On the Subject of Drama

David Hornbrook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134702343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although much has been written on how the drama elements of the English curriculum might be taught in schools, there is less guidance available for teachers who regard drama not as an adjunct of English but as an arts subject in its own right.
In this volume, David Hornbrook and a team of experienced drama specialists show how the subject of drama may be defined and taught. Drawing on literature, visual art, music and dance as well as the rich and varied traditions of drama itself, they map out an eclectic subject curriculum for students of all ages. Opening up the field in new and exciting ways, the book embraces the widest possible range of dramatic knowledge and skills, from the Natyashastra of ancient India to contemporary classroom improvisation.
The book is divided into three sections:
The teaching and learning of drama: ideas about interculturalism, creativity and craft - key concepts informing the drama curriculum - are interrogated and re-theorised for the classroom.
Making and performing drama in school: the fundamental processes of reading and writing plays for performance are explored, along with the potential of dance to enhance and extend students' experience of dramatic performance.
Watching and understanding drama: ensuring the curriculum is appropriately balanced between the production and reception of drama, this last section emphasises the role of students as audience - for both live and electronic performances - and the development of a dramatic vocabulary.

Part 1
THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF DRAMA

INTRODUCTON

Even if we never visit a theatre, the subject of drama impinges upon our lives, every day of our lives, leaping out at us from newspapers, loudspeakers, film screens and television sets, informing the way we think and the way we feel. Drama is simply part of the discourse of life.

This book is an attempt to break loose from the conversations which have characterised half a century of drama education and to articulate an alternative programme for drama in schools, rigorous and coherent enough for a world quite different to that into which the subject was born. Drama has had a strenuous climb to educational legitimacy, and historic, bourgeois suspicions of the theatre, coupled with a sentimental view of childhood, lured many pioneers to some peculiar diversions. Consigning these manoeuvres to the past, this collection lays the foundations for the development of drama as a fully-fledged subject on the school curriculum. It brings together voices in the field which, while not afraid to be critical of what has gone before, are united in their commitment to the subject and to its future. Acknowledging the quality of teaching and learning in many drama classes, contributors are not themselves concerned to unravel teaching methods or learning theory. If the protective embrace of post-war educational enthusiasms shielded many drama teachers in England from the rigours of curriculum planning and assessment, it did allow them to develop a sophisticated form of pedagogy. In placing the emphasis on the what rather than the how, the book tries to redress the balance rather than simply add to the stock of methodological wisdom.

The opening chapter offers a glimpse of drama’s heterogeneous place in world cultures and suggests that what we know as drama-in-education, with its generalised aims and tenuous links with the theatre, may be better understood as a vagary of history rather than (as was once thought) an educational metamorphosis. For years, the aims and outcomes of drama lessons were either developmental, the general well-being of the student being seen as a sufficient end, or moral and social, with students being invited to act out imaginary dilemmas. But times changed, and with them the educational environment. By the 1990s, concerns in Britain were growing that the extreme open-endedness of many drama classes was not giving students a systematic education in the subject, and although it was accepted that teaching methods in drama had been developed to a high degree of refinement, what was going on in classes too often seemed random and directionless. In proposing that the subject of drama must embrace concepts like dramatic literacy and cultural induction if it is to counter accusations of aimlessness, the chapter signals some of the arguments which follow.

All the contributors to this book want to give drama a strong foundation in the modern curriculum by establishing its roots in culture; at the very centre of this enterprise is an acknowledgement that drama is a world phenomenon. Sita Brahmachari challenges the parochialism of a drama education based on television-fed naturalism and proposes an alternative curriculum in which a diversity of forms from world cultures may be represented. Using Indian drama as an example, she shows how the richness and complexity of traditional practices, such as those contained in the ancient Natyashastra, can be interwoven into contemporary drama practice in a way which both enfranchises students whose cultural backgrounds already resonate with those forms and liberates those whose horizons have been limited to popular Western conventions.

It is sometimes claimed that induction of this kind inhibits students’ natural creativity by forcing them into predetermined ways of thinking. In a challenge to the assumptions that have shored up theories of arts education since Rousseau, Sharon Bailin exposes many of the most cherished shibboleths of creativity and shows that established dictums resting upon a belief that creativity is a kind of human faculty—that individuals can be creative even if they never actually create anything—remain either unproven or internally contradictory. True creativity, she argues, is not a kind of inspired innocence, but is crucially dependent upon the possession of rules, skills and knowledge. Without a grasp of tradition and the conventions which constitute it, students have no basis from which to work, no tools with which to build and transform. Creativity can only be understood in context and judged in relation to ideas of quality production.

In some quarters of drama education there has been considerable resistance to the idea that students should acquire specific theatre skills. Yet throughout the world, arts teachers are accustomed to teaching the skills that make art possible. The young painter will need to know something about how to paint, the dancer to dance, the musician to play—and the actor to act. Aptitude in the arts does not come naturally but, as any musician knows, through explanation, imitation and practice. In my chapter on the craft of drama, I argue that it is naïve to think that young people can make a successful drama with no learned aptitude in acting, play writing or directing. Craft is as essential to the subject of drama as it is to art or music. If we cannot expect students to be creative in a vacuum then we must teach them the grammar of drama, together with a framework for appreciating and understanding its manifestations and some of the craft skills they will need to realise their ideas. By proposing a simple model for the subject of drama and a portfolio of drama-specific skills, knowledge and understanding, the chapter finally closes the gap between classroom drama and the theatre.

1
DRAMA AND EDUCATION

David Hornbrook

to study an art form is to explore a sensibility…such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and…the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep…. A theory of art is thus at the same time a theory of culture.

Clifford Geertz¹

The subject of drama

For as far back into history as we can know, human beings have stepped out before others in a prescribed space to portray aspects of an imagined reality. Ghosts, spirits, kings, citizens and fools have been made substantial as performers and audience connive in that profoundly satisfying act of the pretence we recognise as drama.

Language is not a precise art, and drama, like many other categories of experience, has suffered from attempts at crude and limiting definitions. The exact point at which a dance becomes a drama, for example, or to what extent we are justified in calling dramas those aspects of ordinary life, such as trials or carnivals, which seem to have dramatic features, will doubtless continue to be a matter of debate.² The boundaries of any subject will be healthily fluid and it is not the concern of this book to enter into territorial disputes.

We can be sure, however, that any attempt to catalogue even the undisputed manifestations of drama in the world would consume much computer megabytage; the merest dip into such a database would be sufficient to establish the prodigality of drama as a form of human expression. A casual enquirer venturing no further than the first alphabetical entry point might come across the highly stylised dream-seeking mime of the Australian Aranda people, for example, or the dramatic narratives of the Arctic, where Inuit male actors and a chorus of women portray the liberation of the forces of light at the end of the long polar winter. Entries for Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Aristotle indicate the birth of a sophisticated European dramatic tradition, which itself will contain references to forms as varied as those of Artaud, Appia, Anouilh and the Aldwych farces. Clicking on ‘African theatre’ uncovers the Zauli dancers of the Ivory Coast and the Kaukouran fertility mimes of Senegal; ‘Asian drama’ the Wayang Kulit shadow plays of Java, the classical Cambodian Lakon Kbach Boran female dance-drama or the many interpretations of the Ramlila plays of north India. What binds these variegated categories of activity together, allows us to describe them and thousands of others as dramas, is that they all involve the enactment of stories. Drama, in Martin Esslin’s words, is ‘narrative made visible, a picture given the power to move in time’.³

At the centre of this moving picture, of course, is the actor. Elaborately masked and costumed in Chinese Ching Hsi opera or clad in the rough shifts of Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr-Laboratorium, the actor is the primary agent of make-believe. It is the actor who is the focus of our attention, whose speech and action drive the dramatic narrative forward. But, however skilled he or she may be, the actor cannot alone create drama; we should not forget that make-believe is also the territory of the child and the lunatic.⁴ It is the contract with an audience that distinguishes drama from the explorative fantasies of the child and the psychotic delusions of the mental patient. ‘Let us agree’, says the tacit understanding between a performance and its spectators, ‘that for a brief period we actually are that which we represent’.⁵ While for the vast majority of dramas, the audience is a tangible presence—in a theatre, possibly, or gathered around a village square—there will be some cases where the audience is assumed. Rehearsal is the most obvious example of the existence of implicit spectators, while in some forms of spontaneous dramatic improvisation, such as those developed for use in education or for therapeutic purposes, members of the group are simultaneously actors and audience.⁶

The agreement on the part of the audience to suspend disbelief, however, is not open-ended. Dramatic performances are temporally and spatially framed. There is an understanding about when the performance begins and ends and of its physical boundaries. The actors cannot travel home with you on the bus still playing their parts. In Western theatres, plays commonly begin with curtains going up or lights going down and end with curtain calls. A Bengali Jatra theatre performance signals its beginning with a climactic event, such as the firing of a gun or the entry of a demon. Most dramas are performed on stages, and these delineate the territory of the make-believe. Actors may be hidden behind a curtain or in the wings of a theatre before making an entrance. Alternatively, they may remain in full view, sitting on benches at either side of the stage. Whatever the conventions employed, as members of an audience we know that it is only when the actors move from ‘offstage’ into the agreed playing area that our contract with them begins. Likewise, placing them within that same playing area transforms and aggrandises simple objects, as Chorus from Shakespeare’s The Life of Henry the Fifth reminds the audience.

And so our scene must to the battle fly;
Where (O for pity!) we shall much disgrace,
With four or five most ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,
The name of Agincourt. Yet sit and see,
Minding true things by what their mock’ries be.⁷

Actors, audiences, depicted narratives, an agreement to enter into make-believe;the characterising features of the subject of drama begin to take shape. The significance for education of this emerging picture is the matter of this book.

Teaching drama

We might reasonably expect of those professing to be proficient in a field that they know something about its history and conventions, that they are accomplished in at least some of its characterising practices and that they understand the field’s particular contribution to the sum of human experience. Knowledge, aptitude and understanding, in other words, indicate conversance.

Of course, it is quite possible to become accomplished in only one aspect of a field. Drama is no exception. It is not unusual for universities to offer academic qualifications in drama in which knowledge of the subject is regarded as paramount and may be tested by written examination. A student may study Balinese theatre to doctoral level, for example, but would not be expected to have the skills necessary to perform the Barong dance. Conversely, and historically more commonly, respected and highly trained performers may find it unnecessary to have specialist knowledge of practices beyond their own. The first acting school, established in China during the T’ang period between the seventh and ninth centuries, had no other purpose than to prepare performers for the court theatre. In fourteenth-century Japan, the acting schools founded by Ze’ami Motokiyo for the teaching of Noh theatre had a slightly wider curriculum, not only training young actors in the tightly structured conventions of Noh, but also inducting them in the literary and cultural heritage of Japanese theatre. In Europe, for centuries, acting was a matter of apprenticeship and, in some cases, birth. It was not unusual for seventeenth-century Italian Commedia dell’arte performers to be born into a company and to grow up with a ‘mask’ by which they became completely identified, even to the extent of forsaking a baptismal name for that of the adopted character.⁸

While universities, apprenticeships and academies all contribute to specialist induction in important elements of the field of drama, when the spotlight is turned onto mainstream education, which is, after all, the focus of this book, we shall not want to see a concentration on single aspects of the field to the exclusion of others, but rather an eclectic approach in which knowledge, aptitude and understanding are equally prominent. In this sense, the school subject of drama embraces the whole field of drama, allowing students to sample and engage with its diverse forms in ways which establish an appropriate balance between a knowledge of drama and the mastery of its practices.

The acceptance of drama as a legitimate part of a general education is by no means universal. The arts may seem of peripheral importance to the educational project in countries where few can read or write, however prolific what we know as artistic activity may be there. In the European Community, drama is rarely identified as a separate subject within the compulsory curriculum, although most countries do include it within a broader concept of the arts.⁹ In the English-speaking world, drama is certainly no stranger to schools and performances of plays by school children can be traced back at least to the first half of the sixteenth century. The famous Boys’ Companies of the late 1500s were a great public success,¹⁰ and at the height of their popularity these ‘little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’¹¹ could command the talents of playwrights like John Lyly, George Chapman and Ben Jonson. While the Boys’ Companies did not last to outlive Shakespeare, the tradition of performances in schools from which they grew survived and flourishes still. For educationalist David Hargreaves, arguing that the expressive arts should have a place in a compulsory core curriculum for all students, the school play continues to make ‘a unique contribution to the dignity and community solidarity’ of a school.

Pupils and their parents know the deep impact of public performances of the arts…. It is not at all uncommon for parents to report to staff how the play has engendered a new pleasure, interest and commitment—and sometimes a new willingness to come ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Part I: The Teaching and Learning of Drama
• Part II: Making and Performing Drama in School
• Part III: Watching and Understanding Drama