The Interview: Ken Johnson
Veteran director and actor, Ken Johnson, on the Challenge of Teaching Theater in a Pandemic
As schools debate re-opening, even as the COVID crisis reaches another peak, teachers are still struggling with the dynamics of online education. Rarely discussed is the particular challenge of teaching the arts — classes that often are not part of a standard core curriculum, but unique to the experience of the teachers who teach them. We asked Ken Johnson, the chairman of the Theater Department at the prestigious Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, how one school is still navigating the world of digital learning and performing, and find that despite the perception that it’s all bad, teaching on Zoom has been a mixed blessing.
COVID, of course, caught schools off-guard, but now that online learning has been going on for almost nine months now, what in your opinion did schools and school districts get wrong about teaching online?
Johnson: We all got taken off guard by this. The thing that was a constant issue is that the school districts, not in all cases but in most, rushed the preparation process. It could have been improved if we had taken a bit more time before launching, but schools pivoted into virtual learning in what seemed like a weekend. So we did not necessarily have all the necessary tools at our disposal to get ready for delivering the online experience. I think the idea was “Let’s throw them into the water and let them learn how to swim, they’ll figure it out.”
That said, I think teachers did learn a lot. There are these wonderful things that I found I can do online that I could not do as well in a classroom. Just the amount of information at our fingertips was a gift.
But pushing back against that gift was the challenge that every student’s home became a classroom and the classroom environment also became “Is your Mom going to walk into class today? Your little brother?”
How do I, as a teacher, make adjustments for what the student can’t control in terms of their learning environment? No one could completely understand the significance and impact of this.
There’s a clip on YouTube of a mother blasting a teacher on Zoom for being a racist. I don’t think anyone had any idea how complex the virtual world would be. Every kid may have a computer and a hotspot, sure, but we also found that suddenly kids were getting jobs, and babysitting while taking class, and all these responsibilities they could not have had when they were in school. I just wish we had been more intentional about the time we had to prepare.
Since most school districts don’t even consider the arts in their planning, what are some of the specific challenges that you faced in thinking through how to teach theater in this new dynamic?
Johnson: We were in the middle of a production last March when the lockdown happened, and I remember immediately pitching the idea at the time of doing our performance on Zoom. And I knew if we did it, we would be one of the first schools in the country to take that step. But most of the kids said no. They were simply not ready for it.
If it was just a bit later… if they knew what they have learned now about themselves since lockdown about the platform how to navigate the camera, it would have been possible.
With teaching theater, of course, the difference between live theater and film is the audience and your ability to hear how they react immediately– which is what we call “the final character” in any play. The actor’s toolbox includes his voice and his body, but an actor who does not feel comfortable moving or does not know how to express his voice is likely to be not an interesting actor. When you’re in a theater the actor has to physically fill that space.
So our challenge with Zoom, inherently, has been to discover if there is a way for the students to continue to exercise the muscles they need in the theater in the context of this new medium.
When there is a camera involved you have to begin to think more like a film actor than a theater actor. Students began to adjust to the fact that they were sending and receiving (words we use a lot in theater training) and responding to people who were 25 miles away in their basement instead of next to them on stage.
But the challenges are significant, and I would be worried if we had to keep teaching acting this way for several years. But in the short term, students have been able to react to the camera. In theater, actors cannot see themselves. Now theater students have been able to go back to Zoom, or look at the self-tapes they make for college auditions and make serious adjustments that they may not have made before.
That leads me right into to my next question. This time of year students are auditioning for college theater programs, and doing those on Zoom for the first time, when they would normally do them in person. They are also doing school plays on Zoom. It must be difficult for the actor to decide what kind of performance to give, a theater performance or a screen performance. Do you go big or tone it down for the camera? And for the audience or college evaluators, as well, to figure out what kind of performance they are watching and judging…
My sense is that evaluators — and audiences — are looking for the same thing, which is a sense of truth in the work.
I remember I asked a student to critique her self-tape. She thought she played too big on camera. Which was true. But ironically, that was also her problem on stage. Students can become so comfortable with themselves that they can act like an actor instead of acting like the character. There are differences.
The actor, Yahya Abdul-Mateen (Watchmen) spoke to our students recently, and he mentioned that in his first job, the director would not give him notes. He simply said “Just be as honest as you can”. That would be my advice to students as well.
Has all of this led you to rethink how you will teach theater when this is all over?
Johnson: Well, some things have been a revelation. For example, student actors — at home, on Zoom and in their own bedroom, in their own space, can feel a heightened sense of privacy and safety that they can’t sometimes in class. Many of my students have grown a lot during this period. They may have lost some things, but they gained a sense of concentration, a willingness to take more risks because they have the privacy of their own home where they can open up and be more vulnerable. That wasn’t the case with everyone, of course. Some students didn’t feel they could jump all the way into a scene or a character because their family members were so close.
It will take a while to process all the things we’ve learned about teaching on Zoom, but there are positive things to take away and incorporate and it will absolutely change some things.
We all seem to have retreated to storytelling during the pandemic and all the political upheaval, to heal us, to escape, for any number of reasons. What does theater have to teach us in this moment?
Johnson: We are always going to need theater. Theater is a sacred gathering of a group of people to watch and witness storytelling and understand the human condition together. Even the classic design of theaters, in a circle, is about audiences seeing one another react and experience what’s happening as a group. That need — to come together as community — has only been intensified by the COVID crisis.
But also during this time, institutions in the arts, especially theater, have been called out in ways that they never have been before, about issues of race, diversity and equity. I am eager to see how that manifests itself when things get back to normal.
And because we’ve been so consumed by storytelling — Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Max, Disney Plus — as well as obviously the news, will people come out of this with a greater respect for storytelling as an art and a necessity? Will students rush to get into arts schools? Will parents push their kids to be filmmakers instead of going into STEM? Will we see more funding for the arts, or will it all just go back to the status quo?
Johnson: Everything we do is storytelling, and those of us involved in creating new stories, or resurrecting the old stories –we are the most important cornerstone of the social experiment, because if we don’t get the right stories into play, we’ve seen what a mess it can all become. Donald Trump was using storytelling, most believe to destroy what was valuable to all of us.
We are in an epic moment, so if we don’t create the next generation of storytellers and empower people to fully be present and interpret the stories being told around them, then they will be vulnerable to the next Donald Trump. Or worse.
As for funding and greater respect for the art, unfortunately I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.
But I do believe that ideas are more powerful than everything else we create. We are a financial juggernaut in America not because of products or manufacturing — that’s all gone to China or somewhere else. We lead the world because of the use of our imagination, and that imagination is directly connected to the stories we tell ourselves about what is possible.
However, I don’t think there will be a rush of students to learn storytelling — but I wish there were.
Editor’s note: Ken Johnson is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed, Tony Award winning, Crossroads Theatre Company, where he served as Associate Producer, as well as a resident director for ten seasons. His professional directing credits include, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Home, Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, Playboy of the West Indies and The Colored Museum.
