a vocational skill best left to a conservatory-style theatre school such as Toi Whakaari, the National Drama School of New Zealand/Aotearoa. In reality, the omission of actor training reflects material limitations, and perhaps cultural biases that see “acting” as incommensurate with the goals of “higher education.” Most courses enroll well over 100 students even at the 300-level–our “practical papers” in Theatre being a conspicuous exception – an impractical number for teaching acting. However, as the result of a successful summer acting course piloted by Dr. Lori Leigh in 2012, the programme decided to start offering a regular 100-level acting course from 2015. 5 This is a key principle of the approach known as “constructive alignment,” which is one of the leading evidence-based approaches to enhancing learning in higher education. See, for example, Biggs and Tang; Biggs, “Enhancing Teaching Through Constructive Alignment”; Biggs, “What the Student Does”; Treleaven and Voola.

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One of our actors delivered a scathing Brechtian critique of cross-gender casting in our show, breaking character to complain to the audience that in three years at university she has never played a woman – probably, she suggested to the spectators, because of her size. Teacher-directors often only consider the immediate ramification of casting decisions, rather than the cumulative effect of type-casting on a student over the course of her program. 7 More recently, it has become common to conceive of the actor’s contribution as “making offers” – but this still implies that the director ultimately decides what offers to accept. Cole writes that while there are several textbooks on the subject of teaching directing, none of them deals with the pedagogical responsibilities of teacher-directors in classrooms (194). 8 Weimer organizes her argument around five factors, also including “the role of the teacher” (which we have subsumed into “the balance of power” (8–20). 9 The remaining 30% of the final mark came from two presentation assignments. The first was a twenty minute joint presentation on a relevant topic selected by the students: Symbolism, Ubu Roi, Jarry, adaptation, comedy, etc. The second was a solo Pecha Kucha presenting a critical reflection on the participants learning experience. 10 See Biggs and Tang (2011) or Ramsden (2002), for example. 11 All students are referred to by a random letter to protect their anonymity for ethical reasons. Since James was the instructor as well as a co-investigator, and therefore in a position of relative authority, the focus groups were moderated by Ralph, who had no assessment role, and students were promised that James would have no way of attributing comments to them as individuals. 12 The “really-old fashioned language” is of course from the translation and therefore only forty or so years old, but nevertheless alien to the student. 13 Although the authors generally felt a high level of trust in the group, an initial round-table conversation about what we wanted the course to be revealed a high level of mistrust and disappointment about their university experience in general. Several students expressed a feeling that instructors were always trying to “catch them out” in some way, and/or a sense that the theatre program had failed to deliver on its promises. 14 After taking publicity photos, it was decided that the show needed a title that reflected the nature of the show, while highlighting the fact that it was an adaptation of Ubu Roi, rather than a performance of Jarry’s play. The students pitched suggestions via the class Facebook page and ultimately decided on Shit Show.

CHAPTER SEVEN RECONSIDERING GOOD INTENTIONS: LEARNING WITH FAILURE IN EDUCATION AND THE ARTS MIA PERRY IMAGES BY ROHAN REILLY

The images scattered throughout this chapter have been selected and composed by photographer, Rohan Reilly. Prompted by the ideas proposed in this chapter, the images are a visual response as well as an interruption—to unsettle the primacy of words on the page and to provoke broader considerations. How does failure function in the performing arts, in education, and in the intersection between both? And how might it function? Defining Failure; Defying Failure; and Holy Failure make up the organising categories through which I explore the role of failure in our schools and in our performance spaces today. I consider how teachers, students, and artists work to disrupt normative understandings of failure, and I look at the potential creativity and resistance afforded by failure. I do this through flirtation and provocation, and in this way I intend not to define, to prove, or to assess the roles and functions of failure according to literature, data, or analysis; rather, I hope to stir and unsettle the ground in this valueladen, ubiquitous, and ephemeral topic. It would be foolish to assume that an exploration of a value system such as failure could be very far removed from a confession of my own socio-cultural and political positions and relations within the contexts I represent herein. It seems pertinent therefore to preface this text with the recognition of the contingency of the ideas presented. I can claim many positions, too changeable and numerable to summarize here, but I can say with some certainty that I was born into an English family of organic

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growers, painters, and half-hearted protestants; most of my life since has been spent between Europe and North America, and the vast majority of those years attending or working in some sort of educational institution. Not unlike all theoretical propositions, the following is a series of partial and fluid ideas contingent upon my own limited time and interactions in the world.

Defining Failure I The institute of failure is a virtual space overseen by UK based visual artist and theatre director, Tim Etchells and US based theatre director, Mathew Goulish. In an introduction to the launch of the website, performance and culture scholar, Adrian Heathfield relates the 23 types of failure that Etchells and Goulish propose to study. I cite this list here in full by way of an introduction to the topic of this article. 1. Accident 2. Mistake 3. Weakness 4. Inability 5. Incorrect Method 6. Uselessness 7. Incompatibility 8. Embarrassment 9. Confusion 10. Redundancy 11. Obsolescence 12. Incoherence 13. Unrecognizability 14. Absurdity 15. Invisibility 16. Impermanence 17. Decay 18. Instability 19. Forgetability 20. Tardiness 21. Disappearance 22. Catastrophe 23. Uncertainty Heathfield, http://www.institute-of-failure.com

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Fig 7-1: Astrid Photography: Rohan Reilly

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Defining Failure II and III By way of alternative definitions of failure—as this subtitle suggests— I offer the possibility that a flawed writing project such as this might provide ample definition. Or perhaps, the malfunctioning PowerPoint that accompanied the talk that inspired this chapter. Failure may also equate to a refreshing change from advocating for the social utility of theatre in our society (something that many of us in the field of Applied Theatre are immersed in); and the list can go on. But beyond this self-indulgence, failure deserves a sustained consideration. Failure as a concept is based upon a system of values; values that shift and change with every changing context (for example in the community hall we might value generosity and patience, in the business place we might value profit margins and speed). It is integrally dependent upon the evaluation process of success, similarly caught up in larger ideological systems. Materially then, failure and success could be considered slippery ideas, devoid of much tangible influence due to their enigmatic nature, but on the contrary, the position and affects of these ideas in any value based context, and the semiotic relationship between them, amounts to almost impenetrable durability. Whether we consider failure in terms of its contextually-bound meanings or its function as a term, we dwell in a dynamic place of affect and influence. Try as we might, in school, in art, in politics, in our personal lives, success and failure are hard notions to deny or work against. For the purposes of this chapter, I consider the concept of failure in relation to schools and in relation to the performing arts. In partial ways, I put these two conditions in relation to one another and propose an alternative approach to success and failure in contexts where theatre meets education. Discourses of success and failure permeate the school context, and regardless of the individual’s perspective on both (for example, a teacher’s individual pedagogical approach, or a student’s critical perspective), the stigma of failure is powerful in education. Whether we are students or teachers, administrators or parents, we strive, in education, for success, and we tend to do whatever we can to avoid failure. Whether we speak in terms of education policy or pedagogy, failure can generally be understood according to the following self-explanatory diagram.

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1000% A “exceellent” —

0% F “poorr” X

Fig 7-2: Succcess vs. Failure

Failure is defined by educational e prractice and poolicy as a negaative; it is regarded as a reality, but accepted mainly because it functions to o support the value syystem that orgganises experrience and prooduct according to the specific andd fundamentall continuum as a illustrated in the diagram m above. Said anotherr way, we cann’t know succcess unless w we are at least aware of the potentiaal of failure. Failure, then n, functions as an organiising and motivating cconstruct in foormal educatio onal systems. In profeessional arts practices, peerformance arrts and fine arts, the meaning of failure can bee stated almosst as simply, bbut the functiion of the construct is not quite so straightforwaard. The perfoorming arts have h been attributed m many functionss over time, from f entertainnment, to reflection, to deconstructiion and critiqque, to propaganda, to eduucation and so s on. In every respecctive era artissts strive and d succeed andd fail to achieeve these functions. A Art has powerr of affect as well as reprresentation, an nd so the conditions of success are a often heeld in extrem me importancce to an individual, tto an economyy, or to a statee. When perfoormance is tak ken up for propaganda purposes, arttists that fail to t contribute eeffectively to the party line could face extrem me consequen nces (famoussly demonstrated, for example, in Stalinist Sovviet Union by artists exiled and executed d1). When theatre is ttaken up as a reflection of reality, a misrepresen ntation or controversiaal representattion could haave ethical oor social or economic e ramificationns (famously demonstrated d, for examplle, by riots in Dublin after a perfoormance of Pllayboy of the Western Worldd at the Abbey y Theatre in 1907). Failure is slippery thhough, and art a that fails today mightt succeed tomorrow, oor that fails inn one place orr by one standdard, might su ucceed in another. So can it really hold any meaaning beyondd a moment-to o-moment contextual rresponse? Onee might list faailures in, or oof, the arts in n terms of

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funding cuts, dwindling audiences, or bad reviews for example. An inability to practice your art might be considered a failure; a flop could equate to failure without much argument; an empty house, or an actor losing his lines. Even theatre companies who famously flirt with failure and delight in accident like Forced Entertainment (UK), or Goat Island (US), adhere to many of the conventional value systems of success as indicated for example by full houses, good reviews, able actors. The idea or subject of failure for these companies, however, and indeed much contemporary performance art, is a cornucopia of opportunity. Superficially “performing” incidents and ideas of failure is engaging, is entertaining, reflective, critical. The images scattered about this chapter may, or may not demonstrate these affects. Beyond its meaning, failure as an idea functions to represent the opportunity for difference, for individuality, for discovery, and for change. As Sara Jane Bailes suggests, for much contemporary performance “failure is intrinsically bound up with artistic production” (Bailes 1).

Fig 7-3: The Bridge Photography: Rohan Reilly

In the next section of this chapter I explore some ways in which society works with and against failure. Failure has been taken up in many contemporary arts practices to defy the traditional value systems that it feeds from. In other words, failure has been taken up as raw material for success. In education, failure is elaborately, systematically, and continuously warded off, but arguably with less success.

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Defying Failure I In response to the 23 types of failure identified at the institute of failure, I propose 23 ways in which we, variously, endeavour to defy, avoid, confound, ideas of “failure” in our day-to-day lives. 1. Peer review 2. Vaccinations 3. Auditors 4. Second opinions 5. Insurance 6. Spell check 7. Emergency kits 8. Prenatal genetic testing 9. Project management 10. Musicals adapted from hit movies 11. Silence 12. Diplomats 13. Schedules 14. Detox diets 15. Marginal delusion 16. Repetition 17. Confession 18. Formulas 19. Alcohol 20. GPS 21. External hard drives 22. Lesson plans 23. Back up plans

Defying Failure II Schools could be considered as laboratories of failure defiance. Success in education is built upon good intentions, predetermined standards, and expected outcomes. It goes to reason then, that anything interrupting the journey from intention to realisation is on shaky ground at best, unwelcome at worst. We set appropriate standards for particular populations (what represents failure in one school does not necessarily do so in another); we establish punishments and rewards; we train; we repeat; we copy; we check; we test. Teachers do everything they can to help ensure their students achieve “success.” A successful Kindergarten student

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sits still for circle time, if he seems prone to fail at that, a dedicated teacher might provide them a fidget toy to help them succeed, or a sticker to reward him for adhering. A successful secondary student will achieve a particular grade in her exams, if she seems likely to fall short, a dedicated teacher might provide additional training, additional assignments, rewards or short cuts. In the US the “Race to the Top” policy and Standardised Testing have become the latest measures that can be seen to defy perceivable failures in the education system. In Canada, similar measures are slowly taking hold. In England, regulators are being employed to oversee standards and achievements in free schools and academies. Locally and nationally, policy makers, teachers, and teacher educators strive to create environments for student “success.”

Fig 7-4: Trust Me Photography: Rohan Reilly

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Deleuze and Guattari describe structures that facilitate the recognition and reconfirmation of self and knowledge as “resonance apparatus” (216). I content that our schools might be accurately described in a similar way. To consider this a little further, I dwell on ideas of expectation and outcomes in education in relation to Deleuze’s writings on intention and recognisability. Intention, like curriculum outcomes, assumes a known and recognisable quantity or quality. According to Deleuze, that which is recognisable does nothing to disturb thought, it merely reconfirms and “recognises itself the more it recognises things: this is a finger, this is a table” (Deleuze 138). What forces one to actually think is that which is unrecognisable, that which is encountered through senses: “In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object to be recalled, imagined or conceived” (139). In this way, relying on recognition depends on the assumption that the sensational encounters of the past will be summoned to align with the experience of the present, causing recognition and the confirmation of a cohesive understanding of the world. Taking up intention as a similar endeavour to seeking recognition, Walter Benjamin (qtd. in Ingold, no page) proposed that in the captivating process of achieving our intentions we remove ourselves from a presence in life as it is unfolding around us. Ingold prompts us to contrast intention with attention, and in this way suspend recognitions, judgements, and interpretation, in favour of waiting for things to reveal themselves. A process of inquiry then, can be thought of in various ways. If we frame it as a journey, or space taken up, when looking for something, working towards something, it might be otherwise thought of as the space between the known and the unknown. Alternatively, this space might be thought of as one of possibility, or even the very condition of creativity. To return to the context of schooling, this chapter attempts to query what might be lost or overlooked in our endeavours for recognisable or intended success; in our fear, and even in some cases, defiance, of failure in teaching and learning. Where is the place of creativity in this system for success? How can we teach or use contemporary performance practices or the arts in general as part of our pedagogy in a context that relies so heavily on this value system? How might we invite failure into education? In what could be a bleak moment in the potential of contemporary arts in Western education (with program and funding cuts being the norm in this field), Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of the rupture has become pragmatically and philosophically pivotal for me. A rupture describes an instance in which forces (of subjectivity or circumstance, for example) collide to cause a diversion from a previous pathway of thought

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or action. This previous pathway might be a line or a territory that materializes as a process of action, a system of behaviour, or an ideology (like success and failure in education). A rupture in a system of behaviour causes the possibility for an alternative pathway, or a change. I have argued elsewhere that contemporary performance creation processes such as devising or in some cases, playbuilding, can be considered ruptures in the very established structure of the school (Perry, Wessels and Wager; Perry and Rogers). In part this is due to the resistance within these forms to prescribed outcomes, and to an encouragement of multiple and conflicting viewpoints and modes of representation. In this context then, the position and function of failure can suddenly be considered full of possibility.

Fig 7-5: Drowning Photography: Rohan Reilly

Holy Failure I This section explores some of the critical, creative, and innovative functions of failure in the arts and in education. The subtitle is of course in part homage to Peter Brook2, and builds off his notion of the powerful potential of theatre at its most crucial moments. In this context I continue to think about failure in terms of the relationship between intention and realization. Whether we look to learn from philosophers, artists, or children, the notions of risk, chance and experimentation go hand in hand with creativity, progress and learning. In visual art and literature, failure has been taken up as a construct of exploration since early Modernism in the

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1860’s; in theatre we can think back to farcical theatre (present in Europe since in the 13th century). There are copious examples of artists who have taken up this value system (of failure) as the subject of their inquiries (see LeFeuvre), From Zola’s The Unknown Masterpiece to Michael Landy’s work in the South London Gallery in 2010 where he installed a steel waste container for failed artworks—and filled it by donations from artists. Today a movement of Glitch art is taking hold, led by artists who take up digital images from failed technological processes as the content and subject of their work. A group of artists (Nick Briz, Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom and Evan Meaney), who have formed the organisation known as GLI.TC/H?, describe a glitch as “an unexpected, non- or mis-understood break in a technological flow that for a moment reveals (gives a window into), its system.” (Briz, Menkman, Satrom & Meaney, F.A.Q.).) Glitch art, then, is explained as “the intentional provocation or appropriation of a glitch by an artist…for many different reasons (to explore the aesthetic and conceptual potential of glitches, to examine the politics embedded in technological systems, to create digital psychedelic and/or synesthetic experiences, to practice hacktivism, to explore themes of failure, chance, memory, nostalgia, entropy, etc.)” (Briz, Menkman, Satrom & Meaney, F.A.Q.). This idea that a certain “truth” or deeper insight into systems, states, or reality can be made possible through an attention to failure is echoed by Etchells in a short paper ruminating on mistranslations— advertising and branding, for example, that is mistranslated from one language and cultural context to another, often with hilarious results. Etchells suggests that “from the mistranslations (as from all failures) seep other truths, other realities. The gap between aspiration and the world’s true condition is made visible in accident” (Etchells, no page, http://www .institute-of-failure.com. Parentheses part of quotation). Failures are truths. This perspective is arguable but intensely provocative, and offers another realm of possibility in the exploration of failure in creativity and in learning. In contemporary performance failure is a rich area of exploration, but more importantly it is a condition of exploration. A glance at the practices and paradigm of Forced Entertainment serves to illustrate this condition. Forced Entertainment has arguably been playing with the concept of failure since their conception in 1984. They began as a group of theatre studies graduates who self-confess to have failed to acquire particular mastery at singing, dancing, acting (skills reputedly beneficial for succeeding in the mainstream theatre industry at that time), and formed to make work that was on their own terms and based on their own abilities, or lack thereof. Their process of devising (and creating new work)

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involves extensive semi-structured improvisation, which, in its engagement of diverse subjectivities, bodies, minds, and material realities, can take inquiry beyond the realm of recognition and confirmation, and into a smooth space of encounter and discovery. Etchells (artistic director) and the company seek to allow for the smooth space of improvisation in order to see and analyse what “actually happens in time and space” (Etchells) when bodies are put into relation. They are acutely aware of the shortcomings of intention and representation, and the difference between that which opens up pathways of meaning making, and that which simply reconfirms our own image of ourselves. He explains: [I]t’s about an interest in really what happens in time and space…and what happens in the interaction between players in time and space. Not your fantasy about that, not your big idea about that, but, actually what happens…So I think the attention to these rehearsal tapes and to the common creativeness of what happened is about trying to always get back to nature, ha, ha. To go back to those actually chaotic emerging moments …and actually to understand these actual rhythms of interactions in space and time, it’s so much more interesting and useful to us than to understand anybody’s fancy idea of that. Or anybody’s kind of purely theoretical kind of drawing of that. (Etchells)

Fig 7-6: Black Valley Photography: Rohan Reilly

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Intention suggests a path to something that is recognisable and therefore already simply pulling from a past, already absent, event or knowledge: If you can already articulate what you want to see or do, then the event is simply a reconfirmation of previous theoretical or practical knowledge. When this practice is related to Etchells’s perspective on collaboration, his “distrust [of] intention” informs the approach to improvisation. The creation process and performances of Forced Entertainment have many implications, but something that can be seen throughout their work is a resistance to, and exposure of, the “resonance apparatus,” or the systems and structures around us that attempt to reconfirm knowledge and arguably resist failure. If we think about school learners as minds/bodies/selves in a process of becoming as media and public pedagogy theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth has proposed, then we can acknowledge that education engages with people in motion-in motion of creating, of emerging, of learning. She states, A body in motion is not limited to any given moment or position in its movement and is thus open to a range of variations, directions, and destinations. The possibility of qualitative transformation-of thinking and being something unprecedented-is dependent on this “potential to vary.” (121)

As quoted earlier, Etchells proposes that “the gap between aspiration and the world’s true condition is made visible in accident” (http://www. institute-of-failure.com, no page). I take up Etchells’ term of a “true condition” as equating to an understanding of an actual condition, albeit one in a constant state of emergence. In response to these two ideas I am prompted to think of our failures in education, our failures as students and teachers and creators, as the places, the ruptures, through which elements of a “true condition” are made visible. Put another way, how can the failures in classrooms be taken up as truths, as successes of a relevant pedagogy, where subjectivities, diverse abilities, individualities be honoured? How can a reframing of failure in this way, prompt us to welcome ruptures, to draw on them as a place of learning, or a potential place of knowing, meaning making, “education”?

Holy Failure II I would like to add one more element to this consideration of failure, and that is to think about failure as an act of individuality, an act of resistance. As suggested earlier, the use of failure as subject in the performing arts works with and against hegemonic ideologies and value

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systems and this way functions to disrupt normative conventions of meaning making. Eve Katsouraki and Dan Watt suggest that this practice asserts “an anti-conformist ideology” (2) and, borrowing from Bails, “a poetics of upheaval through difference” (2). Like all disruptions to expected norms, failure reminds us of the contingency of meaning and the possibility of difference. Practiced processes of meaning making and narratives of success build our understanding of the world we live in, to disrupt this therefore, is both a political and a poetic act. Considered in this light, failure can be taken up as a practice of resistance to normative or dominant ideologies; the perseverance of the practitioner of failure therefore, becomes a revolutionary model of alternative possibility. Pedagogies of resistance, critical and post-critical pedagogies, share in objectives to shed light on grand narratives and systemic practices, they endeavour to honour individual contributions and analyse power structures in teaching and learning. It seems that conversations about failure are long overdue in these paradigms.

Conclusion: Failure as Praxis I conclude with the partial proposition that at best, failure as taken up in institutional education across much of the Western world is largely a superficial and short-sighted marker, and at worst it is a homogenising tool that stifles creativity and critical thinking. I propose a reconsideration of failure in education as an element of the human condition that can be productive as a place in which to learn, in which to move, discover, as well as from which to reflect, and think critically. I propose failure as a transformative mode of creation, production, pedagogy (including theatre and drama education), that is connected to the ways in which we make meaning, to the ideologies of our society, to our subjectivities and positions in relation to others—political, social, cultural, ideological. In closing I suggest we heed Beckett’s oft-quoted words and do what we can to fulfil his call to “fail again, fail better” (1).

Works Cited Bailes, Sara Jane. Performance, Theatre and the Poetics of Failure. Oxon: Routledge, 2011. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho. Grove Press. 1984. Print. Briz, Nick, Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom & Evan Meaney, F.A.Q. http://gli.tc/h/faq/ .Web. Date accessed: May 2014.

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Deleuze, Gilles. (1994). Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Print. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print. Ellsworth, Elizabeth Ann. Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print. Etchells, Tim. “Mistranslation, Folly and Anti-Photography: Three fragments for Saatchi and Saatchi.” Institute of Failure. http://www.institute-of-failure.com. Web. Date accessed: May 2014. —. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. —. Interview, Sheffield, April 11, 2008. Print. Heathfield, Adrian. Introduction, Institute of Failure. http://www.instituteof-failure.com. Web. Date accessed: May 2014. Ingold, Tim. “Walking, Copying and the Education of Attention.” University of Stirling, U.K. 12 Feb. 2013. Address. Katsouraki, Eve and Dan Watt. “Bodies of Failure.” Somatechnics 3 (2013): 1- 8. Print. Le Feuvre, Lisa, ed. Failure. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2010. Print. Perry, Mia, Ann Wessels and Amanda C. Wager. “From Playbuilding to Devising in Literacy Education: Aesthetic and Pedagogical Approaches.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 56.8 (2013): 649-658. Print. Perry, Mia and Teresa Rogers. “Meddling with ‘Drama Class,’ Muddling ‘Urban’: Imagining Aspects of the Urban Feminine Self Through an Experimental Theatre Process with Youth.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16.2 (2011): 197-213. Print. Perry, Mia. (2010). Theatre as Place of Learning: The Forces and Affects of Devised Theatre Processes in Education. Diss. University of British Columbia, 2010. Print.

Notes 1

To name but a few examples: Vsevolod Meyerhold; Boris Pilnyak, Osip Mandelstam. 2 See Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. Simon and Schuster, 1968.

CHAPTER EIGHT RISK, THEATRE AND LEARNING SUZANNE OSTEN IN CONVERSATION WITH HEATHER FITZSIMMONS FREY

Suzanne Osten’s remarkable career as an artist and a director began in 1968. Her controversial Medea’s Children caused an uproar in Sweden in 1975, while her more recent Babydrama has been responded to contentiously and with fascination. Osten is not well known in North America, partly because there are few texts written about her in English. Exceptions are the English-language summary of Christina Svens’ doctoral dissertation, an article about mental illness on the stage (Kaplan), Osten’s own description of her Babydrama project “On contact: the response of infants to Babydrama” and Norwegian theatre scholar Marete Elnan’s article in Youth Theatre Journal. The UngaKlara.se website also has some content in English. Here is a collection of comments she made during a skyped interview with me. When she attended our conference on theatre and learning in Toronto (2012), she was an engaged and interested participant, constantly asking provocative questions and listening to new ideas. Osten’s work has challenged the status quo in terms of childhood, art creation and audience respect since she began working. Staging taboos for children is a trademark (her themes have included divorce, suicide, eating disorders, and schizophrenia), but she also insists that her work is first and foremost an aesthetic experience for children. In her article, Marete Elnan explains that Osten’s work cultivates both “meaningful themes concerning children and formal experimentation, avoiding traditional, pedagogical aesthetics” (46). Elnan points out that Osten repeatedly proclaims “young audiences deserve theatre art, not just theatre for amusement or educational purposes.” With that in mind, I began this conversation:

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We believe the connections between theatre and learning are uneasy. Do you have any thoughts about that? I think if it’s art, it is learning something. If it makes a deep impact, you learn something. But if the ambition is to really teach a model or something, then I think that is too primitive. We don’t know what each mind takes with her or him [following a performance]. If we make it complex and good quality… then we can predict they will use it, and we can have a strong idea about how we want them to use it, but we can only have a primitive idea of the result. Sometimes young people just shut off or they take something completely outside of our own ambition, like a love for an actor or something. At Unga Klara, we have a great ambition and the work is complex. But we have given up the idea that we can control any learning from it. We can ask the teachers to work along different themes, and we can give ideas of how to do it but we have given up the total control of it. If young people just see it, good. If they work with it, good. If they play with it, good. We have given up the control. Why do people need to see live theatre? When we see people act, we get new ideas for ourselves. This is important for our understanding of the world. We need to play. Children who are not playing get really sick. If children have experienced a trauma, therapists play with them. It’s part of being human. We have to do something with our experiences and share them somehow. It’s too overwhelming to be alone with them. So we play. Are theatre and formal learning connected for children? Of course, we care for our own children, but we don’t really care for all the other kids. We don’t make them a priority. If we look at the research, the brain research, we would really give them a lot more interesting schools, and more. We need to be more interested in children’s development. We wouldn’t let children be without nutrition culturally and intellectually. If we have means, we give our own kids good schools. This is a materialistic question, of course, and if children in the middle or working class cannot access anything other than their local school, that’s what they get. The upper class has always been on the forefront of bringing interesting pedagogical forms to school because they have been creating the next leadership—they were interested in giving their own children a very good education because their children are going to lead

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society. So, all these schools with socialistic ideals, like Steiner schools, Montessori schools—they are all used by the upper class but they were brought about by idealistic people for the working class. But for the middle class, with free schools that offer a little of this and a little of that, we don’t really take a deep look into creativity and class. We don’t do that. So I think it’s another thing. It’s a power thing. It’s a greedy adult power thing that we don’t really care for children. I know this sounds really very aggressive. But I got this from a really good writer, Jules Henry, who wrote Culture vs. Man in 1963. It was a critical discussion of consumerism, and I think he had a really good critique of the middle class—how we really treat children, in a way that we would never admit to ourselves. Well, this is really a polemic. A lot of people have this sincere love for children, of course, but I don’t think they make it a priority—how to reshape a society so the kids, overall, would get a much more interesting education and a deeper understanding of life. How do you think theatre can fit into a vision of a better society? We try to be more like a Robin Hood here at Unga Klara. We think that stimulating working class kids in the same way as upper class kids is essential—we are “unfair fair” here. We are not a very big theatre and we don’t run Sweden, but we always try to get upper, middle class and working class kids together in the same performance. That’s one truthful way of saying “this is society.” And also, we bring interested adults and children into the same show. We’re trying to educate interested adults to encourage the art theme for children so that they crave more. And then we also do things for children like films, and we do workshops for them. And then to the schools that have no money we give our work for free, and we apply for money so that we can be Robin Hood in more ways. Our next strategic idea is to create a capitalist investor fund—people with money—so that they could give it to children who could never afford to go to the theatre. In Sweden, we have crashed our democratic school system and are imitating the worst of the American one, hence the galloping segregation [we’re experiencing] in Sweden now. I have met men who are about 17 or 18 and they have never ever been in the theatre. And of course, they are grown up men, and they are afraid when they are entering the stage area, and meeting actors who are welcoming them who are greeting, and they don’t know what to expect. They’ve never been to the theatre, not in school, not anywhere. They come from immigrant backgrounds or from a poor area or something. This is really

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shocking to me. I was very poor in a social democratic society you know, and I managed to get my education and everything. Theatre can make an impact on adult society by arguing for more interesting and complex text and art. I think we can make a very conscious contribution by examining who are seeing the performances and who never sees them and then we collaborate with other theatre groups with the same vision. … I meet politicians and we have an artistic endeavour, and that becomes a theatre political endeavour, and we work with the schools, and we try to figure out how to grow this consciousness that theatre is something really good for children. Also, we consider how to reach schools and help them not to say “no” to everything that disrupts their daily routine. How do you interpret the responses and understand the differences between adults and children and babies as audiences when they are really engaged in theatre? I think I have to go back to something very concrete. I’m a director and my work is to read the audience. I test my performances a lot. I read the physical response, the listening, the reactions, the movement, and also, of course, what audiences say afterwards. With babies, the only thing you can observe is whether or not you can get them to listen and be present. There is no way you can get a baby to listen if they don’t want to. But if they are more and more educated, they learn what adults expect them to do—sitting down and showing interest. You don’t really know with an adult what they think when they see a performance. You can’t really tell, in the same way, as you can with a young child’s body. At Unga Klara, we tend to talk with specific groups, but if we really want to know, we don’t only talk for a few minutes, we talk for 45 minutes with a specific group. Because it takes time before people skip past the chitchat and say something that’s really valuable. And so when we do research, we do a pilot or something like that, say a thirty minute play on a subject that we are really interested in, like upbringing, we do this play, and afterwards, we talk about it at length with a group of 30 audience members... With the Babydrama experiment, do you feel your actors learned something from the project? Well, the diva, the older actor on the project, Clare said it was the most interesting theatre that she has ever acted for. I think it was the babies’

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connection. They were so fully open that she immediately felt real contact. So it was something like she’d never before experienced—this full attention from an audience. Are the baby audiences learning from it or are they just enjoying their experience? They are imitating us months and months afterwards. They learn from it. And they listen to the music that we made/used/composed/created (we gave the mothers and fathers a recording). Maybe the babies prefer listening to it and meditating on it, better than they enjoyed the show. It’s interesting that they didn’t refuse the music. I get very interesting small reports all the time about the impact of the work we do. And even from grown-ups who have seen one of my plays, and they remember that it made a deep impact. We get reports that pieces stayed with audience members years later. What about other audiences? What do they take with them? We have small children who are talking about this latest production I’m doing. It’s for children and also teenagers. I know a girl who is obsessed with the play and has convinced her parents to take her more than once. It’s about this airplane that takes children on a journey and they end up in a fantasy world without parents to save endangered animals like rhinoceros—it’s a real wild fantasy, but it’s about freedom. For children, it is much more possible to ask for freedom than you may believe. More than you think, because modern children are very dependent on their parents. It’s an attempt to talk about freedom as children to make life choices, interesting life choices… We are now touring around Sweden with this play, and some very small kids are playing out the theme in this play. We have a gigantic baby bird. It is a half-half creature. It is a myth in the play. When a baby is born and has an opportunity to make a choice and become a bird or make another choice and be a human being. In this mystical middle space, there is a character who is lost and who has missed the chance of getting home to his/her mother. This character is such a strong creature for some of the audience we met. And so they go about, and they are dealing with this mythological hero in the play, thinking about the idea that you can become a half-half. This mythological fantasy is a very strong playing partner in the learning. So they use this, and play with it, sing the songs. They sing the songs—it’s a musical, on one level, it’s quite sophisticated and on

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another, it’s just a mythological thing. (I didn’t write it.) So the adult goal is that you will see that as a young person, you can think about the idea that you are going to live an interesting life and you must exercise your wishes. But on the practical level the kids are very much playing it. What projects interest you today? I’m working on a new piece about the painter, Leonora Carrington. [“Häst Häst Häst om Leonora Carrington” was produced after this interview as an interactive theatre project, opening September 2013]. She is interesting—a genius painter, sculptor, text writer, and she wrote a drama. I’m going to do a play about her. I’m going to Mexico in March to do research. I want to know: “What is creative genius in a sustainable mode?” She lived to be very old and she had children and so forth. I’m not interested in the genius for the very young, you know, not Kurt Cobain, a musical genius who blows his brains out. But in the creativity that goes on and on and on and on. Leonora was an English upper class girl with a governess. She was severely dyslexic and very, very, very resilient. She ran away. Didn’t make the contract with the social upbringing for young girls. She became a painter when she was 19, she encountered cubism and surrealism. And then she went almost nuts and went psychotic. She survived. She went to New York and then Mexico. And then she stayed in Mexico for 60 years. I’m going to meet some of her children. You could really say that this story, this inquiry, this is about me, of course—creative woman, old, sustainable—I want to talk with the audience about genius women or about genius men for that matter, but not mystical heroes, more like how you use creativity in a way that you don’t destroy yourself you don’t exploit yourself. You live your life. You have passion and friendship and love and you don’t want to die when you’re 25. My plan is to make a play about her in a gymnasium or wherever young people, 15, 16, 17, are. And then we do the play that she wrote. And then we do a lot of courses on painting, writing, so—yeah—we create young artists. It’s very ambitious. In a time when it is so unfashionable to be a nerd artist, it’s not easy. I would like to take a secret artist like Leonora and say, “What’s wrong with secret? What’s wrong with your inner life? You can be doing extremely ordinary things, but you’re still being creative, you still produce art. I want to talk about art as a way of living. We are very happy to have these ambitious plans for this little theatre!

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Works Cited Elnan, Merete. “Staging the Impossible for Young Audiences: Preliminary Findings in a Research Project.” Youth Theatre Journal 23 (2009): 39– 47. Kaplan, Ellen W. “The Cage Is My Mind: Object and Image in Depicting Mental Illness on Stage.” Studies in Theatre & Performance 25.2 (2005): 115–28. Osten, Suzanne. “On Contact: The Response of Infants to Babydrama.” Babydrama: En Konstrnärlig Forskningsrapport. Stockholm: Dramatsiska Institutet, 2009. 66–153. Svens, Christina. Regi Med Feministika Förtecken: Suzanne Osten På Teatern. Hedemora, Sweden: Gidlunds, 2002.

PART III. RE-IMAGINING

INTRODUCTION RE-IMAGINING, LEARNING, UNLEARNING BARRY FREEMAN

Operating just beyond the limits of the known and recognizable, imagination offers the possibility of renewal and change. In contexts of learning, imagination presents a chance to think beyond the mere acquisition of information or skills, to think instead of unexplored spaces, fresh alternatives, and novel ways to think. And this is what it may offer theatre, too. While theatre relies heavily upon traditions of knowledge and on a mastery of culturally-coded forms of representation, it does so often to imagine these differently, to make strange, to subvert authority, to unsettle the comfortable and queer the familiar. The chapters that follow each in their own way celebrate theatre as a unique and politically potent venue for public and social imagining. Cultural ideas about imagination are in constant historical flux. The Romantic notion of artistic “imagination” was of a transcendent and rapturous act. The artist was an exalted genius who must separate from society in order to receive inspiration from some mystical, possibly divine, source. After a century of modern and postmodern art, the artist has arguably become a more ordinary figure, their imaginative work no longer the result of exceptional genius, and their art rather one of adaptation, combination, and selectivity. On the one hand, this is something to celebrate; imagination is made democratic, reachable—a natural cognitive ability rather than a rarefied gift. But on the other, this may have also exposed imagination to the same capitalist, neoliberal forces that inflect everything in our age. Thus, we have the threat of artists’ work being understood exclusively within the vocabulary of industrial commodity production: company, work, process, labour, projects, skills, or tools. In the context of education, there is the threat of training in the arts being reduced strictly to vocational training rather than something enabling truly creative thinking and bold risk-taking. The four chapters that follow demonstrate how theatre is both subject to such forces as well as an important venue for their resistance. The

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chapters take up very different subjects, namely: how place may influence affective learning, what genuine intercultural engagement in training should look like, a professional theatre’s experiment with technology in a democratic dramaturgy, and how artists and parents can work with children effectively in a daycare setting. Taken together, they illustrate that the imagining happening in and through theatre is urgently public and social. These chapters can be seen to be answering a call issuing from several corners of cultural and pedagogical theory for spaces of imagination that are shared and open. In his oft-cited analysis of imagination in modernity, Arjun Appadurai notes how imagination may no longer be merely conceived of as private fantasy or contemplation, but as “an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (31). The education critic Henry Giroux is less utopian about the possibilities, though like Appadurai, believes that reclaiming politics and the public “requires a form of educated hope that accentuates how politics is played out on the terrain of imagination and desire as well as in the material relations of power and concrete social formations.” Such a vision, Giroux writes, “has to be grounded in a vision and educational project that has some hold on the present.” (“Hope in the Age”) These four authors offer a grounded vision of theatre as an open and inclusive space in which to imagine together. Chapters from Helen Nicholson and Antje Budde, who are university theatre professors in London and Toronto respectively, consider how the literal and discursive spaces of theatre education might be re-imagined. Helen Nicholson uses the occasion of the building of a new theatre at her institution to spark a discussion of what a theatre space, and in particular its atmosphere, means for the kind imagining that takes place there. Nicholson finds in the building an opportunity to refresh her thinking about the pedagogy of the place: that it might not just instil learning through representational practices-storytelling, character, style and so on-but also experientially, by encouraging students’ very sensitivity to the non-human dimensions of space or the material conditions of context. Antje Budde argues for a different kind of openness, pointing to the need for Western theatre programs to imagine a discursive space-in the curriculum, in textbooks, in practical training-beyond Western modes of representation. If Nicholson wants a permeable classroom, Budde wants a cultural permeable curriculum, one that is not tokenistically multicultural, nor drawn to dated, universalist notions of “world” theatre, but one which focuses with rigour and respect on specific traditions of practice and engages with working

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artists in the community. Writing into a different context, Cassandra Silver’s chapter looks at Section 98, an experiment in technology and politics from Toronto-based Praxis Theatre. Billed as “open-source” theatre about “Canadian civil rights history,” Praxis experimented with audience interaction via cell-phone before, during and after the performance, allowing for a “simultaneous” and “interventionist” public pedagogy that Silver likens to Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Though much separates Boal’s working context and intentions from those of Praxis, and the extent of the audience’s participation in (or ethical responsibility for) Section 98 may be limited, the piece shines a light on a company that is trying to make technology the catalyst to create a democratic and politically-galvanizing theatre. Lastly, co-editor Heather Fitzsimmons Frey’s interview with Rhona Matheson of Scotland’s Starcatchers reveals that organization’s experiments in creating a community-based space for children under the age of five to learn through imaginative play and co-create with artists-in-residence. Starcatchers’ challenge is of course not in getting children to engage in imagination and learning-that comes easily enough-but in how to meaningfully involve artists, parents, and members of the community-at-large. The challenge lies in taking the private world of children’s imagining and making it social, public and shared-for the community itself to be the site of imaginative activity. In keeping with popular notions of "social” or “relational” aesthetics in Performance Studies, the important imagining taking place in these spaces is not so much that of the dramatic worlds themselves, but in imagining new terms of engagement, between students and schools, between artists and theatres, between actors and audience. They speak of a compulsion to re-imagine, using theatre, the what, where, and how of learning. As Helen Nicholson points out, the black-box theatres built in the West in the 1970s and 80s reified a cultural idea that learning must take place in a hermetically-sealed laboratory, a private universe, and what we are witnessing is a pendulum swing toward spaces that are welcoming, transparent, permeable and inclusive. Perhaps there is a greater awareness and acceptance of the that the learning taking place in such spaces may have an expiry date, that while foundational knowledge is critically important, so too is the need for it to be interrogated and revised. Perhaps what theatre can offer is a model of the most brave and difficult form of learning at all: unlearning.

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Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Giroux, Henry A. “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism.” Truthout. 2 Dec 2013. Web. 1 Mar 2014.

CHAPTER NINE AFFECTIVE ATMOSPHERES: PERFORMATIVE PEDAGOGIES OF SPACE HELEN NICHOLSON

Over the last few months I have witnessed the building of new theatre. It is a brick-built structure, with an auditorium that will seat around 200 people at the university where I work. It is conceived as a pedagogical space replacing our old-fashioned 1980s black box theatre, and it complements our Boiler House Theatre—a ‘found’ space converted from a Victorian industrial building, and provides a contrast to the Japanese Noh Theatre that signals our research interests in global theatre. The new theatre is intended to be flexible, its spaces designed to be configured and reconfigured in ways that we have yet to imagine. Its newness, pedagogically, opens opportunities or students to re-think performeraudience relationships, to test the implications of reviving historic plays in new theatres, and to develop their work as playwrights and directors. The curriculum combines and interweaves creative and critical practices and, because it is always responsive to cutting edge research and theatremaking and performance studies, our spaces need to be responsive to the changing cultural landscape as well as inspiring new creative practices. The theatre is not designed to teach particular dramatic practices; the space reflects a pedagogic ambition to encourage students to make theatre in forms we, as academics and artists, have yet to imagine. Observing the builders at work each day, witnessing the rise of breezeblock walls, brick cladding and the tiled roof from its grey concrete footings has drawn my attention to the materiality of theatre as a practice and an art form. Theatre is, however, notoriously a haunted space, and its ghosts take many forms. Marvin Carlson points out that in Japanese Noh Theatre the play is a story of the past retold by a ghost, and further observes that there are theatrical ghosts in many dramatic traditions. Stories have been recycled, productions revived and old plays rehearsed, each of which adds to Carlson’s perception that theatre is a ‘site of memory, both personal and

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cultural’ (4). Accounts of ghostly sightings in London’s West End theatres are recounted and retold by actors, often delighting in the delicious sense of the uncanny that accompanies eerie stories. Yet even the most sceptical of listeners would find it difficult to deny that theatres are atmospheric places and, as our students donned hard hats and steel boots to wield ritualistic blows to destroy our old black-box theatre, I think we were all aware that we were also erasing the physical traces of generations of students’ memories and learning. Our new theatre will need to be warmed up, layered with new memories, and the poetics of its space will become haunted by new theatrical experiences. This paper prompted by reflecting on the spaces in which learning takes place, and specifically on the significance of atmosphere in creating productive pedagogic encounters. Of course, both learning and theatre take place in multiple settings, and the purpose-built theatre is not always the place to find it. The social turn in theatre, eloquently analysed by Shannon Jackson, has perhaps given rise to a renewed interest in the affective qualities of space. There is also neat reciprocity between contemporary theatre-makers’ interest in creating interactive or immersive theatre in abandoned and sometimes semi-derelict spaces—disused factories, empty swimming pools, vacated shops and so on—and the institutional spaces such as prisons, schools and hospitals that are often the settings for the participatory practices associated with applied theatre. Each space has its own atmosphere that can spark the imagination or, conversely, carries the weight of its own history in less obviously creative ways. The cultural geographer Ben Anderson has reflected on the relationship between atmosphere and space, using the phrase “affective atmosphere” to describe the emotional ambiguity of this experience (77-78). My suggestion is that Anderson’s notion of “affective atmosphere” offers a way to think through points of connectivity between the affective turn in applied theatre and the social turn in contemporary theatre and performance. In this chapter, I shall take up the challenge to consider the complex intersection between learning and theatre by focusing on the significance of affective atmosphere in pedagogical encounters. It is perhaps surprising that there has been very little debate about atmosphere in drama education or pedagogy more broadly. The ability to create specific dramatic atmospheres is, of course, central to theatre-makers’ craft, but it is also possible to talk of the atmosphere of a lesson, the “feel” of a school or an old people’s care setting, or the atmosphere of a prison. Atmospheres navigate and traverse objects, places, people and events; they are ephemeral and material, affective and social, human and non-human, spatial and temporal—each dualism marking the performativity of

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atmosphere. I shall begin this chapter by opening some conceptual questions about affective atmospheres, before moving to illustrate these issues with different examples of performances, each of which raises new questions about how atmospheres can be created and unfixed, pedagogically, in and though theatre.

Atmosphere and Affect Thinking through atmosphere in relation to theatre and learning is an invitation to reassess the balance between the ephemerality and materiality of artistic practice. Interesting, there are relatively few theorists who tackle questions of atmosphere head-on, and the German philosopher Gernot Böhme’s definition of atmosphere serves as an important starting point for this discussion. Böhme links atmosphere to aesthetic theory, and although a full analysis of his concept of a new aesthetics lies outside the scope of this paper, his scholarly attention to atmosphere as a concept has informed later debates about affective atmospheres developed in cultural geography. I am interested in how atmosphere might be newly conceptualised as a productive force in the negotiation between theatre and learning; my contention is that we have under-estimated the affective, contagious and aesthetic qualities of atmosphere in theatre that has educative potential, however broadly learning may be construed. In his study of atmosphere, Böhme emphasises its spatial qualities as well as its affective powers. He describes atmosphere as “between environmental qualities and human sensibilities” (“The Art of the Stage Set” 200), and suggests that they have different characters that “seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze” (“Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept”114). The ambiguity of atmosphere as a concept, its multiple moods and “tones of feeling,” places atmosphere at the point of intersection between subjectivity and objectivity. He grapples with the indeterminate ontological status of atmosphere which, in Böhme’s analysis, clusters at the conjunction between ephemerality and materiality: ...atmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities-conceived as ecstasies. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space. (122)

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Böhme’s definition of atmosphere opens questions about the ambiguity of affective life as an assemblage of human and non-human interactivity. It is this form of interactivity, and its affective force that, he suggests, lies at the centre of a new aesthetic theory in which it is understood that where the spatial moods of the environment (atmospheres) are perceived, they are experienced as embodied feelings. Böhme specifically cites the skill of artists and theatre-makers to produce and shape atmospheres by “manipulating of material conditions, of things, apparatus, sound and light” (“The Art of the Stage Set” 4). He further points out that there is no clear or direct transition of meaning between production and reception, because “atmosphere itself is not a thing; it is rather a floating in-between, something between things and the perceiving subjects” 4). There are two inter-related points of interest in Böhme ’s analysis of atmosphere that are particularly relevant to this debate about theatre and learning, and both relate to the affective qualities of atmosphere. First, by recognising that atmosphere is ‘something between things and the perceiving subjects’, Böhme paves the way for further discussion about affect not simply as an emotional state, but as spatial interactions between human and non-human worlds. Second, atmosphere invites ways of thinking about affect that recognises its collectivity and materiality. Writing about the distinction between emotion and affect, Ben Anderson takes up Böhme’s suggestion that atmospheres are spatially embodied, but he also draws on Marx to identify the ways in which the affects of atmospheres are collectively experienced. Anderson recognises the ontological ambiguity of affective atmospheres: By linking the term [“affective atmospheres”] to a certain material imagination we reach a first approximation of atmospheres as collective affects that are simultaneously in determinant and determinate. Affective atmospheres are a class of experience that occur before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions. (italics original 78)

Recalling Marx enables Anderson to take account of the materiality of affective atmospheres, and to open political questions about affect by suggesting that mood, ambiance or atmosphere might be collectively experienced as a “transpersonal dimension of affective life” (77). Sara Ahmed further suggests that atmospheres are contagious, the means through which affect is transmitted, thereby challenging the idea that affect is an individualised emotional state. “Thinking of affect as contagious,” she writes, “does help us challenge an ‘inside-out’ model of affect by showing how affects pass between bodies” (36). In considering affect as

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part of the habitual, unreflexive practices of everyday life, Anderson proposes that it is the concept of atmosphere that presents a response to this question: “How to attend to collective affects that are not reducible to the individual bodies that they emerge from?” (80). This question has particular relevance to debates about theatre and learning, where it is widely recognised that learning is often undertaken socially and collectively. Theorising affective atmosphere as an indeterminate space between environmental and human sensibilities also presses a challenge to the affective turn in applied theatre where affect is seen almost invariably in humanist terms. James Thompson, who opened this important debate, uses affect theory to challenge perceptions of the narrow instrumentalism of applied theatre. He is alert to the political force of affect, which he sees in terms of participants’ felt responses and their emotional engagement in ways that extend beyond the immediate dramatic moment. Thompson’s politically effective concept of affect is discussed in humanist terms, and he selects Patricia Clough’s phrase “the self-feeling of being alive” to describe affect in relation to participants’ experiences of applied theatre (119). Nicola Shaughnessy follows Thompson’s lead in her book, Applying Performance (119). She accepts Thompson’s humanist approach to affect and, although interestingly she references the atmospheric in her discussion of affect, her focus lies on affect as a cognitive process and as an aspect of human play, further suggesting that assessing the affects of a dramatic process on participants is one way to evaluate applied theatre. What is interesting about both these accounts of affect and applied theatre, however differently construed, is that neither addresses the affective qualities of the non-human world; Thompson does not take up the element of Clough’s posthumanist definition of affect that focuses on the non-human technologies of the material world, where she argues that affect “transverses the opposition between the organic and non-organic” (2). This focus on self-feeling and human cognition suggests that there is little appetite in applied theatre to explore what J-D Dewsbury describes as “the agency of matter and its affective affordances” (76) and Jane Bennett portrays as “affective encounters” between human and non-human “vibrant bodies” (118), both of which are associated with new materialist debates. Perhaps this emphasis on human agency in applied theatre than is unsurprising. Learning has been cast as socially constructed and personcentred, in which the social dynamic of learning is generally regarded as the products of individuals working as a group rather than in a broader ecological framework of non-human actants and affective sensibilities. My focus here, though indebted to Thompson’s analysis, is differently

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nuanced. I am interested in the ecology of affect where, following Dewsbury, it is understood that “agency is not discretely distributed between the human and the non-human; rather it mutually comes about in the immediate material constitution of any experiential encounter” (74). The affective qualities of the environment on theatre-makers are, however, discussed by Martin Welton in his book Feeling Theatre. Welton follows Böhme by suggesting that, in theatrical encounters, we are drawn in to “moods of indeterminate duration, felt as a condition of neither self nor environment exactly, but somewhere ‘in-between’” (151). Introducing a concept of affective atmosphere has implications for how performativity is understood in pedagogical encounters, and how the immediacy and materiality of performance is recognised to have affective force through atmosphere. My suggestion is that it is these contingent relations between sensations and “things” that define affective atmospheres as possible fields of action in theatre, and that this has the potential to play out productively across timespace in environments of learning.

Affective Atmospheres and Theatre On several occasions in the last few months I have found myself gazing out of the window watching the builders at work on the new theatre. There is a precise choreography of bodies in space, an embodied knowledge of laying bricks, smoothing concrete and fixing steel girders that seems to require focused concentration, but have become habitual routine actions. As someone who has spent my life in immaterial labour, there have been times when I have found myself envying the builders who can see the physical results of their day’s work. The building started to be animated for me when I arrived at work to see that glass filled the window spaces, but I have wondered if the site already had a particular atmosphere for the various architects, builders, surveyors and tradesmen who work there, and if there are ways of capturing their stories about the building process before the moment is lost. Affective atmospheres for both theatre and learning are partly defined by their architectural design, the ways in which buildings encourage bodies to move, flow and inter-connect. Buildings become animated through light, touch, sound and movement and, as John Urry suggests, “atmosphere is in the relationship of peoples and objects. It is something sensed often through movement and experienced in a tactile kind of way” (73). This suggests that there is an affective dramaturgy to buildings, where atmosphere is created in-between people and places. Theatre spaces carry their own pedagogical imperatives where, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-

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Gimblett points out in her discussion of museums, knowledge is performed (3). In my own theatre-making with students, the space has become integrated as a performer, and students shaping the work and defining the intimacy of the relationship between audience and performer, participant and spectator. As our new theatre has grown, our familiar buildings have been reconfigured and the atmosphere has changed. A new sofa in an old thoroughfare invites students to pause and chat, a newly exposed window throws light on a dark corner, making it a quiet place to read. The demise of our black box theatre also reflects a change in theatre culture, and a shift away from modernist theatre designs which, as David Wiles notes in his study of Western performance space, appeared to promise democracy and freedom through the flexibility of the space, yet at the same time isolated audiences from the effects of the outside world by expecting them to witness theatre in the privacy of darkness. It is this lack of light that leads Wiles to comment that the black box is a “depoliticising space” because “no body politic is placed on view” (257). The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century predilection for making theatre in “found” spaces, particularly former industrial buildings, marks a new interest in the inter-dependence of people and their environmental spaces. These spaces possess, in Wiles’ words, a “life of their own,” and a “life constituted by the traces of other human lives” (263). Wiles’ use of the word “other” is telling; the focus of his analysis of found spaces is on professional artists and the examples he cites (Peter Brook’s Bouffe du Nord, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Cartoucherie de Vincennes, London’s Tate Modern, Glasgow’s Tramway and so on) assume a permanent change of use from industrial space to arts venue for audiences with metropolitan tastes in contemporary arts. To adapt Carlson’s metaphor, these found theatres are haunted by old ghosts from a very different demographic and background from their current inhabitants. Theatres are, as Böhme points out, spaces in which affective atmospheres are consciously manufactured, and this perhaps marks a distinction between the aesthetic spaces of theatre and places where theatre is applied to learning, which are often highly regulated institutional spaces. The ambiguity that surrounds the affective quality of atmospheres, particularly in relation to disciplined learning environments such as schools, hospitals or prisons, means that constructing a positive atmosphere for learning can present particular challenges. Looking back at all the institutional settings where I have taught drama or led drama workshops, not all are conducive to creative work—school dining halls with the clatter and smells of cooking, cramped activity rooms in

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residential care homes for the elderly, hostels for the homeless heavy with surveillance cameras, or cold prison education blocks. Yet, because affective atmospheres are infectious, they are one way in which routines, cultures and “desirable” or normative codes of conduct are established and maintained in institutional settings, whether this walking rather than running along hospital or school corridors, maintaining quiet in parts of a library or accepting the routine of security procedures when in prison. Citing Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, David Bissell comments that affective atmospheres can exert a disciplinary force, suggesting they are “central to everyday conduct…since different atmospheres facilitate and restrict particular practices and, in doing so, precipitate particular structures of feeling” (“Passenger Mobilities” 272). It was the tension between the affective atmosphere of a “found” space and the highly regulated space of prison that inspired A Tender Subject (London, March, 2012), devised and directed by the British artist Mark Storor. A Tender Subject was a three-year project in which Storor worked for extended periods with gay prisoners and gay prison officers, commissioned by Artangel, a company that produces contemporary art that is both socially engaged and artistically innovative. I have chosen this work as an example partly because it was a project that negotiated the complexity of learning and theatre, but also because it referenced and transformed the affective atmospheres of very different spaces. The performance, devised with the theatre company Only Connect, marked the culmination of the project, but represented only one small element of it; the ethical and pedagogic focus of Storor’s work was on the participatory process in prison rather than using prisoners to gather or generate material for a public performance. Speaking about A Tender Subject, Rachel Anderson, head of interaction at Artangel, described the company’s commitment to both learning and the arts: Its roots are in educational practice, it articulates itself through social value and through the value of those participating in the process but it stands in a mainstream arts framework. (Needham)

The artist, Mark Storor, has created beautiful and complex work with people in many difficult settings—he worked with terminally ill children and their classmates in For the Best (2009), and with boys and men at different stages in life, including young offenders, in Boychild (2007)). But in a recorded interview Storor described A Tender Subject as particularly challenging because of the “brutal atmosphere” of prisons in which gay prisoners often protect the secrets of their sexuality very carefully.

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The affective atmospheres of prisons permeated the project and the performance. In her book Theatre and Prison, Caoimhe McAvinchey comments perceptively that theatre making and prison life place very different demands on space and time, and their different ways of working can make them incompatible: The smooth administration of prison of prison depends on the strict demarcation of time, space and action: particular behaviours happen in specific places for an allocated duration...In contrast, theatre demands a provocation of ideas of certainty. It invites a playful exploration of time, space and action. (60-61)

Storor observed that the hierarchal structure and disciplined practices within prisons affected gay prison officers as well as prisoners who, over time, had become desensitised by their environment. Rather than making oversimplified judgements about prison officers as oppressors and the prisoners as the oppressed, Storor wanted to break down hierarchies, and find sensitive points of connection between officers and prisoners whose sexuality was shared. With the support of the organisation Gays and Lesbians in the Prison Service (GALIP), Storor was able to develop workshops with prison officers and prisoners three different British prisons, working separately at first, but gradually and with care bringing the two groups together. By working with gay prison officers, Storor hoped that the prisoners would feel supported in coming forward to work on the project. Trust came slowly, he commented, but as prison officers relinquished control of the space and everyone recognised resonances of their own stories in others that were shared, “the presence of the officers gave them [the prisoners] absolute freedom.” The dramatic power of the performance echoed the learning in the workshops. In prison, Storor had found that prisoners protected themselves from the antagonistic atmosphere in many complex ways, making tender moments and intimate encounters impossible. There were many experiences from the workshops that were not included in the performance because, Storor observed, it felt too emotionally raw. He recounted one workshop in which a prisoner said that he felt that he had left “a suit of himself” at the door when he entered prison, and would only put it back on when released. In response, Storor and Anderson bought up all the suits in the local charity shops and asked the men to choose one and to customise it in any way they liked. The man who had sought invisibility ripped out the lining drew things inside that had emotional meaning, and over-sewed it so that it looked to Storor “like a heart-bypass scar.” These moments of tenderness, though not directly represented in the performance, illustrate

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Storor’s workshop methodology and show how working with material objects enabled the men to find metaphors that contributed to creating a new affective community within the prison. Translating this ethic of care into performance, Storor wanted to show how even fleeting moments of tenderness can cut through the harsh atmosphere of prison. Each aspect of the installation symbolised experiences in the workshops, the poetic performance brought together fragmented stories, collages of fleeting images and sounds to capture the fragility of life in prison. Rather than trying to teach audiences what it felt like to be in prison or to replicate the prison setting, the space of performance—the building in which it was performed—need to invoke the emotional landscape of prison life and the affective atmosphere of brutality and vulnerability that Storor had found there. On the evening of the performance I arrived at a central London location, and we were kept waiting in an anonymous office building. Our phones were taken from us, and we were eventually herded into a security van and taken to an undisclosed location. When we got out, we were led down a flight of stairs to a disused basement warehouse that had housed, I later learnt, huge meat refrigerators for Smithfield’s meat market in London’s Spitalfields. There was something of the dead-meat carcasses lingering in that space. Once through the locked doors, we were escorted silently by prison officers a journey through a series of cavernous rooms, encountering performances and installations performed by members of Only Connect, a company of ex-offenders and young people at risk of offending. Each room felt painfully different, the atmosphere haunted by the derelict industrial space and the solo singing of men who were sometimes visible, silhouetted against the dim light or huddled in a dark corner against the cold. Moments of fleeting tenderness punctuated this cruel cold, but the environment still felt tense, as if everything might suddenly turn vicious. In one room two men clung to each other as they balanced precariously on small floor tiles—each bearing a bar of yellow industrial soap—as they were doused repeatedly with buckets of freezing water. In another, we witnessed two prisoners sharing bread outside a candlelit fairytale house built of square loaves. Peering through the halflight in a different space, we witnessed a man cradling another in a pool of blood. Doors slammed and keys jangled as we were ushered wordlessly from one room to another, the aural landscape adding to the refrigerated chill of this underground world. The final room was a sea of blue hyacinths, heavy with a scent that promised freedom and sunlight, but felt almost oppressive in that bleak industrial tomb. We were given back our phones, offered a loaf of Mother’s Pride white sliced bread, and turned out

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onto the night streets, unsure quite where we were. I stood on the pavement feeling disorientated, holding my bread. Each image and installation was clear and sharply articulated in the moment of performance, but the cumulative experience of A Tender Subject felt beyond words. I felt cold and out of place, bereft of a critical vocabulary to articulate what I had witnessed. My sense of dislocation was further emphasised by standing on an unfamiliar street holding a cumbersome loaf of bread that I knew I wouldn’t eat, and yet I couldn’t just throw away. Bread is currency and comfort in prison, and I had witnessed its symbolic value both in my own work in prisons and, exquisitely, captured in performance as a moment of tenderness that lent hope to the situation. But images I had absorbed in performance quickly dissipated and became blurred, and all that I was left with was an acute sense of the atmosphere—the movement of bodies in semi-darkness, the material presence of sounds and images that seemed to haunt the space but swiftly disappear from view. Ben Anderson’s description of the transitory and unfinished qualities of affective atmospheres seems an apt way to describe this feeling: Atmospheres are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing, as bodies enter into relation with one another. They are never finished, static or at rest. (“Affective Atmospheres” 79)

Some critics of the found this unfinished quality of A Tender Subject unsatisfying, but I think they missed the point; the success of the performance lay in its ambiguity, the way it pushed audiences to witness moments of tenderness while simultaneously feeling the discomfort of inhabiting a hostile physical environment. The atmosphere changed the way we felt, it literally altered our biological bodies in ways that Teresa Brennan suggested are both infectious and offer a form of sensory education (116-120). Rather than providing individual audience members with finished lessons, or even an immediate ability to ‘make sense’ of the experience, it was the affective atmosphere created in A Tender Subject that opened a new pedagogical space that traversed and floated in-between people, places and things.

Affective Atmospheres and Learning A Tender Subject illustrates some of the central debates in this chapter about the ways in which affective atmospheres can alter perceptions in, as Böhme puts it, the “haze” between “the qualities of the environment and human sensibilities” (“Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept” 114).

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This insight also presses me to think further about how the dynamic between affective atmospheres, learning and theatre might be productively re-imagined. In education studies, the atmosphere of a school, classroom or lesson might be mentioned in passing, but there has been very little analysis or critical reflection on the relationship between atmosphere and learning. Yet it is difficult to imagine that educationalists are immune to the affective qualities of atmosphere, nor that there would be widespread disagreement with the view that negative atmospheres in educational settings present obstacles to learning. Writing from the perspective of cultural studies, Sara Ahmed points out that people learn to fit into an affective environment when they feel “aligned” to it, taking pleasure in the objects that surround them and feeling physically comfortable in its spaces. Conversely, she suggests, feelings of alienation or unease are generated when there is a gap between the affective value attributed to objects or places and their own experiences of them (37). Applied to learning, if it is understood that affective atmospheres “precipitate particular structures of feeling” (Bissell “Passenger Mobilities” 272), it follows that they exert a profound influence on the way in which people inhabit and embody different spaces, how they move, feel, act and learn. What I am searching for here is an answer to the question: how might an understanding of human and non-human interactivity prompt new ways of thinking about theatre as part of an affective ecology of learning? To address this question, I have turned to reconsider conventional pedagogical connections between theatre and education. It is widely understood, and indeed I have argued, that theatre provides a space for reflection that enables people to symbolise, represent and “make sense” of the world (Nicholson, Attending to Sites of Learning 98). This dynamic between action and reflection in theatre education is habitually associated with social constructivism, a theoretical position that recognises, across all its various manifestations, that knowledge is constructed reflexively by learners as part of an experiential process. In this culture of selfreflexivity, Baz Kershaw argues, theatrical efficacy is understood retrospectively as a consequence or product of the theatrical event (305). Citing Brecht and Boal, Kershaw also points out that dominant forms of Western theatre rely on audiences distancing themselves from the world in order to understand it better, a view that echoes Wiles’ analysis of modernist performance spaces: From this perspective, perhaps theatre–and its performances–may be seen as the social institution that has most quintessentially modelled the abstraction of human life in the “natural world.” (306)

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Kershaw is, of course, writing politically about the possibility of a theatre ecology (the title of his book) that engages productively with the environment rather than draining its resources and further isolating humanity from the non-human world. But it is Kershaw’s critique of theatrical representation as a form of spectatorship—however participatory the process may be—that is particularly germane to my argument. As I have already suggested, a wider understanding of affect and affective atmospheres draws attention to agency as the affective enactment of bodies, material objects and places, and is less dependent on the humanist concept of a reflexive or interpretive self. This way of thinking marks a distinction between social constructivist theories of cognition and nonrepresentational theories of affect. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison take their lead from non-representational theory when they propose that social constructivism might be inverted, acknowledging that learning comes from enactment as well as (or rather than) symbolic meaning-making: “we come to know and enact a world from inhabiting it, from becoming attuned to its differences and juxtapositions, from a training of our senses, dispositions and expectations and from being able to initiate, imitate and elaborate skilled lines of action” (9). It is worth pausing to consider the implications of this way of thinking on theatre and learning. Of course, careful reflection on both social and theatrical experiences is an important aspect of a drama curriculum, and symbolic meaning-making is an important part of the theatre practitioner’s craft. I am not intending to offer an explicit list of what has been learnt in each instance, and anyone reading this article hoping for these kind of drama teaching tips will be disappointed. My suggestion is not that pedagogical approaches hope that students will “make sense” of the world as a consequence of participating in drama should be abandoned, rather that it is also acknowledged that there are also other ways to know the world. This is, conceptually, a challenge to social constructivist thought that has traditionally dominated theories of learning. As Anderson and Harrison explain, social constructivist theories conventionally claim that “the ‘action’” is not “in the bodies, habits and practices of the individual or the collective...but rather in the meanings cited by and projected onto those bodies” (5). Non-representational theory challenges the notion of bodies as a projection of discursively (socially) constructed meaning, suggesting instead that the body acts in the performative present, constantly improvising. This focus on improvisation and enactment offers new ways of thinking about theatre as a potential field of action in education by reassessing some of the ways in which learning happens. For example, one of the consequences of social constructivist theories of learning is that, in

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an understandable attempt to avoid traditional rote learning and transmission models of teaching, it underestimates the ways in which affects can be contagious and transpersonal, transmitted from space to object to body. So, when theatre educators working with social constructivist paradigms claim that the drama “all came from the students,” non-representational theorist might invite them to question how it happens that, despite apparently offering multiple ways of working, there is often a very clear alignment between the students’ work and the teacher’s values or aesthetic preferences. This relates to Ahmed’s view that shared values signify positive affective atmospheres, and further suggests that students learn best when they are attuned to their environment and feel included in the affective community and the genial atmosphere of the lesson or workshop. Writing in a similar vein, Elizabeth Ellsworth describes such pedagogic encounters as “sensation construction” that is no longer “merely representational” (27). A brief example might serve to illustrate this theoretical point. Each year, as part of the drama degree at my university, undergraduate students are offered the opportunity to work in a local primary school, leading drama workshops and learning about theatre education. Towards the end of the course, over one hundred children come to the university to perform their work in one of our theatres, a regular annual event that is now eagerly anticipated by students, academic staff, teachers and the children themselves. Because we have been working in the same primary school for some years now, stories of the university experience have been passed down from child to child, forming part of the school’s cultural memory. But the drama itself, though an important aspect of the school’s arts curriculum, is only one aspect of their learning. Many of the children come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the school’s headteacher is particularly keen that the children have a positive experience of visiting the university as part of her commitment to raising educational aspirations. This means that the affective experience of the day needs to be positive; we are not trying to ‘sell’ the university, but the children they need to feel ‘aligned’ to the environment (to borrow Ahmed’s word), to inhabit and embody it as if they belong. The aesthetic of the theatre provides an appropriate context for this process, not least because the children are working alongside the drama students, creating work together as fellow artists. The students become very involved in the work, often staying up late to turn the children’s artwork into beautiful masks or puppets, or editing their recordings into soundscapes. On the day, they want to bring a little theatrical magic to the children’s experiences, both in the theatre itself and on their first visit to the campus. On one level we are assisted by

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the looming presence of the old Victorian building that reminds the children of Hogwarts, but this also risks perpetuating an elitist stereotype. We need to create the right atmosphere. For undergraduates, universities campuses are not experienced as particularly regulated environments, but the presence of one hundred eight-year-olds challenges that perception. There are invisible codes of conduct that the students no longer notice because they have become habitual, as “environmental memories” that have accumulated and become “wired” into their bodies over time, as Dewsbury puts it (74). Over the years, however, students have found that playing a noisy game of tag in the quadrangle outside the library can bring security guards running and that office staff are disturbed by a crowd of children rehearsing their songs under their windows. Theatres are disciplined spaces, and part of the experience that each year the children seem to remember, perhaps surprisingly, is the health and safety talk given by our very supportive technicians. This might have something to do with the fact that our stage manager also works on the hit West End show Wicked, but I have often heard the children say—in different terms—that the solemnity of this moment makes them “feel professional.” We talk explicitly about the dramatic atmosphere we want to create in the theatre, how we might respond as audiences to each performance and how it doesn’t matter if unexpected things happen when they are performing. Less selfconsciously, the children are completely unaware that when they take over the woods at lunchtime, running, whooping and laughing as eight-yearolds do, they are creating sights and sounds rarely witnessed in our grounds. Recognising the different affective registers that might be experienced by the children enables us to craft the day, but it is nonetheless a process that is necessarily open and contingent, dependent on environmental factors such as the weather, power-cuts or traffic jams as well as the very different expectations that everyone involved brings to the event. As Bissell comments, “affects are transmitted between bodies and objects in ways that are often unpredictable or unforeseen” (“Placing Affective Relations” 83). Each year, when the children have gone home, the woods seem haunted by their presence. The affective atmosphere is changed by their visit, in ways that are intangible, but not abstract. In this instance it is not particularly important whether the children remember the details of the drama, nor whether they can recall information about the Victorian philanthropist who founded the college. What is important is that their affective experience of the day is positive, that they have been able to improvise confidently in each place they encountered, that their senses

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have become comfortably “attuned” to the environment they have inhabited, to borrow a word much favoured by theorists of affect. This opens a distinction between pedagogy, as a structured educative process, and learning that may happen in-between place, people, events and the material world. This recognises the potency of affective encounters between people and things and, following Dewsbury, understands that agency is not “discretely distributed” between the human and the nonhuman, but “mutually comes about” in “any experiential encounter” (74). This kind of experiential learning extends beyond normative models of human learning as a reflexive act of cognition or embodied as habitual practices or skills. It places an emphasis on learning’s ecology, bringing together the ephemeral, the technological and the material, and in ways that create new affective patterns of interaction.

Affective Atmospheres: Relation Learning and Social Change Throughout this paper I have stressed the transitory and unfinished qualities of affective atmospheres; they change and are open to change. This means that they have a particular significance in the intersection between theatre and learning; atmosphere is produced as part of the artistic process, participants work collaboratively in atmospheres that are infectious, and the materiality of spaces and objects is recognised to have affective agency. Moods (or structures of feeling) are not, however, always predictable; affective atmospheres may be contagious but they are also contingent. Atmospheres can, however, be made with the intention of creating specific moods; there is theatricality to atmosphere—Böhme describes it as an “aura”—that means that its affective qualities can serve very different aesthetic purposes. Atmospheres are sold in restaurants and nightclubs, for example, where it is seen as a profitable commodity within the experience economy. From a very different perspective, I am suggesting that affective atmospheres are integral to experiential learning, albeit in ways that have yet to be acknowledged. There is more to be said about this aspect of theatre and learning, but these reflections that will, I hope, provide some tentative ways to extend debates about how affective atmospheres contribute to sites of learning and potential fields of action. By paying attention to affective atmospheres, as one factor in learning, it is possible to understand that learning happens habitually, as part of the adaptation and improvisation of everyday life. This extends beyond seeing individual learners within a wider social context; it represents a paradigm shift in which learning is understood as a relational ontology that decentres

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humanist ideas of both learning and affect. Seen in this light, affective atmospheres can be seen to be a catalyst for learning and change, as David Bissell suggests: [A]ffective atmospheres must be understood as the relational potential for things to act or change in a particular space. Possibly the most effective way of grasping the idea of an affective atmosphere is therefore to think of it as a propensity: a pull or a charge that might emerge in a particular space which might (or might not) generate particular events and actions, feelings and emotions. (“Passenger Mobilities” 273)

Bissell’s emphasis on the “relational potential” of affective atmospheres underlines the significance of space in social action, and recognises that change is responsive to (and constructive of) particular events. Applied to learning, this focus on relationality captures some of the unpredictability of pedagogical encounters—the way in which different events, spaces, people, objects and situations can radically influence the ways in which learning is experienced. Sara Ahmed describes these encounters as “full of angles”—a phrase she uses to describe how each situation is differently read and experienced. She describes the propensity of atmosphere as reciprocal—“to receive is to act. To receive an impression is to make an impression”—and contingent—“the ‘hap’ of what happens” (37). This acknowledges the significance of habit and improvisation–or repetition and difference-within all learning environments. This relationality is evident in both applied theatre and in the social turn of contemporary performance practices, where the relational aesthetics and participatory practices negotiate the creative dynamic in the gaps in-between self and environment. I am suggesting that theatre provides a space to learn about affective atmospheres, to understand how they are crafted and experienced. This is not tied to gauging students’ affective responses in positive ways, nor about measuring how their behaviour might change. I am suggesting that participating in theatre may draw attention to the agency of matter, to the ways in which the non-human and non-human world interact and infuse each other. Atmosphere invites a post-humanist reading of affect, thereby raising the status of the material world, its ecology, fragility and porousness. This requires a new kind of affective pedagogy that radically decentres human cognition as the primary focus of learning. In terms that invoke the debates about affective atmosphere in this chapter, Jane Bennett calls for a pedagogy that is based on “sensory attentiveness”:

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What is also needed is a cultivated, patience, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body. (xiv)

This sensory attentiveness is, I would suggest, integral to a theatrical pedagogy that is alert to affective atmosphere in ways that are productive and forward-looking. I am suggesting that this way of thinking offers a resistance to the instrumentalism of many educational systems, and an alternative to social constructivist models of learning in which the aftereffects or consequences of drama is measured in terms of how people behave or what they do. I am suggesting a wider ecology of learning that is, I would suggest, utopian.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. New York: Duke University Press, 2010. 29-51. Print. Anderson, Ben, and Paul Harrison, eds. Taking Place: Non Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2010. Print Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2009): 77–81. Print. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, 2010 NC: Duke University Press. Print Bissell, David. “Placing Affective Relations: Uncertain Geographies of Pain.” Taking Place: Non Representational Theories and Geography. Eds. Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2010. 70-98. Print. —. “Passenger Mobilities: Affective Atmospheres and the Sociality of Public Transport.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010): 270- 289. Print. Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 113–126. Print. —. “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres.” Le Cresson. The Centre for Research on Sonic Space and Urban Environment, 2000. Web. 18 Jan. 2013. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Print Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Print.

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Clough, Patricia Ticineto. “Introduction.” The Affective Turn: Theorising the Social Eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, Duke University Press, 2007 1-33. Print. Dewsbury, J-D. “Affective Habit Ecologies: Material Dispositions and Immanent Inhabitations.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts17.4 (2012): 74-82. Print. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Places of Learning. London, Routledge, 2005. Print. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. London: University of California Press, 1998. Print. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge, 2011. Print. Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecologies: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print. McAvinchey, Caoihme. Theatre and Prison. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Print. Needham, Alex. “Gay prisoners to get Jail Tales Shown in Artangel Installation.” The Guardian. 5 March 2012. Web. 12 Jan. 2013. Nicholson, Helen. “Attending to Sites of Learning: London and Pedagogies of Scale.” Performance Research 17.4 (2012): 94-115. Print. —. Theatre and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Print. Shaughnessy, Nicola. Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Print. Storor, Mark. “A Tender Subject.” Recorded discussion. Free World Centre, Clerkenwell, 24 and 31 March 2012. “Mark Storor: A Tender Subject.”Artangel. The Artangel Collection. 16 July 2013. Web. 3 Jan. 2013. Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Print. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Print. Welton, Martin. Feeling Theatre. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2012. Print Wiles, David. A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

CHAPTER TEN GROUNDWORK: CHINESE THEATRE, “WORLD THEATRE”…BEYOND? TEACHING CROSS-CULTURAL NARRATIVES OF THEATRE HISTORY, THEORY AND PERFORMANCE ANTJE BUDDE

Hidden in the agenda of postmodernism is, I think, a rebuke, an insult, a devaluation. Instead of recognizing the status of "the other" as an equal, there is the undermining of "the other" by a declared indifference to distinction, while attempting to maintain the same balance of power. In fact, the very designation of "the other" is one such manoeuvre. (Chin 165) The progressivist thesis in theatre studies leads to an approach that is no less exclusionary than was the one in general history studies…literary theatre in China has a longer continuous history than in Europe, but since the Chinese tradition has no place in a narrative concerned with the progress of Western realism and spoken drama, why take it too seriously? Brockett and Hildy’s History of the Theatre (9th edition), devote all of nine pages to Chinese theatre, compared to 575 for the West. (Tillis 107)

Fact Checking This essay critically reviews a contradictory journey of teaching theatre history in a non-Western-centric, cross-culturally inclusive manner while constantly being challenged by culturally and politically hegemonic assumptions, multi-cultural rhetoric, economic pressures and dominating Western-centric canonical expectations by both students and administrators. In my experience, the assumption that all cultural histories—Western or

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not—are equal, yet not the same in their own right, seems to be a provocation that neither students nor administrators are particularly willing to explore. While a full year undergraduate course on two Shakespeare plays can be taught at the university I teach at without a problem, a twelve-week course (i.e. half-year course) with selected examples from 1,000 years of Chinese theatre history, including works of Canada’s Chinese diaspora, could not. Our journey starts with a course on Chinese and Chinese-Canadian theatre history/performance entitled “Innovation and Experimentation in Chinese Theatre” which I taught in the fall terms of 2004 and 2005 at the University College Drama Program, University of Toronto. This course was designed for second year undergraduate theatre/drama students. In 2006, a non-negotiable request was made by the college principal to terminate this course and replace it with a not-further-specified “world theatre” course to be taught in the fall of the same year as part of our undergraduate curriculum. The reasoning behind this termination was that the “usefulness” of knowledge generated in a Chinese theatre course in the contemporary, multi-cultural Canadian context could not be seen by either students or administrators. Apparently, the principal followed a request by students who had expressed their concern that knowledge about Chinese and Chinese-Canadian theatre was not applicable in their future workplace. Between 2006 and 2008, I taught the “world theatre” course as a second year undergraduate half year course. In 2009, this course was upgraded to a third year course. I read this as an indication of the younger students’ difficulties with a course in Chinese theatre, a course which automatically implies a challenging complexity of cross-cultural, historical and interdisciplinary knowledge that questions the dominant narratives of Western theatre historiography and that aims for a de-centralized and decanonized approach. In 2012, the University College Drama Program and the graduate unit Centre for Study of Drama were merged into one department and thereby left the jurisdiction of the College. The new unit also changed its name to Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, reflecting a long overdue recognition of changing discourses and practices in our field over at least the last 20 years. Completing the circle, in the fall of 2013, I taught a special topics graduate level course on Chinese theatre history/performance focusing on theatre as a means of resistance while struggling with processes of modernity, colonialism and globalization. Whether this course will potentially share the fate of its undergraduate predecessor–for the same or different reasons—remains to be seen. Two students enrolled: one from

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Denmark and one from western Canada. The reasons these students took the course were quite interesting. The Danish student mentioned that she had only learned about non-Western theatre cultures through the lens of the Western Avant-Garde; however, she wanted to learn more about the original histories and practices that might be quite different from what western artists were able to perceive, given that they usually don’t speak the language or engage with Chinese artists directly. The Canadian student in this course, who had some basic knowledge of Japanese, was interested in strategies of resistance, as she hoped to compare Chinese experiences to her special field of interest, which is indigenous theatre in Canada. I find such reasoning quite compelling. That aside, there were still only two students enrolled. Perhaps, other students could not make these fruitful connections to their often-far-too-early over-specialized study interests, which are mostly rooted in European and North American fields of theatre and performance studies with little interest in diaspora or minority practices. Personally, I have not yet encountered enough instances of interest, from either students or core faculty, in African, Middle-Eastern, Indian and Latin American theatre, or in native First Nations performance traditions. This year, our department hired an additional faculty member specialized in Asian theatre with teaching capabilities in Western and Asian-Canadian diaspora theatre histories and practices. She will be our first Asian faculty member starting to teach in the fall 2014. In November 2012, University College, inspired by an anonymous donation of four million dollars, established the Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies as part of their Canadian Studies program and has a faculty search under way.1 These developments clearly reflect the demographic realities of Toronto and our university. In 2012, 74% of international students came from Asia, mainly from China (Facts and Figures 2012:34). Domestic students, including Chinese-Canadians are also well represented both at the University and in the city. In 2006, the top mother tongue spoken in Toronto (apart from the two official languages English and French) was Chinese (mainly Mandarin and Cantonese), used by 420,000 citizens (“Toronto’s Racial Diversity”). Given the overall development in recent years this number must have risen exponentially. Personally, when walking on the St. George campus, I can say that I hear as much English as I hear Mandarin (a language I also speak). However, while we have growing diversity in our undergraduate student body this is not yet the case with our Centre’s graduate students, nor our core faculty, both undergraduate and graduate.

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In this paper, I will first introduce the context and concept of my Chinese Theatre course. This will lead to a discussion of conceptual and practical challenges with ”world theatre” courses as discussed in our field and encountered in my actual practice. My major argument is that it is more productive for both students and instructors to make use of the particular professional competence of instructors—in my case a comparative competence as both a scholar and an artist in the field of Chinese theatre, rather than undermining it by ambiguous and not fully thought-through demands for all-encompassing (survey) “world theatre” courses. Part of the problem is the mindset of neo-liberal efficiency and Western-centric historiography that can be counter-productive to openminded learning processes. This is reinforced by politics of globalization within the university and society in general that sometimes follow hegemonic and centralizing power dynamics of dominance rather than questioning them. The opening up of innovative spaces of hybridity, multiplicity and becoming can be forces within globalization2 processes, which deserve more attention.

Circling the Square3—Teaching Chinese Theatre History Our undergraduate curriculum is mainly focused on modern and postmodern European theatre and its colonial national descendants (basically what I refer to as “Western” in this paper), mainly dealing with Anglophone traditions (Canada, USA, Great Britain). English translations of francophone and aboriginal theatre–the latter being a whole tradition in its own right–can be detected in smaller numbers. Students, apart from introductory or survey courses that we offer, usually have to take classes in other departments to gain insight into Western/European early modern (i.e., Shakespeare and his times, Spanish theatre and Commedia dell’Arte) or pre-modern European theatre traditions (ancient Greece and medieval theatre). Those courses are overwhelmingly based on literary history (drama, epic or poetic texts) rather than histories of embodied performance praxis whose primary medium is not the literary text (such as those mediated through stone inscriptions, scrolls or printed books) but the body in time and space—bodies, both of performers and audiences. Furthermore, comparative and cross-cultural historical knowledge situated within the critical framework of post-colonial theatre and performance studies is not very developed among our undergraduate students when they enter university. This situation poses significant challenges in teaching such courses on both the instructor’s and the students’ side.

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In addition, I have observed a particularly prevalent ideology of “universalism”, not just among students but often among administrators and faculty as well. This “Universalism” is anything but universal as this concept is squarely based on assumptions of Western superiority. Am I to understand that Shakespeare apparently has universal value while highly developed Chinese theatre of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), for example, is lacking such universalism? Surely, British colonialism has a stake in spreading Shakespeare’s “universalism” around the world so that Canadian children already learn about his work in elementary school. Had they learned something about Yuan Zaju instead, who knows how definitions of universalism would play out differently? To my surprise, I had one (Caucasian) student who, indeed, had learned about Yuan Zaju prior to her university studies in a private high school specialized in the arts. She struggled much less than other students in my course and was enjoying herself in the process of learning on a deeper level. I do not expect special knowledge of Chinese theatre from our students but I wished that the educational system would take into account theatre traditions that go beyond the colonial heritage, and would open student minds for the diversity of cultural and artistic production in the multitude of histories that come together in a country like Canada. We have to learn to negotiate those histories, and not simply negate them. Students with Chinese backgrounds in my courses were often astonished to suddenly understand and appreciate why their grandparents meet with like-minded people to sing Beijing opera excerpts in their spare time or practice tai chi (Taiqi) in the early morning hours in many Toronto parks. Once, a Chinese student gave me a hug me when running into me in the Robarts Library, a major research library of the University of Toronto. He wanted to thank me for his experience in my course. He said that he now was able to love his family for the things they do (differently) and not to feel embarrassed anymore for the things they don’t do (as many others do). The feeling of embarrassment was rooted in a devastating concept of backwardness since those culturally specific family activities didn’t seem to fit into the Western progress-driven ideology. Admittedly, I did also detect some discomfort on the part of my students via course evaluations and discussions in class. One of the more extreme student responses was that professors who have the privilege to teach Canadian students should not speak English with an accent, they should speak proper English—whatever that means in the global and Canadian multicultural context, where English is spoken in a multitude of different ways. It is noteworthy that the majority of my students at the time (2005 and 2006) were monolingual, as odd as that might seem in an

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officially bilingual country where many more languages are actively spoken. Those students who come from other than Anglophone backgrounds often don’t learn the languages of their family origins anymore. I learned from both students and parents that the main reason for not speaking languages other than English is the need “to fit in”, to not be different from other children in school, to achieve a kind of coherent “Canadian identity” that is based on an enforced nationalist sameness in which all students can act out the happy multicultural script mostly in English. Daryl Chin, quoted above, characterizes this strategy as “declared indifference to distinction”. As for the children who feel the need to conform and fit in, who are the model children they strive to follow and fit in with? Clearly, in Canada most people have an immigration background but some are more Canadian than others? These kinds of statements by students and parents caught me by surprise and made me think even more about peer pressure, the education system and the difficult situation that many immigrants find themselves in when negotiating cultural identities in the best interest of their children. It also taught me something about my own overtly positive preconceptions and maybe even outright naïve fantasies about Canadian multiculturalism. I noticed, however, over the last couple of years, that as our undergraduate student body diversifies, more languages are spoken on campus. I actively support this development and make it a productive and creative part of multi-lingual explorations in my courses. Going further, I didn’t find it surprising that in my students’ feedback contained comments about the oddity of a German professor teaching Chinese theatre in Canada. Why wouldn’t she teach German theatre instead? It seemed odd to them that one’s nationality does not necessarily define scholarly interest and expertise. I’m sure there are Chinese and Canadian scholars who know more about Goethe and Schiller than I would ever care to know. After all, there are Chinese-Canadians, like Adrian Hsia (1938-2010), who are experts in German studies. He was well-versed in German language and literature and had worked, just as I did, in China, Germany and Canada. This kind of cross-cultural, multi-lingual scholar is also an outcome of globalization. At the very root of expectations based on nationality or ethnicity is a troubling and oppressive concept of authenticity. I am also a queer professor. Does this disqualify me from teaching theatre and performing arts created by heterosexual or transgender artists? I am an atheist. Should I therefore not be interested in religions and related cultural practices? I am what people refer to as middle-aged. Should I only talk about other middle-aged people then? To put it provocatively: when I grow older I can also talk about old people

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and only when I am dead I will be allowed to study artists that share the same fate. More common among my students in my course were a general lack of historical knowledge regarding Canada and China, little to no awareness of histories of colonialism, a strong assumption about Western superiority over other theatre cultures and last but not least, some difficulty with Chinese names. I am not making generalized evaluations here. My comments are based on my empirical observations of class discussions and tendencies of argumentation in course assignments. There seems to be a need, however, for exoticism, folklore and touristy nonchalance disguised by a superficial sense of multicultural tolerance, Canadian nationalism and Western “universalism”. This phenomenon actually applies to students regardless of their ethnic or cultural background as this problem seems to be more related to what was previously learned before they entered university, not only in high school, but also by participating in commercial folklore culture such as “ethnic” pop culture across the media landscape (racialized beauty contests, for example) or “ethnic” festivals of which Toronto has quite a few. Commercial folklore pop culture serves mostly the purpose of reinforcing the multicultural nationalism of Canada and its colonial heritage or the free world imperialism of our closest neighbour, the United States. Furthermore, while Canada is a country of immigrants operating within a legal framework of multiculturalism, it is also the land of First Nations and Inuit peoples. The relationship between these two quite diverse groups is complicated, economically and politically charged. We immigrants need to take responsibility for the histories, which we enter, whether we personally caused these histories or not. We might perpetuate those histories unless we become critically aware of them. At least we can make an effort not to perpetuate colonial histories of violence and inequality. As a German in Canada, learning from recent German history I cannot ignore the Holocaust and its repercussions for Germany’s relationship with itself and other countries. I apply the same attitude with regard to Canadian history of which I became a part for the time being. The course title “Innovation and Experimentation in Chinese Theatre” was not only chosen because it related to an important part of my earlier research and field of expertise, mainly conducted in theatre studies in Germany (the Humboldt University of Berlin) and P.R. China (Central Academy of Drama, Beijing) between 1990-2007 (Budde 1999, 2008) but also and quite deliberately because it questioned rather predictable assumptions. Such assumptions include popular beliefs that non-western theatre and particularly pre-modern and pre-colonial theatre has to be

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“traditional” and hence, by definition, fixed, unchangeable, ritualistic, exotic, highly conventionalized and anything but innovative or experimental. Beliefs like this are firmly rooted in the politics of Western historical periodization and notions of progress (as different from prerepublican dynastic periodization in China), a sense of colonial/nationalist superiority (shared by a significant number of my students across diverse ethnic backgrounds) and a western-centric, anglocentric literary canon in literature/drama and theatre studies. Two other reasons informed my choice of course title and teaching methodology. One was the fact that, as mentioned, in the multicultural setting of Toronto we have a significant percentage of students and citizens with Chinese cultural and ethnic backgrounds although in our program the actual number of students with ethnic backgrounds other than Caucasian, was rather small at the time. I hoped a course such as “Innovation and Experimentation in Chinese Theatre”, would encourage students to imagine theatre practices beyond the dominant Western track and the fascination with Hollywood blockbusters or Anglo-American commercial musicals, and seemed like a good way to interest future students beyond the Caucasian demographic (which, admittedly, is also quite multicultural and multilingual in a country of immigrants and their descendants, like Canada). Following critical post-colonial and feminist/queer discourses and interdisciplinary methodology allowed me to challenge narrow assumptions about both Western/Anglophone and Chinese theatre histories. This way we could play with the “paradox” of traditions of innovation rather than reinforcing positivist ideas of divorcing practices of innovation from historical forces and patterns that allow both, the inventions of the contemporary “new” while still communicating with and referencing the “old,” deeply rooted in distinct yet interwoven histories. There is applicable value in what I have to offer in my Chinese Theatre course based on expertise as can be seen in my research which I bring to the classroom.4 The course I designed addressed the experimental and innovative spirit of Chinese theatre and its changing contexts over the course of 2,000 years. We examined its early shamanistic beginnings, the origins of its theatre terminology and differences from Western terminology, the development of a vibrant, culturally diverse and at times highly developed urban and rural theatre culture that was influenced by both voluntary and involuntary processes of acculturation (by means of economic, cultural, religious and scientific exchange, as well as by war, invasion and foreign dominance by Turks, Mongols and Manchu). The course included modules on early dance traditions, the impact of expressive Buddhist and central

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Asian nomadic performance traditions during the Tang Dynasty (app. 600900) and the subsequent founding of the first imperial professional theatre school. Emperor Xuanzong named the school Pear Garden, and related to this, students learned about the significance of name choices for ChineseCanadian theatre companies such as the Toronto-based Little Peargarden Collective. We also attended some of Toronto’s Asian-Canadian theatre shows. Furthermore, we read Chinese-Canadian plays such as Marjorie Chan’s China Doll. Colonial imperialism since the mid-19th century, of course, changed directions of national Chinese theatre developments significantly. This was one of the factors that caused the end of dynastic China, the establishment of two distinct republican eras in mainland China (1911-49, 1949-), the foundation of the Republic of Taiwan (1949) as well as the formation of the British crown colony Hong Kong (1841-1997, except for 1941-45) as a Western colonial outpost and its handover to PR China in 1997. The course discussed plays and theatre discourses from these modern periods as well. Evidently, without this history, companies like Little Peargarden Collective would not even exist in Toronto today. The course also introduced Chinese interests in Western concepts and practices of theatre (Stanislavsky, Brecht, Beckett, Shakespeare, Ibsen)—different from Western interests in Asian theatre by the likes of Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Mnouchkine etc.—and examined Western contributions to an already culturally diverse and long-lasting theatre history. This comparative approach allowed me to address the complex history of Western appropriations of Chinese theatre as well as Chinese appropriations of Western culture. It also enabled discussions on selfOrientalization in the context of Chinese-Canadian theatre and Canadian nationalism/multiculturalism. Early 20th century theatre had an impact on Chinese nation building. Theatre was also instrumental in the development of Maoism and its cultural doctrines as exemplified in Model Opera (ba yang xi), rural mass and army theatre. With the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1976 and the beginning of China’s rise to global economic importance, power dynamics changed significantly again. The Tiananmen student protests in 1989 became another watershed in China’s development towards an aggressively capitalist society that, curiously, is led by a political party that still calls itself “communist”. In the wake of both the opening of China towards the world after 1976 and the emergence of a new and highly performative protest culture5 as performed in 1976, 1989 and beyond. These developments resulted in a new generation of internationally active Chinese transcultural, dissident and avant-garde artists as well as in a rapidly commercializing national

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theatre landscape facing less and less public funding. Of course, the emergence of transculturally active Chinese theatre artists as a result of globalization processes is of particular interest including versatile artists like Gao Xingjian, the Sino-French Nobel prize laureate for Literature, but also the growing number of Chinese-Canadian theatre artists in a multicultural Canadian nation state, which increasingly feels the pressures of globalization as well. My own research and artistic work enable me to share first-hand observations and provide context for my Canadian students. During my studies and artistic work in P.R. China (1990-91, 1994-95, 2002, 2007), when, among other things, I together with Meng Jinghui co-directed the bi-lingual cross-cultural theatre experiment “Put down your whip.— Woyzeck” (1995) at the Central Experimental Theatre in Beijing (now National Theatre of China) I was able to produce unique audio-visual documentation of a wide variety of Chinese theatre that was not readily available as it might be today via YouTube or similar websites. Furthermore, different from that type of footage, I had actually witnessed the productions, which I video-documented, both in urban and rural settings, covering a wide range of theatre practices including storytelling, puppetry, Jingju, Kunqu, Huaju (spoken drama), street performances, multi-media experiments etc. In addition, I was also actively involved in Chinese-German and Asian-European theatre exchange and festival projects in Germany as a consultant, translator/interpreter, critic and organizer, which added valuable perspectives to my work as a theatre scholar but also to my work as a cross-cultural theatre practitioner.6 The Chinese theatre course focused on histories and practices of innovation following a historical narrative from early beginnings to current developments. Students would engage in creative group work literally playing with Chinese and Chinese-Canadian plays, take part in workshops with local Chinese-Canadian artists, watch relevant theatre shows in Toronto and, of course, read important plays from different historical periods contextualized and supported by scholarly essays across disciplines. However, while this course was designed in a way that addresses the complexity of theatre and performance art exemplified by one of the longest lasting innovative theatre traditions on a global scale, the criticism was that it was not complex enough. Hence, a “world theatre” course had to be put in place instead.

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Squaring the Circle—“World Theatre” The problems with teaching theatre history rooted in Western and colonial practices and discourses of superiority, progress (originating in 18th century ideas of the European Enlightenment) and dominance are, in fact, well known, but only quite recently, in the context of accelerated capitalist globalization and increasing violence, displacement and poverty, have they provoked more profound studies and initiatives—and alternative strategies of resistance and critique. In 2008, the theatre studies department at Free University Berlin (Freie Universität) launched an international research centre with a clearly global scope called Interweaving Performance Cultures. It recognizes that the challenges of globalization are quite different from those discussed and only partly practically addressed within the framework of post-colonial critical discourse and intercultural or cross-cultural education. Erika Fischer-Lichte, one of the driving forces behind this project, goes so far as to suggest that tackling issues of interweaving theatre cultures— aesthetically, economically and politically—as an inherently new quality of theatre in the age of globalization does not simply mean pursuing the research of the 1980s and 1990s on intercultural theatre under modified premises, but—in many respects—means opening up a completely new field.” (Fischer-Lichte 294) I would have been happy if, at the very least, the practices and insights of the 1990s had been applied to curriculum decisions regarding my course on Chinese Theatre in 2006. I did incorporate aspects of theatre and globalization beyond the intercultural debate but that seemed to provoke both students and administration even more and resulted in the emergence of the notion of “world theatre”, an idea originally coming from the 1970s. At the annual world congress of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) 2010 in Munich on the theme Cultures of Modernity that I attended, the Danish scholar Janne Risum from the University of Aarhus presented a paper in the panel on Global Theatre History: Concepts and Beginnings entitled Swapping Narratives of Theatrical History. She asked the following question: “If we agree that a global approach to the cultural and cross-cultural dynamics of theatre is desirable, how can we develop a corresponding narrative which is coherent yet open-ended?” (Risum 106). She pointed out that we are at the threshold of a radical rethinking of how we teach theatre history. Risum asks important questions such as: how can we include a multitude of perspectives and histories? How does this development place a new challenge on theatre educators in higher learning institutions to de-centralize dominant narratives and definitions of both

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drama and performance, regardless of their origins (European, Asian, African or American) Such questions are by no means limited to “world theatre” courses but should be implemented by any course on theatre history or theory, not to mention theatre practices. I very much agree with Risum and when listening to her presentation I suddenly felt less isolated in my own struggling attempts for substantial and sustainable change. When searching the term “world theatre” in the JSTOR data base from a Canadian IP address I find articles that mainly refer to subjects of theatre research that can be summarized as “other than Western” theatre. It seems as if anything but Western theatre is considered world theatre. This “other”, however, is often discussed in relation to Western theatre and its level of modernity or, indeed, validity. Validity is measured on the basis of Western ideas of “progress”. It should be mentioned though, that what comes up on my JSTOR search is dominantly written in English and does not give me a reliable indication of how these topics are tackled in other languages and cultures using other IP addresses. Possibly, a search in Chinese or Spanish or Persian or Swahili or Anishinaabemowin would produce different outcomes. I did find one article by Steve Tillis in the Asian Theatre Journal that directly addressed the history of world theatre courses and I found quite radical discussions surrounding discourses on (world) theatre history textbooks by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Interestingly, both Tillis and Fisher Sorgenfrei are specialists both in Asian and Western theatre and this circumstance seems to cause their heightened awareness of problems of theatre historiography and education that go beyond simplistic dichotomies. The article by Tillis from 2003 argues that the concept of world theatre in its early application in books such as Leonard C. Pronko's Theater East and West (1967, rev. ed. 1974) is already outdated. While Pronko’s book in the 1960s and 70s “marked an exciting, even liberating, escape from cultural parochialism” (Tillis 71), it also has significant flaws from a contemporary perspective, which is informed and challenged by processes of globalization. As the title suggests, Pronko’s book deals mainly with theatre forms from the East and the West and does not consider many theatre cultures outside this framework. Even what exactly defines the East and the West, is not clear. Although Tillis makes no reference to the term “Weltliteratur” (world literature) as coined by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827 (Vilashini 18-25; Pizer 10-13) it seems to me that “World Theatre” as much as “World Music” and “World Film” is an appropriation of this literary term in the field of theatre studies and related disciplines. Goethe (1749-1832) mainly referred to literary texts from Sanskrit and Islamic literature (the latter alone would include European, African and

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Asian countries, cultures, histories, languages). According to Tillis, Pronko’s book attempts a comparative approach to both Western and Eastern theatre cultures.7 Tillis concludes, after examining the past and current validity of Pronko’s book: “We need to move beyond the false dichotomy of the EastWest Approach. Not backwards to the parochialism of the Standard Western Approach but to theatre studies that are truly multiregional and world-spanning to theatre studies that trace out the links connecting many of the world's forms and examine without preconception the often surprising similarities and differences to be found among these forms” (Tillis 80). I cannot but agree with Tillis’ desire to go beyond the EastWest formula but does that lead to anything much better or are we simply entering yet another vicious circle in need of impossible squaring? Reading Fisher Sorgenfrei’s essay “Desperately Seeking Asia: A Survey of Theatre History Textbooks” (223-258) suggests even bigger challenges. Because her field of expertise is Asian theatre she only analyses these specific sections in a number of textbooks dealing with theatre history. Her results in regard to methodological approach, factual correctness and historical knowledge in many commonly used theatre text books are rather shocking. Fisher Sorgenfrei uses the word “incorrect” in seventeen instances throughout her thirty-five page long article and in one instance she turns to the stronger word of “nonsense” when saying: “This attempt to segregate and marginalize Asia is nonsense” (227). There are other examples where she attests to a lack of comprehension by authors of such books: “Without comprehending the correlations among the world's numerous cultures, how can one hope to present the history of living arts such as theatre?” (232). What these books achieve is to reinforce the superior Western bias regarding anything non-Western, as they suggest an “insurmountable difference between their theatre and ours” (224) and continue practices of marginalization of “the other.” Fisher Sorgenfrei can’t help but write world theatre in quotation marks. She states: “I must assume that the texts which have errors regarding Asia also include questionable statements regarding Euro-American theatre” (224). In her essay she outlines what she ideally expects from a world theatre textbook and by extension what the expectations are for instructors teaching these courses: First of all, it should be inclusive and accurate without being encyclopedic. The ideal text would look at world theatre history in cultural context. Religious, social, political, and philosophical concepts would be balanced with aesthetic and performative issues. It would celebrate the great artistic

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Chapter Ten achievements of theatre as literature and as performance. It would be comparative and intelligently cross-cultural, demonstrating influences, differences, and synchronicities. It would understand that theatre history is a shifting field. It would be flexible enough to use current theory without resorting to jargon and to reflect popular culture without pandering to trendy notions of political correctness…The author would also understand and avoid bias-whether Euro-centric, Afrocentric, phallocentric, gynocentric, Christocentric, homocentric, pick-your-centric. The art of theatre would be viewed as a complete cultural entity, a discipline of its own, not merely a subset of disciplines such as art history (the oldfashioned mistake) or anthropology (the new-fangled mistake). (224-225)

Of course, ideals are something we can and perhaps should strive for, but which, by definition, we will never be able to reach. Indeed, one of the criticisms that Janne Risum included in her conference presentation mentioned above targets not only Brockett’s 11th edition (2007) of his History of the Theatre, first published in 1968, as one extreme of reading theatre history but also the 2006 published alternative book Theatre Histories: An Introduction, co-written by Zarrilli, Fisher Sorgenfrei et.al. It is noticeable that Zarrilli and Fisher Sorgenfrei indicate by way of book title choice that they recognize the plurality and multiplicity of histories. When I changed the title of my course first from “World Theatre” to “Theatre Worlds” while sticking with the subtitle “Experimentation and Innovation”, I had something similar in mind. Zarrilli and Fisher Sorgenfrei probably wanted to avoid mistakes of the past, yet instead had to struggle with complications of the future. A methodological and strategic choice they made for their book was to change the narrative. Risum summarized that this book has developed the means of communication as its basic narrative, to which are attached a selected string of examples ordered of paratacticly rather by cultural origin. The two narratives complement each other, but both run the risk of drowning the basic narrative in pluralism and detail. No doubt a global theatre history written from a, say, Chinese or Japanese perspective would look very different from either. (106) Indeed, references to books on theatre histories written in multiple languages and from multiple historical and cultural perspectives are rare. Is there an equivalent of theatre histories books in Ghana, Serbia, Israel, the First Nations, Mongolia or Chile? I have never seen a translation of such books into English, for example. For my “Theatre Worlds” course I also came to the conclusion that I had to rethink narrative. “Narrative” here is understood as a dramaturgical device of designing the structure and organizing the content of a course in order to achieve both, a certain coherence while allowing for openness and

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non-fixed, evolving process at the same time. This does not require any kind of linear or chronological narrative. In fact, a non-linear narrative integrates and connects in interesting ways pre-modern, modern avantgarde and postmodern dramaturgies across cultures, historical times and (multi)media. This approach helps to productively criticize positivist “storytelling” of “progress” and challenges related canonical modes of 19th century naturalist theatre (still very popular among students until they learn about alternatives within and across cultures and histories). Actually, anyone who ever made a serious attempt of a deeper understanding of theatre cultures other than their own—whatever the cultural background is—will be surprised to discover that the linear mode of (his)tory-telling is rather an exception than a rule. It only appeared to be a universal rule based on the powerful influence of Western colonialism/imperialism and the historical and literary (androcentric) canon that derived from it since the mid-19th century. One of the major challenges for both students and instructors is the understanding of specific historical and cultural contexts. Such contexts provide a framework but also serve as driving force for performance practices in regional cultures, socially specific communities, nations and transnational nomadic groups. The multitude of languages and histories, their interwoven in-flux qualities and dynamic power relations, the process of evolving multi-layered, cultural identities need to be considered. This creates a methodological, pedagogical, professional and—last but not least—political challenge for any instructor and student. I know the Chinese periodization of history and can easily set it in conversation with Western periodization. I am far less familiar with the long and complex interwoven histories of Iraq or Nigeria, yet I also teach content coming from both countries. In terms of narrative I returned to a strategy that I applied in my courses on performance analysis I had taught in Berlin in the early 2000s where I focused on themes or problem clusters that can be traced and contextualized across cultures and historical times and that allow to comparatively address recent developments in interdisciplinary methodology, post-colonial, queer and feminist theory among others. As a result, each year I change the focus and subsequently the entire reading list and course content of the Theatre Worlds course while maintaining the foundational theoretical framework that consists of two steps: 1. A general introduction of major terms and concepts. 2. A contextualization of these terms and concepts with respect to Canada and Canadian history.

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Introductory theoretical readings include essays on performance analysis (Knowles 2004, 1-23; Pavis 1985, 229-32), theatricality (Fiebach 2002, 17-41; Postlewait and Davis 2003, 1-39), politics of cultural performance (Case 1988, 1-27; Diamond 2000, 66-69; Bharucha 1993, 1-12), interculturalism and theatre anthropology (Bharucha 2000, 20-45; Carlson 1996, 13-33; Barba 1995, 1-12; Royce 2004; 1-18) and post-colonial drama (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996, 1-19). This part is followed by a Canadian contextualization of aspects related to “World Theatre” including, among other texts, Filewod’s “Erect Sons and Dutiful Daughters: Imperialism, Empires and Canadian Theatre, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act,” “Multicultural Theatre” (The Canadian Encyclopedia) and Bharucha’s “Notes on the Invention of Tradition”. The third and most comprehensive part of the course, following the two introductory parts, are case studies organized around thematic clusters but integrating theories and practices of innovation and experiment across cultures and histories (pre-modern, modern, post-modern). Thematic clusters can be organized in multiple ways. In 2008, I focused on origins, practices and theories of animated and stylized bodies in performance. This included techniques and aesthetics of puppet theatre in China (mu’ou xi), in Japan (intersections of Jǀruri and Bunraku) and in Canada (Clay and Paper, a community arts theatre company in Toronto). I invited David Anderson, the artistic director of Clay and Paper to talk in class and discuss possibilities of contemporary urban puppet and object theatre, inspired by multiple cultures and historical practices. Students read plays and scholarly essays as well as watch video materials and documentaries. This is followed by a module on stylized theatre practices such as Beijing Opera and Nǀ Theatre and their impact on modern and postmodern theatre theory and praxis exemplified in the works of contemporary Butoh dancers in Toronto like Denise Fujiwara’s and her CanAsian Dance festival, the Chinese-French playwright, painter and novelist Gao Xingjian (Nobel Prize 2000), the Chinese-Canadian actor and playwright Marjorie Chan and the Toronto-based Chinese-Canadian company Little Pear Garden Collective (http://fourscratch.com/w/littlepear/wordpress/). Emily Cheung, the artistic director, joined us for a class discussion and so did Denise Fujiwara. It is obvious that musical and poetic traditions are deeply intertwined with stylized performance traditions across cultures and histories. Therefore, when the opportunity arose, we were joined by Jean-Jaques Lemêttre, the company composer and musician of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Paris-based company Théâtre du Soleil, who engaged my students in a workshop on physically-based percussion music. Lemêttre’s music is

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clearly inspired by musical traditions from around the world including Asia. This became particularly clear when we watched and discussed the video documentation of Mnouchkine’s hybrid puppet-human performer theatre show “Tambour sur la digue” (The Flood Drummers) which is based on a Chinese traditional story, adapted by Hélène Cixous. Finally, we made a connection to Europe/Ancient Asia Minor when discussing ancient Greek theatre and its impact on companies like the Living Theatre in New York and the Polish theatre collective in Gardzienice, founded by Wlodzimierz Staniewski. Again, this was accompanied by a workshop conducted by Katherine Foster Grajewski, a Ph.D. student at the time who did a research project about Gardzienice. In 2009, I focused on “Black” theatre and Indian theatre. I included plays by Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, South-Africa’s “Sizwe Bansi is dead” by Athol Fugard with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, as well as the collectively written Chinese play “War drums on the equator” (1960s), tackling issues of colonial power in the Republic of Congo. In the latter play the African and European characters were performed by Chinese actors. The African characters were performed using black painted masks/make-up while the European characters were identified through artificially attached larger noses.8 All these dominantly male works were brought into conversation with Afro-Canadian feminist works by Djanet Sears and d’bi.young. Furthermore, traditions of black masks (Commedia dell’Arte, Beijing Opera, African theatre, Kathakali) and blackface were discussed in relation to Barack Obama’s references to Jim Crow in his speeches, controversial productions by the Wooster Group, the history of U.S. Blackface minstrels and Japanese black face parodies on YouTube. Discussions on symbolic and political values of colour in theatre and physical-musical theatre traditions were continued in a cluster on Indian theatre. This included forms like Kathakali and modern cross-cultural dance. The internationally renowned Indian choreographer and dancer Astad Deboo gave a talk in class, conducted a workshop on Kathakali movements and also presented parts of his dance work to the broader community of students, faculty and staff in our Helen Gardiner Phelan Studio Theatre both in live performance and as video documentation. As mentioned, I change the course outline each year. In 2012, the course focused entirely on (feminist) adaptations or culturally specific theatre productions of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Our class had a skype discussion with the Chinese-Canadian actor and writer Marjorie Chan, while she was in Hong Kong working on a local production of Ibsen’s play. We also read Chan’s play China Doll inspired by Ibsen’s play and early 1920s receptions of Ibsen in China. Furthermore, we explored

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feminist and politically engaged adaptations by Françoise Loranger, Five Minutes More (1966, Quebec), Hu Shih (Hu, Shi), The Greatest Event in Life (chung-shen da shih, China 1919), Jesper Halle, Nora’s Children, (Noras Barn, Norway, 2005), Tracy Utoh-Ezeajugh, Nneora: An African Doll’s House (Nigeria, 2005). We watched the Iranian film adaptation SƗrƗ by Darius Mehrjui and also learned about Muslim Dutch, Swedish, Chinese, American, Canadian and German performance renditions of Ibsen’s play on stage, television and film. Obviously, in this paper I cannot talk about the full range of subjects in all of the different versions of this course including entire sections on indigenous theatre in Canada and elsewhere. One of the major complaints by students about these courses is on the one hand the “confusing” diversity, the struggle with foreign names and with my German accent, the challenging multitude of histories and political contexts that need to be considered. On the other hand, students were always critical about the many cultures that we were not able to discuss due to time constraints or not the least the impossibility of such an approach. It seemed, as if they expected me to talk about all possible theatre cultures at once in a kind of “potpourri” style. When I addressed these issues in class discussions I was told that this was a matter of “political correctness” and “inclusiveness”. These arguments left me puzzled. Did my attempt to provide thematically focused coherent narratives each year that aesthetically, historically and politically put different traditions and practices in a productive conversation with each other fail? The opportunity to talk to guest speakers, all of them artists, and to engage in hands-on workshop experiences was rarely addressed in student feedback as something special or helpful on the experiential level. Creative group work assignments in which students were asked to play with theatre texts from around the world were experienced as incredibly challenging, because names, locations and contexts were complicated and unfamiliar. Squaring the circle describes best what I try to achieve in these courses and what I never seem to reach. It goes without saying that instructors of such courses need to be incredibly versatile, ready to take on huge amounts of reading and research in preparation of this type of course, constantly rethinking their methodology and teaching approaches while applying interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and inter-medial practices. Instructors also need to be well-connected with international and local theatre communities in order to stay up-to-date on contemporary developments. It does help to be an actively working, multilingual artist in multiple fields as well.

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I doubt very much that either students or university administrators such as the principal of University College at the time who forced me to abandon my “useless” course on Chinese theatre in favour of an unspecified “World Theatre” course bothered to imagine the consequences of such a change. My concerns were dismissed as irrelevant. The administrators involved moved on to other positions. I never got a chance to discuss this matter with the complaining students, all of whom are long graduated and not concerned with the repercussions of their push for “world theatre” courses anymore. In the fall 2013, I taught the course—now renamed as “Theatre Worlds”—thematically centred on topics of collaborative creation, musicality and political change. For the first time I taught the course in a rehearsal hall rather than in a classroom with fixed chairs. The fixed setting is only suitable for frontal lecture-style teaching or, transposing this into theatre terms, fourth wall lecture theatre. This type of theatre and the conventions that it follows are not suitable for interactive participatory learning and creation. With this change I hoped to instigate a studentcentred, experiential and more creative learning experience as the space allowed for free movement and playful investigations. Eleven of the twelve three-hour class units were organized in one-hour sections of first, introductory lecture, second, student driven discussion, and third, experimental workshop. As always, I invited guest speakers from the local theatre scene who would also follow this template. The remaining unit was organized in the form of a mini-conference-festival where students presented their group work as academic presentation followed by a 15minute creative performance. Students responded well and were inspired by these changes. Of course, in order to allow this new experience-focused seminar format to happen I had to cut about two thirds of class readings that I used in previous courses. The course is considered to be an academic history class but that just did not work with our current student population. As a result students get up on their feet more but read even less. My hope is, that those students who developed a deeper interest in the multitude of performance and theatre cultures inspired by my course will use their new knowledge as a springboard for further explorations, including more selfdirected reading.

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Works Cited Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. —. “Interculturalism and Its Discriminations: Shifting the Agendas of the National, the Multicultural, and the Global.” The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Print. Barba, Eugenio. A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. —. “The Genesis of Theatre Anthropology.” The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology. New York: Routledge, 1995. 1-8. Print. —. “Definition.” 9-12. Print. Berger, Jana, and Jean Yoon. "The Canadian Encyclopedia: Multicultural Theatre." Multicultural Theatre. Ed. Katherine Foster Grajewski. 2012. N. pag. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Brockett, Oscar G. History of the Theatre. 11th Edition. Ed. Franklin J. Hildy. Boston: Pearson, 2007. Print. Budde, Antje. "Der Tiananmen-Platz. Die größte Bühne der Welt." Herrschaft des Symbolischen : Bewegungsformen Gesellschaftlicher Theatralität ; Europa, Asien, Afrika. Eds. Antje Budde and Joachim Fiebach. Bd. 8 Vol. Berlin: Vistas, 2002. 197-346. Print. —. Theater und Experiment in der VR China. Kulturhistorische Bedingungen, Begriff, Geschichte, Institution und Praxis. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008. Print. —. "Kulturhistorische Bedingungen, Begriff, Geschichte, Institution Und Praxis Des Experimentellen Theaters in Der VR China." Diss. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1999. Web. 23 March, 2013 Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1985). Justice Laws Website. Government of Canada, 2013. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Cammann, Schuyler. “The Evolution of Magic Squares in China.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 80.2 (1960):116-124. Web. Carlson, Marvin. Performance. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen, 1988. Print. Chin, Daryl. "Interculturalism, Postmodernism, Pluralism." Performing Arts Journal 11.3 -12.1 (1989): 163-175. Web. 23 March, 2013 Cooppan, Vilashini. "World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium͒." SymplokƝ 9.1 (2001): 15-43. eb.23 March 2013.

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Diamond, Elin. “Performance and Cultural Politics.” The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance. Ed. Lizbeth Goodman. New York : Routledge, 2000. 66-69. Print. Drieder, Leo, and Jean Burnet. "Multiculturalism." The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2012. N. pag. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Dye, Ellis. Rev. of International Faust Studies: Adaptation, Reception, Translation, ed. Lorna Fitzsimmons. Comparative Literature Studies 48.1 (2011): 103-109. Project MUSE. Web. 18 Sep. 2013. Eberhard, Wolfram. A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols. Translated from German by G.L. Campbell. London and New York: Routledge, 1986. 342. Print. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Globalization: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Print. “Dissertations.” Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. University of Toronto, 2013. Web. 23 March, 2013. Evans, Betsy and Annabelle Mooney, eds. Globalization: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. (different publication from the above by Eriksen) “Facts and Figures.” University of Toronto, 2005-2012. University of Toronto. Print. Fiebach, Joachim. “Theatricality: From Oral Traditions to Televised ‘Realities’”. SubStance 98/99 31. 2-3 (2002): 17-41. Print. Filewod, Alan. “Erect Sons and Dutiful Daughters. Imperialism, Empires and Canadian Theatre.” Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and Performance. Ed. J. Ellen Gainer. New York: Routledge, 1995. 56-70. Print. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. "Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Theatre in a Globalizing World." Theatre Research International 35.3 (2010): 293294. Web. 2 Jan. 2012. Fisher Sorgenfrei, Carol. "Desperately Seeking Asia: A Survey of Theatre History Textbooks." Asian Theatre Journal 14.2 (1997): 223-258. Web. 22 Jan. 2011. International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures. Department of Philosophy and Humanities, 2008. Freie Universität Berlin. Web. 8 March 2013. Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. New York: Routledge, 1996. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print. Law, Miu Lan. "Zu einer Ästhetik des Hybriden: Eine Geschichte der Verflechtung von deutschen Theaterkünstlern mit chinesischer

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Theaterkultur im frühen 21. Jahrhundert” (“Towards a Hybrid Aesthetics: A History of Interweaving by German Theatre Artists with Chinese Theatre Cultures in the Early 21st Century”). Diss. Free University Berlin, 2011. FU Dissertation Online. Web. 11 Jan. 2013. —. "The Interweaving of the German and Chinese Theatre Cultures in the Early 21st Century." Deutsch-Chinesische Beziehungen (GermanChinese Relations). Ed. Katja Levy. 39 Vol. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011. 59-79. Web. 2 Jan. 2013. Li, Xiaoping. "William Lau." Voices Rising: Asian Canadian Cultural Activism. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. 176186. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Little Peargarden Collective. 2013. N. pag. Web. 10 Jan. 2013. Pavis, Patrice. “Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire.” New Theatre Quarterly 1.2(1985): 208–12. Peterson Royce, Anya. Anthropology of the Performing Arts: Artistry, Virtuosity, and Interpretation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004. Print. Pizer, John David. "Toward a Productive Interdisciplinary Relationship. Between Comparative Literature and World Literature." The Comparatist 31 (2007): 6-28. Web. 12 Jan. 2011. Postlewait, Thomas and Tracy C. Davis. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Risum, Janne. " Swapping Narratives of Theatrical History.” Culture of Modernity. Aarhus University, München. 27 July 2010. Web. 25 Aug. 2010. Théâtre Duras “schattensprüNge” (Shadow Jumping). Dir. Antje Budde Hackesches Hoftheater, Berlin. 6 Sept.1998. Performance. Théâtre Duras: Zou wei shang忿⃉ₙ (Attempts to Escape). Dir. Antje Budde. Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts), Berlin. 27 Sept. 2001. Performance “Toronto’s Racial Diversity.” Living in Toronto. City of Toronto, 2013. Web. 23 March, 2013. Tiles, Mary and Jinmei Yuan. “Could the Aristotelian Square of Opposition be Translated into Chinese?” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 4.1(2004): 137-149. Web. 23 March 2013 Tillis, Steve. "East, West and World Theatre." Asian Theatre Journal 20.1 (2003): 71-87. Web. 10 Jan. 2012. —. "Theatre History's ‘View of the World’”. TDR 48.3 (2004): 6-10. Web. 22 March 2013.

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Wunderlich, Uwe and Meera Warrier. A Dictionary of Globalization. New York: Routledge, 2007. Web. 23 March 2013 Zarilli, Phillip, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Theatre Histories: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

Notes 1

At the time of publication, the position has been filled. When I use the term “globalization,” I do so in reference to competing definitions and discussions of this complex and dynamic term, concept and practice as outlined in introductions to collections of key concepts and dictionaries as those by Eriksen and Wunderlich and in theatre-specific literature. (Wunderlich, Warrier 2010:1-22 ; Eriksen 2007:1-14; Evans, Mooney 2007:ix-x; Rebellato 2009:4-86) Transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, global culture as many other related or competing disciplinary terms are part of this ongoing discussion which is, while related, not the focus of my paper. 3 The notion of a “square” in this heading does not only relate to the English proverbial expression of a difficult or impossible undertaking but it also plays with one of the oldest and highly charged symbols in Chinese culture, the “magic square”. Thus, this heading can also be read symbolically as “observing, discovering, approaching, circling China.” Both readings are intended as a conversational relationship important to the subject matter. (Regarding the Chinese square see: Cammann 1960:116-124; Eberhard 1986: 342; Tiles and Yuan 2004:137-149). 4 Another substantial contribution is "Faust's Spectacular Travels through China: Recent Faust Productions and Their History," by Antje Budde, an academic with theatrical experience as both a director and a performer, who, earlier in her career, was a postgraduate student at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. This wellwritten essay is informed by impressive knowledge of Chinese language and culture and of theatre, playwrights, and dramatic and theatrical theory and history generally. Underscorings in her section titles (e.g., "Trans_actions" and "Trans_missions") aim to bring etymologies and important meanings or associations to life and to expose and unsettle male prejudices both in China and the West (for the essay has a feminist cast). Above all, however, they serve to highlight the transculturalism and cross-fertilization between West and East…” (Dye 107-8) 5 I extensively wrote about the political performative history of Tiananmen Square– (Budde, 2002:179-346) 6 Projects that are relevant in this context: Théâtre Duras “schattensprüNge” (Shadow Jumping). Dir. Antje Budde, Elisabeth Richter-Kubbutat and Dietrich Petzold. Hackesches Hoftheater, Berlin. 6 Sept.1998. Performance. “An experimental storytelling-project based on an integrated adaptation of Erich Hackl’s “Aurora’s Motive” (Aurora’s Anlaß) and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Sand Child” (Der Sohn ihres Vaters) inspired by Chinese storytelling techniques for 2

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actor and musician, premiered 6 Sept.1998 at Hackesches Hoftheater, Berlin. Collaboratively developed by Antje Budde, Elisabeth Richter-Kubbutat and Dietrich Petzold. Dramaturgy and artistic direction: Antje Budde.” (program); Théâtre Duras: Zou wei shang忿⃉ₙ – Fluchtversuche. (Attempts to Escape). Dir. Antje Budde. Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts), Berlin. 27. Sept. 2001. Performance. A absurd-comical performance on the life and work of the SinoFrench playwright and Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 2000, Gao Xingjian at Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts), Berlin. Dramaturgy and artistic direction: Antje Budde. 7 Comparativity is clearly a main methodological tool in the more recent academic discipline of Comparative Literature. It is also a characteristic which can also be traced back to Goethe’s initial term of “Weltliteratur”. There are significant differences in applying comparative or interweaving methodology, which however go beyond the scope of this paper. 8 In China western foreigners are often called “da bizi” (big nose).

CHAPTER ELEVEN CELLULAR INTIMACY IN DIGI-BOALIAN THEATRE CASSANDRA SILVER

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed posits the visionary notion that the theatrical event can be wholly transformative for an audience in a real, meaningful, and lasting way. Boal’s theatrical project is designed to help a community-turned-audience that is coping with social and economic injustice by providing a safe context for the exploration, training, and repetition of positive action. Theatre of the Oppressed invites an embodied learning that is particularly effective and even lasting. In a 21st century context, theatre makers are exploring new ways of engaging their publics with art that pursues similar goals to those explored by Boal, often by employing new media and technologies in performance. More specifically, some artists are using our ubiquitous digital attachments in an effort to connect with their audiences. This paper presents a production called Section 98 by Toronto company Praxis Theatre in order to explore the effectiveness of a technology-based applied theatre. My question is simple: can a cell-phone interface for live performance provoke spectator engagement with similar results as Boal’s participatory interaction design?

Cellular Intimacy Contemporary social and mobile technologies like cell phones and tablet computers have, in some circles, borne the stigma that ubiquitous computing alienates the individual from her immediate physical and social worlds. When we plug in, we check out. This essay is predicated on the understanding that if we1 do indeed check out from the “real” as we fidget endlessly with our digital devices, we compensate by sharing an unusual intimacy with our technologized extensions. There are compelling arguments that come from a range of disciplines which would have us

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believe that pervasive technologized communication, in addition to connecting us to our communities in new and significant ways, is actually profoundly intimate. In this line of argument, where there is a disconnect between the individual and her real surroundings, there is a new and important connection with the digital device and the worlds that it allows her to access2. These arguments suggest that we are more closely engaged with our social circles—and, if you read the cell phone screen through a Lacanian model of constituting subjectivities3, ourselves-as a direct consequence of our digital extensions. Sociologist Hans Geser explains that mobile phones allow us communication that is “free from the constraints of physical proximity and spatial immobility” (236), pointing towards the now common idea that the “world is shrinking.” We can maintain relationships at a distance like never before because of our persistent engagement with the digital. A compelling argument describing how we participate with these online communities contends that we multiply ourselves, existing both digitally and in the “real” world at the same time. Sherry Turkle, who studies the relationship between technologies and the social, posits the “tethered self” to describe how we relate to our devices. She explains, We are tethered to our “always-on/always-on-us” communications devices and the people and things we reach through them: people, web pages, voice-mail, games, artificial intelligences (non-player game characters, interactive online “bots”). […] The self, now attached to its devices, occupies a liminal space between the physical real and its lives on screen […]. With cell technology, rapid cycling [between real and digital realms] stabilizes into a sense of continual co-presence […]. (122)

The kind of intimacy that Turkle here presents, anchored in the notion of multiple social presences, is accentuated by the physical presence of our devices. For many, the cell phone is the only object that is kept at-hand throughout the day; we tote them to work, they sit on the table through dinner, and even come to bed with us so that they might wake us in the morning. Our phones (can) contain the most intimate details of our lives; we digitally profess our loves, check our bank statements, and book doctors’ appointments. In a step even further, except for those who are fastidiously sanitary, our phones are marked with the dirt from our hands and faces. Mobile phones both contain us and represent us. They both allow us intimacy in the interpersonal sense, but they are also intimate in and of themselves as extensions of the human body. The nature of cellular intimacy is significant because it points, structurally, to a kind of performance. In his analysis of the nature of

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intermedial intimacy, theatre scholar Bruce Barton describes two modalities of intimacy that are either theatrical or performative. He juxtaposes the intimacy of relationship, delimited by contractual and historical traditions, with performative intimacy, which exists outside of these traditional contracts. He relates the intimacy of relationship with the theatrical event, where the actor can lay bare her deepest experience because her intimacy relies on the nature of the theatrical contract. This theatrical/relationship intimacy operates because both parties understand the rules of their engagement; for instance, two work colleagues can admit frustration with their employer because the rules of their relationship dictate that neither will share the admission with their superiors. Barton calls this theatrical because the theatrical event has similar rules which allow an actor to confess to murder without fear of reprisal. In contrast, “[a] performative intimacy is one in which the basic criteria identified across multiple definitions of intimacy […] is valued and pursued outside the context of extended aesthetic, commercial, or emotional contracts” (580). If we can share frustration about a manager with a colleague because the frame of the relationship protects us, we can also share the same frustration in the endless void of the internet because we are anonymous; the ‘safety’ of anonymity is often just as powerful as the safety of relationship. This latter type of intimacy describes, at least in this early 21st century moment, our cellular intimacy. As long as engineers continue to innovate4 in mobile phone technology and, consequently, our use of cell phones continues to evolve (Levinthal 218-219), we will never truly be connecting with our devices inside of a stable ‘contractual’ frame. Social decorum notwithstanding, people employ and express themselves via their phones paidaically5. We play with our phones. Our use of these devices is improvisational, creative, and, indeed, performative, and as such our cell phones offer a particularly productive tool in the context of forum theatre. Where Boal would argue that human relationships are performative, I would suggest that our relationships with our machines are performative as well.

Boal Basics Boal’s major contribution is Theatre of the Oppressed, an interactive theatre practice that emerged from his immediate experience and observation of oppression under the Brazilian military government. Theatre of the Oppressed is intended bring the power out of ‘common people’ so that they might stand up against their oppressors. As Boal’s practice evolved, so too did his tactics. He developed two strategies that

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are particularly useful in considering the usage of cell phones in applied drama: simultaneous dramaturgy, and its successor, forum theatre. Simultaneous dramaturgy describes a particular kind of performerspectator relationship. The audience is invited to interrupt the play in order to offer advice whenever the characters find themselves in circumstances that require a potentially narrative-changing choice to be made. The performers, now equipped with the audience’s ideas, resume the story and test out the guidance they received. Typically, the show that is performed explores themes and stories that relate directly to the lives of the spectators; a group of disenfranchised factory workers, for example, might be shown the story of a person who is overworked and who finally has the opportunity to confront a harrowing employer. Through this interruption and conversation, the audience not only becomes empowered in its traditionally passive looking-at-the-stage spectator role, learning some authority over the performed action, but also bears witness to a mimicry of their own circumstances in which the disenfranchised worker takes control of her destiny. The hope is that the audience will take these lessons into their real lives and start re-shaping their work, their communities, and their relationships for the better (Boal 132). Forum theatre has its roots in simultaneous dramaturgy. As in the previous strategy, the performance is once again matched to the lives of the expected audience. The notion of interruption is important here as well. The play is shown, scripted, beginning to end, for the audience; in the scripted version, the audience’s real-life status quo is staged. The play is then started once more, but the audience is invited to stop the action. The audience member who interrupts the action takes to the stage to act out her alternate narrative choices, embodying her own emancipation and practicing the means to her desired end. If our spectator/worker is successful in subverting the employer’s power, the show may be started yet again – another audience member may act out her ideas, and in rare cases a spectator might take on the role of the oppressor if it is discovered that the representation is not authentic. Boal coined the term ‘spect-actors’ to describe this kind of performing audience. It is important to note that forum theatre is not intended to show solutions, but rather to explore potentialities (Boal 139). The effectiveness of theatrical tactics as a means of rehearsing social justice can be hard to measure. While it can be liberating to rehearse emancipation in the comparatively safe frame of a theatrical performance, it can be challenging to enact those same choices outside the theatre when the potential consequences are both immediate and devastating. However, the effectiveness of Boal-ian tactics has been studied in socio-political

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circumstances that support the change in behaviour that the play attempts to invoke, and it does seem as though these strategies can indeed promote real change. A project based in Edmonton, for example, which has been the subject of a Community-University Research Alliance study at the University of Alberta, has demonstrated in rigorous research-research that is notable for its geographical diversity within Canada and its longitudinal scope-that Theatre of the Oppressed can be transformative. The show, called Are We There Yet, is aimed at fourteen to sixteen year olds and intends to help foster strategies for healthier decision-making about sex. It relies heavily on simultaneous dramaturgy. In almost every part of the country where the play has been performed, a statistically significant jump in areas like “comfort with setting boundaries” and “saying no” was observed (Ponzetti). Again, I will acknowledge that these results are coloured heavily by the fact that, in Canada, the tendency in educational systems is to encourage healthy approaches to sexuality; however, information like this is significant because it demonstrates that Theatre of the Oppressed can, in fact, actually (and quantifiably) work.

Section 98 and Cellular Presence I’ll now return briefly to my earlier questions: as originally conceived, simultaneous dramaturgy and forum theatre rely on presence and even bodily engagement in order to “try on” new ideas. Is the success of this kind of work tied to that particular mode of presence? Can a digital mode of participation still produce the kind of meaningful response that the Are We There Yet project was able to measure? Can our intimate relationship with cell phones offer a meaningful stand-in for bodied presence and participation in a theatre production designed to question systems of power and oppression? In an effort to address those questions I would like to present a few details about a show called Section 98 that was presented, in workshop form, by Toronto company Praxis Theatre in March 2010 as part of the Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH season. The show’s title is borrowed from a section of the Criminal Code of Canada that came into effect in the early twentieth century. The legal Section 98 was created in 1919 to allow the police to break up any assembly that threatened the stability of the government by violent means. Pragmatically, this meant that the police were capable of harassing and arresting members of leftist political parties, the communist party in particular, and labour unions. Popular opinion swayed in favour of those who were incarcerated under this new law, and, under public pressure, the law was repealed in 1936 (Berger 132-5).

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Though it has been rescinded, the authoritarian character of this act is familiar even today; in a Canadian context, both the War Measures Act so famously invoked during the FLQ crisis in 19706 and the special rules put in place while the G20 was meeting in Toronto7 hearken back to this early 20th century law. Knowing what the show’s title is about, it should come as no surprise that the play tackled the notions of individual and civil liberty in Canada, delving into our history and making an effort to trouble our typically complacent sense of security about the way our governments treat us. The project was billed as “Open Source Theatre,” a unique amalgam of a decidedly late twentieth century software creation philosophy8 and methodology with a historically non-digital medium. The Praxis Theatre website describes the project as, “[a]n open-sourced, interactive, collectively created, staged workshop that explores Canadian civil rights history” (Rose). The show was open-source in that it invited audiences (both potential and real) to suggest content and help structure the show; it was interactive in that they provided an online venue for an ongoing conversation about the issues raised in the play. These are the technologized aspects of the show: “[we invite] the audience to participate in the production with their cell phone or PDA during the presentation, and online before or afterwards” (Rose). Some of the pre- and post-show discourse—conversations that are still accessible online in testament to their experiment—yielded interesting ideas, particularly since the company opened up their development process via a sequence of very informative blog posts. The pre- and post-show conversations often entered into dialogue with the creative framework that was explained by the production team on the website. However, given that proposals can only be offered in-the-moment in forum theatre, I will focus my discussion on the invitation extended to spectators to communicate with the show’s creators via cell phone during the performance itself; helpfully, the longest string of conversation amongst spectators was the one generated during the performance. I should here clarify that Praxis did not explicitly set out to engage with the principles and strategies of Theatre of the Oppressed; the connection is one that I am proposing. I am suggesting the connection between Section 98 and Boal because there is an apparent overlap in intention. The show invites spectators to question and discuss the performance, and the performance explores the power dynamics of oppression. This seems a disembodied and digital reimagination of the same process that Boal developed. While Praxis offers up a narrative that should be relevant to everybody in the room-we should all have a stake in civil liberties-the way that we access our phones to send

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text messages demands an interruption in the narrative so that the individual spectator can respond to what is being played on stage. This interrupt-and-comment strategy is not too far removed from the practice of intervention suggested in Theatre of the Oppressed. The marked difference between these interruptions and those in a Boal-ian project is that the discourse emerging from the cell phone conversation had little impact on the way that the stage narrative unfolded. The cell phone discourse occurred in a second virtual space that endeavoured to supplant the bodied proposal and dialogue that were central for Boal. The play and the responses progressed simultaneously with thematic overlap9. Section 98 is, admittedly, not quite Boal; yet, since my project is a conceptual one, envisioning what the points of overlap between technology and Theatre of the Oppressed might look like, I am still quite satisfied to extrapolate a few ideas from the model that Section 98 presents to us. So, do audiences find a way to engage in a meaningful and lasting way with social issues if their participation is limited to a cell phone in their contribution to a live performance? The following is a brief exchange, of the kind encouraged by the show’s creators, by anonymous viewers who were posting while the FLQ crisis was being addressed on stage: -October 1970! ROTFLQ! -FLQ-I know someone was put in a trunk of a car -Making me curious… -So great hearing what other audience members have to say. Exciting!

And then later, the same subject is taken up again: -I don’t get why the FLQ stuff relates to debates today, a stretch -That’s true. I wonder how modern francophone separatists feel about the FLQ crisis.

And later again: -To respond to the person who is happy living in a bilingual country… I would say that we don’t live in a bilingual country at all. At least not a French/English country. That’s why Quebec’s so protectionist and regressive about French language rights. -And Quebec’s population is plummeting because they don’t like immigrants that don’t speak French. (Section 98)

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Though these do not comprise the full extent of the conversation on this subject, we see a definite progression through the evening, in the approximate hour that elapsed in real time between the first comment shared here to the last. We begin with enthusiasm about the process, a flippant joke, and a little factual tidbit undoubtedly dredged from memories of an old history class. Midway, the subject as presented on stage is being dismissed. By the end, the conversation has shifted to what I am inclined to characterize as a debate: we see commenters speculating about language rights and immigration policy in Quebec. The audience stopped engaging with the civil liberty issue on stage and began sharing their opinions on related rights issues today. This progression signals the potential that spect-texters can, through their interaction in a second digital space, develop a meaningful critical perspective about the real world; the conversation culminates in the recognition of colonial, social, and even political modes of oppression. Section 98 looks like a success in its ability to create a space to raise awareness and critical thought. There are similar progressions in discourse on almost all of the subjects that are broached in the play. That said, I have no way of knowing who these writers are – since almost all of the contributors were labelled as “anonymous,” it could very well have been a single voice waxing philosophic on one subject through the entire evening. The anonymous posters did not even need to be at the theatre and watching the show. On the artistic front, Praxis was bombarded with aesthetic feedback. Ranging from “boring!” and “Ya lost me” to “Good music and sounds” and “That was good. The interactive part is fun.” It seems that the public is not shy about sharing their opinions about workshop performances, perhaps enjoying the surface-level freedom afforded by digital anonymity. The subject of interactivity comes up a lot in the cell-phone commentary. The company’s Artistic Producer, Aislinn Rose, in a blog post written after the show was over, analyses and responds to some of the major trends in discourse generated by their workshop performance: The Q&A at the end of the show yielded a number of comments on th[e] topic of interactivity, with many saying they found the texting to be distracting, or that they prefer to lose themselves in the theatre rather than participating in everyday life activities like texting. Others really liked that they were able to communicate with us throughout the show, but they wanted to see it further integrated into what they actually see onstage. Lots to think about here! (Rose)

Still on the subject of cell phones, in another blog post, Rose shares that theatre audiences are so well trained in the rules of attending a live

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event that it can be quite difficult to convince the public to whip out their phones and use them during a show.

Theatrical Intimacy Trumps Performative Intimacy While those who chose to engage in the discourse found their way to a current issues debate, it seems that the urge to fidget with a cell phone and split focus is not yet a given characteristic of our audiences. What Section 98’s experience suggests to me is that it takes a very niche spectatorship to achieve full buy-in of this kind participation and interactivity, and an even tighter niche to bear the kind of discursive fruit that creates a true paradigm shift in spectatorial action or behaviour. To return to Bruce Barton’s definitions, in this example, the theatrical model of the intimacy of relationships trumps the performative free-for-all intimacy of cell phones. The frame of the theatrical event is so powerful that it over-rode even the creative team’s direct request to spectators to turn on and make use of their phones. In order to convince more of the audience to engage seriously in online discourse about a show while it is still on the stage, I think the commenters, and ultimately Boal, are right: the contributions of the spectators have to be given equal weight as the repeatable performed actions of the performers. Without equity between actor and audience, the audience has no reason to commit completely to the narrative journey or their invitation to participate. In spite of the tantalizing potential of digital intimacy, we are not yet ready for this particular brand of applied theatre.

Looking to Games The model for successful digi-applied theatre might more likely be discovered in the realm of digital games. My purpose in borrowing a model from video gaming is double. I would first like to highlight the creative and playful nature of our use of digital technologies. Imagine a diner about to enjoy her favourite meal at her favourite restaurant; before tucking in, she pulls out her cell phone, snaps a photo, applies a few aesthetic filters, and posts her image on a social networking site. Our imagined diner not only engaged in an objectification and aestheticization of her meal in framing the image that she would photograph, but alsoalbeit with a limited digital palette-altered the image using pre-packaged filters and lens flares so that it expressed something more “true” about her meal than a simple photograph might have. Her altered image was not just documentation, but also creatively expressive of her real-life experience. In the spirit of Duchamps and Warhol, I suggest that this is iterative and

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pop art, that this is more than just narcissism facilitated by the digital machine (although it is certainly at least partly auto-documentary). In posting her image she is not only describing what she ate, but also telling her online network something qualitative of her experience. This is more than digital chatter-it is digital performance. Her photo has significance to this essay because of its context, published on a digital platform with an engaged and interested audience, and equally because of its reproducibility-it can be shared and distributed well beyond its original context. Second, I employ the video gaming framework to suggest that our use of digital tools is often, indeed, gamified. Our diner did not post the photo only for her own benefit, but with the expectation that it would garner comment. We engage in the digital world because the world can answer. In this sense, when we go online and perform ourselves, as Goffman and Butler10 would suggest that we do, I want to highlight that we are also performing in a (dramatic) play. The frenetic pace of feedback-looping11, where every action requires another action, means that those who tether themselves to machines perform in this manner on a daily basis. Of course, the internet experience is dominated by rules, both technical and social, that prescribe how the individual can perform, but it is no less significant that the performance occurs on a fictive, pervasive, and enduring stage in a long-running drama defined by how we create and perform our digital doubles and how those interact with each other. If the digital “other,” as Lacan12 would frame it, makes us into an image because of the nature of the gaze, we should remember that in the digital world the image is there even when we are not looking. When our diner’s image is commented upon or shared, networks of satellites and wires send a small notification down to her phone to let her know that the other world continues living without her. If she were less interested in her meal or perhaps had poorer manners, she might have interrupted her dinner long enough to pick up her phone and post once again. Further, when the digital other looks back, it is through our tools. This often leads to a peculiarly bodied response when people step into their others’ lives. We pick up our phones and divert our attention from real life to respond to a notification, we spin slowly on street corners endeavouring to discover which way our GPS thinks is North, and in a gaming context we often jump out of our seats or swing our arms wildly as though our enthusiastic use of a controller could somehow make our avatar jump higher or turn more tightly. Because we access our digital others with tools, and since they look back at us via our machines, the double is our embodied puppeteer almost as often as we are masters to them.

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Millennials, the demographic moniker for those born in or after 1982, have only ever known this digital reality. We are adept at the management of our others and, in spite of considerable evidence that we abandon privacy every time we go online, we relish the opportunity to connect and engage in our digital communities. Several designers have tapped into this social reality in order create games that equip players to make real changes in their lives. Consider World Without Oil, an alternate reality game13 designed to put players in the imagined context of peak oil. As the game unfolded, the circumstances worsened (oil became increasingly scarce), and players were asked to cope in the real world with the hypothetical extremes that existed only in the game world. Players documented and shared their coping strategies, generating a catalogue of thousands of personal accounts that could be accessed by other players via the game’s website. Players used their technological extensions, their computers and phones, to create blog entries, send film clips, and engage in the conversation. Their accounts often included descriptions of real-world strategies for using less oil. The end result, at least according to the game’s creators, were “players [who] made themselves better citizens”. The World Without Oil website offers this explanation for the players’ transformations: WWO didn’t only “raise awareness” about oil dependence. By creating a simple nonpartisan framework that focused thousands of people from all walks of life upon this common issue, WWO sparked peer learning and inquiry-based exploration of the roots, outcomes, and prevention of an oil crisis. By “rousing our democratic imagination,” WWO fostered deep engagement and changed people’s lives. (About World Without Oil)

Although this description bubbles with the enthusiasm of promotional language, the ethos presented is remarkably similar to Boal’s. Pragmatically, there is also considerable overlap between this game and forum theatre; players (spectators) are asked to take on a role, react critically to fictional circumstances, and enact new models for behaviour. And yet, unlike Boal, the primary mode of interaction is technology, just as in Section 98. In this game, we find a model for digi-applied theatre that capitalizes on our digital presence(s) to cultivate a change in real-life behaviour. Perhaps, then, artists and teachers who want to benefit from cellular intimacy should look to models like this one, outside of our contemporary understanding of theatre, to get spectators out of the bleachers and into the play.

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Works Cited “About World Without Oil.” World Without Oil. N.p. N.d. Web. 6 February 2013. Barton, Bruce. "Paradox as Process: Intermedial Anxiety and the Betrayals of Intimacy." Theatre Journal 61.4 (2009): 575-601. Project MUSE. Web. 19 Feb 2013. —. “Impure Interactions: Subjectivity Culture Communications Intermedia: A Mediation on the ‘Impure Interactions’ of Performance and the ‘In-Between’ Space of Intimacy in a Wired World.” Theatre Research in Canada. 29.1 (2008): 51-92. Print. Berger, Thomas. Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1981. Print. Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed. 1971. Trans. Emily Fryer. Sidmouth, UK: Chase Publishing Services, 2000. Print. Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. 1992. Trans. Adrian Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Callois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Print. Geser, Hans. “Towards a Sociological Theory of the Mobile Phone.” Emerging Media: Communication and the Media Economy of the Future. Ed. Axel Zerdick. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2005. 234-260. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Print. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955. Print. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996. Print. Levinthal, Daniel A. “The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change.” Industrial and Corporate Change. 7.2 (1998): 217-247. Ponzetti, James, Jan Selman, Brenda Munro, Shaniff Esmail, Gerald Adams. “The Effectiveness of Participatory Theatre with Early Adolescents in School-Based Sexuality Education.” Sex Education 9.1 (2009). 93-103. Rose, Aislinn. “Section 98.” Praxis Theatre. N.p. N.d. Web. 13 January 2012.

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Turkle, Sherry. “Always-on/Always-on-you: The Tethered Self.” Handbook of Mobile Communications. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. 121-137.

Notes 1

Of course, the “we” referenced here is not a universal group. “We” refers to the middle-class and usually Western demographic that is most likely to regularly make use of a cell phone. While Boal’s audiences were usually not affluent, and were in many other ways dissimilar to the “we” in this essay, I am here interested in exploring the potential that cell phones offer for the provocation of a passive spectator into political thought and action. It is in this provocation that I see a similarity between some of Boal’s strategies and how cell phones are occasionally used in 21st century theatre and performance. 2 As an entry into this argument, see Bruce Barton’s exploration of intermedial intimacy in which he argues that “intimate disclosure” can occur in the logic of the digital because of the “unlikelihood of a further relationship and the attendant opportunities for betrayal” (“Impure Interactions” 82). More on this follows in the next pages of this essay. 3 Lacan’s scopic field diagram describes how we, in gazing through a screen at an image, are also constituted as images by the object of our gaze; we perceive ourselves externally as we also perceive the image. See Lacan 106. 4 Daniel Levinthal offers a nuanced reading of technological change in telephony, and suggests that although phone communication has evolved gradually, it advances more dramatically when existing technologies have been applied to a new domain. While there are certainly plateaus in the evolution of a technology, there is little reason to believe that mobile phones will cease to evolve. 5 Johann Huizinga (in his Homo Ludens) first proposed a typology of play, which was later refined to ‘ludus’ and ‘paidia’ by Roger Callois (in his Man, Play, and Games) ; while ludic play has rules and winners, paidaic play occurs when we create boundaries and our ‘play’ is free-form, like in games of make-believe or when flying a kite (Callois 33). 6 The Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), a group that used violent tactics in pursuing the independence of the province of Quebec, kidnapped two public figures. In response, the federal government invoked the War Measures Act, a policy that (among other things) allows police to detain anyone without due process if it is thought to be in the public interest. 7 G20 leaders met in Toronto in 2010. The police were granted “special powers” to protect the area of the city where the conference was held; the police were later accused of abusing their power, with widespread unwarranted arrests and police brutality being well documented by both media outlets and by the public. 8 “Open source” computer programs are created and published in such a way that the code behind the program is readily available to interested parties. The code is shared so that other programmers can view, copy, and build upon what has already

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been created. This practice stands in opposition to corporate programming practices which usually demand that code is locked up and sold for profit. 9 Problematically, audience members who did not have smart phones could only submit to the discussion; it took a web-enabled phone to get access to the full conversation online. The politics and economics of access to technology are an important part of this kind of theatre practice; but this paper, in exploring a conceptual territory, is imagining a tech-equipped and tech-savvy spectatorship that admittedly does not accurately represent the “real” world. 10 The scholarly tradition of using performance to describe identity as a performance. 11 In brief, this is the continual negotiation between an individual’s behaviour and feedback about that behaviour; for instance, when we send an email, we return to the machine for the response—we are conditioned by how we engage with technology. 12 I am again invoking Lacan’s scopic field diagram. 13 Alternate reality games are net-native forms of storytelling that present a fictive world and ask the spectator/player to imaginatively inhabit the other reality.

CHAPTER TWELVE RE-IMAGINING POSSIBILITIES THROUGH THE VERY YOUNG RHONA MATHESON AND LYNDA HILL IN CONVERSATION WITH HEATHER FITZSIMMONS FREY

In October, 2013, Artistic Director Lynda Hill of Theatre Direct (Toronto) invited Rhona Matheson of Starcatchers (Scotland) to come to Toronto to share ideas regarding their creation process and model. Starcatchers makes theatre for very early years children (under 5), and they are intentional about the relationship of their work to learning, but given the age of their audience, their work does not have content-based curriculum connections. The Starcatchers creation process is primarily through long artist residencies with pre-school (nursery) children in childcare settings; the residencies culminate in an artistic project. One of tensions for Matheson, as a manager, is balancing artist-lead and childlead experiences. Obviously, artists want to create, and some have great plans. Sometimes, it is essential to be flexible and let children’s impulses and interests influence the projects. Another challenge (or opportunity) is that some residencies are in what Rhona calls “regeneration neighbourhoods,” where there is a high immigrant population or sometimes problems related to “major deprivation” such as alcohol, drugs, poverty, and mental health issues. In these communities, especially, there is a lack of community interest or participation in existing arts centres, which Starcatchers’ artists have to overcome. In other areas, the difficulty is trying to connect busy parents to their child’s artistic and creative experiences when parents are rarely present at the nursery—they just drop their child off at the nursery before hurrying to work. Finally, Starcatchers works with psychology researchers and national policy makers, but what kinds of details are necessary to demonstrate that artistic

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experiences for young children are valuable—and what kind of value do those experiences have? Starcatchers started as a pilot project in 2006 and more information about the details of their work and research can be found at starcatchers.org.uk. What follows is fragments of a conversation Heather Fitzsimmons Frey had with Rhona (R) and Lynda (L) that particularly addresses the Starcatchers “building community through the very young” approach to theatre and learning. Rhona, how did you decide it would be exciting to work with very little people? (R) Initially I was brought in to manage the Starcatchers pilot project in Muirhouse in Edinburgh in 2006 [Muirhouse is a housing estate in what is considered to be one of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas]. I definitely saw the pilot project as an opportunity to explore the idea, the form, the process of how you engage and make work for those very young children. I could see the need when I was working for another children’s company and we were doing shows for kind of 3, 4, 5, plus—that there were always under threes coming along. Partly because they were siblings, but you also get those kinds of parents who are like “my 18 month old is very advanced and therefore coming to a show for 5 plus.” And quite often the child is not…(laughs) When we started on the pilot project there was a real sense of “we have no idea what we’re doing.” And for me and the two artists, [Andy Manley and Vanessa Rigg delivered a joint residency from October 2006-March 2007] who all started work the same day, there were huge possibilities to take these first steps on the journey. But I think it was really obvious from the first few sessions what the artists were trying to do with children-by the performances, we had four/five months old babies who were absolutely captivated by what we were presenting. And this had an impact on parents and carers [sic] who were amazed at how the babies responded. What kind of discoveries did the artists make? (R) With Heather, [Heather Fulton delivered the second phase residency of the pilot project from Summer 2007-Spring 2008] she had more contact time with the research team, and one of the researchers was Nikki Powers, a PhD student with Colwyn Trevarthen (Emeritus Professor of Psychobiology, University of Edinburgh). Nikki did microanalysis of film footage that Heather had recorded from within the nursery and from

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sharings of works in progress, and that allowed them to really understand the things that really worked for the babies, and the things people thought worked for the babies—there were certain things that the artists thought were right but actually the researchers demonstrated that babies were more interested in something entirely different. The first piece of work made on the pilot project, by Andy and Vanessa, was “Little Light,” and it had all the kinds of traditional things that you would expect to see in a show for very small children. Feathers, balloons, there was music, there was singing, and lots of repetition, and shadow puppetry, object puppetry, and it was a story about a light, a sort of journey through the day, but it was told through this light that was a little bit lost. It was really accessible for babies and parents. The parents loved it. We still get requests for it to be brought back. That piece connects with people, but creatively, we’ve moved much further forward from that. I mean, Heather’s process was about exploring the point where performance and play meet, so she created an installation space where the children had full ownership of that space, but there were performative elements to read. The children could come in and play. There were many hot water bottles with cow prints and real grass there were wooden toys, a paddling pool, and a mound, and they could explore the space. And there was a cellist sitting in an armchair. And Peep, the bird character came out of a birdhouse in the wall. And you know, that was kind of interesting because that was about what happens when you create a really stimulating kind of environment? And then you add another layer with the performance. Does it matter if some of the children are not engaging with what you’re doing? For Heather it wasn’t important if some of the children were still kind of focused on the things they were interested in. One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about is benefits to the community that you think are coming out of this work. What do you think those benefits are? (R) I think it really depends on the community. One of the residencies for the Inspire Project, (2009-2011) the one in East Glasgow, is the one that has benefitted most. That residency, with Matt, [artist Matt Addicott] has a much deeper impact because of the leadership in that setting: the arts manager there is amazing. She really understands the community context-it’s a regeneration area. There’s lots of new development going on. It is an area where there is major deprivation, drug, alcohol, poverty, mental health issues. As part of the process for the Inspire project, we asked each of the partners in that project to contribute

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10,000 pounds. The money came from the local community health care partnership and the project was very much seen to be contributing to the health and well-being of the community. (We were delivering 4 residencies in 4 different communities simultaneously. Platform, the arts centre in East Glasgow did not have to find the money from their own resources.) I really wanted the artists to focus on one or two settings each, and in some areas that happened. With Katy at Tramway (an international art space)—she had a playgroup that were a five minute walk from Tramway, but they would never ever go to Tramway, and just because it’s not part of the culture of that group and of that community. There’s definite change in attitudes in that community around Tramway: now they come. And through these relationships—you said—some attitudes have changed. What is changing exactly? (R) I think it varies. Sometimes, it’s a greater understanding of the kinds of things community members can be participating in and a sense of connecting to things. Because a college is part of that complex, we were doing some training with the childcare students, who then went on placement settings across the East End of Glasgow—you’ve got a direct feed process taking place. We offer training that includes a theoretical understanding of why arts matters—because it’s not taught at college or at university level either-and then we also offer a practical skills art as life sessions to offer them techniques and also ideas that they can translate into their work when their on placement. And the feedback that we’ve had is that it has built confidence as students and confidence in how to connect to the children… Can you describe a tension that exists in the process? (R) I always want to give the artists opportunities create and make because that’s what they want to do. So I try to find a balance between the developmental work, which I think is fundamental in terms of the child, and how we connect that engagement with creativity and early years and getting that balance with enabling the artists to make creative work. There are occasions where artists just need an opportunity to develop an idea and they already have the experience to make the work without going through the development residency process. Still, what I would really like is that we just have artists in childhood settings all the time. One artist in every childhood setting in Scotland is what I really, really would love to see. But that’s a social change aspect.

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It is about having a balance between what is child led and how you bring an artist into a setting and allow the artist to lead a process or respond to a process. We did a film project called “the news and weather” and we were asking two- to five-year olds to talk about current affairs— you know, what was important to them in their community. But they were talking about flying pigs and super heroes and the artists weren’t expecting them to sit down and be really super serious. It was about letting the children have a voice and that definitely is part of an ideology. So you look at this film that they made out of the however many minutes of footage that we’ve got and it switches back and forth from serious things like the flats they were demolishing nearby and the children that are sitting there watching this happening—that’s really exciting, that’s news—cut to a little animation of a boy, and there’s over it the voice of a boy telling how he’s waiting for this tree house to be built. And like, someone needs to get the wood, and they just need to get on with it. And there’s another boy who’s the fastest boy in the world, and he’s telling a story, saying “I am the fastest boy in the world, and I’ve just gone to Mars, and there is a massive spider, and he sucked us up and turned us all into milkshake, and so on.” The making of the film that accompanies the film is really interesting because you’ve got the recording filming the boy telling the story to one of the artists, and the kind of response that you get between the artist and the kids. And I think that’s what makes it different when you’ve got an artist going into a setting and having a chance to have those relationships. They are not going in to tell someone that they know how to do something better than anyone else. They are going in to explore and play and respond and sometimes build. The artists we’ve worked with might have an overarching idea of what they want to make, but it’s never so fixed that through that exploratory process it can’t change because the children respond in a certain way. Actually, there are many tensions when it comes to this work. It has taken a number of years to break down the barriers to understanding that very young children can engage with performance and that they do so in very different ways. There are many skeptics who don’t think that this work is necessary, however, they are often converted once they have seen a live experience with the children there. The child’s response is vital and this has an impact on everyone in the room. There are tensions between the artists and how they manage the expectations of the key stakeholders involved in our work—not only managing Starcatchers expectations of what they will deliver but also those of the nursery or arts centre where they are working as well as local educators and adults who might engage with the work. They also have to

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manage the expectations and responses from the children and this can cause tensions too—we recently had to completely re-work a piece of theatre that was nearly finished because the children couldn’t grasp the main premise of the piece. I think children’s theatre is marginalised generally; however, theatre for the very young sits in a very strange place, where on the one hand it is marginalised further because it is seen as just for babies and on the other— it causes great curiosity at what it could possibly be. I think the boundaries about this work have shifted in Scotland, as they have in other parts of Europe in recent times; however, there is still a huge amount of work to be done to raise the profile of this work and the importance it has in offering positive early childhood experiences. If I put those words “performance and learning” in connection to the Starcatchers projects, what would you have to tell the world about that? (R) Well, what do you mean by learning? What do you think could be meant by “learning?” When I hear about your work, I hear lots and lots of levels so I would be curious to know your interpretation. (R) I guess that’s the thing because for me, everything is about learning. Everything is about reflecting on practice, whether that’s the artist reflecting on practice, or whether that’s me reflecting on how we’re evolving the work that we do, or whether that’s us working with researchers or evaluators to reflect on work that we’re doing – and then that filters down to staff, to students, to children, to parents because it’s always about that engagement. I’m constantly scanning audiences to understand how they responding to the work that we’re doing. We’ll be talking to parents about their experiences and what they’re taking away from that process. And trying to find ways of understanding how the children are responding and if they’re able to tell us, what they are taking away, or if they’re not, how do you gauge non-verbal communication— you know, how they are responding. And then, again, in the much bigger picture of the policy context, I think there is lots of learning and understand that’s taken place about where we fit in terms of that bigger picture. I know that we’re thinking about policy and national outcomes even as we’re creating performances. But it’s gone on such a journey. It’s become much more fundamental because we are connecting with all these other agencies and sectors and

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supporting them and their learning and how they use this kind of practice to deliver the kind of policies and strategies that are being developed. So—at the end of the day, it’s all about the child and giving the child the best experiences we possibly can from birth to five. I’m always learning and if I’m not learning, there is something really wrong. And I think the artists would say a similar sort of thing. Could you give one example of a great Starcatchers learning moment? (R) We had a really amazing experience with the work that Jen did (Jen Edgar led one of the residencies that was part of The Playground, a project that placed artists in childcare settings/nurseries for 12 months in 2012-13)—I really wanted artists to engage with parents but I knew that engaging with parents was going to be the hardest bit of that project to get because quite often the parents, with the nurseries, are just dropping the kids off on their way to work or to go do whatever it is that they’re doing… In the setting where Jen was based she had such a strong relationship with the nursery teacher that they were really able to work together to find a strategy to get parents involved in the process. It was a very gentle process. They did a series of things. The nursery worker said, “We need parents to support this by taking children to the woods every week.” That wasn’t about them realizing that they were taking part in something creative. And then, they explicitly revisited that six months later. The nursery worker said, “Now we want to do some sessions with you and your child together with our staff and really celebrate the people who are in the community.” It was really beautiful. I asked Jen to write it up as a case study because we had a 96% attendance from parents, which was amazing. There was a little bit of psychology to get the parents in, but once they were in, they really responded to what was taking place. They did very simple things: they drew round their child and the child drew round the parent, and the next week they had to come back with an object that was a shared object, it was about shared memory between the parent and the child, and then we had to decorate their outlines with a story connected to the object and we had an exhibition connected to all of these pictures. It was huge. And we also revisited the woods and the stories that they made and developed that had come from the autumn. It was a really beautiful process. The Children’s Services are very interested in attachment theory—so there were processes where children’s services were saying “We’re seeing things here that we haven’t seen before. What is it about this? We don’t know if we would ever have got to a place where

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we were seeing this kind of behaviour. What is it about the artist in this context that has given us these results? Is it the artist? Is it the setting? Is it the children? Is it the staff? Is it a combination? Could you replicate that somewhere else?” I think you could replicate it somewhere else, but I think the artist is key to unlocking all of that work. But coupled with that is the leadership in the nursery and the openness. I’m always really clear that we’re not there to tell people how to do their jobs, because, you know, the artists we’re working with are not childcare practitioners. Lynda, do you have anything to add regarding Starcatchers and Theatre for Early Years work? (L) Starcatchers is pioneering in the field. There are lots of people working with children under the age of five, and with community and parents. There are so many different programs, but I was compelled by the Starcatchers model of creative learning, creation of community and the commitment to the creation of art. For us at Theatre Direct, those have to go hand in hand. We are not a community service and we are not educators: we are artists. We commit to a long period of research, development, and testing, and we create good art by being deeply connected to our audience (for all levels of age for our work). When artists do work for the very youngest, it’s hard to say that the impact is singular. Who is doing the learning? The artist? The child? The mom? The teacher? In our context, we know that our work can be like droplets of water, rippling out over the course of an hour or maybe a year, and influencing the circle of people that surrounds the child. Our artistry deals in the communication of empathy, compassion, and emotional expression. As Rhona has been saying all along, part of the beauty of this work is that by engaging and inspiring the very youngest, you are affecting societal change.

INDEX

“A Possibility” 78, 79–82, 88 actor training 76, 81, 82, 134 e.n. adaptation 47 e.n., 94, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 134 e.n., 135 e.n. aesthetic(s) 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 23, 26, 28–29, 29, 30–31, 36, 42, 95, 96, 116, 117,120, 122, 123, 127, 132 affect 168–171, 178, 179, 182 affective atmospheres 166–184 affective environment 12, 177 affective result 64 Ahmed, Sara 169, 177, 179, 182 alternate reality games 219, 222 e.n. Anderson, Ben 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176, 178 assessment 67, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 116–117, 118–119, 126, 128, 130, 136 e.n., 137 e.n. atmosphere 86, 131 affective atmosphere (see affect) attentiveness / attention 2, 4, 102, 106, 108, 132, 182–183 audience /spectator xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 1, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 13–17, 19, 23, 24, 25–26, 26, 28–29, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37–38, 41–42, 55–56, 57, 63, 71, 78, 81, 85, 95, 99, 100, 101, 111, 120, 132, 133, 137 e.n., 166, 172, 175, 176, 177, 180, 208, 209, 212, 220 e.n., 222 e.n. autonomy 72, 115, 117, 118, 123, 130, 133–134 Australia (also Tasmania) 2, 3 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 70 e.n. Babayants, Art 71

Babies (see theatre for early years) Babydrama xix, 153, 156–157 Bakhtin, Mikhail 121, 123 Balfour, Michael 4, 11, 12, 19 Benjamin, Walter 146 Bennett, Jane 170, 182 Bharucha, Rustom 18 Bissell, David 173, 177, 180, 181, 182 Blue Bird xvii Boal, Augusto 101, 176, 209, 211– 212, 215, 216, 217, 221 e.n. Böhme, Germot 168, 169, 172, 176, 181 Borzovoy, Laurie-Shawn 37–41 Bouffon 123, 129, 132 Brady, Hana 24, 29, 48 e.n. Brecht, Bertolt 8, 134, 137 e.n., 175 Brennan, Teresa 174 Britzman, Deborah 23, 35, 36, 37 Carrington, Leonora 158 cell phones 209–216, 217, 219 e.n. child/children xviii, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47 e.n., 48, e.n., 52, 53, 55, 78, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107 childhood 27–28, 33, 38 The Children’s Republic 3, 23, 24, 25, 26–29, 41, 42, 47 e.n., 49 e.n, children’s theatre (see theatre for young audiences) choreographer/choreography 3, 9, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60–62, 64, 69 e.n., 70 e.n. Code, Lorraine 5, 8, 12, 15, 19 collaborative 2, 10, 13, 22 e.n., 40– 41, 59, 70 e.n., 74, 84, 86, 87, 88, 98, 100, 104, 110, 111, 115–

232 116, 117, 118, 119, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134 comfort/comfortable 10, 14, 15, 17, 61, 81, 86 , 97–98, 100, 105, 106, 106, 107, 111, 121, 128 commentary (online) 216 community xxii, 2–3, 7, 9, 12 (Roma), 16, 19, 50, 52–54, 55, 57–60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69 e.n., 93, 98, 100, 102, 103, 110, 111, 223, 224–226 creative control 118, 123, 125, 134 creativity/creative thinking 22, 72, 81, 93, 95, 116, 117, 118, 119, 126, 130, 132, 146 creative process 2, 53, 61, 67, 118– 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 130, 145 creative work 7, 12, 40, 132 Critical Educational Events (Woods) 52, 53, 54, 64, 66 critical agency 95, 118 critical thinking 4, 22, 42, 97, 102, 104, 105, 111, 117, 119, 121, 132, 137 e.n. critical youth studies 100, 101, 103 cross-cultural performance/theatre/practice 194, 195, 201, 202 cross-gender casting 117, 137 e.n. Cohen-Cruz, Jan 8, 16, 19, 21 e.n., 22 culture/cultural 14, 16, 19–20, 24 (Multicultural), 96, 103, 111, 136 e.n., curriculum 94, 96, 186, 188 curricular materials 47 e.n. curriculum politics 193 dance 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 67, 69 e.n., 70 e.n. Deleuze, Giles (and Félix Guattari) 96, 102, 146–147 desire 11, 19, 65, 96, 100, 101 desire-based research 100 devising 2, 53, 60, 94, 132

Index Diary of Anne Frank 3, 23, 24, 25, 35–41, 41, 42 difficult knowledge 3, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34, 41, 42 Dilworth, Alan 8, 12, 19, 22 e.n. directing/directors xvii, xix, 8, 12, 19, 23, 26, 29, 30, 36, 42, 54, 59, 60, 70 e.n. in the classroom 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 95, 99, 106, 110, 115, 118, 121, 123, 124, 122, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137 e.n. Dog Accident 82–84, 84–88 Dolan, Jill xxi dynamic assessment, 74, 75, 78, 84, 88 Ecological thinking 12, 15, 18, 19 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 101–102 embodiment 24, 31, 40, 71, 87, 105 entertain xviii environments of learning 51, 52, 82, 86, 87–88, 89, 96, 102, 169 Etchells, Tim 137, 148–150 failure xv, 2, 51, 96, 97, 138–152 festival xvii (Moscow Chekhov), xix (F.O.O.T., Toronto), 3 (Moving Mountains), 35 (Stratford, Ontario), 50–51, 53– 54, 55, 57– 60, 64, 65, 70 e.n. (Mountain Festival) foster care 98 Forced Entertainment (Theatre company) 148 Foucault, Michel 110 Franklin, Ursula 18 Freire, Paulo 64, 101, 118, 123 funding 3, 53, 57, 58, 59, 63, 65, 70 e.n., 76, 97, 98 Gallagher, Kathleen xv, 2–3, 103 Guattari, Félix (see Deleuze, Gilles) glitch art 96, 148 Goodrich, Frances and Albert Hackett 47 e.n., 48 e.n.

Theatre and Learning guest/guesthood 3, 13, 17, 53, 65, 66 habit/habitual 8, 117, 118, 119, 123, 135, 168, 169 Hana’s Suitcase 3, 22, 23, 24, 28– 33, 40, 41, 46 e.n., 47 e.n., 48 e.n. Hare, David 17 Heathcote, Dorothy 66 Henry, Jules 155 Hill, Lynda 223 Hobart, Tasmania 49, 52, 53, 57, 58, 63, 65, 70 e.n. Holocaust representation 3, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41 Hong Kong, 3, 76, 89 hooks, bell 102, 115, 118 Hungary 12, 13, 19 identity 14, 24, 49 e.n. Indigenous People (First Nations) 57, 70 e.n., 99 imagine/imagination 5, 7, 15, 23– 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 35, 41, 42, 49, 106, 119, 125, 160–161 inclusion, 58, 64, 65 installation 8 intention 9, 13, 75, 89, 111, 120, 125 intercultural (ism) 14, 19, 71, 87, 198 intimacy 31 Ironworks Studio 99 Jackson, Anthony 4 Jarry, Alfred 94, 115, 110, 122, 123, 124, 133, 137 e.n. Kesselman, Wendy 23, 35, 48 e.n. Kerhsaw, Baz 177–178 Knowles, Ric 14 Korczak, Janusz 24, 26, 28–29, 41, 47 e.n. Kushnir, Andrew 9 Lacan/Lacanian 210, 218 Lather, Patti xxi, 101 Learner-centred teaching (studentcentred learning) 3, 115, 116, 118, 131

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learning xvii–xxii, 2, 3, 4, 8, 24, 25, 30, 32, 34, 40, 42, 50, 52, 54, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 71–77, 81–82, 84, 86–89, 89, 97, 100, 101, 111, 115, 116–118, 118– 119, 120, 121, 123, 127, 128, 130–135, 154, 178–183, 228– 229, 230 literacy/literacies 90, 102 Living with Lady Macbeth 76, 88 Loutzenheiser, Lisa 99 Mackey, Sally 50 Mackey, Sally (and Nicholas Whybrow) 16 Massey, Doreen 6, 12, 15, 16 Matheson, Rhona 223 mediation 29, 73, 74, 75, 82, 89 memory 23–24, 25, 27–28, 29, 31, 34, 36, 40, 41, 50, 73 methodology (teaching methodology, approaches) 192, 198, 199, 202, 208 e.n. Moscow xvii–xviii Moscow Art Theatre (MAT, MHAT) xvii–xviii, e.n. xxiii Moving Mountains 3, 53, 54, 54–57, 57, 58–59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 multimodal literacies (see literacies) Moscovitch, Hannah 3, 23, 26, 28, 40, 47 e.n., 49 e.n narrative 2, 3, 13, 15, 18, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 41, 42, 47 e.n. 49 e.n, 52, 54, 58, 65, 71, 78, 100, 101, 105, 118 New Zealand 123, 134 e.n. non-human 167, 169, 170, 171, 177, 178, 181, 182 non-representational theory 176 online performance 210, 214, 217, 218 open source/open source theatre 214, 221 e.n. Osten, Suzanne xix, 153 participation (participants) xxii 3, 4, 12, 16, 25, 32, 42, 52, 53, 54,

234 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75, 76, 93, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111 digital 210, 215, 218 participatory research 3, 9, 75, 98, 119, 127 Partnerships in Community Health Research 97 pedagogy/pedagogical xvii, 4, 5, 8– 9, 10, 16, 17, 19, 22 e.n., 23, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 72, 95, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 123, 127, 134, 137 e.n. pedagogy, critical 102 pedagogy, feminist 101–102 pedagogy of resistance 149–150 liberatory pedagogy 115, 123 pedagogical methodology pedagogical spaces 10, 111–112 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 101 performance xviii, xix–xx, 2, 3, 10, 11, 14–17, 23, 25, 41, 42, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 133 Performance Studies 164 “The Playground” 229 Poehner, Matthew 74, 75, 84, 88 Policy 6, 16, 53, 73, 77–79, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89 Post-colonial critique and practice 188, 192, 196, 199 postmemory 24–25, 31, 34, 50 postmodernism 185, 199, 200 power (power relations or power dynamics) xxii, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 59, 66, 95, 101–103, 107, 109–111, 116, 123–130, 131, 134 praxis xxiii e.n., 65–66, 68, 95, 150 Praxis Theatre (Theatre Company) 162, 207, 211, 212, 214

Index presence 30, 31, 70 e.n. process 24, 25, 34, 73, 74, 75 process (theatre–making) xviii, 4, 10, 11, 17, 20, 35, 39, 51, 60, 61, 62, 66, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 87, 94, 95, 100, 103, 104, 107– 110, 116, 117, 118–119, 120– 122, 125, 126, 127, 130–133, 134 product-oriented drama approach 4, 71 Project: Humanity (theatre company) 7, 8, 17 radio play, 82–84, 88 real/real life xx, 3, 14, 17–18, 30, 33, 47 e.n., 80, 86, 129, 132, 136 e.n., reflection / reflecting xiv–xv, xv– xvi, 2 –4, 18, 21 e.n., 51, 53, 54, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 76, 93, 94, 100, 101, 108, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 130, 137 e.n. refugee 3, 6, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 53, 57, 58, 59, 65 rehearsal (see also process) 4, 61– 63, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80– 82, 83, 85–88, 89, 97, 99–100, 103 –104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 – 112, 116, 118, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 134 re(-)imagining xv, xvi, 40, 125 relational, relationality 25, 41, 181– 182 relational space 19 remembrance 23, 25, 43 research xix, xx, xxi, 9, 11, 21 e.n., 22, 49, 50, 52, 53, 72, 75, 89, 94–95, 98–99, 101, 103, 104, 105–111, 111, 117, 119 Participatory Research 1, 9, 75, 98 resistance 24, 96, 99, 99–102, 102– 110, 128, 145 risk xv, 5, 11, 15, 16, 25, 36, 89, 94– 96, 98, 111

Theatre and Learning role-play 14, 15, 31, 72, 85, 99, 100, 105, 106, 108–109, 123 Salverson, Julie 10, 11, 12, 13, 25, 43 school 2, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21 e.n., 25, 47 e.n., 48 e.n., 52, 53, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63–64, 70 e.n., 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, 111, 136 e.n., 138, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 150, 167, 172–173 Scotland (also Edinburgh, Glasgow) 224, 228 scripts 3, 4, 26, 30, 56, 57, 58, 71– 72, 77–78, 78–81, 83–84, 84– 85, 87, 88, 95 , 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111, 121, 122, 124, 125 Second Language Learning 4, 13– 14, 71, 73, 75 Section 98 (by Praxis Theatre) 164, 207, 211–214 Shakespeare 52, 94, 117, 120, 123 Sher, Emil 3, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33–34, 41 social change 2, 3, 6–7, social class 93, 94 social constructivism, 73, 177, 179 social engagement 7, 8 social justice 6 social/relational aesthetics (see aesthetics) sociocultural theory, 71, 73,74, 76, 89 space 5, 7, 7–10, 15–16, 19, 34, 36, 41–43, 60, 63, 65, 66, 101, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 128, 131, 162, 163, 164 Institutional spaces 167, 172 Pedagogical spaces 166, 176 stage design 8, 15, 22, 26, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 134 Stanislavski xvii, 80 Starcatchers 223 Stephenson, Jenn 11 stories/narrative 11, 13–15, 16–17, 17, 18, 19–20, 23, 25, 29, 32,

235

36, 37, 40, 49, 51, 54, 55, 58, 63, 83, 84, 94, 98, 100, 104, 105, 111 Storor, Mark 171–173 success xix, 3, 19, 20, 89, 95, 97, 114, 141–147, 150 surprise 4 Surviving in the Cracks 97, 98–100, 102, 103 Sweden xix, 95, 153 Tasmania, see Australia Teaching Artist 3, 50–54, 65–67, 95 Terezin or Theresienstadt 33–34, 47 e.n., 48 e.n., 49 e.n. tertiary students/undergraduate students 76, 179, 186–188, 190 tethered self 208 theatre 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 17, 20, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 40, 42, 51, 52, 69 e.n., 70 e.n., 94, 99, 100, 102, 106, 111, 113, 117 applied theatre xix, xx, xxi, 1–3, 5, 7, 15–16, 20, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103 children’s theatre (see theatre for young audiences) Chinese theatre 185–186, 188– 195, 203 community theatre 3, 97 theatre for early years xiv, 95, 224–225 theatre education xx, 4, 96, 115, 117, 134 theatre in education xviii, 4, 76, 77, 81–89 popular theatre 96, 97 socially engaged theatre 5, 10, 11, 12– 13, 19 theatre in prison 172–176 theatre for social change (see socially engaged theatre) theatre as therapy 17 theatre for young audiences xvii–xix, xx, 3, 22, 25–26, 28, 37, 42, 94, 154, 223 verbatim theatre 8

236 World Theatre/teaching World Theatre 185–186, 188, 194– 197, 200, 203 Theatre Direct (company) 223 theatre histories xxii Theatre of the Oppressed 102, 162, 207, 209–210 Theatre of Urban 102 Thompson, James 52, 170 Toronto xviii, 2, 3, 35, 42 traces 2, 23, 28, 29 trauma 10–11, 13, 14, 18, 23, 25, 26, 101, 134 Tuck, Eve (and K. Wayne Yang) 99, 101 Ubu Roi 94, 115, 120–122, 137 e.n. Unga Klara Theatre xx, 95, 153–156 University of British Columbia 98, 99, 103 Vancouver 35, 94, 98, 99, 100 Vancouver Youth Visions Coalition, 98 Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) 115, 116, 117, 119, 130, 136 e.n.

Index video games 215–217 Vygotsky xix, 4, 73, 74, Warsaw Ghetto 24, 26, 28, 29 Wessels, Anne 21 e.n., 145 Windpiece 57, 58, 59, 70 e.n. witnessing, witness 3, 10, 16, 19, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 36, 41, 42 Whybrow, Nicolas (see Mackey, Sally) Young People’s Theatre (company) 29, 35–37, 39, 40, 42 youth 2, 7, 9, 11, 20, 65, 67, 93, 96– 110, 211 youth homelessness/homeless youth 7, 14, 104 shelter youth 7, 8–9, 17 street youth 94, 96–110 youth, marginalized, 97, 100, 101 youth, Roma 3, 12–17, 18, 1–20 Youth Theatre Journal 153 Zone of proximal development xix, 4, 74