Afterthoughts ...

I just wanted to post once more at the end of the semester to reflect on the work we did. First, I will say again that I was very impressed and grateful for the small group of students in the class. We had a group of eight at the beginning and a few had to leave because their schedules demanded it, but throughout everyone was very receptive to new ideas and gave their full attention and energy to thinking and talking about these plays and this process. Excellent work all around!

I was also very impressed with what the students put together for their final performances. Naomi Wallace's plays are already extremely relevant and moving, but I feel like the students were able to make direct connections with their own lives, current situations, and local people in ways that doesn't always happen, especially publicly, in acting classes. As I was watching, it occurred to me that if I were an audience member who wasn't familiar with how actors work, I would be intrigued just by seeing the process of research. And in addition to that, I learned a lot from the performances. I really think that if actors always went through such a process of research, interviewing and performing their work on characters, theatre would become relevant in a different way for contemporary audiences. That's an ambitious thought, but it does seem possible.

I will definitely do some things differently if the opportunity presents itself to do this again in the future. (Students can weigh in on this if they have the chance.) First, this is the assignment I gave for the final performance:

You might think of this performance as being akin to a live documentary related to your character, a collage, a quilt woven from a number of different kinds of fabric to represent your character, or a sort of “Frankenstein’s monster” of your character. The idea is to develop your character’s identity using different pieces of information—interviews, written texts, pictures, film clips, songs, costume pieces, etc.— and perform this montage for the class. You will then put that character to work in the scene you are performing. You can create the montage any way you care to do so, but it must include the following elements:

1. At least two “Everyday Life Performance” moments
2. At least two costume pieces
3. A piece of music that you associate with your character
4. All of the Viewpoints
5. At least two pieces of non-fictional research associated with your character (from news media, for example, or scholarly texts)
6. At least two artistic representations—not music--you associate with your character (film clips, sculpture, paintings, etc.)
7. At least two of your character’s lines from the play
8. At least two elements of your character’s history that come from your imagination
9. At least one reference to your own identity and how it is similar to your character’s

("Everyday Life Performance Moments," by the way, refers to an exercise that I took from Omi Osun Olomo's course in Performance Ethnography. It is a short excerpt from an interview performed verbatim, in the way it is spoken by the interviewee.)

I modeled this assignment after the composition work I learned when studying with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company years ago, and think it works well in a situation when there is limited time to compose a performance. I also have used it in the past, for undergraduate students who have very little performance experience. But this time, it seemed a bit limiting.

This may also because I worked along with the student and composed my own performance as part of the class, so they might have a model to which they could look (and also so that I would have something to demonstrate this process in other contexts). But I think that students who are more experienced would benefit from something less structured than this. The problem is that students have so much anxiety about this process, they tend to look for a template or a set of rules to have something that ensures them they are doing this "right." And so when I say "just compose a solo performance using the techniques we studied in the first half of the semester," it seems too wide open and students sometimes feel paralyzed. But the truth is, I think the performances would be more varied, in terms of structure, if I didn't include this list, or didn't show them my own work as a model. I wonder if I shouldn't be less concerned about easing students' anxieties, since sometimes solving the problem of "how do I communicate this character to an audience?" produces such compelling ideas. Not that these performances weren't beautiful and fascinating, just that I don't want students to feel that they have to follow a particular set of rules to get everything "right."

Also, one thing that was really unfortunately missing in this process was more engagement with the interviewees and members of the community outside of class. I always encourage students to invite people to rehearsals, but it never does pan out. That's where I think it would help to have a community of people already interested before the class begins. I think the fruitful conversations that might happen as a result of this process, and the changing relationship of audience to actors this is intended to encourage, really relies on seeing the process as more of a dialogue and equal exchange instead of a process through which the actors interview people and use that information to lend authority to their representations. In fact, that's the way in which this really is fundamentally different than "method" acting or other processes actors undertake - that it is a process that happens publicly rather than behind closed doors. That's also the reason for using the blog and Myspace, so people can offer their feedback as we work and allow their thoughts to influence the choices actors make.

Part of the problem is, of course, that people's time is precious, and to request that they give some of it up to work with a group of acting students is a lot to ask. This part of it ... the "community based," dialogue-driven part ... is perhaps the most important, and the one piece that has never worked. But once again, I am convinced that this process has the potential to introduce a very important shift in the relationship between actors and audiences, so we can all benefit from the questions and ideas being circulated through these processes. What I mean to suggest is that, rather than theatre artists working toward a "production" that is a final point, the whole process is something dynamic and changing, a conversation that can happen before, during and after what we usually consider the "performances" are over. If anybody has any suggestions for how to make the dialogue part of this process more successful, I welcome your comments or thoughts.