WESTCAST 2006

Vancouver:  The Languages of Learning

(Westin Bayshore Resort – Feb. 16, 4 p.m. Marine Room)

Presenters:  Vandy Britton and Susan Barber

Title:  Shedding Our Skin:  Languages of Learning in the Drama Classroom

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Susan Barber:

Welcome everyone to our session, Shedding Our Skin:  Languages of Learning in the Drama Classroom.  If all the world’s a stage, then I guess today we’re the players.  I’m Susan Barber and this is Vandy Britton.  We’re both doctoral students in Arts Education.  We also both happen to be artists as well as secondary teachers.  I’m a writer and Vandy is an actor and a director, besides being a musician and dancer. 

For my part today I would like to give a bit of the theoretical background on the language part of the drama classroom, in particular how we can encourage students to move outside their own identities through the experience of writing plays.  When students are in the role of playwright, they are asked to get inside characters, really imagine what it is like to walk in the shoes of another person.  Performing a role takes it even further; it often enables students to better understand other people, and Vandy will talk more on this later.  At the end of the session, we’ll have some time for some group discussion and questions.

When we read stories or plays about characters, we use our imagination to explore other lives and allow ourselves to experience vicariously what it would be like to be in their situations.  Writing a play and acting a part take that next step into more active imagination.  How would that character talk?  How would they see other characters?  It’s even vital to understand how they hold a cup of tea.  Do they grip it firmly, or, hold it carelessly, or prefer to hold it with two hands, protectively?  These types of actions all indicate who the character is as well as what they are feeling.

So, how does the playwright get to know her characters?  One way is through finding parts of these characters inside herself as well as recognizing character traits in real people.  It’s helpful to know a little bit about the aesthetic experience and how art merges with ethics.  

Aesthetics refers to a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature and perception of what is beautiful, and includes taste or the appreciation of artistic beauty.  Aesthetics holds forth that beauty may be the basic principle from which all other principles, especially moral principles, are derived. 

Many thinkers believe that the aesthetic is a mode of intelligence.  Just as a deductive method of conceptual thinking is developed through logic, mathematics, dialectical and analytical philosophy, the aesthetic uses not concepts but sensory perceptions.  Art becomes the symbolic form for what the artist wishes to communicate.  When we touch an object, we have a perceptual experience, while to be touched is to be moved emotionally.  Growing in aesthetic intelligence therefore deals with the development of sensation and feeling into what adds up to be a whole greater than its parts, a “sensibility”. (Abbs 4).  It is a method of responding to what is inherent in human life, and one that can only be accessed through senses and feelings.  It is through the arts that we gain understanding of the human experience.

It was Kant who put aesthetics at the center of philosophy. (Scruton 26).  In the Critique of Judgment, Kant places the aesthetic experience in a similar category as the religious experience, suggesting aesthetics is the archetype of revelation.  Specifically, what he is saying is that the aesthetic experience is able to reveal the sense of the world.  How does this happen?  Simply, in the presence of beauty an individual senses the purposiveness and intelligibility in the things around him.  This beauty may be highly subjective to the individual or it may be his recognition of what is beautiful based on what has been culturally transmitted to him. 

Either way, when we apprehend the sublime, we feel as though we can see beyond the world to something overwhelming, ineffable and yet strangely grounded.  As we try to grope our way between thought and emotion we become intuitive rather than rational or analytical.  This is because we are able to grasp the idea of the transcendental without being able to verbalize it.   Ultimately we know nothing of the transcendental.  But we feel it and it is in this feeling of beauty that we sense truth. (26). 

To tie this idea to drama, we could say that when we become aware of the beauty in a literary work or a play, its content begins to feel true.  We start to accept the particular situation in a play and agree to go along with it as if it were true.  If the playwright has done a good job of presenting a “world” in which the characters move and speak, then we let go of our real world and begin to imagine ourselves in that fictitious world.  Once this journey begins, we accept certain truths that apply within that world. 

What we have when the mind waltzes back and forth between imagination and understanding is aesthetic delight or rapture. (31).  This takes place in a state of disinterestedness, when there is no personal motivation for assigning value.   (28).  It is often called an aesthetic attitude, or a possession of a psychic distance, that allows the mind to roam with controlled imagination.  In other words, we know this is not reality, but we agree to let go of ourselves for a short time to experience the play. 

This is why we are so attracted to art and why it is so powerful to us. (19).  We stand in awe before representation and tend to cherish those works by gifted artists who are able to capture a part of life and truth. (38).  Through its unique blend of form and content, then, art can remind us of our humanity in new and fresh ways and confirm our connectedness to others

The benefits are huge.  The play can focus on a narrow slice of life and show us what might happen in our own lives.  We can watch people work through conflicts and maybe show us new ways of looking at them.  These are unique people, but we can find parts of ourselves in them.  And perhaps most strikingly, we can be intimate with them, hear their innermost thoughts and feelings, that might echo our own.  In turn, we are surprised at how tender emotions arise within ourselves, which in turn elicit feelings of impartial love for these characters as if they were genuine human beings.  We could say they have our moral attention, and we perceive with intellect and feeling their particular lives.  Our moral imagination reaches out to understanding.  By identifying with them and allowing ourselves to participate vicariously in their emotional responses to events in the story, we become enlightened by more thoughts and more emotional experiences.  If we can carry this over into reality, we might be willing to see more complexity in other people and be willing to open ourselves more to life.

Murdoch states that literature commands us to conquer self-absorption, and one way to do this is through beauty, which in a disinterested state of mind, allows us to perceive beyond ourselves.  “Then the ‘otherness’ which enters into us makes us ‘other’”.  (Steiner 188).   The specific challenge then is to let go of ourselves in order to become something larger, more human.

Literature of significance says to us, “Change your life”.  An intelligent voice appeals to our way of thinking and feeling and proposes another challenge.  The author seems to be asking the reader or the spectator, What do you feel now?  And now?  How does this affect the possibilities in your life?  Steiner (142) remarks on the indiscretion of serious art; it invades our last privacies and exposes our unknown motives and beliefs.  The immediacy of what happens to us when we read or watch a play comes unbidden.  How this penetration occurs is not wholly known.  Some possibilities are in the effects of language, rhythm, their patterns and appeals to memory and intuitive processes; all of which combine to work on our psyche.  Freud places more weight on the subconscious; Jung on recognition of archetypal figures and situations.   When we are emotionally engaged, our minds are more attentive and our opportunity for learning is heightened.  Emotions code the information we are receiving and it enters more deeply into our awareness.

Now what does this look like in the classroom?  Reading literature and plays aloud is great for understanding the characters and stories to a certain extent.  But actually writing a play moves students from a passive state to a more active one, involving thinking and feeling and the shaping of life.  Because of the nature of writing, students are given permission to let go of themselves.   They are released from their day to day identities and are encouraged to play at imagining what it’s like to be someone else.   In many ways, students feel released from the necessity of explaining themselves or being judged.  The story dictates certain things can happen, things that the student is in charge of.  But here is the big secret!  Often students think they are free from exposing who they are when they create other characters, when in reality this is quite false.  In actuality, they must look harder inside themselves to find out what makes their created character “real”.  They must do this by entering into their own memories of experiences when they had the same feelings or when they exhibited certain traits.  They also must enter into other people in order to understand how all people feel in a certain situation.  In order to make their writing believable, they must find the truth about their characters, which directly reflects on themselves.  It is just done in a more disinterested way.  The aesthetic experience demands the truth or the reader or audience won’t accept it.  The “beauty” here is when they find the truth, they will know it. 

This is why writing has the potential to facilitate great learning about human beings.  We have to dig deeper than superficial judgments to understand why characters think and act as they do.  Writing points at the complexity of life and what we learn in writing spills over into our daily lives.  We tend to leave off making blanket rejections of those who are not like us and we’re more willing to look a little closer to understand differences.  It may even happen that the student will become aware of how she is opening up to other people and enlarging her vision of the world.  If a writer can experiment with multiple versions of herself and embrace varied experiences as part of her transformation, she can also imagine greater ways of being for herself.

What I’ve been exploring here is a way of valuing creative writing.  The corollary for education as well as for life is enormous.  “Shedding one's skin” means being on a two-way street.  In one direction, for a writer to really understand characters, she has to search deeply inside herself and understand feelings and experiences.   Through isolating certain character traits such as generosity, jealousy, optimism, rage – she will grasp the consequences in fiction and real life. 

In the other direction, the writer has to look hard at other people and characters to understand the complex qualities that come together in unique individuals.  Being willing to understand comes from an interest in writing authentic characters. 

Most honest authors believe that the effort of really seeing, and really representing life accurately in writing, is no idle business.  Creative writing is not for everyone; it is much too strenuous and time-consuming with little hope of financial reward.  But for those who work out of an obsession for writing, Henry James urges to be “someone on whom nothing is lost”.  By identifying with characters, imagining new worlds and trying to express our own experiences, we become more responsive to life’s adventure, and more willing to see and be touched by the world.  (Nussbaum 161).   With much practice, the writer may be able to unite that which is inside herself to the people who are outside and the result may be a greater compassion for all human beings. 

MACTHELLOLETRA

Two years ago, Vandy  and I wrote and put on a play for a Master’s drama education class.  We were assigned to groups of four and asked to write a play in a certain time period.  I had been thinking for some time it would be fun to write a comedy with Shakespeare’s most flamboyant characters.  Obviously the humor had to dominate and it became clear that if four huge characters were in one play it would be a battle of the egos.  Our group talked about which characters they’d like to be and which characters would naturally be in opposition.  For example, Iago, the manipulator would be equally matched in wits with Hamlet, the sharp but indecisive intellectual.  Cleopatra could jerk both these guys around but her pride would be threatened by another strong female, one who could also goad Iago and mess with Hamlet’s mind, say, Lady Macbeth. 

            The guiding principle in this case was the genre – it had to work towards being funny but also be consistent with the time period, manners and language, but more than that, overall it had to be character driven.  Even in comedy a writer must ask, are the conflicts strong enough?  So these were some of the controlling factors. 

            I went back to the plays themselves and noticed in more detail how the characters responded to “types” that were in the new play, finding out more deeply what motives them, how they speak in their own voices.  Also, I was connecting all the while with my own feelings, finding out more about their feelings.  This gets quite schizophrenic at this stage for the writer!  The part of me that experiences pride starts to blur with Cleopatra’s pride till we’ve formed this hybrid.  But it’s also happening for me and Hamlet, me and Iago and me and Lady Macbeth.  Very weird.  That’s why writers stay in their rooms and write alone.  The split personality thing has been diagnosed as mental illness elsewhere.  Well, soon all the characters are talking to each other in my head and I have reserved part of my awareness as the controlling intelligence, otherwise known as the author.  Sometimes I have to stop their chattering and tell them that they are not making sense in light of where I want the plot to go and so we have to roll back to the point before that and solve the problem.  There are constant compromises on where I have to let the characters lead but I guide them in certain directions by shaping their dialogue.   And that’s the magic of writing folks.  There are tons of re-writes until you get it so it feels true.  And that’s why after spending so much time with these characters, you really feel they are inside of you.  You’ve really developed an understanding of who they are.  The really hard part is coming out of your room and turning off the evil villain or the sultry vamp!  Pushing them back into their box.  Until the next time.

(To view the play, click on "MacT" on the top left side.)