MARK BLAGRAVE
In accounting for the fact that some Theatre programmes appear to "turn out" unthinking drones who would rather not reason about or question the nature of their art, while some Drama programmes appear to encourage, in a material vacuum, the automatic reproduction of "dominant values," it is tempting to try to lay the blame on outside forces. Notions of market forces, cultural affirmation, and of mysterious hegemonic forces interested in preserving their own vested interests (could theatre studies in this country ever become that important?) provide plausible rationales. Such explanations, though, may overlook a simpler explanation: that the distinction between Theatre programmes and Drama programmes is a function of the motives of those who actually run them. Many who choose the so-called theatre stream enter it because they love the medium as medium and want to experiment with its potentials, while those in the so-called academic stream (at least described by Richard Knowles) appear frequently to have really been interested in some other agenda altogether.
The study of Drama all too often finds itself in the position of a small passenger balloon abandoned in an empty field: easily hi-jacked, subject to invisible currents, buoyed up on hot air; and everybody thinks it would be easy to fly. In some cases, the hi-jacking is prompted by various expectations created by the diverse backgrounds and training of the available professoriate. Persons with disciplinary training in a (usually national) literature will often (without malice) conceptualize drama as a subspecies of literature, for instance. In other cases, the practical necessities of survival within a university system will encourage the formations of partnerships of convenience between drama specialists and departments of language and literature (the so-called interdisciplinary programmes). In order to justify their existence in terms understood by their colleagues, those responsible for teaching within such programmes may be tempted to fall back on a "unifying theme" or a "values" approach such as that described by Knowles. In its most advanced stages, this form of hi-jacking might try to persuade us that Plato's dialogues are drama; in its mildest form, it purports to teach drama while longing all the time to branch off into ethics or political science or psychology.
There are more subtle forms of hi-jacking. As Richard Knowles observes, "many educators and theatrical practitioners are drawn to theatre, as to the other arts, because they are interested in the potential of the form to examine or even be critical of aspects of the world in which we live." Such people, he asserts, are attracted to the arts because they foster "free expression, exploration, and dissent." This is merely to replace one ulterior agenda with another; and it is not hard to see how those who expect the medium to serve some other end altogether are always to be disappointed. It must be like marrying purely for an inheritance only to begin wondering, after the inheritance has been spent, why the sex is no good.
The proposal to adopt, for the future, something like a cultural materialist approach to drama studies may represent a third form of hi-jacking. Under this model, we would study drama for what we can discover about "the ways in which particular and historicized dramatic and theatrical techniques in the theatre and in the classroom conspire with the social and cultural backgrounds, educations, and expectations of audiences and students to produce meaning." The ultimate goal would be an understanding of "how and in whose interests meaning is produced." The worry is that when this grafted-on agenda is "failed" by the medium, another will be sought, and another after that.
As ulterior agendas go, however, this latest appears to have the virtue of being most in tune with the actual nature of the medium itself. (Even) Aristotle seems to have known that drama is about process, that it is imitation in action. We may forgive him if he wasn't as zealous in arguing the necessity of performance as we should like him to have been, since, in recent years, that battle seems finally to have been won without his aid. Most academics involved in drama programmes will now concede that plays are meant to be performed. Performance necessarily entails a series of material conditions, all of which are variable and subject to change, and all of which must be accounted for in a responsible study of drama-but not primarily because of what they can tell us of power structures or "difference." Rather, a historicized approach (if that is what it is) may more sensibly "limit" itself to the enormous task of understanding the potentials of the medium and the variety of responses to the question of how drama imitates (not to mention what it can and cannot imitate). It is curious that the study of drama should so often feel that it must justify itself almost exclusively in terms of the form's revelation of culture, politics, and value (if not hat styles), while the studies of poetry or painting, for instance, content themselves with explorations of form and the medium's potential for communicating.
If a gulf is opened between Theatre and Drama approaches by differing expectations of the medium, it may be broadened by the mutual suspicions, even paranoia, that mark many practice-theory relationships. It is by no means narrowed by the attitude expressed in Knowles's diagnosis of the "potentially debilitating and destructive situation-endemic in university theatre--of using un- or undertrained actors, directors, writers, and so on-the bland leading the blind-as 'laboratory rats."' If Antoine and Stanislavsky had shared this phobia in their early years, Henry Irving and Charles Kean might still tread the stage. Knowles is no doubt right to plead for "interrogation" of "the Method" as a dominant (and largely unquestioned) recipe. Given his argument that "training" and "the Method" are at present virtually synonymous, though, the fear of using "untrained" actors seems inconsistent with this plan. In the end, the only "method" must surely be that suggested by the individual work itself, as determined by actors and a director attuned to its peculiar network of signs.
How do we prepare such actors and directors? Is it enough simply to suggest "integration" of "the fields of study now represented by Drama and Theatre programmes" if one of the objectives of such integration is to ensure "that actors, directors, and others would enter the profession knowing something about theatre history and dramatic literature, while academics and critics would graduate with some training in what actors, directors, designers and technicians do"? This would seem to maintain the notion of a split at the end of the process, rather than to achieve true integration-a little more like two individuals being billeted for a few weeks in one another's countries, only to return home, than like the establishment of a new country where both can live indefinitely.
Knowles's plea for a new methodology appears to be predicated on an understanding of "the liberal-education model" as "separating the 'scientific,' technological, and methodological from the realm of values." Is there any avowedly "liberal arts" institution that has not traded in a "values-of-Western-Civ" approach for the encouragement, usually through distribution requirements, of the acquisition of several different methodological approaches? This is not, though, to say that it became necessary to throw out the proverbial baby with the bath water. Our traditional "survey" courses (whatever purpose they may have served many years ago) would seem to be well suited to "historicizing" everything. Where I would differ from Knowles's suggestion is in forbidding any kind of external agenda in such a course--either one of "enshrined values" or one of "cultural materialism." Rather, students might be better encouraged to see plays as experiments in a medium, the potentials of which are discovered and rediscovered over time. Aesthetic conventions, as imposed by material conditions of the theatre, should be examined first, and no "meaning" that cannot be derived and defended practically should be entertained in such a course. When this approach is tried, students find it hard, at first, to resist the urge to talk about how Oedipus's feelings for his mother "mean" something universal. They are not used to dealing, instead, with such questions as how Jocasta must exit when "she" does in order to change her mask and come back as somebody else. By the time they have worked their ways from the Greeks to the twentieth century, however, they are able to see contemporary practices as merely several more in a series of conventions. In this way, the "dominant forms of theatrical practice here and now" are contextualized through a course structure that has been around and in use for a long time.
The attractions of Drama studies, for some of us, have always inhered in the mutability of the form, in its sensitivity to technological and cultural change, in its being more manifestly "made" than other genres, and in the challenge and reward of understanding it first in practically-defensible terms. These are not, I believe, substantially different from the interests proposed by Knowles or from those espoused in a so-called Theatre programme.
The question for our future appears to be not so much how to "integrate" the programmes as how to "de-stream" them. It is also how to make Eilert Løvborg take over from Georg Tesman. Specialization is so ingrained in our universities that it may be easiest to persuade ourselves that the best that can be achieved is a kind of integrated view over the curriculum as a whole, but not within individual courses. In this way, the two types of programmes would remain on their separate courses, with the odd exchange of students, perpetuating the view that Drama studies are really nothing more than a constellation of separate disciplines to be sampled and coordinated. Only when we are willing to approach the medium as medium, rather than as a means to some other end, and to reason about it in an academic setting, do we have a hope of producing something like Gordon Craig's "artist of the theatre," whose method is more than the sum of a variety of approaches borrowed from the sister arts. Then "this discipline which is not one" might become the discipline that is one, indivisible.