Reflections on the 2018 Drama Victoria Theatre Festival
by Krystalla Pearce

 

Krystalla Pearce - Workshop Facilitator for Drama Victoria’s Theatre Festival

 

Having recently returned home to Melbourne after almost ten years living and working in other places, I was excited to take up the position of Workshop Facilitator for Drama Victoria’s Theatre Festival (DVTF) and apply what I had learnt overseas – particularly as a ‘Teaching Artist’ in the education department of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.

 

It was at Lincoln Center Education (LCE) that I was introduced to the concept of teaching artistry, and I realised that I had worked in this very profession for years but had never had a name for it. Teaching Artists bring their own artistic practice to the classroom.

 

LCE’s precise pedagogy is based in the work of educational philosopher and social activist Maxine Greene. She was LCE’s Philosopher-in-Residence and a major conceptual force behind its founding in 1975. Her philosophy, inspired by John Dewey as well as existential philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, posits that understanding a work of art takes place in the continuous interaction between the viewer and the artwork. She characterises a work of art as an inexhaustible resource for learning.

 

Teaching Artists work with classroom teachers to design and deliver experiential, collaborative, inquiry-based workshops that engage participants in art making, questioning, exploring context, and reflecting. All of their residencies are designed around a work of art. This approach helps young minds develop skills of creativity and critical thinking that are applicable across disciplines and throughout life. These ways of thinking are central to LCE’s work, which is underpinned by the belief that the people best prepared to perform in our dynamic world are those who think like artists. Artists solve problems, collaborate, communicate, imagine, persevere, and create.

 

As DVTF’s Workshop Facilitator, I brought my experience at Lincoln Center to bear, guiding five pre-service teachers in their design and facilitation of experiential, collaborative, inquiry-based workshops for Year 9 & 10 drama students. Similar to LCE’s approach, these workshops would all focus on a work of art – or stimulus material – that the pre-service teachers and I were to select. We were encouraged to select a stimulus material that was in line with Drama Victoria’s focus for the year: Unity and Diversity.

 

I contacted the pre-service teachers prior to our first day working together and asked them to bring along an image that in some way conjured up for them unity, diversity or both. I didn’t explain how we would be using the images as I didn't want that to affect their individual selection process, but something that we arrived at collectively. Before we began our work for the day, I posted all of our images around the room on butcher’s paper and asked the pre-service teachers to silently observe each image and anonymously write down responses to the following three questions: What do you notice? What questions do you have? What connections can you make? At the end of a day spent exploring Maxine Greene’s characterisation of a work of art as an inexhaustible resource for learning, we returned to these works of art and had a rich and provoking discussion about the works and what we noticed.

 

We weren’t, however, able to come to a unified decision as to the stimulus for the Festival. But it was a great learning experience for the pre-service teachers, as well as myself; and I was confident we would arrive at a worthy stimulus image for the festival participants. I suggested that we all spend some time prior to our next session reflecting on our work together and thinking of other images that might be suitable. Now that the pre-service teachers knew how their selected images would be used I encouraged them to think about potential movement and text-based activities when coming up with other options.

 

At our next session, we decided on “Before I Die” – a global art project that began on the external wall of an abandoned house in New Orleans. It is a huge blackboard with the prompt “Before I Die, I want to…”. Passers-by use the chalk provided to share their personal aspirations in public – some serious, some hilarious, many heart wrenchingly moving. The project’s website describes the work as “reimagining the ways the walls of our cities can help us grapple with death and meaning as a community today.” There are now over 4,000 Before I Die walls in over 75 countries and 36 languages. We used an image of the wall under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City for this year’s DVTF stimulus image.

 

“Before I Die”- Brooklyn Bridge

 

The pre-service teachers and I selected this image because we found so much inside of it to explore. Part of the beauty and power of the image is that it juggles life-affirming aspirations alongside the unavoidable finality of our mortality. What a pertinent and powerful subject for Year 9 & 10 students!

 

The subject of mortality did set off some alarm bells for me. Was it too dark a topic for some students, teachers and parents? Upon discussion with the pre-service teachers and DVTF staff, we decided that this concern could be combatted by considered lesson planning that did not shy away from the topic of mortality but introduced the stimulus material through the many life affirmations that are present within it – particularly hopes, dreams, and courage.

 

Many of the Drama teachers who were present with their students throughout the Stimulus Days shared their positive feedback on the pre-service teachers’ work in selecting the stimulus, designing and delivering the workshops. There were, however, a couple of teachers who were unhappy with the choice of stimulus material – they thought it might be triggering for some students’ at this vulnerable age.

 

Without wanting to diminish these teachers’ responses, my own experience is that if students are struggling with something, it’s quite likely that it will come up in the Drama classroom no matter what you are exploring. For example, while teaching a residency on Newspaper Theatre to third grade students in the Bronx, I asked my class to think of the person they would most like to interview and ask them three questions. Most interviewed Sponge Bob, Barack Obama and Cardi B, but one student interviewed his brother who had been murdered two weeks earlier. My experience as a teaching artist suggests that many students value the space within a Drama classroom to explore ideas and emotions that they might find hard to articulate in other spaces. What’s important is that as Drama teachers and Teaching Artists, we make sure there is time and ensemble support to make these explorations safe.

 

A real challenge of being a Teaching Artist is creating space for such explorations within shorter timeframes and with less knowledge of your students and their backgrounds. This should encourage close collaborations between Teaching Artists and Classroom Teachers. The couple of teacher concerns raised about the suitability of the stimulus material for their particular student cohort prompted thinking about how to compensate for the absence of individual connections between the DVTF and participating schools during the festival planning phase.

 

These concerns were discussed by the festival team and also at a meeting of the Drama Victoria Committee of Management. Committee members unanimously supported the choice of stimulus material. They agreed that providing opportunities to explore deep matters of the heart is one of the most powerful gifts that drama can offer young people, especially for teenagers grappling with the existential complexities of their life-worlds.  At the same time, the committee agreed that while we could never hope to pre-empt every potential ‘trigger’ for the diversity of the festival’s participating schools, we could work more closely with participating teachers who are well placed to know the needs and circumstances of individual students.

 

I’m incredibly proud of this year’s DVTF pre-service teachers for their stimulus selection, their lesson planning and delivery. Over five days, they each led ten workshops – each workshop was with a new group of 30+ high school students whom they had never met. Throughout the week, they all demonstrated a perceptiveness and adaptability well beyond their level of teaching experience.

 

As I reflect upon DVTF as a learning experience for the participants, the pre-service teachers, and myself, I return to Maxine Greene and LCE. We were all thinking like artists – that is solving problems, collaborating, communicating, imagining, persevering, and creating. The Festival as a whole – the process of selecting a stimulus image and then designing workshops and devising theatre in constant conversation with that image – is a brilliant demonstration of the inexhaustible resource of a work of art and that its meaning and interpretation lies in the continuous interaction between viewers and the artwork.

 

Krystalla Pearce will run a Masterclass with Vanessa O’Neill, as part of the Drama Australia National Conference, hosted by Drama Victoria on Friday 30 November, An Introduction to Aesthetic Education – strategies for helping young people engage deeply with live theatre, based on the teachings of Martine Greene and LCE.

 

An extended version of this masterclass will be presented in 2019 as part of the Drama Victoria Professional Learning Program.