Teaching is on my mind a lot these days.
After a year and a half of focusing solely on research, well heeled with new
ideas and knowledge, one nevertheless comes back to teaching feeling a bit out
of touch. It came as a huge shock therefore that a new guideline had been
introduced in our institution whereby if a module scores below 4/5 in student
satisfaction it is in danger of being pulled. I only discovered this when one
of the modules I taught last term came in mid-January with the score of 3,7 –
and not without repercussions. One could never take these things too seriously in
the past, but as of this year, what the university
authorities actually seem to want is to harness positive student scores in
order to be able to sell their degrees in a competitive market place. They
don’t care how, but high scores must be had. And so, we lowly university
lecturers increasingly find ourselves between the pressure from the rock above
and the dissatisfaction from the hard place below. How does one teach an arts
subject in a place like that?
I must say I was very happy to escape these
questions for a few days, taking my group of fourth year students of Directing
and a few MAs to Prague.
***
So here we are on the last evening of
January, sitting in a small actors’ studio miles away from home, listening to
the American theatre-maker Howard Lotker talk about Ivan Vyskočil, a Czech actor, director, writer, psychologist
and a one time friend of Vaclav Havel. Born in 1929, Vyskočil dedicated most of his life to theatre and
pedagogy although he also studied and taught philosophy and psychology, and in
1957 coined the term ‘text-appeal’ to refer to a genre of literature that he
was creating and promoting at the Reduta jazz club/theatre in Prague, before he
embarked on a period of ‘non-theatre’ in the 1960s. In the latter decades of
the 20th century Vyskočil taught Authorial Acting and Interaction with the
Inner Partner at the DAMU academy, a practice which can be seen as analogous to
Devising and Performance Art perhaps, although entirely autochthonous to its
own context.
Having studied with Vyskočil, Lotker now
teaches the discipline himself, and before he begins one of the basic exercises
for Interacting with the Inner Partner with the University of Kent Drama students,
he explains the rules. The point is for each student to come out into the space
one by one and engage in a spoken dialogue with their inner partner – it is a
practice that we should all be familiar with because we have all at some point
talked to ourselves. We may have a number of different inner partners and the
point is to discover them and summon them to our aid when we might need them to
solve a problem of some kind. So we talk to our inner partner for about 2
minutes, but this is timed by the teacher rather than by the student, so to
ensure that one keeps going at those times when one would ordinarily want to
stop because they hit a crisis point. The idea is to recognize and follow one’s
verbal and bodily impulses – in a psychophysical way – to go with them, maybe
even exaggerate them. On the other hand, the audience is to pay active
attention, in a Stanislavskian way, to the actor’s ‘public solitude’. Finally, the actor is not allowed to
interact with the audience or with any potential props in the room, they should
be entirely focused on themselves. Needless to say, one should not plan their
behaviour before going up on stage.
At first this is
nerve-wracking, but gradually, one by one, the students go up and find their
calm within the space, within themselves. It is an exercise which may expose
one’s stream of consciousness, one’s playfulness, the wonders of one’s
imagination – eventually perhaps one’s own voice as an artist. Howard’s
students do this twice each session, two or three times a week, for about a
year or 18 months. I wonder whether this could sometimes lead to excessive
solipsism or over-indulgence, but Howard reminds us that this is not so much a
theatre training technique as a technique for working on the self.
The DAMU students
work on themselves in a variety of ways. The following day we witness a dance
class presentation of Jiri Havelka’s second year students in Acting for
Alternative Theatre and Puppetry. Havelka is also our contact person here and
someone who opened the doors to us on this winter showcase of the DAMU
students’ work. The first half of
the presentation is a contemporary dance/ physical theatre showcase featuring a
variety of etudes ranging from parody, ballet and fighting to some more
meditative, more dramatic numbers. The second half of the presentation is a
showcase of mazurkas and ballroom dancing routines. This is all taking place in
a massive room with a wedding cake ceiling and stained glass windows, which may
well have been a genuine ballroom once. Several generations of teachers are
present, but the oldest one, who was here since the 1960s doesn’t even know
what this room was before it was annexed by the DAMU School (which by the way
looks not unlike a Habsburg version of a Tardis – small on the outside,
genuinely endless on the inside). One of the younger teachers is there with her
toddler, who can hardly resist keeping still to the beat of the music. The
toddler is comfortable with the students and all the audience present – even us
foreigners – and she keeps giving us pieces of paper to read in between her
dancing and snacking breaks. There is a definite sense of community and
homeliness here – and certainly no Health and Safety considerations – as most
of us are seated on the floor, informally huddled together for the performance.
This is the second
day of our stay and following the dancing showcase, Jiri gives us a couple of
hours of his own time. He takes us to his palatial office where we can leave
our coats to facilitate free movement around the building. We chat about
differences between our courses, what we do and within what kind of conditions
(limited resources and excessive restrictions on the UK side being a major theme).
Being Drama School students, the DAMU actors clearly get a lot more technique
classes and this shows.
Jiri then takes us
around some of the teaching spaces they use – a scenography room, where we can
see a recent exhibition, and eventually his own acting studio where he works
with his students. He calls it an ‘atelier’ – a term which I associate with
painters, but rarely, until now, with actors. And indeed these rooms are like
real artists’ studios with scratches on the floors, peeling walls, cuttings of
texts, pictures, interesting quotes or interesting drawings on the walls. There
are even a couple of coffee cups with cigarette ends lying around…
I ask Jiri what is
the first thing he teaches a group of students when they arrive to him. He
sends one student outside the room, asks him to take a walk and come back. When
he comes back, the student is asked to repeat exactly what he did when he was
outside. This raises issues of observation and the difference between reality
and theatre performance, and very quickly we arrive at Brook and his idea that
all we need for an act of performance is one person walking across an empty
space and one person watching… Jiri then asks people to walk around the space,
becoming aware of and exaggerating their own idiosyncrasies; followed by some
concentration and movement exercises, and eventually by an exercise where
students take it in turns to build a sequence of non-verbal actions by creating
a chain of memorized units to which each person adds something and therefore the
gestures are repeated/ copied but not the inner meaning of each gesture. This
sort of sequencing can occur on a number of parallel lines simultaneously, thus
building potential narratives. The most thrilling is the final exercise, where
students are paired up to represent a car and a driver – one pair’s aim is to
hit the others, whereas the others are to avoid getting hit. This is unusually
entertaining to watch too!
The following couple
of days are filled with more student presentations and us being squeezed (or
not managing to be squeezed) into rooms of very small proportions where we
often find ourselves sitting on the floor, well within the performers’ own
space. They deal with this beautifully, accommodating and accepting our
presence, even interacting with us in the course of the performance. Their
etudes range from non-verbal renditions of what looks like unsuccessful nights
out, to whimsical fantasies involving picture frames and cake ingredients being
spilled all over the floor, to a parody of Stanislavskian acting itself. They
have also worked with a Slovakian choreographer Jaro Vinarsky (http://vimeo.com/30961113) and one of
their showcases is an improvisation based on his specific combination of the
visceral, the dynamic and the meditative.
There are two counts
of full frontal male nudity across the two days, numerous counts of haphazard
refocusing of lights by climbing on each other’s shoulders in between scenes,
opening up and closing of windows to let the air in. This is a working
atmosphere, and as one of the British students observed – you can tell that
they real ‘own the space’. They respect it too and they also respect each other
profoundly. The way in which the students work with each other testifies to a
kind of collegial closeness rarely seen in any other contexts. They are
comfortable with their own and each other’s bodies – one of the guys adjusting
his colleague’s penis as the latter plays a dead body – and there is no
discomfort or awkwardness when playing erotic moments with each other.
Everything is technically accomplished, professional, honest. Perhaps the
biggest giveaway of the secret of their success is a motto hanging on the wall
behind the audience’s backs which reads ‘too much EGO will KILL your TALENT’.
The process of letting go of one’s ego is a lifetime’s work, of course, but the
foundations for it are apparently very well laid in here.
And talking of
secrets, there is the whole alchemy-side of Prague as a city worth bringing
into this discussion for a moment too. In the wake of the European Renaissance,
in the late 1500s, the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II apparently created an
alchemists’ hub in Prague, which also occasionally included the Britons John
Dee and Edward Kelly and – according to the Alchemy Museum – William
Shakespeare too, who supposedly visited Prague as a spy in the company of Kelly
and Dee. Later the myth of the Golem of Prague – a creature brought to life
from inanimate matter by a 16th century Prague rabbi becomes part of
the local folklore of the occult. Much of the Czech culture is therefore co-opted
into this narrative and so is Kafka’s observation, for example, that Prague has
claws which make it impossible to leave as well as a lot of Karel Čapek’s
work. An example of this is Krakatit, a novel he wrote in 1922,
which concerns a scientist who invents a bomb in his laboratory and enters a
state of delirium. This was made into a film in 1947 and duly interpreted as a
story about the nuclear bomb at the time. In the rendition of a present day MA
student at DAMU – which we also saw as part of our programme – the story
becomes a sassy James Bond spin off.
It was not until we
reached the airport that I was reminded again of the dreaded evaluation forms –
a bunch of which I was given on my departure for my fellow travelers to fill
in. What did they get out of the trip? What I witnessed was an image of a group
of young adults being curious, being open, enthusiastically responding to their
surroundings, asking questions and having fun. What the form-filling exercise
forced out of them was, sadly, a group of consumers whose experience is
measured by numbers from 1-5. No offence to my students but: what kind of alchemy
does it take to make consumers into artists? This is a question my Inner
Partner must find an answer to.
