Dramatic Interactions : Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater—Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices [1 ed.] 9781443827485, 9781443826501

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Dramatic Interactions

Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater— Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices

Edited by

Colleen Ryan and Nicoletta Marini-Maio

Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures through Theater— Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices, Edited by Colleen Ryan and Nicoletta Marini-Maio This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Colleen Ryan and Nicoletta Marini-Maio and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2650-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2650-1

To our students, who have inspired our work and friendship.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... xi Preface ...................................................................................................... xiii Les Essif, University of Tennessee Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Colleen Ryan and Nicoletta Marini-Maio Section I: Why Theater? Practical and Philosophical Perspectives Chapter One............................................................................................... 14 Rehearsing the Uncertainty of Theatrical Art and/in Foreign Language Les Essif, University of Tennessee (USA) Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 35 Finding Liberation Through Performance/Disguise in a Foreign Language/Culture: A Feminist Perspective Domnica Radulescu, Washington and Lee University (USA) Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 63 “Acting . . . is the recovery of a ‘lost’ physical of reading.” Or: Why We Should Consider Theater-Based Literature Courses. Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College (USA) Section II: Performance-based Pedagogies for Foreign Languages and Cultures Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 86 Performing Brazil: The Cycle of Performance for Communication and Theater in the Foreign Language Classroom Patricia Sobral, Brown University (USA) Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 110 Embodied Culture, Living History: Teaching French Theater as Performance Art Christine A. Jones, University of Utah (USA)

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 137 Towards an Embodied Pedagogy in the Teaching of Latin American Theater Francine A’Ness, Dartmouth College (USA) Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 164 Reading, Representing, and Recreating Latin American Theater: Collaborative Experiences of Language and Cultural Learning Jeanie Murphy, Rockford College (USA) Section III: Performance-Based Practices in the Foreign Language Classroom Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 184 Présences partagées: Design and Implementation of an Advanced-Level Course in French Theater Charles Nunley, Middlebury College (USA) Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 205 Contemporary Colloquial Theater in Japanese Language Teaching and Learning: A Case Study Yumiko Hashimoto, The University of New South Wales (AU) Chapter Ten.............................................................................................. 219 Analyzing Dramatic Texts on the Big Screen: Teaching Theater through Cinematic Adaptation Christina J. Wegel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) Section IV: Embodying the Cultural Other: Recreations, Improvisations, and Adaptations Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 244 Enhancing Heritage Speakers’ Communication Skills through Drama and Improvisation Elena Sukhina, Moscow State University (Russia) Chapter Twelve........................................................................................ 270 Making This Up As We Go: Using Improvisational Theater in Foreign Language Learning Ian Andrew MacDonald, Dickinson College (USA)

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 295 Re-creating Antigoni: Promoting Intercultural Understanding through Empathy Nicoletta Marini-Maio, Dickinson College (USA) Section V: Theater in the Curriculum and Theater in the Community: Program Design, Learning Objectives, and Assessment Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 328 The Goldoni Project: Building Connections and Community in the Foreign Language Curriculum Colleen Ryan, Indiana University (USA) Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 355 Evaluating Drama in the EFL Classroom: From Theory to Practical Experiences Laura Stella Miccoli, Universidad de Minas Gerais (Brazil) Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 382 Special Events: Beyond the Limits of the University Campus with Teatro delle Albe and Marco Paolini Thomas Simpson, Northwestern University (USA) Contributors............................................................................................. 392 Index........................................................................................................ 398

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Dickinson College for generously funding our project. Dickinson’s support allowed for much of the research, data collection, and editorial work in several parts of this book. We would like to thank Less Essif for writing the preface and Debra Karr for her outstanding editorial assistance. We also thank Carol K. and Amanda M. of Cambridge Scholars Press for their excellent guidance throughout the editorial process. In addition, we express our heartfelt gratitude to the numerous colleagues who have encouraged and supported our explorations of the pedagogical intersections between foreign languages, cultures, and theater. Fundamental have been the theater workshop courses we have been so fortunate to establish and regularly offer with the help of colleagues, administrators, and staff who provided funding as well as logistical and practical support at the University of Pennsylvania, Middlebury College, Dickinson College, The University of Notre Dame and Indiana University. A special thanks goes to our colleagues and teaching assistants whose involvement in certain aspects of our theater productions made our work much easier and more pleasant: Paola Bonifazio, Silvia Carlorosi, Alessia Cecchet, Fabiana Cecchini, Eleonora Raspi, Michela Ronzani, Laura Colangelo, and Mary Migliorelli. Finally, we would like to thank all of the Italian students who participated in our theater courses over the last decade, embracing the experience of Italian theater with incredible energy, great care for details, and an indefatigably positive spirit.

PREFACE DOING AND EXPERIENCING THEATER IN THE CULTURE OF THE DECIDEDLY FREE LES ESSIF, UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. . . . The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant. . . . His culture is based on “I am not too sure.” —H. L. Mencken

In my essay included in the body of this volume I argue the cultural and pedgagogical urgency for guiding our students through and toward theatrical uncertainty. In this preface I would like to situate my interest in uncertainty by outlining its relevance to the considerable shift in my research agenda in recent years. My current research project, tentatively titled “Images of American ‘Unculture’ in Contemporary French and Francophone Theater,” might seem distant from “dramatic interactions” and performance pedagogy, unless of course we consider the essential relationship between theatrical performance and human culture. The project has broadened my understanding of the culture behind the theatrical art and has taught me a great deal about how the undialectical, “uncultural” orientation of my home culture affects the potential for understanding, approaching, and doing theater in America from critical, artistic, and pedagogical points of view. In short, we live and work in an undialectical culture of certainty that is correspondingly untheatrical. It is not that French culture, as opposed to American culture, has it right. French social codes and conventions are in some ways more burdensome, rigorous, and artificial than ours. But overall the French as a people have a more uncertain world view, which renders them more open than Americans to being wrong. They are more dialectically predisposed to acknowledging the fundamental contradictions of human culture and therefore to realizing

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they will always need to evolve culturally. Consequently, they more readily embrace the fundamental theatricality of life. My project examines how prominent post-1960 French playwrights represent “America” and “Americans,” especially in terms of what the French (among other foreign cultures) perceive to be the extraordinarily uncritical collective consciousness of Americans and the alternative cultural “reality” it has engendered for the United States and the world. In our globalizing world, “American unculture” extends beyond the geographical location of the United States. Régis Debray, for example, refers to a “homo americanus,” a creature and a perspective which is dominant in the United States but encountered throughout the world (203). Since Tocqueville pondered this anti-intellectual legacy in the nineteenth century, in today’s context of the United States’s global hegemony in an increasingly globalized world, the French conceptualization of it has transformed into what Jean Baudrillard has termed American “unculture.” Baudrillard and others believe this unculture results from an undialectical approach to history and the present, one which tends to dismiss or oversimplify the contradiction, conflict, and nuance (read “uncertainty”) underlying all forms of sociocultural practice, including and perhaps especially, theater. Unculture is reflected in those American values and practices that the French find fascinating as well as culturally and historically regressive, and consequently problematic, and, I would add, untheatrical at the core: individualism, hyper-patriotism, provincialismpuritanism, religious fundamentalism, materialism-commercialism, a pioneer-cowboy-lawman mentality, militarism, gangsterism, violence, a cultural obsession with spectacle and entertainment (Hollywood), and with all this, a refusal of social community. Most of the essays included in this volume deal with pedagogical applications of theater/performance in the Western world. The United States stands out against neighboring Western cultures in that it is predominantly an undialectical culture, one which is less disposed to understanding or engaging what Terry Eagleton refers to as “culture as critique”: “Culture in this sense arises when civilization begins to seem self-contradictory.” All culture is contradictory (“civilization in the very act of realizing some human potentials, also damagingly suppresses others”), but it takes “dialectical thought” to flesh out the fact that “culture is not some vague fantasy of fulfillment, but a set of potentials bred by history and subversively at work within it” (22-23). A dialectical approach to life and to art will take serious account of this cultural uncertainty. The undialectical unculture of the United States is not comfortable with uncertainty, and consequently it has a problem with theatricality.

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In an essay on the subject of “acting Italian” in the teaching of foreign language and culture, William Van Watson explores theater as a culturally specific practice by contrasting the intrinsic theatricality of Italian culture with American culture. He begins his discussion by reminding us that “the essence of drama is conflict,” a conflict which responds to the inherent contradictions of culture. He then draws a noteworthy contrast between Italian and American cultures in the way that each culture works semiotically, that is, the way each one distinguishes signs: To be American is to want to mistake the sign of the thing for the thing itself. Italians do not make this mistake. . . . Theater as an art form is an amalgam of semiotic systems, and so consequently, two cultures having disparate conceptions of the sign will also have disparate conceptions of theater. In semiotic terms, then, Italians know that the signs are duplicitous, that they are constituted of signifier and signified, and that the relationship between these parts can be arbitrary and even perverse. . . . The Anglo-American position is comparatively semiotically naïve, believing in an imagined primordial wholeness of an Ur-sign. (51-52)

Sound familiar? Americans prefer the certainty of (illusionary) realism in their art and their culture, they prefer the non-conflictual illusion of certainty conveyed by happy endings, and “[a]s a formal aesthetic, Realism attempts to minimize the disparity between the signifier and the signified, a disparity with which Italians are relatively comfortable, while AngloAmericans are not” (73). Jean Baudrillard has challenged this “referential” perspective insofar as his theory of hyperreality identifies the major paradigm shift from this sort of ideological (semiotic) understanding of cultural communication to what Baudrillard believes is the post-ideological, post-semiotic condition of hyperreality. But I agree wholeheartedly with the crux of Van Watson’s argument, which, for me, amounts to the fact that, like the French and unlike the Americans, the Italians tend to discern and engage the inherently arbitrary, contradictory, dialectical nature of cultural awareness. Furthermore, the American lack of discernment is exacerbated by the increasingly high-tech and consumerist mediation of reality. In Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, everyday reality has become indistinguishable from its mediated, commodified, high-tech representations: reality equals hype. In addition, Baudrillard points out the Americans’ belief that they represent an “achieved utopia” (America 77), a belief that has been cemented by the “problem” of U.S. global hegemony: the more hegemonic we are, the more certain and the less dialectical and theatrical we become. Consequently, I would argue that the issue is not so much America’s lack of cultural awareness as its developing indifference to cultural nuance and contradiction. Americans are comfortably yet

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recklessly certain of the certainty of their culture (of their cultural superiority), within which they nurture a self-image of “achieved utopia.” We foreign language teachers, with our “near native” attachments to nonU.S. cultures, might feel we are more dialectically sensitive to the biases of American unculture in which we live and work; but even if this is true, we do theater with students who are, for the most part, wholly immersed in a labyrinth of unculture of which they are more consummate, polished products than we. Theater is culture. For our purposes, it is a product of the teachers who teach it and of the students who practice it. The understanding of theater and the theatrical sensibilities that we pass on to our students must take into account our students’ undialectical preconceptions of theater. Doing and experiencing theater within an unculture consummated through corporate, consumerist, hyper-tech mediations is not the same as it was yesterday—it does not have the same implications—and it is not the same as it is elsewhere in the world. When I speak of American unculture, I do not want to imply that all Americans, all our students and our colleagues, are uncultured, but that all Americans—academics, artists, and intellectuals among others—must to some degree reconcile themselves and accommodate their lifestyles to a mass culture whose technocratic and materialistconsumerist lifestyle tends toward the undialectical and totalitarian.1 We all must act and signify within this cultural system. We feel, of course, that we have both the will and the political and institutional freedom to create. American universities grant us a great deal of freedom to incorporate varying shapes, forms, and degrees of theater into our classrooms, without the threat of censure or control. We are convinced that America means freedom and there is no reason to doubt our solid institutional guarantee of freedom to create pedagogically and theatrically. However, as Tocqueville pointed out over a century ago, the political guarantee of freedom does not necessarily translate into social, cultural, or institutional freedom; and theater is culture. How cognizant are we of the invisible fencing that corrals us? We practice, after all, within an academy that endorses plutogoguery and brands not only its academic buildings and classrooms but also its chairs of excellence (those it identifies as its premier critical thinkers) with names of corporate and individual sponsors. Ever felt uneasy about attending a lecture by the Johnny “Bud” and Dorothy “B” Wilkens Professor of ... in the Toyota Auditorium of the Microsoft Center of ...? Most American academics have well-honed critical skills and they assume a dialectical attitude within their scholarly fields and instructional methods; yet we partake in undialectical habits in our private and social

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lives, habits that ultimately alter our cultural and political world views, the way we teach, and the cultural messages we convey to our students who are learning foreign language from a largely uncultural point of view. We theater faculty and foreign language faculty who do theater may be professionally and pedagogically enlightened, yet we are considerably compromised by undialectical social and institutional pressures of the academy when we set out to practice the dialectics of theatricality, which necessarily conflicts with the uncultural source of many of these pressures. More often than not, we teachers feel (or are persuaded) we need to adapt our methodologies to the most precise cultural (uncultural?) awareness of our students, that we need to teach to and through an approximation of the everyday culture with which our students are most familiar. Witness the call (and the pressure) to relate to our students’ high-tech and consumerist conditioning through the use of high-tech media and to an acceptance of consumerism and the pursuit of wealth as cultural givens. Witness as well the call to oblige the students’ appetite for entertainment?2 America’s blind faith in the (virtual) virtues of a rapidly (r)evolving technology is not unrelated to its hyper-consumerist need to be entertained. Do most of us really know how supremely “wired” our students are? Benjamin Barber warns us of the “generational fallacy.” Academics who were raised on books and libraries primarily tend to use the Internet as “a surrogate library, a substitute reference system” and we tend to believe our students will do the same: “But our children, socialized in the image-rich culture of television and the Internet, have little experience with books and libraries and will bring a different set of expectations to the new technology” (62). As I argue in my essay, “Rehearsing the Uncertainty of Theatrical Art,” the “image-rich culture” that is raising our children, steeping them in virtuality and what Barber calls “the necessary solitude in cyberspace” (64), is fundamentally untheatrical. I assume, of course, that most of us still feel we belong to a technological and cultural generation that differs from that of our students, despite the fact that, in the information age, generations are so short and obsolescence so effective an economic force. So, beyond the moral, cultural, and pedagogical dilemmas of accessing and conforming to the culture of students who are adopting a world view which is increasingly alien to our own and to what we might call the corporal communitas of theater, our own immersion in an undialectical lifestyle coupled with our attempts to “reach” the lifestyle (rather than the basic humanity) of our students can foster an ultimately untheatrical pedagogy.

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Contemporary Diversions from the Theatrical Core In my essay “Rehearsing the Uncertainty” I examine at some length the relevance of uncertainty and theatricality to human culture through concepts such as the “meagerness” or the “absence” of theater (Bert O. States) as compared to the virtual illusion of fullness in film, and the actor’s distention of her stage presence into a “body-in-life” (Eugenio Barba). To transcend the triviality and certainty (trivial certainty) of cultural reality, to theatrically translate human culture and produce an uncertain effect, and to prepare and render an intense and concentrated learning experience, we would do well to avoid losing sight of the performative body-in-life. Students must understand that the performance we are doing in our class is neither a poor or ancient relative of film nor a step toward achieving a filmic model—what they have come to indulge as the certainty and the totalizing illusion of film—but that we are deliberately engaging the less certain absence of theater. Living in a hightech society that is going digital and high definition only makes our work both tougher and more vital. Those of us who do theater are now not only competing against the illusionary reality (stereotypical role playing) of routine and superficial social life, but also against our society’s increasing participation in and consequent conformity to virtual reality that takes the illusion and the sociocultural mediation to another level. If in past generations mediated reality was generally limited to social role playing and cultural convention, since the postwar period, especially in the last several decades, then oh how intricately we’ve woven the web of mediation through consumer-oriented technological conditioning. While social role-playing and sociocultural mythology distract us from what we might call unmediated reality, they do not have the validating authority of a multifaceted, technologically-enhanced virtuality. If there is no such thing as “authentic” reality, there are different levels and different intensities of mediation. The layers of (enter-taining) mediation between our students, their bodies, their minds, their (deep) culture and “true” feelings, their teachers, and their fellow students and actors are growing in number, and their capacity to distract us from the body-in-life is becoming more determinant. Today’s theater students and foreign language students who do theater, even as they believe they are engaging in theatrical exercise and performance, probably have some idea of seeing themselves projected as a kind of “celebrity someone else” on a technologically enhanced screen of some kind. Numerous sophisticated tools and screens of mediation simultaneously reduce their direct contact with life and limit their

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theatrical (theatro-performative) potential. Face-to-face conversation and confrontation seems increasingly to be an exceptional and uncomfortable pause between portable conversations and text-messaging. Who could have foreseen that in such a short time, since the beginning of the latest technological revolution, our daily routines would be so profoundly altered? Before we take (or before we believe we take) a short break from the technological, institutional, and corporate command of our lives— before class, before rehearsal, before the film, the performance, the lecture, or the sermon begins, and even before we do group meditation or hold a protest rally: “Please put your cell phones on vibrate.” And we are obliged to ask members of today’s audiences to “please refrain from textmessaging during the performance.” Is MySpace really our space? Might it hamper our escape from a “body merely/virtually alive”? Can the hightech and virtual social networking to which we surrender our body-minds nurture anything other than the mediation of mediated bodies in space?3 So call me a technophobic curmudgeon. I realize that the developing technologies of our civilization have the potential to participate in some form of evolutionary theatricality, but not when they mask or distract from the body-in-life at the heart of theater and human culture—at least not for now. I confess I am something of a luddite in my personal and my professional lives. If I’m not radically retrograde, I’m certainly a distance behind my peers. I expect to evolve, but to do so slowly, measurably, reflectively, and on my own, not in response to the shady certainties of market culture, not to what’s available in the store, in my classroom, or online.4 As a member of The Lead Pencil Club, I believe that the pencil and the book contrast in many ways with high-tech writing, research, communication, and the production of texts (word processing, textmessaging, and the Internet) as theater contrasts with film. I frankly don’t have time for and don’t miss the totalizing illusion of “reality” surfing through the massive bytes of instantaneous and flashy yet overproduced, unedited, unreflective, ideologically, and commercially tainted information that are electronically available to me at any given moment. Instead of “twittering away my time,” I find the meagerness of low technology and the absence of high-technology to be intellectually, culturally, and theatrically stimulating—and vital. In my theater practicum, the journal my student-actors keep and regularly submit for review must be handwritten. I want to reduce the grip of mediating processes by encouraging my student-actors to develop a corporal connection to the words they are writing, to feel them. I want them to produce for me an uncertain, unfiltered imprint of their body-mind’s relation to the project and the world. As Lance Morrow puts it,

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“Handwriting is civilization’s casual encephalogram” (124). In short, handwriting is more theatrical. (For that matter, a manual typewriter produces a more direct, uncertain representation of the body-mind than a word processor.) Though I do use technology in my projects, I guess I’m behind the curve, or at least this is a thought which increasingly occurs to new generations of my student-actors. Much of the musical background and sound effects we use in our play productions, if not produced by the actors themselves, is recorded and played on audiocassettes, a technology which many of my students now consider outmoded. In our latest production, one of my actors, who had prior theatrical experience, was initially quite resistant to what she considered to be my very “low-tech” approach to sound—among other things. Another actor, one with no theatrical experience, told us that his turn at operating the “antiquated” audiocassette system was the first time he had ever placed a cassette in a player. However, both students finally reconsidered their reserve once they got a better idea of how the “hands-on” use of audiocassettes in a stereo system (in addition to actor-generated sound effects and music which, of course, is the more theatrical) would facilitate and enrich our collaborative operational tasks, and how it added to the overall theatricality of the production. (At least, this was the sentiment they expressed in group discussions or conveyed in their handwritten journals.) My actors collaboratively operate the sound system in full view of the audience and in a space that is intimate with the audience space; so the operation of the sound is part of the performance, an exercise which subverts any potential stage-audience boundaries. Funny how one can feel revolutionary by being old-fashioned. I also resist high-tech and try to nurture theatricality in my French literature, culture, and film classes whose content is not explicitly theater. I go out of my way to find classrooms with chalkboards instead of dry-erase boards, overhead viewers, and viewing screens, and my students do a lot of “hands-on,” collaborative group work with chalk at the board. As strange as this may seem, many of my students see this board-work as innovative, as an invigorating relief from many of the prefab, ready-towear, spoon-fed PowerPoint presentations they now get. When I teach film I avoid entertaining the students by showing the film in class. Once the students have viewed the film out of class, we engage its story as “meagerly” and theatrically as possible in class, avoiding the (enter-taining) “voyeur” effect of the totalizing illusion. In my intermediate French conversation and composition class, for example, I’ve adopted a text that helps me use film to theatrically approach the foreign language and culture. Once my students have discussed a French film and its new

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vocabulary through the textbook exercises, I complete the study of the film by asking the students to invent a re-creative sketch representing an alternative conclusion to the film’s story. For Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1990 Cyrano de Bergerac, for example, I list on the board the four principle characters: Cyrano, Roxane, Christian, and the Comte de Guiche. Then I ask students to use the new vocabulary to collectively (re)invent two concluding lines for each of these characters. We write these lines on the board, theatrically rehearse their pronunciation, and then I divide the class into groups of four. Each student of each group assumes the role of one of the characters and chooses one of the lines which were collaboratively negotiated by the class and written on the board. Then each group invents a mise-en-scène to stage these lines. With bodily expression and gesture, character positioning and movement (an initial step toward experiencing one’s body-in-space and toward finding one’s body-in-life), they must create a performance context to accommodate the lines they have chosen and make them signify a new alternative conclusion to the story, one which is uncertain of course, but not unrelated to the original story. Since these lines were not originally written as a coherent scene, there is some obligation (however slight) on the part of the actors to discover their body’s signifying potential and its communal context, to collaborate with others, and to do something with theatrical meagerness that was not accomplished within the totalizing illusion of the film and their voyeuristic reception of it. The structure of this exercise parallels the structure of the tableau vivant exercise, which “Rehearsing the Uncertainty” examines in detail. In both exercises—within the instructional framework of an upper-level undergraduate-graduate French program at a public university, composed primarily of students with little or no theatrical experience and who are using a foreign language which pretty much remains foreign to most of them—I do my best to place the student-actors in a situation which will put them in touch with the dialectically oriented uncertainty of their bodies-in-life. I admit, however, that it is increasingly difficult to get the students in any of our classes to make physical contact with one another, or even to make eye contact, to look deeply and deliberately into something other than a Facebook face, especially in those non-theater classes that do not benefit from the preliminary theatrical exercises I use in my theater practicum to refamiliarize students with their body-minds. Have we given up on the theatro-cultural core of life? Surely it is increasingly difficult to put our students and ourselves in touch with it. But before our students can learn foreign language and culture—I don’t mean to learn to text message in the foreign language or even to interactively

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engage a foreign image on a computer screen via Webcast, but to confront head-on the cultural aura of their own body-mind as well as that of the cultural other—they need to be culturally reactivated and resensitized, and “de-mediated” from within their own culture. We’ve got to point them back to their cultural core, to their cultural senses, to their body-in-life. They need to share our awareness of the diversions and distractions interposed by the virtual and voyeuristic reality shows of our twenty-first century and its frenzied quest for the clearest, most familiar, and certain image on a screen, be it television, cinema, computer, or phone. No matter how clear and “finished” our high-tech virtual images become, they will never match the unprocessed and unfinished depth, density, visceral complexity, and sociocultural subversion produced and conveyed through the meagerness of theater. Student-actors must understand that they are neither voyeurs watching a screen nor virtual (cinematic) images engaged in the communication of vicarious experience, but real bodies alive with the potential to engage in the visceral experience of bodies-in-life. But let me conclude this preface on a positive note. We teachers who think, research, and write about our experiences with the pedagogical merits of performance are probably as close to being on the right track as we can be—to the extent that we remain open to fundamental questions about the cultures and subcultures in which we work. How we should teach theater depends to some degree on where we teach it and to whom we teach it. A good starting point is the observation that we teach it to human beings who have “voluntarily” (or ostensibly, at least) placed themselves in a learning situation which requires the shedding of layers of an (un)culturally-conditioned identity. Unadulterated, uncompromising dramatic interaction is a sound pedagogical method, one which requires a serious approach to dealing with the alienating effects of an uncultural, untheatrical world view.

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Bibliography Barber, Benjamin. “The Uncertainty of Digital Politics: Democracy’s Uneasy Relationship with Information Technology.” In Globalization: The Transformation of Social Worlds, edited by D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn, 61-69. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1989. Debray, Régis. “Confessions d’un antiaméricain.” In L’Amérique des Français, edited by Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop, 199-220. Paris: Editions François Bourin, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Gabler, Neal. Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Hertsgaard, Mark. The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Lotringer, Sylvère. “Consumed by Myths.” In Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design from France: 1958-1998, 2447. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1998. Miller, Henry. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. New York: New Directions, 1945. Morrow, Lance. “Scribble, Scribble, Eh, Mr. Toad?” In Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, edited by Bill Henderson, 121-26. New York: Pushcart Press, 1996. Mueller, P.S. Cartoon. Funny Times (September 2009): 2. Postman, Neil. “Virtual Students, Digital Classroom?” In Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club, edited by Bill Henderson, 197-215. New York: Pushcart Press, 1996. Watson, William Van. “Acting Italian: From Piazza to the Stage.” In Set the Stage!: Teaching Italian through Theater, edited by Nicoletta Marini-Maio and Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, 50-80. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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Notes 1

Speaking about “the economic structures and technological forces that are propelling our [American] civilization relentlessly forward,” Mark Hertsgaard notes that Americans “don’t necessarily like all this; it’s simply what we’ve gotten used to. Some of us find it exhausting to live in a society where time seems always to be speeding up, where every new gadget—email, cell phones, Palm Pilots— promises us more freedom and convenience but also further separates us from the larger community and our inner selves.” Though we complain about the stress and our diminishing quality of life, “in the end, we are creatures of our society, and we neither recognize the full damage being done to us nor see any real alternative” (118). 2 Neal Gabler discusses the makeover of the American campus into a “theme park,” in which “entertainment came to modify intellectual discourse itself by changing the common conception of what intellectual discourse was” (139). “For how could anyone, even the most hermetic of intellectuals, resist entertainment?” (142). 3 Neil Postman speaks of technology as having become a kind of religious belief, where we worship the “god of Technology—in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it and that, in the ‘born again’ mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits and their relationships to accommodate it,” and “nowhere do you find more enthusiasm for the god of Technology than among educators” (198). He provides the example of a former Assistant Secretary of Education who represents the deterministic point of view that “The technology is here or will be; we must use it because it is there; we will become the kind of people the technology requires us to be, whether we like it or not, we will remake our institutions to accommodate technology. All of this must happen because it is good for us, but in any case, we have no choice” (200). On the other hand, Benjamin Barber sees technology as a mirror of (our materialistic) society. “Although we like to think of technology as a radical modifier—even as an absolute determinant—of how society is shaped, new technologies tend to reflect rather than to alter the culture that produces them. . . . If [the dominant moments of modern society] are primarily commercial, private, material, and consumerist . . . then the technologies will also become commercial, private, material, consumerist. Technology cannot save us from ourselves; it can only reflect all too candidly who we are” (62-63). Take your pick: Either we are victims of the anti-humanist god of Technology or technology is a symptom of our antihumanist materialism. 4 I do not own a cell phone, watch commercial television, or have the Internet or email at home, dubious innovative “conveniences,” which my wife and I also spared our two children, currently university students.

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A cartoon by P.S. Mueller makes a point about the way cell phones intrude on our intellectual processes of reflection and contemplation. The single-panel cartoon shows a male customer purchasing an electronic gadget that looks much like a cell phone. Gazing gleefully at the gadget in his hand as a satisfied salesclerk looks on, the customer remarks “You say it’s guaranteed to interrupt my thought process every two minutes?” (2). As early as the 1940s, Henry Miller lashed out against the “instruments” produced by American technology for popular use. His harsh claim that they were “crutches that have paralyzed us” (229) would seem mild in the face of the cell phone and the Internet. In theoretical writing, discussing Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and their interpretations of the “society of the spectacle” and hyperreality, Sylvère Lotringer concludes that “technology is now everywhere, both outside and inside our bodies, and this makes the resistance to technology (and the fascination for its invasive capacity) even more inexpungable [sic]” (35).

INTRODUCTION DRAMATIC INTERACTIONS: TEACHING LANGUAGES, LITERATURES, AND CULTURES THROUGH THEATER— THEORETICAL APPROACHES AND CLASSROOM PRACTICES COLLEEN RYAN AND NICOLETTA MARINI-MAIO

The famous statement made by the character Jacques in As You Like It has never been as true as it is in our globalized society today: “All the world’s a stage.” We live on a public platform where, to continue with Shakespeare’s metaphor, we are “merely players” acting “many parts,” all exposed and deeply embedded in a specific culture and moment in history. Therefore, the world stage is both a literal and metaphoric place for sharing and engaging with the other—for exchanging cultural products perspectives, ways of living, and ways of behaving. This stage is a space on which we not only meet others, but also on which we come to know ourselves more deeply. At the same time, this global platform is ever more precarious and insecure. Mutual understanding among peoples and cultures is no longer a choice or luxury; it has become a baseline necessity. For this reason, in today’s foreign language and literature programs, the study of language and literature alone does not suffice to reach multicultural and, especially, intercultural learning goals. Dramatic Interactions addresses the need for intercultural curiosity and understanding as endorsed by the 2007 MLA Report and subsequent Whitepaper to the Teagle Foundation.1 An integrated curriculum—one that develops multiple literacies (visual, informational, cultural, etc.) through the use of numerous texts, disciplinary materials, and active learning experiences—will hopefully lead to greater subjective investment in the

2

Introduction

meeting places of different cultural beings. Within the variety of materials and approaches aimed at fostering these literacies, literature, argues Nicoletta Pireddu, shall remain primary.2 However, drawing upon some theoretical considerations by Appiah, De Lauretis, Pavis, Pireddu, and De Marinis to begin, we maintain that of the literary genres at hand, theater is that which most actively or completely engages the cultural learner and, thus, maximizes his or her ability to appropriate what is other. “When Jews from the shtetl and Italians from the villagio [sic] arrived at Ellis Island,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, “they brought with them a rich brew of what we call culture. They brought a language and stories and songs and sayings in it; they transplanted a religion with specific rituals, beliefs, and traditions, a cuisine of a certain hearty peasant quality, and distinctive modes of dress; and they came with particular ideas about family life. It was often reasonable for their neighbors to ask what these first-generation immigrants were doing, and why; and a sensible answer would frequently have been, ‘It's an Italian thing,’ ‘It's a Jewish thing,’ or, simply, ‘It's their culture.’”3

This, a hundred years ago. Since then our view of the world has changed, says Appiah, and it is dramatically different in the panorama of the post- 9/11 era. Not only do we live in a globalized reality, where cultural difference may cause misconceptions, communication deficiency, or failure, but we are also too aware of the sense of vulnerability that affects us as individuals living in a “world of strangers.”4 In order to navigate through this risky condition, Appiah maintains, we need to actively engage in “cosmopolitanism,” which implies the paradoxical status of being both citizens (polites, in Greek) of a local community and of the world (cosmos).5 The ambivalence, indeed, the polysemy of such a condition presents the fields of Second (SL) and Foreign Language (FL) studies with unprecedented challenges and demands. Examining the state of language teaching in the United States, the 2007 MLA report, entitled “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World,” claimed that our culture “must become less ethnocentric, less patronizing, less ignorant of others, less Manichaean in judging other cultures, and more at home with the rest of the world.”6 Overall, the report recommended that the FL curriculum produce “educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence.”7 The recommendations of the 2007 MLA Report caused widespread debate and various reactions on issues pertaining to foreign language teaching methodologies and content. Among these, Pireddu’s response, featured in Profession, is particularly meaningful, for it affirms the

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centrality of FL instruction in higher education as a natural vessel of culture. Here Pireddu suggests that the proposal for curricular change presents an opportunity for foreign language programs to not only maintain their status, but also resolidify their central presence in the evolving landscape of higher education, “by preserving the centrality of the literary text and highlighting its specific dynamics,” and by “capitalizing on the skills that we can export from literary analysis to other disciplinary areas.” Rather than downplay the value of literature with respect to stronger humanities disciplines, writes Pireddu, FL professionals should present their discipline “as able to throw light on other cultural phenomena, as the forger of messages and interpretive strategies that modify or even create those adopted in other areas.”8 Pireddu’s faith in the power of literature is very much in line with some of the most original philosophical positions of our times: Adriana Cavarero, for example, maintains that “literature is a polysemous language that undoes the arrogance of every system claiming stability,”9 while Appiah, still discussing the notion of cosmopolitanism, explains that: “what makes the cosmopolitan experience possible for us . . . is . . . a different human capacity that grounds our sharing: namely the grasp of a narrative logic that allows us to contribute to the world to which our imagination responds. That capacity is to be found up the Amazon. The Mississippi, the Congo, the Indus, and the Yellow River, just as it is found on the banks of the Avon and the Dordogne. … And the basic human capacity to grasp stories, even strange stories, is also what links us, powerfully, to others, even strange others.”10

In this framework, it becomes clear that literature needs not be surpassed by more “useful” or “appealing” subjects for our student population, but it should be taught in ways that show intrinsic and lasting connections to those topics or disciplines of interest. Another critical contribution to the notion of transcultural change evoked by the MLA Report comes from the field of theater and performance studies. Back in the 1980s, Marco De Marinis and Teresa De Lauretis had explored the “pragmatics of theatrical communication” as seen in its relationships with the audience and the historical, sociological, and generic context of a given work. 11 Their innovative perspectives raised a great deal of interest and triggered a host of new of studies on the relationships between theater, performance, and culture. Since the 1990s, Patrice Pavis in France and Erika Fischer-Lichte in Germany have focused on the analysis of intercultural performance, placing performance texts “within contexts and cultures . . . to appreciate the cultural production that stems from these unexpected transfers.”12

4

Introduction

Dramatic Interactions proposes its own response to the call for transcultural, translingual, and cosmopolitan change, and one adaptable and applicable to any level of foreign language study. By affirming the relevance of the philosophical and pedagogical views that posit literature and culture at the core of FL and SL teaching and learning, this collection of essays treats the flourishing and interdisciplinary subject of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures through theater. Here theater is intended in the most comprehensive sense of the term: from innovative approaches to specific theatrical texts, to critical treatments of the genre, to physical and interpretive improvisation exercises, to theater's integral value for numerous aspects of FL teaching, such as oral proficiency, intercultural competence, and the fostering of positive emotions and intrinsic motivation. Our hope is to inspire and facilitate the use of theatrical texts and techniques in FL courses far and wide.

Structure, Content, and Goals of the Book The “dramatic turn” that this book proposes stems from a fertile terrain. In the last few years, the use of theater and drama activities in foreign language teaching has developed as a pedagogical perspective, theoretically informed methodology, and vibrant classroom practice. Original and inspiring research and materials are circulating in the field, and this volume both builds upon and continues their discussions. In engaging with current theories and materials on the subject of theater in the foreign language class, Dramatic Interactions presents a comprehensive approach which goes beyond the mere practice or integration of certain texts or activities in class. Indeed, it conceptualizes theater as much more than course material. This work conceives theater both as a cultural product and as the substance of a teaching philosophy about what it means to interact with a text and with others. Several contributors to the volume emphasize the development of an intercultural stance (see Ware and Kramsch) through a holistic (mind, body, disposition) encounter with a theatrical text. These authors show how the experience of what Patrice Pavis has called the “gap” between text and performance can be central to the process of validating and appropriating the target language and its culture(s).13 In their volume on multiple literacies, Swaffar and Arens maintain that the intellectual charge of foreign language programs should be that of guiding students to the discovery of how a language other than their native tongue produces and distributes knowledge within certain communicative and cultural frameworks.14 The authors further suggest that at the heart of

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foreign language programs’ core mission and, thus, their distinct contribution to education, is their “instantiat[ing] unique cross-cultural literacy, since their documents reach from the students' source culture into the target culture (or from cultural sphere to cultural sphere).” A foreign language program, therefore, “can define its identity as teaching students the social and linguistic frameworks of texts and genres for spoken and written communication—across time periods, across cultures and in multicultural frameworks.”15 From this perspective theater fosters the study of culturally specific forms of language and of moving between cultural spheres through the rich set of texts and contexts it provides. Moreover, the performative aspect of theater allows students to experience the cultural sphere and often assume language, expressions, behaviors, and values of the target culture as something of their own. As readers, listeners, and viewers who “identify how cultural production in a foreign language is transacted and managed and how foreign language speakers contact and influence one another in cultural and multicultural frameworks,” students become “agents of culture across hegemonic lines” and experience a unique form of personal growth.16 In the specific case of full-scale theater productions, which is the focus of several contributors to this volume, students must continuously engage with authentic literary texts in the foreign language and their relative cultural (social, historical, linguistic, political, artistic) contexts. They must also become active, cooperative, and productive members of a community. This very personal and intense engagement with both language and culture helps students develop a truly intercultural disposition—a fundamental goal for foreign language study today. When viewed in this light, Dramatic Interactions complements previous writings on the subject of teaching foreign languages through theater, but also expands the current discourse by integrating a range of languages, literatures, and cultures, and several of the most recent theories of language learning, performance theory, literacy, assessment, and curriculum design. The interest in and need for this type of project continues to grow, as the number of conference panels and journal articles treating this subject continues to increase across the languages in professional meetings and publications. Instructors worldwide and at various levels display a creative and interrogative spirit vis-à-vis theater, offering new courses and new approaches to language proficiency, cultural and visual literacies, and textual analysis this way. The contributors to this volume come from and currently work in different countries and continents, come from public and private institutions, and from programs large and small. Their essays are unified

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Introduction

by two common lines of inquiry. The first explores performance as an object of study, a means of expression, a mode of self-knowledge, and a source of learner motivation. The second line of inquiry investigates the pedagogical benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach to language study for acquiring ever-greater linguistic and cultural competence, for learning literary terminology, and for practicing different kinds of textual analysis. The theoretical rationale of the book is corroborated by analyses and examples of class practices and experiments in curricular design which foster aesthetic sensibilities and appreciation while creating a greater sense of community within programs and departments. The first section of this work, titled “Why Theater? Practical and Philosophical Perspectives,” focuses on the adoption of theater in the foreign language to establish meaningful relations between the text, the performing self, and different modes of self- expression, such as voice, tone, register, and body language. Although the authors of this section work from different theoretical standpoints, whether semiotics, psychology, or communicative language learning, the common denominator uniting their work is the humanistic claim that theater has a transformative effect on individuals, their communities, and their active engagement with the foreign language. The languages featured in Section I are French, Romanian and English as a Second Language, and German. The second section, “Performance-Based Pedagogies for Foreign Languages and Cultures,” shows how theater can be a pedagogical tool for shaping innovative methods for teaching and learning foreign languages. The authors in this section discuss how theories of performance and language pedagogy intertwine and offer unique pedagogical models that explore from within both literary products of the past and cultural realities of the present. They argue that performance-based pedagogies can change the ways in which foreign language teachers as well as students understand the foreign literatures and cultures. This section includes the discussion of performance theories applied to a variety of communicative practices in Portuguese, French, and Spanish. The contributors of the third section, titled “Performance-Based Practices in the Foreign Language Classroom,” describe theater- and performancebased courses in the frameworks of specific language levels, specific literary and dramatic texts, and specific media. Although their pieces center on different languages and strategies, they all converge in demonstrating how flexible and effective theater is as a way of gaining ever deeper and personally meaningful access to literature as well as other cultural texts. The languages discussed in the section are French, Japanese, and German.

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The fourth section, “Embodying the Cultural Other: Recreations, Improvisations, and Adaptations,” features a series of essays on various approaches to the foreign culture through what we can define as acts of appropriation—that is, recreations, improvisations, and adaptations of literary texts. In discussing the transformative effect that these acts may exert on students, the authors of this part of the book envision attitude and methodology to foreign language and culture learning that incorporates the Other through theater. The languages comprised in this part are Russian, French, and Italian. The last section, titled “Theater in the Curriculum and in the Community: Program Design, Learning Objectives, and Assessment,” affirms the effectiveness of theater within the context of the foreign language programs and communities of learners. The authors demonstrate how theater can be vital to the delineation of comprehensive or interdisciplinary projects across the curriculum, to the creation of courseand program-wide assessments, and to the implementation of exciting experiments for community building. This part describes projects in Italian and English as a Foreign Language. Though most of the contributions to Dramatic Interactions are qualitative in nature, several articles (for example, those by Hashimoto, MacDonald, Nunley, and Sukhina) consider theater as an instrument for the improvement of oral communication skills. In doing so, they examine the processes and resultant benefits of working with improvisation techniques and kinesthetic, non-verbal communication. At the same time, the primary assertion of Dramatic Interactions is that theater (its theories, its texts, its processes and procedures) provides direct and unique access to cultural and intercultural learning. Therefore, the work of our contributors tends to focus not only on the acquisition of language per se, but also on the effectiveness of theater in 1) forging essential connections between language and literature in the curriculum, and 2) facilitating the more curriculum-wide tools that a transcultural or multiple literacies approach can offer. For instance, several contributions in the current volume depart from the central notion that the theatrical text is a “cultural and aesthetic artifact” (the citation comes from Jones in this volume, but Murphy, Marini-Maio, Matthias, Nunley, and Sobral share this perspective). Similarly, several authors in the volume underscore the ways in which theatrical texts and techniques lower or remove the affective barriers that often limit or inhibit students' access to foreign language literatures. Still others emphasize how an “embodied” approach to theatrical texts can be central to deep and lasting comprehension. Almost all of these essays provide concrete examples of techniques that enable the instructor to

8

Introduction

increase motivation, lower anxiety, and really “embody,” or appropriate, a literary text. Dramatic Interactions incorporates a wealth of teaching stimuli and articulates numerous teaching and learning goals, grounded in the common assumption that theater should be central to the foreign language curriculum, because it combines several ideas that derive directly from communicative language teaching while addressing sophisticated and interdisciplinary content material. While each section of this book focuses on specific aspects of theater and performance in the FL classroom, the authors collectively maintain that theater courses, texts, and technique have become keystones for their teaching because of the way they engage the mind, body, and spirit of learners in profound and indelible ways. The widespread popularity of truly student-centered approaches to languages and culture, engaging learners in the “expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning,” has made the incorporation of dramatic activities in the classroom quite natural.17 Indeed, methods such as total physical response storytelling, or in-class activities such as role-plays, improvisations, and variations on dialogues have become a daily practice in many language courses, substituting more traditional and mechanical modalities that focus on grammar through aural/oral drilling. However, through a more systematic process of dramatization, students can undertake a variety of tasks that require them to recombine and practice in creative ways the linguistic and cultural concepts they learn. This more purposeful incorporation of theater in FL courses leads students to recreate social, cultural, and linguistic contexts which, over time, bring them closer to natural communicative acts. It is our hope that Dramatic Interactions will appeal to students and scholars of foreign languages and literatures worldwide, as its content includes examples from eight different languages and is easily applicable to numerous other languages and cultures. This volume should also be of interest to students and colleagues in second language acquisition studies and secondary and post-secondary foreign language pedagogy, since their focus on social interaction, communicative competence, and performancebased assessments is on the rise. In addition, we hope Dramatic Interactions might prove a valuable tool for curriculum planners, language program directors, department chairs, and single instructors who wish to revise and enrich their programs with interactive yet critical methodologies, or to bridge the oftentimes formidable gaps between language and content study, or between proficiency building and literary/visual analysis training. Finally, for scholars, instructors, and graduate students of theater and theater pedagogy, Dramatic Interactions

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aims to provide a unique path for exploring interdisciplinary crossroads among literature, theater, pedagogy, and intercultural learning. Though the essays are theoretically informed, they are supported by concrete examples and practical advice. They are also written in a clear, jargon-free style, which makes the book accessible to the foreign language and theater specialists. In proposing the adoption of theater as a central node in the study of foreign languages, literatures and cultures, Dramatic Interactions not only responds to many of the MLA Report's recommendations. This book also sets the stage for a more comprehensive learning experience, which will introduce the learner to a new set of rules and patterns with respect to his or her native culture. Through theater, students enlist all of themselves— their bodies, their emotions, their ideas, and their creativity (linguistic and other) to partake in this intercultural community. Vygotsky's social interactionist theory, which sees human learning as primarily interpersonal, emphasizes not only the relationship between thought and language as fundamental for the understanding of intellectual development, but also the importance of seeing and feeling oneself as part of a group.18 According to Vygotsky’s psycholinguistic model of social interaction, the dialogic nature of drama activities elicits the interactive mental processes in which language learning is grounded to promote a sense of belonging to a social environment that stimulates learners to interact and cooperate with those around them.19 While dialogue and group collaboration are vividly present in classes that include drama activities, communicative and cultural goals are both more significantly achieved when interaction is not limited to specific portions of class, but rather adopted as a means of accessing and exploring a course's content focus. The “dramatic change” in the teaching and learning of languages that this book puts into practice pivots on the assumption of various theoretical positions characterized by a common objective, that of realizing not the formation but the transformation of students from subjects who learn to subjects who interact completely. Theater undoubtedly promotes this interaction in various ways: socially, as learning maximized within a group or community; cognitively, as the potential of different individuals in a single learning environment; and culturally, as the coming to consciousness of a lively, continuous, and evolving dialogue among the historical, intellectual, linguistic, political, and artistic contexts of two or more cultures.

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Introduction

Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. —. Kwame Anthony Appiah. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. Cavarero, Adriana with Elisabetta Bertolino. “Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference. An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19.1 (2008): 128-167. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London: Macmillian, 1984. De Marinis, Marco. “Semiotica del teatro: Una disciplina al bivio?” Versus 34 (January-April 1983): 125-28. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Josephine Riley, and Michael Gissenweher. eds. The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theater, Own and Foreign. Tubingne: D. Kolesh, 1990. Lee, James, and Bill VanPatten. Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen, 2nd ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2003. MLA Report 2007. “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World.” In Profession 2007, 234-245. New York: MLA, 2007. MLA Report 2009. “Report to Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature.” In Profession 2009, 285-312. New York: MLA, 2009. Pavis, Patrice. “The Semiology of the Mise en Scène.” In Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre, 1-27. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. —. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger. London: Routledge, 1992. Pireddu, Nicoletta. “Literature? C'est un monde: The Foreign Language Curriculum in the Wake of the MLA Report.” In Profession 2008, 219228. New York: MLA, 2008. Swaffar, Janet, and Katherine Arens. Remapping the Foreign Language Curriculum: An Approach through Multiple Literacies. New York: MLA, 2005. Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

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Notes 1

See MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages, “Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World” and “Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature.” 2 Pireddu, 221. 3 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 114. 4 Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006. 5 In Cosmopolitanism, Appiah offers a novel definition and a thorough discussion of this notion. 6 MLA Report, 1. 7 MLA Report, 3-4. 8 Pireddu, 221. 9 Cavarero with Bertolino, 33. 10 Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 257. 11 De Marinis, 125-28. See also De Lauretis. 12 Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, 2. See also Fischer-Lichte et al. 13 See Pavis, “The Semiology of the Mise en Scene,” 1-27. 14 See Swaffar and Arens, 5. 15 Swaffar and Arens, 5. 16 Swaffar and Arens, 5. 17 See Lee and VanPatten, 51. 18 Soviet psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky explored the function of interaction in the development of cognitive and linguistic skills. In particular, he theorized the notion of a zone of proximal development (ZPD), or, in his words, “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.” In other words, Vygotsky claims that learning and cognitive development are socially mediated, and any activity may be more conducive to learning if conducted through social interaction. See Mind in Society, 86-88. 19 Vygotsky explores the social role of dramatic activities performed in children’s play in chapter 7 of Mind in Society, 92-104.

SECTION I: WHY THEATER? PRACTICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES

CHAPTER ONE REHEARSING THE UNCERTAINTY OF THEATRICAL ART AND/IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE LES ESSIF, UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

For me obvious ideas are, in the theatre as everywhere else, dead and done with. —Antonin Artaud

Pondering my choice of subject for this essay, I’ve been trying to figure out what principle, value, or practice provides the impetus of my developing, maturing (perhaps aging) interest in theater production with foreign language students. As I’ve made clear in other writings, more than simply teaching my student-actors the theatrical skills they need to produce a performative reading of a French text, I hope and try to collaboratively and re-creatively engage with them in the art of re-creative foreign language theater, an artful pedagogical practice which the following discussion will clarify.1 So the immediate response, I suppose, is art. But a broader, more reflective response, I think, would be uncertainty. Art is always uncertain; it reflects life’s uncertainties. In foreign language theatrical work, we must reconcile ourselves with various guises of uncertainty: the uncertainty of all human Culture (with a capital “C”) and especially of foreign culture; the uncertainty of all human language, and especially of foreign language; and the uncertainty of life. (Who really are the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese? Do we know with any accuracy what it means to be American and to understand the world and communicate through English, through American English?) All these uncertainties are encompassed, managed, and (re)presented by the quintessential complexity of theatrical art, which provides the pedagogical framework through which many of us work. The uncertainty

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of the art has a lot to do with the pedagogy. In the introduction to French Play, I merged relatively recent instructional paradigm shifts in foreign language learning, arguing that foreign language students are more prone to the learning of the foreign language when the teacher’s instructional approach emphasizes theater (as subject matter) instead of language and when it sets up a parole situation of production (that is, an immediate and group-specific context for language), what Janet Swaffar calls “authentic input-language creation,”2 one which allows the learner to forget the system of the language (langue) and which solicits the creative, imaginative, and personal production of language on the part of the individual learner as well as the collaborative community of the group. By assuming the role of an artist engaged in an artistic project and by engrossing students in theatrical activities, the teacher better (pre)disposes them to learning the language, to understanding the nature of the foreign culture and the genius and humanity of the foreign text. This happens precisely because the student-actors abandon their self-conscious fixation on the foreign language and they concentrate on the theatrical medium. We can move this paradigm to another level by saying that, in following a parole concept of theater, I also hope to enhance the pedagogical effect by shifting the actors’ focus from the certainty and security of acting as a technical skill (building a role) to the collaborative negotiation of theatrical uncertainty, of an uncertain theatrical process. While we can perfect a skill through some presumption of certainty (a belief in accuracy and concomitant lack of distortion), we stand a better chance of enriching the cultural effect of art through subtle investigation and manipulation of cultural uncertainty. The art that we do is theatrical art, so the principle, practice, and problem of theatricality remains at the heart of our attitude toward uncertainty. Lest we forget, for the artist herself, art is an uncertain medium of contemplation, examination, experimentation. While we like to think of theater as a definite pedagogical tool, it is equally a less determinate artistic attitude. Approaching our foreign language theater practicum as doubtful artists, helps us, I believe, become better practitioners of theater and better teachers of language and culture. Furthermore, we should do everything we can to communicate this attitude to our student-actors, who should feel not so much like students, or even like actors per se (acting often has too much of a professional, skill-based, “practitioner” ring to it), but as collaborators in the production of theatrical art, an art which experiments with the uncertainty of life’s stories, meanings, and conventions.

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We remember, perhaps, Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty and his caution that, in observing and evaluating the world, when we believe ourselves to be behaving empirically and to be discovering empirical evidence and truth, what we observe is not nature or the world themselves but the world exposed to our method of questioning.3 Not only does questioning imply uncertainty, but it is also at the heart of teaching and learning, and some methods of questioning have been more productive for the human race than others, even as these methods have evolved and devolved with the political and ideological orientations of successive historical periods. Theatrical performance is a method of questioning, an artistic one, and one which can be more or less productive and culturally stimulating and illuminating, depending on the way we understand it and apply it in our teaching. In the conclusion to French Play I speak about the need for resistance in the production of art. As artists, we and our actors deliberately resist the false security and certainty of our conventional and referential world, that is, “reality” in its covert forms as well as its more overt ones, and we surrender ourselves to the uncertainty of art primarily through the recreation of classical theatrical texts. In this essay, I will try to round out the call to resistance that I made in the book by addressing the topic of theatrical uncertainty as a form of resistance to conventional culture’s call for certainty. Along the way, I will say something about how theatricality can lead to the ultimate goal of art and pedagogy—humanism in the form of Turnerian communitas. But reader be warned, a part of me feels that the principle of uncertainty will of necessity carry over to the style and tone of the discussion at hand. I have decided to risk temptations of mystification, essentialism, and sentimentalism in an attempt to provide clarity to the profound significance of incertitude. I’m going out on that limb. In the title of a short but incisive essay, Patrice Pavis asks, “Do We Have to Know Who We Do Theatre for?,” and he tries to come to terms with the artistic and sociocultural values of plays that should/could continue to be relevant to our evolving and increasingly “globally centered” (and indeterminate) postmodern societies. Against the rising tide of high-tech and politically correct drama and performance work, Pavis argues that “humanistic values are still needed, especially in theatre, if the audience is to be addressed globally, concretely, and politically.”4 Over the past late-postmodern decade—Who really knows where we are in the postmodern period?—many theater scholars and practitioners have issued similar cautions about theater losing touch with its inherent humanistic mission, and, in the final part of this essay I will return to the arguments of

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these critics. In addition to reasserting the need to recover the humanistic mission of theater, I would, however, add to Pavis’s counsel that we should also know who we do theater with because, as I have argued in French Play, the theater-makers and the collaborative-creative process they undertake constitute the first and primary stage of those for whom we do theater. Art happens first and foremost with the actors themselves. It happens in exercises and it happens in rehearsals, without an external audience. Whether we are doing what we consider to be simple theatrical or performance exercises or a full-blown foreign language play project, those who engage in collaborative acting are the more viscerally involved in the artistic and learning processes because, conscious of their own image and experience and those produced by their fellow actors, they are also their own spectators (“spect-actors”) and as such, their own (first) audience. So doing theater with our student-actors is better than doing theater for them.

Rehearsing Cultural and Theatrical Uncertainty in the Tableau Vivant I primarily use theater to re-create, contemporize, condense, and customize productions of classical French plays with my students. In spring 2008 my students and I re-created Jean Giraudoux’s La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, which translates to English literally as “There Will Be No Trojan War,” but formally as Tiger at the Gates. Giraudoux wrote the play in the 1930s, when France was facing the prospect of a second war with Germany. Set in ancient Troy (Greece), it tells the very relevant and timely story of imminent armed conflict and of the characters’ desires, strategies, and arguments for justifying or preventing war. Pâris and his Trojan soldiers have abducted Helen (the consummate “beauty of mass destruction”) from the Greeks, an opportune pretext for war. But the returning war hero Hector, having recently participated in the deliberate destruction of life, has experienced a crisis of conscience, a moral awakening, and has adopted a pacifist approach to life and survival. He and the Trojan women struggle against glory-hungry old men, hawkish poets, and destiny itself to maintain peace with the Greeks and prevent a catastrophic war that will in fact exterminate the Trojan civilization. As part of the re-creative process, my students and I set out to discover our twenty-first century theatrical community’s relation to this “between-wars” French play about the personal, social, and national conscience behind the Trojan War and behind all war.

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Since we re-composed the primary structures of the play, we did the same for the title, which became: “La Guerre de Troie: ça sert a quoi?,” which rhymes very nicely and translates as “The Trojan War: What is it good for?” Early in the re-creative construction of the project, we read and discussed the text, we did performative exercises that related to the play’s themes and characters, and, as our reading progressed, my students split into (continuously reconstituted) groups to build extremely condensed (thirty-second to two-minute) re-created sketches of different scenes from the text (see my French Play). One of the later exercises I devised for the group was a variation of a tableau vivant: a living tableau, a living image. I made a list of the eight most prominent characters from the original play text and wrote the name of each of the characters on ten sheets of paper, including two names each of the two most key characters, Hector and Helen. Since these characters and the tensions between them provided the major impetus to the action of the story, I assumed that they would be the most ambiguous, contradictory, uncertain: the pacifist warrior and the politically fickle yet socially savvy, self-absorbed beauty. I also wanted to see how the individuals who assumed their roles would interact with their doubles and with the group, and how the group might incorporate the doubles. Of the other characters, some are hawks, some doves, some male, some female, some young, some old. Nine actors were female, one male. They each drew a random name from the batch without revealing their character to their fellow actors. I instructed the actors to assume as far as possible the body and mind of the character they had drawn and the group performed several warm-up exercises with the actors assuming their role, that is, their imagined body-mind-in-space, a term I will reduce here to body-in-space and which I will modify and further explain in the next section of the essay. To begin, the actors spread out, forming the perimeters of a playing area. I instructed them that as soon as they felt ready they should enter the playing area one at a time and place themselves in a position and with an expression and a gesture, which they felt reflected the role they had assumed within the space they had imagined. Consequently, the first actor entered the playing area, positioned herself (with gesture and expression) in what she saw as a scene reflecting some idea or action of the play. The remaining actors tentatively interpreted the image (body-in-space) of the first actor. Then a second actor entered the playing area and assumed a fixed position and an attitude which she felt would expand, reinforce, or transform the tableau created by the first actor. Then one at a time, the eight remaining actors added their body-minds to the tableau, with the

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same tentative and uncertain intention as the preceding actors. Once all the actors were in the space, the final actor to integrate with the group uttered “tableau” to signal the completion of their living tableau. Then, one by one, I asked each actor from the group to step back and examine the comprehensive depiction of the fixed scene. This step prompted the actors to reexamine the “complete” collective-collaborative tableau in relation to their original idea of who they were and how they fit into the scene. It would likely decrease the certainty of each actor’s grasp of the exercise, especially those who were the first to enter the tableau. Once all the actors had contemplated the collectively constituted image and returned to their individual place and role, I began to coax the static tableau into a full-blown improvised scene from the play. First, while the actors were still fixed in the image, I asked them one by one to utter (in the less certain language of French, of course) one word associated with their respective roles (thoughts, feelings, potential actions) in the scene, then a phrase, then to utter their phrase simultaneously in a cacophonous chorus. I asked them to silently consider adding movement to the tableau, to animate their embodied role and move about the space in their character, in the context of the idea or the scene they imagined, and with regard to the other characters they imagined their fellow-actors to be. Whenever they felt the urge, they could begin to speak, as much or as little as they desired. Once the actors had improvised for a minute or two, I gave them the signal to freeze and then to articulate a word or a phrase from their new position within this revised, reconstituted tableau. Since these actors were not native speakers of French, and their competence in French varied widely, their choice of words and expressions to reflect the feeling or attitude of their body-in-space was not nearly as precise—as certain—as it would have been in their native tongue, perhaps. This step ended the physical exercise, which we followed with a discussion. The gist of the discussion was that while the actors were not quite certain of their group identity and their role within it—of exactly where they fit within the group construction—they were “comfortable” with the level of theatrical uncertainty that the exercise had attained. When I asked them not only if they were able to embody their own character within the scene they had imagined but also if they could identify their fellow actors and the space they had imagined, many of them had clearly misidentified at least some of the characters and were not clear about the group’s relation to their character. And most did not unambiguously agree on what might have been the collective common ground of the scene. Even though they did not know beforehand that any of the characters would be duplicated,

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the two Hectors correctly recognized one another; but one of the Helens did not recognize her double. Of course, much depends on the acting ability of each of the actors, their skill at embodying a character, on their competence and comfort in French, on the individual actors’ perception, not to mention on individual personality traits, which were more or less conducive to the performance exercise. Some students were more skillful at elaborating their characters than others, and some were more perceptive than others. Still, this tableau exercise has many practical pedagogical effects, not the least of which is increasing the actor’s awareness of all the elements that contribute to building a role. Collaboratively involved in a search for collective theatrical meaning, the actors were especially attentive to one another’s efforts. The exercise required the actors to think about their own bodies as a live image, and to explore the relation of their bodies-in-space to those of others in the same (uncertain) light. On the less practical, more artistic side, however, in some part owing to the uncertainty of the new self-awareness and communal relationship, this exercise was more of a success than I had anticipated. The uncertainty of each actor and her role joined the insecurity of the group exercise, which found a path (and added its artistic weight) to the uncertainty of the final production. The fuller mode of interest and understanding attained by this early, raw theatrical negotiation of an uncertain stage community inspired us to design the beginning of the final production in the same format, that is, as a more deliberate, yet still fairly tentative exercise resembling this one. Once I/we had conclusively assigned the roles (by criteria other than a lottery, I admit) and the twelve scenes of the entire production were sufficiently rehearsed and fairly coherent, I put the actors through a tableau exercise resembling the one described above. Since this time they knew the role (or roles) they were playing, I instructed them to take a position on stage (the boards) in a prearranged order according to their roles: Helen, then the two Hectors (this was the only shared role in this play), then Hector’s wife Andromaque, and so on. When the play began, a faint light came up on the empty stage boards, then one by one the characters entered the playing area to assume the position of their character in the tableau. Once the tableau was complete (see Figure 1), one of the group shouted “Tableau!” and the actors began slowly and softly to murmur lines from their role(s) in the play, lines that they selected randomly, uncertainly. The volume of the cacophonous chorus intensified. Then, as the light gradually intensified, the volume of the chorus faded in counterbalance to the light, reaching silence at maximum light. The lighting then slowly faded again while one

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of the actors sang a popular contemporary version of a French love poem and other actors gradually evacuated the stage. The three characters remaining at the completion of the song were those who were part of the first scene of our re-created play, which began straightaway. We rehearsed the introductory tableau about five times, each time the product was slightly different as the actors reconsidered their individual contribution to the communal image. At the first performance before an audience the tableau evolved again as it did in “rehearsal” and as it did with the second performance. Thus, our production was marked by the conditional, dialectical, experimental quality of rehearsal, the rehearsal paradigm which followed this particular theatrical process through three uncertain stages: exercise, rehearsal, performance. This idea of having the performance seem like a rehearsal owes something to Brecht and the alienation effect. Brecht wanted his actors to convey to the audience the fact that there is no fixed, true, or absolute social reality (social certainty) which any theatrical representation could reveal. The rehearsal effect is also promoted by Richard Schechner as a reflection of the inherent uncertainty of culture, a part of his project for a “postmodern subjunctively projected future” of performance, a future which Schechner also surprisingly refers to as “posthumanist”: Process itself is performance. Rehearsals can be more informative/ performative than finished work. The whole structure of finishedness is called into question. If the world is unfinished, by what process are the works of people finished? Why should these works be finished? The world is a reality we are making and changing as we go along.5

But my idea of emphasizing the unsettled quality of the performance focuses primarily on the actors’ experience and awareness of cultural uncertainty as well as their performative rendering of it. I have a strong interest in what happens to my actors in rehearsal and in the spontaneity of what they think of themselves (beyond the pervasive self-conscious concern with “What are the director-instructor and my fellow actors thinking about me now?”), and how they conditionally fit their subjectivity into the community of their fellow actors. In the final production, the actors were still rehearsing the performance of a cultural hypothesis, not delivering a cultural thesis. The actors and I were on some level conscious of being involved in a dialectical theatrical process, in a theatrical method of questioning, moving with and within our theatrical community toward and through increasingly fuller modes of understanding of the culture within the text. The only regret I now have is that, at the time, it did not

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occur to me or the actors to work up a conclusion of the play in a tableau vivant exercise that would have paralleled the first. So part of the message of uncertainty that the actors maintained as a community and that they surely conveyed to the audience was that, as in all productions and “performances” of human culture, there is always something of the “unfinished” and “incomplete” in every play production, that is, the interrogatory quality of the rehearsal. In a sense, the “final” production represents a more coherent stage of rehearsals—one which has considerably evolved through personal awareness in conjunction with collaborative negotiation—while still remaining unsettled and open and susceptible to change. This is what my actors and I have always attempted to convey to the audience. This is why, for example, I do not introduce the framework and a rough text for the introduction and the conclusion to my productions until a few rehearsal days before the opening of the show. This strategy orients both actors and audience toward an acceptable sense of uncertain artistic process, which strengthens simultaneously the play’s theatricality and its cultural force and relevance. Furthermore, though I do believe that this unstable and open-ended theatrical exercise wound up working for the audience, it only did so because it first worked for the actors; it was largely generated by them and made them feel not just like artists but also like culturally evolving individuals belonging to a culturally relevant community. Lest we forget: in a unique way, theatrical art happens first and foremost within each actor and among the actors themselves, before the audience is involved. What the actors learn about the foreign language and culture of the story they are enacting—a learning process they will share with and convey to the audience—depends largely on how immersed they are in rehearsing the art of the culture rather than reproducing the story.

Theatricality as (Concentrated and Dialectically Processed) Cultural Uncertainty What do I understand by “theatricality” and, more important, how do I approach it as an artistic process and a pedagogical tool? Richard Schechner says that theatricality “is among the primary human activities. It is not a mirror, but something basic in itself. Theatricality doesn’t imitate or derive from other human social behavior.”6 I would go further and suggest that theatricality might be the primary humano-cultural activity, that is, the activity-event that anticipates and stimulates cultural development. We might think of it as we do of “literariness” as opposed to

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literature, the former term invoking all the aspects of a written work that transcend conventional communication to make it a literary work, literature. Theater involves so much more than verbal language, however, and to apprehend theatricality we need to think in more comprehensive terms of cultural, social, and biological life. We can certainly think of theatricality from a viewer-centric, voyeuristic point of view, relying on the etymological meaning of theater: a place or instrument of seeing. But the actors themselves not only “see” their performance, they also enjoy a privileged experience of it. Thus for this discussion, and from the perspective of the spect-actor rather than the audience, I will identify the origin and essence of theatricality as a performed communication involving concentrated and collaboratively-oriented seeing and experiencing, the primary dialecticocultural phase of human uncertainty and potentiality. Theatricality begins psychologically as an impulse toward the physicality of performance, toward the communication or expression of an experience, feeling, idea, thought, or story by acting it out: the acting out of a body-in-space. The dialectical aspect of theatricality occurs psychosomatically with the theatrical/performative body, which Eugenio Barba calls not the body-inspace, as I have referred to it above, but the “body-in-life”: A body-in-life is more than a body merely alive. A body-in-life dilates the performer’s presence and the spectator’s perception.... We often call this performer’s power “presence.” But it is not something which is, which is there in front of us. It is continuous mutation, growth taking place before our very eyes. It is body-in-life. The flow of energies which characterise our daily behaviour has been re-routed.7

The vital dilation affecting performer, spectator, and spect-actor is a case of dialectical growth. For the spect-actor/performer it applies to the selfperception of her dilation that is an integral part of her presence. Barba’s definition suggests that the body-in-life “grows” beyond the certainty and familiarity of conventional reality. So theatricality begins with the performing body-in-space, which becomes a body-in-life within a given communal space; and, paradoxically, the space or the stage of performance is potentially the space where real life can happen, where the artificial roleplaying of certainty is banished. Furthermore, as Antonin Artaud has observed, from a theatrical perspective the body and the mind are inseparable entities and so the body-in-life is equal to a body-mind-in-life.8 A recognition of the self as a living body-mind, a body-in-life, is the wellspring of theatricality and is necessary for the individual to performatively communicate and connect to others. In the tableau vivant exercise, to the

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extent possible, I expected my actors to use their bodies-in-life to cooperate mindfully as a performance community. Do we take theatricality seriously enough? Do we make a deliberate attempt to lead our student-actors toward a discovery of their bodies-in-life as a preliminary step to assuming a role? Performance transcends purely oral, written, or pictorial communication. Speaking of performance in more or less generic terms—that is, all types of cultural performance, including ritual, ceremony, carnival, and theater— the anthropologist Victor Turner emphasized the especially transformational quality of performance and how the performance of an experience generates new information and cultural awareness: “The performance transforms itself.” While restrictive, conventional rules “may ‘frame’ performance,” Turner goes on to say, “the ‘flow’ of action and interaction within that frame may conduce to hitherto unprecedented insights and even generate new symbols and meanings, which may be incorporated into subsequent performances.”9 Turner believes performance elicits new cultural meaning, and implicit to his argument is that the “framing” of performance, the establishment of a boundary between the space of the performative act and conventional culture, creates a space where alternative (theatrical, cultural, theatro-cultural) meaning is fostered. I think we can connect Turner’s idea of performance to the idea I want to convey about theatricality by recognizing that the new cultural meaning produced (dialectically) pushes beyond referentiality toward uncertainty, and this uncertainty is the part of Turner’s notion of liminality which is too often missed, glossed over, or simply underrated. Theatricality, as it applies to my work of re-creating dramatic texts with my student-actors, implies a focused awareness oriented within and toward a collaborative process. Actors develop a heightened awareness of their own body-minds and of their body-minds in relation to other members of their performance community. What they collaboratively negotiate derives in part from a diminished interest in and attachment to the certainties of (1) their own subjectivity (self-image, social role), (2) any fixed and certain external referentiality of the classical text (which to be deemed classical must point toward new and alternative meanings), and (3) the contemporary conventional culture which largely determines their subjectivity and orients their relation to the classical text. The new internal meaning that my community of “Trojan War” actors produced was less “certain” and more dialectical than those meanings external to the culture of the group and to the group’s theatrical moment, external to its theatrical project. In our play, there were two Hectors of different sizes and shapes, different ages,

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different backgrounds in the study of French language and culture, different acting styles, different interpretations of the whole story and of the particularities of the text they proposed in the initial tableau exercise. One played the role in the first half of the play, the other in the second half. They watched each other closely during rehearsals and dialectically learned from one another. To some extent they theatrically renegotiated a hypothesis of Hector’s comprehensive role, one example of which they jointly proposed during the final stages of rehearsal. When Hector number two was performing her antiwar speech before the Trojan community on stage, Hector number one took it upon herself to ironically mimic her counterpart’s behavior behind the playing area but in full view of the audience and other characters. This mirroring, the performative details of which evolved each time it was played, kept the actors aware of the dialecticality of the character and of their shared role, and it reinforced the message of dialectical uncertainty relayed to the audience. Dialecticality is a healthy cultural attitude, primarily because it derives from a principle of uncertainty: it is only healthy if it takes account of the inherently contradictory nature of culture and consequently moves from thesis (sociocultural convention, classical theater text), through antithesis (counter-convention, alternative story lines and attributes), to synthesis (new meaning, reinvented culture, re-created performance of a theater text), with the objective of obtaining a fuller mode of understanding and without the expectation of obtaining certain truth. Theatricality is naturally and genuinely a dialectical process because it is a process of individual and social negotiation of verbal and extra-verbal meaning, a holistic process which begins with a prise de conscience of the individual actor’s body-inlife. Working from a classical text, it creates a dialectic between the referential story and its performance; it necessarily challenges, expands, reinforces, twists, or undermines (even as it might pretend to follow) the referentiality of the text. Theatrical performance engenders a primary “dialogue” between the individual actor’s socially-derived identity—her “body merely alive” (according to Barba)—and a deeper individual awareness, her body-in-life, and a secondary dialogue between her individual body-image and that of the group. Summarizing Wilhelm Dilthey, Turner maintains that: it is not enough to possess a meaning for oneself . . . an experience is never truly complete until it is “expressed,” that is, until it is communicated in terms intelligible to others, linguistic or otherwise. Culture itself is the ensemble of such expressions—the experience of individuals made available to society and accessible to the sympathetic penetration of other

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When actors collaboratively seek fuller modes of performative communication, they expand their (uncertain) self-awareness and their introspection dialectically. Turner did not directly express this dialecticality, but we do not all think alike and no two individuals have had the same personal, social, or cultural experiences. We do not all have the same kind and the same degree of certainty about ourselves and our culture, self-confidence being a key determinant of personality. In the production of theater, we get in touch with and approximate our introspective impulses while collaboratively negotiating the rehearsal of a conditional and unstable, theatrical communication. As the dialectical rehearsal of cultural uncertainty, theatricality does not so much build subjectivity and society as open them up to reconstruction and renewal after tearing down their familiar meanings. As noted above, textually-based theater is dialectical because of the oppositions and transformations that take place between the text and the mise-en-scène, including the opposition between the actor’s body and the body-mind of the character the actor represents. Foreign language performance projects are especially dialectical in the oppositions and negotiations between the local culture of the actors and the culture and history within the text. (An enhanced dialectical awareness of the opposition between art and life also derives when non-artists first engage in the creation of art.) When my students and I set out to produce a recreated story from the French culture and language, we form a re-creative cultural community that brainstorms and “bodystorms” new kinds of referentiality and meaning to test the conventions and codes of the foreign culture against the conventions and codes of our own national culture and of all culture. We can also define theatricality dialectically as an absence that intensifies presence. Bert O. States has explained the failure of the film version of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town in terms of a theatrical absence which is missing in film: What was missing, of course, was the absence against which all the words and gestures in the play forge their particular validity. Throwing a baseball and shelling real peas trivializes these actions, in Brecht’s sense, rather than casting them into relief as the paramount stuff life is made of. If there’s any play that demands meagerness... it’s this one.11

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The meagerness or absence of theater—as much the refusal as the inability of theater to recreate a total and totalizing illusion of reality—reinforces theater’s status as the collaborative rehearsal of uncertainty and it can produce a dialectical form of meaning better than film. In his own idiom, Antonin Artaud expressed a way of distinguishing theater from film in terms that suggest the potency of an absence: the “what is” of film versus the “what is not” of theater. “To the crude visualization of what is,” he says, “the theater through poetry opposes images of what is not,” even as the theatrical image “obeys all the exigencies of life.”12 Theater transforms and de-realizes (de-familiarizes) the “real” stuff the world is made of, including communal space, by casting real live bodies and objects into relief, by ostending them through live presentation, giving them up to individual awareness and collective contemplation—again, from the selfaware actor’s and the collaborating actors’ points of view. The theatricality begins with the meagerness of the live and present configurations and interactions of exposed bodies-in-life. All the rest is special effects, even to a degree the conceptual layers of referential meaning provided by the verbal language. The inhabitual, unfamiliar, uncertain, yet dilated meagerness is felt by the actors and must be dealt with by them. In theatrical rehearsal, we create body-space configurations, working from the bodily form outward to the costuming, setting, props, lighting, and sound. Even before the addition of material accouterments and technical enhancements, the concentrated simplicity of the body-in-life’s dilated presence is rendered complex and profoundly uncertain by the inherent and comprehensive meagerness of the theatrical presentation: the theatrical framing of the absence of the material referentiality of the world. Contrary to the belief that theatricality depends on the addition of a skill or skills, or sign systems, it relies fundamentally not so much on the addition of anything, but instead on the peeling back of layers of (un)cultural certainties and inhibitions. 13 Theatricality is at once a concentrated form of cultural life and a transcendence of it. The individual body-in-life is the gateway to the communal body-in-life, to the embodiment of community. As a dialectical rehearsal of meaning and message, the profoundly meager theatrical act is always a focused act of communal humanism.

Theater in a Postmodern World of Communitas In the past decade or so, many theorists and practitioners of theater have been calling theater practitioners, theorists, and critics in from the cold crisis of indeterminacy (not to be confused with unpretentious, informal

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uncertainty) wrought by our perceived postmodernist turn, and directing them toward a warm and fuzzy global form of humanism, community, and communitas. The “multicentric,” intercultural, theatrical virtues of performance that Richard Schechner expected to flourish in the postenlightenment, “posthumanist, postmodern subjunctivity” of a globalizing world have not been achieved.14 Contemporary scholarship recognizes this failure and affirms a new respect for the human baby Western theater practice had submerged into the chilly bathwater of postmodern progress. We have already heard Patrice Pavis’s expression of interest in a return to humanism at the beginning of this essay. In her book Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan writes about a post-postmodern reanimation of humanism: “This reanimated and reenvisioned humanism is contextual, situational, and specific, nothing at all like the totalizing signifier it once described.”15 She speaks of a “postnationalist expression of humanism” and “a point of process moving toward what political theorist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum calls a more ‘human core.’” Dolan realizes as well that her American audience, in particular, wants to hear that their individuality will be preserved: “We do not have to choose between ‘the embedded life’ of community and a deracinated type of individualism.” Her argument borrows heavily from Victor Turner’s post-structural, astructural concept of communitas which Turner says is a “way by which persons see, understand, and act towards one another . . . an unmediated [my emphasis] relationship between historical, idiosyncratic, concrete individuals. . . . For me communitas preserves individual distinctiveness.” Communitas, says Turner, takes humanity beyond the roles they play in “social structural relationships”: “human beings play their roles in human ways. But full human capacity is locked out of these somewhat narrow, stuffy rooms.” Turner identifies three distinct forms of communitas: spontaneous, ideological, and normative, all having “certain relationships with liminal and liminoid phenomena.” But let me cut to his explanation that “Communitas exists in a kind of ‘figure-ground’ relationship with social structure,” and, on the pedagogical side, by presenting a contrast to social structure, “as an alternative and more ‘liberated’ way of being socially human,” it has the potential of “evaluating” the “performance” of social structure.16 In addition to the instructional attribute of communitas, which has the potential to evaluate our culture, I am struck by Turner’s remark about “unmediated” relationships between individuals. Is it possible that “full human capacity” is being “locked out” of the human core of life by the not merely conventional but more intrusive and insidious

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virtual imagery that mesmerizes us through the narrow, stuffy, mediating cells/screens of our computers, large and small? Janelle Reinelt too advocates a return to the theatrically human community. She observes that in postmodern dramaturgies in both America and Europe “fragmented narratives, decentered subjects, unstable signifiers, and lack of closure keep the definition of meaning, let alone any political argument at bay,” and so “theater is diminished in its capacity to function as a venue of social inquiry and critique.” Her solution unfolds as follows: “an epic dramaturgy, or more loosely an open dramaturgy, which creates a representation of the social imagination itself in order to stimulate, or perhaps, simulate a political process in the conditional modality is more appropriate in a time of unstable signifiers and rapidly changing circumstances.” But if this sounds more political than humanistic, her insistence on uncertainty removes the doubt: “What can be gained is an appreciation of the ability of performance to operate politically at the boundaries of undecidability and decision, possibility and impossibility, chaos and stabilization.” Her uncertain final conclusion: “In performance there is a way to stage nowhere [utopia] while gesturing toward somewhere.”17 Dialecticalism is a humanism, the first intellectual and sociocultural step toward a truly gobal humanism. The quintessential dialectical process of culture moves toward inclusion, from the thesis of “I” through the antithesis of “you,” to the synthesis of “we,” and then, following the path of uncertainty, from the new thesis of “we,” through the antithesis of “they,” to a new, reprocessed synthesis of “we.” This applies to macrocultures as well as to small communities and individuals. To conclude this discussion, I want to move beyond the “barriers” of national and ethnic cultures, and beyond even the more superficial artistic and instructional domains of theatrical production to the theatricality of human culture. Today more than ever students need culture, and the only true culture is an uncertain or “foreign” one.18 In doing foreign language theater with our students we can effectively experiment with culturally specific gestures, proxemics, expressions, and accents; but I do not believe we need to strive to locate and adopt the identity, linguistic or otherwise, of the foreign culture behind the original cultural “text,” be it written, audiovisual, or alive. Yes, we all do theater to teach and to sensitize the students to foreign culture, but the initial path we take might be more theatrically sound if it is oriented toward a deeper cultural core, toward the theatricality of human culture. Before targeting the national culture and language of France (or Brazil, or South Korea), we should first concentrate

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on retreating from the familiarity of national culture in which we are immersed and one which hubristically embraces certainty (see my “Preface” to this volume). We should try to sensitize our student-actors to their existence as a specifically human cultural community in their own right. In mounting re-created versions of French classical texts with my students, I now realize that I have always sought to build a culturally and linguistically “Frenchified” version of a human story. I realize now that the humanity of the story is the crux of what I have referred to as the “culturein-process” of the project and the dramatic work.19 Our 2008 production of the Trojan War seemed to convey (more obliquely than directly) a strong (yet uncertain) antiwar message related to the world’s and to the U.S.’s current conflicts and bellicose cast of mind. Yet the student-actors, who in some part built the production and then interpreted it on the stage, were surely not of like mind with regard to the virtues and vices of war or to the politics of America’s current conflict. But in retrospect, and at the risk of sounding sentimental, I’m going to say that the most essential, relevant, and vital meaning of the production was not so much about the path to and the consequences of war as it was about humanity, about the safeguards and communal security of feeling and acting as humanity-in-cultural-process, an awareness which can provide more than an “ounce of prevention” against war. If we had approached the re-creative process from the more specific and polarizing angle of the decision to make war or to seek peace (depending on some sort of costbenefit analysis) we would have had to engage civilization at a more superficial level of certainty: the certainty of national cultural (and subcultural) identity. What my students and I discovered in Giraudoux’s text and eventually emphasized on our stage was the basic humanity of each of the characters, a humanity grounded in an inherent uncertainty which differentiated each of the text’s characters, hawks and doves, according to their acceptance or denial of cultural “truth.” Each one of the characters in the text was rehearsing a social and political role which, at base, differed according to the character’s acceptance or refusal of cultural uncertainty, of the inherent contradictions of culture. Would this “rehearsal” apply to contemporary Americans, hawks and doves? Ultimately, by encouraging my actors to approach their characters through the dialectical uncertainty of theatricality, I was equally discouraging them from approaching these roles as Americans. In the spirit of Janelle Reinelt’s idea of staging “nowhere,” much of the certainty of this American life would necessarily be left behind as the actors gestured not toward some specific certainty of French culture,

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but toward the visceral uncertainty of a wholly foreign culture, a foreign “somewhere.” The “Frenchification” of the role would have to come naturally, par défaut and faute de mieux. This culture being what it is, I hold no illusion that my students all discovered their bodies-in-life and that the theatrical experience changed their lives profoundly and definitively. But the project offered them and me an alternative theatrical experience of life, it pointed us in a different, more direct direction. It gave our reality the (“unreal”) uncertainty check it needed. Following our shared Trojan War experience, we all returned to the overwhelming unculture from whence we came. But maybe we were a bit more certain of being human and a bit less certain of the cultural form our humanity has taken in life, a bit more aware of culture’s contradictions, of culture’s resistance to itself. The final production was a rehearsal just as individual, subjective life is a rehearsal of culture and as culture should be a rehearsal of humanity. We theatrically rehearsed our story as we would socio-theatrically rehearse our lives. Being aware that we are rehearsing our human culture allows us to evolve not haphazardly or in lock step with some dictatorial ideological system, but through and toward a fuller mode of awareness of life’s contradictory systems. I use theater to teach foreign language and culture and I teach theater through foreign language and culture in large part because I immodestly believe that teachers and learners of/through theater and performance can help prevent a self-annihilating third world war. If more teachers and learners, or more universally and inclusively, if more people consciously and deliberately disposed themselves to seeking their bodies-in-life, to making theatrical theater and to engaging in the collaboration, the experimentation, and especially in the construction and performative display of the artistic, communitarian uncertainty it honestly requires, humanity (of any cultural form) would never again be sufficiently dehumanized, that is, self-sufficiently certain to perpetrate war. So when we do theater with students, after we’ve asked them to detach themselves from the false security of their pseudo-social network by turning off their cell phones, let’s show them the way to place their bodies-in-life on vibrate.

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Bibliography Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Barba, Eugenio. “The Dilated Body.” A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer. Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese. Translated by Richard Fowler, 54-64. New York: Routledge, 1991. Baudrillard, Jean. America. New York: Verso, 1989. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Essif, Les. “Way Off Broadway and Way Out of the Classroom: American Students De-, Re-, and Performing the French Dramatic Text.” ADFL Bulletin 27.1 (Fall 1995): 32-37. —. “Teaching Literary-Dramatic Texts as Culture-in-Process in the Foreign Language Theater Practicum: The Strategy of Combining Texts.” ADFL Bulletin 29.3 (Spring 1998): 24-33. —. Empty Figure on an Empty Stage: The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. —. “(Re-)Creating the Critique: In(tro)ducing the Semiotics of Theatre in the Foreign-language Performance Project.” Theatre Topics 12.2 (September 2002): 119-42. —. “A Workshop on the Re-Creative Approach to Performing and Teaching Theater: The Example of Jarry’s King Ubu.” In The Theater of Teaching and the Lesson of Theater, edited by Maria Fox and Domnica Radulescu. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. —. The French Play: Exploring Theatre “Re-creatively” with Foreign Language Students. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006. Glissant, Edouard. “French Language in the Face of Creolization.” In French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, edited by Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele, 105-13. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958. Pavis, Patrice. “Do We Have to Know Who We Do Theatre for?” Performance Research 3.1 (1998): 82-86. Reinelt, Janelle, “Performing Justice for the Future of our Time,” European Studies 17 (2001): 37-51. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.

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Schechner, Richard. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Swaffar, Janet K. “Curricular Issues and Language Research: The Shifting Interaction.” ADFL Bulletin 20.3 (1989): 54-60. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

Notes 1

See my “Way Off Broadway and Way Out of the Classroom,” “Teaching Literary-Dramatic Texts as Culture-in-Process,” “(Re-)Creating the Critique,” and “A Workshop on the Re-Creative Approach to Performing and Teaching Theater.” 2 Swaffar, “Curricular Issues and Language Research,” 55. 3 Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 58. 4 Pavis, “Do We Have to Know Who We Do Theatre for?” 83. 5 Schechner, The End of Humanism, 124. 6 Schechner, 72. 7 Barba, “The Dilated Body,” 54. 8 See my Empty Figure 63; Schechner speaks of “body thinking,” 123. 9 Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, 79; and see my French Play, 17. 10 Turner, 14. 11 States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 98. 12 Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, 98-99. 13 I do use costuming and props and I put a lot of semiotic and instructional stock in “supplemental” signifying systems (see my “(Re-)Creating the Critique”). However, when it comes down to the theatrical nitty-gritty, the costume, the prop, the music, and the lighting are at best an intellectual/conceptual support for communicative abilities of which the naked body in space is potentially capable, and at worse, the means by which we confess the dramaturgical and psychosomatic shortcomings of not being able to generate sufficient energy, innocence, and complexity from the body to override the conventional certainties of our nontheatrical roles in society: our inhibitions, hang-ups, cultural delusions. 14 Schechner, 120. 15 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 22. 16 Dolan, 23; Turner, 45-46, 47, 50-51. 17 Reinelt, “Performing Justice for the Future of our Time,” 39-40, 42, 42, 50. 18 From the perspective of a globalizing world, conceptions of a “global village” should regard the attributes of “foreignness” as productive, theatrical forms of uncertainty. Edward Said cites a “hauntingly beautiful passage” by Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony. In an attempt to profile the ideal cosmopolite, Hugo affirms that the quintessential global citizen is neither he who

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remains attached to his homeland, nor he who accepts every foreign place as his own, but “he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place” (335). Therefore, the first duty of the global citizen is to acknowledge and accept the contradictory nature of all cultures, including his/her own, and to see the whole world as a strange place/community with the potential for what Edouard Glissant calls “relational identities” (112) that require a constant critical, intellectual vigilance, if not struggle, in which self-doubt is of the essence. Despite some reservations stemming from his postmodern uncertainty, Baudrillard would concur with Said and Glissant. Testing the notion of “truth” in his version of the problem of world totality, Americans, he says, have an “ignorance of the evil genius of things,” preferring to see the dynamics of human culture as “plain and straightforward.” Consequently, “Americans are fascinated by the yellow-skinned peoples in whom they sense a superior form of cunning, a higher form of that absence of truth which frightens them” (85). The Oriental’s superior cunning derives from a belief in and an acceptance of the absence of truth, implying selfdoubt. 19 See my French Play, 19-25.

CHAPTER TWO FINDING LIBERATION THROUGH PERFORMANCE/DISGUISE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE/CULTURE DOMNICA RADULESCU, WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSITY

Foreign Language as Performance We do not just speak a language, we inhabit a language; we love, hate, imagine, and die in a certain language. Hence, doing anything in a foreign language, or in a language acquired second to our native or first tongue, requires not only an effort of memory and linguistic practice or ability, but also a degree of reinvention of one’s self. A path toward self-discovery, of inner and outer freedom and of exploration of one’s own hidden inner universes may be created upon such an effort of reinvention. In this process of reinvention one could also be said to be playing a role, or to be performing a different persona. Our voice, gestures, facial expressions usually change whenever we speak in a foreign language, similar to how an actor has to change and transform herself in order to become the part she is playing. Different vocal cords, pitches, and semiotic constructs are used. In structuralist terms, the Saussurian egg, the unit made of the famous signifié and significant, has to be cracked and a different one assimilated by the brain. The phonetic or written signs that we once used to associate with a certain reality sound and look different. The reality of the signifié known by an English native speaker as house is matched by a signifiant that sounds like casa for an Italian or dom for a Russian. The metaphors and symbols that mediate between language and our material and intellectual or imaginary worlds may suddenly become unrecognizable.1 Dawn or a cat or the color purple may have very different connotations and symbolic references for a French actress, an American teenager, a

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Japanese politician, or a Turkish writer. What may mean an innocuous object or verb in our native language, may sound like a swear word in the second or foreign language we are acquiring or performing in. Communicating in a foreign language is a performative act in which we have to constantly negotiate between the knowledge of the new role, that is, vocabulary, idioms, grammatical structures and the ability to improvise and mimic, as closely as we can, the ideal model of what is commonly referred to as “native fluency.” Only that by and large, no matter how well one may speak a foreign language, one rarely fully attains that ideal, hence those of us speaking languages as second or third to our native ones, we are referred to as having “near-native fluency.”2 Ironically, the ultimate test of how well I can play the role of a native speaker of the language that is foreign to me relies not on how well I grasp the French subjunctive or the Italian conditional, but on how well I can improvise in the adopted language and thus in how seamlessly I can use the text of my role (vocabulary, grammatical structures) and match it to its substance— that is, the totality of cultural constructs associated with say French or Italian, the semiotic systems, the gestures, expressions, and metaphors. A level of deceit usually goes into that role because even the highest level of linguistic proficiency (with the exception of perfect bilingualism) rarely matches an equal level of cultural, carnal, or metaphysical understanding and appropriation of the worlds of thought and reality contained in our role—that of the foreign language speaker. As immigrants who even when becoming citizens of their adoptive country will still always remain “naturalized citizens,” so speakers of a foreign language will be “naturalized” speakers performing a role through which they are constantly negotiating between the universe of thought and culture related to their native language and the one associated with the adopted language. But in the performance of this role one may find thrilling ways toward discovering new sides and riches in oneself, new perspectives and understandings of the world.

Foreign Language and Performance as Strategies of Liberation I am one such “naturalized” citizen and speaker of several languages who also happens to teach to undergraduate students. Throughout my two-anda-half decade career in teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures I have used with some consistency theatrical and performative approaches that have ranged from myriads of classroom skits and interactive activities to full-fledged two- and three-hour performances in various theater

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venues. However, my discovery first, of the liberating possibilities available in the act of entering the universe of a foreign language and, second, of performing in a foreign language or being in contact with a foreign culture, was not as a teacher, but as a student of English at the University of Bucharest during the Communist dictatorship of the eighties in my native Romania. In previous articles on theater, feminist, and language pedagogies, I have mentioned and described at length the strategies of resistance, self-discovery, and of developing a certain inner freedom both through the experience of delving into foreign languages and cultures and of engaging in theatrical practices and performative endeavors. Speaking of the first time, I found myself in the position of teaching English to a group of Romanian high school students in the article titled “Winnie in the Attic: Toward a Feminist Awakening in Beckett’s Happy Days,” I noted, “Two decades of teaching and theater has confirmed for me time and again two important truths that were revealed to me the morning of my first class: that teaching and theater are most authentic and genuine when students are, as bell hooks so beautifully puts it, engaged in “the practice of freedom,” and when teaching is done “in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students.”3 Studying English literature, speaking English, and acting in a countercultural theater as a college student may have just allowed me the “practice of freedom” that protected my “soul” from the monotony of the Communist ideology which imbued our daily Romanian language in the media or in public spaces.”4 Ironically, what further protected if not “saved” my “soul” as a newly arrived refugee in the United States in the eighties was teaching English as a second language to other refugees and immigrants from Indochina, Africa, and Eastern Europe. My students, all gathered in one class after a full day of work in various Chicago factories and having arrived there from Cambodia or Vietnam or Poland or Ethiopia each with a bag full of traumas and stories, came to the English classes I taught as if it were the high point of their day--which for many it really was. As they repeated and practiced the conditional mood or chanted the irregular past participles trying to imitate my already accented English, or prepared a skit using comparatives and superlatives, the laughter that invariably irrupted among the students, the intensity and concentration of some of the students as they tried their best to use the correct grammar or adjust their vocal chords from their own Indochinese languages to English, was a sure sign that our classroom, with the chairs always arranged in a circle, had became a place of freedom. A place where as they entered the sounds and universe of English in a performative, interactive, and nonthreatening environment,

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they may have left behind for a little while their traumatic stories of relatives killed by pirates or by Khmer Rouge soldiers, or their hardships as refugees in their adoptive country. And with their freedom also came my own, as a new and anxious refugee making a connection with people from all corners of the world, who were even more traumatized than I was and whose attempts at performing in English met my own performance as a non-native teacher of English, thus allowing me to rise above my own worries and anxieties. I do believe that it was due to the fact that like them, I was also “performing” in English as a foreign language and due to my experience in the theater and the ways in which performance had played a role of liberation and resistance to oppression in my own past, that I was able to guide those students toward productive ways of performing their roles in English.

The Performative Classroom as a Space of Openness The first thing I do whenever I walk into a classroom is ask the students to rearrange the chairs in a circle. Invariably, stubbornly, I have been doing it for over twenty years. And invariably, stubbornly, someone who comes after me into that same classroom will rearrange the chairs in their initial position of cluttered rows all perfectly lined up and square. As for bell hooks, the classroom space is for me also a radical space of possibilities and of transgressions.5 I attempt with some consistency to make of all my classes, whether Intermediate French, Italian Renaissance, French Theater, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, a feminist classroom like the one described by bell hooks: “a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.”6 Performative approaches and constructing theatrical worlds with my students has been the most productive strategy in my teaching that has contributed precisely to that union between theory and practice and to the subversion of the alienation and estrangement of neatly arranged rows of chairs throughout the American university classrooms. But in order to engage in theater practice in a foreign language with university students and achieve that openness and freedom at the same time, one other subversion has been necessary. Namely, the subversion of the very practices, modes of functioning, and structures that in theater as well, have perpetuated practices of marginalization, exclusion, sexism, or neglect of and respect for diversity. My greatest breakthrough in the

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practice of directing theater in foreign languages with undergraduate students came when I lucidly began engaging in feminist theater and directorial pedagogies. Directing Beckett’s Happy Days more than a decade ago was the beginning of this new path and the moment of profound realization about joining theater, language, and feminist pedagogies in order to transform the stage/classroom into a space of margins that is also a space of creativity, “radical openness,” and freedom.7 A space of margins because like many other language and literature professors in American universities who engage in performative pedagogies and produce plays in foreign languages with their students, we usually rehearse in spaces that are marginal to the imposing performance arts center at my university. A space of margins because we perform in French to small audiences, with little or no funding. Even when performing in the university theater, we have the status of amateurs vis-àvis the theater students, and we produce our shows with minimum technical support. A space of margins because whenever we produced a show in the university theater, even when it was in Italian or in English, our group and the signs on the doors to our green room or to our changing rooms still said “French Play.” The word French came to symbolize the generic universe of “foreignness” irrespective of the actual language we actually performed in. But every time we transformed that space of margins into a space of openness and creative vibrancy because my students acted in a foreign language and somehow felt freer, less inhibited, once the safe circle of our open classroom was established; and because my students came to theater with curiosity and usually with no previous training; because I refused the role of traditional director who tells everybody what to do and how to do it; and, finally, because I directed best when I actually stopped directing and became a guide and a mentor to my actors, facilitating for them the path to their own voices and guiding them to engage in the journey of their multilayered roles.

Performing in a Foreign Language in/on the Feminist Classroom/Stage as Strategy of Self-Discovery and Freedom Finding Oneself through the Performance of Madness I will discuss several productions and the ways in which my students and I created spaces of open margins and freedom while acting in/directing foreign language plays. The first is a show created from the quilting of three different French language plays on the stage of the black box theater

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of my university with American students enrolled in the French Theater in Production course I created more than a decade and a half ago. The second is a collection of one-woman shows that I developed as a Fulbright scholar in Romania with theater students at the university where I taught. They are parallel but also complimentary endeavors, and they have both resulted in transformative artistic and intellectual experiences for both myself and the students involved in them. I will discuss the first production partly in light of the performance of madness and theater of the absurd in French and partly from the perspective of margins. I take the notion of the margins as a space of “openness” from bell hooks who, in Yearning: Race, gender and cultural politics urges us to turn the margin into “a site of creativity and power, that inclusive space where we recover ourselves” and also as a location of “radical openness and possibility.”8 I will focus in particular on the experiences of two female students for whom this experience was one of revelations and transformations. The theatrical quilt I mentioned above was made of three plays from the French tradition of surreal and absurdist theater: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, and Matei Visniec’s L’Histoire du Communisme racontée aux malades mentaux. Most of the students were upper-level French majors, with one first-year student, and all were women. Following principles of feminist directing and theater pedagogy I cast everyone in several different parts and made sure everybody had a relatively equal number of lines.9 I have always cringed at the traditional and clichéic attitudes of directors who invariably distinguish and cast in terms of prima donnas and secondary or invisible parts and then console the actors in the latter category that “every part is equally important.” Maybe in some absolute terms such a line holds some truth, but traditional casting and directing based on this principle still creates very distinct spaces of centrality and marginality. Moreover, from my experiences as an actress and from my knowledge of and working with both professional and amateur actors, I know that for those waiting in the margins of the theater to utter one line to the hundreds of a central character, the experience is frustrating at best and excruciating in its boredom and sense of futility at worst. From directing plays in foreign languages with American students I also know that one ought to be mindful of the experience of the actors and most importantly of the pedagogical value of their engagement in such a project from a multidisciplinary perspective: first, from the point of view of the strictly linguistic benefits they obtain by practicing, learning, performing, and listening to dialogues in a foreign language and second, from the point of view of the intellectual, cultural,

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and overall human enrichment that such a project provides for my student actors. Finding myself already in the margins as a language and literature professor situated in my university, in the building that is literally at the end of a long line of imposing red brick and white columns called the colonnade; engaging in theater outside of the traditional boundaries of academic theater departments; and having had to fight for space, recognition, validity, and importance of this specific kind of academic/artistic endeavor at every step of the way, I certainly do not wish to impose a politics of marginalization on my own students, who mostly women, as is common in in language and literature departments today.. Besides, even beyond the political and pedagogical considerations, by allowing everybody in a production to equally alternate between positions of marginality and centrality in terms of quantity of lines, importance of parts, and actual use of the stage space, the entire learning environment acquires a certain lightness and joyfulness as everybody is fully engaged in all the learning and creative processes. The three plays chosen for this particular show all parody various forms of political tyranny and dictatorship. Ubu Roi makes Macbeth, the character that serves as inspiration, look like a naïve child as he is torturing, “debraining,” throwing into the “trap,” and killing just about everybody in his dishonestly acquired kingdom of an imaginary Poland. Ionesco’s characters turn into frightening beasts that look and sound like rhinoceroses under the very eyes of the spectators, in a modern myth of the new dictatorships and the destructive mass ideologies that make them possible. And Visniec’s play, still in the absurdist and surrealist style of both his Romanian predecessor and the turn-of-the-century pioneer that was Jarry, explores the methods of brainwashing developed and applied by the Stalinist dictatorship on the population of a mental asylum in the Soviet Union. One of the students in the class was a triple French, philosophy, and theater major, and though she had acted in one of my French productions during her first year, now a junior, she had since acted mainly in the theater department. I had been truly impressed with the truthfulness, the emotional intensity, and gracefulness with which this student had performed in that first show during her first year: the part of Lais, a sensitive and passionate actress in Fernando Arrabal’s The Garden of Delights and the role of the carnivalesque and sensuous Roberte in Eugène Ionesco’s Jacques ou la soumission. She already had the emotional versatility and the work discipline of an authentic consummate actor. Though at times during rehearsals she was still working through some of the vocabulary in the play and was struggling with some of the more

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bizarre and unusual aspects of the cultural and aesthetic structures of that kind of French surrealist theater, her performances ended up bringing tears to my eyes or making me choke with laughter, as they did for many of the spectators in the theater. Her acting had such intensity, her French had become so fluid on stage, and her entire performance was so exquisite, that she seemed to be truly on the path to self-discovery and accomplishment as an artist. Following that experience, she immersed herself in auditioning and acting for the theater department. While her talent and hard work were still evident in all her stage appearances, her performances lacked that quivering quality she had in my French production, the emotional depth and freshness that had brought me to tears orto peals of laughter during her first year. And in the classes she took with me in the following years, her French seemed at times to regress both in oral and written expression. In the meantime she also became the president of the female student organization called Knowledge Empowering Women in Leadership that is affiliated with the women’s and gender studies program I chair. She took on some very courageous battles for raising consciousness about gender inequity and sexual assault on campus and brought the organization she was leading to a new level of feminist activism. Still, something in this young woman seemed to be aching and often she seemed to be at the breaking point emotionally. The traditional and hierarchical functioning of the theater department was stifling her to some degree and instead of progressing she was in a stalemate. I could often hear it in the lack of modulations and nuance in her voice, when I knew that she had great versatility in her voice. With the same stubbornness with which I arrange my classroom chairs in a circle, I kept urging and encouraging her to act in French any chance she had, whether it was to redo a scene from her first year French performance for the National Symposium of Theater in Academe I organize annually at my university, or to exemplify a theory, or to bring to life a character in one of the other French theater or literature courses she was taking for her French major. Finally, at the end of her junior year I offered the French Theater in Production course again, with the quilt of three French plays chosen more or less from the same theatrical modes and tradition as the previous one. Though she did not need the class for any of her required credits this time, she decided to take it again, not without some renewed nudging on my part. Because I knew she was searching for more meaning, accomplishment, and a sense of balance in her life and acting career, and that she was still searching for herself, for something beyond the parts she had been acting in on the regular theater stage, I gave her the widest variety of parts, while

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still keeping more or less an equal distribution of lines vis-à-vis the other students in the class. She played a tormented Russian mental hospital worker foolishly in love with a Party activist in Visniec’s play, parts of the role of Berenger himself in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a soldier in Ubu’s army, the Queen of Poland in Jarry’s play, as well as Ma’ Ubu herself and a few other secondary parts. I used the motifs of madness, surrealism, and absurdity as catalysts for the entire cast in their various acting processes throughout rehearsals as we worked toward orchestrating, quilting, and preparing our show. As cultural and artistic background for the plays, I gave several presentations on surrealism and madness as a form of artistic expression that brings forth less explored sides of our imagination, and of our conscious and subconscious mind. I guided my students throughout a variety of preparatory exercises in French in which they were asked to relinquish their tight hold on logical understanding. For instance, they had to improvise scenes from the plays based on certain moods and emotions or on one basic movement from one scene in a play, asking them not to worry about their lines, but just focus on the basic emotion, on one basic movement and cling to one or more words or clusters of words. Several of the battle scenes in Ubu Roi, the dinner scene, or scenes from Rhinoceros where the stage is suddenly invaded by rhinos to everybody’s dismay, or the actual mental asylum scenes in which the patients are playing out their madness through repetitive games, unrelated strings of sentences or, to the contrary, through repetitive, incantatory lines—offered excellent practice for loosening up and breaking down the students’ inhibitions both vis-à-vis their roles and vis-à-vis the linguistic challenges of their parts. As their movements, bodies, and gestures became more fluid and free, so did their French. At first the students were reticent to take on and fully immerse themselves in the mental asylum patients’ scenes. But after a while, everybody wanted to have at least a small part in them, which I gladly encouraged. Shoshana Felman makes a provocative and extremely pertinent statement with regard to women and madness: “If, in our culture, the woman is by definition associated with madness, her problem is how to break out of this (cultural) imposition of madness without taking up the critical and therapeutic positions of reason: how to avoid speaking both as mad and as not mad.”10 I had also shared with my student actresses in this production that the playing of madness had once been in fact one of the most important performative stepping stones for the first female actors who stepped on European stages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of the commedia dell’arte troupes. The famous actress Isabella

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Andreini, also known as the most accomplished performer of her time, achieved her highest glory on stage with a play titled La Pazzia d’Isabella in which she awed her royal audiences (the Medici family) with a scene in which she breaks down the entire logic and conventional femininity of her part as innamorata by breaking into bawdy language, nonsensical absurd utterances, and impersonating parodically all the other male masks in the play.11 Furthermore, surrealist theatrical language and styles exhibiting behaviors and discourses that we have come to associate with madness were used in the three plays with the purpose of denouncing the actual absurdity of tyrannical political systems, blind mass ideologies, violent dictatorships, and forms of thought control. This allowed the acting out of madness to appear more fully as a form of liberation and subversion of these oppressive structures; but the playing of madness was also more easily adopted by my students because it was done in a foreign language. A fascinating detail with regard to this confluence between the performing in foreign languages and enacting madness is that in her performance of La Pazzia d’Isabella, the Italian actress indulged with panache in a multilingual performance, speaking, according to historians of her time and witnesses, not only the languages she knew but also invented languages. Indeed she, like my students acting in French the disruptive identities and language of the mental asylum characters, was speaking “in tongues.” My students took to these scenes with such gusto that we often started our rehearsals with those scenes or just warmed up by repeating lines from the asylum scenes. Students who had initially experienced difficulty uttering their lines in the other plays or getting under the skin of their other characters, acquired more fluidity in their movements on stage and more clarity in their utterances. As for the one student I have singled out so far, and to whom I will give the fictional name of Laurie to preserve confidentiality, she exploded artistically and linguistically into a kaleidoscope of sparkling, deeply felt, funny stage identities. Her French had never sounded better and her acting reminded me of that quivering and luminous presence she had been on stage in her first year in my other production, only better, because she had now acquired the maturity and courage to juggle and negotiate her various personas with grace and precision. From the strident and carnivalesque Mother Ubu, to the existentialist musings of Berenger, to the over-the-top melodramatic Russian heroine, Laurie was discovering all her performative registers and voices and most importantly all her human potentialities, while freeing herself from some of the traditional, if not stodgy, training and acting she had been engaged in over the past couple of years. From the occasional tremors in her voice, to the shine in her eyes, to

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the lightness of her gestures or the sharpness of her movements, I knew that she had discovered and re-discovered something in herself, a source of authentic feeling and emotion, an empowerment as a female actor on a carousel of both male and female parts. Laurie graduated Washington and Lee and is now in New York City successfully pursuing and accomplishing her dream, that of acting on a stage, of which she had once confessed to me that: “It’s the one thing that makes me feel most alive.” The other actresses in the class equally rose to the occasion and found some form of liberation and authentic feeling through acting in French and, moreover, through performing madness in French. One other student, whom I will refer to as Stephanie and who was a tentative and nervous first-year student in this production, the way Laurie had once been in the first production with me, took on her several parts with courage and extraordinary drive and eventually became a French major. She took on almost as many parts as Laurie and played side by side with her in some unforgettable scenes. This year, returning to one of my theater classes as a senior, her French was smooth and her behavior and acting in class sparkled with confidence and ease. Of the couple of dozen shows I had orchestrated and guided my students through over the past two decades, I could say that this theatrical quilt of madness and absurdity had been the most successful in terms of facilitating a certain inner freedom and authentic emotion for my students. Paradoxically, this happened while acting in plays that dealt in parodic ways with oppression and dictatorship. I attribute this largely to the seamless weaving of French language and culture (the history of surrealist and absurdist art) with madness processed as an artistic alternative to traditional and realistic acting, as a carnivalesque approach to the stage in which the actors used both the foreign language and their roles to break through boundaries of logic, gender (as almost all the students crossdressed and played both female and male parts), education, and years in school (from first-year to fourth-year students). Throughout the multilayered processes of the production of this show and its performances, these students defied the severely staged rows of chairs in their classrooms, the masculinist culture of their university, where white male privilege seeps through every one of those century-old white columns that hold our colonnade together and amidst which they were often made to feel disempowered and trapped by a solid Greek system, by conventional dress and behavior norms, by the relentless performance of middle- and upper-class, white, heterosexual identity and its unabashed sense of entitlement.12 To a significant degree these students achieved that paradoxical balance mentioned by Felman, of acting both “as mad and as

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not mad.” The fact that they had the foreign language “disguise” on or engaged in the performance of foreignness, their acting of madness was rendered more acceptable and less threatening. Everything is possible in a foreign language after all, and foreigners are somehow all French, or rather Frenchness is the ultimate foreignness by some clichéic formulae. “It’s all French to me,” goes the expression often used by some Americans when they fail to understand something foreign or different. But simultaneously, it was through that immersion in a different kind of cultural, artistic, discourse, and body language resembling madness or “craziness” that facilitated for them a deeper and more reckless dive into the diverse layers of thought and culture that unfold behind the foreignness of the French language. I went about this production this way because, as Jill Dolan has beautifully articulated it in her book Utopia in Performance, I too have always “connected performance and the possibility for something better in the world.”13 “In theater,” Dolan goes on, “I found ways to both free and constrain myself, to say who I was and to hide myself carefully.” It is what happened to me when I first started acting as a student in Communist Romania, it is what was happening to Laurie and Stephanie on the Washington and Lee stage and in the theater classroom “disruptively” set in a circle. And when the foreign language performance is layered onto the first disguise that is theater, and onto the disguise within a disguise that is the performance of madness, thus when the three layers of performance are seamlessly united, at times, as some of the students’ own statements quoted below have shown, we do achieve, even if briefly, some moments of “utopia in performance,” or “hope at the theater.”

Finding Feminist Empowerment through Acting in a Foreign Language/Culture In the fall of 2007, the same year when I produced the surrealist quilt discussed above, I returned to my native Romania as a Fulbright scholar to teach theater and gender in the theater department of a large university in the northern part of Romania. I was returning to my native country as a professor teaching students of the age I was when I had escaped twentyfive years before. I found out from my Romanian students that the counter-cultural theater, where I had spent so many hours of my student life finding refuge in Shakespeare or Beckett or Kabuki drama, still existed and was run by the same director, and that some of those very students had at some point worked with him and had brushed with his Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba acting techniques. Teaching in Romanian, a language

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which for more than twenty years had become for me logistically and in terms of how much I used it, almost like a second language, turned out to be both something of a challenge and an unexpected thrill. During the first weeks of my classes in that department where the theater students would have put to shame through their heightened level of training and professionalism, even the best students in the theater department of my American university, I went through some of the hardest existential and professional crises of my life. There were days when I left the classroom in tears, when I questioned all of my years of study, research, and writing about women’s voices, about the construction of gender in theater and in society and the inequities derived thereof, my feminist theater pedagogies, the articles and books I had written, the classes I had taught. What good were they here, since nobody seemed interested in what I had to offer? And what if I was somehow misguided too? Relations between the male and female students in all classes I taught seemed much more smooth, direct, and friendly than those of the men and women on my American campus; the women were outspoken, feisty, not in the least shy and withdrawn the way so many of my American women students were, at least until they took a class from me. Confident about their training, passionate about their craft to the point of being obsessive, yet blasé and apathetic about anything that had to do with politics and civic involvement (being the generation of children whose parents had lived through the worst of Ceausescu’s years of oppressive indoctrination and through the post-revolutionary chaos) the Romanian students assigned to me in three different classes were hardly interested in anything I had to say about gender, feminism, or any form of feminist interpretation of canonical works. I sometimes profoundly regretted my choice to go on that Fulbright scholarship to Romania, at other times I thought I should just give up my idea of teaching theater from the perspective of gender construction and just take a traditional approach: for instance, teach the history of comedy in Western theater, one of the courses assigned to me, simply from a historical or textual perspective. Every time I brought up gender or feminism in class some students would start snickering, others would get into arguments with me and tell me that they already had gender equality in Romania—abortion was legal, women worked side by side with men—and that they didn’t need a women’s theater because they could get anything they needed in terms of acting parts from canonical works such as Chekov’s plays, or their own exiled compatriot Ionesco, or Pirandello, and the rest of the theatrical canon from the classics to the absurdist playwrights (all male, incidentally). One student once told me that to them political and civic

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involvement and the mixing of art and politics was the most obscene thing in the world. I tried to remember that my way of being political during the Ceausescu years was also to engage in what may have seemed like apolitical theater—Shakespeare, Beckett—the white male theatrical canon. They didn’t realize of course that the position of white male privilege whether in art, science, politics, or society in general is of just as political as any of the politics of resistance or opposition of the marginalized, but that it has always been invisible and remained hidden under the pretense of the apolitical.14 Only these students were no longer living under Ceausescu and under a brutal dictatorship. Part of a country recently accepted into the European Union, they lived in a cultural and social environment that was often desperately trying to absorb as many of the trappings of Western culture as possible, from the rap or techno music played in every clothing store, to the new sex shops in the center of town, to video games, trappings which were often combined with newly unleashed mentalities that had been present while I was still living in Romania but which now were coming out without restraint as an expression of the newly acquired freedom: such as sexism, racism, anti-Semitism. Perfectly intelligent and educated students or faculty in that city would say to me things such as: “So America is really going down, you will end up in these next elections with a president who is either a woman or a black man or an old man.” I really loved the Romanian students assigned to me on that Fulbright semester; they exhibited passion and motivation for their chosen theater profession like no other students I had ever seen on the campus of my university, not even my dear Laurie; they had incredible training in several acting styles from commedia to Stanislavsky, with directors and acting teachers that had no problem telling the women students, for instance, that they were too fat for a part, or asking them to strip for a play without any clear aesthetic motivation. All those students wanted were good parts and the chance to play them. But when I heard them pour out those floods of clichés and offensive comments that insulted about three-quarters of the globe’s population, let alone their own Fulbright teacher standing right in front of them, I wanted to scream or better yet to just run away from the whole scene and return to my American university and students. For the first time while in Europe as an naturalized American citizen, I missed America. But since I had never to that point given up on a project I had set my mind on, I was not going to do that now. I was not going to just let these kids mock my hard-won knowledge and expertise. I gathered all my lectures and PowerPoint presentations on the history of women’s theater in

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America and Western Europe, all the photocopies I had carried with me from the States, of women playwrights I particularly liked, from Aphra Behn to Caryl Churchill, to Franca Rame, to Heather Raffo, and to Deb Margoli. I had seen some of these women perform in person and I was friends with some too. After a particularly frustrating class in which I found myself swearing, picking up my things, and leaving the room slamming the door with a huge bang, I decided I was going to change teaching strategies. In the next class, I first asked all the women to tell me what roles in particular they were working on at the moment with their acting teachers. Some mentioned a part in a Chekov play, others a Shakespeare play, others mentioned the roles of a prostitute and another one of a housewife in a contemporary Romanian play. Some said they were searching for monologues. After listening to that bit of information, I told all the students in the class that they were going to keep quiet for the full two-hour duration of the period, and that they were going to listen to my lecture and presentation; that for the following class they were to read the texts I had prepared for them and if not, they would flunk their exam. I first gave them Churchill’s Top Girls and Rame’s Orgasmo Adulto Escapes from the Zoo. I told them I had had enough of their sexist nonsense, that I came there from the other end of the world leaving one son completely on his own in his first year of college and dragging with me my younger son; that I was given a fellowship to teach them things about which they had no idea; and that if they considered themselves true artists they needed to know what was going on in the theater world besides bloody Chekov. There was a deep silence. Some of the women in class seemed satisfied that the rowdiest of guys were put in their places. I went on for the two hours without a break. This time rather than trying to give them feminist and gender performance theories, I actually took them on a virtual tour of some of the playwrights, actors, performance artists, and directors, from the Women’s Experimental Theater to the Wooster Group and Karen Finley to the Split Britches Theater to the plays of Caryl Churchill to Franca Rame, to Deb Margolin. The one point I did stress time and again was the creation of new roles for women, by women, about issues and concerns of interest to both women and men, such as: female sexuality; motherhood; sexual violence; the breaking of stereotypical images of women; and going beyond Chekov’s martyr or seductress protagonists to multidimensional, multilayered characters, to parts of women coming from all walks of life, ages, and sexual orientations. I read passages from some of them or I had them read different scenes. I read the texts in English, the only versions I had, while still lecturing in Romanian. At the end there was

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something of an awed silence, the guys were smiling, only this time not with a snicker, but with an inkling of interest. The women seemed preoccupied. As the students were slowly leaving the classroom, a few of the women shyly waited for me near my desk or near the door. After all the men were gone, about six of them approached me and asked me if I wanted to work with them on a monologue, or a one-woman show. Judging by how confidently they had earlier held on to their positions of resistance to any initiation into gender theory as if that was all passé and irrelevant for their lives, I was surprised to find out none of them had ever actually done a one-woman show. I also found out they were frustrated by the lack of good women parts, that they were starved for a part such as the ones I had mentioned and sampled in my presentation. They all had approached me to ask for one thing: that I direct them in women’s shows over the rest of my semester at their university. At the following class one of these students actually gave me a copy of Sara Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis and asked me if I was willing to direct her in it for her end-of-the-year show. She hadn’t had the courage to ask that of any of her other teachers. This turned out to be the most intense and unforgettable theatrical/pedagogical experience of my life—and of theirs too. I directed three of these women students in Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire, two others in two one-woman shows featuring monologues by Franca Rame, and one in Sara Kane’s wrenching monologue. They presented these plays at the student theater festival at the end of the academic year, and three of these students came to Washington and Lee and presented their monologues as part of the Tenth National Symposium of Theater in Academe and First International Theater Festival in November of 2009. I could say that I was partly inspired to extend my regular Theater Symposium into a festival as well in order to give these students a chance to perform in a foreign language on a foreign stage, the work I had done with them during my Fulbright fellowship at their home university in Romania. I believe there were several things that spurred in these students their change of heart and mind and their opening up toward a different kind of theatrical experience than the one they had been used to. First, it was the hybridity of my own cultural and linguistic identities. They were puzzled by my constant and unapologetic shifts between several languages, as if all and none were my native ones, as if I belonged to all and to none in particular and they noticed that I was at ease and rather positive about life in that state of linguistic and cultural multiplicity. Second, I believe it was also the fact that rather than teach them the theory behind the practice, I turned the tables around and started with the practice. It was then that they

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stopped and listened. I just showed them the possibilities of some beautifully crafted texts that offered them what they were starved for: interesting and complex parts to play in. I left the politics aside and just confronted them with the art—which was what they could best relate to. Third, the appeal to their artistic and intellectual integrity had a profound echo and finally urged them to listen. These students were also fluent in at least another language other than Romanian (mostly English), but their performance of foreignness was not as it had been for me decades ago, a form of resistance to oppression. Neither was it always the result of a deliberate system of a liberal arts education, as was the case with my American students. Rather it was often “the new cool” of a postrevolutionary generation who felt confident and sassy about taking on certain surface parts of the performance of foreignness, particularly American, but refused anything that came say from American activism or civic consciousness. But those Romanian students were darned serious about the practice and development of their art—an art they saw in a political vacuum, free of any “polluting” ideologies. And finally, but equally important, the attraction of acting in foreign plays and “disguising” their feminist parts under the mask of foreignness was a real catalyst: A British, an Iraqi, and an Italian playwright. They could always say they were just playing a foreign play whenever the men in their class might have teased them for becoming feminists overnight. Eventually, when three of these actresses actually had to play in English on an American stage at my own university, they blew away every one of my students registered during that term in my two theater classes, as well as many of my colleagues, and as well as the writer Matei Visniec who was present at the Theater Festival I organized and hosted. I worked for the entire rest of the semester with these students and presented their shows at the end of the term, one night after another. I worked with each of them differently, allowing them to find their own voices and urging them to delve into the texts and find common points of experience and emotion with the characters. At first they were confused because they were used to teachers who told them exactly how they should act, be, or sound on stage and they kept asking me “What should I do now?” or “How should I be here?” I stubbornly resisted and rejected that approach. For instance, in my rehearsals with the Sarah Kane actress, whom I will refer to as Adina, we sometimes ended up having long discussions about the character every time she felt stuck and didn’t know what tone of voice or blocking choice she should make. We struggled together with the text and its troubling character, trying to figure out as

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deeply as we could the reasons for her ardent desire and attempts to commit suicide. The main character of this play, a lesbian woman who has fallen in love with her therapist and struggles with overpowering depression, memories of childhood traumas, conflicted self-image and relation to her own body, offers one of the most powerful but also challenging parts for women performers in contemporary British drama. Adina admitted to me a few times in rehearsals that although she was not a depressive person, something in the despair of this female character really touched and shook her, and she identified with her to some degree. It would be interesting to note here that Adina was also the student who had been rehearsing the part of a prostitute in a different play, that day when I asked the women in my class what roles they were working on. She eventually gave up that part and took this one on with a vengeance. Sometimes our rehearsals left both of us exhausted and frustrated, at other times elated. We were getting deeper into the role but she still felt it wasn’t quite clicking, and she hadn’t quite cracked it. What was bothering her more than anything were the allusions to both sexuality and religion in the play--until one day when she came to our rehearsal with a peevish smile. She asked me if I was open to a really wild idea. I told her I was open to just about anything with these two exceptions: that it not be something gratuitous or gimmicky for the sake of sensationalism, and that it not be something that presents her as a woman in a degrading situation on stage. She delved her arm into her bag and pulled out a package that had a dubious smell. She opened it slowly with the same peevish smile, by now turned into giggles. and produced a silvery, perfectly-shaped, glistening fish. Yes, a real fish, not alive but one whole fish that had been recently murdered for consumption in one of the local markets. “This play is about both hatred for religion and a search for spirituality and dealing with sexuality all in one,” she said. “Do you get the fish?” I got it and was shaken to my core. She said she was going to prepare that fish on stage and create a last-supper kind of scene, the character’s last supper which she was going to prepare for her lover that would never come. She was first going to chop up the dead fish in front of the audience as part of the dinner-preparation ritual. She wanted it to be both a symbol and not a symbol and for her to be “both mad and not mad.” She wanted to have that strikingly literal object and metaphor in her highest moment of madness, when she rages against religions, genocides, a wrongly set society, manipulative doctors, the obsession with her body and sexuality, her own broken heart, and lost love. All of that for her “last supper.” Our rehearsals became famous throughout the theater department

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because they always came with a strong smell of fish. The performance was both a shock to everyone and a success even written up in the local newspapers. When she presented it on the stage of my university theater, my friend, the superb feminist playwright Deb Margolin, said, “It’s that Sylvia Plath kind of rage, it’s all of their rage, all of those women, and our rage too, isn’t it?” Most of my American students loved the piece, and some of them considered it as the most powerful, disturbing, and also beautiful show of the entire festival. Many wrote about it in their final projects. Something crossed cultures and languages in the well-prepared and deliberate rawness, in the total foreignness, recklessness of that performance in which a Romanian student took on one of the most challenging parts in contemporary Western women’s theater and flew with it, becoming as Cixous has often urged women artists to do: “une voleuse de langue,” a thief of language as she “flew” with it.15 The students who performed two different Franca Rame monologues, “Waking Up” and “We All Have the Same Story,” engaged in similarly intense, soul-searching theatrical processes, delving full force into foreignness, into madness, into women’s voices that they could identify with, and that retold some of their own stories or the stories of women they knew. I guided them throughout these processes and watched them proudly and often choked with emotion as they searched for just the right accessory on stage, for just the right tone, as they dialogued with Franca Rame’s women and made them their own. Andrea played the role of a working mother who is desperately trying to get to work on time while also getting her baby ready for daycare, and who rushes back and forth between domestic objects and chores as she tells the story of her marital life while her husband is still sleeping. Andrea creatively devised her own stage space in a Brechtian manner of dialoguing with the audience and breaking the fourth wall, as she used several objects on stage that were supposed to suggest her domestic space and on which she wrote labels with their names. Some of the objects were reversed or simply ironic. She used a jar on which she wrote “refrigerator,” she used a shoe box on which she wrote “washing machine” and a doll on which she wrote “baby.” In her frenzy to get to work the character mixes up everything and as she searches for her keys she thinks she put the baby in the oven or the refrigerator. She speaks in the voice and tells the story of so many of us working mothers trying to juggle work and family the best way we can in a world that is still hostile to women who either want to or have to do “it all.” Andrea took on this role joyously and, to use Elin Diamond beautiful phrase, she “play[ed] gender with a vengeance.”16 Andrea discovered the inexhaustible comic potentials of

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feminist humor that “mocks the deepest possible norms, norms fourthousand years old” of humor that is subversive of both an entire canon of theatrical works in which women are the butt of men’s jokes rather than creators of their own humor and of the notion that women, in general, and feminists in particular are devoid of humor.17 In We All Have the Same Story, Diana played the role of a woman who is having a baby as a result of a negligent sexual act. The play starts with the sex scene acted by the woman alone and is constantly interrupted because of the woman’s worry she might get pregnant. She ends up having the baby who is a naughty girl who has a naughty doll that teaches her obscenities. The story takes a surreal jump into traditional fairy tales gone wild and gone feminist, in which the girl grown into a woman in her turn experiences sexuality, a bad marriage, and childbirth, but in which she ends up realizing the inequity of her position as constant sex object and caregiver. This actress chose to perform the entire scene with only a bed on a bare stage. She wanted to challenge herself as a performer to the maximum and she derived a particular thrill from playing with and developing the different voices of both the female and imaginary male characters in the play. Alone with a bed, a symbol with so many sexually and politically charged meanings, and going on a rollercoaster of female and male voices and impersonations in commedia Isabella Andreini style, Diana performed an equally courageous act of self-discovery and liberation, particularly since her English was the least proficient of the three actresses. On the American stage she cleverly used her thick Romanian accent and built it into her character, together with the leaps into performing madness, into performing the women’s voice and stories she had been so starved to perform. This student also ended up writing her capstone thesis on feminist theater, the first occurrence of the kind in her department. All three students shared with me several times that the discovery of women’s theater, and their experience of acting and producing these onewoman shows had been the most fulfilling experience of their acting career to that point. It gave them a chance to search for their own voices as complete artists, it allowed them to act creatively and devise their own performance spaces rather than mechanically take directions from a teacher, to tell their own stories as they “disguised” themselves behind foreign women’s stories or a foreign language. Besides the pure artistic and human thrill it gave me, the experience of working with these remarkable women artists also taught me that I had become too comfortable and confident myself in my rather Amerocentric feminism, that I had gotten to a point where I had stopped questioning

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hard enough my allegiance to various linguistic and cultural identities and had maybe forgotten to be foreign enough. There had been too much of a seamless overlap and pretense of a perfectly assumed American feminist identity when I walked into those classrooms filled with fierce or sardonic—but almost always highly-motivated—students, and too little left for improvisation, just like an actor who has become too savvy, who knows her role too well and has no room left for the flight of insecurities in the space between the role she is playing and the person that she really is. Like an actress who is too native. In this sense, foreignness acquires a positive and an even larger meaning; that of taking a distance from oneself in order to find oneself. I wouldn’t want to conclude this article without also mentioning that while working on these shows in Romania, as we got closer to the performances, the men in the class started coming to the rehearsals more often and offered to help with technical support and behind-the-stage work. Partly joking, partly serious, they would come in “to help the girls.” They rose to the occasion for their classmates indeed, helping with sound, lights, moving scenery and coming to each one of the performances. I also brought two of them to perform at the theater festival at Washington and Lee, one together with Andrea for another Franca Rame and Dario Fo piece written for a man and a woman, and the other to perform a monologue from Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. But the story of the men in the classroom is one for another article. Going back to pictures of these shows and to video clips, as I often do whenever I miss working with these women actors too much, and going back to one of my very favorite books on feminist performance art and theater, Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance, I am time and again moved to tears by the following sentence: “Live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world.”18 Invariably I try to imagine how my Romanian students may be using these transformative artistic experiences in their everyday work to capture those “fleeting intimations of a better world,”19 as they try to get by on their minuscule starting actors’ salaries in a country heavily hit by the recent economic crisis, how my American student Laurie may be faring and catching one of those glimpses as she faces the ruthless jungle that is the New York acting and artists’ world. And I look at the pictures again, read their statements, think of my own journey as a multilayered foreign performer of sorts and comfort myself with a hope similar to Dolan’s; that there is hope in performance, there is

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hope in foreignness as performance and in performance as foreignness. As long as we also give them a touch of creative madness and do not become too comfortable in either performance, as long as we do not forget that the disguise is not who we are, but a journey or a vehicle that may take us closer to who we are or who we want to be. And then instead of a place of margins, foreignness may just become a place of “radical openness.”

Interviews I have asked the actresses discussed in this essay five interview questions about their experience of acting plays in a foreign language or representative of a foreign culture. Some of their answers are transcribed below. All the students recognized a certain liberating factor in their experience of acting in a foreign language. For the American students, Laurie and Stephanie, the liberating aspect may have been one of experiencing the openness of the margins, as they embraced and worked from an assumed place of marginality on campus, as women acting madness, cross-dressing, and in a foreign language that they were trying to master; whereas for the Romanian students, the liberating factor may have come from a reverse process, namely from the fact that coming from a place of margins already, of women in a country at the margins of the Western world in which most discussions of sexism are yelled down or mocked, they brought their marginality to a place of centeredness. It is also worth noticing that Stephanie noted as one of the hardest challenges in acting in a foreign language was the slowness or difficulty of improvising, of performing foreignness as if it were native. She also noted that one remarkably liberating moment in the show was one that involved “hysterical laughter,” in the play about the mental patients, while Laurie noted that it was the more visceral and less intellectualizing aspect of being immersed in the foreign language that represented for her the most liberating aspect of the experience. For the Romanian actresses, the liberating aspects derived on the contrary from the joy of having mastered the language and of having gotten to what Adina perceived as the truest, or deepest, of the meanings of the play, as well as the communication with a foreign audience that gave them a sense of belonging to a wider, more global community. When Laurie and Stephanie and Adina and Andrea and Diana actually met each other during the theater festival at Washington and Lee and participated in it on the same side of the Atlantic, watching each other perform, or actually performing together in dramatic readings, I couldn’t help feeling that some kind of a “utopia in performance” had been achieved.

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1. Was it an aesthetic/emotional challenge to act in a foreign language, why or why not? Stephanie: I found acting in a foreign language had both ups and downs. Certain lines that would normally be out of character for me to say in English were much easier to say in another language, such as when expressing deep emotion or fear. A weight is lifted as you speak in a different language, and I believe it makes it easier to assume another role. On the other hand, grasping the entire meaning and nuances of the foreign text could prove difficult. I found it harder to envelop the entire core of the character. Laurie: It was actually quite the opposite. Because I was acting in a language that wasn't my own, I wasn't able to over-intellectualize. Everything was conceptual and bare-boned. Granted, I didn't always know the exact, literal meaning of a sentence. But that was the gift—the freeing ability to approach something and have it speak to you without having to force it into this box and say, "this is exactly what this means." There's something organic about speaking in a language that's not yours, finding a piece of text that you identify with on a very base level which connects you to your very core. 2. Was the experience of acting in a foreign language or that of acting plays that represent people and situations from a different culture than yours liberating in any way? Why or why not? Adina: Yes, I found the experience quite liberating because somehow my focus went to another level. I wasn't translating from Romanian to English, but actually thinking and feeling in English (or so I like to think). Also, there is a certain dramatic force to the English language that helped, I think, with my interpretation. In English, I felt closer to the meaning of the text and thus I think I got closer to the state of "owning" it. I have my director, Professor Domnica Radulescu, to thank too, for encouraging me to perform it in English. During our work together we spotted several things that might have been lost in translation. Stephanie: I felt more freedom in saying certain lines I would be uncomfortable personally saying in English. A non-native language instantly distances yourself from the words—even if you have spent hours upon hours studying and practicing those very lines. I think acting in a foreign language can also be difficult because certain situations and people

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you come across are so unlike anything you have seen or heard before. In that sense, foreign plays can broaden your point of view and stretch your talent. 3. By acting in a foreign language/culture did you discover sides of yourself as a person and sides of your acting strategies, techniques that were refreshed, challenged, improved or that you didn't even know you had? Stephanie: The physical improvisation improved as I lacked, on occasion, the oral improvisation. I distinctly remember a moment when my arm was caught in my blazer but before I had time to tell my fellow actress, we were onstage. The hysterical laughter became what it should be, a rage, since myself and my colleague were supposed to be in a shouting match. I believe we succeeded in turning one emotion into another seamlessly. Laurie: Most definitely! There is a certain connection I found that I've implemented in subsequent rehearsals or work I've done. I will often translate a piece I'm doing in English into French just to see what comes up for me, how I react to the words, what emotions come out, what images I see . . . it's a completely different experience that adds so much perspective. I also have different facial expressions when I speak French, my voice is a little different . . . it's amazing to discover that. Adina: For the most part, acting in a foreign language proved to me that there is no such thing as a language barrier for actors in theatre. The text I am working on right now was written in French. So, I would say that not only have I overcome a sort of linguistic self-consciousness, but I also gained this sense of . . . international or universal possibility. 4. What was the greatest joy in acting in a foreign language and on a foreign stage? Stephanie: I enjoyed the freedom you felt when acting in a different language and the ability to learn more about how people in other cultures potentially act the same or different in a familiar scene or situation. Seeing scenes from a different point of view opens your eyes to different mannerisms and expressions.

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Laurie: The greatest joy in acting in a foreign language is being isolated from all obstacles so that you can connect to the simple truth of what you're trying to do . . . it's like being in tune with something communal to all human experience. There's simplicity, there's heart. Adina: The greatest joy I found in acting in English in front of an American audience was the joy of feeling and seeing how the message gets across to them. They were an amazing audience, very open and honest and resonating good energy. As they say, it takes two to tango and luckily I had whom to tango with, the audience was an amazing partner for me during my solo. Andrea: My greatest joy was the fact that I performed in the United States and that through theater I communicated with people from a culture and country so different and so far away from my own. 5. What was the greatest frustration in acting in a foreign language/stage? Did you overcome that frustration in the process of preparation or in the actual performance? How? Stephanie: My biggest frustration was my inability to improvise. I believe one’s level in the foreign language plays a part in improvisation but you must also be able to keenly understand what would be appropriate in such a situation and that culture. Laurie: I guess I would say that the greatest frustration matches the greatest joy: the simplicity . . . It’s just a different sort of acting experience. As long as you recognize that and embrace it, you're golden. Andrea: My frustration had to do with the fact that I was a beginner in English and I had to focus both on the acting and on speaking correctly. But the experience was successful and feeling how the audience understood me and laughed and enjoyed the play . . . that was my greatest reward.

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Bibliography Aston, Elaine. Feminist Theater Practice. New York: Routledge, 1999. Bettie, Julie. Women without Class, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Boal, Augusto. See also The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. —. The Theater of the Oppressed, Pluto Press, 2008. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 347-63. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Writings in General Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Diamond, Elin. “Mimesis, Mimickry and the ‘True’ Real.” In Acting Out: Feminist Performance, edited by Linda Hart and Peggy Phelan, 36382. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Essif, Les. “Teaching Literary Dramatic Texts as Culture-in-Process in the Foreign Language Theater Practicum: The Strategy of Combining Texts.” ADFL Bulletin 29.3 (1998): 19-27. Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness.” In Feminisms. An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 7-20. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Gray, Frances. Women and Laughter. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Hart, Linda, and Peggy Phelan, eds. Acting Out: Feminist Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1989. —. “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. —. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Boston: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. Little, Judy. Comedy and the Woman Writer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

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McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” Working Paper/Wellesley College, Center for Research on Women, 1988. McNeece, Lucy Stone. “The Uses of Improvisation in the Foreign Language Classroom.” The French Review 56.6 (May 1983): 829-839. Radulescu, Domnica. “Isabella’s Trick or What a Sixteenth Century Comedienne Can Teach Us Today.” In The Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater, edited by Domnica Radulescu and Maria Stadter Fox, 161-91. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005. —. “Winnie in the Attic: Toward a Feminist Awakening in Beckett’s Happy Days.” In Radical Acts: Theater and Feminist Pedagogies of Change, edited by Ann Elizabeth and Kathleen Juhl. Saint Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Young, Marion. “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” Ethics 99.2 (1989): 250-274.

Notes  1

See de Saussure, Writings in General Linguistics and Jakobson, Language in Literature. 2 See the article about the use of improvisation in the foreign language classroom by McNeece, “The Uses of Improvisation in the Foreign Language Classroom.” 3 The quote from hooks is from Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. My article is in the collection Radical Acts. Theater and Feminist Pedagogies of Change. 4 See my discussion on what I have called “a pedagogy of tyranny” versus an aesthetics and pedagogy of freedom in the article from Radical Acts. And see Boal, The Theater of the Oppressed. See also The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. 5 See Teaching to Transgress. 6 In Talking Back, 51. 7 See the article by hooks entitled “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. 8 hooks, Yearning, 151-53. 9 See the collection Radical Acts and my own article in it. See also Aston, Feminist Theater Practice. And see Hart and Phelan, eds., Acting Out: Feminist Performance. 10 See the article “Women and Madness,” 20. 11 See the article by Radulescu, “Isabella’s Trick or What a Sixteenth Century Comedienne Can Teach Us Today.” See also Irigaray’s discussion of “mimesisimposed” and of the female hysteria as a response to the imposition of mimesis and

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 a subversion of male-created impositions of femininity in Speculum of the Other Woman. 12 See the article by McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” For excellent ethnographic studies of the performance of class identity and its intersections with gender, see also Bettie’s Women without Class. For an excellent analysis of quilting different dramatic texts in performance and the process of acquiring an enhanced cultural awareness see Essif, “Teaching Literary Dramatic Texts as Culture-in-Process in the Foreign Language Theater Practicum: The Strategy of Combining Texts.” 13 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 4. 14 See the articles by McIntosh and also Young’s article, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship.” 15 See Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Cixous plays on the French pun voler which means both to fly and to steal. 16 See the article by Diamond, “Mimesis, Mimickry and the ‘True’ Real.” 17 For the previous quote see Little, Comedy and the Woman Writer, 4. And for an excellent study on women’s and feminist humor see Gray, Women and Laughter. ϭϴ Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2. ϭϵ Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 2.

CHAPTER THREE “ACTING . . . IS THE RECOVERY OF A ‘LOST’ PHYSICAL OF READING.”1 OR: WHY WE SHOULD CONSIDER THEATERBASED LITERATURE COURSES BETTINA MATTHIAS, MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE

“Grau . . . ist alle Theorie”—gray is all theory, these are the words of Goethe’s witty Mephistopheles, posing as Doctor Faustus, and as someone selling himself as an experienced scholar-teacher, and as a very colorful dramatic character, he should know. 2 Teaching cannot succeed without actively engaging those who learn and listen and without making pertinent and relevant that which we teach. In the same vein, theater will never really get audiences involved unless they see, hear, and feel the dramatic text and its characters come alive. Reading a drama will always necessarily remain an incomplete experience for, as the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal put it, “the dramatic text is something incomplete . . . . For the mature observer, there is nothing more miraculous than recognizing in the world’s greatest dramatists how everything, in spite of its magical completeness, still suggests a sketch, how they all knew how to leave things up in the air, how not to disclose the last secret, not even the second-to-last.”3 Dramatic texts need to be performed, seen, and heard in order to be complete, and this holds especially true when we think about audiences that are little used to dealing with literature, and those who face the challenge of confronting texts in a foreign language: our students. Based on this conviction, I will make a case for integrating performance-based drama and literature courses into every foreign language department’s curriculum and join the growing number of voices that call for a revamping of traditional course offerings in foreign language literature and

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culture. Offering theater-based literature classes serves a wide variety of purposes, ranging from improving our students’ level of proficiency in the foreign language to raising their awareness for cultural semiotics, introducing them to the much-feared field of literary analysis and criticism, responding to newer trends in foreign language pedagogy which “place the student in an active, rather than a passive role and encourage him to assume a certain initiative for his own language acquisition,” to helping foreign language departments gain greater public visibility, thus supporting their recruitment and retention efforts. 4 The proposal may sound daunting, considering that such projects require a significant investment of time and energy from the students and those leading them, an investment that is certainly higher than anything required for more traditional classes. Furthermore, tackling the difficult issues of assessing students’ work and keeping a high level of academic integrity are critical in planning such a course and convincing colleagues and administrators of the viability of theater-based (literature) teaching. Finally, financial considerations often put a damper on plans to realize a theater project in our under-funded foreign language departments, and outside support is not always easy to find. It will be one of the purposes of this essay to address such concerns and to suggest practices that have worked well in the past. Over the past decades, a number of colleagues have shared their success stories about most satisfying theater projects, and a synthesis of their ideas will allow me to offer some sort of “best practices” list that, I hope, will make preparing and offering theater-based classes easier. To be sure, the time-commitment is and will always be significant, but after more than six years of doing German plays at my institution, I cannot but second what Bernd Ruping states in such strong and concrete terms: “Whoever has ever participated in a theater project, be it as an actor or as a director, knows about this strange eroticism of work which, on whatever level, is a key productive force in doing theater.”5 It is this “eroticism of work” that drives us practitioners to devote ourselves to this kind of work with our students; it is this “eroticism of work” that keeps students interested in working with literature at a time when many other media and more lucrative tasks compete for their attention; and it may be this “eroticism of work” that opens up new pathways for our students to become responsible readers and learn how to take charge of their own education in the framework of play, according to Johan Huizinga6 and Friedrich Schiller7, the ideal realm for human development and freedom.

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Teaching with Theater in Context If you have read this volume from the start, there is no need to explain in depth the many benefits that theater-and drama-based teaching offer us as teachers of language, culture, and literature. 8 A growing body of scholarly literature, studying the connection between communicative language teaching, the merits of “tapping the students’ bodily-kinesthetic intelligence” in linguistic and cultural learning, and the significance of collaborative creative explorations of the target culture and literature attests to this approach’s validity for practitioners as well as those concerned with the future of foreign language education in general.9 Performance-based teaching targets our students’ emotional-affective as well as their physical and intellectual/analytical attention, and it makes meaningful and relevant tasks and ideas that would remain “gray theory” if taught in a less contextualized, creative, and engaging manner. As Donna Van Handle explains in her discussion on the value of theater-based instruction and its potential for teaching social roles in context, and, more specifically, cultural semiotics: “In a world which is becoming ever smaller, it is . . . important to foster students’ cultural awareness by connecting language with culturally-specific gestures, facial expressions, and movements.”10 As a group-effort that is both process- and product-oriented, a theater project provides a low-anxiety environment in which every single participant is invited to negotiate and overcome personal, linguistic, social, cultural, and psychological differences and hurdles. A significant number of publications, among them Gerd Bräuer’s edited volume Body and Language: Intercultural Learning Through Drama, have outlined the challenges that students face in today’s multicultural world and how drama and theater can help them understand and appreciate linguistic, cultural, or socio-economical differences through, for example, “performative inquiry” (Fels and McGivern) or transcultural performance (Axtmann).11 Acting out differences leads to experiencing them and, if all of the above holds true, understanding them better. The same approach can help overcome a “cultural challenge” that has arisen for our students more recently, and it is in this respect that theater provides a real chance for language departments to regroup and revitalize their offerings and reach out successfully to students. For many, literature, and especially the written dramatic text from times past and different language communities, has nothing to do with today’s multi-media reality in which multiple sensory stimuli compete for their attention and the general attention span has shrunk to almost nothing. Reading literature is a real challenge for our students today, not only in a foreign language, and

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we better find a way to help them access this part of our cultural capital if we want to continue working with it. For generations, literature has played a central role in any foreign language department—it “has been used for the aesthetic education of the few (1910s), for the literacy of the many (1920s), for moral and vocational uplift (1930s-1940s), for ideational content (1950s), for humanistic inspiration (1960s-1970s), and for providing an ‘authentic’ experience of the target culture (1980s-1990s),” and it is now the object of “the current interest in voice, style, and culture in applied linguistics.”12 But current professional discussions about the future of foreign language programs in general, in which colleagues make a case for abandoning the traditional foreign language department’s focus on literary studies in favor of cultural studies, suggest that we have to find new ways to teach literary texts if we want to be in line with philosophical changes in our profession and demands from our twenty-first-century-cultured students.13 Using performance to teach literature is one such adjustment. Interdisciplinary and multi-sensory in nature, it necessarily triggers academic discussion of much more than just the literary text. Cultural studies have a lot to contribute to a performance-based approach to literature, and performance in turn enriches any cultural studies-inclined curriculum. Furthermore, performance helps bridge the cultural gap that has opened up between the literary text and today’s readers, between two cultural paradigms. If playwright David Cole (whose philosophical musings about the relationship between acting and reading has opened this essay) is right, it even reverses a basic “loss” that has changed the nature of reading in general. For him, “[a]cting is a physicalization of the act of reading . . . . is the recovery of a ‘lost’ physical of reading.”14 If music goes “straight into the legs,” as a German idiom has it, and dancing is the physical manifestation of music through the human body (the “physical” of hearing?)