The JOURNAL for
DRAMA in
EDUCATION
Volume 28, Issue 2
Summer 2012
ISSN 1476 – 9395
£3.00
• Editorial
• Chair's Report
Ruth Saxton
•
Drama - A Public Space
Chris Cooper
• Medusa: Not Settling for Less
Maggie Hulson and Guy Williams
• Citizens and Stewards: Dorothy Heathcote’s
‘Mantle of the Expert’ System
David Allen
• The Drama of History – an experiment in
co-operative teaching: (Chapters 3 and 4)
John Fines and Raymond Verrier
International Section:
• Kids at the Centre ‘ArtWorks’ at Valleys Kids
collaborate with ‘Common Room of Art for Kids’
Kronika Contemporary Art Gallery
Miranda Ballin
• Bond - 50 years in theatre
Maggie Hulson
The National Association
for The Teaching of Drama
Charity Number 1135457
NATD
NATD
The National Association for the Teaching of Drama
For membership enquiries please contact
[email protected]
Correspondence
Maggie Hulson
10, Olinda Road
London N16 6TL
[email protected]
For home and overseas subscriptions contact
Kirsty Fechter
Performing Arts Administrator
Kingstone School, Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 6RB
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THE JOURNAL FOR DRAMA IN EDUCATION has a worldwide readership and is
sent to individual and institutional subscribers in Canada, Eire, South Africa, Greece,
Palestine, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK.
All members of NATD receive a copy as part of their membership.
The Editorial Committee welcomes contributions and letters for publication. The
views expressed do not necessarily reflect editorial or NATD policy.
Editorial Committee
Mitch Holder-Mansfield, Undergraduate Philosophy student, University of York and
Vice-Chair of Bridges Arts Group, Crawley, West Sussex
[email protected]
Maggie Hulson, Professional Mentor, Gladesmore School, London
[email protected]
Guy Williams, Director of Performing Arts, Sir Robert Woodard Academy, Lancing.
[email protected]
Roger Wooster, freelance actor, director, and academic.
[email protected]
Cover design Lucy Fredericks
Notes for Intending Contributors to
The Journal for Drama in Education
The Journal for Drama in Education is published twice a year and contains a
refereed section. All articles that have been refereed will be indicated
underneath the title on the contents page and within the Journal where the article
appears.
The Editorial Committee welcomes contributions on any aspect of drama and
education, contributions which reflect on NATD policy, and more general
contributions on education.
The following guidelines are offered to contributors but the Editorial Committee
recognises that not all potential contributors will have access to the necessary
technology. Contributors should not therefore be discouraged if they can only
submit articles in another form.
It is preferred that contributions are submitted by email to the address on the
inside front cover. The author's details should be submitted on a separate page and
should include the personal details which the author would like to appear at the
beginning of the article, as well as a short digest of the article. Authors should
also include full address, telephone, fax and email numbers.
If the articles are for the refereed section they should be presented using the
Harvard system of referencing. Footnotes should appear as endnotes at the end
of each article.
REFEREES
Lina Attel - Director of the Performing Arts Centre, Noor Al Hussein Foundation,
Jordan.
Gavin Bolton - Reader Emeritus, University of Durham.
Professor David Davis - Professor of Drama in Education, Birmingham City University.
Dr Brian Edmiston - Professor, Ohio State University, USA.
Wasim Kurdi - Researcher, Qattan Centre for Educational Research Development,
Rammallah, Palestine.
Carmel O'Sullivan - Lecturer in Education, Trinity College, Dublin.
Allan Owens - Professor of Drama Education, University of Chester.
Jaroslav Provaznik - Principle Lecturer in Drama in Education, Charles University,
Prague, Czech Republic.
Bill Roper - Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Birmingham City University.
Dr. Urvashi Sahni - President of the Studyhall Educational Foundation, India.
Dr Paddy Walsh - Senior Lecturer, School of Education, Queen's University, Belfast.
1
Contents
Page
Editorial
3
Chair's Report
Ruth Saxton
9
Drama - A Public Space
Chris Cooper
12
Medusa: Not Settling for Less
Maggie Hulson and Guy Williams
24
Citizens and Stewards: Dorothy Heathcote’s
‘Mantle of the Expert’ System
David Allen
41
The Drama of History – an experiment in
co-operative teaching: (Chapters 3 and 4)
John Fines and Raymond Verrier
51
International Section:
Kids at the Centre ‘ArtWorks’ at Valleys Kids
collaborate with ‘Common Room of Art for Kids’
Kronika Contemporary Art Gallery
Miranda Ballin
64
Bond - 50 years in Theatre
Maggie Hulson
72
2
Editorial
The local elections have brought a shift of power to many town halls. There was a time
when such a change would have an almost immediate effect upon local policies,
including Education policy. But the days when teams of Local Education subject
Advisors roamed the schools, and each LEA would have its own educational priorities,
have long been swept away. Decisions about curriculum content are now made in
London, Cardiff and Belfast (Scotland’s education system has ever been more
independent). The last twenty-five years has also seen a drive to take away from local
authorities fiscal relationships with schools through various systems of delegation of
funding and the encouragement of independent schools and Academies. This
‘encouragement’ is now being given further weight through the setting up of an RSA
Academies Commission. The three-person panel includes Christine Gilbert who has for
some time made her support for Academies clear. Indeed, the Commission has been
clearly instructed as to the conclusions it should reach including the need for ongoing
inspection, oversight of financial management to ensure and generally to make the case
for ‘academisation’ (sic) as a route to improved attainment, due diligence, outcomes
and the servicing of the ‘public interest’. NATD members who are interested in finding
out more may wish to visit http://educevery.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/the-rsaacademies-commission. It seems clear that what children learn and how they learn it is
to become increasingly centralised, as will the way in which children prove that they
have learned it and teachers prove that they have taught it.
Education in British schools since 1944 has demonstrated an ongoing tension between
whether schools should be preparing children to fulfil their niches in society (manual,
technical or academic) or whether education should seek to maximise each individual
child’s potential. This battle has been fought out between public and private education,
between Grammar schools and Comprehensives and now is set to continue between
Academies and ‘the others’. At such times it serves us well to ask ‘cui bono?’ – ‘who
benefits?’ As drama practitioners we find that our conscious practice is that of
nurturing the whole child and valuing each child’s abilities and aspirations as they
emerge. As a result we frequently find ourselves at odds with the teaching and
assessment strategies that we are constrained to work within. This has long been so. A
pioneer of drama in schools in the early decades of the twentieth century, Caldwell
Cook, was hounded from his school and died of drink and despair. Hopefully things are
not that bad for most of us, but it is a constant struggle to gain trust and respect for
what we achieve with our pupil cohorts and individuals within those cohorts. It is
amazing and disappointing in equal measure that despite the work of some great
practitioners in the latter part of the twentieth century, even fellow drama specialists
greet our work with ignorance and mistrust at times.
Darren Henley’s recent independent review of cultural education for the DCMS
(www.dcms.gov.uk/images/publications/Cultural_Education_report.pdf) on the face of
it provides a thorough and enthusiastic defence of the importance of cultural and
3
creative education in England. However, closer inspection reveals that its view of
cultural education is myopic. The arts in schools are seen as either something to ‘allow
children to gain knowledge through the learning of facts’ and be understood, learned
about and critically examined OR for children to ‘learn skills through the opportunity
to practise specific art forms.’ (Henley Review, 2012, 3.2). That is, a child’s cultural
education consists of either becoming a consumer or producer of culture. Not that there
is anything particularly wrong with these aspirations, but they do overlook what we
spend most of our time doing; that is using artistic penalty-free exploration and
empathetic approaches in order to understand the world. We aspire to giving children
the tools to take control of their future, not merely to consume or produce the cultural
menu – though many will want to do this. There has been much talk in recent NATD
EGMs of how our work is much less to do with the ‘teaching of drama’ (ambiguous
term) and far more to do with the concept of ‘learning through drama’. There is very
little evidence in Henley’s report that this central cultural and creative driver has been
acknowledged. In Paragraph 3.28 he concludes:
An excellent cultural education will help children to learn how to be
creative, while at the same time helping them learn about creative
and cultural subjects.
There is nothing here really to argue about, except that one fears that the ‘creativity’
sought is that which will focus on developing industrial consumerism and that the
cultural learning may become a way of marginalising those with a different cultural
heritage.
The government response to this report (www.culture.gov.uk/images/
publications/Cultural_Education_Govt_response.pdf) is generally favourable and there
is even talk of disaggregating Dance from PE and Drama from English which would
involve discussions perhaps not visited since the 1988 Education Reform Act. The
response also warms to the ideas of awards and medals from Downing Street to
recognise cultural and creative achievement in schools. Britain’s Schools have got
Talent and we may look forward with confidence to Simon Cowell becoming a schools
inspector: my tongue is firmly in my cheek, but watch this space.
Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of this Review and the positive government
response, is that it chimes uneasily with other aspects of government policy already
being played out. There is pressure to persuade schools and pupils away from
undertaking ‘soft’ culturally based subjects in schools and colleges. In Higher
Education there are even moves to restrict funding for arts subjects in favour of those
degrees which serve the perceived industrial and economic needs of the country. There
is a sleight of hand being played out before us and we must take care to see through the
conjuror’s art.
The centralisation of finance and curriculum over the past two generations has severely
4
affected the autonomy of the classroom teacher. How often do we hear complaints of
form filling and box ticking? A teacher reaching retirement now might well wonder
quite how we got to where we are. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as
Jefferson said, and that was never more true than for us today. The distracting pressures
from inspection, policy and curriculum changes and the ever present lack of
understanding of how and why we do what we do in Drama, tend to consume our
working lives totally and leave no room for this vigilance, but it is crucial. Consider the
new Teachers’ Standards that come into force this year (www.education.gov.uk
/publications/eOrderingDownload/teachers%20standards.pdf) and to which all teachers
in England will be bound. Once again, superficially the Standards appear totally
reasonable, charging us to ‘maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour but then
add ‘within and outside school’ (p 8). Best beware on a Saturday night! We are also
instructed to ‘not undermine fundamental British values’ and these include ‘the rule of
law’ concerning which we are also not to do anything which ‘might lead [pupils] to
break the law’. ‘Fundamental British values’ are expected to be upheld and the
definition of these is referenced to the government’s Anti-terrorist Prevent Strategy.
The Journal Committee is at one in our concern about the possible implication of these
standards and this wording upon our drama teaching in schools. Our explorations often
allow students to question the status quo and to sense their responsibilities as human
beings to understand and at times challenge their world. It is a trap in which TIE
companies in the 70s and 80 frequently were caught as they encouraged pupils to
question the motives and outcomes of historical events and the way they were present
within the curriculum. In these new Standards for the first time perhaps, each of us, as
teachers, have to be able to show that we have not done something. If a child takes to
the streets in anger and frustration can you prove that you did not get him or her to
question the society against which the bottle is hurled? Despite the pressures of work
upon us all, eternal vigilance will be required.
We can’t promise to protect our pension rights or resist the drive to local wage
bargaining, but the Journal Committee hopes that the content of Journal 28:2 will offer
some sustenance to help in this process of the defence of drama in schools and indeed
its advancement. Together with this Journal we are also publishing a supplement
reproducing a selection of Dorothy’s prolific contributions to the NATD Journal over
the years as well as some articles by others about her work. We think members will
welcome the opportunity to see the progress of some of her ideas over the years and the
centrality of her inspirational approaches to us all. Two other special supplements are
planned. The first is a history of NATD, which will be distributed at our National
Conference in September. The second will look at key writings on Theatre in
Education from past Journals and will be produced early next year to rally support for
this threatened approach to education and theatre and which will highlight the
symbiotic learning relationship which exists between the two disciplines.
In the Chair’s report Ruth Saxton takes us through the activities of the NEC in planning
this year’s conference and also the discussions that have taken place at the EGMs. She
5
also gives details of the 2012 Conference and you should find further details and a
booking form with this journal. As a preparation for this year’s conference we have
taken this opportunity to reproduce Chris Cooper’s keynote speech from last year.
Dorothy Heathcote was unable to be there due to her increasing frailty, but Cooper
reminds us of her unique rapport with children before going on to dextrously explore
the interweaving of the political and theatrical context in which we are now working
together with personal anecdote and reflection. The potentially dire situation he
describes still challenges us and will no doubt form a backdrop to this year’s
discussions at Oriel. Also from last year’s conference are notes and commentaries
describing and exploring the workshop run by Maggie Hulson and Guy Williams.
Several participants requested a detailed breakdown of this workshop and an indication
of how it worked in its original form in schools. Hulson and Williams offer here a timeline of the project together with a useful indication of the techniques and considerations
for those who might like to use or adapt the approach in their own work.
Dorothy Heathcote continues to dominate our theoretical and practical debates and
NATD members will find it useful to read the Heathcote supplement alongside David
Allen’s useful historical analysis of the development of her work in the main journal.
Here you will find an insightful account of how she moved from her early ‘Man in a
Mess’ work to the beginnings of the sophisticated system that was to become Mantle of
the Expert. The thematic links between the two approaches are clearly delineated as he
explains the important role that ‘crisis’ has played as a motivator within the MoE
approach whilst also exploring the need for space to ‘reflect’ within the process. These
two aspects of her work, Allen demonstrates, clearly are rooted in the same dramatic
framework of action and reflection.
The Journal also contains two further chapters from John Fines and Raymond Verrier’s
excellent The Drama of History. The two chapters deal with the difficulties, and yet the
importance, of getting children involved in the drama through ‘making a bargain’ and
offering support to those brave souls who early in the process are willing to commit.
Chapter 4 wrestles with the frequent criticism of using too much discussion in drama
sessions. Fines and Verrier make a clear case for the importance of giving children
‘enough time to understand and warm towards a topic’ and describe the ‘perennial
delights [of seeing] a child discovering that his own experience and ideas are really
useful to the group’. The indebtedness to Heathcote’s work is present in these chapters
and serve as another reminder as to how long she has been core to our understanding of
drama in education.
The International contribution this issue comes from Miranda Ballin who has worked
using drama for many years with young people in the deprived post-industrial
communities of the South Wales valleys. In her piece she describes an exchange project
undertaken with a group from Bytom in southern Poland who have mainly worked
through visual art. The article vividly describes how the two groups shared their
working methodologies and developed a working practice that led to a piece of
6
guerrilla theatre based on notions of superheroes.
Finally your attention is drawn to Big Brum’s celebration of Edward Bond’s work,
entitled ‘Bond@50’. You will find the programme of open events running until
December listed, together with details of how you can help support the ongoing
collaboration between Bond and Big Brum.
Finally, we would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Brian Woolland who has resigned
as a member of the Journal committee, due to a growing number of work
commitments. Brian has made a significant contribution to the Journal, not only
because he is highly skilled as an editor, but also because of his technological expertise
and his finely written articles. It was Brian who digitalised the back copies index (no
mean feat) and who guided The Journal through an important transition in formatting
for print. He remains a very active member of NATD and we hope and trust that he
will continue to offer his skill and wisdom to the Association and its Journal.
We hope that you enjoy this edition of the journal and urge all members to consider
contributing in the future and we look forward to seeing you all at Conference.
7
Chair’s Report
by
Ruth Saxton
Since my last report, this year has already proven to be a busy one for your NEC.
We ended 2011 by celebrating the life and lessons of Dorothy Heathcote at her
memorial, beautifully led by her daughter and family.
Then we hit the ground running in 2012. Following our former chair, Paul Gibbins’ call
for a dialogue about the direction of our Association, in February the NATD held an
Extraordinary General Meeting to address our future, as well as some outstanding
issues from October’s AGM:
•
•
•
•
Treasurer’s Report
Student Membership/Quoracy at AGM
Charitable Status
Trustees
We were a small but determined group that met and I think we were all surprised by
just how much we covered. It definitely is a time for change and everyone was
incredibly open and brave in discussion.
Firstly, Liam Harris shared his succinct Treasurer’s report. This showed members what
a fantastic job he has already done in straightening out our finances, which was noted
and he was formally thanked for.
After recognising the importance of the next generation of NATD, last year we
recruited many new student members. However, this has since caused some problems
with quoracy at AGMs. So, following a discussion about voting rights for students, it
has been agreed that they are too important to remove that privilege, so we are
amending the membership title and proposing a rewording of the constitution to take
this into account.
We have also been approaching possible new trustees and drawing up a document of
their duties. In contrast to previous years, these people will be separate from the NEC
in order to protect the interests of the Association. We are very excited about the
prospective trustees and look forward to introducing them at AGM in September.
For the main part of the meeting, our Secretary, Gemma (who kindly hosted the event
at Hazelwick School), successfully facilitated discussion with a mini mantle based
around an enterprise that was archiving our resources and advising a development
agency that wanted to set up a resource centre and support other countries with creative
8
teaching. We therefore had to decide which documents from our history we felt were
still relevant and which could be filed. This was a major learning experience for the
newer members, as the more experienced members filled in the historic holes in our
knowledge and the relevance of past key figures.
We also looked at just how much members got for their membership fee and whether
we could support them more in other ways – a key concept in defining the Association
today.
By the end of the meeting, as those of us heading away from Sussex anxiously looked
towards a very snowy North, it was obvious that we needed another day of discussion.
There had been some significant proposals, including a possible name change for
NATD to the National Association of Learning Through Drama, to reflect the change
in direction and desire to attract more non-drama specialists.
It was also clear that there was still some distance to cover in how best we could carry
on Dorothy’s legacy. Through a developing relationship with Luke Abbott, we are now
hoping to officially work more closely with mantleoftheexpert.com and support each
other’s activities, ‘hand in hand’.
The next meeting was called for April 21st. We continued from where we had left off in
Sussex and plunged straight back into the meat of the debate. Liam Harris, Treasurer,
constructed a timeline from the inception of NATD to a point in the future, on to which
we all placed artefacts/documents/notes, where we thought they belonged. Others could
then move them as they saw fit. Again this was a fantastic insight into the history of the
Association and all the wonderful experiences and support it has offered teachers in the
past.
We then looked into the future and explored what was important for NATD and how
we can achieve these goals. These will become evident over time. Many of which will
be discussed at AGM in September.
Which brings me neatly round to conference. I can now reveal this year’s conference
title of ‘Imaginary Teaching, Outstanding Learning’. We are looking forward to
providing members with an event that arms them with the skills and experiences to go
back into the classroom and experiment in the application of drama for learning for
more proactive learners.
Luke Abbott will be running Mantle of the Expert workshops on both days, to cope
with the overwhelming demand, and we already have confirmation from Headteacher,
Richard Kieran, who will also be sharing his successes at using the approach school
wide.
Conference will run from 28th – 30th September at Oriel College in Oxford. Please
9
complete the enclosed form or go to one of our online outlets, so you don’t miss out on
what promises to be an even more exciting and optimistic event than ever.
As well as that, we are currently choosing our new President, so I am not exaggerating
when I say we really are working hard to try to make NATD more relevant, more
progressive and more sharply focussed on the needs of young people and their teachers
than ever.
If you have any questions or suggestions for any of us, do not hesitate to contact us.
We’d love to hear from you!
10
Drama - A Public Space
by
Chris Cooper
(Chris Cooper is director of Big Brum Theatre in Education Company. He is also a
playwright and works extensively abroad as freelance director and writer, and as a
workshop leader and trainer.)
This article comprises the key note speech given by Chris to the annual conference of
NATD 2011
Good afternoon. I want to begin with an apology because after my contribution I will
have to dash off. It’s Big Brum’s production weekend for Frankenstein which is our
new secondary programme and we need to rehearse. We will have had 14 days in total
to rehearse, design and produce it from beginning to end but that’s another - though not
unrelated - story of the crisis we are all dealing with. I don’t like dipping in and out like
this but when I was invited to contribute to conference I said yes despite the clash of
dates because I thought that it was important to be here.
Secondly, I have to confess to being a little bit nervous, although not as nervous as I
would have been had Dorothy been present today.
Thinking about that reminds me of the first time I experienced Dorothy in action. It
was in the autumn of 1989, I think, and I was a young actor teacher at The Dukes TIE
Company in Lancaster. Dorothy was the consultant on a project we were doing at the
Helmshore textile museum. I can’t remember now if it was set in post-Napoleonic
recession-hit Britain with Peterloo looming, or later around the Chartists, nevertheless
it was the stuff of good drama.
One day Dorothy came to see the project in action and as the action ranged all over this
wonderful museum where actor-teachers would appear and disappear, engaging the
children in role, so did Dorothy. On this occasion I think it’s fair to say I was having
one of those days and at one point I found myself in a very dark corner surrounded by a
group of children who I was attempting to recruit to my clandestine cause against the
ruthless mill owner. The only problem was that the children wouldn’t talk to me and
inexperienced as I was the tendency to fill the silence was proving overwhelming. It
was at this point that Dorothy roamed into my dark corner. I heard a door open behind
me and I remember thinking “Oh %$£”! It’s Dorothy”. I didn’t look; I just KNEW it
was her behind me. So, although with hindsight this seems impossible, I decided to
work even harder. I was giving it my best, emoting passionately, with sweat trickling
down my spine. The more silent the children were the more hysterical I became, like
one of those nightmares that seem to last forever, where you are trapped and there’s no
way out. I had sunk to my knees imploring, no, begging, them to answer my questions.
It’s possible I might even have said “don’t you know who’s stood behind me?” when I
suddenly felt a strong hand on my shoulder and a voice said – [in that well elocuted
West Yorkshire accent] “Shall I?”
11
So Dorothy stepped out of the shadows, looked at the children for a moment and then
asked them exactly the same question that I had asked (repeatedly). There was a
moment’s pause before the floodgates opened and response gushed out of them. They
wouldn’t shut up. And that was the first time I realised that it’s not just what you ask
that matters, but how you ask it.
Anyway, back to this moment. We are living in a period of profound social, political
and economic crisis. The disturbances on the streets of English cities in August 2011
have once again underlined the corollary between economic slump, austerity measures
and social unrest. While we would undoubtedly acknowledge that the school
environment itself expresses the crisis, it is worth noting what occurs when they are
closed; for all the faults of the school system we have, for most young people, it is the
only social and public space they can physically occupy and own. And schools are also
largely staffed by teachers, committed professionals, who unlike the curriculum,
struggle to put the needs of young people first. The remodelled curriculum with its
focus on ‘facts, principles and fundamental operations’ 1is a reductive one. And ‘facts,
principles and fundamental operations’ 2 without human values are arid and dangerous.
The source of human value is the imagination, and theatre and drama is the imagination
in action. But drama is about meaning and knowledge, not facts. So when conference
asks itself: ‘How can Drama not only survive, but thrive within the current educational
environment? Without being compromised? Without settling for less?’ 3 I think, given
Michael Gove’s ‘vision’, to be honest, we might as well ask how can progressive state
education survive? What I mean, is that the answer to those questions, in my opinion,
ultimately lies in a political struggle that we all need to take a relationship to. That
doesn’t mean of course that we should relinquish our responsibilities as drama teachers
to do everything in our power to influence our own environment, ensure that drama
survives in our own schools, and that the art form of drama flourishes in our own
lessons.
And therefore because of the climate we live in, when we ask, ‘Who decides what
young people need to know and understand?’ 4 I think we have to be brutally honest and
say fundamentally, not you, or I, or the kids.
Yet it seems to me that in the common sense world of reality, of every day life rather
than the rarefied environment of the school curriculum, children decide what they need
to know all the time. At the risk of digression, take my youngest son as an example.
When he was five (he’s 6 now) he told me on the way to school one day that he was
fed up and frustrated because he is so slow and always the last child in the class to
complete any task. I was devastated to hear this and immediately began to think about
1
DFE website
As above
3
One of the central focusing questions for the NATD conference
4
As above
2
12
where my wife, Ceri, and I had gone wrong as parents. Why hadn’t we noticed this?
All I could think to say was,
“Why?”
“Well,” he answered. “Because I don’t really listen to what the teachers are saying.”
At first I was relieved. Then I tried to explain that this wasn’t a good idea and
suggested strategies to help. Even though I know he wanted to change this situation, all
my suggestions were soon forgotten the minute he stepped into school. We all know
that for young children time can seem so arbitrary. It’s because it’s one of the hardest
of concepts to grasp. You can only really see it when you can read a clock face, but
when you’re five you haven’t got the time for that and the reality is that he has little or
no sense of time and easily becomes distracted.
But I know the real reason he doesn’t complete work is less to do with his sense of time
and more to do, despite the best efforts of his teachers, with being bored. He’s easily
distracted because he’s looking for something more interesting to do. Now he can’t
help himself to deal with that problem, and at the moment there doesn’t seem to be
enough on offer for his teachers to deal with it either.
But he has explored time for himself in a different way at home. When he was 5 he
realised that Mum and Dad will not always be there and that they are going to die. He
was stunned and cried – and I really mean– cried his heart out for 30 minutes. We all
cried. I’d certainly never considered my own mortality from that perspective before and
it was really upsetting. But that began a process of becoming, and of coming to know
for him. He started to work out familial relationships; worked out that Mum couldn’t
really be 21. Then one day, months on, when he was reading at tea time he asked
“Are you my ancestor’s?”
“No.” I replied, “Ancestors are more distant relatives like grandparents, ancestors are
no longer alive.”
“You soon will be though,” he cheerfully noted.
And yesterday morning at breakfast he said,
“I’ve got a big question for you two.”
He eyed me up first.
“Where does life come from? Did we come from dinosaurs?”
Like all good Dads I referred him to his Mum.
There is a clear distinction to be made between who decides what my son learns at
school and his relationship to it, and what he learns outside of school and the use he
makes of it. In fact it’s fair to say the difference between his experience at school and at
home is that he is deciding what young people need to know and understand and you
can follow the logic of his journey from understanding his parents’ mortality to his
interest in the evolution of the species - it’s universal but very particular.
He still has little or no sense of time in a practical sense but then again the point is that
he won’t acquire that until the use of time becomes more purposeful for him. There is
little space for that at school. How could there be with this curriculum in a class with
30 children all seeking attention, which I’m sure is one of the main reasons people pay
huge fees to send their children to private schools with class sizes no larger than 12.
13
I do, though, visit many schools and there is certainly something very important
lacking across the curriculum. I’m sure many of you have varied and different views
about this, but recently Edward Bond said, during an interview we were both doing
together, that we can show a child where the continent of Africa is on the map, but only
you can know who you are, can map your ‘self’. That is the responsibility of each and
every one of us, but also because we live in society the ‘self’ is socially constructed,
therefore Edward was also posing a social question. He was also identifying a
fundamental difference between facts and values. The map of Africa involves facts –
knowing yourself requires values. And I believe that while the exploration of values is
sadly lacking in the contemporary curriculum, drama is purposely designed to provide
a public space to fulfil this function in the class room. And I believe that it truly is
something we should never compromise or settle for less on because we have never
been more in need of a public space that exists for the purpose of creating ourselves
and testing our values, of making us more human. Because no public space exists in a
vacuum - it is a product of history and culture. And as I said earlier, we are living
through a period of extraordinary crisis – economically, politically, socially and
culturally.
When I was 14, Thatcher came to power. I was fortunate to be just old enough to
escape being part of what became known as ‘the lost generation’, but I remember the
early to mid-eighties as bleak and hard and at times hopeless – finding work, any work,
was difficult. But what young people face today, including my own 18 and 16 year
olds, is much worse unless we can stop them from what they are doing.
The Chancellor said about the recession that ‘we’re all in this together’, but we know
that is a big lie. The national debt is being used as a blunt instrument to reconstruct the
foundations of society – a society of more inequality and less social justice, with
obscene wealth concentrated in fewer hands. Where we once had the welfare state, we
now have the neo-Burkeian Big Society, which would have the most vulnerable in
society dependent on charity once more. So in terms of education, particularly access to
tertiary education for working class people, the outlook is terrible. And in terms of
progressive children-centred education –never before has so much that was good been
undone so quickly. I don’t need to tell you about the further ruinous damage Gove’s
curriculum review, academies, free schools and English Baccalaureate will do to state
education.
There are many expressions of the crisis culturally too. In July there was the phone
hacking scandal at the News of the World. I am reminding us about this because not
only are they trying to sweep it away under the carpet as quickly as possible, but it
highlighted a crisis of public space, because public space is not just physical – it can be
spiritual and technological.
The relationship between News International and the government (Rebecca Brookes
and senior News International staff enjoyed 15 visits to Cameron in the first 18 months
14
of his administration) has utterly corrupted and disfigured the democratic process – as
did the Labour party’s before it. There can be no doubt about this. When Cameron
stood up to acknowledge the culpability of all political parties at Westminster in order
to avoid taking responsibility for appointing Andy Coulson – it was the only time the
phrase “we were all in this together” rang true. The corruption of course extends to the
police force whose officers have profited from the sale of privileged information to the
Murdoch Press. It’s been going on for years. The most relevant details of this scandal
were published by The Guardian and in Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News in 2009.
No one bothered too much then. We turned a blind eye.
So why did it become such a scandal? Well it undoubtedly was the straw that broke the
camel’s back following the MP’s expenses scandal, bankers’ theft, and recession.
Seething discontent was able to express itself because when the death of a young girl,
Milly Dowler, became so evidently a commodity to sell, to exploit, to profit from and
the abuse was so extreme that the ideological veil was suddenly lifted. Instantly,
prying into the lives of politicians and celebrities or ‘freaks’ and hapless victims (what
the ‘news’ is all about) where information has become confused with entertainment, or
info-tainment as John Pilger once coined it, was exposed for what it was.
It was a very important moment and Murdoch’s public apology, the swift closure of the
News of the World and the public inquiry should never be allowed to obscure or bury
that. This event both created a public space but also, contradictorily, expressed the
virtual absence of it. Three months of the anger and indignation felt by so many, the
common ground that the ‘public’ occupied, has been re-occupied and obscured. We had
nothing to sustain or develop our opposition to being manipulated and lied to.
Then in August of course we had the riots, which to the government’s relief switched
the focus from the political elite and back on to the marginalised. I’m sure you are
more than aware of the invective aimed at young people as a result but I would like to
draw your attention to one particularly vile piece of polemic by The Daily Mail’s Max
Hastings, whose article of 10 August 2011 boasts one of the longest titles ever written
in a tabloid:
Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral,
uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters.
It also contains pornographic passages such as the following:
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it
seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might
make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between
right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to
eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of
others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear
15
which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing
what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it....
And:
They are an absolute deadweight upon society, because they contribute
nothing yet cost the taxpayer billions. Liberal opinion holds they are
victims, because society has failed to provide them with opportunities to
develop their potential. Most of us would say this is nonsense. Rather,
they are victims of a perverted social ethos, which elevates personal
freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline —
tough love — which alone might enable some of its members to escape
from the swamp of dependency in which they live.
Only education — together with politicians, judges, policemen and
teachers with the courage to force feral humans to obey rules the rest of
us have accepted all our lives — can provide a way forward and a way
out for these people….
And I promise this is the last:
They are products of a culture which gives them so much
unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human
beings. My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of
values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and
Birmingham.
Unless or until those who run Britain introduce incentives for decency
and impose penalties for bestiality which are today entirely lacking,
there will never be a shortage of young rioters and looters such as those
of the past four nights, for whom their monstrous excesses were ‘a great
fire, man’.
There were images aplenty, like the one below, to supplement the rhetoric.
There isn’t the time or space today to take a closer look at what Hastings is saying,
such as his implicit acceptance that there will always be an underclass, but it’s
important to acknowledge that this is not the ranting of a mad man, but the rant of man
with a vision. The class he represents is back in power – they have a plan and they have
targets, not only the young and the poor but liberal people with liberal values, people
like teachers and arts educators, people like you and I. This is because in days like
these, taking sides becomes increasingly difficult to avoid. Protest is often spontaneous
and public space contested. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Guardian:
Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people
committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have
16
been committing daytime robbery. …. The Tories are right when they
say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with
what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning
underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job,
a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a
message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck
where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our
increasingly fortressed borders.
Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal:
evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools
and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a
stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear,
and do it quietly.
This is what Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the
same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of
what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have
more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance – whether
organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's
physics.
While it is still permitted in schools, drama has an important part to play in enabling
young people to know themselves as social and historical beings and as active agents in
determining the future. I think it’s the only way that drama can remain relevant to the
lives of young people and enable them to determine what they need to know and
understand. This requires us to pay attention to the art form itself by asking ourselves
what the function of drama is in the 21st century and what it needs to be.
I do worry though that too often teachers and arts educators do settle for less. Drama is
often reduced to performance skills, or used as a tool for cross curricular teaching at the
expense of the art form and without paying enough attention to what drama is being
used to teach.
In order to do this I believe we should look to Ancient Greece. It’s worth reminding
ourselves that Edward Bond was saying we should do this in the NATD Fight for
Drama Conference in 1988. He has consistently returned to the theme since:
The Greeks created the first democracy. They did this not because they
had a public assembly and law courts, but because they created the first
public drama. Courts and assemblies give only the law, but drama gives
justice. We are the dramatic species and drama is deep in our psyches. It
is the only means we have of unravelling and reweaving our complex
contradictions and visions. Our society thinks in terms of cures,
punishment and gadgets. The Greeks relished their problems and made
them creative in the profound liberty of tragedy. We are not restricted to
17
their ideological solutions, but we have the same problems of self – and
– society. After two thousand years their drama towers over our stage.
(Programme notes, A Window, 2009)
He is also the first to acknowledge that paradoxically, the first democracy was built
upon slavery which is why it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. To
paraphrase Edward, drama was superseded by philosophy, which can justify anything –
Aristotle assured the citizens of Athens that slaves were no more human than cattle and
that great Drama was no longer possible.
But the role of drama in ‘unravelling and reweaving our complex contradictions and
visions’ within the ‘profound liberty of tragedy’ remains as relevant today as it did
then. The word Drama derives from the Greek word Dran, meaning to make or do with
significance. Theatre of course is also a Greek word which comes from Theatron,
meaning a place to see, a place to see significant action. The theatre was the public
space whose function was to challenge and question the values of the society it
depicted.
The great Greek plays are a living monument to this function. The Persians by
Aeschylus is the oldest tragedy in the world to survive and it is unique because it treats
the defeated enemy Persians with empathy. Medea, who kills her children in revenge
on the husband who has deserted her for another woman is, in my opinion, described
by Euripides with great empathy. It offended the audience perhaps because this great
play, one of the greatest in the canon of western literature, only picked up 3rd prize in
the festival of Dionysus the year it was produced. I think Euripides understood that
Medea killed her children in order to retain her self-respect – that’s a contradiction and
it’s food for thought - perhaps too much for the Athenians to swallow at the time.
In my opinion Euripides was the greatest Greek writer of all. At the time he was often
attacked for criticising the values of Athenian society. He was the first to bring the
psychological motivation of his characters – their sense of ‘self’ and their values - into
his plays. Furthermore he presented traditional epic heroes as ordinary people with
problems. It’s here you find the voice of the oppressed too – women and slaves.
Medea’s words still retain their relevance, poignancy and power today:
I should rather bear a shield and face their battles three times than bear
a child!
In Antigone, Orestes, Oedipus and the The Bacchae et al is a restless and relentless
exploration of justice in order to define what it means to be human. Drama deals with
this in its most complex and common expression; in the remarkable, and more
importantly, the routine. To quote Edward Bond again:
Gossip holds civilizations together. It’s like a cool magma that seeps
18
between and soaks into all the elements of a culture. It unites streetlife and the needs of the home, the workshop and shopping arcade,
media and high art, prisons, churches and academies, the
complications of science, the chants of sports arenas, infant prattle,
the adages of sages, crime and the high offices of state. These things
are the text of drama. And every day all of them must be reduced to
gossip, so that they can be understood and exist side by side in the
same world. In this way the most erudite and intellectual knowledge is
filtered into daily life in sufficient strength to inform and change it.
Vox populi, vox dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God.
This should be good news for theatre. It means that drama may
combine chatter and high rhetoric in a way that makes the profoundest
human experience and deepest meanings understandable within the
audience’s creative intelligence. That is what theatre is for. It’s been
said that if God came down to earth he would go first not to church
but to the theatre.
Not anymore. Our gossip is debased. It no longer springs from the
people’s inventiveness. It is filtered down to us by television and the
big screens, distorted by the media mobs, relentless advertising and
compulsive consumerism. In simpler forms these things could be part
of the good life. But today they are produced not to make life good
but to make bankers rich - not to meet our wants but to addict us to
wanting what can be sold for the greatest profit. Every word we speak
echoes with cash. The symptom of any drug addict is the neglect of
social responsibility – and everything in our society works like is a
drug. We begin to fumble through life in a chaotic haze of virtual
reality. (Programme for Bingo at Chichester March 2010)
In Greek drama the chorus provided the vox populi. It was the general population of the
particular story, in sharp contrast with many of the themes of the ancient Greek plays
which tended to be about individual heroes, gods, and goddesses. Often the chorus
expressed to the audience what the main characters could not say, such as their hidden
fears or secrets. The chorus also provided other characters with the insight they needed.
But when our gossip is debased by the celebrity chit chat or soap opera angst, it distorts
our values; it distorts and corrupts the human.
The Romans inherited Greek theatre but interest in drama waned from the beginning of
the empire and the theatre provided a different function – theatrical entertainment. The
collapse of ancient Rome, in an orgy of decadence and corruption, was reflected in its
theatre or perhaps I should say in an absence of drama, and it begs the question whether
we too are living our own ‘last days of Rome’. I am not saying there is no place for
entertainment, but not at the expense of drama in our theatres and drama lessons. Too
much of the theatre and drama in schools not only avoids reality, or numbly accepts it,
but reinforces ideological prejudices - it wouldn’t be stretching it too far to say
19
celebrates it. This needs to be challenged because ideology sustains the status quo, it
provides the answers to both the known and unknown, and ideology tells us what to
think. Drama puts us into the known-unknown so that we have to search out our
humanity, this requires us to forge values we can sustain and ultimately live by. We
achieve this by creating Drama that demands that the audience makes a choice – makes
the meaning. Drama puts us on the stage. We experience a felt understanding, a unity
of thought and feeling, because we are in it.
This is what occurs in the best of our work with children and young people. I recently
stumbled across an old 2003 interview with a boy aged 11 after Big Brum’s TIE
programme, based on the Tempest, The Eye of the Storm. The children were in role as
Scholars called to Milan to assist the returned exile and ageing Prospero in order to
help him discover the ‘natural order’ of society. This boy had a physical response to the
conflicting loyalties the drama stirred in him between Propsero, who had summoned
him to Milan to help, and Caliban – who had been brought from the island to Milan as
part of a circus show:
Q: How did it feel to be a Scholar?
Strange in a pleased way. Inside my blood was like bubbles, popping in my blood, as
they popped they were kind of telling me this is good. I had a good and a very good
feeling. The good feeling was being asked to help, the very good feeling was being
asked to help by Prospero. But also there was a bad feeling because I also had a
feeling of not wanting to help Prospero, it was like my veins squeezing my blood, but I
was so excited it felt like my bones were getting flat, as flat as they could. It was like
two sides were fighting, one side wanting to help, the other didn’t. And if one side had
won I would have got up and done something.
Q: What would you have done?
On the proof [he means siding with Prospero] I couldn’t answer. On the disproof
[siding with Caliban] I would have said something like, ‘Why don’t’ you try and call
him his normal name not slave’. This fight sometimes pushed one way the hardest and
then the other way the hardest.
Q: Can you remember a moment when it went one way or the other?
When [class mate] said why are you always on the floor? And that pushed me to the left
because I wanted to prove Prospero wrong.
Q: How did this make you feel?
It was like my bones were fighting about which side they would really go. I could feel it
but it didn’t hurt. Like my long arms punching each other. Like my blood was bone and
20
the blood pouring out, still popping in my arms, in my legs and where my ribs were. It
was trying to force me to go up and say something, but the other side stopped me, not
to prove Prospero wrong, it was stopping me, long arms with fist of fire punching my
bones, it was pouring out while it was still popping.
Participating in role in The Eye of the Storm this child was able to own his language.
His words are not owned or ideologised; they belong to him, and are based on the
experience of being in the situation.
The imagination is a way of gaining knowledge, extending sensory perception, and
complementing reason, allowing us to apprehend and interpret, and therefore ‘create’
the outside world. And, as:
...we act with humanity when our imagination recognises imagination
in others... 5
and as
...we must imagine each other... 6
the imagination is fundamentally altruistic and is therefore the source of The Human in
us. We need to imaginatively understand human problems so that they – and we – do
not become destructive. It is not the vitality of our imagination that makes this
necessary: it is the urgency of the problems. This makes imagination the basis of
human education; because nothing else teaches the imagination other than the
imagination. Without imagination facts may still have meaning (consequences) but
they cannot have value.
Drama is experience imagined and I believe that offering young people the kind of
experience that that boy entered into is essential to the survival of the art form. It is
about human experience as story: we need to own our own stories, they are our map of
the ‘self’ and we need to understand our collective story, it is our culture. The tragedy
at the heart of the News of the World scandal and at the heart of how the ‘riots’ are
being represented is that ideology has stolen our story. We are told that lies are truth.
Truth is a lie and lies become fact.
Which brings me back to our production meeting and my impending exit. One of the
greatest stories ever written is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The recent riots and the
demonisation of youth that followed gave the creation of this programme renewed
impetus. The Creature says that:
Misery made me a fiend
5
6
Davis D., (2005) Edward Bond and the Dramatic Child, Ed. Trentham, p210.
As above
21
and the centre of our production focuses on his rejection by both his maker,
Frankenstein, and the DeLacey family. Starved of the love and affection he craves the
Creature makes a funeral pyre out of the DeLacey’s home and of his desire to be
human, and at that moment he begins to seek revenge not justice – his imagination is
distorted and his values corrupted. Even as he incinerates his desires he quotes Milton’s
Paradise Lost which he has learned to read with the unwitting guidance of the
DeLacey’s:
The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a
hell of heav'n.
And as the house burns he berates Frankenstein:
Thou art my father, thou my author, thou my being gav'st me; whom
should I obey but thee, whom follow?
He, like the looters in the riots, follows the fathers of our experience – the makers of
our society - and following in their footsteps, wreaks destruction and reaps a terrible
revenge. It’s as if each vindictive act is a rejoinder to his own question:
Was Man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent,
yet so vicious and base?
It is a story for our times and provides an opportunity, a public space, for young people
to experience the self in society and society in themselves. This is a valuable space that
is endangered. The need to offset a cashflow crisis has already reduced the production
period to 14 days from the 28 planned. The next challenge is to find a public space to
perform it in enough schools to make our TIE programme financially viable. Big
Brum’s struggle to survive and the fight for drama that NATD was created out of are
one and the same. We face huge challenges. I don’t know what the future holds or
whether Drama will thrive, but I do believe it can survive if we attend to what the
function of drama is, and if we continue to develop the art form young people will need
and demand it.
22
23
Medusa:
Not Settling for Less
by
Maggie Hulson and Guy Williams
(Maggie Hulson is Professional Mentor at Gladesmore School in Tottenham, London. Guy Williams is Director of Creative and
Performing Arts at the Sir Robert Woodard Academy in Lancing, West Sussex. Both are members of the Editorial Committee for
this Journal.)
Context
This article outlines a process drama based on the ancient Greek myth of Medusa. The work was originally a scheme of work for
year 9 students (aged 13-14) in a secondary school, devised and taught by Maggie Hulson. It was then re-worked into a
workshop for the NATD conference October 2011, designed and run by Maggie Hulson and Guy Williams. The commentary
focuses on the first half of the scheme as the pedagogical principles are laid down.
NATD had raised three central questions around which the work of the conference was to be shaped:
• Who decides what young people need to know and understand?
• How can Drama not only survive, but thrive within the current educational environment?
• Is anything being compromised? Are we settling for less?
The conference workshop was very much informed by the responses to the original scheme made by the year 9 students, not least
of which was the drama offered by one student in role as Perseus. This became an essential part of the Conference workshop and,
along with other examples of student response, allowed the workshop to get at that which was being decided by the teacher and
that by the students.
Inserted into the text of the scheme of work are two types of notes:
1. The reflection questions presented to the workshop participants
2. Notes on the response by the year 9 students
24
Scheme of Work
Part 1 – Story and context
Teacher Notes
And student responses
Stimulus
Bridging sentence
Tasks (In school this took one
lesson)
Resources – story, information
sheets and pictures of the Atlas
mountains.
1. Teacher reads story to students
sat in a circle (see Appendix 1).
2. Teacher says – “I wonder what it is
like to live in the shadow of the
Gorgons - how do people live in the
Atlas mountains?”
25
Commentary
And NATD Workshop Reflection
Questions
The choice of the story is crucial. It has
to resonate in three areas: its structure
anticipates excitement and challenge;
its language is engaging and rich
enough to suggest this is a story we
want to hear more of; in its telling it
must have a sense of ‘gather round to
hear this’ as well as an immediacy that
is inclusive.
Much has been written about Dorothy
Heathcote’s approach to questioning –
shifting the communicative initiative
from the teacher to the student, from
teaching to learning. The first part of
this beguilingly simple question
invites the students to muse. It is
barely a question at all. The teacher
Avoid discussion at this stage. The
work is being layered. There may be
a temptation to talk about what is
known and what is being imagined.
The teacher needs to trust that the
seeds of the whole are present in the
task and that young people will
construct meaning around these
carefully chosen images. It is better
to move straight to dramatic action
than to talk about it - to try out the
shape of it in the body action something about imagined
sensuousness rather than the more
abstract words.
e.g. I can see a place where people
really put their backs into their
work- they are showing strength
and working together
e.g. I can see people who look into
each others’ faces and enjoy being
together
e.g. I can see people who gather
3. Teacher says – “Show me, in
groups, a depiction (freeze) of how
the people in that place at that time
earn their living.”
Teacher circulates the groups
presenting information regarding
the Atlas mountains to inform the
depiction
.
When they all are frozen (all at same
time) teacher voices what they are
seeing.
26
needs to allow silence – thinking time.
The second part is more concrete and
provides the scaffolding to the
‘wondering’. The internet provides the
opportunity to place rich visual images
that will lever the imagination.
Often treated as synonyms, the
depiction offers the opportunity for
students to either abstract or
universalise from the particular
moment of action. The ‘freeze-frame’ is
a first step towards this more complex
technique.
The task is being scaffolded. The
teacher will judge the extent to which
she has to differentiate for the needs
of the individuals within the group.
It is important that this task is
completed simultaneously by all
groups. This is not a ‘show to the rest
of the class’ moment. Rather it is a
safe, public reflection of shared
understanding at this moment. The
teacher is informing the students of
each other's work whilst at the same
time protecting the student who may
together to comfort one another
In a way this is a directorial, a
teaching, and a creative moment teacher informs the class of that
which is most relevant/significant to
the kernel of the story as it connects
to the being of the class
Perhaps use litany as an example
(see appendix 2) – if time is going
well we could work on a version
using cannon, unison and echo –
whispered. This is a Drama scheme –
the wider the range of conventions
and opportunities to develop the
material through practice the richer
the response will be.
What the year 9 class did
They created a rural community of
mostly farmers.
feel fear of being stared at. Hulson sees
this moment as a crucial structuring of
a whole-class drama. It honours the
work that has been created, relays it
amongst the students and draws out
the significance of the work which may
at this stage be latent or intuitive.
S/he models the dignity and the
universal held in the particular
4. Teacher narrates – “And as the
people go about their daily work, they
are aware, and ready for, the moving
shadow that is Medusa. Snake like she
senses their movements and is
excited, crawling to the edge of the
plateau from time to time, gazing
down on them, like fish in a bowl.
Each flick of the eye, each iris
retraction, seeming to record their
every move.”
27
The stylised, poetic form of the litany
evokes the fauna of the region and
provides a further lever to the
imagination. Painting verbal pictures
of the animal life creates a sense of the
'otherness' of the geography enabling
the participants to extrapolate to their
own vision of the place.
The language is very carefully
constructed in advance, working to
stay within the imagery offered by the
story. Every word counts. It has a
register that signals both the mythic
and the immediate. Aspects of the
story have been researched and
explored for the resonances of 'now
and then', such as that of snakes, or of
What the year 9 class did
There was one birthday, no weddings
and a preponderance of funerals. Some
buried their dead, hiding them away
from the Medusa, others offered up
their dead to her
5. Teacher says – “I wonder what
rituals, birthdays, wedding, funerals
the people of the mountains have.
Show me, in groups, three staggered
depictions; the audience will close
their eyes in between each image.”
As the groups show, teacher voices
what they see, particularly referring
to movement.
6. Teacher refers to rituals and says
28
predatory eyes watching our every
move, or of people who knowingly live
under a potentially killer gaze?
Again, careful suggestions that provide
choice and structure.
A useful convention born out of
Heathcote’s drive to find the signs and
portents in the actions of our lives. In
this convention we see
representations of ritual in action, but
as if they were presented through
controlled blinking. Anyone who has
played What's the time Mr Wolf? or
who has seen the Doctor Who episode,
Blink, in which the stone angels only
move when eyes are closed will know
the power of this device.
The layers keep accumulating. Each
task builds on the previous one. The
teacher consciously makes reference
to the significance of the work in
which we have collaborated.
Workshop Reflection
question 1
What decisions over content
– “I wonder how living in the shadow
of the Gorgons would affect their
speech, their words. I wonder how
they would communicate in words;
e.g. how parents talk to/sing to
children - what is the stuff of their
communication? – What marks do
they make?”
This can be developed if necessary
by creating places and contexts to
and from which they move. Teacher
demonstrates suggested ways of
speaking such as whispers around
the room and other small signing
techniques – e.g. sign language or
small written messages passed from
one to the other.
7. Once the teacher is sure that the
students understand and have some
ideas/skills, they can create short
moments based on any one of the
depictions using the particular
language form.
8. Peer evaluation of the world that
is being created – the speech,
movement and context.
29
have been made by the class?
What by the teacher?
The students are invited to explore the
dialectical relationship between
culture and the environment both
physical and social. What is being
made explicit here is that we are a
social species and that which we take
for granted in ourselves is shaped by
our environment and our response to
it. In turn, we make marks upon the
world and leave traces of ourselves
upon it.
Part 2- Action and Reaction
Teacher Notes
And student responses
I use a pottery head, slightly
grotesque, that I rescued from the
Art department bin.
Here is where it’s possible to unpick
the people’s attitudes to the children
of their society - the fact that this
child has stone under her bed could
be seen as a parallel to anti-social,
dangerous or even life-risking
behaviour. TiR is also able to
establish other ‘givens’ such as
children being forbidden to go up
the mountain.
Tasks (in school this took two
lessons)
Resources - individual pieces of eyeshaped paper, stone head, story.
30
Commentary
And NATD Workshop Reflection
Questions
Another detail that provides a layer of
understanding for the students. It uses
imagery central to the story to connect
us to the inside and the outside of
Medusa. It provides a sensual lever
into knowing the complexity of the
material.
The stone head is a crucial prop. It
provides symbolic resonance with a
material essence of life on the planet,
the ability of humans to shape our
material world artistically. At the same
time it holds up some of the
contradictions for exploration - within
the imagery of the story, stone
represents loss of action/death. Yet,
because a child has caused it to be
present in the unfolding drama it is a
call to action for the adults. It also
provides the artistic dimension – both
in terms of the representation of the
1. Circle.
Note the move into the present tense
– teacher is in a shadow authority
role.
What the year 9 class did
They created an underground cavern.
Around the edges of the cavern were
statues, of priests. Some of the statues
could come to life and give advice.
Teacher says: “Every morning the
people of the town gather – to check
and to know – I wonder why and in
what kind of place they gather.”
Discussion - what kind of place, what
temperature is it kept at, is it
indoors? Keep teacher voice in story
mode. Who is allowed there? The
elders? If it is exclusive in some way,
31
power of the Gorgon as well as being
the focus for the dramatic action in the
next sequence.
It is important to note that the layers
of meaning that are held throughout
this scheme are powerful tools in
developing a rich understanding of
theatre skills. Students immersed in
this process develop a deep
understanding of dramatic action,
symbolism, investment in character,
the development of plot and the
development of meaning.
The circle is a powerful, democratic
organisation of space. It evokes
Heathcote’s paradigm of the crucible:
we are all stirring this around together
and in a very real sense makes the
space a shared one – one in which all
have an equal voice.
This is a subtle tongue. We are
immersed in a story together. While
the discussion may well have a
rational feel to it, the story mode keeps
replacing the mythic and the sense of
us being on a journey, together.
That is to say that she uses the ‘we’ of
Some of these priest statues would trick
the people when they came for advice.
At first some of the class said that only
the elders were allowed in the cavern.
When I asked if only the elders were
allowed to speak their ideas, they then
created an outer circle of the people,
with an inner circle of the elders. The
people could whisper into the ears of
the elders if they wanted to contribute
to the decision making and discussions.
how do they convey decisions to the
rest of the people?
Workshop Reflection
question 2
What do you predict your
class of year 9 students
would create for the
gathering place? What
decisions over content have
been made by the class?
What by the teacher?
(It is interesting to note here how this class are
beginning to shape the Drama form and draw
upon their previous experiences of the process.
They are becoming sophisticated constructors of
theatre.) When I asked if children were
allowed the class was very clear that
they were not. I asked how the children
would know what was going on some
said that the children needed to be kept
safe and it was for their own protection,
and others said that the children would
know anyway.
the fiction and places givens that
constrain the action. It is as if she
speaks for the moral code of this
society. She places the questions as a
conscience, making explicit the
implied complicity of the social bonds.
2. Create the gathering place using
actors only. There is no need for
props or set at this point.
‘Teacher in Role’ enters the
gathering place carrying a wrapped
stone object.
She asks those gathered for help as
her child has gone missing
overnight. The child was not in bed
that morning and the parent has
tried asking the child’s friends, has
searched the house, and has
32
searched everywhere. It looks as if
the child has been missing all night.
Also, this (indicating the wrapped
stone head) has been found under
the child’s bed. TiR is reluctant to
reveal stone head; perhaps some
indication that stone has a taboo
surrounding it and that it shouldn’t
be in ordinary homes.
3. TiR responds to class’ suggestions
– discourage any from going up the
mountain; re-enforce that it’s taboo
and far too dangerous.
At this point teacher decides
whether to manage the next stage in
or out of role, easing the students
into groups depending on what they
suggest (asking e.g. how many
should search her friend’s house,
how many to interview her friends,
etc).
As the groups begin to organise
themselves, teacher steps out of role
and asks for…
4. ... a private moment. The people
think through their reactions to the
33
missing child, and the stone. They
are used to keeping themselves
quiet. Teacher asks class to close
their eyes to think what is written
on the inside of their eyelids. They
can write these words on individual
pieces of eye-shaped paper, which
can be displayed.
5. Teacher in matter of fact story
mode so that we move into a slightly
more distanced mood: “So, as the
people are about to search for the
missing child what they don’t know is
that Perseus is about to arrive. The
people had heard rumours of him,
they knew he was a hero but they
didn’t know his whole story. This is
what they didn’t know: (See appendix
3 for the story of Perseus).
Perseus then proceeded to the land of
the Gorgons, where the people must
make him welcome. Even though they
are about to set out on a search for a
lost loved one, the laws of hospitality
make this a requirement.
As you know, hospitality is a matter
34
of pride amongst us. Who can offer
him hospitality? Make a meal? Who
will greet him?
What the year 9 class did
I briefed a student to take on the role
of Perseus. He had been away during
the session with the missing child.
Whilst the rest of the class were
preparing for the arrival of Perseus, I
filled him on what he had missed, and
asked him to enter as Perseus, and
explain that he had come to rid them of
Medusa. I asked him to do it in a way
that might challenge the class a bit.
Arriving at the gathering place he used
heightened formal language. In role as
Perseus he said that he would get rid of
the Gorgon for them - on one
condition. That the townspeople would
have to be willing to sacrifice a child to
go with him.
This caused the beginnings of a very
heated discussion.
In that moment I decided to guide the
drama from within as the mother of the
missing child, which I had to do via
whispering into the ear of an elder.
6. As the class
organises/demonstrates who’s
doing what, teacher briefs a student
as Perseus, who then arrives at the
gathering place.
35
It is worth noting that this ‘gift’
became an essential part of the
Conference workshop.
Workshop Reflection
question 3How do you think a year 9
student might take on the
role of Perseus?
What decisions over content
have been made by the class?
What by the teacher?
Before we could reach any conclusion
within the story, the bell went signalling
the end of the lesson.
36
Part 3- Crisis and Denouement
Teacher Notes
And student responses
Tasks
Resources – large pens, paper, glue.
This lesson could only be planned after the student in role
as Perseus had played his part. The teacher is more and
more responding to the contributions made by the
students, finding structures, such as the silent debate, that
will keep the drama safe and manageable as the students
offer up their concerns.
1. Re-create the end of the last moment as a whole class
depiction, taking care that it is as exact as possible.
However, Perseus will go up the mountain. It’s a given.
What the year 9 class did
The arguments and discussions continued as though it had not
left off. Mostly the people were not willing to sacrifice one of
their children. Perseus said that the reason he wants a child to
accompany him up the mountain is that even though
Medusa is a merciless killer, she was once a child and seeing a
child will cause her to pause for a moment and her snake eyes
will close for a moment and she can then be killed. A member
of the town (whispered) offered their child and the child was
brought forward. I asked for a depiction of the child looking at
Perseus with the parent standing by and asked what was in the
2. TiR says: “Our debate is too noisy. The vibrations will
attract Medusa.”
Teacher begins to demonstrate, placing a large piece of
paper in the centre and writing her (in role) opinion on it,
then handing the pen to another, and more pens to others.
Through silent gesture TiR encourages all to write their
opinions in this silent debate. Then Perseus is asked to
speak one more time.
37
child's mind and the parent’s mind.
What the year 9 class did
One scene showed parents as they hid their children. One
scene showed a pair of siblings listening outside a door as the
parents inside decided that they wouldn’t tell the children.
Another showed a parent telling their child that they would be
very proud of their child as they went up the mountain and that
there would be a better place waiting for them if they died.
3. Teacher asks for small group scenes: “What do the
people say to their children? Does the child go? What do
their parents say to them? How do you prepare your child to
be the one to go up the mountain?
4. Teacher says: “As the townspeople gather to see Perseus
on his way up the mountain they tear words from their
silent debate to stick on the back of his shield so that he will
not forget.”
5.Teacher narrates: “On the mountain top, walking
between the men, women and children of stone, on winged
sandals, he comes upon the sleeping Gorgons. He pauses and
turns his back upon them, moving so slowly that not even
the air is disturbed – he lifts his burnished shield and
watching the reflection of Medusa, raises the adamantine
sword behind his head he swings his arm and cuts off her
head. In that moment, from her neck springs Pegasus
soaring into the sky. Perseus gathers up the awful head and
places it in to his kibisis. The sister Gorgons wake and leap
to chase Perseus, but under his helm of darkness he escapes.
In this way Perseus comes down the mountain, victorious.
With the Medusa’s head safely in the bag.
38
6.Teacher asks for two whole group depictions:
a)Perseus back in the gathering place reports to the people.
b)A child’s voice asks “Do her eyes still work?”
(This was asked by one of my year 9 students as she heard
the end of the story).
Step out to view the depiction and feedback what they see.
7. Teacher asks for final task - small group statues with
written titles. The statues should answer this question:
Where is the medusa’s head now?
Appendix 1 First Text
As you travel from the land of the west you will see an island with a mountain that rises to a flat top – like a table.
On this flat top lie three shapes in the heat of the noon day sun: huge shapeless shapes with monstrous limbs. Two with wings
(sign), claws (sign) and hair of bronze with teeth like swinish tusks (sign), breathing loud in their sleep like drunken men.
The third that lies between the others is as quiet as the face of a sleeping child, as beautiful as the face of the goddess of love,
with long dark eyelashes veiling the eyes and red lips half open. Nothing stirs but the serpents that are the hair of this beautiful
Medusa. They are never still, coiling and twisting as she sleeps.
She alone of these three Gorgons is mortal and can be slain. So terrible are her eyes that all those who have gone up against are,
straight way, changed to pillars of stone.
And why do these three sleep so soundly in the heat of the noonday sun? Because they have just finished their midday meal,
feeding on the bodies of unburied men.
Below lies the town of the people. They too are resting after their midday meal.
Appendix 2 Litany
Leopard, oak, sheep and stag,
39
This our mountain home
Viper, auroch
Badger, bear
This our mountain home
Lion, ibis, cedar, pine
This our mountain home
Macaque, and dipper,
And gazelle
This our mountain home
Appendix 3 The Story of Perseus
Perseus and his mother, Danaë , were living on an island. They had been rescued and taken care of by a fisherman. Why they
needed rescuing is another story.
The King of that island was called Polydectes and he fell in love with Danaë.
Perseus knew that Polydectes did not have the best of intentions, and so took care to constantly protect his mother from the king.
Thus, Polydectes wanted to get Perseus out of the way, so he hatched a plot to send Perseus away in disgrace.
The king held a large banquet where each guest was expected to bring a gift of horses. Perseus had no horse to give, so he asked
the king to name any gift, for he would not refuse it. Polydectes held Perseus to his rash promise, demanding the head of the only
mortal Gorgon, Medusa, whose very expression turned people to stone.
The goddess Athena helped Perseus in this task, by directing him to the nymphs who were caretakers of the weapons needed to
defeat the Gorgon. Following Athena's guidance, Perseus first had to go to the Graeae sisters to find the whereabouts of the
Hesperides.
Now who the Graeae were, and how Perseus tricked them, is another tale, but he found his way to the wonderful garden and the
nymphs. There he was given:
• a knapsack (kibisis) to safely contain Medusa's head;
•
an adamantine (impenetrable stone or diamond) sword (from Zeus);
•
Hermes’ winged sandals to fly;
• Hades helmet of invisibility;
40
•
A polished shield, from Athena
41
Citizens and Stewards: Dorothy Heathcote‘s ‘Mantle of the Expert’
System
by
David Allen
(David Allen is Artistic Director of Midland Actors Theatre. He has undertaken
numerous projects in schools using the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ system.)
Dorothy Heathcote first developed her ‘Mantle of the Expert’ system in the 1970s and
‘80s. For David Davis, the system marks a decisive break from Heathcote’s earlier
work, which was based on a conception of drama as a 'man in a mess'. Davis claims
that the system took Heathcote away from drama as an ‘art form’, towards a more
overtly didactic approach, aimed at meeting ‘curriculum’ needs. (See Davis 2005,
p.171.) Heathcote herself, however, insisted: ‘I’ve only ever been in one room’
(Heathcote in Davis 2005, p.173).
The phrase 'man in a mess' was used by Heathcote in Three Looms Waiting (Smedley
1971), the BBC documentary that really established her reputation as a drama teacher.
Other statements she made at different times also suggest an emphasis on drama as
crisis - for example: 'dramatic activity was concerned with the crises, the turning points
of life, which cause people to reflect and take note' (Heathcote in Wooster 2007, p.13).
'Man in a mess' also became known as 'gut-level' drama and as 'living through.' Both
phrases suggest an intense level of emotional experience. For Davis, the aim of 'gutlevel' drama was to 'build belief and live through a moment of heightened significance'
(Davis 1985, p.71 [1]). The prime example of this, for Davis, comes from Three Looms
Waiting, where Heathcote is seen working with a group of boys on a drama set in a
WWII prisoner-of-war camp. In the drama, a stool-pigeon is planted by the Germans
among the English prisoners. There is a climactic moment when a German officer
demands that the stool-pigeon, in front of the rest of the prisoners, must disclose the
whereabouts of a stolen set of keys — making him reveal his real identity, and betray
the British prisoners. The boy subsequently breaks down in tears.
Davis describes the moment when the German officer says to the stool-pigeon, 'Hans,
where are the keys?' as a moment of 'living through' drama, of a kind which (he told
Heathcote, in an interview in 1985), 'you no longer seem to have' (‘DD’ p.72).
Heathcote, however, observed that this moment only emerged after several days of
painstaking work - much of which, to an outside observer, would not have looked like
drama at all; 'moments of significance’, she said, only emerge ‘from a slow build-up'
(Heathcote in ‘DD’ p.72).
Heathcote, moreover, insisted that her work could not, at any phase, be described as
42
'living through.' ('On the old films you only see those points that look like that' —
Heathcote in ‘DD’ p.79.) If we look again at the POW drama, Davis seems to think that
the moment when the stool-pigeon broke down and wept was a 'remarkable moment of
natural, spontaneous' emotion (Bolton 1998, p.221) — in other words, real 'gut-level'
drama. However, Gavin Bolton reports that the moment was actually planned in
advance. The boy had ‘previously raised the question with Heathcote and the class
whether it would [be] appropriate for his character to cry’. Similarly, ‘the deft hiding of
the keys’ from the guards had been rehearsed in advance for the cameras (Bolton 1998,
p.221).
The revelation that the moment of the boy’s tears was pre-planned changes our view of
it. Heathcote, in fact, has observed that, in drama work, the teacher and class should
always 'plan together how they will design situations':
By planning together they foreshadow how they want it to work out. In this
sense they have their self-spectator awake which is the artist mind. 'I do and
I know why it will happen like this' so when they try it out they are
measuring how far it is fulfilling the model they've planned. (Heathcote
2007b)
The combination of ‘pre-planning’ and ‘self-spectatorship’ means that there is never
simply a spontaneous ‘living through’ of a situation. The group knows the end result
(but not the precise journey to it); in this way (Heathcote observed), drama becomes a
responsible business: to create and sustain the ‘world’ of the drama, to perform certain
tasks, etc. (rather than simply rushing ‘to get the play finished’) (Allen 1984). Preplanning and self-spectatorship also create multiple levels of awareness in the
participant: a sense of, ‘as this is happening, I’m actually dealing with it and I’m seeing
what I want to deal with’ (Heathcote in ‘DD’ p.66).
Heathcote told Davis:
I always knew, without realising it, that if you have to deal with a situation,
at the point of dealing with it you don't reflect on it. (Heathcote in ‘DD’
p.66.)
In the 1985 interview, Davis recalls a drama which Heathcote led, where the
participants (who were all students on Davis’s PGCE course) were firstly in role as
'witches.'2 As witches, they had special powers; but their powers were presently weak,
and they needed help. (Clearly, there was a close analogy between the drama, and the
students’ own situation, as trainee teachers unsure of their own abilities in the
classroom.) After a time, Heathcote switched the ‘frame,’ and the participants became
almost like 'gods': they were now members of some kind of elite group, working in a
building for (as Heathcote described it) 'benign and unemotional energies' (Allen
1984).
43
As ‘gods’ or ‘benign beings,’ they had to decide whether or not to come to the aid of
the witches in their plight. The students were asked by Heathcote to draw icons on a
map, to represent the witches at their lowest ebb. Of course, they were in effect
drawing an image of themselves; but now, instead of being in the situation, they were
seeing it (literally looking down on the map). For some of them, the result was
something akin to an ‘out-of-body’ experience: one participant commented later that
she saw herself, for the first time in her life, as ‘Other’ (Allen 1984).
Davis himself, who also took part, observed that this more 'distanced' frame gave him
'an experience of cool detachment and intense emotion' at the same time. He told
Heathcote: 'it seems to me that's what you work for'; and she replied: 'Yes, yes, you're
right. And now I'm cleverer at doing that' (‘DD’ p.79; emphasis in original). This is
very different, however, from the kind of 'gut-level' emotional experience Davis says
elsewhere that he is looking for.
The switch in frame created not just a certain emotional ‘distance,’ but also gave
participants an authority to deal with the problem; an expertise. At one point in the
‘witches’ workshop, Heathcote observed that she now generally started drama work by
giving the group expertise first, rather than ‘feeling’ (Allen 1984).3 If (following Davis)
we break Heathcote’s career into two phases, then this is, arguably, the key shift that
occurred; and it was critical for the development of the Mantle of the Expert system.
In Drama for Learning, Heathcote recalls how, in the mid-1970s, she first stumbled on
the idea of endowing young people with the point-of-view of 'experts.' She was
working with three boys, who were taking the frame of the Three Wise Men in a
'Nativity' drama. The journey of the Magi was created through a series of episodes:
making wills in case they did not return; bartering for a camel, etc. Heathcote saw ‘that
it was the tasks we did on our journey as Magi that created the power, curiosity and
vulnerability of the three wise men’ (Heathcote and Bolton 1995, p.193 [4]).
Gavin Bolton argues that, in Heathcote's 'man in a mess' days, her planning here
would have centred round the nature of the 'mess' - how to find the way;
suppose one of the camels falls sick?; shortage of water across the desert
etc. (Bolton 1998, p.240.)
Yet, these ‘problems’ are not so different from the 'tasks' which the boys actually
undertook in the frame of ‘experts’ (guarding the gold, bartering for goods, etc.). In
both cases, there is a ‘productive tension’: studying maps of the night-sky, for example,
is a task that demands expertise, but there remains an implicit danger or threat ('What if
we get lost?'). Arguably, the difference lies, less in the tasks or situations, than in the
new emphasis on expertise and professionalism. In a sense, the participants focus first
on the responsibility inherent in their tasks as experts; and only secondly on the
44
particular problem or dilemma. In other words, there is expertise first, feeling second.
In Drama for Learning, Bolton and Heathcote outline an MoE project based on an
airplane crash. The children were framed as experts testing electrical equipment in a
remote area of Canada, who intercept a message from a plane in trouble. The way the
group experienced the problem of the crash was, firstly, through the tasks they
undertook as experts — concentrating on the responsibilities and demands of their role.
The key elements of the scenario were these:
1. We are vulnerable — remote, snowbound, relying on a helicopter, a
delicate machine.
2. Our work, listening to the world, demands a high level of concentration.
3. It is a routine day; we are alert to anything unusual because we are so
careful in following routine. (DfL, pp.96-7; emphasis in original.)
The group established a sequence of tests to be performed 'for strength of materials,
correct writing, correct instructions' etc. As they worked, a radio signal was received —
the last words of the pilot before the plane crashed. Everything was planned and agreed
in advance; the only things that were not decided were exactly 'when the call would
ring out … and how that would affect our routine. So we got on with our work, and the
pilot's message came' (DfL, p.97; emphasis in original).
The group, then, had a responsibility to perform certain tasks. This was the primary
focus, with the ‘crisis’ on a secondary or subsidiary level of awareness. Arguably, the
sense of care, precision and responsibility fostered by their frame as experts would
have stayed with the participants as they dealt with the 'crash.'
The group had asked for a 'plane crash' drama, but in this scenario, they never actually
experienced a crash themselves. In this sense, the frame distanced them from the
drama. However, the strategies Heathcote employed involved them imaginatively in the
experience of a crash: as they heard the voice of the pilot, for example, struggling to
control his plane, they could imagine those final moments of panic and fear. The expert
frame gave them a paradoxically ‘involved-yet-removed' relation to the event.
Later, they marked on a map the tell-tale signs of the crash — e.g. the trees that were
damaged as the plane came down. Again, as in the ‘witches’ drama, they were like
gods or benign beings, literally looking down on the situation; but as they looked at,
say, the marks for the scattered items of luggage that were found, they could imagine
the people who were lost. In other words: they could imagine the situation, see it, and
deal with it at the same time. Reflection was not something that occurred after the
event, but was structured into the process itself.
(As Heathcote once observed, if the participants were framed as plane crash victims,
45
rather than experts, the teacher would have to keep stopping the drama, and ask them
questions about the experience, to enable reflection to take place – Allen 1984.)
*
‘Crisis’ in MoE
Davis insists that the purpose of drama based on 'man in a mess' was to encourage
young people to re-examine and re-think the 'fundamentally held values by which they
lived' (Davis 2005, p.167). In contrast, he claims that in MoE, young people are not
challenged in their values; rather, they are mostly 'concerned with taking on the values
of the chosen occupation', and so are 'less open to re-assessing their personal values
and perspectives'. He argues that MoE takes participants away from their personal 'site'
and 'into the site of the expert world they are entering' (Davis 2005, p.173).
It is true that a major part of the teacher’s time and energy in the early phases of an
MoE project is devoted to developing a sense of a shared culture and context: to make
them ‘citizens’ of a community that is, to some extent, self-regulating; and also
‘stewards,’ who share in responsibility for the work. In this way, MoE is about creating
a communitarian ethos in the classroom, rather than ‘taking on the values of the chosen
occupation' as such. The aim is not to create ‘good little workers’ (DfL, p.18); what is
built is strong sense of ownership, so that, for the pupils, it becomes ‘our company.’5
However, once the context is established, there is always (Heathcote noted) a ‘crisis
around the corner’ (DfL, p.170) – a critical turning-point, or ‘pinpoint’ of change.
Heathcote argued that, as in ‘all theatre’, there has to be ‘one pinpoint, that sets it off’.
The seeds of the ‘crisis’ should be planted early on, so there is a gradual ‘build-up of
discomfort’; but it is necessary to ‘to create a culture’ first — in other words, ‘you
don’t start with the pinpoint, you start with what’s normal’, so that the moment of
change can be recognised (‘Well, we thought everything was normal this morning…’ Heathcote 2007a).
We may identify (broadly) two types of ‘crisis’ in MoE:
1.
2.
A challenge to the company’s own values and practices (e.g., a company of
leather-makers, producing quality hand-made goods, faces the problem of
changing to mass production).
Dealing with a challenge or crisis affecting the ‘Other’ (e.g., passengers in a
plane crash).
In both cases, the aim is to encourage children to explore their own 'personal values
and perspectives' – or, as Heathcote once put it, to ‘stir the compost of their experience’
(Farrington 1981).
46
Crisis affecting the ‘Other’
An example of a crisis affecting the ‘Other’ is a Mantle project that Heathcote led, in
which the participants were framed as a company planning a ‘Roman Britain’ theme
park.6 In one session, they went from looking at images of Roman life (i.e. seeing the
‘Other’ in iconic form); to representing people working in a Roman villa (through still
depictions); to a drama in ‘now time’, where they ‘became’ these people, having to deal
with a crisis when their master, the Centurion Drusus Pollio (Heathcote in role),
announced to them that he had been ordered to return to Rome – but he was reluctant to
go. He asked for their help in making his decision; whatever they decided, there would
be significant consequences for their own futures. Some agonised discussion followed.
Even when inside the dramatic situation, however, the participants remained ‘experts’
on some level (with responsibility, ultimately, for finding ways to represent Roman life
to visitors to the theme park) – thereby maintaining a continual tension between ‘Self’
and ‘Other’; between being (‘living through’), representing, and observing.
Crisis affecting the company: ‘Blackley and Broadene: Makers of Fine Leather’
In 2007, Heathcote worked with Midland Actors Theatre to plan an MoE project for
KS2. The children were framed as people running stalls in market. At a certain point, a
new trader was introduced (represented by a teacher-in-role), who questioned and even
broke with some of the market’s rules and traditions. This was the ‘crisis around the
corner’. During planning, Heathcote stressed that the new trader should not become a
‘scapegoat’ (from his own point of view, he was simply ‘a legitimate trader’ –
Heathcote 2007a); nevertheless, he provided an internal challenge to the company’s
values.
A similar situation was created by Heathcote for a project filmed by the BBC in 1981
(Teacher). She worked with a group of primary school pupils from Newcastle; prior to
filming, she met the group, and asked for their thoughts on 'What's it like being a
Northerner?' (Farrington 1981 [7]). What came through strongly was a concern they felt
about the introduction of new technology, in particular the microchip, and its likely
impact on jobs. We may say that this established the pupils’ ‘site’ — their current
concerns and fears.
The context which Heathcote chose was a firm of leather-makers. The group chose a
name for the enterprise: Blackley and Broadene: Makers of Fine Leather — a name
which suggests an old-established business, with a reputation for quality. Early in the
project, Heathcote established the daily routine for the ‘firm,’ stressing the need to
maintain ‘standards’ (‘... because we are quality workers, aren't we?'). At the same
time, she began sowing seeds for later developments (the ‘crisis around the corner’);
for example, on Day Two, she asked them if they thought the development of the
microchip would affect leather-making; they insisted that it wouldn’t. Heathcote
responded: 'The thing is, lads and lasses, are you prepared to change with the times, is
47
what I say?'
Interviewed for the TV programme, she noted that the children had quickly developed a
strong affiliation with the company; and she wanted, then, ‘to test this sense of how
workers can feel quite broken up, when they've felt they belong to a firm they've
understood, and suddenly the firm seems to have new ideas'. She assumed a new role,
as the company accountant, who announced that she had been brought in to put the
company on a sound financial footing, which would require mechanisation of the
production process. She assured the ‘staff’ that they would still be ‘in total charge of
the button pressing operation’, and would use their ‘craftsman’s eye’ to monitor the
quality of work produced. The pupils’ shocked reaction to this new development (this
‘pinpoint’ of change) was visible in their faces. The ‘crisis’ was a direct threat to the
values of the enterprise that had been so carefully bred into the group. One boy said to
the ‘accountant’: ‘Why does there have to be change?’
As we have seen, Davis argues that MoE takes participants away from their personal
'site' and 'into the site of the expert world they are entering’ (Davis 2005, p.173). But
we can see that, in ‘Blackley and Broadene,’ there was a close parallel between the
group's own ‘site,’ and the situation faced by the ‘leather-makers.’
In the ‘air crash’ Mantle, the element of ‘expertise’ provided a certain distance from the
‘crisis.’ In ‘Blackley and Broadene,’ however, it was the pupils’ own sense of
‘expertise’ that came under threat. This was, perhaps, a risky strategy. The pupils’
reaction was quite emotional (‘gut level’). This was not dealing with someone else’s
crisis; the participants were the ones in the ‘mess.’
What Heathcote did next, however, was designed to lead towards reflection. On the
final day of the project, the group were confronted by a number of questions that
Heathcote had written on the blackboard, under the heading, 'Work, a thinking room' –
for example:
Why do we work? Do people have to work?
Why do conditions change?
What is work?
Can we learn from the past?
The strategy of the ‘thinking room’ was akin to the ‘building for benign and
unemotional energies’. The questions sought to move the group beyond struggling with
the immediate problem, and trying to sort their own feelings, to looking at the problem
in its wider ramifications; to see it more from a ‘bird’s-eye’ perspective. The children
each chose a question, and copied it onto a piece of paper; then, the papers were pinned
to their backs. As they worked again at sewing their leather goods, Heathcote assumed
the role of an anxious mother, concerned about the future employment prospects for
herself and her son, and seeking advice. She went round to different children as they
48
worked, to talk to them, basing her questions on the lines written on their backs.
Through this strategy, Heathcote was taking on for herself, in role, some of the anxiety
that the children had shown about ‘change.’ She was making it ‘Other.’ Significantly,
she now made the children the ‘experts’ again; they were giving her advice. This
restored a certain distance, to enable the pupils both to reflect on the problem, and find
words to express their thoughts about it. For example, one child (with the question
'What should work be like?' pinned to her back), told the ‘mother’ that change should
be resisted: '… if you want something not to happen that's going to happen, you've got
to do what you should'. But Heathcote also used the role to challenge the pupils’
thinking; for example, she told the same girl:
One of the things the accountant did say, though, was ... [speaking as if
quoting the accountant] "If the doctors never tried new things, you know,
we'd still not be able to take legs off … and eyes and new kidneys and
that….
Heathcote later observed that it was inevitable that the majority of the group would be
resistant to idea of change, at least at first, after she had worked so hard to build their
investment in both the firm, and the ‘quality’ goods they made; but she recognised the
need to ‘keep things in some kind of balance' – i.e. to test and extend their thinking to
some extent.
After the project was completed, the pupils wrote essays about their experience. Some
put their thoughts in the form of a 'protest letter' to a newspaper:
We all feel that we should carry on with the tradition of our ancestors:
handmade quality leather-wear, and not automatic fashion-rubbish, made of
plastic and felt.
At the same time, one of the boys wrote: ‘There has always been change, otherwise
there would have been no progress.’
Davis claims that MoE is designed to create a context where 'problems can be solved'
(Davis 2005, p.173); but we can see that here, the problem (of change) was raised, but
deliberately left open, for the children to ‘stir the compost of their experience’; to
continue to ask themselves, ‘Why does there have to be change?’
*
Davis has acknowledged that, as far as Heathcote was concerned, her work could not
be simply divided into two phases: only the outer form changed with time, and not the
inner form.
49
In drama work in schools, Heathcote argued, ‘we are always dealing with ... embedded
personal and cultural values' (Heathcote and Bolton 1998, p.160), or (as she termed it)
with ‘stance’:
‘Why am I like this? Why has it to be like this?' And that's the question you
want to keep asking. The questions I ask here (STANCE) are because this
to me is what life is about. (Heathcote in Gillham 1989, p.33.)
Davis is wrong when he states that pupils working in the MoE system are simply
inculcated in the values of an 'enterprise culture’ (Davis 2005 p.173). ‘Blackley and
Broadene’ is an example of how the system is intended to lead pupils to re-examine the
'fundamentally held values’ by which they live; to explore for themselves, through the
metaphor of drama, 'Why am I like this? Why has it to be like this?’
NOTES
1. All subsequent quotes from this source (‘Dorothy Heathcote interviewed by David
Davis’) are cited in the text as ‘DD’.
2. The drama in question, which took place in Newcastle on March 14-15, 1984,
involved students from Davis's PGCE course at Birmingham Polytechnic. I was among
the participants, and this account is based on my journal notes. Heathcote may have
drawn the idea for a building for ‘benign and unemotional energies’ from Doris
Lessing's 'Shikasta' series of novels, which depict a benign and superior race of aliens
who look down on the muddled affairs of Earth.
3. In the case of the ‘witches’ drama, it seems that Heathcote began with ‘feeling’ first
and switched to ‘expertise’ later. This may have been because she had been asked by
Davis to develop a drama with the students in a ‘living through’ mode. (For example,
she agreed to begin the process with the question, ‘What do you want to do a play
about?’ - a strategy which she said she now thought was ‘fairly crude’ – Allen 1984.)
4. All subsequent quotes from this source (Drama for Learning) are cited in the text as
‘DfL.’
5. In a sense, the use of the term ‘enterprise’ in the MoE system is misleading, with its
connotations of a business ethos. Davis falls into this trap: he supposes that MoE is
‘non-critical of ... enterprise culture’ (Davis 2005, p.173). It would be more accurate to
talk about ‘cooperatives’ than ‘enterprises.’
6. This project was originally developed for schools, but my notes here are based on a
two-day workshop for teachers, held at Ringsfield Hall (27-28 February, 2009), where
Heathcote took participants (myself included) through different stages in the process.
See Heathcote 2010a and 2010b for more details about the ‘Roman Britain theme park’
project.
7. All subsequent quotes are from this source (Farrington 1981) unless otherwise
specified.
50
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, David (1984), personal journal.
Bolton, Gavin (1998), Acting in Classroom Drama: A Critical Analysis (Stoke-onTrent: Trentham Books).
Davis, David (1985), ‘Dorothy Heathcote interviewed by David Davis’, in 2D, 4:3,
pp.64-80.
Davis, David (2005), ‘Edward Bond and Drama in Education’, in Davis ed., Edward
Bond and the Dramatic Child (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books), pp.163-180.
Farrington, Alan (dir.) (1981), Teacher (BBC Television).
Gillham, Geoff (1989), ‘What life is for: An analysis of Dorothy Heathcote’s “levels”
of explanation’ in 2D, 8:2 (Summer), pp.31-38.
Heathcote, Dorothy (2007a), personal interview with David Allen and Gill Adamson
(28 August).
Heathcote, Dorothy (2007b), letter to author (dated 23 December).
Heathcote (2010a), ‘Productive tension: A keystone in Mantle of the Expert’, in NATD
Journal, 26:1, pp.8-23.
Heathcote (2010b), ‘Dramatic imagination’, in NATD Journal, 26:2, pp.14-30.
Heathcote, Dorothy and Bolton, Gavin (1995), Drama for Learning: Dorothy
Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education (Portsmouth NH:
Heinemann).
Heathcote, Dorothy and Bolton, Gavin (1998), ‘Teaching culture through drama’, in
Michael Bryam and Michael Fleming (eds.), Language Learning in Intercultural
Perspective: Approaches Through Drama and Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), pp.158-177.
Smedley, Ron (dir.) (1971), Three Looms Waiting (BBC ‘Omnibus’ Season 5, Episode
12).
Wooster, Roger (2007), Contemporary Theatre in Education (Bristol: Intellect Books).
51
THE DRAMA OF HISTORY
by
John Fines and Raymond Verrier
CHAPTER THREE
Starter for one
SHE HAD ATTENDED one of our lectures during her post-graduate training, and was
anxious to engage in this kind of teaching; perhaps we had been too infectious, had not
given sufficient warnings, but now she had tried, and found it endlessly difficult. One
night she phoned, determined that she wouldn’t give in: the children were not easy,
they wouldn’t be serious, and the girls wouldn’t work with the boys. Perhaps it was the
half-hour periods they had to operate in. I agreed that this did make things difficult, and
promised to go over and teach for her to observe – she could look at someone else’s
silly mistakes for an afternoon, instead of brooding about her own.
I asked for little in the way of information, as I don’t believe much can be written or
spoken about the state of a class – it has to be seen in a classroom. All I knew was that
they were lively, and the topic was medieval villages. They were coming to the end of
the first term in their second year of secondary school.
I thought a little about the problem in general terms beforehand. I knew that I had to
make something happen for the children and complete it in half an hour – so I would
need tension and a watch; the tension could come from conflict or mystery – which was
it to be? I confident enough, as a fresh face a reasonably experienced teacher, that I
could hold them in a conflict situation, but I doubted whether I could resolve it in the
time allowed; so mystery it must be.
Mystery in a medieval village led on to murder and courts. I recalled reading coroners’
court rolls from the period and having marvelled at the way a superstitious people
without Scotland Yard and Sherlock Holmes managed so well on commonsense and
native wit. That was interesting, and I thought a worthwhile bit of learning. On a more
mundane level I had held courts in drama before, and recalled how many ‘control
cards’ this situation fed into the hands of the teacher – the inbuilt seriousness of the
occasion, the formality of language and procedure. It looked not only good, but safe as
well.
Now I needed a start, and here an object as ‘evidence’ seemed most suitable: it could
hold attention by its own interest, would act as a focus, and have what I have come to
feel is hypnotic power – a single object, uncluttered by all else, reverently handled,
unavoidable. I did not need to search far: I have a museum replica of one wing of a
diptych, showing the nativity, beautifully carved, but roughly torn from its cover, and
with two crude holes bored in the top. It didn’t take long to thread a lace through these
52
to make it into something that could have hung round a person’s neck – something that
had a past.
It was in my waistcoat pocket as I went to the school, but I tried to concentrate on the
other factors as I approached the lesson, notably the inner tension I would require to
establish the seriousness of the operation, and the openness of eyes I would need. Both
kinds of preparation are necessary for success; a slap-happy approach will not persuade
children that what they are doing is important, and a teacher whose mind is clouded by
the significance and multifaceted nature of his material cannot observe properly.
I cleared an ordinary classroom of its desks, and noticed first that the teacher’s personal
tutor group who were helping me were very willing, but found it difficult to work
together on a task as simple as this. They pushed and banged a great deal, were hasty
and not prone to careful listening, and didn’t look to see where they were going; they
were easily distracted by anything that had the makings of a joke, and the girls would
not work with the boys. A simple situation, not by any manner of means uncommon,
but one that told me a lot; if I was to succeed I would need a working shape –
something that would physically coordinate the group.
The class poured in, fairly noisy and careless, and at once a group of boys made for the
radiators in the far corner of the room; one of them appropriated the window opening
pole, and the rest showed lots of bounce. The girls tended to stand around, lost because
of the absence of desks, and unwilling to commit themselves. Their teacher called for
silence and began to introduce me in formal fashion, intruding hints here and there that
she hoped they would be good and how lucky she considered them to be. This is
always an embarrassing time, but it is time. a teacher’s most useful tool, and I had a
chance to take in the whole group, compose my face into a friendly smile, but to make
sure that I didn’t flash too many confusing signals at once.
It gave me also time to think, and make a number of decisions: first. I must make no
hostile gesture, no move that could be misunderstood; but second I had to get them into
a working shape quickly and by their own consent. I must use an old, but important
tool of teaching: I must make a bargain with them. This may read as the action of a
frightened man, and in some ways I would accept that judgement, for I believe that the
arrogance involved in taking the time of thirty five souls and using it for their own
good is a kind of madness if it is not backed by the humility of some stagefright; but
also I feel strongly that open bargains openly arrived at are a part of modern adult life,
and should not be denied to children. So to begin with I left them as they stood or
lounged, and the only doubt I had in mind was whether to do anything with the window
pole. No immediate answer came to mind, and experience tells me that if a teacher’s
mind is clouded by unsolved dilemmas at this crucial stage of the lesson then
everything else suffers; so I would let that one ride – if I could find a part for it to play I
would, but meanwhile I would regard it as a legitimate play-object for one boy who
plainly needed something to fidget with. Should it become a nuisance I would have to
53
turn my whole attention to it, and use it; one thing was sure, I must not take it away, for
this would be hostile.
I talked easily and slowly to the children, using a soft but clear voice, registering my
own comfort and self-assurance. I asked whether they would like to make a murder
story with me, posing this as a real question that required a real answer. The answer
came, interested but still dubious. Incoherent as it rattled out from various individuals
set at different levels of commitment. Strangely I read that the girls showed more
interest than the boys at this point. I moved on to ask whether they knew the term
‘coroner’, and one or two did, and volunteered that he had to have a court.
By this time the children were getting wound up in commitment, but realising the
discomfort and unreasonableness of their situation – physically scattered over the
room. I then offered the bargain: if they would help me to make a court, and try to
believe they were there, in it, I would agree to make something happen in the court they
had made. Not only did I agree, but I promised, a word I have found of great
significance for children.
We were no more than half way there, for now the self-consciousness and the
comedians’ active desire to deflate seriousness had to be faced; some children were
now giggling at the funny new man they were having, and wondering how they could
capitalise – a natural, healthy and very agreeable reaction, I feel, but not productive in
this circumstance. Still I must display no trace of hostility, so to cover the action, and
give time to settle, I speeded things up. This may sound a paradox, but again
experience tells me that it works, and in this situation I really did need speed. So I
quickly told them that a coroner’s court sat in a circle, and could they all quickly get
chairs and make a complete circle.
This allowed time for some banging about, for a quick word between friends, for the
odd nudge; I was giving them a chance to deflate the situation preparatory to the
massive inflation I would soon have to induce. A circle has many advantages in this
situation: a teacher has a total view of the class, but can make quite individual
relationships across the circle; there is a togetherness that is not a herd but a unity;
there is a stage ready made, and it only needs one footstep to enter it; there is no
hierarchy of space.
I allowed time for everyone to settle, and used this time to notice who was where; the
boy with the pole and his bouncy friends, the girls who had signalled interest. I allowed
time and more – for it is that magical pause after noise and before it begins that was
most needed, a contrast with the bustle of the past few moments.
Very quietly I began to say that all of them knew why we were here, what were the
events that had led up to our meeting. I pushed every grain of seriousness into the
speech, but not to impose it, rather to bring out the ones who couldn’t believe. A few
54
gigglers were still hopeful, and so I turned to address them alone; this open conflict of
eye against eye is most important in establishing what is required – if it does not
happen at the start then the instinct for larks will burst out later and ruin what has been
so carefully built.
I spoke on, outlining how I had been awoken early one morning by a woman beating
on my door shouting ‘Murder’, and how I had hustled on my clothes to rush to the
scene. Still one giggler remained, so I focussed on him: ‘You remember where it was,
do you not? Down there in the deep lane that divides the two greater fields, the lane
that leads off to the town.’ By now the power of story had taken over – all were quiet
and waiting.
Now it was essential to convert the mode from story to drama, so I decided to increase
the pressure to a high point and ask for an entry from the children. Here timing was
important: I described the horrible wounds the man had received, his features beaten
beyond recognition; his dress all disordered where a thief had taken every article of
value, everything that might identify him. Everything bar one – and here I took from
my waistcoat pocket the talisman that had hung around his neck. ‘This is all the
evidence we have-pass it round with care, and look well on it; if you know its shape or
substance, if it triggers off any little memory in you, then you may hold the key to the
mystery’.
The strong classical language was important here, and the silence that followed, whilst
the children passed it round and peered at it carefully. When all had seen it I let it
swing easily from between my clasped hands, and very quietly said ‘ I do not know to
this day which of our women here it was that woke me.’
Up to this point in the lesson I had been in charge, I had controlled, and some readers
might say manipulated events and children; but from now on they were in control, they
were the story builders. Having made that last statement I had entered uncharted water
– had no notion whether anyone would reply, who it would be, or what she would say.
My duty now was simply to radiate confidence in the task we were engaged on, to
accept all contributions gravely and graciously, and to build them into the story that
would develop.
It is a difficult moment in drama, this handing over to the children –especially difficult
for a conventional teacher like myself. filled with desire to tell, to direct, to narrate, to
make things work. The imp that tells us to chip in, to help them out, to nudge them with
suggestions must be silenced; the nervous tickle that pessimistically whispers in our ear
‘it isn’t going to work, it’s a flop, stop it all and start something different’ must never
show for a moment on the face. Patience, confidence, comfort must all shine through to
a group of children who are thinking hard, and need time to think, and nerving
themselves to take a part, and need a moment to discover their courage.
55
On this occasion I didn’t have to wait long, for a girl (one I had least expected, as ever
in such situations) said ‘It was me’. Now I had to support her, as she had supported me,
feeding her with my interest and with easy questions that wouldn’t flummox her. The
time of day, dark or light would you say, weather conditions, was she puffed by the run
– which way had she come? All of these questions contained no threat, were posed in
an important sounding, but anxious, tone, suggesting how important the answers would
be.
As indeed they were, for every answer began to build the picture we needed if we were
to believe, and as confidence grew the answers became longer and more detailed. One
girl was believing a lot, and the other children were drawn with her and, half admiring
her, half envying her place in the limelight, were nerving themselves to take a part; but
for the moment I decided to give her control, to vest my power in her, as a symbol to
the class that they truly were in charge. I ended by asking her to tell me who had sent
her, who seemed to have discovered the body.
The child nominated was taken a little by surprise, so here I gave him a chance to opt in
or out by asking whether he had actually discovered the body or not. He opted in, as the
discoverer, and soon his evidence began to flow, building the murder scene itself, and
establishing why he had been abroad so early.
By now most children were ‘in’ the story, and a great deal of evidence was deposed
from all parts of the room. As it came I continued to express deep interest, and to
deepen the commitment of the deposer by questioning about the background. Had there
been time I would have slowed down this stage deliberately by engrossing the evidence
on a large roll of paper; but there was no time and, to my chagrin, a glance at my watch
told me the infuriating news that it had stopped. From now on I would have to work on
inner time.
This annoying accident flurried me a bit, and caused me to hurry needlessly – a moral
not to be forgotten, and since then I have bought a self-winding watch precisely to
cover such a contingency. Perhaps the reader will be amused at the seriousness of the
writer, but if we are genuinely committed to making things work for children then we
should pay the closest attention to timing.
To move things on I searched overtly for contradictions in the evidence, and it is easy
enough to signal to children that one is searching for a victim. So keen were they that
they produced three highly suspicious cases at once, a useful slowing down of pace in
itself, as each had to be separately interrogated, and a procession held round the circle
for an identity parade.
And now the funsters took a hand, my bouncy boys producing a flurry of evidence
against one of their friends, the village butcher. He quite fancied a central role and
made a number of artless self-incriminations to support the case. This was too easy a
56
way out to provide satisfaction, and in any case much of the evidence against him (not
least his own) was contradictory. We could end on a hilarious note (and there are many
good lessons that do so, and splendidly) but from the start I had felt against this: the
children lacked commitment, the ability to work together and seriousness of purpose.
So my mind backtracked to one of the three previous suspicious characters; he was a
small boy who had sat on the edge of his chair and taken little part – suspicion had
fallen upon him in the random way that this kind of work induces – but he had
protested heavily his innocence, and seemed to enjoy the thrill of the false accusation.
So for a while I physically stood him up and went over the evidence against him, with a
touch of third degree. When the class had quite forgotten the butcher, I turned on him
portentously and made him stand, going over the evidence against him, pointing out the
conflicts, but suggesting that a guilty man can very subtly cover his tracks in this way.
The court considered its verdict, and the butcher was most solemnly condemned to
hang. Then for a moment we were silent, drooping a little, relaxed in the enjoyment of
what we had created. To reduce the tensions for the ending of the lessons I allowed a
little mild speculation on whether the teacher would take the next lesson on a hanging,
and we laughed, a pleasant laughter in which all could join. And there was a moment
left to point out to the children that they had together made a good story, and had
deserved credit for their work.
In this example a lengthy account has been given of the preparatory stages of work in
drama, with the rest of the lesson fairly lightly sketched in. It is clear that no amount of
paper planning could have met with the particular situation described, nor could it have
fulfilled the objectives. Indeed, if there is any virtue in this piece of work it is to be
found in the economy of materials, which allowed more detailed observation of the
children, and more singleness of purpose in the teacher. With a known class, or one in a
different state of mind. then other factors would have predominated – with more
detailed planning perhaps, and greater freedom of action for the children. This, then, is
no ‘model lesson’ but a description of one teacher’s reactions to a particular set of
circumstances.
CHAPTER FOUR
Discussion
A NUMBER OF TEACHERS who have observed our work have noticed the large part
that is played by ‘sitting down and discussing’; some indeed have felt a bit cheated, not
finding enough ‘drama’, and others have been hostile, considering that so much
discussion can’t be good for children. However much we emphasise the fact that we are
not in the business of ‘activity’ in a physical sense, nor are we concerned with acting as
such, the labels under which we operate and under which others see us tend to confuse.
Let us take a specific example here: we have spoken of a lesson in which one of us
attempted to sell a collection of antiques to a group of children; now in this lesson the
only person doing any acting as such was the salesman. The children remained
57
themselves, children, and individuals at that, and although we were asking them to
suspend disbelief (if not quite to believe on this occasion), we asked for no taking on of
role. The lesson as such consisted of the boys examining the objects, discussing their
merit and price, and considering how they should react to the challenge posed by the
salesman. This lesson was nearly all discussion, on the face of it.
Yet if we consider for a moment what we are not requiring of children in our work,
then it will become clear that discussion and drama are for us very close cousins
indeed; we don’t expect alteration of voice or posture to suit the needs of an audience;
we do not require learning of lines or particularly close adherence to any one person’s
character-traits; we demand no more make-up or costume than is necessary for an
individual to feel comfortably in his role; we require no art in presentation, no
production qualities. One could go on listing the requirements of a theatrical
production, and most of those items would appear on our list of don’t wants.
Thus we are simply using role as a convenient and efficient tool for exploring ideas and
situations that are valuable in children’s learning. Even perhaps the use of the word ‘
role’ is too theatrical to describe what actually takes place, for frequently all we are
asking of children is that they should take a stance or position in relation to the theme
we are studying, in order to find out what happens, and in doing so to learn about it
from the inside. There is then very little difference between a group of children
working with us in discussion and in drama, though as will be seen in the following
chapters exciting and valuable theatrical events do occur out of the work; it is
important to state, however that they genuinely occur and are not produced.
Discussion can come anywhere in a lesson. Maybe it is at the start, and very lengthy
(and to an observer tedious); possibly it is a cut-off point in a lesson when something is
going wrong, or it is clear that more depth or involvement is needed for success; it can
come to link together pieces of work, for development; it can come when drama is over
but no one has yet explored the implications of what has happened. The teacher must
be prepared to break into events at all times and reconvene the group so that they may
decide rationally how. to go forward.
A small example here comes to mind from a lesson John taught for a student who was
having trouble with one rather naughty boy. In fact he was by no means troublesome,
but the student knew no ways of coping, and so it was worth her watching for a while.
The class was thrown straight into a situation (for they were too bubbly to settle to
much talking at first) and the troublesome child’s energies were used sketching out for
us the streets of Pompeii in which we were to live. The children quickly set up house
and began to practise their crafts, and the teacher quietly went round asking for the
baker’s shop, in order to give children a chance to articulate their chosen professions,
and with a plan in mind to use the child who responded that he was indeed the baker as
leader of the group. The best laid plans are always fragile, and the naughty boy had
now recovered his poise – he claimed that his ‘profession’ was a mass-murderer.
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Now at this point there was no choice but to break up and discuss! It was just
unavoidable. But it was equally unavoidable that the teacher should break into
discussion as if this were natural and right and intended ab origine; furthermore, it was
vital to accept in all seriousness the claim that was made. We discussed, whilst
remaining in role, just how it was that perfectly respectable people lived in company
with such a man. Were they not a bit worried? Had they tried to complain? What were
the authorities doing about it?
The children were soon quite clear that they had been worried in the past, that all their
efforts to get rid of the man had proved useless, and they had now settled down to the
fact that he was their neighbour. They even began to show some sneaking admiration
for the skill he used in his trade, and so long as he operated elsewhere (which he
conveniently always did), then the neighbours didn’t care a bit. Throughout the
discussion the teacher had kept a very serious look upon the discussion, greeting each
fresh piece of information with interest and concern, and fitting it into a growing
pattern of life in this Pompeiian street. He then sent them back to live and showed as
they went back the various ways in which people perceived an earthquake’s beginning:
through the soles of their feet, through heat on their cheek, through glare in their eye,
dust in their hair, the tip and swell of a room upsetting itself.
It was not long before the street felt every one of these sensations and more, and soon
they were huddled together in the vaults of the mass-murderer’s house, where he kept
his stolen gold. He had a ship too, but that was several miles away and now the streets
were full of gas. The only way to get through was to cover their heads with wet cloths
but then, of course, they would not be able to see their way.
No doubt the reader can guess who it was who risked death to lead a line of blind
citizens with shirts round their heads to safety (and that was high theatre indeed) but
the more important point is that the roots of this piece of learning (for such it surely
was) lay in the hastily convened discussion group held in the middle of a lesson, lest it
should all fall to pieces.
So the first major point is that drama grows out of discussion, but that discussion can
take place at any point, and not always at the beginning of some work. Frequently it
does so, and in this chapter we shall spend most time on this kind of discussion because
of its importance to a teacher working in a new way. We have found, for example, that
the evaluatory discussion at the end of the lesson is much easier to conduct for fairly
simple and obvious reasons.
At the beginning a teacher has to use discussion for two main ends: to give children
enough time to understand and warm towards a topic, and to allow for a full
exploration of all the resources the group has to hand that may help in its exploration.
This group is going to have to live off its own resources, and many children barely
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appreciate that they have got any; one of the perennial delights of this kind of work is
to see a child discovering that his own experience and ideas are really useful to the
group.
Thus the first part of any discussion must be devoted to a search for meaning—just
exactly what is it that is being put in the centre of our circle today? A student was
observed recently to stride into a classroom most impressively and declaimed ‘Now
today is rabbits’. Indeed it was not, nor could any of his effort and enthusiasm rescue
the lesson—today was not going to be rabbits, not for anything. The student had read
Watership Down and had been greatly excited by it; consequently he made the common
mistake that his own degree of excitement could be kindled in others by osmosis,
without any explanation. We have all made this error, several of us time and again.
What was needed in that situation was a roundabout route, one several steps back from
rabbits. Indeed it is a good tip we have learned (as so often, from Mrs Heathcote) that
at the start of anything one should take several steps back from the apparent starting
point. The student could well have begun with books, and their effect on people, and
gone into the children’s own reactions to books, and their interest in his would have
been aroused. He might then have spent some valuable time checking their opinion on
the believability of animals who talk, before ever beginning to home in on his blessed
rabbits. All this, of course, to give children time to settle down, to begin comfortably
and at their own pace to be able to see what he is driving at, and to be up with him and
revving as hard as they can ready to go when the start is really arrived at.
So often children’s perceptions of a teacher’s meaning are clouded by several different
problems: language and conceptual blockage are most common, but also there is the
problem of class – the teacher’s experience and values may not be open to the children,
they may not share the same background; children may be suffering from some defect
(that can be as small as a fit of the jiffies and as large as undetected deafness) that
makes them slow to catch on; but the greatest problem is suspicion. Children have had
a rough experience, all of them; they have misunderstood people since first they
opened their eyes, and they have been teased and sometimes punished for it; the world
of adults is as strange as any Alice dreamed of, and twice as dangerous – only fools
rush with confidence to greet adult suggestions. Finally, they are just not used to being
asked to take decisions, having had adults doing that for them throughout their lives. It
must seem strange to a child to be suddenly treated this way, and a big risk is involved,
for the adult may laugh at the decision taken, may despise it. Children need time to sort
out the minefield that lies ahead of them before they are sure they will come on.
Similarly, discussion is needed to help children develop enthusiasm for a topic in hand.
True interest is not quickly aroused, nor is motivation ever sent as a gift from Heaven;
just as children are suspicious of what they half understand, so their background
experience of the boredom inherent in adults’ suggestions prevents them displaying too
much enthusiasm. There is in fact amongst older children a quite overt code against
‘keenness’, and quite right too. What appears seductively interesting might at any
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moment turn into yet another burst of trigonometry in drag. Thus respect for a subject
must be built from the children’s own positions, it may not be won by a teacher. Slowly
the comments are accepted at face value: what people think about the topic in hand;
what information they possess that might be useful. At first the contributions are
miniature and painfully incoherent and naive; there are frequent pauses, and much
embarrassed giggling. And there is nothing for a teacher to do but accept – if he tries to
elaborate at this stage it will show clearly that he is merely spinning words to fill the
gaping chasms of silence in the room, and the relief and joy on his face as he swoops
on the next contribution from the children will be very funny to them, and nothing
more.
Our teacher sits, patient and confident, neither smirking nor scowling, but expressing
comfort and pleasure. The way he sits is important, and where in relation to the
pupils—some situations require the perfect circle of equality, whilst others need
directing quietly from the back. The stance and tone of voice come from the teacher to
the pupils as very sharply refined signals about how we are today, what we hope for,
what we might achieve. As each contribution comes he receives it with respect, neither
disregarding it nor hysterically over-estimating it; the mark to aim for is genuine adult
conversation in which either party fully respects the integrity and intelligence of the
other. On the other hand the teacher must also cope with, accept and on occasion use
silence, a period of thinking that should not be clouded by chatter, or a period of
screwing up courage to say something risky. For risk is of the essence, creative,
probing and challenging, the reverse of the snap answer, and the conventional wisdom
that has never passed through the head. We are in the business of getting pupils to take
risky steps for their own good, but we must allow them to do it at their own pace, and
cushion them where need be.
The importance of such teacher behaviour cannot be over stressed, for children have to
learn during this stage of the discussion what degree of confidence they may place in
their teacher; he is asking them to be very free and open with him and with their
colleagues, dropping all the conventional defences – not a very safe-seeming situation.
The trust children give to their teacher is the strength of the lesson, and is worth
working for; in certain circumstances (when the teacher is new, or trying some
unfamiliar strategy) the children will test him pretty severely, presenting challenges of
various sorts in order to see how he reacts. They may be ‘silly’ in a variety of ways –
stupid, insolent, careless or inept, and the teacher must accept and use each challenge.
For a challenge usually comes from a child with greater energy than the average, and to
convert that energy to positive uses is a most worthy aim.
Whilst we would not suggest that any teacher lowers his standards in the classroom, it
is important when coping with such situations neither to panic nor to react in a hostile
fashion. It is far better to meet the challenge as if it were a genuine contribution, to be
read purely at face value, and then to try to convert it into something positive. As an
example we would quote an occasion where a group of children were examining some
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work they had done the week before and were asked their opinion of it. One boy
shouted out that it was ‘stupid’. Now in reality the boy had made no evaluation of the
work, and was at that stage no proper part of the lesson. He was instead voicing a
challenge that represented his own and several others’ feelings: was this way of
working valid, did it help you learn in the way that the more conservative lessons they
were used to did? The only way to find out was to check the degree of commitment the
teachers had, hence the cry of ‘it’s stupid’.
If the teacher dealing with the class at that stage had responded with overt anger, and
punished the boy with his tongue, one thing alone could have been learned out of the
situation: ‘this chap is dangerous when riled, everybody duck’. No more constructive
outcome could be suggested. In fact the teacher greeted the remark with interest, and
ask the boy to enlarge a little, and give some reasons; he asked whether anyone else
could help the boy with supporting evidence. A discussion on how you judge a piece of
work followed, and valuable learning took place; but there was more – a number of
messages had flowed ‘this teacher isn’t easy to rile’ is the simplest, but also ‘he seems
to be serious about our views being important’ and ‘he will go to a lot of trouble to find
out what we think’.
These signals or messages to the children are all part of the conscious striving to induce
participation in learning, and discussion is itself one major way of achieving this:
children can only learn in action, and learn best when the terms of reference lie within
the range of their own experience. As they begin to take a part in discussion, perhaps
only as a listener and one who nods agreement, or votes, perhaps more actively as one
who screws up his face with concentration to think, of a way out, or a useful fact or
idea, then they start to grow in learning, and learn socially and communally. Here there
are few of the barriers that form such a large part of conventional learning: non-readers
may shine, and those whose social background is poor may have more exciting
experiences to tell. Above all the act of taking a part, making a stand, is productive of
mental courage, an attitude that militates against passivity.
In order for children to achieve these heights a teacher has to downgrade himself
somewhat. He must be careful not to flood the discussion with his own ideas and
language; he must not put these into children’s mouths, finishing off incomplete
sentences out of impatience; he must not direct or control in a way that will inhibit
children’s initiative. He must try not to look too far ahead, not to see implications
further than immediately.
His part at first is very much as a receiver, expressing merely thanks for the messages
given him. As more material comes, however, his part grows larger and more complex,
demanding more sensitivity and tact than before. He will need to record for the
children, will need to point to the shape, flow and direction of their thinking, and
ensure that due attention is given to balance. Let us take recording first: quite simply it
helps children pay respect to their own resources and ideas if these are written down
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when volunteered. We have tended to use wallpaper (following our mentor) in that a
long roll is impressive and not easily exhausted, but there is no reason why an ordinary
blackboard should not suffice. Frequently it is a good idea to scribble up bits of
language that arise in discussions that may prove useful as headings later on: a teacher
may comment: ‘that word keeps cropping up, it sounds as though it is quite important
for us, shall we have it up?’ – helping children decide, but also asking for their full
participation. Wherever possible what goes on the board should be in the children’s
own language, not subtle reinterpretations on the part of the teacher.
As more and more material gets up on the board, ideas, bits of experience, facts, useful
language, then the teacher will begin to see patterns in what is being presented. When it
is clear that the discussion is taking one special direction, or falling into two or more
specific categories, it is useful to stop listing for a moment to point out to children the
observation the teacher has made. Now they may not be ready to see it yet – it may be
too early, too subtle for them at this stage, and the teacher must be prepared to drop this
with an apology, and bide his time some more. It does no harm at all to say to a class,
‘Sorry, I just thought there was a bit of shape coming there, but never mind let’s get
some more things up, and try again later.’ If categories are to emerge they must come
with the full consent and understanding of all the children in the group: at a blackboard
it is all too easy for a teacher to engage in impressive wizardry that makes him feel
great but makes the children feel puzzled.
There remains the duty of the teacher to ensure some sense of balance in any
discussion. Children can be remarkably prone to chasing hares if left to themselves, and
they can also get over excited about one point of view, allowing an engaging partisan
spirit to develop that keeps out all trace of another set of notions. The teacher’s job here
is to carefully recommend the interests of the alien party, exercising sufficient
discretion not to appear a ‘Holy Joe’ of fair play, nor a corrector of false reasoning. It is
valuable to couch such interventions delicately, Yes, of course I do see the force of
that, but someone else might put it differently. For example, ‘Imagine you were a . . .’
Also a teacher can intrude pieces of his own experience, matching the children’s part of
the discussion, but also providing sufficient counterweight to ensure its shapeliness and
usefulness. Sometimes a teacher can find himself changing rapidly from a devil’s
advocate into an Aunt Sally in this situation, when a class is determinedly headstrong,
and there are probably good reasons for this; in such a case the teacher should
restrainedly explore why the children want to hold this biased point of view, unearthing
reasons in the drama, and waiting for the right moment to add the balance.
Discussion time is probing for the teacher as much as for the children: he is testing the
weight their interest will bear, who is most committed, who least, and where his
problems will be. Above all he is looking for feelings, for belief. His questions will
lead from the simple stage of ‘What do you think and what do you know about it?’ to
more specific and loaded questions that build upon the discussion: ‘If that really is
what we think, how do you reckon that could have happened?’ and on to questions that
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lead to role-building and role-taking: ‘Speaking as a villager, I don’t agree, myself, but
how can I know what you townsfolk think?’ The move again is subtle and depends on
the teacher’s feeling that the class is ready, and his appreciation of their feelings of
readiness. He may make a false start, move too quickly into role, and be faced by
rebuff on the part of the children; this is in fact a rare circumstance, but can happen
where children are really enjoying the discussion as such and genuinely feel that it
hasn’t yet finished.
The flow from discussion to drama may well take place without anyone noticing it, for
children’s instinct to play in role is deep, despite the surface veneer of sophistication.
The enjoyment and liberation of role is attractive, and frequently discussion will trigger
individuals into quite unexpected roles that they enjoy for novelty value, or because
they have rejected that role before in their lives for subconscious reasons. We
remember with pleasure a boy who became a bishop out of sheer bloody-mindedness,
and lived to enjoy not only the dress and status, but something of the reverence too.
[Further chapters of The Drama of History will be published in future editions of the
Journal.]
64
Kids at the Centre
‘ArtWorks’ at Valleys Kids collaborate with
‘Common Room of Art for Kids’
Kronika Contemporary Art Gallery
by
Miranda Ballin
(Miranda Ballin is the ArtWorks Co-ordinator for Valleys Kids a youth arts project set
within a community development organisation in the South Wales Valleys. She is also a
part time lecturer at the University of Glamorgan.)
Let’s dare to use the not yet binding language of art to formulate real
demands and to represent the needs of the societies in which we live.
(Stanislaw Ruska in Trembling Bodies, Conversations with Artists:
Zmijewski, A: DAAD and Kronika, 2011)
Introduction
In May 2011 Miranda Ballin was invited to a European Conference called Toolquiz to
speak about ArtWorks, the youth arts project she co-ordinates with children and young
people at Valleys Kids, a Community Development project in the South Wales valleys.
She shared a platform with a young woman from Poland, Agata Tecl, who works at
Kronika Contemporary Arts Gallery in Bytom, Silesia. Here she had set up a weekly
workshop for children called ‘Common Room of Art for Kids’ and this evolved into
running projects in the holidays culminating in exhibitions of the children’s work.
They were placed together because they both worked developing arts practices with
children in deprived communities in post-industrial settings. They immediately found
a synergy and through further discussion they came to understand the context of each
other’s work more fully and they decided that they wanted to try and find a way to
work together.
The Environment
They began from the position of what interested them about each other’s work: where
the commonalities were and where were the areas of difference. They wanted to
explore where they could learn from each other’s disciplines and methodologies.
ArtWorks practises predominantly through drama and theatre methodology whereas
Common Room of Art for Kids works predominantly through the visual arts. The
central area of unity was the children and young people who attended their projects and
the kind of communities they worked in. Agata’s description of Bytom could as easily
describe the South Wales Valleys:
In the opinion of many of the young people Bytom is a dark, ugly
and sad place with a lack of prospects. Unwise decisions of local
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politicians, lack of financial investment in education and culture,
social services, parks and recreation creates an urgent need to
indicate children and young people towards new opportunities for
growth. The majority of our participants in Kronika’s project
come from poor and pathological families. Therefore our priority
is to convince kids that they can have an impact on their lives.
A Shared Philosophy and Way of Working
The two practitioners soon realised that in both organisations the children and young
people they worked with were often seen to be on the margins of society and through
their arts practice they were seeking to place them at the centre once again. ArtWorks
characterise their work as that of ‘Journey Makers’. The children and young people
have been involved in this work for over twenty years. In the last four years they have
developed a programme called ‘Flight Wings’ for young people aged between 16 and
25. In both projects it is part of the practice to create a co-learning environment and
therefore this was one of the areas of development that drew the two groups together.
At Kronika they always encourage volunteers both local and international to engage
with the work but as the project is at an earlier stage of development they have not yet
started to involve their own young people in this role.
Miranda and Agata also realised that it would be useful to have a bridge between their
different disciplines and methodologies. Miranda had been working with Rhian Lloyd,
a recent graduate of photography who had done her final placement with Artworks.
Rhian was born and brought up in the South Wales Valleys and this is a strong focus
for her artistic work. She explains:
An underlying theme throughout my work is the impact and
significance of my home area. The Rhondda Valley has and will
continue to shape me as an individual, both positively and
negatively.
Rhian was asked to work alongside the group to document the work through a creative
process with the young people. This is in keeping with the practice of ArtWorks to take
every opportunity to create a shared learning environment between practitioners with
all levels of experience. Together they agreed as artists to explore the broad areas of
identity, place and community as an overarching theme.
These broad themes enabled them to look at all aspects of their practice, the community
development context of their work, areas of each other’s history that they were
particularly drawn to as artists and their shared understanding of the broader needs of
this area of work alongside the political and social context within which it is set. Their
collaboration has already had far reaching consequences with regard to a possible
community project in Bobrek, one of the poorest areas where Agata works. However,
this article will focus on how they shared their methodologies and practice in relation
66
to the young people and how a small, shared practice project where the ideas could be
tested together was identified.
Rhian and Miranda were funded to visit Bytom in Silesia with the help of a research
and development grant from the Wales International Opportunities Fund. This was to
be followed in January 2012 with a visit by Agata to the South Wales Valleys to
continue to develop the collaboration. Throughout this process these practitioners
developed praxis with the children and young people as the means to understand their
shared purpose.
Testing the Water Together
Working Visually
In September 2011 Miranda and Rhian arrived in Bytom, Silesia in Poland for a tenday intensive visit. This involved them in planning and running workshops with Agata
including drama practice. During their time at Bytom they began to conceive of a book
of photographs that they could both send to the children they had worked with as a
memento of the visit, and which they could also use to introduce the Polish children to
the Welsh children. On Agata’s suggestion the children from Common Room of Art for
Kids took Miranda and Rhian on tours throughout the week showing the town from
their perspective and taking us to their favourite places, including their playgrounds,
parks, schoolyards, railings and in one case their favourite tree. Each child chose where
they wanted to be photographed by Rhian and described to Miranda the ‘taste’ of their
favourite place.
This kind of sensuous language was new to them in a way that it is now familiar for the
children who work with ArtWorks. Conversely what was so striking about the
children’s engagement in Bytom was how comfortable they were using architectural
and spatial language. They were painstaking in the attention they paid to describing
their surroundings and the way they felt about them. This has come from the detailed
work the children at Kronika have undertaken alongside professional artists and
philosophers in which they have discussed the importance and significance of their
space and architecture; one of the main practices that Agata employs. The photographic
books became a way of creating this visual vocabulary with both groups enabling
Rhian to fully participate in the process.
Working Through Drama
In discussion with Agata and Martyna her co- worker who is a trained teacher, it was
agreed that Miranda would take the step of running a drama workshop. For both
partners a preferred method would have been to complete an observational visit first.
However it was felt important to ‘test’ drama practice with the group. This was also the
first visit back for the group of children after the work on their summer exhibition. On
arrival Agata introduced some new members to the group, three young boys who were
not used to working with the Common Room of Art for Kids team – so all practitioners
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were a little in the deep end from the outset.
The main stimulus for the workshop was a series of photographs that Rhian had taken
during the summer of the young people at ArtWorks: Valleys Kids working on their
theatre productions including some informal shots and some staged. The images were
very striking and all in black and white. Miranda asked the children if there was a
photograph of a child that they particularly related too. Maybe they liked the look of
the photo? Maybe the person reminded them a little of themselves? She then asked
them to go and stand by the photograph that they would like to work with or find out a
little bit more about.
Group Work
In their groups she asked them to discuss what they were drawn to and why they chose
the photograph. Again it was very noticeable that although the children were working
in a different discipline, those children who were used to working with Agata and the
Common Room of Art for Kids project focused at an entirely different level. Their
responses focused on how they related to the feelings the person was expressing.
Sometimes of sadness and loneliness and sometimes of fun, friendship and laughter. In
this way they were already beginning to build empathy with the young person in the
photograph, someone they had never met or worked with before and imagine what it
was like to be in that person’s shoes. They also spoke of how the image was ‘haunting’
or commented on the darkness of the background and how eerie this was. Again they
were both developing a visual and dramatic language in a simple way and also
subconsciously building a relationship with the group in Wales.
Creating Images
They were then asked to find a word or phrase that encapsulated the image for them
and out of this to create their own physical image with their bodies. It was striking that
the boys who had never worked in this way simply described what they saw: ‘a boy
sleeping’, though with support they constructed quite a complex image of a young girl
watching over her brothers. The young people who were really experienced at
interrogating visual images responded in a more symbolic way. They described a
photograph of children from Penygraig thus: ‘They are dancing on memories’.
Despite the inevitable difficulties of working ‘at the deep end’ both Agata and Martyna
were very excited by the possibilities of the work and together began to conceive ways
to take the project forward.
Agata Visits Wales
In January 2012 Agata was able to make a return journey to Wales. This felt
particularly important in relation to experiencing the drama methodology of ArtWorks.
Miranda also wanted her to test out her way of working through visual stimulus and
explorations of space and environment with the young people. They focused on the
group of children they were hoping to engage in the exchange. This time Agata was
able to experience at first hand how the children in ArtWorks engaged with drama
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work. The group were working with a set of stones; through their drama exploration
they were uncovering their understanding of Freud’s concept of ‘the uncanny’. She
was really struck by their ability to sustain a metaphorical language and understanding
as they worked with their two facilitators to tell the story of the stones from ‘the stones’
perspective’.
However, when Agata met with the group and started to ask them simple questions
about their local environment and surroundings (for example, what did they notice
around them? What was striking about their environment? What physical aspects were
they drawn to?) Miranda realised how little ArtWorks, and the group organisers, had
developed this visual aspect of working with the young people. It became clear how
much was taken for granted in this context and as Agata drew the understanding from
the young people it was realised what a rich source of material this was for exploration.
The young people began to tell stories that had been passed down and to share local
knowledge of places that were particularly interesting to them. As a practitioner
Miranda became fascinated as to how to marry these methodologies particularly within
a fictive context. This led to an exploration of the next steps towards a joint project.
Superheroes
Agata explained that for the last three years in Bytom a parade was held by the local
community where they all dressed up as superheroes and that the next one was due to
take place in April 2012. She wanted to use the parade as the focus for her winter
workshop programme where the children would explore the concept of ‘superheroes’.
They would use this starting point to explore their physical environment and
architectural space with artists, costume designers and architects:
We would like to encourage the children to talk about finding
ways to grasp a quality of life among the dilapidated buildings
(buildings which may be interpreted as monuments of a failed
transformation). At the same time we would like to show them
‘another face’ of the post- industrial space.
In the event, the children and Agata worked with the artists Michal Korchowiec and
Lukasz Stopcznski for ten weeks leading up to ArtWorks joining them in April. It was
important to the artists and Agata that they gave the children a different starting point
than the stereotypical view of superheroes that employ violence and aggression to
create change. They asked the children to take their inspiration for their superheroes
from nature. This became increasingly important to them. They began to research with
the children who soon realised how little knowledge they had of even the variety of
animals that exist and certainly of the qualities that they possess. This became a rich
source of discussion, research and debate for the children and artists. Through
designing their costumes with a professional designer the children began to identify the
qualities that their animals held, what their superpower may be and how this could be
used to help their community. They also explored this concept in architectural terms
69
both in the structure of the animal. For example, the long neck of the giraffe became a
periscope enabling the superhero to see what lay ahead in the future and to share this
knowledge with others. In some instances they transformed the potential negative
quality of the animal and demonstrated how this could become a strength. Favourites
were a snail that can teach others a slower life style - to be mindful and more observant,
and the snake that with its knowledge of poison can now teach and perform first aid.
This way of working enabled the children to intuitively view their superheroes from a
role position. It had been decided that Miranda would work with the children on
creating small ‘interventions’ or ‘miracles’ that the superheroes would perform in their
communities and on the parade. The emphasis was on the superheroes deciding what it
was they could achieve from their position or role and how they could affect change in
their community.
Initially it was thought that this would lead towards a performance element perhaps in
different architectural spaces. However, through working with the children two things
became evident. Firstly their experience of drama linked to performance was nonexistent and secondly in their minds the actions they wanted to create for the
superheroes were very real. For example, the lioness had decided that she was very
protective towards her community and wanted to nurture the people she came into
contact with. She had built into her design the idea of a folding table and she wanted to
serve the people on the parade with cookies and drinks. The youngest child was a dog
who played games with lonely people. She had huge pockets in her costume for puzzles
and cards and she wanted to engage ‘the lonely people’ on the parade in her games.
The orientation was much more about inhabiting the role of the superhero and the
drama intervention was more akin to the kind of guerrilla theatre that was so popular in
Poland in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
The focus was on really understanding the nature of the ‘animal-superhero’ and also
how the different superheroes may work effectively together. They had really inhabited
these roles and often spoke of how the snake would want to help the snail for example.
Miranda and Agata then focused on their particular actions and why they were so
important and how they could realise them. They were really struck by the children’s
capacity to hold complex discussions and to also enable each other to have different
opinions. Even when this became uncomfortable for them Agata never used her power
as an adult to intervene and stop the process; she simply guided them with more
questions so that they came to their own conclusions. It was a highly democratic
process and didn’t, in that sense, lend itself to the role of a director. The final event
was a joyous occasion and the young people really inhabited their role. They drew
crowds of people to them in their sensational costumes that were beautifully realised by
the costume maker from their original designs. They also created messages for each of
the animals - little ‘signifiers’ to give out to the crowds who really engaged with them
throughout the parade.
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Developing the Project in Wales
During the winter Agata and Miranda had heard that they would not get the funding in
the summer for the Polish children to come to Wales. However, they decided instead
that they would ask the children in Poland to create an instruction manual to assist the
children in Wales to create their own superheroes’ parade. Agata felt that this process
would be particularly important for the Polish children who thought of Britain as a
‘paradise’ or, more worryingly, a place that ‘took their parents who were sometimes
never returned to them’. To have the power to make this kind of intervention with
young people from Britain she felt would really develop their confidence. She worked
on the instruction manual with the children and then the graphic designer on their team
transformed it into a beautiful comic strip, which will be highly accessible to the young
people in Wales.
The next stage of the process is that ArtWorks will use the instruction manual as
starting point to work both with the Penygraig Middle Drama group and the Penygraig
Community project to engage with the idea of having their own superheroes parade in
August 2012. This time there will be a theatre element however; inspired by the
experiences in Bytom and the process of re-defining how this element will be created is
underway. Throughout this process Rhian has been capturing the process
photographically but, as she observed of herself as a young woman who had not left the
Valleys before, this has also begun to change her as an artist:
Since getting back my outlook has changed quite substantially.
Before leaving I was certain my opinions were solid and
grounded. However the short experience in Bytom and Krakow
managed to change my opinions towards my hometown and
inevitably myself…. The time away has made me realise the
possibilities away from the Rhondda, and also the beauty outside
of my hometown…. I cannot solely convince myself to limit my
work to the Rhondda Valleys. The places, which seemed so
significant and special to me before, no longer serve as they once
did.
Perhaps in the end it is this ‘felt’ level of exchange that begins to shape communities
and influence lives.
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Olaf’s design of his snake costume created with the artist and its realisation. Other
photographs of the project can be found on the NATD website (www.natd.eu) in the
Galleries menu.
 Rhian Lloyd Photography. All rights reserved
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Edward Bond - 50 years in Theatre
by
Maggie Hulson
On Sat 19th May Big Brum Theatre in Education Company hosted an event to pay
tribute to Bond’s fifty years in theatre, entitled ‘Bond@50’.
Big Brum have recently produced the 9th of their collaborations with Bond, which have
spanned the years since 1995. Their alliance with this most resolutely human and
justice- driven of practitioners has formed the UK hub of Edward Bond’s work, and has
generated a series of thought-provoking works, viewed by Bond as:
...the most radical he has so far written and intrinsic to his
development of a new form of theatre... 7
Chris Cooper, the company’s director, took the invited audience through a cogent
programme of chronicle and analysis. Drawing contributions from the extended
community within which Big Brum operates, as well as showing clips of performance
work and interviews of children’s responses to the work, Cooper skilfully distilled
something of the essence of Bond into a absorbing two hour tribute, the culmination of
which was a talk from Bond himself.
Bond began by telling us that writing for Big Brum is not writing for children. This is
because the children will be adults, and so he is writing for adults. He ended by telling
us that he sets his plays in the future because he wants to give young people the futuresome responsibility for the world they are living in.
When you listen to Bond, you can’t help but really listen. He makes you think. He
makes you imagine how you might think in the future, and what actions might
therefore follow that thinking. He makes you think that what you think, and how you
think it, is important.
And it was evident from the interview clips of children’s responses that the artistic
work reaches out similarly to the children. It is clear that they are highly engaged both
artistically, reflectively and, as Bond might put it, self-creatively.
Bond’s 50 years in theatre is being celebrated both nationally and internationally. Big
Brum, with Arts Council funding, has created a series of events and projects to run
throughout 2012.
7
EB 62 12- the programme accompanying the event on the 19th May
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Bond@50
Open Events 2012
April – July: The Broken Bowl: TIE tour of Birmingham schools
6th June: At The Inland Sea - A Staged Reading 7.30pm, The Old Joint Stock, 4
Temple Row West, Birmingham B2 5NY
12th June: The Question: An evening of Bond’s poetry & short stories 8pm Hare &
Hounds, High Street, King's Heath, Birmingham B14 7JZ
12th & 13th July: The Broken Bowl - Public performances 7.30pm @ A E Harris,
Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, B3 1SZ
October – December: The Edge: TIE tour of Birmingham schools
October – 1st November: Demonstration performances of The Edge TIE programme
with young people, Birmingham. For invited audiences.
2nd – 3rd November Edward Bond Festival & Conference at Warwick Arts Centre
University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Rd, Coventry CV4 7AL
Public performances including The Broken Bowl and The Edge, keynotes, readings,
film screenings, workshops and an academic conference.
6th - 9th November: The Edge Public performances 7.30pm mac, Cannon Hill Park,
Birmingham B12 9QH
9th December: The Pope’s Wedding: Staged Reading at London venue tbc.
for further information contact
[email protected]
The Edward Bond ~ Big Brum Collaboration Fund
will help to ensure that this significant and unique work
flourishes, develops and extends its reach in the years ahead.
Donations can be made via www.bondat50.org.uk
or text BIGB12 £[YourDonation] to 70070
74
Back-copies of The Journal for Drama in Education
The following back-copies are available at £3.00 each. (Earlier back-copies are also
available. Details of these can be found on the NATD website www.natd.eu). Please
make cheques payable to NATD specifying the Issue you require e.g. Vol 28, Issue 1.
Please write to:
•
•
•
Guy Williams at [email protected] or
128 Hythe Road, Brighton, BN1 6JS.
Vol. 27, Issue 2. Summer 2011
Includes: Dr Dorothy Heathcote MBE; Scaffolding for Realisation, Dorothy
Heathcote; Possibilities and Constraints, Iona Towler-Evans; Collaborative
Creativity, Brian Woolland; Becoming a Teacher: Exploring the transition
from student to educator, Mitch Holder-Mansfield.
Reviews: Albert: A DVD of Dorothy Heathcote’s work, Roger Wooster;
Gavin Bolton: Essential Writings, Brian Woolland; Drama to Inspire. A
London Drama Guide to excellent practice in drama for young people, Guy
Williams.
Vol. 28, Issue 1. Spring 2012
Includes: Obituary, Dorothy Heathcote; Memories of John Fines, Brian
Woolland; The Drama of History – an experiment in co-operative teaching
(Chapters 1 and 2), John Fines and Raymond Verrier; Two Key Components
of the Drama System known as Mantle of the Expert, Luke Abbott; Raising a
Storm: a case study on ‘The Tempest’ from drama workshops to year 6
production, Cathy Wardale; Assessment for Learning: Fad or Pedagogy?,
Guy Williams.
International Section: Dispatches from Palestine December 2011, Luke
Abbott.
Reviews: Six Plays for Theatre in Education and Youth Theatre by Geoff
Gillham, Ian Yeoman; Remaking the Curriculum; re-engaging young people
in secondary school by Martin Fautley, Richard Hatcher and Elaine Millard,
Paul Gibbins.
Vol. 28, Issue 1. Special Supplement. Spring 2012
Includes: The Fight for Drama – The Fight for Education, Dorothy Heathcote
The Mary Simpson Fund
For nearly 20 years, members of NATD who require financial assistance to attend our
events have been supported by the Mary Simpson Fund. Dorothy Heathcote and Gavin
Bolton were close friends of Mary. Gavin outlines the history of the woman in whose
name so many teachers have been able to attend our Conferences and Regional events.
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Mary Simpson nee Robson 1907-92
Having begun her career as a Primary school teacher in 1924 Mary Robson was
appointed to the newly set up Emergency Training College in 1946, (becoming a twoyear training establishment after three years and then, in 1961 amalgamating with
Neville’s Cross College, Durham) under the auspices of the University of Durham. It
was based at Wynyard Hall, property of Lord Londonderry whose estate is on the edge
of Teesside. From the start a feature of the college was the insistence by the Principal
that it should revive the pre-war tradition of the Londonderry family of promoting the
Arts by arranging concerts and play performances for the local community. This is how
Mary, an artist, actress, theatre director and much loved trainer of teachers
established her reputation in the North-East. Her early productions included ‘Tobias
and the Angel’ and ‘Peer Gynt’. One of her students at that time recalls that ‘She
nurtured everyone and brought out the best in them. She was kind, gentle and
unassuming with a twinkle in her eye and a wonderful sense of humour.’
Such was her reputation that Professor Brian Stanley, Director of Durham University
Institute of Education, in 1950 offered her the post of working with experienced Drama
teachers (there was no other such post in the UK) but she turned this down because she
wanted to continue to work in Art as well as Drama. Her non-acceptance of such an
invitation is not without its significance in the history of UK Drama Education, for
Dorothy Heathcote would not have been appointed and her whole career and influence
on the world’s drama teaching would have been much less influential had she accepted
it. And my career too would have been seriously affected, for it was Mary Robson who
introduced Dorothy and me to each other when I was appointed Durham Drama
Adviser in 1961. She invited us both to tea (a popular way of entertaining guests all
those many years ago!) and because I replaced Dorothy at Durham University two
years later when she moved on to Newcastle we were able to share our work for the
next 30 years!
In 1969 Mary retired and in 1978 she married her cousin, John Alfred Simpson
(popularly known as Alf Simpson), also an artist. She died in 1992.
Mary bequeathed a sum of money to continue the nurturing of students and young
Drama teachers. In 1992, Dorothy Heathcote and Tony Grady recommended to the
NATD committee of that year that using this money a fund be set up to enable all
members to attend Conference. That fund still exists in Mary’s name and continues to
ensure that all who wish to can attend our events. We are always looking for ways to
top up the fund and at each conference there will be an event or activity that encourages
you to contribute. Please give generously. In addition, you may like to consider paying
your membership fees by standing order and adding a small monthly amount that will
go directly into the fund. Please contact the Treasurer for further details and a standing
order form.
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If you would like to receive support from the Mary Simpson Fund, please write to the
Chair of the Association indicating your reasons for needing support and the proportion
of the Conference fee that you would like to receive.
The Tony Grady International Fund
Tony Grady was twice chair of the national executive of NATD. He was an outstanding
leader, always careful to develop the theory and practice of drama and theatre in
education, always with the needs of the young firmly at the heart of all endeavour.
Tony was also on the editorial committee of The Journal of NATD for seven years,
again providing a focus and leadership that was second to none. Underpinning all of
Tony’s work was a great humanity born of which was his leadership of ‘NATD to think
and work as internationalists’ 8. He was a founder of the International Association for
Drama and Theatre and Education, and led developmental work in Bosnia, Serbia and
Kosova, always working to bring international delegates to NATD conferences.
In 2003 Tony died, much mourned and missed, not only for his insight and guidance,
but also because he was a good mate to so many of us. When the arrangements for his
funeral were being discussed his partner, Angela, asked that, instead of flowers, money
should be donated to NATD to create a fund for bringing international delegates to
NATD conferences. In this way, through the Tony Grady fund, NATD seeks to
continue, both in conviction and in action, an internationalist practice.
We are always looking for ways to top up the fund and at each conference there will be
an event or activity that encourages you to contribute. Please give generously. In
addition, you may like to consider paying your membership fees by standing order and
adding a small monthly amount that will go directly into the fund. Please contact the
Treasurer for further details and a standing order form.
If you are a practitioner from outside the UK and would like to receive support from
the Tony Grady Fund or you know of someone who would benefit from it, please write
to the Chair of the Association indicating your reasons for needing support and the
proportion of the Conference fee that you would like to receive.
8
Margaret Higgins 18th December 2003 – letter to NATD
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