Teaching Theory With Theatre: an introduction to Prompt
Jeanmarie Higgins
We’re still making theatre with things, but the things have changed. As we navigate this transition, we can’t let the medial become immaterial. – Sarah Bay-Cheng
When the MFA students at Penn State decided to create a journal about the intersection of theatre teaching, theory, and practice, it arrived as the answer to a question I had been posing for most of my teaching life. Q: Why are theatre students so “good at theory”? A: Because theatre artists “do theory” all the time: scenic designers present the stage worlds they create as sign systems; actors “deconstruct” scripts, not to reconcile but rather to acknowledge (and play) the contradictions within seemingly unified characters. In short, theatre students are good at theory because theatre is a structuralist practice.
This methodological part of theory comes easily; interestingly, I find that it is more challenging for theatre artists to let go of canon, majority, and unity in plays, characters, and productions. Once they do, though, accounting for the bodies and stories of the unrepresented, the invisible, and the forgotten can become a lifelong pursuit. And in this, theatre practice provides a method.
While some might account for occlusions within discourse by bringing the background to the foreground, we might instead see the power already inherent in the positionality of background. (Fitz-James)
In her response to “Rehearsing Thread” in this the first issue of Prompt: a journal of theatre theory, practice, and teaching, performance artist Thea Fitz-James theorizes the director’s use of space as a conversation about the relative value we give to background and foreground. This is what studying theatre contributes to the learning of theory: spatiality. Although there are many ways to imagine theory in practice, theatre production requires composition and communication skills, combined with the task to put bodies onstage within representation, that is, for others to gaze upon. This is another reason why theatre artists are such deft theorists—the stakes are high for ethical spatial practices.
The five videos herein are the product of formalizing a class exercise from the Spring 2020 theatre pedagogy seminar at the Pennsylvania State University School of Theatre—the first time such a course has been offered for our MFA students in scenic design, costume design, costume technology, and musical theatre directing. Naturally, this course was especially challenging in this particular semester. To frame our switch to remote instruction in visual terms, one week we were sitting around a seminar table discussing the likes of Paolo Freire and bell hooks (I was in heaven), and the next week we were on a zoom call discussing plans to reimagine our undergraduate teaching assignments from in-person to remote delivery.
But somewhere between reading The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Teaching to Transgress, and learning how to share screen and make a Canvas quiz, we taught each other things—with things—without knowing that this journal was our destination. In one zoom class session, everyone was given fifteen minutes to figure out how to teach something about theatre, using a thing they had lying around their home. And so, “the mundane object became slightly extraordinary,” as Kee-Yoon Nahm notes in response to Alyssa Ridder’s “Sock Talk: Character” video. Using three differently shaped vases in her apartment, costume technologist Keagan illustrated three waistlines from specific points in fashion history. Alone in a different apartment, Jessica, also a costumer, held a measuring tape to another vase’s “waist.” The vase, made of glass, inspired an attitude of care for the (now invisible) actor’s body. We collectively held our breath as Jessica let the tape fall from the middle of the vase to the table top.
We learned more in that moment than how to measure the length of a dress. (Although we did also learn how to measure the length of a dress.) This acknowledgement of the absence of liveness, joined by our collective attention, gave Jessica the power to turn the object into a thing, in Bill Brown’s sense of the term. I would like to say that with these pop-up lessons we hoped to create a tension between the forcefully theatrical and the brutally material character of things, but that would be disingenuous. Rather, what began as a classroom ice-breaker developed into a collective response that demonstrated our usefulness—as students, as artists, as teachers—in the wake of our profound feelings of loss.
“What does it mean to be ‘at home’ in a space that is built for someone else?” So Alan Ackerman asks of the characters of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll House in response to Beatriz Chung’s video, “LEGOs vs. Robots.” Separated from our stages, our shops, and our studios, we made something in a virtual space that, because of our field’s insistence on the exclusivity of “liveness” as a phenomenological condition, we did not think was meant for us. Together in our not knowing how to go on—with our pedagogy course, or in our field, or in “the theatre business”—this zoom class testified to our refusal to give up on the centrality of material as a tool for communication in our fields. If, as August Stringberg said, “The world is a reflection of your interior state, and of the interior state of others” (quoted by Sebastian Trainor in response to Grisele Gonzalez-Ledezma’s video, “At Home with Rocks: Environment”), then this zoom class expressed our collective interior lives in this moment of “no theatre:” through our grief, signalling our desire to connect.
Any discussion of marginality, occlusion, or forgotten-ness would be irrelevant at this moment in history (what Sarah Bay-Cheng has helpfully named ACV, or Anno Corona Virus) without Les Gray’s provocation that we ask ourselves to see the white porcelain canvas upon which the texture of spice and color live in temporary usefulness—for designers, yes, and for white people of every metier. In response to Rozy Isquith’s essay, “Painting with Sprinkles: Textures,” Gray names the precarious spaces of Black life, including even domestic spaces, calling to mind Breonna Taylor and Botham John as an extension of the victims in the lynching plays Gray writes about in their response essay to Rozy’s painting lesson:
Their interiors became exteriors as they were removed from the interior spaces that we so often assume to be spaces of safety. As we have been saying for so long now, their lives mattered. What is the texture of a Black home in the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation? (Gray)
Prompt aims to start conversations such as these between artists, their materials, teachers, and scholars in our fields of theatre and performance studies. But as with any new venture, this journal joins conversations already in progress. This is why we asked Sarah Bay-Cheng to convene this conversation with us, as she has embraced the virtual and the mediated with joy, in counterpoint to gripings about the loss of theatre’s liveness and immediacy. I think we need this kind of optimism in the years just ahead. It is also crucial to note that the structure Prompt creates—videos and essays that speak to each other—is both homage and reframing of the dramaturgy used in Imagined Theatres, conceived and edited by Daniel Sack. As each “imagined theatre” contains both a theatre and its gloss, so we reached out to scholars, asking them to write something in response to a teaching video. In this way, we hope to show teaching as the inspiration for the writing of history and theory, as we also hope that the essays herein will inspire new approaches to teaching. We are excited to see how people will use this space.
Bio
Jeanmarie Higgins is an associate professor of theatre at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She’s the editor of Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge 2020) and the dramaturg for #HereToo, a theatre for social change project that amplifies youth activists’ voices.