WP1: Pedagogical Freedom
As an actor, I’ve had the opportunity to expose myself to conditions and cultures I wouldn’t have otherwise learned about through an education in high school. Whether it be Bertolt Brecht’s destigmatization of sex work and lower socioeconomic classes in The Good Person of Szechwan or Federico García Lorca’s criticism of prioritizing traditional values over family members in Blood Wedding, theatre has allowed my pursuit of knowledge to escape from the confines of typical Eurocentric literature and history classes.
In this sense, theatre has created a healthy, well-rounded educational experience for me, filling in the gaps that the school system failed to address. My experience in acting has allowed me to discover a new, active method of spectating, similar to Augusto Boal’s concept of “spect-acting” in his Freire-inspired magnum opus, Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal believes that the actor and spectator function in tandem, mutually bringing to light systemic oppression within common situations. That notion has cultivated a sense of pedagogical freedom for me — an opportunity to diverge from the rigidity of a conformist high school curriculum and embrace empathy as my primary tool for growth.
Before I had ever learned about Boal’s theories, I was introduced to the empathic qualities of spectating through my experience playing Zach in a production of A Chorus Line (the plot of which is linked here). By sitting in the middle of the audience and spectating the actors through my role as the director, I learned about each of the individual performers’ backstories, from broken marriages to struggles with identity and homosexuality. Through its focus on emotional storytelling, the “ensemble” of the show becomes less traditionally dissociated from the plot of the play, giving the audience a new understanding of the diverse lives of the people who might typically blend into the background.
In hindsight, A Chorus Line embodies the aforementioned topic of “spect-acting.” I served as the bridge between cast and audience, providing an interactive experience to catalyze the audience’s formation of their OWN personal connections to the characters. I could respond in tandem with them: form attachments to my favorite characters, engage with them while drawing from my own experiences, or feel time stop during a particularly powerful monologue.
That aspect allows A Chorus Line to accomplish a rare feat: to allow the audience (myself included) to “[cease] to be an object and [become] a subject” (Boal 126). The interactions between myself and the characters facilitated an air of interaction in which the emotional impact of each story became infused into the atmosphere of the room. Each individual audience member could resonate individually and actively, because the gap between audience and stage was completely disintegrated.
While Zach’s “spect-actor” role is more clearly defined, all acting roles serve that same function. Similar to the response produced in the spectators, the ability to act also has a heavy reliance on the ability to empathize. Different characters may have different physical, mental, marital, or socioeconomic statuses than the actor playing them; the actor, then, must find a way to connect to them in order to effectively portray them.
Individual characters’ stories can foster a deeper understanding of the unique yet interconnected lives of those around us. Thorough actors take it a step further — developing a complex comprehension of the historical context of a piece and its impact on the events of the play (and the characters’ reactions to them). The plotline of the show acts as a guide for the steady flow of empathy-driven ideas and reactions, facilitating a meaningful, emotionally interactive experience.
While typical education in high school often encourages a one-way regurgitation of information, theatre allows both the actor and the audience to form their own opinions about the character, creating a more entertaining active learning environment. As Boal argues, “Learning is an emotional experience, and there is no reason to avoid such emotions. But at the same time, ignorance causes emotions, and one must oppose emotions of this kind” (103). Theatre provides the opportunity to combat negligence in an emotionally charged way, creating the freedom of pedagogy I’ve sought over the course of my life. It engages the senses and the imagination, creating the understanding that everybody has their own story.
With every new role I leave behind after a show concludes, I permanently assimilate their experiences into my mindset. It allows me to combat problems from new perspectives, to expand past my own perspective to build the foundation of a well-rounded comprehension of the world. By absorbing the emotion of “learning,” in Boal’s words, I can actively challenge and retaliate against the emotions of ignorance. With that in mind, I’ve built theatre into a core part of my identity, embracing that attempt to empathize. It’s allowed me to break out of my (inherently limited) Californian social bubble and indirectly experience other struggles and lifestyles.
The public education system fails to acknowledge many of the important and interesting aspects of history expressed across the globe, instead upholding the status quo by Americanizing the “experiences” we’re presented with. Units focusing on literature outside of American classics, for instance, are sparse, often acting as a “change of pace” rather than a normalized option. At the end of the day, there’s no room for interactivity: the intoxicating excitement of the “spect-actor” atmosphere is lost due to the lack of room for the students to connect with experiences that transcend the classroom.
Theatre, on the other hand, provides a unique look into the world of the playwright, offering experiences otherwise unavailable for absorption. Many of the plays I’ve had the privilege of acting in have delved into more obscure topics and struggles, allowing different demographics to relate to and feel represented in art and modern media consumption. It’s allowed me to cultivate a new perspective of my life in such an incredibly interconnected world: that everybody around me has their own personalized stories, weaving in and out of others’, and the amalgamation of those stories is what makes the world flourish.
We can analyze Orwellian dystopias and the cyclical nature of the American dream all we want, but there’s only so much we can gain from such a narrow scope of creativity. Nobody can pretend to understand exactly which struggles another person is going through, but we can acknowledge that variance in experience and widen our perspectives through art, allowing for a more empathetic global community. Lack of accurate representation has plagued media intake for decades, and while theatre isn’t a shining example of perfection in that field by any means, it offers a start — a method to escape the endless stream of whitewashed content that is typical in most veins of education or media. And while the allure of true freedom of pedagogy isn’t exclusive to theatre, it’s an enthralling and eye-opening place to begin.
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Works Cited
“A Chorus Line.” The Guide to Musical Theatre, www.guidetomusicaltheatre.com/shows_c/chorus_line.htm.
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, Theatre Communications Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=1394257.
