This article is derived from a speech given to the All Souls Group, in Keble College Oxford on the 9th November 1980 and then, at the request of Prof David Bridges of Homerton College, prepared for publication in the CAMBRIDGE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION (Vol 11 No 1 Lent Term 1981) in March 1981 pp 46-55.
From 1977-1981, I was a Principal Lecturer in Theatre in Education at the Rose Bruford College of Speech & Drama where, along with Stuart Bennett, I was co-head of the Community Theatre Arts Department. The department had recently been set up in an institution that has produced some interesting artists-in-education off its now defunct combined teaching and acting course. There were three courses offered by the college: a two-year Technical Theatre diploma, a CNAA honours degree in Theatre Arts, and our three-year diploma in Community Theatre and TIE. I went there in 1971 from a professional Theatre-in-Education (TE) and Community Theatre Company that I had co-founded in 1972: the Perspectives Theatre Company, based in Peterborough.
A personal view
First off – since our department had been made into a separate course within the College – we were prompted to explore what was so particular to Community Theatre and TIE as to warrant special training. In many ways we were breaking new ground and we had to begin by asking some fundamental questions about the arts-in-education as a particular phenomenon.
At the time, there was no other directly vocational course exclusively devoted to this area in British Drama Schools, although nearly half an actor’s employment opportunities lay in this field. We knew that various people identified a need for better quality in the band of skills found in traditional theatre networks. What better place than a drama school to seek to do that? But the same people were much less aware of the additional range of skills called for when the demands of teaching are added to performance challenges, themselves complicated by physical and economic constraints never encountered in the traditional networks.
The best point of departure was an analysis of our own practice and professional experience in the arts-in-education. The very juxtaposition seemed significant. We had felt it necessary to remind people that art and education are linked. Why had they been separated? Why were they now put together? What united them?
We surveyed the provision of theatrical arts, and how historically we as artists had grown to oppose certain practices and provide alternatives. We looked at certain contexts and how we had responded.
Cultural. Why act, and in dark rooms specially built for the purpose? Who’s interested? According to Arts Council figures, about 10% of the population. What then is the relevance of this acting to the disinterested, what does it have to say? Is what it has to say irrelevant to the other 90% perhaps? Is its claim to make universal statements suspect? So what is that acting about, and what above providing for the 90%?
This led us to look at who the acting was done for. The Audience.
We observed a certain amount of mystification around the provision of this “10%” art, in a social anthropological sense. It takes place in dark rooms; the audience are left in the dark. It creates masterful illusions of life. It is dependent on special buildings which people have to go to to observe actors working under floodlights. Access to the building is bound by a ticket-purchasing ritual. You can’t just walk in. There is a thing called a box-office, discreetly positioned, where you go, or telephone, to get a ticket to get in. But not on the night you want to get in. Once inside, the audience is somehow controlled by elaborate codes of behaviour —what to wear, when to talk, how never to show disapproval, how to know when the acting is just about to start, how to sense the difference between the interval and the end.
We considered the status accorded to the whole activity of acting and watching, and discovered that this was conferred through its patrons. We found that there was a class base to this. We considered this relationship in the light of social equality, particularly as regards the concept of education for all and a welfare state. Very little acting was done to celebrate or reflect the cultural aspirations of 90% of the population, particularly women, children and the working class. We set about providing alternative acting designed for them. A fundamental inequality of status was accorded to what we did. We got far less money for working with far more people. We observed that the audiences we worked for, particularly children, are accorded little status either financially or as a power-base in society. Consequently, teachers are given very little too. Consequently, art for “kids” is given little.
This situation had obliged us to be alternative, rather than it being our choice. As part of a great movement that included the primary school revolution and the work of the Schools Council, we tried to accord status to the audience through our artistic activity. For children, their true status lies in their sub-culture. We worked on new forms that were designed to open this up, not expose it but validate it. For the first time for many audiences they saw themselves portrayed as they knew themselves to be. Their focus on our activity (which took place with everyone in broad daylight, on the audience’s territory) was: “What is this about?” not just: “How is it done?” We were identified as, and became an emergent oppositional force.
We then looked at our career as artists. We worked under a star system. A pyramidal, public-accolade structure that was competitive and hierarchical. It threw up names only to consume them.
What happened when actors took power and began to operate laterally? Acting, but also writing, directing, singing, thinking, doing the accounts, driving a Transit van? We observed that as the motivation to act became to express sub-cultural aspirations through theatre, it became unacceptable for actors to say, as they used to: “I work with children because they’re nice. I just want to act and all juniors have to start with kids before getting a serious job. It’s the way to get your Equity card.”‘ It also became quite inadequate to explain one’s educational objectives, when working with children, as to produce the audience or artists of tomorrow because children are the taxpayers of tomorrow; since, reviewing artistic provision in this culture, we knew that these statements held exclusion clauses for some 90% of our audience.
Which forced our attention onto our own activity. We found ourselves saying: “Why do I want to act for children? What is my acting about? Is its meaning expressed in the clearest form? Is it fun to do but not fun to watch?”
In trying to set up a course of training for all this, a set of artistic practices only born after 1965, we were bedevilled by the absence of a theoretical framework. All of us had done this kind of work but we found ourselves more confident about why we were not doing certain kinds of acting, rather than why we were doing the kinds of things we were doing. We had to be more specific and began to list those things we knew from experience.
I am a citizen who has decided to act. To perform and be paid for doing it. To be a professional in that sense. I exist in a real world as a member of a society and share the experiences of my audience. We live in the same community. I call my work theatre-in-education. Art and education are linked because both activities are concerned with learning.
How do I know this?
At an early age, we learn that the world is not in fact an extension of our self but has an independent reality that can affect us as much as we affect it. Experience teaches us what our relationship to the world is, and forms the body of our knowledge about this relationship. But this is not static. The world disturbs us through sensate contact, in the form of people, events, ideas or things. Ripples occur in our picture of the world. We must respond to the disturbance, a creative impulse that forms a curiosity to find out. We respond with reason, emotion, action. Using what knowledge we have, we can shape the response, plan it, be deliberate. But the contact has altered our perception of ourself in relation to the world. Our response and this new perception interpenetrate, adding to our knowledge. We have moved. We are changed when learning occurs.
The artist-in-education knows this to be a description of what s/he does. Art is learning: I produce a disturbance to which my audience will respond. I disturb them through sensate experience. My work and my audience’s role are defined as productive. This process operates independently of my wishes but not totally outside of my control. I can manage the process. Indeed I am obliged to. The power to provoke disturbance incurs social and political responsibilities because it will change my audience.
The artist-in-education manages the process by carefully choosing his material, his artforms, and by knowing his audience. He sets up the disturbance artfully, controls his intention, finds forms that carry his meanings to his audience participants. Art is experiential learning. It is not a subject, but a life process. But the artist is distinguishable from the teacher. The teacher deals in reality: artists deal in fictions of reality. They also take disturbance into the unconscious picture of self in the world. They provoke the imagination to project realities, to test likely responses, to practice being real. It is a science. They use their imagination to provoke other imaginations to enquire into the real world by inventing fictions. They show the participatory audience that reality does not remain static, that as they are changed by it they change it.
A Theory
We were beginning to describe a theory that distinguished us from what sometimes appeared to be happening in the “10%” art.
Because on the other hand, artists can mismanage the process. They can pretend they do not disturb, teach nor change by their activity. To do this, they must erect a defence against the inevitable audience response to their disturbance. They must control not only the disturbance, but also the response. To control the response they reduce the experiences offered. They develop rituals to restrict access to their activity and promote comfort by familiarity. They deny the productive role of the audience, turning them into consumers. They turn the lights out on them. They become a purveyor of forms, a consumer of past disturbances that history and the contempt of familiarity have defused. Any disturbance that is not intended deflects attention from those that are present but beyond their control. They portray such clever illusions of reality in their fictions that people accept life as being just like that. As the audience famously suspend their disbelief, they also suspend their criticism. They are not offered the possibility of thinking that their reality might be otherwise. These artists show their audience nudity, rather than why there are no clothes. Their choice of what experiences to offer is of course determined by their values. This art is patronised by those whose values the performers represent. Because none of this is deliberate, it is irresponsible.
Teachers must also manage the process of learning. And some mismanage it too. They seek to control the response: why else are there so many exams? They socially manage knowledge and access to it. Any experiential learning that leads to a loss of their control over the response is not chosen. Their values inform their choice. Those values are taught as the knowledge and learning is managed. This is not deliberate, but if the teacher does not assume his or her responsibilities, the conditions of service, the training, and the culture that is most dominant will control the situation. We can see the effects of this. Those in front of the teacher need sets of knowledge to make them productive workers. If they are not helped to be productive adults they will not earn money and will not survive. They must learn how to make profit, not usually for themselves but as producers and consumers. Experiential learning does not guarantee sufficiently that this will be the result of schooling. Consequently, where the operation of free market forces is allowed rein, learning responses will be channelled.
The Actor-Teacher: a conscious devising actor
The work I do as an artist and as a teacher of artists is to face up to the fact that learning does take place in the way I describe. It is the case. I therefore have to accept my responsibilities. I cannot assume my role is meaningful just because I want it to be. Who needs actors? I cannot ignore my audience/participators. But my aspirations clash with those of my audience. I fight for my right to produce, and theirs too. I devise a production that best expresses my relationship with my audience. The spring for my artistic activity is my citizenship, not my technique.
Consequently all our students were trained to be conscious devising actors. Did they know why they were doing it? Who they were doing it for? And importantly, could they actually do it? We trained their brain, their bodies and their emotions to a high pitch, to build a platform of strength and confidence in their three intelligences (conceptual, emotional and manual) to confront the great responsibilities and challenges they had chosen to bear.
The phrase ‘conscious devising actor’ was not designed to contain a restrictive definition of one kind of consciousness, one kind of devising, one kind of acting, that was somehow ‘right-on’ and definitive for all time. It was rather there to set the limits, create a scaffolding within which the students could be required and enabled to use their three intelligences. It described a citizen whose role was to perform (actor), who deliberately negotiated content with a community of spectator/participants (audience) in the context of the world they both lived in, by the use and inventions of an artform called theatre (event). Put another way, the phrase described actors, conscious of their personal, political and artistic responsibilities, who artfully devised an artistic encounter that was an expression of the relationships between community and artist, who were both living in the same world. Devising was defined as that set of theoretical, artistic and practical decisions that produce the artform that best negotiates the common concerns of actor and audience. This could involve the selection of extant text from our theatre heritage. Above all, the phrase was designed to describe the synthesis of the 3 intelligences within a structured artistic practice.
The course was very practical, and based around continuous Performance work. The student was expected to grapple with the central and great problems of artistic expression: use of a subjective medium to enable people to be objective, use of emotion to promote reasoning, use of fiction to enable people to make sense of reality. These problems are inherent in all artistic work. What distinguished the course was that we were conscious that this was the case and which made us deliberate in all our work.
To perform, an actor needs technical expertise, and much time was spent building a technical platform. But he or she does not lift their arm because the exercise makes them. Their desire to communicate drives them to lift their arm. They exercised their arm to make the statement clearer.
It was taken as axiomatic that the student wished to perform. But sometimes had to learn that acting was not about pretending to be other people in order to avoid being themself. We taught them as citizens, who had concerns about how to make sense of the world, so that they could live in it. Having to identify these concerns out of a true and honest understanding and articulation of their personal position in terms of experience, knowledge, feeling and concept.
What does this actor actually do?
Let us say he is a young man who comes from Newcastle. His most recent experience is that of being an unemployed school-leaver. He wants to tell school students coming up to sixteen, how to cope with unemployment, so that they are better equipped than he was. He researches the question.
At this point we obliged him to spend some time with prospective school-leavers. He must listen to them, prepare open questions, and not impose his values on the relationship. He thinks leaving school means unemployment. His research tells him this is statistically very likely. His experiences tell him so. As he listens to the school students he discovers that their perception of leaving school is employment, financial independence, buying a motorbike to gain status with peers etc. They have hopeful projects.
The student actor is disturbed by this knowledge about his audience. The school students’ opinions fly in the face of the facts. He talks to teachers and careers advisers. Discovers that the perceptions of education are based on the assumption that studies lead to employment. In the difficult classroom conditions the cooperation of school students has been got by the stick and carrot method-you work now and you’ll get a better job.
His aspirations are in direct contradiction to his audience’s. Now he must find a means of expressing both through an artform. He seeks to give the school-leaver the opportunity to untangle the reality of un/employment by involving him in a story. He plays out a fiction that projects the aspirations of his audience into the future. He becomes a school-leaver. The audience recognise themselves. The fiction brings their aspirations up against people, events and ideas that exist outside school, and beyond, in the world of employment.
The contradiction between their aspiration and the reality is uncovered. The actor then invites them to participate in the fiction by role-playing various people or groups, or by offering advice to the characters about how to operate with, or against the forces that are at work. They write and re-write the scenario. As they do so, they practice what they will have to do when they are in the same situation in reality, say a year later. The teacher then takes the responses of the students, set up by the disturbance, and details the learning, perhaps over a period of weeks. The students can return to the security of knowing that they are, in reality, still at school, but have the confidence that when they do leave, should they be unemployed, there is an explanation, and perhaps a means of survival, that they can find within themselves. The actor has been changed by the experience, his assumptions challenged. As the audience responded to the story they took control over his character.
He played things he had not planned. He learnt from his audience. His artistic practice was learning.
How does all this relate to the theme of education and the arts?
It seems that it is in the very nature of art and education to be open to abuses. Art and learning are used to support a set of value-laden practices. Denying art its power of disturbance invites concentration on its forms as a product to consume; rather than on its content and its context, as a process to be produced and reproduced. It can therefore be used to reinforce the notion that abstraction is the supreme intelligence, abstraction of reality is more interesting than real life. Sensate experiences can be made unnecessary if art becomes solely the consumption of forms.
It can be used to create a monopoly for an elite group over skill and the imagination – only those who have the skill appear to be imaginative. It can be used to imprison the body and the imagination in the mechanics of technique in order to control the response into the kinds of response that are acceptable to the production of productive workers. Experiential learning is here again suppressed. It can be used to concentrate on intended outcomes-the imaginative response is only accepted if it falls within the definition of the recognisable art-form label (“yes, but it’s not dance, painting, sculpture, drama, art etc is it?”)
It can be used to ‘sort’ pupils and people in order to meet the prevailing economic needs of production. Sorting by sense of failure, by using art as a standard outside of participant control, posed as being ‘beyond’ them. (“Everyone knows schoolchildren can’t do operas properly.”) It can be used to produce conformity to other people’s standards in order to demobilise forces for change, promote convergent practices that are opposed to personal discovery on one’s own.
The actual context within which the arts and education operated then was to produce literate and numerate people who would be productive. But also in the knowledge that – since large numbers (then some 2¼ million people and rising) would not be wanted – leisure activities that would stop reflection must be found. You can’t have that number of people idle and allow them to be creative thinkers.
It must have come as a great shock that the great liberal tradition of the 1944 Act could be abused in such a way. But the governments of the Seventies made this clear, particularly the one in power at the time.
We would be abdicating our responsibility as teachers and artists if we did not equip people to survive in that status quo. Reading and writing are essential to survival. But we had to recognise that prevailing economic needs had distorted the experiential discovery functions of art and education, in order to preserve the status quo, and hinder the changes that were soon bound to occur.
The centre of the debate over the arts and education was not in the false polarities that had been set up-between work and leisure, art and science, imagination and numeracy, art or food and drink. The struggle was over the management of learning, allowing the forces of change to operate through sensate experiential learning that is how we learn; or preventing this process by the social management of the contradictions thrown up by the process: Experiential art and education do not sufficiently guarantee successful management and would therefore be eliminated.
So what did we do?
We recognised that changes were going to occur independently of us, but of what kind? Could we have the learning, art and education we wanted in the society we had? If we allowed the forces for change to operate we knew that we could be deliberate and shape a response. We were not just victims of circumstance. we were a power-base. We worked at the chalk-face. If we joined forces as teachers, students, artists and communities, a way forward would be found in our practice as we created responses to the disturbances coming our way.