I should
first declare an interest: although divided by the Irish Sea & some
distance by land, I regard author of Drama
at Heart as a very good colleague & friend. I have observed Nell Symth teaching
during my visits to Steiner Waldorf schools in County Clare, & have had the
privilege of some of rich, far-ranging conversations with Nell & her
life-partner, Cliff, along with enjoying a convivial meal. I remain grateful
for those conversations. For me those occasions are examples of clear, living
thinking, stemming from spiritual scientific enquiry, taking account of current
culture & scholarship, as, I believe Rudolf Steiner intended: anthroposophy
in action!
Having
placed this review in context let me add that, irrespective of knowing the
author, I believe that anyone interested in drama, Waldorf education or
anthroposophy in general will find this is a book full of interest &
practical insights. Non-specialist readers
too could find much useful for their personal voyage of discovery. Thus the book's
sub-title, "Teaching drama in Steiner-Waldorf schools", is misleading
if it suggests exclusivity of audience. This volume transcends any narrow
focus, although it arises from a life's work in Waldorf teaching, I believe it
intimates a direction for the development of Anthroposophy in general, but it
contains much a person with little previous interest in Steiner's work might
appreciate. The author has absorbed, applied & transformed ideas from
educators & thinkers such as Dorothy Heathcote, Michael Chekov, Cecily
Berry, Moshe Feldenkrais, Ilse Middendorf. Their discoveries inform & inspire
Nell Symth's teaching: she engages with their work in depth, tests it out through
a process of in action research & active reflection. The book not only describes
this process, but also exemplifies it, so anyone concerned with questions about
developing positive communication & more imaginative living will find Nell
an insightful & enlivening guide. The most experienced Waldorf teachers will
find content to renew their inspiration & those starting out will find this
book an indispensible resources, a text that repays the reading &
re-reading.
If, as
Albert Camus said, "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the
truth", then drama is surely the enacting of fiction in such a way that we
can "suspend our disbelief[1]"
& enter fabricated worlds in which we encounter some near hidden truths
about ourselves, truths both within &
(apparently) above the mundane presentation of realities in which we embed
ourselves. Because drama involves enlarging what in the workaday often works
below our habitual attention, the techniques & ideas in Drama at Heart provide a dynamic account
of rich human communication in action. Moreover, Nell Symth conducts an ongoing
dialogue throughout the book, modelling her message through her narrative &
the style of writing. Key to that message are the words included in her
conclusion, which emphasise the
"human need to learn to navigate the world, to feel empowered in our
skills, & to work with others".
Albert
Mehrabian, in his book, Silent Messages,
came up with, a much misused & often miss-quoted, quantification for how
much day-to-day communication is non-verbal. While the figure of 93%, said to
be the contribution of body language & tone of voice to communication, turns
out to be both meaningless & mistaken, it is clear that, where feelings
& underlying attitudes are concerned, voice & gesture are highly significant
(consider what you experience when listening to certain politicians). Drama is
the art that, above all, makes use those qualities. But Drama at Heart is, of course, not about instruction in methods by
which to deceive[2],
it has a moral core directed toward bringing about positive humane learning
& the best possible outcomes for young people. If that sounds puritanical, is
certainly is not, for this is literally a "play-book", full of joy
& light-hearted exploration. But that lightness leads to a place of
personal & interpersonal freedom, the corner-stone of our humanity. For
students of Rudolf Steiner's work, this might put us in mind of how much
importance he attached to both the arts & social renewal. If the Philosophy of Freedom could be
introduced to children, this is a book that reveals an artistic methodology by
which that can be done.
Movement
& speech underpin our capacity to learn & to acquire the capacity for
genuine thinking. Drama at the Heart
has much to say about the use of the human body as a dynamic, integrated whole.
And this is accomplished through imagination, imagination as a practical
capability. Anyone who has ever related a personal experience, or reported on
an event, will know, even if largely unaware of it, the everyday, social,
importance of narrative arc, speech rhythm, dramatic development, gesture &
pacing. We are story-tellers & story-sharers, even if the compass of our
stories are no larger than the space we fill. There is also plenty of advice
for doers of plays, from preparation to choosing or writing, then developing
plays. Exercises set out here demonstrate how we all might better sensitise
ourselves to other people & to the world at large; these are lively enablers
for the social & sociable arts. We might bear in mind that Steiner suggested
the teachers of the first Waldorf School should seek to become "dancers",
or as he put it, referring to Nietzche, "dancers in the realm of concepts
& thoughts". Similarly, I am reminded that Ita Wegman was known to
have instructed those who attended her readings of the lessons of the First
Class of Spiritual Science to go dancing afterwards. Dance & drama, are of
course, disciplines that are very closely aligned & Drama at Heart explores much of that common ground in the most
practical of ways.
Many
Primary teachers, & Waldorf Class Teachers in particular, find themselves
expected to "do plays". Unfortunately, "doing a play" can
become an end in itself, as if the task resembled that of an ambitious sports
coach, aiming to get the best possible performance on the day. Drama
specialists too sometimes fall prey to focusing on the end rather than the
means of their subject. But every subject taught according to Waldorf
principles gains its place through what it can do to foster the development of
the young growing person & its contribution to removing obstacles to that
development. Thus Nell Symth's first question in her "toolkit" for
"Developing your play" is "Who are these children?" The
great variety of practical exercises, scenarios & games are all prefaced by
that question & together set out the nature of a voyage for the child's
self-discovery & potential for fulfilment.
Nell
Symth's epigraph for the fourth chapter well evokes the essential spirit of her
text. This is a quotation from the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney:
Within our individual selves we can reconcile two orders
of knowledge which we might call the practical & the poetic...Each form
redresses the other & the frontier is there for the crossing
For
Waldorf teachers this might be a description of one of the fundamentals of the
education. Any attempt to set out the principles within the advice Rudolf
Steiner offered to the first teachers, those inherent in the curriculum, must
ensure to reflect the importance he placed on relating teaching to the real
world, to real life. Baldly stated,
that might be taken as an injunction for a Gradgrindian assault on childhood
with nothing but flat, monotone facts, facts, facts[3].
However, facts alone are abstractions & as such are as lifeless &
unreal as they can be harsh & inflexible. Life also involves imagination,
or to use Heaney's word, poetry stand must with & alongside the practical.
In Drama at the Heart the ongoing
metaphor of "the voyage" provides such "a frontier for the
crossing", helping to integrate the different elements, much as drama
itself is shown in this book to offer the means to integrate varied aspects of
students' educational experience. The classroom comes to life!
That
there has to be a battle within education & culture generally to create
& protect space for the arts is one of the saddest symptoms of our age. It
is a battle in which the odds are stacked against both humanity & what the arts
offer. Although there are plenty of knowledgeable people trying to speak up about
that situation - for example, Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pulman, Sir Ken Robinson
- & although organisations such as the Paul Hamlyn Foundation produce
powerful reports[4],
where public policy is concerned, the art education remains marginalised or
footnoted in most State curriculums. What Drama
at the Heart demonstrates is that the artistic is no added extra in
education (or life in general), but the essence of what makes us human. Life
without some sort of art is life depleted, shredded & desiccated of deeper meaning.
This is book is an antidote to that: it deserves to be widely read &,
better still, en-acted.
Kevin
Avison 03/10/2016
[1]This is the modern form of an observation first made by
poet & philosopher, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: .. It was agreed, that my
endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at
least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest
and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination
that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his
object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from
the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of
the world before us...
[2] Implied in the old actor's joke, "Sincerity, dear
boy. is everything. Once you can fake sincerity, you can fake anything!"
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