#why do so many english majors expect us all to choose one of the unproblematic british female authors as our favorite author | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

conflictdramascripts · 8 years ago

Text

Teaching Drama Conflict The Politics of Representation and the Difficulties of Inclusion

The Politics of Representation and the Difficulties of Inclusion

In English classes, which I also teach, texts (novels, plays, poems and essays) can be deconstructed to discuss politics of representation. What this would entail would be breaking down of the narratives to discuss how and why, and through what theoretical perspective, particular stories dealing with identity politics are being told in the ways that they are and what other narratives might be excluded by this practice. In my Grade 12 English class for instance, we critique the novel The Outsider, by Albert Camus, using existential, feminist and postcolonial theory. Understanding the novel then, isn’t simply about understanding the how and why the characters act and end up in the situations that they do, it’s to question why the narratives are being told in the ways that they are.

In drama classes, which function in a particularly different way, there is seldom time or inclination to deconstruct the narratives that are being presented in the ways that they are. In modern productions of ‘classic plays’ that might be something that would be discussed (ex. Shakespeare’s invoking of gender roles), but, within the daily use of materials within drama classrooms, texts are seldom deconstructed at that level. An attempt to overcome this problem has often been to use contemporary ‘issue based’ texts, the assumption being that the critical press and the author’s own intentions had already taken care of the work’s cultural implications and dimensions, however, while the text might be seen to be highly relevant and dealing with contemporary circumstances, the original intentions of both the author or the critic couldn’t be seen to ensure that the handing of the text to a high school student would be unproblematic.

There are a number of factors at play here, but to simplify the discussion I’ll frame two sides to the argument. At one level, it might be said that drama students need to be exposed to lives beyond their own, to politics of representation and storytelling that expand their experiences of the world, and to have the opportunity to ‘play’ those characters either on stage or in class can be a very rich experience. This is probably the status quo on the argument however there are a few considerations to be taken into account before it should be given blanket acceptance.

Since theatre is based in characters in conflicts, and these characters are composed through identity politics (which are usually being explored in the piece itself) then it would be naïve to claim that handing a student a script, especially a student that is expressing some of the same identity politics as the character they are being given, is a value neutral act. Put bluntly, assigning students roles because they represent the same cultural identities as the characters (ex. a non cisgender male student being handed a monologue from Kushner’s “Angels in America”) raises serious issues.

Kevin Kumashiro, in Troubling Education – Queer Activism and Antioppresive Pedagogy raises these issues in relation to the use of texts in the classroom and how those texts might be taught in ways in which their use of representative politics might be examined. The questioning as to why particular texts are written, read and studied by whom is becoming more the norm, however this is not normally part of the conversation around roles in drama classes, especially as it would add another layer to the already complicated process of assigning characters and scenes.

In my ‘life’, I exist within a hegemonic patriarchal culture that can be described through such terms as white supremacist, heteronormative and phallocentric. The concept of the ‘Other’ is created through not participating within normative identity politics, which are centered in Western culture in being white, male and straight (there are many more aspects to this but these ones dominate). In my classes, teaching in downtown Toronto, I might usually have 1 or 2 white, straight males in my class at any given time. Thus, the vast majority of my students are continuously navigating and negotiating a politics of ‘otherness’ within their own lives.

I am going to list some of the problems (that Kumashiro notes) of assigning students characters that are representative of identity politics and conflicts:

1) When a play or a scene is presented as an expression of the ‘experience’ of the lives of culturally identifiable characters (which all plays are) the ways in which those characters are separated from the normative aspects of the culture identify them as the ‘other’, thus ‘being the other’ is taught through the exploration and presentation of the scene.

2) ‘Teaching about the Other could present a dominant narrative of the Other’s experience that might be read by students as, for instance, the queer experience, or the Latino/a experience. Otherness might become essentialized and remain different from the norm.’ (Kumashiro)

3) ‘Teaching about the Other often positions the Other as the expert, as is the case when students of color are asked to explain the African American or some other ‘minority’ perspective. Such a situation reinforces the social, cultural, and even intellectual space between the norm and the Other.’ (Kumashiro)

4) ‘The goals of teaching about the Other and working against partial knowledge are based on the modernist goal of having full knowledge, of seeing truth, of finding utopia.’ (Kumashiro)

Matching a student, who is identifiable as Other in very specific ways, to a character similarly identifiable, entails the enforcement of a difficult politics of representation. There is often a presupposition that the student is the expert on those politics already, and thus will intuit the author’s intentions for the playing of the role, which becomes problematic when the student is being directed especially as the student is now ‘the expert’ on the role’s meaning. There is also a further supposition that in the playing of the role the student might be lead to some further expression or knowledge of themselves, and while it is entirely possible for this to happen it is also entirely possible for it to not, and that the student might feel pressured, over-identified, essentialized and limited while basically being handed a role and being told, “This is you, you get to play yourself.” This might seem as oversimplification of the narrative between the student and the teacher but this still seems to be an active and ongoing possibility as Kumashiro points out.

Aside from the ethical dimensions (located in essentializing the Other) there are also the implications that Kumashiro brings up in the fourth item above. Playing a role successfully usually entails expressing some ‘truth’ of the character, wherein the humanity of the character, the realities and difficulties of their circumstances, the literal and symbolic natures of their struggles, as well their being located within other extremes of plot and narrative, are expressed. In the theatre, we are still dominated by narratives based on these types of truth and reckoning and so are the characters we normatively ask our students to play in drama classes. As actors, our students are therefore not only expected to play the characters truthfully, in effect, becoming them, but also to express the truth of their circumstances and cultural realities. Since students are being handed roles that are, in effect, about them to begin with, this ‘truth finding’ becomes problematic as it follows either the author’s own narrative (in biographical dramas) or something approaching the author’s own experiences or projections in other forms. With all this truth realizing where does the truth of the student come into play? Are the students to be idealized as properly suited to play the role of the characters they are culturally matched with as being ‘like’, are they ‘pre-positioned’ as being expert on the character and thus given roles through which to express themselves, or does this pre-positioning and idealizing reveal fundamental problems in the assigning of student roles?

I am not, for a minute, going to pretend that I have found a good answer to this problem. I’ve tried some ways around it though, amongst them:

1) Have students choose their own roles, either by taking them to the ‘well stocked’ school library or accessing theatre databases.

2) Discuss the cultural implications of the role, including the representational politics of the student playing the role, with the students.

3) Not to use materials of these kind at all.

My own solution, which took years to come to and develop, has been the third one, which I will explain in a while, but it is in no means unproblematic. Of the first two solutions to the problems of representational politics in the classroom I would say the main enemy is time. In Grade 12 I teach two English courses, one on Philosophy and Media, the other on Gender Theory and Literature, both of these courses require hours of discussion to make implicit the politics of representation. In the second solution, to deconstruct the play for cultural politics, biases and exclusion of other narratives from the plot, the discussion would be ongoing but nearly impossible to complete. In the first solution, the taking the students to the library might work for some, but the breaking down of the play into possible scenes to be explored, plus the usually limited number of copies, plus the need to read the whole play by all the students acting in the scene, plus the domination of the protagonist/antagonist narrative mixed in with supporting roles, equals another form of dedication to a tedious process of cajoling students to do the necessary background work (at least it did in my classes where I attempted this process for years). Basically, I was facing problems in that most students had not read the full text, thus barely understood their own narratives and interrelations with the other characters. I was also facing problems with the selection of texts, and of ‘finding something good’ which was always a common goal/complaint. I, in the end, had to do as much choosing the texts as any of the students did, usually masked as suggesting a particular play and scene, and thus the whole politics of representation began again.

It would be wrong to say, however, that despite how problematic the whole process of letting students choose their roles was, that in many cases good work didn’t develop or that the students were unhappy. I would say, though, that it was the unit I looked forward to the least each year. My own solution (the 3rd one), which came from a position of privilege as I have a background in professional theatre as a playwright, became to write open-ended scenes wherein the politics of identity and representation are brought to the pieces themselves by the students. In my Grade 11 and 12 classes students are given the choices as to which scenes they want to play, they have to choose them, and these scenes are based on aspects of contemporary life. Rather than dealing with identity politics, however, I’ve separated the scenes in different ways: relationship/non-relationship, comedy/drama, absurd/realistic. The politics of representation are left up to the students themselves to bring to the scenes and this has lead to many different and quite interesting performances over the years. It becomes quite common, for instance, for cisgender students to create noncisgender relationship scenes. The scenes themselves are not gender specific, characters are only identified as A or B, so students will engender the scenes by their choice of partners.

(As this is a blog post on discussing the problems of representation in drama classrooms I’m not going into a longer discussion on the materials I use in my classroom here. Please refer to Conflictdramascripts.com to see the scenes.)

My solution to the problems of representation, while it avoids some of the pitfalls Kumashiro discusses, is not without its own problems. By working through scenes that have been created primarily for acting training purposes, students are not exposed to other voices or narratives within the culture that are expressed on modern stages. While an ethical problem has been acknowledged and a solution engaged with, this has lead to an exclusion of the outside voice of the Other in my classes. While the Other’s voice is expressed by my students as they add the voice of the Other in their own develop of characters within the open ended scenes, this denies them the immersion in how others ‘like them’, have expressed their place within the world. As much as my own solution has been to attempt to maximize students’ abilities to incorporate their own voices and experiences into their work, it is still thus not any kind of a full solution to the problem that is complex and ongoing and probably unsolvable…

My primary defence to my own solution to the problem, however, would be in the acceptance that the voice of the Other is already primary in my classroom, by allowing this voice to be made particular by the students themselves, I am attempting to provide a drama teaching and performance space in which students are free to set the terms of their engagement with representation and identity politics themselves. As a former student (now a professional theatre artist) said to me once, “I don’t always want to play the black girl. I like that I don’t have to focus on that when I’m playing these scenes and that I can just work on my acting.”

In conclusion, I would say that the politics of representation and the difficulties of inclusion are ongoing and the solution to this problem can’t be found in isolation from other ‘needs’ in the drama classroom. At the end of the day, drama training should be focused in the art form, that the art form is replete with cultural and personal meanings that become active within student engagement is well established. The balancing, or maintenance of these competing needs is a crucial aspect of reflecting upon classroom practice.

#drama teaching #education #anti-oppressive education

0 notes