G.B. SHAND
This is from a perspective of personal involvement in an undergraduate Drama Studies Programme, offered in a small liberal arts college. I applaud the Utopia which Richard Knowles dreams: a world of consciously active makers of theatrical meanings and institutions; a world where theatrical practitioners, audiences and teachers habitually spotlight the cultural and critical ideologies conditioning all signifying practice; a world where the impossibility of neutral or objective reading is not merely observed as a critical inconvenience (or even danger), but embraced as an opportunity to celebrate the wealth of authentic signifying possibilities in our various engagements with theatrical text, script, performance. What Knowles really dreams, I think, is a critical and cultural awakening, harmonized with, for instance, Catherine Belsey's call for a new critical practice able to question and destabilize the liberal humanist status quo, or Augusto Boal's recognition of acts of intellectual and cultural oppression inherent in purportedly neutral dramatic theories like Aristotelianism.
Where does the revolution begin? In fact, it has long been underway, but I believe it begins again and again, in the university environment, with valorizing authentic plurality, both in the ways we produce theatrical/dramatic meaning, and in the resultant meanings we produce. In a truly pluralistic surround, no reading (or style of reading) can lay legitimate claim to complete exclusivity, no particular reader can be the boss. The healthy recognition that competing or coexisting readings tend to be contingent on the cultural and critical baggage of the reader is often rooted in the discovery and examination of alternative interpretive possibilities, between or among which no absolute choice is available.
How is interpretive pluralism emphasized? Particularly, how are multiple readings observed not merely as explicable aberrant phenomena which are, therefore, dismissible (the frequent resort of liberal humanist discourse), but as equally authentic and respectable interpretive options? Let me describe how a few teachers of Drama Studies courses at York University's Glendon College are trying to go about it, deploying theatrical strategies to uncover viable interpretive options. 1
Knowles observes that "Even within Drama programmes themselves.... the split between drama and theatre is usually replicated in two 'sides' of the programmes, usually constructed as the academic and the practical, and usually functioning in real or imagined conflict." At Glendon, this split is directly contested in the formation of a Drama Studies major. Our project is, within the context of so-called 'academic' courses, to keep the multiple possibilities of the 'practical' ever-present as a producing condition and an interpretive tool, to keep process in view, and to attend to some few of the contingent factors which may determine our modest acts of performable interpretation. (At Glendon, for example, the student population is nearly 80% female. Interpretive issues of gender frequently, if not inevitably, come to the fore.) All the courses I am about to describe, importantly, are cross-listed between Humanities (in which Drama Studies is housed) and the English Department. A number of the students exposed to this integrated approach, in other words, will take up careers as teachers of English. They will, I think, be unlikely to approach dramatic texts as simplistically closed literary objects.
As part of an integrated approach, we require all Drama Studies majors and minors to take one of two 'practical' courses, in which the class mounts a full production (directed by the instructor) in Theatre Glendon. This is a central feature of the programme. But if we did only this, the merger of 'practical' with 'academic,' and the foregrounding of multivalence, would be anything but guaranteed, since production would be potentially ghettoized, and since the 'finished product' dynamic of such courses frequently works against explorations of optionality.
More important, therefore, is the extent to which traditionally 'academic' courses, while retaining their drama study aims, are nonetheless permeated with the theatrically 'practical.' Thus the entry-level course in Modem Drama, treating the major concerns, movements, playwrights and texts of theatrical modernism, begins by plunging its students, however inexperienced, into full first-term production of a modern play for which they take complete artistic and practical responsibility. They are compelled to enact early closure on many open matters, of course, but the positioning of the production, as starting-point rather than culmination of their learning process, ensures that in the rest of the year-long course, the remembered material conditions and contingencies of performance may inform their dramatic learning.
Integral to the same project, an entry-level course called History of Western Theatre combines study of Greek, Roman and northern medieval theatre with a mask-making workshop, leading to acted scene studies which inevitably uncover alternate signifying possibilities, particularly as students speculate actively about differences between masked and unmasked readings, and about the extent to which available meaning is conditioned by differing styles of performance and (re)presentation. Again, in an upper level course called Reading Shakespeare (the name itself underlines the role of 'reader' in producing varieties of meaning), all students present acted scene studies, and prepare a staging paper in which they introduce critically, and annotate theatrically, the moment-by-moment interpretive obligations, options, and decisions, of an imagined (and variously historicized) production of a stretch of Shakespearean text. While both these courses include a goodly variety of 'non-theatrical' reading and writing as well, it is through their theatrical approaches, I think, that legitimately multivalent possibilities are most readily acknowledged.
Finally, toward the end of their degree programme, most Glendon drama students (and many English majors as well) take a course called Media, which might more accurately be described as Critical and Cultural Theory in Media Practice. Purists might question its placement in a Drama Studies curriculum, but we see its presence as important. A main effect of the course, ideally, is to enable and refine the analysis Knowles calls for, analysis of how "supposedly neutral techniques and technologies" in the theatre, and elsewhere, work to condition the production of meaning and to contain both dissent and change. What we cannot now achieve of the integrated critical and cultural consciousness Knowles envisages in theatre practice, drama teachers must also not defer. It is a small corner of a much larger endeavour, but informing drama studies programmes with theatrical learning, celebrating the interpretive multiplicity thus released, and becoming increasingly aware that meaning may be contingent, local and negotiable, rather than absolute and universal, strikes me as one real strategy to foreground the constructed (and therefore changeable) nature of the cultural status quo, and to assist drama students to produce a future, rather than simply to reproduce a past.
NOTES
1 I don't claim, don't even dream, that classroom theatrical techniques reflect, in any but the
most primitive manner, the producing conditions of the material professional theatre. We
obviously share neither the interpretive inclinations of training nor the necessities of economics
which drive most professional work; we merely seek to foster a habit of imagining playtexts in
'theatrical' terms, a habit which regularly provides access to more meanings than one. So what I
am describing here is only a baby step into that larger gap, between the professional theatre (as
distinguished from 'practical theatre') and academe. But it is a step. Because it patently does not aspire to mirror the performing/signifying conditions of professional theatre, I think it is not
subject to Knowles's justified complaint about university theatres' use of un- or undertrained
practitioners as laboratory rats-although even there, I would argue that the problem may be
less with that experimental practice than with the truth claims it makes about its results.
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WORKS CITED
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications, 1985.