Unrehearsed Futures

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When the year 2020 began, nobody could have prophesied that just three to four months in, the whole world will be forced to lock themselves in because of fear of a contagion: the novel coronavirus. For theatre practitioners, this was a curveball which took them some time to navigate. The first response was of shock, followed by a migration to the virtual world. What seemed like a stop-gap measure earlier seems to be accepted as the norm now, with performances on Zoom and other platforms being looked at as the future.

What astonishes Giovanni Fusetti, artist, natural scientist and theatre pedagogue is the extraordinary speed with which the collective moved online. “At first it was like an emergency and a measure to just hold on. Then, it turned into adaptation to the new medium. By the third week of the lockdown, it turned into a sort of evolution, where there was progress. Now we look at it as the future,” exclaimed the founding director of the Helikos International School of Theatre Creation in Florence, Italy at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

As a Gestalt therapist, the first Gestalt or pattern that Fusetti sees in this process is the behavior that theatre-makers feel they can replace a lot of what they had before with what they can create on these “wonderful machines” such as the one you’re reading this from. “And this, for me, is pretty shocking. Soon they will tell us, ‘Remember in 2020, when we all moved online and then we never got out?’ Whoa, that was quick,” he expresses, calling it a retrospective prophecy or retrophecy, as Amy Russell terms it, about the present moment.

Abandoning the Natural Space

This detachment from the physical world has been a slow and gradual process, according to Fusetti, and has its roots in the earliest philosophies of Parmenides and Plato. As someone who loves diving into etymology, Fusetti points out that the word physics and physical come from the Greek work physis which means ‘nature’. “So this story of the progressive abandonment of the physis, of nature is very, very long,” he begins.

Parmenides, a Greek philosopher, is also thought to be one of the earliest founders of metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things and includes abstract concepts such as identity, being, knowing, time etc. In 5^th century BC, Parmenides came to the conclusion “…for thinking and being are the same thing” in his only written work, entitled On Nature.

Following this, Plato, one of the greatest classical Greek philosophers, in his theory of Forms, said that the visible world is not reality but that the real reality is ideas and exists in the mind, which he called idealism. “And those people created something called metaphysics, ‘beyond physics, beyond nature. And the problem that I have is that there is a rank and value system in this,” says Fusetti. To explain this, he discusses the binary of virtual reality as opposed to “real” reality, saying that in the current use of these terms the virtual has a rank over the real. The word virtual comes from virtuous which has its origins in the Latin word virtus, meaning ‘virtue’ or ‘of value’, and actually contains the word vir, man, so it specifically refers to manly qualities. So, Fusetti believes, one begins to hear the virtual versus real debate where these terms are not neutral and the virtual world is seen with awe and wonder and “considered to be better than the real world which has physical constraints such as eating, breathing and pooping.”

He also dives into his Christian upbringing in Italy where he was taught that “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1). “We come to life wailing, ‘Waaawaa’. Is that the word?” he asks. Fusetti disagrees with the Christian doctrine and further says that the Renaissance in Italy was a series of models which postulates the superiority of the intellect over nature. “So the Italian garden is an expression of complete control of nature and wilderness, where wilderness is considered to be regressive, primordial and fundamentally evil. What I see happening is that the virtual is becoming a world of fantasy and delusion and that is coming from the idea that we can be in charge of the world through our mind, through the digital medium, and not through the body,” explains Fusetti, who is also a Lecoq practitioner.

He goes on to quote French philosopher René Descartes’ famous Latin statement Cogito, ergo sum, which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Recalling a high school joke where Fusetti and his classmates twisted it to Coitus, ergo sum and says that it is coitus that brought him to physical theatre and therefore, for him, in the beginning was a gesture. “And the word will appear from the body, and not vice versa,” he says.

What disturbs him most is how much humans want to control everything. “It is intense and makes me quite angry when I talk about it, because behind this virtual world, there is an epidemic of control, which I find more complicated and more dangerous than the COVID pandemic,” he says, giving an example of a movement called transhumanism, where people are waiting to upload their brains onto a hard disk and live immortally or chop their heads off after their death to preserve it frozen in a hangar in Arizona, US.

Being a Mammal in a Digital Zoo

Fusetti terribly misses being in a live physical space interacting with others in his natural eco-system. His body is his home, his oikos (the Greek origin of the word ‘ecology’) which is an intrinsic part of nature because he is in contact with the eco-system around him. “I need social contact. I need physical contact with other humans. And I am a mammal. I’m amazed of how little we are talking about our needs as mammals in this time of lockdown,” he says.

“As a mammal, I spend the first part of my existence inside another mammal, which is my mom. And then I come out of it and for a very long and incredibly significant time, I am completely physically intertwined with another human being. And then my body includes her and my family, my house, my toys, my pet. We all remember that. The life of a child is an ecosystem of physical interactions,” he explains, adding that due to this abandonment of the natural needs of one’s body and ecology while theatre practitioners migrate online is resulting in abandoning the natural space.

“And this can have terrible consequences because we are not engaging with the actual caring of the physical space around us. I’m disturbed by this because I see that this migration to the digital medium as a very bizarre decision that doesn’t respond to my needs as a mammal.”

Every time he wears the words ‘pandemic’ and “social distancing”, Fusetti says his mammal brain screams hysterically and misses his embodiment as a physical theatre practitioner tremendously. “I miss it physically,” he says, “I study myself lduring these times and I notice that when there is a gesture emerging in me, a class, a project, an act, I realize that I can’t do that. I could do something else but then I realize I can’t do that either. It feels like a wave of excitation that cannot manifest in the embodied interactive world.” He adds that this ‘can’t happen’ realization becomes a sort of a low-key depressive state for him.

“I love that we can have an interaction through these machines. But this is a surrogate to something that I am terribly starving for. And I’m cultivating that craving because that craving makes me feel that I’m still alive. The moment I stop craving and accept junk food, I’m in trouble,” he states.

With all the Zoom interactions, Fusetti believes that he is a part of something but can’t find the words to describe it. “Because I constantly connect with how I feel when I’m sitting here in front of the machine and there is a mix of excitement of being in contact. There is joy in seeing faces of people I know and love and there is the distress of not being able to reach out. So, there is a mixture of joy and of animal terror,” he explains, adding that when a Zoom call gets over, he feels excited that he was with a collective but finds it bizarre when his body notices the absence of that collective at the same time.

The Collective Poetic Body

Staying true to the sanctity of the natural and physical space, Fusetti made the conscious decision to suspend any sort of physical theatre training of new students online with through his Helikos International School of Theatre Creation. Not taking the position of a naysayer, but in defense of the pedagogy of the poetic body, he wrote in an article in May (http://www.helikos.com/pages/workshops-details.php?post=121&lang=en) that there is no such thing as a virtual physical theatre, just as there isn’t virtual gardening or virtual hiking. Stating that the virtual cannot replace the authentic, he wrote, “We can practice a live embodied art online as long as we are aware that it is a surrogate of the real experience. As long as we frame it as such.”

While he believes that one can do online training in online performing, he feels poetic space and time cannot be taught to new students of theatre through the virtual medium. “In years of my practice of the Lecoq’s approach, one of the biggest realizations I had was that the poetic body is collective. It is not individual. That’s why all the experience of chorus, of band, of flocking, of buffon or just the whole ensemble concept is so powerful. It includes not just my body, but the bodies of my fellow performers, the body of the audience, the props, the space, the stage. So, the body is like quantum physics. It is like a wave, not a particle. That, for me, needs to be preserved. That is the part of the theatrical process that gets filtered out in digital media, because we cannot hold that,” he asserts, while adding that one can hold some space but it is not possible to co-regulate one’s emotions between the performers and audience.

Fusetti also believes that the universal comfort in disembodiment is the result of the global trauma that lives in the physical body. “One of the consequences of trauma is the abandonment of the body, of the numbness of the body. So I think that it is evident that we are collectively living with a lot of collective trauma of all kinds. We need to bring back to the people the tools of healing and therapy on a large scale,” he says.

One of the ways in which theatre practitioners can work on healing is to work locally with the people around while being aware of the physical and emotional wounds present. “And they appear in the form of gestures,” he says, “I wish there was more collective political and educational awareness of this particular question, because I don’t see any at all. And this is disturbing. I think it comes back to what I was saying in the beginning that this process of disembodiment is certainly helped by the fact that we might feel safer online because the intensity of the contact and the potential conflict is less. Any encounter with ‘the ‘other’ brings and transformation of the self, and this can be scary, especially if, due to my emotional wounds, I have become protective and somehow conservative of my identity  ”

Ecstasy through Theatre

There have been pandemics much worse than this and theatre has always survived and come back stronger. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fusetti feels that when things do open up more, there could be a decreased demand for live entertainment. While this need for entertainment has been fulfilled by Netflix and other platforms, theatre as a form will have to become even more theatrical to make it clear it cannot be replaced with anything else. He also notes that historically, at the end of pandemics, there have been records of great celebrations, parties and festivals in cities and even orgies.

“So they were looking for ecstasy: physical ecstasy. This is a fact. They’re not going to come to see Hamlet after the pandemic is over unless Hamlet is done in a very wild, ecstatic way. So, what I’m saying here is that we need to think in terms of what kind of ecstatic physical experience we can provide to people who have experienced extended physical and emotional deprivation and the fear of death, and need to celebrate the euphoria of not being dead and being together again. As a practitioner, you have to come out with something pretty cool. Otherwise, people are not going to come to see a show,” he says, before signing off.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

A voice speaks volumes about a person. Voice work is considered a crucial element of actor training in drama schools around the world, closely connected to movement and acting. The late vocal coach Kristin Linklater believed that to free the voice was to free the person. Freeing the natural voice of an actor is key to be able to portray characters truthfully on stage.
With voice training, it is often a psycho-physical exploration guided by a facilitator who needs to be in the room with students to see where each individual is, what their bodies are like, help them release tension in their bodies through physical touch, check their resonance, breath support etc. But, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to move out of public spaces, it was a huge challenge for voice pedagogues to transition their teaching online.

“How does this sit with practical training, such as training a voice, where self-discovery needs to be held and guided, especially in the establishment of the basic technique? Would you let a beginner loose with a chainsaw in a woodwork class, especially if they were working on their own?” asked Judith Phillips, Head of Voice at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) at a recent Unrehearsed Futures session.

LAMDA closed on 16 March, 2020. At that stage, there were a few weeks of the Foundation course (2-semester course) left which was moved to Zoom quickly. However, other courses at the time were suspended, whilst teachers decided to begin online learning from 28 April onwards. “I’ll be honest with you. I think, I can safely say all of us had either very, very little experience of teaching online or absolutely none,” she says.

“What we did was split our cohorts into what we call clusters of about five students. There was some teaching in larger groups of 30 and 15 and some rehearsals involved larger groups, but for the most part the teaching was in small groups or one-on-one,” Phillips adds while explaining that the arrangement turned out to be quite expensive.

Phillips has spent all her teaching career encouraging students to tune into their senses in order to encourage an imaginative and a visceral engagement with language and communication. She believes that students over the years have become increasingly visual. Her work involves waking up the idea of smell and taste and touch and how these are pertinent to breathing life into a text. She believes in encouraging the slow, careful listening in a world where the average time spent online is around 10 seconds as one surfs the net. So, for her, it is crucial to ensure that students stay in touch with the world around them, especially during this pandemic, and continue to relate this to their imaginative exploration of text.

Phillips filmed herself doing warm-ups and recorded auditory and text exercises so that students could work in semi-supine. These were sent to students to keep them ticking over till classes began online. They also had to deal with students in different time zones. They were students from Australia, New Mexico, Canada, US and from all over Europe. “So you can imagine that the practicality of it was an absolute nightmare to try and sort it all out. Most of the sessions lasted one hour, because we thought that would be enough online,” she says, adding they also had 30-minute one-on-one sessions which focused on individual challenges with voice, rehearsal support and so on.
In the beginning, Phillips found it hard to facilitate proprioception – awareness of the position and movement of the body – on Zoom as everyone was in tiny squares, visible till their shoulders, the rest of the body hidden. What exacerbated the situation were Internet connection issues, the blips and freezes, making it harder for her to understand the students’ sound quality.
However, she found it possible to work live and on one’s feet online much more than she thought she could. Being able to see people’s feet in a physical classroom in a crucial part of her work as all of it begins from the feet upwards. “And I work a lot with the downward connection into the earth, the downward trajectory, and then the upward energy of the spine, through the crown of the head. This was very, very hard to do,” she shares. She devised a short seated-vocal warm-up where the pelvic bones were equivalent of the feet.
“I realized that if we closed our eyes and we covered them with our hands, we could have a kind of soothing, velvety darkness away from the screen, and focus on space in the pharynx, `space for the breath, the lower abdominal muscles and the sacrum,” she says, adding the intention was to tune into the body while in a seated position and keep the sense of the physical alive. But, she admits that even if she was trying to get her students up on their feet, they were doing a lot more sitting in this online space than accustomed to in a shared physical space. Eventually, she encouraged students to lead warm-ups as well. She also found that accent and speech work worked fairly straightforwardly in this medium.

There is a sense of living in a nightmarish, parallel reality pervading all of the learning, feels Phillips. “It’s beautiful and gifted young actors that I’ve got who are now confined, they’re stuck and they’re really frightened. So I felt that a lot of my work was a very strong duty of care towards them, to hold them and to encourage them, and keep them positive without being ridiculously unrealistic about everything.”
Teaching voice work in a virtual space is hard because the work is physical and it is hands-on. “It’s about shared space. It’s about shared breath. It’s about the thrill of working with excitable air, and we could have none of that really. Students were frustrated with the pressure of having to be continually creative online, and come up with new ideas all the time. All they wanted was to be together,” empathises Phillips. She also says that it is difficult to feel expansive, warm and generous vocally if one doesn’t know where one is sending their voice. If on the phone or laptop, there is a constant split focus which makes it hard for voice to travel. Phillips feels that, though voice can be exposed (experienced better here?) through proprioception, the intention to speak has to involve communication and release of those vibrations. This becomes difficult when one is not in the same room as others and knows that technology is unreliable.
There were also instances of students who were unable to work easily in their home settings which threw up how unequal everyone was. “So politically, that’s really difficult. It’s not shared. It’s not equal. If somebody can hear you, if you’re sharing a room, if you have to work in your bedroom in a tiny space, it is very, very difficult. Nothing replaces the equity of a shared space,” she believes.

Despite the many challenges, there were some silver linings. Phillips noticed that some students who were generally quiet in the classroom and worried about feeding back, really found their online presence and a voice. “They sort of felt safer in a way to contribute more to the class,” she shares. They could also hear their sounds much better in their individual spaces as LAMDA has some very echo-ey spaces. Students also adapted to the medium creatively with renaming themselves as the character, passing objects from one screen to another, finding garments to help them find their character etc.

What also helped were the 30-minute one-on-ones with students where the focus was on individual challenges and tensions. But she emphasised that, because the students had already had at least two terms’ training the on-line work was helped by an established shared physical/verbal vocabulary that could be tuned into. She was concerned that it may be much harder starting the work in this form. it was relatively easy, because there was already a shared vocabulary established, physically and verbally.

Coming Back to the Live Space

Phillips was heartened to find that students who prepared work online and then returned to the live space, quickly adapt from one realm to another vocally at LAMDA. They experimented with maintaining a two-metre distance on stage which meant actors needed to extend to each other a little bit more which is great for exploring voice and different acoustics.
A large part of voice work is allowing oneself to become vulnerable with the self and those around them, which is hard to do anyway. But this becomes harder when there a bigger distance between people now. While Phillips feels it will be harder to achieve this sense of ease and vulnerability now, she believes that students have enough emotional and physical memory of what’s it like to be close to someone, to use their vibrations to connect to the other which will help them navigate that space.
While LAMDA plans to continue with blended learning in the coming months, Phillips continues to be (is eager, yet) concerned, about (installing) starting vocal work (in) with a new cohort.

Working with fresh students

While having a common vocabulary and shared experience helped actors proceed with their learning on Zoom, it is a daunting task to communicate vocal knowledge with a new student who has no idea of voice work and has never had a hands-on experience. As Phillips put it, would it be like leaving a child with a chainsaw in the name of self-learning?
As a starting point, Phillips feels the need to approach the work “slowly”. “So I think finding your spine, finding your feet, finding your body takes so long in the work anyway. And then factoring in release, breath, being able to allow the air in an easy way without working the air coming in will take time to help new students develop the language of proprioception,” she says, adding that voice trainers must now take more time with preparation and technology to film how something looks effectively, especially when sharing anatomical knowledge about voice, breath and the spine. What can further help is giving them visual imagery to help them understand what their bodies must look like, how their breath must flow. Another way to engage students could be to get the student to know their spine, by marking it against a wall as they come up, like a body map.

Pedagogy in the online medium has taken an interesting turn, where the teacher has to step away more from the pedagogy and let the student make their own journey of learning and self-discovery within it. “I think that’s really, really interesting. And trying to work out what one’s creative role is as a teacher, is fascinating: Are you curating? Are you feeding back?” ponders Phillips.

While online collaboration is an amazing way of working internationally and is a more environmentally friendly way of working internationally, Phillips realizes the importance of getting on board with it as a voice trainer. “I still don’t think it will ever replace a living, breathing human being but I think it can be really exciting about what you can achieve with these technologies,” she says.
Most importantly, despite all the challenges, Phillips believes that trainers need to remain optimistic for the young people learning and going to learn at drama schools. “I feel I have to also remain optimistic for all to know that the art they need for shared space, that exciting live air to send great words out into someone else’s ear won’t go away. And I think we’ll find a way through,” she says assertively.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

It is going to be nearly six months since the World Health Organisation declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic on 11 March, 2020. In the weeks following the announcement, several countries went into lockdown, with businesses and schools shutting their doors. Many lost their jobs. With the ability to congregate in a physical space taken away, the site of the workplace shifted online. Work from home Zoom calls became the new norm.

With theatres shut, a crucial element of stage craft was taken away from theatre practitioners and pedagogues all over the world. How do we recreate the feeling of a shared space online? How does this affect the way we think about theatre training? What happens to the embodied nature of actor training in a virtual space? Is performing plays online “theatre”?

In her 2011 book Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, author Shannon Jackson wrote: “To ask about the role of theater in a world changed by new technologies is to ask about the role of a form distinguished by the co-present state of its participants, one where sender and receiver age together. To ask about its role is also to consider the labour required to sustain a space of shared durationality.”

Amy Russell, founder of Embodied Poetics and co-founder of LISPA, drew focus at a recent Unrehearsed Futures talk to this definition of the theatrical medium: “spaces of shared durationality”. “Is this how we might distinguish what we do in a studio with what we do online?”

As theatre-makers and teachers sit locked in at home for months, they have begun teaching and performing online, which would have been called ridiculous in pre-COVID times. Russell’s concern with the alacrity, if not enthusiasm, with which theatre pedagogues are embracing online teaching is the degree to which they may be responding to panic, to the detriment of the pursuit of difficult questions about the art form. The labour required to sustain a durational commitment to shared time and space is, as Jackson puts it, uneconomical. “We’ve known this since the advent of mass media. We are simply responding to a temporary, albeit horrific, crisis. Or are we also, perhaps less consciously, responding to deeper market forces that have been pushing us out of spaces of shared durationality for a very long time? If we do not offer some resistance to these forces, is there any chance that our spatio-temporal habitat will survive?” Russell wonders out loud.

While she lauds the many breakthroughs her colleagues have found in theatre pedagogy and performance online, Russell explains why she believes in the power of live, shared space theatre.

She shares a personal anecdote where her mother was admitted to the hospital earlier in the day. Hospitals in Tasmania, Australia, where Russell currently stays, have a strict policy of not allowing visitors, except under certain circumstances, to visit patients due to the pandemic. However, a kind nurse admitted her as an all-night visitor, against the rules of the lockdown.

“I cannot tell you the difference that makes to me that I can be with my mother tonight. And I am reminded of the people who have had to say goodbye to their loved ones on Skype. And I am very sobered by this. I thought about why we do theatre and my answer is, as long as I could not bear to say goodbye to my mother on Skype, I will do live theater,” she asserts.

Physical, embodied learning is a crucial part of theatre training in drama schools across the world. Much of what is done in those classrooms is unspoken; it is a nod, a gesture or a human touch. For Russell, not being able to do that is like children being raised by mechanical arms. “Children can’t be raised by mechanical arms. Babies know the difference,” she says, while adding that one can’t give them an audio track of a heartbeat and an electric blanket and expect them to survive. “They won’t. You can’t raise an infant on Zoom. So that would be another answer, I guess. As long as the human infant knows the difference between the virtual and shared space, I will do live theater.”

Russell shares her experience of teaching a Zoom workshop ‘Rewild Your Living Room!’ with Drama School Mumbai, where the idea was to see what participants could make of their relationship with their living rooms they’ve been cooped up in for a long time. “It’s a writing class, but it’s through embodiment so people can go off into their living room space and discover, what I’m calling, a kind of ecological embodied relationship to all the aspects of their room. And basically create from that. That’s an individual space where embodiment can be experienced,” she says. Though the students had fun doing screen improvisations together, it didn’t seem like it would go very far. “It seemed like it was going to give them more ideas individually and they were going to take that forward rather than actually creating something together.”

With a lot of teaching set to take place online in the coming months, till it is safe to get back into physical spaces together, the question is also about how should pedagogues train ensembles in a virtual space? Is it possible online? Russell feels that while the present time is good for practitioners to work in individual spaces, it important to think about if there is a group body in theatre. Is that one way to distinguish what theatre-makers do in their art form, she asks.

“What is the difference between a crowd and a group? When do we start making a group body?” she wonders. Recalling exercises from the Viewpoints method, she says, “There is an absolutely magical moment when you realize that you are no longer an individual moving in your own self-responsible way. You are part of something bigger. It is moving together. It is organic. It has a life of its own. To me, it’s very magical, actually.”

Russell feels that while there is the opportunity to adapt to the new medium and finds its theatricality, it is also crucial to put pressure on the question of a group body. “There’s something about the language of cyber capitalism’s spatiality: ‘Google hangouts’, ‘Zoom us’, ‘chat rooms’. The truth is I experience this terrible facial fatigue – my neck hurts. At the end of the day, I just feel kind of depleted. It’s so obvious to me that I’m missing something,” she says.

While there is a rush to make the best of the situation and ensure theatre is “alive” at this time, Russell worries if trainers risk giving students a false sense of sufficiency by providing simulacra. “We know we can’t touch each other. We can’t share a meal. I can’t smell what you’re eating. I can’t share a bite with you. So it’s very obvious to the other parts of the body that we’re not in a shared space. But it seems to me we’ve been kind of hoodwinked by the dominance of scopic and acoustic sensation, she says, adding that it is a good opportunity to reassess what drama schools must resist from doing within theatre training instead of going hook, line and sinker into the crisis.

There is also a concern among teachers that if students, especially the new ones, don’t have an embodied experience of theatre and training, will they know to go and look for it later? To this, one of the attendees Nicole Stinton, who teaches theatre at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, shared her observations about what happened when students re-convened in the physical space. “Something happened when they walked into a room with somebody else and encountered the energy of other people. People knew they were missing it intellectually, but they didn’t realise how much. So the creative burst and experimentation and risk taking that has happened in the past couple of weeks is phenomenal to witness,” says Stinton. She believes that though theatre will change in some forms from this pandemic, the human instinct to connect will take over rational suppression eventually.

Creative forms of resistance

When the pandemic disrupted physical teaching, many of Russell’s colleagues in the Lecoq-based community sent out email manifestos saying they will not be teaching until they can teach in shared space. “They’ve been categorical about it. Now they are monetizing their lives differently. They’ve made that decision to stand by their principles and made a stand that teaching cannot be done differently. It must be done in shared space,” she says, asking if there are other ways to manifest resistance creatively without having to stymie the life of theatre.

To this Russell suggest the use of Viewpoints, a highly adaptable technique. One of the elements of Viewpoints is the kinesthetic relationship i.e. spatial response between people. “Well, isn’t that social distancing?” she posits.

“What if you do an improv with 1.5 metres between everybody in the class in the shared space? We can get back into the classroom and do that safely, you know. And we haven’t even started talking about masks, because masks are masks, aren’t they? That’s very safe. That’s very protective. So I think, for me, it starts with the creative person questioning if we really can’t do anything in shared space,” Russell explains.

In conclusion, she suggests that if one were to insist that theatre is a shared space medium, that it is not Zoom, we might propose some sort of creative resistance to the world, to one’s organization, to one’s own practice of the possible manifestation of theatre right now. “On the one hand, we could reinforce our shared space theatricality, like the Italians getting out on their balconies and singing to each other. This is actually a powerful gesture towards our shared space communities. On the other hand, if we were to insist that theatre doesn’t happen if we are not in a shared space, our online teaching might serve to develop or hold over some individually-based skill sets, and also possibly open doors to new and emerging media. ”

However, for many, resistance in forms of refusal to teach till we can meet in the shared space again is not an economical option. There is the possibility of losing jobs if one decides to do this. Careful not to devalue any form, Russell says that the online medium is great to spark creativity and ignite energy in individuals.

More profoundly and perhaps even more controversially, Russell says it might be the moment for us as practitioners to ask ourselves if we have been ignoring what makes theatre theatrical, which is precisely the medium of shared space/time. Referring to director Ariane Mnoushkine, who disparages what she refers to as  “littérature en costume” (literature in costume), Russell hopes that being deprived of our medium for this critical period of time might inspire a reevaluation of what we care most about in our form of practice, and bring us back to the shared space with renewed purpose and inspiration.