Phalguni Rao

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

One of the pressing questions the pandemic has thrown up among theatre practitioners and pedagogues is: What is an actor preparing for in the given circumstances? Since COVID-19 enveloped the world earlier this year, education transitioned online with drama schools and universities struggling to adapt traditional theatre learning to a medium that was considered alien to the form until now.

The pandemic has provided a much needed pause for pedagogues to reflect on what should an actor be trained for now. At the recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar, Switzerland-based director and curator Julie Beauvais and American playwright Kamili Okweni Feelings believe there is a need for a trans-disciplinary approach to using theatre as a tool to access imagination and inspire populations.

Both Beauvais and Feelings have been working audaciously at the edge of what is considered to be the “Canon” with new ways of looking at theatre. Beauvais’ art is driven by her interest in embodied experience and elevation. After graduating from École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, she went on to explore forms of epic theatre in diverse political contexts. She then directed operas and engaged in monumental installation art in public spaces. With an interest in experimental music and deep listening practices, she also the founded the platform BadNewsFromTheStars*, which is a trans-territorial and trans-disciplinary laboratory for innovative convergences of sonic explorations, scientific research and environmental studies.

Philadelphia-based Feelings is a Brown University alum who studied playwriting under Paula Vogel and the late Aishah Rahman. He went on to work with several theatre groups including the Pig Iron Theatre Company, Pulley and Buttonhole Theater and Beacon Theater. He was also a teaching fellow at the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA). He talks about the framework and hierarchy within which he learnt how to write plays — where other playwrights spoke in a certain shorthand while constructing the architecture of their play. On the other hand, what he holds more important is the questions he learned from his instructors — specifically around how much does one know about human beings in order to be able to tell the stories that frighten one the most. “You go through traumas as kids, and you don’t put it together into your 20s or 30s and you certainly don’t start working on them until your 40s,” he says, “So I’m still working out how those traumas relate to stories that I’m still trying to articulate. I’m not really writing plays anymore. I’m working on radio dramas and I think that’s probably an easier way to access the mind of an audience.”

Beauvais shares a similar love for theatre of sound. Any drama or acting program around the world places great emphasis on the act of listening. In her artistic practice, Beauvais takes it a step further and uses deep listening practices inspired by American composer Pauline Oliveros, who was a pioneer in electronic music in the 1960s and wrote specific musical and text scores to attune with the world, both inside and out. For Beauvais, she is far from the general association of theatre with a black box. “How can we, in these troubled times discover and listen to the world’s changing messages and pass them along to others in order to facilitate the dialogue between a variety of sentient beings?” she asks, adding that it is the opposite of being in a black box. The idea is to be porous and focus on consciously being and co-creating together.

The Swiss artiste also elaborates on Oliveros’ score The Witness. Beauvais’ work involves collaborating with artists, scientists and indigenous historians. Biology and art ties together humans and more-than-human ecologies, evolution, development, history, spiritualities, affects performances, technologies and more.

She is currently creating a 3-year open lab project with groups of researchers-creators based in South America, North America, Africa, India, the Arabic region, Russia, China and Europe exploring new perspectives on trans-territorial cooperation for sustainable development in a context of emerging challenges and shifting paradigms in a more complex and multipolar world.

“It is not about going on sites with the Philharmonic Orchestras and playing for the burnt forests. It’s about approaching people, groups, actions or proposals of minorities or populations that are displaced. It’s about long-term studies and creations in forests, collecting scientific observations on the effect of deforestation on local and global ecosystems. It’s about developing a new – and also ancient – kind of virtuosity, one that grounded in attention and an un-solipsistic relationship to another’s sonic and energetic reality and moving beyond an unquestioningly anthropocentric way of thinking.”

A few years ago, Beauvais stopped using the words “performer” or “actor” in her work, as she felt it limited what she was trying to achieve with conscious movement and deep listening based works. She believes in breaking the binary of being a performer and audience. “We need to look for another vocabulary because if I say we are deeply listening, we are aiming to be, very humbly, in presence. We are now including a lot of vocabulary from permaculture, gender studies, sciences, so that we can eventually get rid of this very narrow idea of performance and actor, and widen it so that we free ourselves from having to do and having to really impose a style or a throw something there,” she expresses.

In his experience too, Feelings found the label of an “actor” limiting the actor-performer. “What I always found kind of lacking even in creation groups sometimes,” he says, “is that we were being put into these positions of being ‘actors’ where we were supposed to be ‘strong’. We were just being very literal about something that’s supposed to affect people out there — meaning your audience specifically. You know, it’s not about you trying to be ‘strong’ so that other people think you’re ‘strong’. It is about somebody being able to recognize something that’s so abstract, that they go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s scared’—and that behavior is so much more interesting than just showing what you’ve personally-observed ‘strength’ to look like. It’s building a ‘story’ from what you automatically offer the public from a more unique vantage point as artists.”

Feelings felt so strongly about the hierarchical pedagogical approach to actor-training that he decided to stop teaching at universities after he finished his training at LISPA. He shares he felt he was doing something false, because he knew students had to get their A’s — and there was no point in being a C-minus student in American society.  Students and teachers, he found, had less time for the nuances of storytelling — the more vital and lasting parts of the instruction for him — within an environment where “better” jobs are non-existent without a college degree of some kind.

“I don’t know what we’re teaching people half the time when we talk about performance, in terms of communicating with the public. And I’m talking about working to communicate with more popular audiences where everybody can understand what happened in the room, even if they are not ‘theater people.’ If we’re not doing that, I think we’re playing a game around how much money we can get from people by teaching them things that we’ve learned. And I couldn’t do that,” shares Feelings. “I think there’s an ethical dimension to learning theater ‘tricks’ that is either ignored or undervalued in society. It might be because the instructional emphasis regarding ‘career choice’ is bent upon fetishizing the individual “performance” — as opposed simply to using “performance” as a makeshift means towards more open communication with an audience. Like the jackleg preacher or even the traffic cop, ‘performance’ might be far more of a public service than we want to admit. But that would mean de-emphasizing ‘authorship,’ and the notion of a ‘settled legacy,’ for each artist. And who wants to be deprived of personal legacies — when artist careers are so precarious already?”

Instead Feelings is choosing to work with medical students as a standardized patient — where he gives students advice on how to communicate more compassionately with patients. “I tell them they could talk to me a little bit better, nicer. I tell them how they can use pausing in order for me to understand that they heard something I said, as opposed to just speaking and getting their agenda done,” he says and adds that such moments between human beings is what inspires one. “That’s what all human beings do. Inspiring one another is what all human beings can do.”

Instead of an actor or performer, Feelings and Beauvais espouse the idea of training to be an “inter-being”, where one develops the ability to tune into being in one’s inter-being-ness but also leaving it open to using it in different ways. Going back to Oliveros’ work, it is like sitting on one’s skin and being able to see the inner and outside world at the same time with presence and openness.

Often, Beauvais works at a stretch of 2-3 months with participants and listeners (not actors/performers) in outdoor and indoor spaces to physically listen inwardly and outwardly. Her approach was met with a lot of backlash from a young group of actors in Berlin, who were hungry to learn specific skills. “They hated me so much, because they wanted skills and technique. They wanted to do ‘theatre’ and suddenly I was there and telling them ‘Nah, just listen’.”

In her experience, Beauvais has found that it is easier to work with or train non-actors in this kind of deep listening work. The problem with the current structure of theatre pedagogy is that an actor stocks up a mountain of skills and techniques through the course of their journey as a student, which they then find it difficult to look beyond, feels Beauvais. While it is true that drama schools increase the capacity to listen, it is important to go beyond these techniques and invent new ones. Actors are in a hurry to do something, to use their knowledge of techniques in response to listening, Beauvais says and adds that that frustration between wanting to do and simply listening is beautiful to watch.

“I realized that it’s much more difficult to work with actors and performers because they are like the dancers entering the room. They have technique ingrained in their body. They are flexible, because they understand a new style and new research very easily. That flexibility is their strength. But they have a lot of techniques and goals that make their process through this kind of work very slow and much more complicated than non-trained people. It’s fascinating, but it’s not easy for them to go there. But it’s much easier for a non-trained person as an actor to develop that,” Beauvais observes.

As people who went through theatre and are now exploring beyond, Feelings and Beauvais agree that it is necessary to constantly break the codes and challenge the binaries that have been set within theatre. They imagine a fluid future where skills and techniques are used as improvisational tactics rather than letting them become a hegemonic structure in themselves.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the video of the entire session here:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

When one thinks of a drama school, one generally envisions a pedagogy that is focused on building individual skills, equipping students with a plethora of techniques and providing a safe space for exploration. It is understood that the teaching imparted will possibly be used for political ends when young theatre-makers go out into the world and create their own work. But is it possible to see theatre pedagogy itself as a form of activism? Dr. Nesreen Hussein, an artist, scholar and lecturer at Middlesex University, London strongly believes so.

Hussein, whose research interests and publications focus on the intersection of performance, politics and activism in relation to issues of identity, agency and belonging, said at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar that her ideas of art and activism were deeply shaped by the events of the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

The idea of dislocation, of always existing between a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ has been ingrained in Hussein from a young age. She, originally from Egypt, was born in a different country and returned to her home country to finish her schooling and undergraduate education before moving to London to pursue her artistic and academic career. “And that was a significant part of my existence and the shaping of my identity as I grew up. This sense of liminality shaped my understanding of self and identity in deep and significant ways,” she says, adding this also challenged her sense of belonging for she never fully felt rooted in one place. This also extended into her professional identity as someone whose practice shifts between the artistic and academic.

Hussein identifies as a woman, an artist, academic, Arab, Egyptian and also as a person of colour. She describes that in being in the position of inside and out constantly has turned her into a critical observer of her experiences on an embodied and experiential level. “So, all of these different layers, levels of connection and disconnection also shaped my understanding and my engagement with the notion of activism and how this can be generated or ‘activated’,” she says.

When the revolution began in Egypt in January 2011, demanding the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak, Hussein was in the middle of her doctoral studies in London. She says that the revolution emphasized and heightened her engagement with the ideas of belonging, responsibility and agency, for at that moment, something had shifted in her relationship to London and to Cairo, the two main cities she moves between.

“I thought the revolution was a huge historical moment that was happening in my country of origin. And I was not there. It started while I was distant from that place,” she says. It led her to question her presence in the UK while this was happening in Egypt. “I felt like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had a sense of responsibility towards what was happening in Egypt. I really longed to be there on the streets with the people of my home country.”

Despite the circumstances, Hussein managed to reach Tahrir Square in Cairo, where a lot of the demonstrations were taking place at the time, a day before Mubarak stepped down. Though brief, Hussein managed to have an embodied experience of the early days and months of the revolution, with protesters, of how it affected people’s sense of empowerment and agency, and how various forms of creative practices were used as tools for political activation. “This expression was unprecedented, at least in my lifetime,” she says, “Creative tools like graffiti, verbatim theatre, documentary theatre and chanting, which were not all commonly utilised before that moment partly due to state censorship, were being used for political and artistic engagement. Before the revolution, people didn’t have a meaningful sense of full ownership of public space and how they can intervene in it.

So when socio-political shifts occurred at the start of the revolution, these creative practices were framed in new and progressive ways that I hadn’t experienced before. So, this experience offered me a deep and significant understanding of the relationship between art and activism and how it can manifest and be driven by a growing sense of agency and belonging.”

This was one of the factors that inspired Hussein to push for bridging the gap between art and activism, and pedagogy and activism in her own artistic and academic practices. She believes it is important to emphasize that what happens in other parts of the world is not separate from what happens in one’s local or immediate context. This was emphasized when she began her career as a full time academic in a UK university.

“I’ve tried to challenge a separation in my teaching by bringing the outside in and trying to find the commonalities and shared experiences, and to learn from differences. To acknowledge these differences and invest in them.

There is great value in bringing those elements and experiences from the wider global context into the British university. I think there is a need for that, as well as a need to cultivate a bigger understanding of our relationship with the outside world, and what we can learn from it. It’s a way of activating the classroom itself as well, by looking at models of activism from various global and cultural contexts,” Hussein asserts.

Bringing such discourses into classrooms that are shaped by Eurocentric, colonial pedagogy in a neo-liberal institution comes with its own set of challenges, feels Hussein. When she encountered it in the early stages of her academic career, she noticed that there was a general lack of engagement with politics in the classroom. “There was a general sense of apathy when it came to politics, and there wasn’t much space in the classroom for conversations around how our life experiences are shaped by politics and by what’s happening globally. I’ve tried to bring in those conversations into the classroom,” she shares, adding that there has been often an implicit sense of questioning as to why should theatre students in Britain look at what’s happening politically in Egypt, for example, or India or other parts of the world. “So, conversations around global politics could be marginalized or exoticized in those instances when they aren’t embedded in wider institutional and pedagogical systems that support these kinds of conversations. This has also been one of the factors that contributed to my sense of otherness in predominantly white institutions.”

Despite these challenges, Hussein believes that her position as an outsider looking in allows her a sense of critical distance that gives her a degree of clarity while still being able to remain connected as an insider or as someone who has access into certain communities or contexts. That position offers her the privilege to step back and see how she can participate and use her unique position for intervention and change.

Hussein takes inspiration in that context from Indian scholar and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thoughts on the subaltern. “Spivak talks about margins and the outsides while maintaining a privileged position as an Indian scholar in the American academy, and how she uses that position of privilege to bring the margin into the centre, to bring the outside in,” she says.

Hussein relates to that position as someone whose (‘third world’) country of origin was formerly colonized and lives in the country of the colonizer while having a privileged position in the British academy. She goes on to say it gives her a sense of empowerment and responsibility, and an impulse to consider how best to utilize the power given to her by that position. “I try to maintain an eye on the margin while being in the centre,” she says, “and this gives me motivation to use my position of privilege, as well as liminality, to engage with and foster multiple perspectives and viewpoints. I think there’s something hugely powerful in this.”

Hussein also believes that one has to carve out space for activism within pedagogy and create points of entry where one can bring in marginalized narratives into mainstream discourses. “Part of my understanding of pedagogical activism is to intervene into established or dominant systems of knowledge, even in small ways, even if it’s not received with a lot of enthusiasm or recognition. But there is a need to make space for that. And eventually, over time, this space will grow.” She also points out that it is a collaborative process where one needs to embrace a sense of togetherness and solidarity while navigating this process; one can’t do it alone.

She also addresses the question of how one can work with colonized bodies politically. The body, throughout history, has been a site of oppression. Hussein feels that, though she does not have the power to make her students think politically in how to use their bodies, she can contribute to that process by introducing different paradigms that go beyond Eurocentric or dominant systems of knowledge and training and share various models of practice as alternatives and as opportunities for learning.

Hussein also notes that it can be potentially traumatizing to engage with history, to unpack it, and examine its impacts on the body, especially the colonized body. “But I think the road to freedom lies somewhere along that journey. There lies the possibility for empowerment and liberation and the ability to look back at that history, to look it in the eye and question it, which is very important. For me, this is tied to notions of freedom and liberation,” she says as she signs off.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

Over the past several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced theatre pedagogues around the world to rethink ways of delivering teaching. In addition to the ongoing health crisis, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the custodial killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, led to protests across the world against systemic racism endemic in various fields and disciplines, including theatre and other performing arts.

Earlier in August, an informal network of Black and Global Majority scholars in UK Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies published an open letter White Colleagues Listen! (https://medium.com/@revolutionornothing/white-colleague-listen-2d098d6a4a5d) , urging their white colleagues, as an ally and an accomplice, to address racism within the field with the same sense of urgency as was demonstrated in the ability to adapt curriculum delivery for the academic year.

Following protests against racism, institutions reaffirmed their commitment to address it through solidarity statements noting “there is more work to do” without providing a concrete plan of action.

Calling this out, the letter, signed by 49 academics, states: “It is therefore no longer enough to intend not to be racist; we need you to be actively antiracist. What we need from you is actionable and meaningful change. And so we urge you to move from private expressions of solidarity to real public actions that enable meaningful change for us, your Black and Global Majority colleagues and students.”

The letter also highlights instances where Black, Asian or People of Colour academics felt isolated, not taken seriously for their work due to racism prevalent in the field.

“It makes me anxious, the feeling that I have to protect myself. The risk, pain and trauma reminds me of all the racism and racist incidents that I’ve been through,” shares Dr. Mojisola Adebayo, one of the signatories to the open letter, during a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation.

“It costs me and other People of Colour, Black people, Asian people in white environments. It costs us many breaths, many, many extra breaths. It costs us many extra heartbeats, minutes, hours, weeks, months from our lives. It’s a great cost to just exist, especially when we’re in a very white context, when we’re trying to challenge racism in our work. There are voices in my head that make me question if I am invalid and worthless just by my existence. There is trauma in that. I can feel it in my breath, in my body. I can feel it in my chest. I can feel it in my heart.”

Adebayo, who is also a lecturer at Queen Mary University, London, believes this moment in time is a crucial opportunity to dismantle whiteness in performing arts departments and schools in the UK. “And dismantling whiteness is not about hurting white people or killing white people or ending white people themselves, whatever ‘white people’ means. Whiteness is a social construct that has to be dismantled. We’re all in this together,” she says.

When white colleagues listen

What would happen if white people listened as the open letter urges them to? If they did everything as suggested in the letter, Adebayo believes the curriculum would be much more exciting and challenging. Pedagogues would be forced to do a lot more research and spend time understanding another form. There will be more jobs for people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latinx and indigenous descent, she says. “I think we’d all be learning new stuff. And we’ll be sharing ideas,” she feels. “I think the students would get very, very excited because they’re always way ahead of us. It would be an opportunity for our teaching to be more relevant, more contemporary, and more diverse.”

However, she also cautions that there is a danger in using such measures and reforms to only “spice up the curriculum” and not create any change within power structures inherent within racism.

“It could become very tokenistic. And still, whiteness wouldn’t be undone and dismantled. Everybody would just look better. Everybody would just be a bit cooler. And I think ‘cool’ has done nothing for blackness,” Adebayo asserts.

The letter also highlighted dangers of institutions hiring people of African, Asian descent and People of Colour as “diversity hires” and giving an impression of diverse representation in a predominantly white environment and considering it as action against racism. It is not enough to be the only Black person in a department at a low level job where one is often not supported by the institution as a whole, says Adebayo.

“Everybody is expecting you to be the voice of the rest of the world. And, then you’ve massive pressure to get everything right, pressure that you put on yourself too. There is massive pressure to know everything from Japanese Noh theatre, to Beijing opera, to West African storytelling and to be the voice against racism,” she asserts.

Being the only Black person in the room

Adebayo also speaks of the exhaustion that comes with being the only Black person in the room, among some white friends and colleagues. “I’m a kind of a badge of honor, a kind of passport, without saying the most clichéd thing of all, ‘I’ve got a black friend, and she doesn’t feel like that’. I’m often invited by my white colleagues to shine their medals of anti-racism. It is tiring and really boring,” she says, emphasizing that reflective action on behalf of her white colleagues is the need of the hour.

Adebayo also subscribes to the idea of abundance and questions what it would mean for capitalist structures, white people to have less, do less, be less successful in order to create space for marginalized communities. “What if a professor’s ambition and aim is to get out of higher education, to become redundant and make space for people who are much less privileged? That could be on your job description,” she wonders.

The open letter also addressed how racism manifests as both, epistemic erasures and appropriations, as well as microaggressions and overt racist behaviours. Addressing this, Adebayo shares that keeping a record of all the instances of racism she faces helps her assert to her herself what is happening is “crazy” and not a figment of her imagination. “One of the ways in which racism works is that it gets inside your head and makes you question yourself. It makes you massively doubt yourself. It’s a psychological condition we’re experiencing,” she shares, adding one does get angry with oneself when one does not stand up for oneself.

“It is not about courage, it is about abuse,” Adebayo believes. “What we need to address is the abuser and the abuse of institution that makes you feel that you’re that you’re not good enough. So I’d say that keeping a record, even for yourself, that you might use at a particular time can be really helpful. Many years ago, I took a theatre company to court for racial discrimination. And it was the keeping of my records that helped. I won that case effectively, and then we settled.”

Dismantling whiteness in UK’s higher education institutions

Adebayo recalls an incident at her first academic job when she was given the recommended reading list for theatre students for the summer. She found that every single play on the list was written by a white European, and almost all of them were dead, except Caryl Churchill. It affected her deeply and she couldn’t do anything about it at that time. If given a chance to turn the clock back, she says, she would have given the list back and pointed out how problematic it was. She admits she was scared at the time but as the years have passed, Adebayo resolved to dismantle whiteness by using any money that came her way.

“When I’d have a little bit of the budget and I decided to make sure that any pound, any euro that came my way, I would use it to dismantle whiteness,” she says, encouraging her colleagues to do the same.

When she noticed there was not a single play by a Black person in the library at the first university she worked at, she used the budget to stock up on plays write by people of African and Asian descent. “I use my budget and I only ever bring in Black, Asian, People of Colour and Middle Eastern people to teach on my courses. So, I have more power than I think I have sometimes. I focus on my teaching, and what I can do with the students in the space,” she shares.

She also points out that one of the things institutions must keep in mind while dismantling racism and whiteness is the cost and toll it takes on those who go through racism. When it comes to changing curriculum and letting go of a white playwright on the list, it is crucial to ask what it costs to make this sacrifice, she says.

“In terms of racism, I can say with total confidence that it’s cost me heartbeats. It’s cost me my breath. It’s cost me my mental health, it’s cost me my physical body, sometimes in terms of physical abuse. It’s cost my income, my ancestors, 60 million of them transported across the sea. It’s cost lynching, murders and inequality. One can’t even express the personal and cultural cost involved,” she argues, adding that it is time to let go of what one calls “tradition” and come up with a new tradition, a new ritual in order to undo history. She admits the work is messy and chaotic, but it is possible if people work together.

“As theatre-makers, we have to improvise our way to some other way of being messy, full of mistakes, and being clumsy, but we have to. Because it costs someone else far too much. Because it just hurts,” she says.

Adebayo’s experience of racial discrimination has been painful and what’s been more painful is having white people tell her how much it hurt reading the open letter. “Stop worrying about feelings. Get involved collectively, see what you can do, make something happen, change something, let it cost you something. If you’re losing some money, it’s probably a good thing,” she says, adding that whiteness and white supremacy is an evil construct born out of racism. She passionately urges her colleagues and pedagogues around the world to dismantle, disrupt and pull down whiteness. It is the time to create a new equitable system in its place because white people in higher education institutes have gotten away with it for too long, she says before signing off.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

For the longest time, theatre departments within schools and universities have faced the threat of elimination from the curriculum. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting people and institutions world over, theatre pedagogues again faced the harsh possibility of shutting down their programs when the ability to congregate in physical spaces was taken away. In October this year, Monash University in Melbourne decided to dissolve its theatre department, the Centre for Theatre and Performance.

Theatre practitioners and pedagogues have long debated how to ensure theatre education remains relevant. What is it that theatre does that can be unpacked and understood in an interdisciplinary context? What can theatre do that is special and can be put at the core of other pedagogic processes?

Meg Keating, Head of School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania, sought an interdisciplinary approach to keep elements of theatre and performance in the curriculum. In 2017, it was deemed by the University that the three-year bachelor degree in theatre and performance was no longer viable. The offerings were reduced to a major i.e. from 24 units, it came down to 8 units within a Bachelor of Arts framework, shared Keating at a recently-held Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

“Obviously, eight units being reduced from 24 was a significant change. And over the three year period, it has been an extremely tough battle to keep that viable,” she says, adding that their last intake of students into the course was in 2017. Keating and her colleagues realized that reducing the program, with lesser offering in terms of learning was not going to make it sustainable. So, this year, they were faced with the question of whether they should completely cancel out the program or do something radical and invest in it.

“We decided to invest,” Keating shares, “And what we did was restructure all of our degrees – Bachelor of Visual Arts, Bachelor of Music, Bachelor of Media and Communication – and build in the centre of those degrees a number of core units, which had theatrical practice at the very, very heart of it and make it compulsory.”

Keating and her colleagues came up with 5 units, called the Creative Curriculum. According to her, the philosophy behind them is to take all their core disciplines, and build a new program that is experimental, interdisciplinary and engages in vibrant learning experiences. At the very heart of it, the program has a number of key elements at the centre of all their degrees: collaboration, co-production, devising and performance.

“What it does is encourage students to take risks, to think big, to look at professional development, and to work through new ways of developing what creative practice and interdisciplinary practice is. We build from foundational skills to more advanced skills as students go through the various programs. And everything is experiential. It’s about engaging and working in project-based and experiential learning.”

Within the Creative Curriculum is a 4-unit block called Creative Lab, which students take up in the second year. Students have the option of exploring one of the following units: Research Lab, Making the Event, Field Trips in Creative Industries, Practices and Cultures, and Industry Placement.

Keating considers the Creative Lab as the linchpin of the whole program where roughly 150 students across disciplines come together under a devising-based workshop. Students are provided with online resources and workshops to build a framework around their learning in the Creative Lab. “It is 11 weeks of taking all students for the very first time and introducing them to interdisciplinary practices with colleagues and students from a range of different disciplines. It is something that is completely new to all of them. So it is about experimenting and risk taking,” she shares, adding that in order to take the pressure off students, it is a non-graded subject where the emphasis is on going through a process rather than getting a result.

“We understand that such a new learning experience may not always end in a very clear result, but it’s about the journey of getting there and learning all of those things along the way,” she believes.

Over the course of the semester, students devise new work that builds upon their own creative practice. In the first few weeks, they are introduced to a range of performance-based works and each one is tailored to a different discipline. It looks at different ways of engaging with performance through music, visual art, film etc. Some works shown to students include Christian Barclay’s Guitar Drag, Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, Group Show’s The Theatre Is Lying, Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen and Soda Jerk vs The Avalanches’ The Was. With these case studies, Keating takes her students through a number of workshops, where they are introduced to key skills in each one of them.

“We start building devising and ensemble groups through this,” she says, “One of the key skills here is teaching students for the first time to collaborate. How do you actually communicate across disciplines? How do you actually co-devise, and what is it like to work within an ensemble? So we’re starting to build some crucial soft skills.”

For those in the third-year, students engage in a Research Lab where they work with an industry partner, be it a museum, shoemaker or art festivals in Tasmania. Students respond to a brief from an external partner in a classroom context that mimics an incubator hub. The focus is on collaboratively translating real world issues and problems into interdisciplinary creative outputs or concepts. The external partner joins the class to give them the brief, hear milestone updates and to see their final work, where students pitch to the partner.

“So this particular unit does take into account some very clear problem solving. It involves working very closely with the creative industries, and starting to build professional skills in it. How do you actually project manage a project? How do you actually build a production schedule? How do you budget it? What is the equipment list? How do you actually get it to the end? All of these skills are key in terms of the ongoing professional practice,” Keating says.

In the third unit, students can do Making The Event, where students across disciplines get the opportunity to work together to create a one-off immersive experience/event for one night only. Students and external partners devise a work for a particular festival. “The results of this are usually quite chaotic,” says Keating, “The students’ learning curve is incredibly steep. But it’s also a lot of fun, because it’s really high energy, a lot of adrenaline, and students are working really hard for an audience turning up in the vicinity of 6000-7000 people for that event.”

The remaining two units, Industry Focus and Field Trips include students working closely with an industry partner closely for a brief period of time and going into the field, across the country or internationally, to see what is out there in the creative industries.

As radical as the whole program sounds, not everyone was up for it in the beginning. Keating says she was lucky that the senior management was on their side and willing to try out something new. “Not everyone thinks that it’s a great idea. You can imagine, we have a traditional Conservatorium and a lot of our classical performance students will struggle exponentially within this,” she says, adding that she accepts not everyone would be interested in an interdisciplinary practice.

“There was a lot of shouting and a lot of back and forth,” Keating elucidates, “It wasn’t easy. I’ve shown you things we gained, but there is a lot we lost out on too. We lost a number of studios within the visual arts program. There was a real trade off and when there’s a trade off, not everyone’s happy with that outcome.”

Often, it involves a student’s identity as well. Some identify as a photographer or a dramaturg or filmmaker. “We don’t always get that right. I think it has to be a constant sense of refining where sometimes you put things on the chopping block, and you say, ‘Actually, I think we’ve gone a bit too far there’, ‘Actually, we need to rebuild some of those things back in into the curriculum somewhere’,” she explains.

However, with a little bit of luck and lots of late nights arguing, Keating and her colleagues were able to strike a balance to create a framework where there was freedom to experiment and work with different people/organizations each year.

The pandemic has forced the theatre community to innovate and it is often the resistance to say yes to propositions in front of one that prevents one from exploring a new path, a new relationship with the art form and its pedagogy. In all this, Keating’s measure of success from this new program is to see her students be employable, not have “regular jobs”, and move from industry to industry where they’re still creating and devising and having fulfilling creative careers.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

The human brain is adept at finding patterns where none exist. The brain rushes to assign meaning to things it sees and perceives in its surroundings. Doing this helps offer one a sense of self-control. When the pandemic hit, theatre practitioners and pedagogues rushed to understand what it meant for the art form. Was performing online actually theatre? Should theatre pedagogy include teaching students media skills? Will there be a return to physical performing spaces? What does the pandemic mean for the future of theatre?

One of the questions the pandemic raised is the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to theatre and using theatre to expand other seemingly unrelated forms, such as architecture or sports, for example.

This isn’t the first time pedagogues are looking at interdisciplinary resilience in theatre. In 1977, Jacques Lecoq, founder of the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, founded a stage design department, known as the LEM (Laboratoire d’Étude du Mouvement — Laboratory of Movement Study) in collaboration with Lebanese architect Krikor Belekian. Here, Lecoq developed a teaching program on architecture, which is based on the human body, movement, and the “dynamics of mime”. It became a space for experimental scenography, exclusively dedicated to the dynamic research of space and rhythm through a structural form.

According to Mark Evans, a researcher who trained originally at the Lecoq school in the 1980s and went on to study with Philippe Gaulier and Monika Pagneux, it is only during the last 30-40 years that embodiment has become key to developments in theatre and pedagogy. Describing his experience of the LEM at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar, he says, “I didn’t actually study the LEM. I was peeking through the door. I was the person looking down the corridor full of what appeared to be just a ramshackle corridor, full of bits of wood and paper and cardboard and string and all these wonderful things.

But it was clear, even way back then in the 80s, that it was something Lecoq was very, very committed to. And there was a strong sense that this was a foundational part of his personal research. The interesting thing about the LEM is that it looks far beyond just the actor and the performer in theatre. It looks at space, shape, motion, and all of these concepts, not in a conceptual way but in a way, in which you’re engaged in doing, making and moving these things.”

What makes the LEM interdisciplinary is the way it was conceived. Lecoq came from movement-based training while Belekian came from constructive, architectural training. “So, the fact that it was born out of the meeting of these two minds, and they developed the approach together, immediately makes it utterly interdisciplinary,” says Aurelian Koch, who studied the LEM under Lecoq for two years. “The LEM, therefore, can never be either theater or architecture or anything else. It always falls between things. And that is, I think, where its strength lies,” he adds.

Koch was the co-founder and joint artistic director of Bouge-de-là Theatre in Oxford for 12 years. He works with architects, graphic designers and uses the LEM approach to relate movement and architecture. He shared an incident where he was working with a group of architects in the room and asked them to move long sticks in the space. It was strange enough to go into the architects’ practice with bits of cardboard paper and hot glue guns but here they were, asked to move in space with sticks, says Koch. Their first instinct was to assign meaning to what they were doing with the stick i.e. play it like a guitar or hold it like a gun. “We don’t feel comfortable to give all the focus to a stick. And the nice thing about this is, you tell them, ‘This is not about you as a performer. What we’re doing now is purely about this stick in the space’,” shares Koch.

There were a bunch of architects wielding their sticks and a lot more watching what was going on. And then, there was a moment where one architect made a connection with his stick, says Koch. “And he just started realizing that actually, if he focuses, and if he just gently moves that stick, it really starts affecting the space. It was also interesting, because he realized it’s not just the stick he was moving, but actually there’s a whole line that extends in the space. And it all became about that moment and there was this calm that descended in the room,” he shares, adding that the power of the LEM lies in its simplicity, in allowing oneself to surrender to the process, to the space.

Koch believes that the LEM allows a performer to physically relate to the space they inhabit, develop a kinesthetic response and look at their physicality in relationship with others. “If I move one stick in space, it’s interesting. The moment you bring a second stick into it, the whole thing changes and it isn’t about the one stick anymore. It becomes about the relationship of the two sticks together. And what you start looking at now is less the individual sticks, but more the space in between them,” says Koch.

The LEM doesn’t teach anything new. It makes participants more aware and instigates to refine something that is actually inherently in them. “And architects, particularly, are really bogged down when they do work on computers with design programs and draw lines. It gives them the freedom to step back and to actually play with the space and take a breath, get away from two-dimensionality,” shares Koch.

Both Evans and Koch agree that the LEM is not an intellectual approach. One can’t read about it to know more, one has to do it in order to understand it. LEM helps the participants heighten their awareness and defer meaning-making, allowing unexpected meanings to emerge as the work progresses.

Koch feels that younger people in the present generation are very adept at making immediate decisions due to the extensive presence of social media in their lives, which encourages reactions that are instant, “like”, “don’t like” or “yes” or “no”. He gives the example of how brand logos have meaning attached to them. If one sees a black tick or swoosh, the brain instantly tells one to associate that image to the sportswear company Nike.

“And I think the other thing that it speaks to, is notions of creativity,” remarks Evans. “That part of trying to be creative is not coming up with your own ideas. It’s waiting for the ideas to arise, to come forward out of the things that you’re working with. And it’s really important there to push back the urge to straightaway find a meaning and find something that is meaningful for you in the thing that you’ll do.”

The central part of Lecoq’s teaching in the LEM is about tackling movement from numerous corners. It is about finding movement through making charcoal drawings, cardboard constructions and more importantly giving oneself time to move and experience. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s a bit like having a lump of clay, and really putting force into it and finding a form in it a rhythm, creating something. By doing that, you take another step towards something much more fundamental and much deeper but you have to give yourself the time to do it,” believes Koch. “And the LEM allows you to take that time and get away from that superficial level of giving meaning to things, rather than understanding them. It is a physical response, even on a piece of paper. And that’s where its strength is.”

As young students and theatre practitioners, it is tempting to view pedagogy as an end, to find instances of its direct application in our work. Koch shares that when he and his friends founded his theatre company Bouge-de-là, they constantly kept asking themselves if they were actually using the LEM in their work. What they realized, as they created more and more work, is that the LEM can never be the end, that it is not a separate component. “The LEM has to always be connected to something else. In our case, it was creating theater. But what the LEM did really well was that it was always in the back of our minds, always hovering there. And at the right time, when we created things, it would just come in and give us a solution,” he says.

If there is one thing that is helping the world get through this pandemic, it is the use of technology for teaching, entertainment etc. Theatre teaching has shifted online at this time. But the pandemic has also provided a much-needed pause for theatre practitioners to reflect on how the online space can act as a catalyst for creative transcendence.

Both Evans and Koch agree that technology is here to stay and that it will only develop more as time passes by. “So there are potentially ways in which, through augmented reality for instance, we could start to do some of these things. But at the moment, a lot of that technology is not developed and not available in the ways that would make it happen. It would need to be far more pervasive, cheaper, and a lot easier to use than it currently is,” feels Evans.

Lecoq’s relationship with theatre was interdisciplinary to begin with. In fact, he was a trained physical education teacher before he got into theatre. Looking to the future, both Koch and Evans believe an approach to learning and making like the LEM could be used far more for the future development of theatre pedagogy and pedagogy in a wider sense, as it looks at ways of bringing together different disciplines, nominally within the context of theatre training, but with potential to expand way beyond that.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

When the year 2020 began, one did not foresee the period of upheaval and disruption that would follow due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Upheaval not just in terms of socio-economic and political losses but on a personal level, forcing professionals in different fields to take a long hard look and change something about existing systems and structures in place, including theatre. As the world moves towards the end of an unbelievable year, it is perhaps safe to say the year has been one of transitioning from what had been labelled as the norm to establishing a new norm.

Within theatre and its pedagogy, Lazlo Pearlman believes that the pandemic has provided the community with the opportunity to, what he describes as, “trans the Canon”. A creator, performer and teacher at Northumbria University, Newcastle, England, Pearlman’s work is inspired by his queer Jewish and transgender identities. Speaking at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar, he said the idea of
trans-ing comes from transgender scholars like Susan Stryker and it is thinking about trans-ing as a verb i.e. the idea of moving across or beyond the gender one is assigned at birth while keeping it in their rear-view mirror.

“So for me that act of trans-ing is one of the powerful things about having a transgender experience,” he says, “The experience of having moved away from the gender I was assigned at birth, but not actually towards anything.”

Similarly, Pearlman looks at being queer as a verb, an action. “Queering”, according to him, is then twisting and subverting the normative and the hegemonic which has a sexuality that’s rear-view mirrored. Applying this to his work, Pearlman seeks to move away from the Western canons of theatre pedagogy, be it Lecoq, Stanislavski or other training and performance origins that were thrust upon as Canons of learning. In an interview titled Against the “Lecoq canon”1 and published in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training journal in September 2020, he says that his encounter with the “Lecoq canon” at LISPA (London International School of Performing Arts) seemed to follow a strict pedagogical protocol that was already established “in order to get to certain results in a certain order.”

“My originality was completely squashed by the pedagogy. I only remember getting negatives. The people who were doing well simply used the tools well. It didn’t seem original to me. As a teacher now, I understand that you can use a pedagogy like musical scales. You may eventually find your originality, but that doesn’t happen while you’re learning to use the tool,” he said in the interview.

For Pearlman, trans-ing theatre pedagogy should be a continuous journey because the minute one settles down on one way of teaching or learning, it is established as another tradition with a fixed set of rules and regulations. “Trans-ing for me is no longer trans when it stops moving away from something. It is almost like the polarities of magnets. There is always movement. There’s a point at which the moving toward has to become a moving away from again, because otherwise, you end up in another norm,” he explains.

If you want to kiss her, just kiss her!

Unpicking further on the need to trans theatre pedagogy, Pearlman shares an anecdote about an intensive Meisner training workshop he attended. Sanford Meisner was an American actor and trainer well-known for developing the Meisner technique, which focuses on “being in the moment” and the reality of doing, forcing actors to listen to each other and cutting away intellectual shop talk. One of the foundational exercises within this technique is the repetition exercise where partners sit across from each other on a chair and make an observation such as “You are wearing a blue sweater.” The partner repeats the phrase exactly as they have heard it. This repetition goes on till a deeper connection and emotional dialogue is established between the two actors. Meisner’s aim was to “teach actors to respond spontaneously to outside stimuli, to act on impulse.” The role of the instructor here is to hold the space and allow for “freedom”, espousing Meisner’s mantra of “fuck polite”.

In the workshop Pearlman attended, the trainer was watching a young man and young woman doing the exercise who were clearly in a lot of distress and were stuck. The trainer asked the man what he wanted to do, as a way to gently nudge him to follow his instinct. He replied, “I want to get closer.” The trainer again asked, “No, but what do you want to do? Do you want to kiss her? Then kiss her.”

“And in that immediate moment,” Pearlman shares, “for me, the hegemonic heteronormative norms came crashing down on both of them, and you could see it on them. The only thing that he was able to do with them from that moment on was head in for the kiss. All other possibilities within the Meisnerian repetition were removed.”

For him, the instructor pushed the two individuals into a performative reification of heteronormative gender roles. Pearlman further breaks this down in a paper If you want to kiss her, kiss her! Gender and queer time in modern Meisner training2, co-written with Dierdre McLaughlin.

He also believes that theatre instructors and pedagogues have to unpick what they see when there are two people doing any exercise. If one sees, like the above trainer did, two people who will or must kiss, it is imperative that the instructor stops themselves from laying this structure on them, shutting down other relational possibilities. “We have to unpick ourselves and we have to allow space. Maybe we have to allow more chaos, maybe we have to allow less recognition inside of these things in order to let them open up and do something else,” he believes.

The biggest problem with the Canon, for Pearlman, is that Meisner thought his “fuck polite” mantra meant anything was possible but what he really meant was to “fuck polite” society inside the strictures he already knew of what gender, sexuality and behavior was supposed to be. “So it’s almost as though what he wrote and how he was able to apply it, were two different things, mediated by his culture, and his background etc. So it seems to me that the Canon might have useful things in it. But it is loaded with all kinds of normative requirements of all kinds of bodies, all kinds of genders and sexualities, and ethnicities, backgrounds, ages, sizes and everything else,” feels Pearlman.

Creative resistance

Pearlman believes the present COVID-19 pandemic has provided theatre pedagogues the opportunity to challenge traditions and trans the Canon. “Everything is thrown up in the air now. Our norms have been shattered. There’s a space for us as theatre makers, because our ideas of what theatre can be have been completely crushed. So it’s a perfect time to be rethinking things quite deeply. We have to rethink everything in order to teach and what to teach in these times,” he says.

This moment in time requires a creative resistance within theatre pedagogy which can be seen as being resistance fighters or resistant to change. For Pearlman, trans-ing is an act of resistance in itself which requires one to push away from something. He emphasizes on the need to do it at a personal level first. Speaking of resistance of change in pedagogy, Pearlman feels it is sometimes too simplistic: include other people in the Canon, changing of pronouns or adding wider variety of authors in the Canon.

“In my mind, what that does is, it simply tries to make more room in a messed up norm for more people rather than destroy the norms themselves. And I think that is a great first place to start but, when we stop there, when we say that’s it job done, we actually resist looking more deeply into the the structures themselves. And again, it’s a place where we have to look in ourselves first,” he strongly believes.

“We blow things up, but if all we do are looking for inclusion inside, we just reify and recreate the same structures just with more people inside them. And that doesn’t change any of the actual problems. I think there’s a resistance to change because it’s hard to really look at those structures and figure out what we do with them. It is hard to think outside the binaries,” Pearlman says, insisting that theatre makers and pedagogues must resist the impulse to simply make a bigger normative table.

He believes it is important to remember one is here, in pedagogy, “for now”. A particular process works “for now” and it is crucial to ensure one does not hold on to the product for too long, and rather look for trans-ing in the process of reaching a finished product. And then remember to move forward, to “be”, instead of seeking to “become”.

As we navigate these tumultuous times, it important to “be” now, says Pearlman, The present moment calls for us to transition, “be” fluid in all aspects, navigating with presence and grace as we move ahead to train theatre-makers of the future.

Citations:

1. Amy Russell (2020) Against the “Lecoq canon”, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 11:3, 370-377, DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2020.1791485
2. Lazlo Pearlman & Deirdre McLaughlin (2020) If you want to kiss her, kiss her! Gender and queer time in modern Meisner training, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 11:3, 310-323, DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2020.1789723

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the first series of Unrehearsed Futures initiated and moderated by the Drama School Mumbai, to set the stage for questions faced by drama schools and the teachers and students of theatre.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced people into their homes for months on end, people began working, learning and doing everything from home. What was, at first, considered a stop-gap measure soon turned into the norm and now, it seems to be so for the foreseeable future. Teaching theatre through Zoom windows and squinting in the blue light to make sure one is able to give equal attention to all students, it was a task theatre pedagogues were not prepared or equipped for. Being ripped away from a shared physical space, teachers took some time to find their grounding in the virtual space.

But, for Fay Simpson, associate arts professor and movement teacher at New York University (NYU) Tisch School of Arts’ graduate acting program, who has coached actors from around the world over video conferencing platforms, teaching online was not wading into unchartered waters.

“So, I had a bit of prep before the pandemic hit,” she said during a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

Simpson is best known as the founder of the lucid body technique, a physical process for actors based on the exploration of the seven chakra energy centres. It is equal parts actor-training and understanding the self. She uses the chakra centres as diagnostic tools where she uses Jungian psychology to unlock the self. This involves diagnosing the physical and emotional habits the body holds and breaking them down in a psychophysical manner to enable an actor to play any character.

When the pandemic hit, NYU shifted its teaching online in the blink of an eye. “And I would say in terms of the learning curve, it took me about a month to figure out how do I get what used to be extremely intimate personal journeys with each and so it goes quite deeply into places that they need support,” she says.

Simpson’s work with actors requires a hands-on approach, being in the same physical space where she can sense their energetic bodies and assess how far they can go. But she is much more careful about pushing her students online. To help them find their grounding, she asks students to feel their palms on the wall to help re-regulate their nervous system.

“I’m just so much more careful. I mean, frankly, if someone really has a hard time with rage, I don’t even have them hit a place where they feel out of control,” says Simpson. And given the nature of the medium, where everyone is working in their individual spaces, she found there is less judgment towards others. “They’re listening to their bodies in a different way. I feel they are actually improving, because everyone is muted. And nobody can hear them. I find that there is less judgment towards each other because they are so focused on themselves and working with the one other person they pin on their screens,” she shares.

Simpson also does intimacy work as part of her teaching, specifically how to use consent and choreograph intimate scenes. The first impediment was to figure out how this could translated into an online space, and still carry the learnings that being in the same physical space could have offered. What transpired is that students began voicing out asking for consent. For example, two scene partners would pin each other and one would ask, “I’m putting my hands around your waist, is that okay?” and the other would respond, “Actually no, that doesn’t feel right. I don’t know why but you can put them around my shoulders,” and so on.

In this, actors were forced to imagine being touched and observing how their bodies reacted to such touch. This way of asking for consent became almost a part of the script.

“And I found that the feedback I got from the students was that they could actually find where they were sensitive. Because so many times in face to face, young people just want to be good actors and say yes to everything. And they actually don’t take the time to recognize they do have some physical sensitivities and issues. Being in a space by themselves, they actually had the time to feel,” she shares, adding that she found shy and reserved students came forward more in this virtual space and the scenes ended up being quite intimate.

The success of doing intimacy work online was a surprise to Simpson and that is when she began warming up to the physical space.

However, there has been a lot of debate about what are drama schools and theatre pedagogues training students for in a world where the ability to perform and be in the same physical space has been taken away. Simpson is the kind of person who believes in making the best of the situation.

“The training continues. We’ll be back in the theatre in a year or two. If you look back into history, the plague did last for a few years, and then it did end. So to me, I feel like how can we continue training and not have a whole generation of untrained people? I am training people to get back in the theatre. It just so happens that they’ll probably be great film actors by the time we’re through with them.”

But she also worries if actors trained on Zoom will be able to reach vocally to audiences on stage, when we come out of the pandemic. She recalls watching some great film actors fall flat on stage because their physical and vocal choices are so small that the person sitting in the back row can hardly notice anything. With Zoom, it is easier to fall back on naturalistic acting and making small choices. And there’s no real choices being made about the given circumstances and about the character, feels Simpson.

Recently, Simpson also had the opportunity to teach live and virtual classes at NYU. And she found a marked difference between the students’ physical and virtual energies. “When I met them live, I didn’t recognize them. Not just because they were wearing masks, but because their energetic body was different than their virtual body. And it was like, whoa, so much more information. Then when I go back on the virtual, I feel like I have loads of physical knowledge that leave me more informed as I coach them online,” she says.

Training in a time of multiple traumas

The pandemic is not the only disruption in the students’ lives. In the US, Black Lives Matter, the differences in socio-economic statuses, the California fires are all multiple disruptions that is affecting how students turn up for class. Simpson acknowledges it and asks her students to “call her in” (as opposed to “call her out”) and correct her if she says anything wrong or discomfiting. Students are going through multiple traumas, and Simpson feels it is not possible to leave it all at the door, especially in the kind of psychophysical work she does.

She recounts an incident where she was coaching an actor whose character had an underlying layer of loneliness and grief. Simpson wanted the actor to feel loneliness instead of indicating it. The actor, who lived alone, dropped to the ground and broke down. In such situations, pedagogues often come close to the trauma a person is feeling, especially on Zoom, and the lines cross over into therapeutic practices sometimes. This then brings up the question of if the teacher is teaching or being a therapist.

“I know this has been a point of discord but I think theatre, by its very nature, is therapeutic,” believes Simpson, “I mean, you can’t ask an actor to go to all of these very extreme places, and then walk out of the room like, ‘oh, yeah, I just killed someone.’ I wouldn’t worry about that. I think you have to trust your instinct to say this person is falling apart a little bit, let me see how I can get them back on track so that they can get back to their work.”

She recalls another incident where she was teaching a class about creating their own work, and as part of an exercise she had them close their eyes, imagine things in order to open up them. In that, she told them to imagine being chased down and that they’re running. There were three African Americans in the class who stayed back to talk to her after the class. They were angry and upset and Simpson had to have them put their hands on the wall to calm down. The instruction acted as a trigger for them, given what is happening in the US right now. “As African Americans, they are chased down the streets and shot at. I obviously felt terrible about it, and realized I was not being mindful. I apologized for my insensitivity,“ she says, adding it is an absolutely scary moment when something the instructor says on Zoom triggers trauma within the actors because the teacher isn’t in the same room as them to help them re-regulate in a more effective manner.

Simpson also feels that people need to understand and make room for the traumatic history African Americans have had.

“Ancestral history needs to be honoured. If there’s a trigger, it’s my responsibility not to trigger them. For centuries, white teachers have expected people of colour to walk into a white room and play by white rules, and have white people say things that are not sensitive to the fact that they’ve been from slavery or they’ve been put down, they’ve been cut out. They’ve had so many disadvantages. I feel actor training is unpacking the personal history and the ancestral history of each.”

Most importantly, Simpson also feels that given the isolated world one is living in right now, where structures are falling apart, it is important to establish a community of care of sorts, to acknowledge what is happening and move forward with the work, instead of ignoring the elephants in the room.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the first series of Unrehearsed Futures initiated and moderated by the Drama School Mumbai, to set the stage for questions faced by drama schools and the teachers and students of theatre.

Over the last couple of months, there has been much talk and discussion about what is going to be the future of theatre given the adverse effect of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. In the beginning, there was a swift movement towards online teaching and performance, and as time passed by the theatre practitioners began looking at ways in which they can engage with the new medium. Thus followed a slew of online performances, short films based on plays, improve comedy etc.

Theatre pedagogues around the world have been struggling with how to deliver learning online that was specifically designed for a physical space. Most drama schools shifted their courses online as soon as the lockdown kicked in and figured their way out through trial and error as they went along. There were discoveries along the way.

For Nicole Stinton, course coordinator for musical theatre diploma at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), the experience brought forth such unique surprises that she has decided to retain some of the online practices in the curriculum moving forward.

The move to teaching online was a sudden one. Stinton and her students were face-to-face on a Monday and 100 percent online next day. “The online performances we did were in no way to replace face-to-face theatre training. We were swift and responsive. We saw it as a stop gap measure. We didn’t get it right in the beginning, and we didn’t get it right in the end. But we probably got it more right after three and a half months of being online,” she shared at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

The COVID-trained performer

Since the pandemic took over, there has been discussion about what theatre pedagogues are training the students for. The kind of training students are going through now is unique and is perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime event which leads one to wonder if drama schools are bringing out a new breed of performers: the COVID-trained performer.

Stinton found that some skill developments were hindered being online and acknowledges that there is a limit to the type of theatre one can create in this space. “But even so, I believe that there are many things to celebrate and elevate about the COVID-trained performer.”

While she hopes that there will come a time when one wouldn’t have to worry about COVID –related safety and teaching can happen unhindered, Stinton believes there have been valuable benefits from such training, especially skills which were considered as a byproduct of theatre training earlier. “I do believe that COVID and being online meant that we had to delve into things about communication and leadership practices, how we create together collectively but be separate and isolated. The pandemic perhaps honed and fostered some of these skills more explicitly with more awareness from the students at times,” she says, adding that she wishes to keep these in the future too, regardless of face-to-face teaching or in a blended capacity.

In her online classes, Stinton says, the medium made it easier for her to switch between theoretical and experiential learning in a way that face-to-face teaching hadn’t earlier. On Zoom, with 26 students across Australia, she could play on the piano while the cohorts sang from their individual homes, albeit mute. “So I’d teach them a bit of a song and they would be singing along with me so they could hear my piano and or they can hear my instruction or even my demonstration of vocals. And then they would sing it as I played and went along,” she shares.

In this real-time coaching, students would also demonstrate a bit or sing acapella or sing along to a backing track that Stinton would have shared with them prior to the class. “But what it also allowed me to do was that I jumped between platforms. We’d sing something, they’d experiment with something and then I’d show them a video clip from YouTube, or we’d listen to a recording right then and there. I’ve never been able to switch so quickly between theoretical and experiential learning like this before or integrate the history and contextual components as I could when we were doing online this year.”

The process worked so well for Stinton and her team that they’ve decided to have a part of the learning through online components as they did this year, and have other components through face-to-face teaching, COVID-19 restrictions permitted.

Performing a live Zoom musical

By the end of working online for three and a half months, Stinton’s students performed a portion of a musical online live on Zoom. They chose to perform the opening scene of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a musical comedy with music and lyrics by William Finn. The setting of the musical was adapted to being on Zoom. For this purpose, each student had to design and recreate spaces at home. In terms of the script they did not change it much, except to alter an occasional word to suit it to the Zoom setting.

“During the show, we staggered entries. So you can listen on Zoom and not have your video on. The other actors would be listening and we worked it out in such a way that we could have no trace of them to be on Zoom and then they would jumped in as they would enter onto a stage in a face-to-face version. We varied the spatial depth and the physical direction as well in the choreography,” Stinton shares.

The students played with the idea of creating a shared physical space on Zoom and simple choreographed movements that were synchronized. Most remarkably, students sang live. For only a couple of parts, the harmonies were pre-recorded with the main melody sung live. If there were multiple characters singing different portions of the same song, Stinton sent each character their backing track. So, as and when one character finished their part, the other character would appear on Zoom, hit ‘play’ on their device and sing to that particular backing track. In all, the performance gave the audience a live experience of a musical, which, given the chances of technical glitches happening on Zoom, is commendable.

Needless to say, there were multiple challenges in getting right with technology and accounting for internet lags which required a lot of rehearsal. “Everyone experiences the sound differently on Zoom. Asynchronous sound is still a big problem globally and still hasn’t been solved yet. There are different music systems such as CleanFeed which can be used, but you can’t hear yourself back,” Stinton shares.

There was also some ensemble singing. In their rehearsals, students found that non-lexical sounds such as ‘oooh’ or ‘aah’ worked better for background singing on Zoom. To simply sound further, they decided to use piano as the only instrument instead of multiple ones. “But we feel, in the end, we were able to create this world of the play and be as close to a face –to-face situation, and create shared musical ensemble work as we possibly could whilst being online,” she asserts.

During the time that they spent together online, Stinton also felt a huge sense of responsibility towards her students.

“I knew that I had 26 people in front of me, who’d signed up for something and who wanted to learn and were hungry to learn, and were asking for guidance. I felt I had a responsibility to give them the best possible thing I could provide, so my attitude was always, ‘Yes, yes, we can’ to any situation and work things out as we went along.”

There has been a lot of back and forth on whether what theatre practitioners are doing online can be classified as theatre. There are some who believe so, some who vehemently disagree with it, and some who feel it is something between film and theatre. “I would call it theatre, even though it was online,” says Stinton, referring to her students’ performance, “And I’d call it theatre because of several things: the first that it was live, and the second that it was a shared experience, and even a shared space.”

Though they trained online and performed online, she believes that the students’ experience of learning was embodied. “I felt that the students were very much inside their body. They were very tactile, they were very sensual. They were very physically holistic and there was a connection of mind, body, soul and emotion,” she says.

The icing on the cake was the renewed, fresh energy students brought back into the physical space, when they returned to WAAPA in early August and Stinton found they exhibited a burst of energy and creative explosion unlike what she had seen before. “There was a joy and passion for live theatre and a tactile response, and physical embodiment of one being to another, even if they had to sanitize first, wear a mask and not breathe on anyone.”

Stinton believes the whole process and experience of working online has broadened her teaching methodology, rather than replace it. “It is important to take the online learning environment and milk it, capitalize on it in order to extend the learning and achieve the outcomes in new and exciting ways,” she says.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the first series of Unrehearsed Futures initiated and moderated by the Drama School Mumbai, to set the stage for questions faced by drama schools and the teachers and students of theatre.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many thought of it as a blip in the road which would last for few weeks, and life would go back to how it was in a short period of time. When lockdowns, in countries around the world, began being extended, the pandemic was viewed as a pause in normal daily life. Six months in, it has turned into a pregnant pause in our daily lives, except no one knows when it will end.

The pandemic has also challenged one’s perception of normalcy. It has forced institutions, including educational, to rethink their philosophies and the way they work. It has compelled the world to take more notice of what had taken for granted.

Without a doubt, the pandemic has been a source of major disruptions, upending millions of lives in multifarious ways. For theatre practitioners, it was like being banished from one’s home. Within the theatre realm, things that were thought could never be done online –teaching, performing, watching – transitioned into the digital space within a few weeks. While for many, it is the first time experiencing such a massive disruption, it is not so for Sara Matchett, the new head of Centre for Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Pedagogy in the time of socio-economic disruptions

The University of Cape Town (UCT), and other universities in South Africa, have been facing a series of disruptions since 2015. In March 2015, Rhodes Must Fall began as a protest movement, originally directed against a statue at UCT that commemorated Cecil Rhodes. The campaign for the statue’s removal received global attention and led to a broader movement to decolonize education across South Africa’s tertiary institutions. In October, the Fees Must Fall movement, a student-led protest that grew out of Rhodes Must Fall, gathered momentum demanding to stop increases in student fees as well as to increase government funding of universities. This continued into 2016. In that year, in October, the campus where Matchett is located, was occupied for nearly two months. The university shut down from mid-September to the end of 2016, which meant students couldn’t finish the academic year (In South Africa, the academic year begins in February).

This meant that they finished the 2016 academic year at the beginning of 2017 and began the new academic year later than usual. In October that year, a smaller Fees Must Fall protest took place due to which the campus was closed for two weeks.

In 2019, a first year student was gang-raped and murdered at a local post office. This sparked a series of protests against gender based violence and femicide in South Africa. The UCT campus was closed for a week. However, students did manage to finish the academic year in time.

So, when South Africa president Cyril Ramaphosa announced the lockdown in March this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Matchett felt they had been here before. “But what the COVID pandemic has done, I think, is bring questions of equity, and accessibility to the fore. It has highlighted the inequalities that are so pervasive in South Africa,” Matchett said at a recently held Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

When the lockdown was announced, Matchett and her team decided not to teach any of their studio work or practical courses online and instead, focus on theory courses which could be taught asynchronously. A maintenance course for physical and vocal conditioning was provided to students and they were encouraged to engage in self-study.

The emphasis on asynchronous learning makes complete sense when a large majority of students come from underserved communities, says Matchett. “Many of our students live in remote areas where access to the internet is dodgy. The bandwidth doesn’t allow for any kind of synchronous connectivity and many of our students live in very, very small homes with many people. In some instances, one or two rooms shared between 5-8 maybe more people,” she shares, adding that the University made provisions to provide laptops and/or other devices to students who didn’t have them. Additionally, students were also provided with monthly data bundles to help them cope with their online classes. However, what transpired was that in many instances, the data and laptop was shared amongst family members, which meant students ran out of data much before the end of the month.

During the lockdown, Matchett figured if she could get students who live in residency back to their residence, they could start a blended approach to teaching that involves synchronous online teaching combined with face-to-face teaching. After much toying about, the UCT executive agreed to this. The government also announced that inter-provincial travel would be allowed from 18 August and that 66 percent of university students could return to campus. This meant, courses which require students to be in lab-type teaching spaces, such as Matchett’s, could return to campus. “And we had our first cohort of students come back onto campus this last Monday (14 September),” she says.

Decolonizing the curriculum

While Matchett feels she has surprised herself with the online teaching experience, she feels it is a good time to address and action questions of decolonizing the curriculum. “I don’t think we have yet fully decolonized the curriculum. This COVID-19 pandemic has come at an important moment and provided us with the opportunity to really looking at our curriculum and try to understand what a de-colonial curriculum looks like. I think this is the perfect opportunity for us, as an academic institution, to actively engage in shaping the future of the theatre and performance industry in South Africa, instead of letting it guide what we teach. In other words, letting it guide the processes of training performers for an existing industry,” Matchett believes.

When the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements took place, departments within UCT did begin to respond with regard to restructuring the curriculum. “But my sense is that it’s a bit of a Band-Aid situation. In terms of employment equity, teachers have been changed. And emphasis is placed on employing black South African Africans. In terms of staffing and curriculum, things have changed, but I don’t think they have changed fast enough. The students feel that the whole process of decolonization hasn’t been as rigorous as they were pushing for,” Matchett says, adding that one of the reasons for the delay in change is that it takes nearly two years to introduce any change in curriculum with the bureaucratic structure of the university.

One of the ways in which the theatre curriculum has been decolonized, is through providing courses in languages other than English: isiXhosa and Afrikaans, two of the 11 official languages in South Africa. For example, a cademics at the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies have, together with students worked on translating canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth into isiXhosa. “It worked beautifully. The students were involved in the translation of the text together with their lectures at that time,” she shares, adding that there are beautiful heightened texts in these regional languages, which are no less than a Shakespeare or Ibsen text.

Matchett strongly believes that theatre will return and that the current situation is an intermediary phase. In the mean time, she sees the pandemic as an opportunity to explore digital and non-physical spaces such radio. “We’ve actually just purchased a whole lot of equipment to revamp our recording studio. We haven’t done any radio or audio work in a long time. And as a voice teacher, that’s my main area of pedagogy. I’m quite excited about the possibility of exploring audio performance,” she says.

In this changing landscape, she also feels as a theatre and performance school, they might now need to teach their students how to create and establish a YouTube channel, how to create digital installations or digital art or how to create content on TikTok. “I think it’s important to sit with the students to find out what skills they need.”

Communities of care

During the course of the pandemic, Matchett realized that this global health and economic disruption has highlighted the importance of creating communities of care. She says it is crucial to do so because of social inequities and gender violence on campus and in the country as a whole.

To give an example, if a student has to rehearse till late at night, say 10 pm, they have to wait for a shuttle bus to take them back to their residence that is 10 kilometres away. Sometimes, the student is waiting in an unprotected area, sometimes the bus does not arrive on time. And sometimes, it drops that student off at a point far away from their residence, compelling them to walk the rest of way. “South Africa is a very violent society. Creating communities of care means looking at how we can shift these bureaucratic systems within the university. How do I speak to the transport service and make sure they have a bus that drops the student at their residence rather than at one central point when it is unsafe for students to walk home in the dark?

It’s about connection in a world that is becoming increasingly disconnected; and young people are becoming increasingly disconnected. You can see it in the high levels of depression amongst the young people that I teach,” Matchett shares.

One of the first things Matchett and her team did, when the lockdown set in, was to call up students and speak to them, instead of sending emails. “They couldn’t believe that we had done that, because no other lecturer in any other department had contacted them. I think, because as theatre practitioners, what we do is so relational, that this was the most obvious thing for us to do,” she explains.

In a bid to encourage more care for one’s community, Matchett hopes, for example, to establish a kitchen garden at the school in the future where students come together and do community work for an hour in the morning, where they grow vegetables to be collectively shared. This will also hopefully begin to address food security issues that the pandemic has escalated. “My intention is to foster a community that is not just about going into class, to learn skills and techniques. But rather about caring for one another, in an environment that is becoming increasingly uncaring,” she elaborates.

As much as there has been a lot to learn from this pandemic, Matchett is hoping that there isn’t a second wave of the disease, disrupting teaching again and wishes to believe that it is only an interim phase.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

https://youtu.be/PRt40RdxlaU

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.

This conversation was part of the first series of Unrehearsed Futures initiated and moderated by the Drama School Mumbai, to set the stage for questions faced by drama schools and the teachers and students of theatre.

There have been many attempts to make sense of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. At the most basic level, it is a global health and economic disruption that simply brought life as we knew to a halt. Theatres closed their doors, drama schools could no longer teach in physical spaces, people lost livelihoods, deaths were reported at alarming rates all over the world.

Living through disruption is not new to Janice Sze-Wan Poon. She lives and teaches theatre in Hong Kong, which has been seething with pro-democracy, anti-government protests since June 2019. As a teacher and academic project officer at The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts’ (HKAPA) School of Drama, Poon and her colleagues had to deal with issues such as closure of the Academy during the protests in 2019 and the pandemic in 2020, due to which students lost the opportunity to perform onstage in School productions. When the School shut again in early February 2020 due to the pandemic, the School shifted all their teaching online. In the talk series named “Unrehearsed Future”, she shared her teaching and directing experience during the lockdown period of the pandemic.

Living through multiple disruptions

The protests in Hong Kong began with the main objective of compelling the government to withdraw a controversial bill that would have allowed extradition of fugitives to mainland China. Critics were worried that the Xi Jinping-led government could use the bill to prosecute people for political reasons under China’s opaque legal system. The peaceful demonstrations soon turned into violent clashes with police. The movement grew quickly to include four more demands, which reflect a long-standing call for democracy. According to Hong Kong Watch, since 9 June last year, 10,016 people have been arrested (as of 8 September, 2020).

Most recently, China passed a new national security law for Hong Kong, making it easier to punish protesters and reduce the city’s autonomy.

This political disruption, coupled with the disruption caused by the pandemic, has been a disturbing time for Poon and her students.

“Teaching and learning has been totally disrupted,” she says, “I still remember I was so, so afraid to watch the news every night in the second half of last year. I was so afraid to read the newspaper. I was so afraid to receive phone calls in the middle of the night. I was so worried to see my students or familiar faces on the news. It is a very disruptive moment for us in Hong Kong.”

All of this has had an adverse effect on students who are emotionally disturbed and vulnerable. “My students are losing hope. They are in a desperate situation, in terms of emotions. It is an accumulative effect of the political movement, the COVID-19 pandemic and not being able to go back to school,” explains Poon.

The lockdown also exposed the inequities of not learning in a shared space. The living space in Hong Kong is very tiny and crowded. Many students live with six or seven family members in a small one-room tenement. “When you have online classes, and students turn on the video, you can immediately see the kind of environment they are living in. And, of course, not many of them have very good Wi-Fi. They don’t have good computer devices either. And these are, for us, very basic technology that support our teaching, but for them, they don’t have the money or are not that well off to equip themselves with such learning technology,” says Poon.

In order to bridge this gap and make learning relatively easier for students, the School of Drama supported students by giving them sim cards for good internet connection. The case of student resilience

In April, students began texting Poon and asking her about what will happen with their production, because for many of them it was the final year of their studies which made them eager and hungry to perform. They were losing hope in their future, about being a theatre practitioner, shares Poon. “So, for me as a teacher, theatre became the only hope or the only survival kit for me to give hope to the students. That’s really the only thing I can do,” she says, adding there were times when she had to make students promise to show up for class the next day, because they were emotional about everything that was happening around them and to them.

As a result, Poon and her students decided to do a live online performance of UK playwright Simon Stephens’ play Pornography. Poon points out that the students were not taught to perform in front of a camera, even a laptop camera and she hadn’t been taught how to direct an online production, though she had developed different forms of online performances when she was an artist-in-residence in New York a decade ago. “But if that’s the only way I can give some hope to my students, if that’s the only way I can get them together and form a community where they can support each other, I will do it. I will do whatever I can to give hope to them,” she says.

And so they began rehearsal.

Pornography was written in response to the euphoria and promise of the 2012 Olympic announcement into the devastation caused by the July 2005 bombings in London. In six seemingly unrelated stories, Stephens paints a compelling picture of the oddities of ordinary Londoners yearning for love in the midst of human lives and condition being commodified.

“The students found that the characters resonated a lot with their own lives, because of how the society and situation is in Hong Kong right now. And I think that’s when they get connected, with not only the characters but with the human condition as well. When they read the play, they cried and, they laughed. It is tiny moments like these that became so precious in front of that little hole, that little camera on the laptop which we never thought we would have to use it to communicate and to do a play,” shares Poon.

They decided to perform on Google Meet, a video conferencing platform similar to Zoom. They first investigated all the functions of the platform and tried to use the different functions during performance. Poon shares that she learnt a lot from her students in this process about how to use technology and find a cinematic yet theatrical language in this medium.

More than Poon could have imagined, students displayed an unexpected sense of resilience during this time. Many lived in tiny spaces and had to rehearse there. Poon gives an example of a boy who didn’t have his own room and rehearsed every day in his tiny living room where he put a sheet of cloth around him to separate his living space from his performance space. “His family members can hear everything. He was so brave to still perform. In one of the scenes, his character becomes kind of violent, yet he still performed it with his family sitting a few inches away,” commends Poon. In fact, this also showed how supportive their families were during the pandemic.

Many of them shared the living room. Often, during rehearsals, one could hear a baby crying in the background. “One of the students was rehearsing sitting next to the toilet. Every time I rehearsed with her, I could see her father crossing to go to the toilet and hear the sound of the flush. Despite these distractions, she was still so concentrated on that tiny camera in front of her as if there was nothing happening next to her. The thing about performing for an online medium is that you don’t know what is being capturing. You don’t know if you have done enough. You don’t know if you have exaggerated it too much. I have to say, they all have my respect,” says Poon with admiration.

Some of the scenes were very intense, says Poon, such as one where there is a love affair between a brother and a sister. Poon threw in the idea of making the audience believe that they had had intercourse without showing it. The students agreed and rehearsed on their own and showed it to her and received feedback. While the living environment was not very desirable for performance, the students tried their best to focus. On the day of the performance, they would go over to their friend’s house, who has a room of their own, to perform.

In the end, Poon and her students managed to put up a performance spread across a week, one day for each scene, owing the difficulties of watching a play online for an hour or more. They received a good response for it and Poon is glad that they did it. “I could see the change in them. At least I could see that they were energetic and began looking forward to going back to school and rehearsing in a physical space again,” she says.

Poon and her students did get to go back to school when lockdown regulations were relaxed. They began rehearsing for an immersive production of Pornography. A lot of choices they had made during the online production, made their way to the aesthetics of the immersive form. Unfortunately, they could not see it through since the school was closed again in July, when a student at HKAPA was diagnosed with COVID-19.

Changing student-pedagogue relationship and planning for the future

The experience of holding space for students online changed Poon’s approach to understanding a pedagogue’s role in their cohort’s learning. In terms of what is happening in Hong Kong, she found there was a lot of anger among students. “I realized that when they ask me questions, they might necessarily not be looking for an answer. They just need an ear to listen to them. They have a lot of things they want to share. I learned,” she pauses and continues, “I learned to walk with them more, than delivering knowledge and skills. I know that’s the primary responsibility of a teacher to extend knowledge but we are encountering multiple disruptions. I learnt that listening, laughing and crying with them is the most important thing a teacher can do.”

When comes to running a drama school and planning for the future, in lieu of the current situation, Poon believes how schools understand planning has to change because no one knows how long the pandemic is going to last. “Theatre began as a ritual and offering in ancient Greece but it was also a symbol of citizenship the ancient Greeks shared in the form of a performance. That’s very important for me,” she says, adding there are things that will not change, even if theatre is done online.

“The essence of drama won’t change. It is about storytelling. It is about sharing the human condition. For me, the purpose of a drama school is to encounter the human condition,” she elaborates. She also clarifies that this does not mean that we only have to do online theatre from now onwards and forget the physical space. She looks at the online medium another stage for theatre practitioners to explore.

Lastly, Poon asserts that if working online is the only way to continue doing theatre, she will take the digital space and turn it into another stage. “I am seeing it this way: regardless of being a proscenium theatre or a black box, that’s a stage. The online platform is the stage for me. And I have to find the language of that particular stage, be it virtual or in a physical theatre,” she believes.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel: