Unrehearsed Futures

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.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Several decades ago,  a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist by the name of Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais said, “Nothing is permanent about our behaviour patterns except our belief that they are so.” During his life, he came to be known for developing a unique system of science and aesthetics aimed to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement, popularly known as the Feldenkrais Method.

During the pre-coronavirus time, our understanding of what makes theatre “theatre” included audience coming to a space to watch actors perform on stage. Both, the performers’ and the audience’s physical presence was key to get a wholesome experience. In a way, that had become, what we thought to be, a permanent behaviour pattern, until the current pandemic strode in and challenged the community to reconsider the social contract a physical space holds between performers and the audience. Can theatre take place in the absence of presence?

In the months that have followed, knowingly or unknowingly, theatre practitioners have been doing what Feldenkrais meant: undoing our understanding of theatre and in the process, creating a whole new world of possibility within it.

When Sita Mani, a physical theatre artist and lecturer at Columbia University School of Arts, went home after a day’s work in March, happy with the students they had chosen for the Class of 2023 for their three-year graduate actor training program, little did she know she wouldn’t be able to return to teach in a physical space for a very long time.

Her first response, and a very human one, was one of shock and panic.

But her second response, she says, was one of curiosity, about what could be done with this situation, “It’s like one side had dealt with the fact that, ‘Well, I have to do this.’ No one’s giving me a choice. I started to see it as an opportunity to ask myself what it was that I was doing,” she shared at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

Mani, a Feldenkrais practitioner, spent several years training in, and doing, professional dance and movement. She performed as a musical theatre dancer in India before studying modern dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in New York. She then began exploring physical theatre and went on to work with Fay Simpson (who came up with the lucid body technique) for eight years. During that time, she also went to massage therapy school which led her to discover Feldenkrais in her journey and thus began her fascination with the human body and breath.

Unbeknownst to Mani, she was gathering a ton of information that set her up perfectly to work with actors. Meditation and Feldenkrais began to become a container for her work, where the idea is that the more awareness one has, the more choice one has. She deeply believes Feldenkrais is the thing that makes people aware and change. Mani’s work in movement involves close contact with human bodies in the same physical space, whereas a teacher, embodied learning and physical touch are huge components of the training process.

When the lockdown began, the incoming class of 2023 at Columbia decided to defer by a year. This left Mani and the other permanent faculty members to decide what to do with the second and third-year students. Before going into further details, Mani explains what she thinks goes into training an actor physically. One is, she believes, training the instrument: the body and the mind. The second is the artistic process. For her, the two are separate, crucial somatic trainings for an actor and it is important to separate them, at least in the teacher’s mind.

In terms of training the mind and body, it involves cultivating a physical intelligence. It means understanding your instrument in a way that you can make it to do what you need to do, to work with it and not against it. “Conditioning is not only like finding ways to keep an actor fit so that they can do what is physically demanded of them in any kind of situation or any kind of work that they may choose to do, but also conditioning the nervous system because we do intimacy work,” shares Mani.

She does conditioning for sensual contact and aggression with her students before they move to their stage combat classes. “Most of us don’t understand what happens to us when our bodies come in contact or even in proximity to another human. I have also found that you need to condition yourself to be able to make a choice while you’re in a responsive state because you want to be affected and yet you don’t want to be so affected that you’re out of control,” explains Mani. She describes her work with students as building a foundation for a physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, artistic being to then take on other techniques.

When Mani was denied the ability to be in the same room as her students, the words of Feldenkrais rang true for her – “If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.” Having studied about this, practised and found it to be true, she believed that if she knew what she was doing and the other person was with her, she could find some way to teach within the given circumstances of the pandemic.

Feldenkrais on Zoom

Mani decided to go ahead and take a Feldenkrais class on Zoom in the spring semester. The first years had had six months of training previously with her, which made the job relatively easier in terms of the teaching vocabulary used. She also worked closely with the teacher who teaches Alexander technique at Columbia and they both found that doing Feldenkrais and Alexander helped students be in their bodies for the rest of day on Zoom. The students loved it too.

“Everybody is lying on their mat in their little square (on Zoom). Doing Feldenkrais and Alexander helps them stay with awareness and also it helps them be in their own space. With 18 students lying on a mat and someone giving them instructions, it allows them to try different things,” she shares, while adding that the medium of Zoom makes it look like students feel a little more sense of permission to rest when they want, to try something a little different. In this way, the learning deepens.

However, it is exhausting for the teacher. “I feel like I have to zoom into every square and check on someone and give them some feedback and make sure I’m keeping the room going. I was drained in a way that I had never experienced,” Mani says, “I’m slowly starting to find ways to think about how to deal with that since the upcoming year at Columbia is completely set on Zoom.”

So, she found Feldenkrais was possible on Zoom. She also tackled some new conditioning exercises such as some yoga stretches and breathwork, though she cautions it was a little risky. She’d rather teach a person new movement when she is with them. “Physical risk conditioning was out of the question. It requires me to be there to be able to put hands on the person, to be able to watch them and sense them and feel them and stay by them and hold a space of the two or three students that work together. So anything that is nervous system conditioning for discomfort and system disruption, I don’t think it’s a good idea to teach over Zoom,” she believes.

According to Mani, while she found she could teach for three hours on Zoom and stay connected to the students, it was not so vice-versa. When students had to sit and listen to someone else or watch others do scene work on screen, attention and focus became hard to achieve. “It’s exhausting. The mind wanders. It’s not you. It’s the platform and the conditions,” she says, adding that going forward she will not be taking classes for such a long period and instead spend an hour and a half working together, warming up, discuss and a little Q&A with them.

While teaching on Zoom had a myriad of challenges, there were many benefits too. Mani took more of one-on-one tutorials with students where she was able to tackle some exercises which involved nervous system conditioning for discomfort and risky yoga stretches and breathwork.

“I give them little tasks. They do it with me. We talk about how they’re experiencing it. They go off and practice it and we talk again after a week. That way I feel like I can be responsible for them moving into disruption. And it’s disruption of the nervous system, which is such a huge part of the training,” she says. While this is tiring, it is also helpful. Using such a platform, she found there is a greater takeaway for students when more work is done over one-on-ones or in smaller groups rather than doing it only in large groups.

Scene work on Zoom

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many of the seasoned acting teachers at Columbia, who are aged above 60, took a step back. It was a lot for them since they could not imagine a world where people can do scene work without being in the same room together.

This created an opportunity for teachers to collaborate with each other. With technical support for teachers from the National Alliance of Acting Teachers in North America on how to teach over Zoom, students were able to perform scene studies on the videoconferencing platform. “We can have just two windows up on Zoom and everyone else disappears but can watch what’s happening,” Mani explains. She adds that the benefit of the situation is that since it is very challenging to feel connected to a person students are not in the room with, it forces them to deepen concentration. “If you want to do it, if you have the desire, it forces you to cut out your own internal monologue and the rest of the world, and really stay with the person,” Mani believes.

What guided her through this time are her colleague Ron Van Lieu’s words: Acting is breathing and believing. “When he says that, he means so much,” she says, “I’ve been thinking on this. I’ve cultivated exercises around a deeper understanding of the imaginary muscles we need to have to be able to believe to the degree that one can transform in the moment. It is a really, really, really huge opportunity here on Zoom because on if you are forced to go deeper if you want to do the work. Otherwise, you’re going to sit on the surface of it.”

There were students who resisted this. Many others jumped in. There were things lost in terms of people getting bored and irritated on Zoom, but in all Mani witnessed growth in all her students without an exception in this co-tutoring process.

One of the things that helped was having a shared vocabulary of techniques and tools of Alexander and Feldenkrais methods. “I could say, ‘Have you engaged this? Have you engaged that?’ There’s a technique I use in terms of when emotions are getting heightened. They need to that it works with the nervous system and feet, to continue breathing and bring the attention back,” she shares.

Mani also focused on the concept of “returning using the technique”. The idea was to get the student’s mind off of how difficult it is to connect over Zoom and instead, focus on their body on engaging with the material so that it looks like how they would in a room, so that they could forget the things that got in their way in a room, on their screen. “Suddenly they’ve forgotten and they’re lost in a conversation the way you and I are right now, looking at each other and so interested in what we’re saying. We are not thinking whether we are doing a scene, but we are doing a scene,” says Mani.

What about the physiological response that happens when two people are in the same room, what happens when that information is denied which adds to the scene? According to Mani, with the use of the online medium, there is less coming to feed a performer. But that is what theatre practitioners are good at: working with what they have at the moment. As a teacher, she pushes her students to cultivate that ability, especially now. Even those who resisted doing scene study online, got excited when they could see that it worked. Many expressed that they finally felt what they had been craving and missing since they had not been allowed to be in a room together.

“Now, none of them are going to tell you that it’s as good (as performing in the same room). And I’m not going to tell you it’s as good. But it is possible to continue training in this way. And the things that we are capable of strengthening will serve us, I believe, when we get back in rooms. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think this (Zoom training) is a substitute. I have great hope and deep desire for physical theatre to come back as soon as possible.”

And when it is possible to get back into spaces and train with social distancing, Mani believes it will be a good challenge to connect with someone without touching them. Touching another body is believed to be the easiest way to connect but there is also the question of it being the easy way out and not making the performer (as a character) work for what they’re try to get or communicate. “It will be an obstacle, right? It is just another theatre task. When we get back into rooms, we’ll start from pursuing the character’s intentions when they are six, seven and eight feet apart, and then take it from there,” she explains.

The way ahead

When the acting program students at Columbia were given the option to return to rooms, they refused to do so for fear of putting their elderly parents and teachers at risk of infection. That left Mani and her colleagues to figure out how to conduct the next academic year online. For her, it is a struggle as she feels the need to be close to people to help them train. “This is something I’m learning. How do we contact each other?”

But Mani also believes that it depends on how we choose to see the situation. “With an year to live in a state of challenge, fear and not knowing what comes next, you are developing your humanity if you choose to see it that way, and if you see it as how you are looking at your experience, you’re constantly training for what you need to be an actor,” she says.

America is not dealing with one, but two pandemics at the same time. “We’re dealing with Black Lives Matter. We’re dealing with how our students feel, how our white students feel, how our colored students feel, how our faculty feels, what that means for the syllabus,” she says, adding that it is not just about teaching them a new syllabus. She believes it is a great opportunity to rip everything up and learn to breathe and go one step at a time.

“Rather than trying to make the old thing work in a new situation, we’re talking about updating the kind of text we use. We never want to get rid of Shakespeare, or Ibsen, right? But we can’t have just one Black writer, or one BIPOC writer. We are all reading and looking for ways to collaborate with others. We’re doing shorter classes on Zoom. At the end of the semester, we’ll together again to try to figure out if Zoom went okay or if we need to adjust things,” she elaborates.

What’s important to remember, Mani believes, is that there isn’t a right answer to any of this. We’re progressing through the unknown. It’s what we do every day, but it is even more heightened now. And this means that the actor, the theatre artist and artists, in general, are living in conditions that cultivate their skills, which is a big win too.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

A Ballerina in a Mask: Artistic Dilemmas in Pandemics. Image Courtesy: AtlasObscura

UNREHEARSED FUTURES 

Conversations in Drama Pedagogy with Dr Felipe Cervera and Jehan Manekshaw

It has been four months since people around the world have been locked up in their homes due to the novel coronavirus taking residence in our midst. As it affected all other disciplines, this situation threw up a whole new challenge for theatre-makers who were now told to say goodbye to physical performing spaces, an integral part of their livelihoods.

Several practitioners took this up as a challenge and responded to the situation with exploring performances and workshops on Zoom, an audio-visual, online chat services platform that is used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education and social relations. A spate of free (and some ticketed) performances followed on Zoom, hoping to answer the critical question: How do we capture the immediacy and live-ness of theatre in a virtual space? Is Zoom the answer?

The current situation has become a challenging space for drama schools to exist in. If students and teachers can’t congregate in the same physical space, how do we teach theatre in such a scenario?

Answering this and more, Dr Felipe Cervera, a Mexican theatre and performance maker and lecturer at the Lasalle College of Arts, Singapore, said it is crucial to understand what this pandemic-driven disruption means, to begin owning it and meeting the moment at this point in time.

“In this moment of the pandemic, in theatre and performance, it is precisely important that we take a moment to breathe in and to realize, ‘Right, where are we?’ We have all been reacting to a global scale emergency, to a global scale pandemic and we have been thinking on our feet, which as theatre-makers, we are very good at. We have been improvising the moment and the play hasn’t collapsed yet. The show has gone on.

But what next? Especially for theatre schools?” he asked, at a recently-held Unrehearsed Futures talk, a series of webinars discussing questions about drama pedagogy and theatre training facing drama schools, teachers and students of theatre in the post-COVID world.

The way he sees it, theatre schools have very specific challenges. One of them is the disciplinary format theatre teachers have adhered to for much of the 20^th century i.e. somatic, live synchronous teaching, which is exactly the thing we, including DSM, can’t do now.

Furthermore, how can drama schools deal with this without having to sacrifice livelihoods, without sacrificing theatre? How do we deal with it without falling prey to, ‘Let’s just do Zoom’?

Theatre-makers and schools need to stop and think. While there have been numerous Zoom performances, that is not what the platform is meant for. “We have been misusing tech. That is important to realize, and continue to do” says Cervera.

What the theatre community is currently experiencing is “planetised”, i.e. in space and time everywhere. At the moment, nobody has a template to how to respond to such a situation but Cervera believes this means there is a great opportunity for creativity. “I don’t mean to say this in the corporate sense of ‘innovation, disruption, so let’s bring on new tech’, but really take a moment to think about theatre: think about things we have taken for granted, many of them collapsed and cancelled at the moment, but will return. How do we return?”

The current scenario for higher education is frightening. The enrolment rate is expected to drop drastically worldwide and several universities are expected to close.

Speaking of Lasalle’s response to the pandemic, Cervera says the country heard about the virus in early January and by February, and 30% per cent classes went online as the initial measure. They had begun planning for what would eventually turn into a massive disruption. By April-May, productions, which were in tech week and due to open in a week, went online. While he acknowledges that they went with the moment and did well, it doesn’t guarantee their success for the next academic year. It doesn’t guarantee there will not be a drop in recruitment because if they can’t teach theatre the way they used to, so why even bother enrolling and paying a fee?

Reflections in Hindsight

Looking back, there are four key questions for Cervera that theatre-trainers, teachers and schools must think about before deciding how to move forward with drama education today:

1. How does theatre meet history?
2. What was performance pedagogy in historical times?
3. How does theatre training make history?
4. What is the social contract of the drama school and how is that changing?

Sharing some of his reflections prompted from Lasalle’s response to the pandemic, Cervera believes theatre isn’t dead. Principles of theatre and teaching theatre are under pressure. The following thoughts are an attempt to reflect upon how theatre and theatre pedagogy can adapt to these changing times.

1. Stop thinking of how to apply technology to performance

In Cervera’s opinion, performance is technology. “It is a technology of social construction. It is a technology of social evolution. The point is not, ‘How do we begin to hybridize?’ It is, ‘What can we do with the kind of performance technology we have?’”

In reaction to the pandemic, Cervera believes the community suddenly forgot about the public space. Everything became about immediacy and live-ness. “ We became so focused on liveness of somatic and embodied learning that we forgot about the other dimensions of theatre,” he says.

2. An actor today needs media skills

To speak of media skills in actor training has also become a name-holder, in a way. What exactly are these media skills? Does it mean schools should now teach editing, filmmaking, video and sound recording, video art etc.? It is important to think about the specificity. Does this mean theatre schools have to reconsider a curriculum of theatre and theatre training?

3. Auto-didactism

 In traditional face-to-face performance pedagogy, the time of the teacher is equivalent to the time of the student. That means the time of teaching is equivalent to the time of learning. In distance learning, that is not quite the case. The time of the teaching may be asynchronous to the time and experience of learning.

“As theatre educators, we have a lot of issues grasping that. How do I observe my student is doing what I’m doing? We need to be thinking about these things. A key point here is that a lot of the people we study, Stanislavski to begin with, did not go to a school to study theatre. They were autodidacts. They taught themselves how to do theatre. It is not the first time that theatre realizes that teaching oneself is a way of training,” says Cervera.

While there is a lot of discussion on what the future of theatre pedagogy must be, it is interesting to note the etymological roots of the word “pedagogue” itself. Derived from the Greek paidagōgos, it means ‘a slave who escorted children to school.’ “It refers to the experience of walking and reporting knowledge. Etymologically speaking, the pedagogue is a companion,” he asserts emphasizing on the need to de-construct the authority of the teacher as the central bearer of knowledge in an education system.

“One of the reasons we hold on to synchronicity and body-to-body contact is because we keep holding on to the teacher as the verifier of knowledge. But the knowledge a student can access or experience in the room asynchronously is not any less valid than the one they are experiencing with the teacher inside the room. It is different.

Now how do we deal with that difference? How do we accommodate that difference into the curriculum, into the rigours of teaching, into the rigours of technique? The question is not how to teach but how do you measure the encounter? Where is the encounter? Teaching can happen.”

4. Distance

So far, according to Cervera, we have been thinking of distance in terms of digital remoteness. When thinking about auto-didactism, there is also the distance between what the teacher says to what the student does. “The distance between learning and teaching, the distance between thinking and doing. Re-evaluating distance in theatre education is also something important to think about,” he says. He further adds that drama schools are not training actors to make theatre, but training them to enact the world.

“So how they understand the world, that is important,” he explains, “It is not just about Tadashi Suzuki. It is about what Suzuki does to the world.”

Drawing from his own research, Cervera also talks about the need to let go of geographical binaries of East and West, North and South and instead focus on multi-polarity. Inviting collaborations with teachers across the planet is a way to enforce the planet as a learning environment, not just the physical classrooms one teaches in.

5. The Digital Medium is only an Interface

Cervera says if we haven’t realized this by now, we haven’t really been listening. Online theatre training does not necessarily mean interacting only with screens. It is an interface but the experience of making theatre can continue to happen offline. “Of course, it is about a lot of documentation but it is also about how the student reports the experience of making. It is also about how the student creates impact on the immediacy of their environment.”

6. Synchronous + Asynchronous Teaching

In terms of performance pedagogy, this translates into that distance learning is based on the binary between synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous refers to understanding two bodies in the same space, experiencing the same thing. On the other hand, asynchronous is about two bodies experiencing the same thing at different times.

“If you think about it, we’re all synchronous in as much as living on the planet. What is asynchronous, if anything,” opines Cervera, “is day and night.” This means somebody can be teaching at night and somebody can be learning during the day. That is the experience of asynchronicity.

“Once you’re there, it is not a huge leap to think that the planet is a classroom. It is a re-evaluation of the sense of co-presence. We are always co-present. Presence and co-presence don’t happen only when we are in the same room. It happens when we experience the planet at the same time: as living beings with other living beings.”

7. Social Contract of a Drama School

In such a tumultuous time, it is critical to examine what is the agreement of drama schools with their students. If physical teaching is hampered or limited, and being in a time where there are going to be fewer jobs, fewer theatres and a changed practice, what skills will schools be teaching their drama students? Are we expecting theatre to go back to what it was?  What will be the vocabulary for such teaching: presence/absence and co-presence; virtual, virtual reality; media and mediation. When one is online, is one absent?

In response to these questions, Cervera says by enforcing co-presence into Zoom, we have forgotten about other possibilities: slow work pedagogies, smaller classrooms, which will not be profitable immediately but they exist.

“For me to think that Zoom sacrifices the embodied learning and embodied teacher is not really the case. But learning will always be embodied. It is about how you translate that to the student,” he emphasizes.

He goes on to use the example of The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, a book by the philosopher Jacques Rancière (1987) which is about a teacher who taught French to a group of students without knowing French. Posing peer learning as an important part of learning, Cervera believes learning of any form is always embodied. “It is provocative to think how do I teach my students any technique without leaving the room? What other encounters can I facilitate? How many people can be in the room?”

Theatre is not dying, nor is it going to. At present, it is crucial for theatre-makers to reflect on the past and see what they want to bring through the conduit of the present situation and into the future.

About the Speakers:

Dr Felipe Cervera: 

Felipe Cervera is a Lecturer in Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and Graduate Faculty at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, & Performance Studies of the University of Toronto. His research interests are collaborative academia (teaching and research), and in the interplays between performance, science, and technology. His current research develops two lines of inquiry within what he defines as planetary performance studies: understanding the planet as a critical metaphor for collaborative methods and practices in the context of theatre and performance studies, and as a material condition for theatre and performance on earth and outer space in the 21st century. He serves as associate editor and co-editor of the international peer-reviewed journals Performance Research and Global Performance Studies, respectively.

Jehan Manekshaw:

Jehan Manekshaw is the Co-Founder and Head of School at Drama School Mumbai. He is also the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Theatre Professionals Education. He completed his Masters in Theatre Direction from Birkbeck, University of London. He is a recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar. Jehan has taught at Ninasam, Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, St. Xavier’s as well as Shinshu University, Japan, and NSD’s T.I.E division in Agartala.