{"id":580,"date":"2013-01-30T10:49:46","date_gmt":"2013-01-30T08:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=580"},"modified":"2013-01-30T10:49:46","modified_gmt":"2013-01-30T08:49:46","slug":"theatre-in-class-the-first-dessertion-and-the-last-one-i-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/01\/30\/theatre-in-class-the-first-dessertion-and-the-last-one-i-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"THEATRE IN CLASS: THE FIRST DESSERTION (AND THE LAST ONE I HOPE!) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

[This one is for my ‘English Theatre’ students]
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

I feel quite frustrated today because one of my students in the elective subject \u2018English Theatre\u2019 has walked out on me \u2013even before classes begin. Actually, two have done so, one for job-related reasons and the one that worries me because (her claim) she\u2019s very shy.<\/p>\n

As the Syllabus explains, students get 30% of their final mark for class participation and this is a very high percentage because you\u2019re expected to take part in dramatised readings of the plays selected. The shy student misunderstood this Syllabus, thinking she had a choice not to act and has left me rather than, um, embarrass herself. I\u2019m therefore writing this, thinking that perhaps other students are in a similar panic about the subject, which makes no sense at all to me… This is all about enjoying ourselves together as we learn<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To begin with, most of our students choose eventually to become teachers, a profession for which being stage-shy is quite counterproductive. I am myself very shy<\/em> in many social and personal situations but when I \u2018perform\u2019 in front of a class I just assume a different, bolder personality and that does the trick (I think \u2013at least for me). I\u2019m sure it\u2019s like this for many, many teachers around the world. <\/p>\n

Also, I believe that part of the training we give you in the degree consists of reinforcing your oral skills, including the ability to do public presentations. Playing a part in a scene is perhaps simpler, for you\u2019re asked to assume a fake personality \u2013what you say aren\u2019t even your words!! So you can always relax and let the author bear the burden of what you\u2019re saying (and perhaps doing).<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m asking students to do is not<\/em> in any case to perform as if they were actors, in costume and with no text as a prop. I ask students to prepare, simply, readings. It\u2019s absolutely their choice to decide whether to use costumes or to transform the classroom into an actual theatre. My experience of the other two editions of this very same subject is that students choose to have fun<\/em> and offer a total show but it\u2019s not compulsory to do so (well, having fun is…).<\/p>\n

In the previous edition, two years ago, what I most enjoyed was that I never knew what the classroom would look like for each performance nor what students would be wearing. I\u2019ll give you three memorable examples. In a scene from Brian Friel\u2019s Translations<\/em> (in the first edition of the subject) the student playing the English officer in charge of occupying a small Irish village chose to wear a black leather coat and a Nazi decoration \u2013my God, did we understand the horror of occupation! People were awed… In Hysteria<\/em>, a farce by Terry Johnson, the female protagonist is all the time naked on scene \u2013logically, one cannot have naked students in class, and the girl who played the part decided to wear a sign around her neck announcing \u2018I\u2019m naked!\u2019 Everyone loved that. Most memorable was the sight of the young man playing the alleged madman in Joe Penhall\u2019s Blue\/Orange<\/em> dressed entirely in orange and reading from the text against a background image of a blue orange (which I had found on the internet two minutes before class started!).<\/p>\n

Some of the texts we\u2019ll read together are hard and demanding in their presentation of violence and sex on stage \u2013but, then, you can simply read them and comment on them. I had a very concerned German Erasmus student who came to me absolutely adamant, annoyed and worried, that she would NOT do what Sarah Kane had written in Blasted<\/em>. Of course not<\/em>!! Then she amazed us all by playing a victimised woman in one scene and a brutal soldier in the next one with the only interval of stepping onto the corridor for a quick costume change. Actually, the play that has me worried sick is Simon McBurney and Complicit\u00e9\u2019s very beautiful A Disappearing Number<\/em>, as I see no way we can reproduce in class, not even remotely, its mad visual richness. (I\u2019m thinking of leaving that to shy students…)<\/p>\n

Since I thought last time that it was unfair to subject students to the \u2018ordeal\u2019 of having them act in class, I myself acted a part. I chose the monologue of the terrorist in Simon Stephens\u2019s Pornography<\/em>, which I accompanied with a PowerPoint presentation about the London outrages of 2007. This is someone (man or woman, who knows) travelling on the underground to plant a bomb and Stephens\u2019s whole point is that s\/he happens to be as ordinary as you and me. Those are twenty minutes of my life that I recall with all their intensity, dry mouth included, and I\u2019m looking forward to taking that tube ride again this time. What a lesson about evil!<\/p>\n

As a teacher, I must say it is impossible for me to imagine any other way of teaching theatre than doing<\/em> theatre \u2013whether it\u2019s simply reading aloud or turning the classroom space upside down and yourselves. When re-reading the plays, I\u2019ve been wondering all the time how we\u2019re going to present this and that, and here\u2019s the challenge \u2013some solutions to this problem I\u2019m already familiar with as I have learned from the students who read the scenes. Others I can\u2019t wait to see!!<\/p>\n

So, please, trust me<\/em> \u2013I know what I\u2019m doing and I only hope to give you a very enjoyable time to play<\/em> (I love it that in English texts for the stage are called \u2018plays\u2019 and that actors \u2018play\u2019 parts). And if you\u2019re shy, remember that a) you choose how to present yourself on \u2018stage\u2019, b) some of the best actors are very shy for, as I say, they find in playing fake personalities an outlet for this shyness.<\/p>\n

See you soon in class!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This one is for my ‘English Theatre’ students] I feel quite frustrated today because one of my students in the elective subject \u2018English Theatre\u2019 has walked out on me \u2013even before classes begin. Actually, two have done so, one for job-related reasons and the one that worries me because (her claim) she\u2019s very shy. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}