Taoist Theater / Teaching

From Keith Johnstone’s Impro (online here)

Anthony Stirling

I felt crippled, and 'unfit' for life, so I decided to become a teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example. It wasn't so much what he taught, as what he did. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher.

I'll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating.

He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn't like, but which I thought I understood—'He's letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,' I thought.

He made us mix up a thick 'jammy' black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he said, 'paint the mark he leaves on your paper!'

I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I'd always been 'good at art', and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student. This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks?

'He cycles on and off your paper,' said Stirling, 'and he does all sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very interesting...'

Everyone's paper was covered with a mess of black lines—except mine, since I'd tried to be original by mixing up a blue. Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me.

Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had made. 'What kind of colours?' 'Any colours.'

*Yeah .. . but... er ... we don't know what colours to choose.'

'Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like.'

We decided to humour him. When my paper was coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the outlines black.

'Johnstone's found the value of a strong outline,' said Stirling, which really annoyed me. I could see that everyone's paper was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody else's—but no better.

'Put patterns on all the colours,' said Stirling. The man seemed to be an idiot. Was he teasing us? 'What sort of patterns?' 'Any patterns.'

We couldn't seem to start. There were about ten of us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this madman. 'We don't know what to do.' 'Surely it's easy to think of patterns.'

We wanted to get it right. 'What sort of patterns do you want?'

'It's up to you.' He had to explain patiently to us that it really was our choice. I remember him asking us to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which it didn't. Somehow we finished the exercises, and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor, and it was the same exercise done by other students. The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive—clearly they had been done by some advanced class. 'What a great idea,' I thought, 'making us screw up in this way, and then letting us realise that there was something that we could learn, since the advanced students were so much better!' Maybe I exaggerate when I remember how beautiful the paintings were, but I was seeing them immediately after my failure. Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. 'Wait a minute,' I said, 'these are by young children!' They were all by eight-year-olds! It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they'd done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. I was speechless. Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered. It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.

Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad ...'

'But supposing a child wants to learn how to draw a tree?'

'Send him out to look at one. Let him climb one. Let him touch it.'

'But if he still can't draw one?'

'Let him model it in clay.'

The implication of Stirling's attitude was that the student should never experience failure. The teacher's skill lay in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed. Stirling recommended that we read the Tao Te Ching. It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual. Here are some extracts:'...

The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words When his task is accomplished and his work done the people all say, "It happened to us naturally" .... I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves. I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block ... One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them. This is known as the virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of others To know yet to think that one does not know is best.


The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.' (Translated by C. D. Lau, Penguin, 1969.)

Being a Teacher

I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new teachers avoided—but I'd been a postman there, and I loved the place.

My new colleagues bewildered me. 'Never tell people you’re a teacher!' they said. 'If they find you're a teacher in the pub, they'll all move away!' It was true! I'd believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as 'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive. If a child is creative he's likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn't a reason for disliking him. My colleagues had a poor view of themselves: again and again I heard them say, 'Man among boys; boy among men' when describing their condition. I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant, or rather that the school was something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you'd remove him away from his parents (which is what my education had done for me). Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn't want their children alienated from them.

Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. Mine was a mix of twenty-six 'average' eight-year-olds, and twenty 'backward' ten-year-olds whom the school had written off as ineducable. Some of the ten-year-olds couldn't write their names after five years of schooling. I'm sure Professor Skinner could teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I couldn't believe that these children were really dull: it was more likely that they were putting up a resistance. One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren't being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated.

Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. My case was peculiar in that I'd apparently been exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven, winning all the prizes (which embarrassed me, since I thought they should be given to the dull children as compensation) and being teacher's pet, and so on. Then, spectacularly, I'd suddenly come bottom of the class—'down among the dregs', as my headmaster described it. He never forgave me. I was puzzled too, but gradually I realised that I wouldn't work for people I didn't like. Over the years my work gradually improved, but I never fulfilled my promise. When I liked a particular teacher and won a prize, the head would say: 'Johnstone is taking this prize away from the boys who deserve it!' If you've been bottom of the class for years it gives you a different perspective: I was friends with boys who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as 'useless' or 'ineducable'. My 'failure' was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.

I was determined that my classes shouldn't be dull, so I used to jump about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up—which is exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline. My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of themselves as 'being educated'.

I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I'd also type out their dreams—and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)—but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school-hence the misbehaviour.

I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I'd never seen any examples of children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!). By far the best work came from the 'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation. He'd found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces—they'd made them in art class and I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them. There was a cardboard tunnel he was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk around. I'd stuck all the art paper together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning forest.

My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher: 'You're not the right type,' he said, 'not the right type at all.' Now it looked as if I was going to be rejected officially. Fortunately the school was inspected, and Her Majesty's Inspector thought that my class were doing the most interesting work. I remember one incident that struck him as amazing: the children screaming out that there were only three chickens drawn on the blackboard, while I was insisting that there were five (two were still inside the hen-house). Then the children started scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard. I shouldn't think half of them had ever seen a chicken, but it delighted the Inspector. 'You realise that they're trying to throw me out,' I said, and he fixed it so that I wasn't bothered again.

Stirling's 'non-interference' worked in every area where I applied it: piano teaching for example. I worked with Marc Wilkinson, the composer (he became director of music at the National Theatre), and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my typewriter had. He soon had a collection of tapes as surprising as the children's poems had been. I assembled a group of children by asking each teacher for the children he couldn't stand; and although everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be very talented, and they learned with amazing speed. After twenty minutes a boy hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, 'It's the Japanese soldiers from the film on Saturday!' Which it was. We invented many games—like one child making sounds for water and another putting the 'fish' in it. Sometimes we got them to feel objects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so that the others could guess. Other teachers were amazed by the enthusiasm and talent shown by these 'dull' children.

[p. 93]

Many teachers get improvisers to work in conflict because conflict is interesting but you don’t actually need to teach competitive behaviour; the students will already be expert at it, and it’s important that we don’t exploit the actors’ conflicts. Even in what seems to be a tremendous argument, the actors should still be co-operating, and coolly developing the action. The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination. What happens in my classes, if the actors stay with me long enough, is that they learn how their ‘normal’ procedures destroy other people’s talent. Then, one day they have a flash of satori--they suddenly understand that all the weapons they were using against other people they also use inwardly, against themselves.

Masks

[This is a passage difficult to excerpt because it’s all so amazing. The idea of masks “possessing” their wearer is very old but rediscovered in Johnstone’s theater work. He even refers to Voodoo possession, and African masks as ways of communicating with the spirit world. Chaplin reports donning his “tramp” costume spontaneously connected him with that famous character…who was silent.]

[p.148] Masks seem exotic when you first learn about them, but to my mind Mask acting is no stranger than any other kind: no more weird than the fact that an actor can blush when his character is embarrassed, or turn white with fear, or that a cold will stop for the duration of the performance, and then start streaming again as soon as the curtain falls. 'What's Hecuba to him?' asks Hamlet, and the mystery remains. Actors can be possessed by the character they play just as they can be possessed by Masks. Many actors have been unable to really 'find' a character until they put on the make-up, or until they try on the wig or the costume. We find the Mask strange because we don't understand how irrational our responses to the face are anyway, and we don't realise that much of our lives is spent in some form of trance, i.e. absorbed. What we assume to be 'normal consciousness' is comparatively rare, it's like the light in the refrigerator: when you look in, there you are ON but what's happening when you don't look in?

It's difficult to understand the power of the Mask if you've only seen it in illustrations, or in museums. The Mask in the showcase may have been intended as an ornament on the top of a vibrating, swishing haystack. Exhibited without its costume, and without a film, or even photograph, of the Mask in use, we respond to it only as an aesthetic object. Many Masks are beautiful or striking, but that's not the point. A Mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it. A very beautiful Mask may be completely dead, while a piece of old sacking with a mouth and eye holes torn in it may have tremendous vitality.

In its original culture, nothing had more power than the Mask. It was used as an oracle, a judge, an arbitrator. Some were so sacred that any outsider who caught a glimpse of them was executed. They cured diseases, they made women sterile. Some tribes were so scared of their power that they carved the eye holes so that the wearers could see only the ground. Some Masks were led on chains to keep them from

[p. 149]

attacking the onlookers. One African Mask had a staff, the touch of which was believed to cause leprosy. In some cultures dead people are reincarnated as Masks— the back of the skull is sliced off, a stick rammed in from ear to ear, and someone dances, gripping the stick with his teeth. It's difficult to imagine the intensity of that experience.

Masks are surrounded by rituals that reinforce their power. A Tibetan Mask was taken out of its shrine once a year and set up overnight in a locked chapel. Two novice monks sat all night chanting prayers to prevent the spirit of the Mask from breaking loose. For miles around the villagers barred their doors at sunset and no one ventured out. Next day the Mask was lowered over the head of the dancer who was to incarnate the spirit at the centre of a great ceremony. What must it feel like to be that dancer, when the terrifying face becomes his own?

We don't know much about Masks in this culture, partly because church sees the Mask as pagan, and tries to suppress it wherever it has the power (the Vatican has a museum full of Masks confiscated from the 'natives'), but also because this culture is usually hostile to trance states. We distrust spontaneity, and try to replace it by reason: The Mask was driven out of theatre in the same way that improvisation as driven out of music. Shakers have stopped shaking. Quakers don't quake any more. Hypnotised people used to stagger about, and trem ble. Victorian mediums used to rampage about the room. Education itself might be seen as primarily an anti-trance activity.

The church struggled against the Mask for centuries, but what can't be done by force is eventually done by the all-pervading influence of Western education. The US Army burned the voodoo temples in Haiti and the priests were sentenced to hard labour with little effect, but voodoo is now being suppressed in a more subtle way. The ceremonies are faked for tourists. The genuine ceremonies now last for a much shorter time.

I see the Mask as something that is continually flaring up in this culture, only to be almost immediately snuffed out. No sooner have I established a tradition of Mask work somewhere than the students start getting taught the 'correct' movements, just as they learn a phony 'Commedia dell' Arte' technique. The manipulated Mask is hardly worth having, and is easy to drive out of the theatre. The Mask begins as a sacred object, and then becomes secular and is used in festivals and in the theatre. Finally, it is remembered only in the feeble imitations of Masks sold in the tourist shops. The Mask dies when it is entirely subjected to the will of the performer.