In the fifth session of Unrehearsed Futures, Australian theatre-maker James Brennan and Asher Warren, lecturer (theatre and performance) at University of Tasmania engaged in a thought-provoking conversation about using theatre for social practice and how audiences relate to theatre.
Brennan, who is an actor, composer, director and an ex-parole officer, shared his journey of how he moved away from creating art for art’s sake to questioning how he could use theatre to build honest, responsible relationships between convicted people and their communities. A lot of his work is influenced from the time he spent as a parole officer and the inherent failings he witnessed in the criminal justice system. This led him to create ‘The Chat’, a theatrical piece of work about creating a utopian parole system. Apart from three professional actors, it also featured four ex-offenders on stage.
Borrowing US scholar Lauren Berlant’s term “cruel optimism”, Warren uses it to understand a society’s attachment to theatre and speaks of how it can be exclusionary, which can lead to siloing of the theatre community at large. “And I think cruel optimism sums it up nicely, because we have such high hopes for theatre to deliver us moments of beauty, of insights, of pathos, of bathos. And so often, at least in my experience, they don’t happen,” he said during the conversation.
STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.
The fourth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) witnessed interdisciplinary artist Amitesh Grover and Artistic Director of UK-based Limbik Theatre, Ben Samuels sharing their investigations into working beyond the stage and venturing into spaces across mediums.
Samuels, who has worked with motion capture technology and Virtual Reality in his work Fatherland (2019), says he keeps coming back to the theatrical understanding of how to create a dynamic experience for an audience in space. Recalling his experience of constructing a virtual space for Fatherland, he says it was a theatrical experience of trying to imagine space, and then add stuff that would happen in a virtual space, in a physical space. The work was to constantly map the physical space onto the virtual. “You’re making the invisible visible. It’s just that the visible is manifesting itself in a virtual space. And so working in this kind of virtual reality was a very intuitive shift, because we were essentially imagining,” he said.
Samuels also mentioned how he discovered certain movement dynamics within this space and out of those dynamics arose a kind of poetry, which led him to question what is the intrinsic metaphor that sits within technology.
Sharing his experiences, Grover shared he tends to work conceptually and poetically with no regard for disciplinary boundaries or integrity. “I have, from very early on in my career, moved very freely between theater, performance, poetry, writing, technology, and visual art and photography and back,” he said during the session.
Grover works with technology and performance in a conceptual way. “But for me, what’s important is to uncover the layers behind the screen, and behind the materiality of these devices and to see what are the different kinds of inter relational experiences these technologies are sort of unleashing for us,” he shared of his explorations.
STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.
One year on from when the COVID-19 pandemic took over our lives, uncertainty has gripped our hands again and is unlikely to let go any time soon. As India battles a devastating second wave of the disease, theatre-makers and pedagogues are back in their houses again discussing and reflecting on what theatre is and can be.
When young theatre-makers burst into the industry, there is very little guidance on how to go about producing theatre on their own. Most of them seek out established groups, hoping to join their ranks as actors, stage managers etc or attach themselves to institutions producing work. But is the journey like to be producing one’s own work on one’s own?
Picking up on a moment of introspection, South Africa-based Tony Miyambo and Phala O Phala shared their journey and experience of producing the award-winning one-hander play Kafka’s Ape, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story A Report to An Academy, at a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation.
Kafka’s Ape, adapted and directed by Phala and performed by Miyambo, was developed as part of Phala’s master’s project at the University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. For the first few shows, it was showcased at the university and South Africa National Arts Festival (Grahamstown), where it received a guaranteed audience. But once Phala and Miyambo took up the show in a personal capacity, they found barely any takers for the first two years of the show’s life. Af A few years ealier there had been another version of Kafka’s work being shown at a local theatre with prominent actor, which didn’t work well either.
“I felt like people, at that point, felt like if this prominent actor can’t do this text justice, then who is this little thin, scrawny boy that’s attempting to do this text,” recalls Miyambo. “It was very difficult to get audiences in. There were a lot of cancelled shows, a lot of disappointment.”
At that crucial juncture, in 2014, the two friends and theatre-makers had a hard conversation around a difficult question: Was this a project they felt needs to carry on? They decided to give it one more year and made a few changes to the show itself, including the name. The initial name of the play was long-winded and gave the audience no idea that it was Kafka-related play. They had to reimagine everything about the play in order to recapture audiences, says Phala. When they performed again at Grahamstown in 2015, the show won the Silver Ovation Award, which resulted in travelling with the show to Amsterdam.
“I think that’s when the swing for the life of the play took another turn because opportunities we never imagined turned up. It’s also at that point, that Phala and I realized that part of the problem was our limited ways in which we thought about staging the work and where it was possible to stage the work,” reveals Miyambo. The economics of it all came into play when they realized that the amount of money they spent trying to stage their work at Grahamstown or Johannesburg was nearly the same as other opportunities they could pursue outside in the world.
Post their new found success, Miyambo and Phala put together a ‘Hit-List of Festivals’ they wished to perform at and found themselves developing relationships in Johannesburg which led them to perform at places like Chicago, New York and Prague, to name a few. For example, if they were invited to perform at Prague, and their flight went through Dubai, they wrote to 40 performance venues in Dubai and ended up performing in one on the way.
It’s a mixed model, says Miyambo, with resilience built into it. The initial lack of success of the show positioned both of them to become independent producers reaching a global audience. “The way that we’ve packaged the show has allowed it to be an easy show to pack up and move around. The show quite literally fits into two bags, and can go anywhere in the world,” explains Miyambo, “And I’ve also had to learn the skill set of a director and a technician. So, everywhere I go in the world, I travel alone. I move the show in, I plot it, I perform it.” He also adds that the more people saw it, the more opportunities it received. Most importantly, he says, it freed them from having to rely on mainstream models of working, funding and chase conventional touring circuits.
Phala calls this way of thinking as a “collapse of the mainstream fallacy” where students are made to believe the only way to create work in theatre is to wait for someone to commission it. For him and Miyambo, the shift began happening when they realized that the industry didn’t exist outside of them but within themselves and the call to create and finding ways to sustain work was upon them.
“So, we were producers here. We weren’t just the director and actor. We needed to think like producers. So, what do producers do? They look for opportunities. They look for money, they look for budget,” says Phala, “We believed in the product, and those who have watched it also believed in it. That’s why we began focusing on how do we sell this product?”
A properly funded show requires a director and stage manager to travel with the show. But once Kafka’s Ape began travelling, Phala, who is also an Animateur at The Centre For The Less Good Idea, had to take on the roles of a lighting designer, stage manager, set designer director to cut down on costs. There was a lot of learning involved as well in terms of enhancing his software skills and understanding lighting design.
What also began happening when the show started travelling abroad, is a transference of responsibility. Phala says, “Tony had to be an actor and a lighting plotter of the show at the same time. He had to be his own stage manager, when required. Why? Because we were saving on travel costs, accommodation, food in order for us to make the performance happen.”
Since Miyambo began travelling alone with the show, he also became the financial manager for the show, tweaking the budget as was needed. “He is the one traveling with the show, I don’t. He doesn’t need to call me and say this is the monies he needs. He needs to make decisions on the spot about the kind of costs that are related to the show,” Phala believes and emphasizes that this is a system that worked well for them. It killed the need for hierarchy and established the actor and director as equal partners, taking equal ownership. “At the core of this model is trust. It is trusting that the other person is equally invested as you are; equal partners and that’s how it is then moved. And that’s how we had adapted,” he further elaborates. He also explains that maintaining a kind of untethered budget was a positive experience because it implied there was trust among the two collaborators to use the money best suited for the production.
Speaking further on adaptation, Phala also shares that there were times when they budgeted for Miyambo’s health. “When he’s not feeling well – and it’s during the show’s run – the production must be able to pay for Tony, because Tony is not on medical aid. That’s the situation artists find themselves in. We need to find funds within this, not as part of taking away from his payment but to say, here we are, this is the problem that we are facing, this is how we need to solve it.”
What this hybrid model also entailed was working out the economics and aesthetic economy of production. “We had to take all the clutter away. We strip it down. We make it simpler. Ensure it is travelable. And then from there, on the economic side of things, only what is needed goes, not what is wanted. I may want to travel, but I cannot travel because of so and so reason,” says Phala. This way of thinking and working was a paradigm collapse of how he thought things should be. It was a positive collapse, he reassures.
“The way in which [the production] happened has shaped the director that I am today. It also involved understanding that your performer is not somebody who you have cast in a play; they are more than just a performer. They are a custodian of the performance itself. And that they they’ve got a say in how the performance develops,” he explains and adds that there was a certain give-and-take that he and Miyambo understood.
For Miyambo, the rehearsal process for Kafka’s Ape has ebbed and flowed through a period of 10 years – a luxury most actors cannot boast of. Through that entire time, he experienced what felt like perpetual losses within the play when they began stripping down the production. It forced him to rely less on material outside of him and believe that all that he needed to essay the part of Red Peter (the ape in the play) was within him. “Phala began nourishing the emotional aspect of it, which was to say that everything that you do, the capacity that you’ve been building up as a performer is enough. This thing that you crave and are constantly reaching for, is not what you need to sustain the performance,” Miyambo shares.
The independent actor also found through this process that performance didn’t begin only when the lights were about to turn on onstage. “For me, the performance starts from the moment I pack up that 45 kilogram bag, and I strap it across my shoulder, with set pieces that could get me arrested at the airport because people think I’m trying to smuggle some sort of gun or bomb into the country. For me, the performance is throughout,” he expresses. Miyambo recalls the surreal feeling of going to New York and performing on Broadway and shares how people think that if you’ve performed there, ‘you’ve made it’.
“My experience of New York, was arriving in a very cold and harsh city, lugging across a 40 kilogram set piece, and my own 20 kilogram bag through the New York subway, getting lost for two hours, before quickly heading to the Broadway venue that wanted to charge me $300 in order to have me build my set inside – the set which I need for the performance on stage. And so, I had to build my set on the sidewalk of a New York theatre. I was reprimanded by police because they didn’t understand what I was doing. So, by the time you get on stage, you’re carrying all of that with you.”
When youngsters come up to him for advice on what how they should stage their work, Miyambo says, “I said I really can’t help you think about how you want to make the show, because my experience of the show has been a rehearsal that’s taken nearly 10 years. In terms of rehearsal time, in a show, you can’t beat that. But you need to chart your own way and your own understanding to make it work for you because what Phala and I have done is we’ve just simply found a way to make it work for us. It wasn’t always easy or ideal, but it was necessary.”
Throughout the journey of Kafka’s Ape, both Phala and Miyambo have cultivated values and relationships which have helped them reach the next place. Earlier, The Center For The Less Good Idea received an invitation to perform Kafka’s Ape at the University of Toronto, Canada. Once the lockdown set in, the organisers said that since they had already budgeted for them, they asked if Phala and Miyambo would be open to exploring the show in an online format. “This performance, now at The Center for the Less Good Idea, is one expensive experiment for the University of Toronto,” says Miyambo, “Nobody knew how it’d turn out. Nobody knew if it would work. But we’ve built the kind of relationships where people believe in us and they they’re willing to put in the money to say ‘we’re willing to find out and see where it goes’.”
Reflecting on creating work for the online/digital medium, Phala believes theatre as a form allows enough space to adapt to different mediums. He doesn’t consider online theatre as a separate genre in itself. “Theatre adapts itself into different spaces; be it a museum or a planetarium,” he says, “If it fails to adapt in spaces, then it is meant for only one thing. And things that are meant for themselves die quite quickly. I don’t think the digital form collapses theatre.”
Phala feels you can still form a relatable connection, albeit not a physical one through this medium. Much like Kafka’s works, this experience made him realize that knowledge is ever-changing. For Miyambo, adapting Kafka’s Ape for the digital medium made him realize the curiosity gap in using technology in his own theatre-making. Theatre has embraced technology before the pandemic too – light, sound, use of projectors etc. “I do think that there is a space where we need to sit down and think about how can we find simple and manageable ways to create access to resources that can allow people to explore fully,” he says.
As the conversation comes to an end, both artistes hope that institutions create an environment for experimental inquiry where there isn’t pressure to create the ‘perfect work’ and there is openness about the fact that it is a journey on the spectrum of exploration.
In the second session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), curator and interlocutor Mwenya Kabwe, lecturer at Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa explored what it means to transcend theatre and performance beyond acting and theatre-making with South Africa-based broadcast journalist, process designer and facilitator Ndoni Khanyile and Clara Vaughan, head of the Market Theatre Laboratory.
During the invigorating session, Khanyile, a drama graduate from UCT, shared how the strong, skills-based program left her with no professional preparation to face the processes of the theatre, TV and film industry. It was only after she left UCT she found that not all creative companies allowed space for people to be creative. She also recognized that it is truly difficult for a young person to make a living and provide for a family purely from doing theatre or screen work. Seeking to do more, Khanyile ventured into journalism and process design and facilitation where she used the skills she learned at drama school to create spaces for meaningful conversations in a country which does not know how to hold complexity or have conversations rooted in love.
How do we make an empowered theatre-maker? Speaking of her work at the Market Theatre Laboratory, Vaughan asserts that one of the main intentions of the lab is to give access to students who don’t have access to spaces like universities and give them a training which empowers them – economically and is based in knowledge that’ll help them make their lives better.
The speakers also meditated on the challenges of moving into these spaces and using their theatre training beyond performance, to make lives better for communities.
STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.
It’s been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. What was initially perceived as a ‘temporary disruption’ has now turned into the ‘new normal’ over the past year. Countries like India are in the midst of a vociferous second wave of infections.
Around this time last year, the thought of teaching drama online or performing pieces of theatre online were unthinkable. Zoom, the video conferencing platform, set new challenges for theatre pedagogues, students and practitioners in terms of how to teach in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, mediums and formats for live performance, the shapes, forms and directions that theatre can take.
With lots of questions and a curiosity for answers, curators and hosts Jehan Manekshaw (Head, Drama School Mumbai) and Amy Russell (Founder and Pedagogic Director, Embodied Poetics) began Unrehearsed Futures as a series of public conversations about the realities of teaching and practicing drama in these changing times and exploring both our ability to respond, and our response-ability.
Kickstarting another edition of Unrehearsed Futures, Season 2 welcomes on board co-curators Mbongeni N. Mtshali and Mwenya B Kabwe (lecturers, Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Cape Town) who, along with Manekshaw and Russell, will continue to look at questions of performance, pedagogy, practice and critique, broadly framed by their chosen themes on ‘voicing’ and ‘transcendence’.
At the first session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) held recently, Mtshali and Kabwe shared how they respond to questions of plurality and planetarity from their fields of interest. They also share how their own practices and understanding will shape the sessions they will curate for Unrehearsed Futures in the coming months.
Kabwe, a Zambian-born theatre maker and scholar, studied and worked across England and the US for many years before settling in South Africa. “As a result, my theatre-making practice really centres very much around migration, migrancy and movement and I have a particular interest in African women’s migration narratives,” she says, adding she has become really interested in African futurism, particularly, where migration, the relationship between migration and African futurism meets as dramaturgical strategy.
During the course of her research for a production in Eastern Cape, South Africa a few years ago, she came across ‘a rather colourful character’ in Zambian history called Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a school teacher in the 1960s. A grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, he sought to beat the US and the Soviet Union at the height of Space Race and put a 17-year-old girl and two cats on the moon. To train his astronauts, he set up a makeshift facility outside Lusaka and used tire swings attached to trees and rolled the astronauts in empty oil barrels down bumpy hillsides to simulate weightlessness. When asked to identify his spaceship, Nkoloso, who also wore a cape, pointed to two oil drums stacked on top of each other. He even referred to the participants of the space programme as Afronauts.
“So needless to say, he continues to fascinate me to this day. And what happened as a result of doing this research, coming across him, was I made a piece of work called Astronautus Afrikanus. It was this mad immersive piece set in and out of all of the nooks and crevices of the Rhodes University main theatre complex,” Kabwe explains, elaborating on her practice.
Similar to how Kabwe’s work relates to her personal life and roots, Mtshali’s theatre-making practice is driven by his own experience of being black and queer in South Africa, growing up in a very “traditional” home in the mid-1980s between several states of emergency, when South Africa was debating the state of the nation as it were. Being the last of five children, and the first to go to a private school which were generally not available to Black students at that time, Mtshali didn’t know much English. He went through what he likes to call his ‘Pygmalion’ years, where he was acculturated into the appropriate language and comportment for a student at a private school.
“So, from a young age, I was hyper aware of being embraced within specific cultural communities, but also being aware of my difference to those,” he explains, “That informs a lot of my thinking: questions on identity, questions on blackness, and more broadly conceived as questions on nationalisms in the plural. My work takes off from the personal. I’m really interested in this question of black queer and black femme performance specifically. And the kinds of tactics that queers of color use to push back against, destabilize and perhaps re-imagine what it is to belong to the nation and to belong to a black community, where a lot of these questions are really fraught.” His last major work, in (s)kin, was inspired by the period he spent in the private school and what followed after.
Mtshali’s interests have also begun expanding into the Caribbean, Latin America, South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Increasingly troubled by the overdetermination of all stories about Africa and about black people in the transatlantic slave trade, he began asking how else Africans have entered into global presence, other than as objects or commodities. “And the work has taken me in various ways. For example, how dance practices transmitted ideas of African and African-ness within colonial spaces, without necessarily having to have arrived in those places via slavery,” says the multidisciplinary theatre practitioner.
“I’m really interested in syncretic modernities that emerged in Latin America, partly as a result of slavery, and also the other stories that emerged. I’m also interested in how Africa has moved elsewhere into the globe across the Indian Ocean – this is somewhat less explored in post-colonial black modernity,” Mtshali shares.
Finding one’s voice
Speaking of the theme of voicing he has chosen for his curated talks for Unrehearsed Futures, Mtshali explains his fascination for language and how he views voice, both as a material and the conceptual idea of voices as plural. “Vocality might be a more accurate term and more specifically, poly-vocality,” he says, “I come from a multilingual community. So, this idea of language and the voice and what the voice sounds like, has always fascinated me in some ways.”
He believes voice can be quite deliberately attached to questions of identity. It isn’t only about the ‘sound’ of the voice, but its textures and how it locates one within a particular cultural space, economic categories among other things. Mtshali’s interest lies in observing what happens when multiple voices occupy, whether by choice or force, the same space.
“What happens when you speak with one another, or speak across one another? What other kinds of sonic possibilities become available when we play with all of us speaking at once and not necessarily with an interest in hearing one another? But just what it is to sit with multiple voices at once?
Voicing is a somewhat messy way of grasping at these ideas around identity, around intelligibility, around poly-vocality, our capacity to think and speak in multiple voices. But it is also about just the ethics of sitting with other people and laying claim to a voice, or the multiple voices in which we speak,” he elucidates.
Transcending theatre and performance
Since the pandemic began, what’s come into sharp focus for Kabwe is how one’s particular skills, tools and languages of theatre-making can be applied and repurposed in different settings – outside of academia and making creative goods per se. Apart from teaching at the University of Cape Town, she has also done a lot of process design facilitation work with Ingenious Peoples Knowledge (IPK), a company based in Cape Town and Geneva.
Connecting it to her chosen theme of transcendence for curating the Unrehearsed Futures sessions this season, Kabwe says, “In my mind, the languages of process design facilitation and the languages of theatre-making really go hand-in-hand. I’ve really had to become much more articulate about what it is that I bring to the table as a person who is trained in theatre and performance, and what my skill set is outside of the context of making theatre. Some of the principles of the work I do with IPK are, to serve the human spirit, to leverage diversity and to handle complexity. These are things that resonate so much with some of my core principles as a theatre-maker.”
She is keen to speak with people who have some sort of theatre and performance training but don’t necessarily make “theatre” out of it or teach. Instead, they have transcended “theatre”, drawing on those skills directly, having figured out ways to be clear about what those specific skill sets, languages and tools are and use them in interesting ways.
Chasing planetarity
One of the focal points of this season’s Unrehearsed Futures is to explore what it means to be planetary at this point in time.
Responding to this, Mtshali believes it is the tension between the impulse to step outside of globalist frameworks to something that is not anthropocentric. “And yet performance, ironically, is one of those things that relies, if anything, on the recognition or the capacity to recognize other humans. We’re stepping out into this scale that exceeds the global, that is its excess, maybe. But we’re moving simultaneously into this deeply intimate space that relies on the recognition of our fundamental human-ness. So, it’s both a de-centering of an anthropocentric worldview, yet at the same time, it has to emerge from a grounding perhaps more explicitly in the body than anything else in the moment,” he says.
While Kabwe finds it liberating to think about planetarity but it also reminds her of particular inequalities within society. One of the concerns of teaching online has been of access. “We’re back in a space of asking ourselves as we have for a long time, as we teach in this part of the world: how do we bridge the access gaps? This feels like a huge one. And if we are going to be teaching and learning and working in this way, for the foreseeable future, then there’s real work for us to do and to figure out how to make it work,” she comments.
As the conversation comes to a close, Kabwe and Mtshali contemplate on what it means to be a pedagogue in this space and time. If one is to look at voicing as a way to find identity and transcendence to find one’s interdisciplinarity, these seem to be investigations rather than a teacher delivering information to a silent student. Responding to this, both Kabwe and Mtshali feel that as a pedagogue, their role isn’t to offer expertise to deliver answers. Rather, it is to frame and model ways of engaging in a conversation. While there may be things that aren’t necessarily useful for one, it is the act of conversing and listening to and with each other, which is the starting point for recognizing that we all have the capacity to make knowledge in a particular way.
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.
This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.
In a few months, the world will have gone through the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic for a year. A lot has changed since it began: the world went into a lockdown, businesses shut shop, people lost their livelihoods, the meaning of being in someone’s physical presence changed completely, Zoom became the go-to place for sharing space. For the theatre community, it forced makers and pedagogues to contemplate on what is theatre, what the lack of gathering in one physical space means for the future of the form and its pedagogy. This period in time also forced the community to sit at the charnel ground of theatre and look inward, sit with uncomfortable parts of it, and begin to work again from a space of emptiness, allowing a change within.
Daniel Reis Plá and Dr. Diane Denis, both contemplative arts practitioners, shared at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar that they believe performance is meditative and that the stage can be seen as a charnel ground.
Denis, who teaches at Centre for Buddhist Studies, Kathmandu University, explains that she uses contemplative approaches in performance as a way to allow inherent wisdom to manifest. She believes that a teacher’s role is to create conditions for that to arise. “In a contemplative approach, the basic premise is that sentient beings have inherent wisdom. The second premise is that everything is in constant movement,” she says, “When I talk about wisdom in a contemplative approach, I’m talking about heightened awareness through one’s sensory faculties, and a wakefulness of the whole being.”
For Plá, a lecturer at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria in Brazil, using contemplative practices in performance is about transforming people, allowing them to discover new perspectives of themselves and the world around them. It involves cultivating potentials, creating awareness of one’s life and potentials, he says, adding that it means coming back to one’s body, to one’s senses, to one’s home.
“So, the contemplative approach for me is that we come back to this basic wisdom of the body and the body in relation to its space and environment. It brings something new to our perspectives in the way we see each other and ourselves, and makes us aware of the responsibility we have.”
Contemplative practices abound throughout human history and are a crucial part of the fabric from which people build meaningful lives. Some of finds its roots in sacred rituals of different religions such as chanting, prayer, ritual performance and meditation. At the moment, Denis shares that she is confined to a Tibetan monastery in Nepal where she’s been observing the rituals they perform.
“And I keep thinking that it’s so close to theatre. So, so close to theatre. The element, which strikes me the most, is the confidence with which these young women perform those rituals. There is confidence that, all of these words, gestures, offerings actually have a consequence. For them, these actions have a positive impact in the world, all that they do is not empty of meaning,” she says.
“And there are no questions about it. There is an aloof, impersonal, yet heightened sense that each action, each ritual object has power, a connection with the betterment of the world. The thing is that now in our world, in our different communities and as artists, the meaningfulness of our work is slipping. So how do we regain that confidence? How do we regain a sense for that?”
Denis feels that cultivating that sense of meaningfulness is crucial in a world cloaked with disruption, for the individual and the collective.
Plá recalls an instance from 2003 when he was pursuing his MA and studying the Red Tara ritual from Tibetan Buddhism. He found that the lamas or senior practitioners who were chanting had a presence that reminded him of the presence an actor is required to have. “So, the way I see it, the relationship between rituals and performing arts is the possibility of using the tools of rituals to refine our perception of ourselves in the world. Perhaps that is why the lamas and monks have this strong sense of confidence and presence. They are in this vertical process of making their awareness broader and so they can see more than we can actually see,” opines Plá.
Doing theatre, be it on stage or off stage, involves meditating on the self, like how one does at a charnel ground. A charnel ground is an above-ground site for the putrefaction of human bodies. It is where Buddhist practitioners meditated to gain insight into the nature of living. “The charnel ground is a place where people go to meditate on the impermanence of life, to meditate on the nature of self,” Plá says, while adding, “And it is these kinds of practices, these rituals that can be used to refine our awareness.”
Denis looks at performance as a charnel ground, a way to meet fears, endings, and raw emotions, a way of personal transformation. No collective transformation is possible without individual transformation. From this point of view, the stage is a path, and the path, a creative process. The impulse in such approach is not so much oriented toward the production of something – or perhaps one could say that the goal is the path.
While these traditional Tibetan rituals have a set structure to them, contemplative arts practitioners like dancer Barbara Dilley used them as tools to develop a Dharma art practice called contemplative dance, a sort of postmodern relinquishing of form, meaning and structure.
“I think that’s a really inspiring bridge because the traditional rituals have an extremely tight forms and then we have people like Barbara Dilley, who use this type of structure in a minimalist form to let that inherent wisdom or inherent awareness, expand,” explains Denis.
Dilley performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in its early years (1963-68) and later became a leading force in establishing a dance program at Naropa, a Buddhist contemplative community. She developed her practice from the understanding that the present moment is always an occasion. In one of her interviews, she said that her minimal structure was inspired by the teachings of the founder of Naropa, Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. “For me, it sums up a kind of instruction for the training: No matter what we do in this landscape of improvisational exploration, if we are able to stay in this very moment, all of it is expressive,” Dilley said.
The ‘jewel’ within a contemplative approach, Denis says, is the space it allows; the freedom it provides for discovery. The mind/heart actually opens up in this process. “The exploration of movements begins. Nothing is predicted, everything arises. The whole idea is to observe one’s own mind. It seems that the defining of the outer form (the space and time) creates the inner space and allows one’s inner reality to reveal itself,” she says, “But the inner and outer looking eye are neither separate nor exactly the same things. So, you end up creating within a formless space, and that influences the way you relate to yourself.”
Apart from Dilley, Lee Worley, Arawana Hayashi, Jerzy Grotowski, Thomas Richards and Mario Biagini delved deeply into using contemplative practices in performance. “And I think it’s interesting because Grotowski had this approach where the sacredness was not separate from everyday life. He talks about objective drama that has an effect in the world, an effect in oneself,” explains Plá.
He believes that this contemplative approach to performance is a gentle and more mindful approach to actor training. “I was built in an environment where actor training was about setting a war against the body. I had to do this and that to achieve such and such goal. So, I had to train for eight hours every day, and it didn’t matter if it hurt, because I had to achieve a certain goal.
However, this approach from Dharma art is completely the opposite,” says Plá. “It is looking attentively at the body, looking attentively to the space and the sacredness that is still here. One of the things I think is beautiful in meditation is that enlightenment is in the here and the now, in this very moment. And I believe that art can give us this same sense of sacredness.” Using contemplative performance practices in his work as a practitioner and pedagogue, Plá found that he didn’t have to force something in the body, but rather let movement manifest itself from stillness.
Denis calls upon for radical kindness and patience towards one another as this kind of contemplative work does not yield results right away. It needs to be offered as an opportunity again and again, she says.
At this moment in time, Denis and Plá both believe that it is a unique opportunity to change the way theatre and performance is taught around the world where it marketed as a bag of tricks and techniques a performer will have by the end of a course. Instead they encourage that drama schools around the world adopt contemplative practices in teaching the same techniques, be it Stanislavski, Lecoq, Chekhov etc and offer students the freedom to expand their potential and live theatre in their daily life.
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.
This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.
In life, one moves through space. In theatre, one moves space.
As an art form, mime is essentially about expressing an idea or story through physical movement, without words. It exists between acting and dancing and is often compared to it. Marcel Marceau, the French mime artist is considered to be one of the greatest pantomimes of the 20th century and the art form itself gained a lot of popularity because of him.
Over the last few decades, pursuing and performing mime professionally and studying it as a serious art form has been on a decline as the number of amateur and street performing mimes grew. There are a handful of mime companies around the world and a handful of festivals on mime. So much so, that some contemplate if mime is indeed dead.
Norman Taylor, one of the remaining few first-generation masters of Jacques Lecoq’s method, disagreed with this at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.
“Mime cannot be dead. In fact, it depends on what we mean by the word ‘mime’. Is it a style of theatre? Or is it the very essence of life?” he asks.
Taylor believes mime is the very essence of being. He gives the example of a human baby learning to walk. “When we are young, we walk on all fours. And then we see the adults, who are standing up. And each adult walks a bit funny, but we don’t see that as a baby. Then, the baby mimes what he or she sees. And of course, they make all sorts of mistakes. They see that their foot comes off the ground. So, they lift up their feet, and they have this funny walk sometimes. But they are miming all this. We learn everything by miming,” he says.
If Taylor’s way of looking at mime is as a reflection of life, Daniel Stein, a senior lecturer at the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, holds a contrarian view and understands mime from the perspective of theatre. He gives an example of how light reflects off a mirror and says that what Taylor refers to as mime is light being reflected back from a mirror. “This is what Norman is explaining as mime. We see something. We understand what we see and we try to mimic what, in fact, we have seen.”
But what Stein wants to say is that he understands mime as a product of refraction. “I come at it from a perspective that, instead of a mirror here, in fact, theatre is a prism. And so, what’s going to happen to the light when it comes in is that it is going to be broken. And instead of going back, as the whole light that came in, it is going to transform into a spectrum of colours,” he explains. As a modern performer of corporeal mime, Stein adds that he does theatre because he is interested in exploring the “splitting of the light we are seeing”, the life one sees and looking at the individual parts of that life.
The reason pantomime is no longer as often reflected on stage is because it is not nearly as useful as the other tools present in theatre, Stein believes. “Pantomime is the utilization of the negative mold,” he says. In mime, the negative mold is the shape one’s body creates to project the illusion of holding or referring to another object. For example, if a performer wants to show they are holding an orange, they would shape their hand like holding a sphere of some sort and the audience fills in the image of holding the fruit in their imagination.
“If I have a positive mold here, and I put my hand around it, I take the positive mold out and I now have the negative mold in my hand. I manipulate that negative mold to create a type of detailed story, which becomes a guessing game of what, in fact, am I manipulating?” says Stein, who also studied mime with French actor Etienne Decroux in Paris for several years.
When Stein went to Decroux, who had also taught Marceau pantomime, the former had moved on to a different chapter where he developed a new form of physical movement through corporeal mime. “And the reason he said he moved on to a different chapter is because, instead of playing a guessing game about what was in the hand, what are you going to do with what you have? Which is to say that we spend a great deal of time, both in theatre and in our lives, wishing we had something rather than exploiting what we have in the room that we are in,” suggests Stein.
However, Taylor and Stein both believe that one of the things that makes mime relevant today is its use in actor-training. It is well known that Jean-Louis Barrault studied mime with Decroux and used it to heighten an actor’s presence, using it as foundation to teach other forms. Taylor asserts that doing mime is an exercise in articulation. He shares an anecdote where he went to watch a play and the character on stage had to go to the table to pour wine in glasses. Taylor says he saw the character go to the table and reach for the wine bottle but he observed the actor using a corkscrew to open the bottle.
“It’s obvious to me that they had not gone through this passage of illusion, negative mold. The negative mold is a very positive idea, by the way,” he says, “Can you articulate your body in space? Can you articulate how you move through space? Can you articulate an idea? Can you articulate an image? Pantomime is about articulation. Mimicking is a conscious effort but there is so much of us that is not conscious. Training in this mime approach means that we get a little bit of an insight into what is in our unconscious behavior.”
Decroux introduced the idea of the thinking body through corporeal mime and articulation was the underpinning of his technique. “If we have no meaning, we have movement for its own sake, which I call dance,” says Stein. “Decroux was very fond of three-dimensional materialization of thought or an idea. Articulation, from the perspective of corporeal mime, is about watching the human body think. And if we spend our time focused on ideas and its three-dimensional manifestation, we have a world that’s worth living. I’m not going to make a negative mold of an idea. I’m going to make the negative mold of a thing. And when we drop the world of things, we actually leave space for a world of ideas,” he strongly believes.
Arguing for pantomime, Taylor asserts that ideas need to be given a form to see if they work or not, while Stein says that pantomime deals with manipulation of things. In Decroux-vian corporeal mime, he argues, one has to use the juxtaposition of shape and movement to create an idea with no acting required.
In the end, both Taylor and Stein agree on going back to the poetics of the form of mime and using it to create something else, like how scales in music is used to create a song, alphabets to make up words. “What makes something poetic is that it’s not simply what it seems to be. It is more, and the poet is underlining what ‘more’ there might be. This goes back to the authoritarian idea that it does not have a single meaning,” says Stein. “And if I was going to say anything to acting teachers, it’s that giving students a destination is not useful. Giving students direction is useful so that they can take themselves where they need to go rather than where you want them to go.”
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.
This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.
One of the pressing questions the pandemic has thrown up among theatre practitioners and pedagogues is: What is an actor preparing for in the given circumstances? Since COVID-19 enveloped the world earlier this year, education transitioned online with drama schools and universities struggling to adapt traditional theatre learning to a medium that was considered alien to the form until now.
The pandemic has provided a much needed pause for pedagogues to reflect on what should an actor be trained for now. At the recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar, Switzerland-based director and curator Julie Beauvais and American playwright Kamili Okweni Feelings believe there is a need for a trans-disciplinary approach to using theatre as a tool to access imagination and inspire populations.
Both Beauvais and Feelings have been working audaciously at the edge of what is considered to be the “Canon” with new ways of looking at theatre. Beauvais’ art is driven by her interest in embodied experience and elevation. After graduating from École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, she went on to explore forms of epic theatre in diverse political contexts. She then directed operas and engaged in monumental installation art in public spaces. With an interest in experimental music and deep listening practices, she also the founded the platform BadNewsFromTheStars*, which is a trans-territorial and trans-disciplinary laboratory for innovative convergences of sonic explorations, scientific research and environmental studies.
Philadelphia-based Feelings is a Brown University alum who studied playwriting under Paula Vogel and the late Aishah Rahman. He went on to work with several theatre groups including the Pig Iron Theatre Company, Pulley and Buttonhole Theater and Beacon Theater. He was also a teaching fellow at the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA). He talks about the framework and hierarchy within which he learnt how to write plays — where other playwrights spoke in a certain shorthand while constructing the architecture of their play. On the other hand, what he holds more important is the questions he learned from his instructors — specifically around how much does one know about human beings in order to be able to tell the stories that frighten one the most. “You go through traumas as kids, and you don’t put it together into your 20s or 30s and you certainly don’t start working on them until your 40s,” he says, “So I’m still working out how those traumas relate to stories that I’m still trying to articulate. I’m not really writing plays anymore. I’m working on radio dramas and I think that’s probably an easier way to access the mind of an audience.”
Beauvais shares a similar love for theatre of sound. Any drama or acting program around the world places great emphasis on the act of listening. In her artistic practice, Beauvais takes it a step further and uses deep listening practices inspired by American composer Pauline Oliveros, who was a pioneer in electronic music in the 1960s and wrote specific musical and text scores to attune with the world, both inside and out. For Beauvais, she is far from the general association of theatre with a black box. “How can we, in these troubled times discover and listen to the world’s changing messages and pass them along to others in order to facilitate the dialogue between a variety of sentient beings?” she asks, adding that it is the opposite of being in a black box. The idea is to be porous and focus on consciously being and co-creating together.
The Swiss artiste also elaborates on Oliveros’ score The Witness. Beauvais’ work involves collaborating with artists, scientists and indigenous historians. Biology and art ties together humans and more-than-human ecologies, evolution, development, history, spiritualities, affects performances, technologies and more.
She is currently creating a 3-year open lab project with groups of researchers-creators based in South America, North America, Africa, India, the Arabic region, Russia, China and Europe exploring new perspectives on trans-territorial cooperation for sustainable development in a context of emerging challenges and shifting paradigms in a more complex and multipolar world.
“It is not about going on sites with the Philharmonic Orchestras and playing for the burnt forests. It’s about approaching people, groups, actions or proposals of minorities or populations that are displaced. It’s about long-term studies and creations in forests, collecting scientific observations on the effect of deforestation on local and global ecosystems. It’s about developing a new – and also ancient – kind of virtuosity, one that grounded in attention and an un-solipsistic relationship to another’s sonic and energetic reality and moving beyond an unquestioningly anthropocentric way of thinking.”
A few years ago, Beauvais stopped using the words “performer” or “actor” in her work, as she felt it limited what she was trying to achieve with conscious movement and deep listening based works. She believes in breaking the binary of being a performer and audience. “We need to look for another vocabulary because if I say we are deeply listening, we are aiming to be, very humbly, in presence. We are now including a lot of vocabulary from permaculture, gender studies, sciences, so that we can eventually get rid of this very narrow idea of performance and actor, and widen it so that we free ourselves from having to do and having to really impose a style or a throw something there,” she expresses.
In his experience too, Feelings found the label of an “actor” limiting the actor-performer. “What I always found kind of lacking even in creation groups sometimes,” he says, “is that we were being put into these positions of being ‘actors’ where we were supposed to be ‘strong’. We were just being very literal about something that’s supposed to affect people out there — meaning your audience specifically. You know, it’s not about you trying to be ‘strong’ so that other people think you’re ‘strong’. It is about somebody being able to recognize something that’s so abstract, that they go, ‘Oh, my God, he’s scared’—and that behavior is so much more interesting than just showing what you’ve personally-observed ‘strength’ to look like. It’s building a ‘story’ from what you automatically offer the public from a more unique vantage point as artists.”
Feelings felt so strongly about the hierarchical pedagogical approach to actor-training that he decided to stop teaching at universities after he finished his training at LISPA. He shares he felt he was doing something false, because he knew students had to get their A’s — and there was no point in being a C-minus student in American society. Students and teachers, he found, had less time for the nuances of storytelling — the more vital and lasting parts of the instruction for him — within an environment where “better” jobs are non-existent without a college degree of some kind.
“I don’t know what we’re teaching people half the time when we talk about performance, in terms of communicating with the public. And I’m talking about working to communicate with more popular audiences where everybody can understand what happened in the room, even if they are not ‘theater people.’ If we’re not doing that, I think we’re playing a game around how much money we can get from people by teaching them things that we’ve learned. And I couldn’t do that,” shares Feelings. “I think there’s an ethical dimension to learning theater ‘tricks’ that is either ignored or undervalued in society. It might be because the instructional emphasis regarding ‘career choice’ is bent upon fetishizing the individual “performance” — as opposed simply to using “performance” as a makeshift means towards more open communication with an audience. Like the jackleg preacher or even the traffic cop, ‘performance’ might be far more of a public service than we want to admit. But that would mean de-emphasizing ‘authorship,’ and the notion of a ‘settled legacy,’ for each artist. And who wants to be deprived of personal legacies — when artist careers are so precarious already?”
Instead Feelings is choosing to work with medical students as a standardized patient — where he gives students advice on how to communicate more compassionately with patients. “I tell them they could talk to me a little bit better, nicer. I tell them how they can use pausing in order for me to understand that they heard something I said, as opposed to just speaking and getting their agenda done,” he says and adds that such moments between human beings is what inspires one. “That’s what all human beings do. Inspiring one another is what all human beings can do.”
Instead of an actor or performer, Feelings and Beauvais espouse the idea of training to be an “inter-being”, where one develops the ability to tune into being in one’s inter-being-ness but also leaving it open to using it in different ways. Going back to Oliveros’ work, it is like sitting on one’s skin and being able to see the inner and outside world at the same time with presence and openness.
Often, Beauvais works at a stretch of 2-3 months with participants and listeners (not actors/performers) in outdoor and indoor spaces to physically listen inwardly and outwardly. Her approach was met with a lot of backlash from a young group of actors in Berlin, who were hungry to learn specific skills. “They hated me so much, because they wanted skills and technique. They wanted to do ‘theatre’ and suddenly I was there and telling them ‘Nah, just listen’.”
In her experience, Beauvais has found that it is easier to work with or train non-actors in this kind of deep listening work. The problem with the current structure of theatre pedagogy is that an actor stocks up a mountain of skills and techniques through the course of their journey as a student, which they then find it difficult to look beyond, feels Beauvais. While it is true that drama schools increase the capacity to listen, it is important to go beyond these techniques and invent new ones. Actors are in a hurry to do something, to use their knowledge of techniques in response to listening, Beauvais says and adds that that frustration between wanting to do and simply listening is beautiful to watch.
“I realized that it’s much more difficult to work with actors and performers because they are like the dancers entering the room. They have technique ingrained in their body. They are flexible, because they understand a new style and new research very easily. That flexibility is their strength. But they have a lot of techniques and goals that make their process through this kind of work very slow and much more complicated than non-trained people. It’s fascinating, but it’s not easy for them to go there. But it’s much easier for a non-trained person as an actor to develop that,” Beauvais observes.
As people who went through theatre and are now exploring beyond, Feelings and Beauvais agree that it is necessary to constantly break the codes and challenge the binaries that have been set within theatre. They imagine a fluid future where skills and techniques are used as improvisational tactics rather than letting them become a hegemonic structure in themselves.
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.
This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.
When one thinks of a drama school, one generally envisions a pedagogy that is focused on building individual skills, equipping students with a plethora of techniques and providing a safe space for exploration. It is understood that the teaching imparted will possibly be used for political ends when young theatre-makers go out into the world and create their own work. But is it possible to see theatre pedagogy itself as a form of activism? Dr. Nesreen Hussein, an artist, scholar and lecturer at Middlesex University, London strongly believes so.
Hussein, whose research interests and publications focus on the intersection of performance, politics and activism in relation to issues of identity, agency and belonging, said at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar that her ideas of art and activism were deeply shaped by the events of the Egyptian revolution of 2011.
The idea of dislocation, of always existing between a ‘here’ and a ‘there’ has been ingrained in Hussein from a young age. She, originally from Egypt, was born in a different country and returned to her home country to finish her schooling and undergraduate education before moving to London to pursue her artistic and academic career. “And that was a significant part of my existence and the shaping of my identity as I grew up. This sense of liminality shaped my understanding of self and identity in deep and significant ways,” she says, adding this also challenged her sense of belonging for she never fully felt rooted in one place. This also extended into her professional identity as someone whose practice shifts between the artistic and academic.
Hussein identifies as a woman, an artist, academic, Arab, Egyptian and also as a person of colour. She describes that in being in the position of inside and out constantly has turned her into a critical observer of her experiences on an embodied and experiential level. “So, all of these different layers, levels of connection and disconnection also shaped my understanding and my engagement with the notion of activism and how this can be generated or ‘activated’,” she says.
When the revolution began in Egypt in January 2011, demanding the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak, Hussein was in the middle of her doctoral studies in London. She says that the revolution emphasized and heightened her engagement with the ideas of belonging, responsibility and agency, for at that moment, something had shifted in her relationship to London and to Cairo, the two main cities she moves between.
“I thought the revolution was a huge historical moment that was happening in my country of origin. And I was not there. It started while I was distant from that place,” she says. It led her to question her presence in the UK while this was happening in Egypt. “I felt like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had a sense of responsibility towards what was happening in Egypt. I really longed to be there on the streets with the people of my home country.”
Despite the circumstances, Hussein managed to reach Tahrir Square in Cairo, where a lot of the demonstrations were taking place at the time, a day before Mubarak stepped down. Though brief, Hussein managed to have an embodied experience of the early days and months of the revolution, with protesters, of how it affected people’s sense of empowerment and agency, and how various forms of creative practices were used as tools for political activation. “This expression was unprecedented, at least in my lifetime,” she says, “Creative tools like graffiti, verbatim theatre, documentary theatre and chanting, which were not all commonly utilised before that moment partly due to state censorship, were being used for political and artistic engagement. Before the revolution, people didn’t have a meaningful sense of full ownership of public space and how they can intervene in it.
So when socio-political shifts occurred at the start of the revolution, these creative practices were framed in new and progressive ways that I hadn’t experienced before. So, this experience offered me a deep and significant understanding of the relationship between art and activism and how it can manifest and be driven by a growing sense of agency and belonging.”
This was one of the factors that inspired Hussein to push for bridging the gap between art and activism, and pedagogy and activism in her own artistic and academic practices. She believes it is important to emphasize that what happens in other parts of the world is not separate from what happens in one’s local or immediate context. This was emphasized when she began her career as a full time academic in a UK university.
“I’ve tried to challenge a separation in my teaching by bringing the outside in and trying to find the commonalities and shared experiences, and to learn from differences. To acknowledge these differences and invest in them.
There is great value in bringing those elements and experiences from the wider global context into the British university. I think there is a need for that, as well as a need to cultivate a bigger understanding of our relationship with the outside world, and what we can learn from it. It’s a way of activating the classroom itself as well, by looking at models of activism from various global and cultural contexts,” Hussein asserts.
Bringing such discourses into classrooms that are shaped by Eurocentric, colonial pedagogy in a neo-liberal institution comes with its own set of challenges, feels Hussein. When she encountered it in the early stages of her academic career, she noticed that there was a general lack of engagement with politics in the classroom. “There was a general sense of apathy when it came to politics, and there wasn’t much space in the classroom for conversations around how our life experiences are shaped by politics and by what’s happening globally. I’ve tried to bring in those conversations into the classroom,” she shares, adding that there has been often an implicit sense of questioning as to why should theatre students in Britain look at what’s happening politically in Egypt, for example, or India or other parts of the world. “So, conversations around global politics could be marginalized or exoticized in those instances when they aren’t embedded in wider institutional and pedagogical systems that support these kinds of conversations. This has also been one of the factors that contributed to my sense of otherness in predominantly white institutions.”
Despite these challenges, Hussein believes that her position as an outsider looking in allows her a sense of critical distance that gives her a degree of clarity while still being able to remain connected as an insider or as someone who has access into certain communities or contexts. That position offers her the privilege to step back and see how she can participate and use her unique position for intervention and change.
Hussein takes inspiration in that context from Indian scholar and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s thoughts on the subaltern. “Spivak talks about margins and the outsides while maintaining a privileged position as an Indian scholar in the American academy, and how she uses that position of privilege to bring the margin into the centre, to bring the outside in,” she says.
Hussein relates to that position as someone whose (‘third world’) country of origin was formerly colonized and lives in the country of the colonizer while having a privileged position in the British academy. She goes on to say it gives her a sense of empowerment and responsibility, and an impulse to consider how best to utilize the power given to her by that position. “I try to maintain an eye on the margin while being in the centre,” she says, “and this gives me motivation to use my position of privilege, as well as liminality, to engage with and foster multiple perspectives and viewpoints. I think there’s something hugely powerful in this.”
Hussein also believes that one has to carve out space for activism within pedagogy and create points of entry where one can bring in marginalized narratives into mainstream discourses. “Part of my understanding of pedagogical activism is to intervene into established or dominant systems of knowledge, even in small ways, even if it’s not received with a lot of enthusiasm or recognition. But there is a need to make space for that. And eventually, over time, this space will grow.” She also points out that it is a collaborative process where one needs to embrace a sense of togetherness and solidarity while navigating this process; one can’t do it alone.
She also addresses the question of how one can work with colonized bodies politically. The body, throughout history, has been a site of oppression. Hussein feels that, though she does not have the power to make her students think politically in how to use their bodies, she can contribute to that process by introducing different paradigms that go beyond Eurocentric or dominant systems of knowledge and training and share various models of practice as alternatives and as opportunities for learning.
Hussein also notes that it can be potentially traumatizing to engage with history, to unpack it, and examine its impacts on the body, especially the colonized body. “But I think the road to freedom lies somewhere along that journey. There lies the possibility for empowerment and liberation and the ability to look back at that history, to look it in the eye and question it, which is very important. For me, this is tied to notions of freedom and liberation,” she says as she signs off.
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. These discussions look at pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, formats and mediums as well as planning long-term learning journeys against an uncertain future.
This conversation was part of the second series of Unrehearsed Conversations, titled Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times, run as a collaboration between the Drama School Mumbai and Embodied Poetics. Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.
Over the past several months, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced theatre pedagogues around the world to rethink ways of delivering teaching. In addition to the ongoing health crisis, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, following the custodial killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, USA, led to protests across the world against systemic racism endemic in various fields and disciplines, including theatre and other performing arts.
Earlier in August, an informal network of Black and Global Majority scholars in UK Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies published an open letter White Colleagues Listen! (https://medium.com/@revolutionornothing/white-colleague-listen-2d098d6a4a5d) , urging their white colleagues, as an ally and an accomplice, to address racism within the field with the same sense of urgency as was demonstrated in the ability to adapt curriculum delivery for the academic year.
Following protests against racism, institutions reaffirmed their commitment to address it through solidarity statements noting “there is more work to do” without providing a concrete plan of action.
Calling this out, the letter, signed by 49 academics, states: “It is therefore no longer enough to intend not to be racist; we need you to be actively antiracist. What we need from you is actionable and meaningful change. And so we urge you to move from private expressions of solidarity to real public actions that enable meaningful change for us, your Black and Global Majority colleagues and students.”
The letter also highlights instances where Black, Asian or People of Colour academics felt isolated, not taken seriously for their work due to racism prevalent in the field.
“It makes me anxious, the feeling that I have to protect myself. The risk, pain and trauma reminds me of all the racism and racist incidents that I’ve been through,” shares Dr. Mojisola Adebayo, one of the signatories to the open letter, during a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation.
“It costs me and other People of Colour, Black people, Asian people in white environments. It costs us many breaths, many, many extra breaths. It costs us many extra heartbeats, minutes, hours, weeks, months from our lives. It’s a great cost to just exist, especially when we’re in a very white context, when we’re trying to challenge racism in our work. There are voices in my head that make me question if I am invalid and worthless just by my existence. There is trauma in that. I can feel it in my breath, in my body. I can feel it in my chest. I can feel it in my heart.”
Adebayo, who is also a lecturer at Queen Mary University, London, believes this moment in time is a crucial opportunity to dismantle whiteness in performing arts departments and schools in the UK. “And dismantling whiteness is not about hurting white people or killing white people or ending white people themselves, whatever ‘white people’ means. Whiteness is a social construct that has to be dismantled. We’re all in this together,” she says.
When white colleagues listen
What would happen if white people listened as the open letter urges them to? If they did everything as suggested in the letter, Adebayo believes the curriculum would be much more exciting and challenging. Pedagogues would be forced to do a lot more research and spend time understanding another form. There will be more jobs for people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latinx and indigenous descent, she says. “I think we’d all be learning new stuff. And we’ll be sharing ideas,” she feels. “I think the students would get very, very excited because they’re always way ahead of us. It would be an opportunity for our teaching to be more relevant, more contemporary, and more diverse.”
However, she also cautions that there is a danger in using such measures and reforms to only “spice up the curriculum” and not create any change within power structures inherent within racism.
“It could become very tokenistic. And still, whiteness wouldn’t be undone and dismantled. Everybody would just look better. Everybody would just be a bit cooler. And I think ‘cool’ has done nothing for blackness,” Adebayo asserts.
The letter also highlighted dangers of institutions hiring people of African, Asian descent and People of Colour as “diversity hires” and giving an impression of diverse representation in a predominantly white environment and considering it as action against racism. It is not enough to be the only Black person in a department at a low level job where one is often not supported by the institution as a whole, says Adebayo.
“Everybody is expecting you to be the voice of the rest of the world. And, then you’ve massive pressure to get everything right, pressure that you put on yourself too. There is massive pressure to know everything from Japanese Noh theatre, to Beijing opera, to West African storytelling and to be the voice against racism,” she asserts.
Being the only Black person in the room
Adebayo also speaks of the exhaustion that comes with being the only Black person in the room, among some white friends and colleagues. “I’m a kind of a badge of honor, a kind of passport, without saying the most clichéd thing of all, ‘I’ve got a black friend, and she doesn’t feel like that’. I’m often invited by my white colleagues to shine their medals of anti-racism. It is tiring and really boring,” she says, emphasizing that reflective action on behalf of her white colleagues is the need of the hour.
Adebayo also subscribes to the idea of abundance and questions what it would mean for capitalist structures, white people to have less, do less, be less successful in order to create space for marginalized communities. “What if a professor’s ambition and aim is to get out of higher education, to become redundant and make space for people who are much less privileged? That could be on your job description,” she wonders.
The open letter also addressed how racism manifests as both, epistemic erasures and appropriations, as well as microaggressions and overt racist behaviours. Addressing this, Adebayo shares that keeping a record of all the instances of racism she faces helps her assert to her herself what is happening is “crazy” and not a figment of her imagination. “One of the ways in which racism works is that it gets inside your head and makes you question yourself. It makes you massively doubt yourself. It’s a psychological condition we’re experiencing,” she shares, adding one does get angry with oneself when one does not stand up for oneself.
“It is not about courage, it is about abuse,” Adebayo believes. “What we need to address is the abuser and the abuse of institution that makes you feel that you’re that you’re not good enough. So I’d say that keeping a record, even for yourself, that you might use at a particular time can be really helpful. Many years ago, I took a theatre company to court for racial discrimination. And it was the keeping of my records that helped. I won that case effectively, and then we settled.”
Dismantling whiteness in UK’s higher education institutions
Adebayo recalls an incident at her first academic job when she was given the recommended reading list for theatre students for the summer. She found that every single play on the list was written by a white European, and almost all of them were dead, except Caryl Churchill. It affected her deeply and she couldn’t do anything about it at that time. If given a chance to turn the clock back, she says, she would have given the list back and pointed out how problematic it was. She admits she was scared at the time but as the years have passed, Adebayo resolved to dismantle whiteness by using any money that came her way.
“When I’d have a little bit of the budget and I decided to make sure that any pound, any euro that came my way, I would use it to dismantle whiteness,” she says, encouraging her colleagues to do the same.
When she noticed there was not a single play by a Black person in the library at the first university she worked at, she used the budget to stock up on plays write by people of African and Asian descent. “I use my budget and I only ever bring in Black, Asian, People of Colour and Middle Eastern people to teach on my courses. So, I have more power than I think I have sometimes. I focus on my teaching, and what I can do with the students in the space,” she shares.
She also points out that one of the things institutions must keep in mind while dismantling racism and whiteness is the cost and toll it takes on those who go through racism. When it comes to changing curriculum and letting go of a white playwright on the list, it is crucial to ask what it costs to make this sacrifice, she says.
“In terms of racism, I can say with total confidence that it’s cost me heartbeats. It’s cost me my breath. It’s cost me my mental health, it’s cost me my physical body, sometimes in terms of physical abuse. It’s cost my income, my ancestors, 60 million of them transported across the sea. It’s cost lynching, murders and inequality. One can’t even express the personal and cultural cost involved,” she argues, adding that it is time to let go of what one calls “tradition” and come up with a new tradition, a new ritual in order to undo history. She admits the work is messy and chaotic, but it is possible if people work together.
“As theatre-makers, we have to improvise our way to some other way of being messy, full of mistakes, and being clumsy, but we have to. Because it costs someone else far too much. Because it just hurts,” she says.
Adebayo’s experience of racial discrimination has been painful and what’s been more painful is having white people tell her how much it hurt reading the open letter. “Stop worrying about feelings. Get involved collectively, see what you can do, make something happen, change something, let it cost you something. If you’re losing some money, it’s probably a good thing,” she says, adding that whiteness and white supremacy is an evil construct born out of racism. She passionately urges her colleagues and pedagogues around the world to dismantle, disrupt and pull down whiteness. It is the time to create a new equitable system in its place because white people in higher education institutes have gotten away with it for too long, she says before signing off.
In the fifth session of Unrehearsed Futures, Australian theatre-maker James Brennan and Asher Warren, lecturer (theatre and performance) at University of Tasmania engaged in a thought-provoking conversation about using theatre for social practice and how audiences relate to theatre.
The fourth session of 
One year on from when the COVID-19 pandemic took over our lives, uncertainty has gripped our hands again and is unlikely to let go any time soon. As India battles a devastating second wave of the disease, theatre-makers and pedagogues are back in their houses again discussing and reflecting on what theatre is and can be.
In the second session of 
It’s been more than a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. What was initially perceived as a ‘temporary disruption’ has now turned into the ‘new normal’ over the past year. Countries like India are in the midst of a vociferous second wave of infections.
