A privileged position

Yesterday I was using some of the members of my youth theatre as a focus group. I’m training a group in a couple of weeks in “Directing Youth Theatre,” and wanted the youth theatre member’s opinions on what they would want me to teach adults who could potentially lead groups such as theirs.

As is so often the way their answers were entirely unexpected. I anticipated a list of games, techniques, exercises etc that they found useful as actors and instead their comments focused on the relationship, interactions and conversations they have with directors or teachers. What came across strongly was that they want to be treated with respect, with a sense of equality and as real people. I take it for granted that these qualities are at the heart of every relationship and therefore a prerequisite of a relationship between actor and director or student and teacher. This assumption was very much negated with young people stating that the way they are treated in my workshops is unique and being told to do things, receiving mixed messages and being made to feel reduced in some way is depressingly common.
I started to think about the reasons why this happened and decided perhaps it is down to a sense of being threatened by the inspirational young people that put themselves forward to be the next generation of artists and practitioners. Are teachers and directors of young people allowing their egos to be bruised through the fear of their actors and students becoming better than they themselves are? If this is the case, and I fear in too many cases it might be, then I find it incredibly sad.

I’ve just spent the last few weeks creating and rehearsing theatre with a group of 16 to 23 year olds. The process has been incredibly positive and valuable for everyone concerned and it has been so I believe due to the overarching sense of respect, responsibility and relish within the project. We’ve been blissfully happy making our discoveries, shaping the story, evolving the characters and the piece was very much enhanced and enlightened by each of the contributors. This is only possible by directing the process in a way that encourages input and proactively welcomes any and every ideas. Somebody needs to have an overview and weave the disparate strands of ideas together fuelling the process to meet the final vision. Somebody needs to be an outside eye and edit, discard and develop the raw material into a final performance but the last thing a creative process needs is a dictator.

My point is that the privileged position that practitioners working with young people have is too often abused. Whether this is a result of a fear of inadequacy or overdeveloped ego I’m not entirely sure but of this I am certain…whenever there is distortion of our role everyone loses out…

I’ve spent a significant amount of time in the primary schools of Wakefield this week and will spend the next three weeks in a similar vein. It’s an interesting and revealing insight into the formative education of the young people of our city and its surrounding area (for those of you unfamiliar with the geography of this area of West Yorkshire, the district of Wakefield covers a significant distance encompassing the “5 Towns” of Normanton, Pontefract, Featherstone, Castleford and Knottingley and a number of other towns deemed not worthy of being counted for some unknown reason.)

What becomes overwhelmingly clear, as I and my colleagues visit the schools with our range of drama workshops and educational experiences, is the absence of any kind of consistency. From the minute you enter the buildings you are hit with the personality of the school…from classroom to staffroom from the way you are greeted in reception to the displays on the walls. The overriding inconsistency glaring at me this week however was the attitude of the teachers to what we were doing. I delivered the same workshop four times this week; teachers responses varied greatly…from utter disinterest in my work and more importantly the work of their pupils, to delight at the teaching skills a head of year 6 professed to having learnt through observation of my workshop.

Although I am an ardent advocate of variation, idiosyncrasy, freedom and expression there are some things I feel should be universal in education and this week some of the schools I visited were found wanting…if the professionals in charge of our children’s education aren’t inspired and motivated, for whatever reason, to revel in continual self development how can we expect our children to make the most out of school and its opportunities. Equally if teachers are not committed in their quest to understand their pupils and thereby create the optimum learning experience for them, a vital aspect of the educative experience is lost. Reassuringly however there are great schools and great teachers that do embrace all that is good in learning …an attitude reflected directly in the disposition of their pupils. The next bit of the puzzle is to find an effective way of disseminating these vital attributes as widely as possible…