Reflections Task 35 and Task 36 – Composition

Dear Marie,

many thanks for task 35.

I engaged with the task quite a lot during the week through the way it conditioned my intentionality (this is a fancy way to say that I basically started noticing a lot more the rhythms around me). However, I only got round to actually doing it yesterday. It was then that I discovered that the task required quit a bit of skill, which I evidently do not have (I did suspect this earlier in the week but I was hoping that I will find a short cut. I did not).  The video below shows a very poor attempt to at least keep two rhythms at the same time: with my feet a rhythm that is mercifully recited for me, and with my arms another one (it doesn’t matter which, as long as it is different!). Having these two actions in a syncopated relation was beyond the tricks I can master in a week, or indeed this lifetime. 

Beyond my apparent failure, your task made me think about both syncopation and rhythms. First of all I thought about the various rhythms that go on in the body: circadian rhythm, menstrual cycle, the heart pumping the blood round the body, the secretion of insulin and other hormones etc.  So, the body is made of rhythms and is of course situated within rhythms; day and night, the seasons, the cycle of the washing machine, the football world cup every four years and on and on. However, syncopation is slightly different, because, from the little I figured out yesterday, in syncopation the two rhythms are in relation to one another, the syncopated rhythm fills the spaces between the full on. It complements and complicates the rhythmic structure. I tried to listen or feel instances of syncopation arising spontaneously but I did not manage to trace anything.  The following task is partly an attempt to continue with this search but in terms of visual rhythms, rather than auditory ones.

Task 36 – Composition

I saw an image by Joan Jonas dating from the 1970s. A performer is standing in Vrksasana (Tree Pose) holding a piece of paper that has a painted triangle on it. The performer is part of a wider environment, and probably the still is an image from a recorded performance.

This, and my experience of Task 35, form the basis for Task 36.

Develop structural forms/sculptures with your body in one of the yoga postures positioned in relation to an aspect of a background, foreground, texture of your environment and/or in relation to something you hold or wear, for example an object, a painting, a drawing, a costume etc. Think of a. your body-in-yoga, b. the surrounding environment around and behind the body, and c. the object, if you decide to use one, as one composition. Do this with as many postures, objects, places as you wish. Take a picture of the compositions and bring them to the blog.

CfP – The S Word: Stanislavski in Context

 Annual Symposium organised by

The Stanislavski Centre and The Department of Theatre Studies (University of Malta)

in collaboration with The University of California Riverside.

5th, 6th, 7thApril 2019

Venue:                     The Valletta Campus of the University of Malta, Valletta, Malta

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Laurence Senelick (Tufts University)

Prof. Vicki Ann Cremona (University of Malta)

Co-conveners:

Prof. Paul Fryer (The Stanislavski Centre)

Dr Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)

Creative Adviser:        Prof. Bella Merlin (University of California Riverside)

 

Following on from the past three successful editions of the Symposium, we are very pleased to announce the Call for Papers/Presentations for the fourth major event of The S Word project.

In choosing ‘Stanislavski in Context’ as its title, the 2019 edition of The S Word Symposium shows a dual ambition. It invites proposals that reflect on Stanislavski’s work within the social, cultural, and political milieus in which it developed without however forgetting the ways in which this work was transmitted, adapted, and appropriated within recent and current theatre contexts. The Symposium’s reach, therefore, is both historical as well as contemporary, and participants are encouraged to think of Stanislavski both as an instigator of modern theatre as well as a paradigm for performance practices within twenty-first-century training and performance scenarios.

We invite proposals for contributions in the following formats:

  • an individual conventional paper (20 minutes);
  • practical/workshop sessions (40 minutes);
  • panel presentations (a minimum of three participants) (60 minutes);
  • and, for the first time this year, practice-as-research sessions/practical presentations (20 minutes).

In the first instance please send a short written proposal (no more than 300 words) to Prof. Paul Fryer ([email protected]) and Dr Stefan Aquilina ([email protected]), to arrive no later than 30thNovember 2018. Please include a short bionote.

Booking for this event will open on 1st September 2018.

This event is generously supported by the School of Performing Arts of the University of Malta, and presented in association with Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance (UK).

Reflections Task 34 and Task 35 – Syncopation

Dear Maria,

Thanks for Task 34. Find my reflections below and you next Task 35 – Syncopation

Revisiting task 32

A few weeks back I received task 32 in which you asked me to decide ‘in the moment’ to close my eyes, focus on the breath and inhabit it. When I received task 34, I understood that in my reflections of the first task, I had subconsciously sidestepped your original intention. Here is why: There was a temporality issue in the task I could not solve. From the moment of reading the instruction I would await the task to happen but, in that anticipation, hinder the possibility of surprising myself in the action. It felt significant to the task (in my reading of it) to not plan the moment and for the week of testing task 32 I had daily flashes of thinking ‘now I will do the task’ but feeling untrue to it because I had planned it. It did give rise to a real-time exploration in timing and breath which was very fruitful. It left me with questions such as:

When am I being present in my breath and can this be planned?

When does the breath begin and end?

What happens to my sense of timing when I realise I am now in the moment of carrying out the task?

How does the timing of a task interfere/interact with my own timing and daily rhythm?

Reflection on Task 34 – the breath and the gaze

So I welcomed the prod that asked me to reconsider this task as it prompted me to reflect on it again. At the same time, you gave me a second even more unachievable task, which was to photograph what I see when I open my eyes. Unachievable because I was only interested in the immediate gaze I would have after completing my breaths, I did not wish to postpone taking the photograph.These are (some of) the photos i took:

It became awkward at times as i remembered  the task half way through practicing yoga

Sometimes obvious when enjoying a moment at the beach

And dangerous when it popped into my head while cycling

and driving…

Task 35 – Syncopation

It strikes me now that my task 33 ‘what if..’-task was a response to my own inner struggle to grasp your instruction for task 32. Yes, it was incredulous and unwieldy to intellectual meaning. Like something out of synch that doesn’t beat to the same rhythm.

For this reason – and further on from the question that arose from reconsidering Task 32 – I want to think of timing out of synch. 

Consider this image showing a beat-level syncopation

Decide on two (or more) actions that you do throughout the day that has different sense of rhythm. They could be breathing or running down the stairs, playing with a child, reading an article etc. Now try and do the actions at the same time or overlapping and explore how it changes your sense of rhythm of the synchronal action. Bring back any traces of reflections from this.

Enjoy

Challenging the Challenges Facing C21st Theatre Training: Lighting, training and collaboration

The following post is part of a series of responses that are framed by Jonathan Pitches here.

Previous posts can be found here.

In their article “Toward Revising Undergraduate Theatre Education”, Peter Zazzali and Jeanne Klein (2015) maintain that theatre pedagogy and curricula have remained largely unchanged for over forty years. They write, “[T]heatre professors seem to merely recycle what they were taught, albeit with new infusions of technology” (p.261). It is worth noting, first of all, that Zazzali and Klein are both based in the United States, and therefore presumably this is a criticism of the prevailing American pedagogy. Indeed, this is an observation that seems to be echoed by others in the US, particularly those working in the teaching of theatre design. Raynette Halverson Smith notes that “the scenic design process has become frozen, steeped in tradition […] at its core it has remained unchanged since the practices outlined early in the [twentieth] century by Craig, Appia, and Robert Edmond Jones” (quoted in Isackes, 2008, p.41). In the same article, Richard M. Isackes confesses that his teaching of theatre design “was largely based on an unquestioned replication of the training I had received as a student [and] there was a major disconnect between my practice as a designer and the theoretical methodology I was advancing in the classroom” (p.41), a realisation that led him to examine his own pedagogical practices.

Much of contemporary lighting design training can trace its roots to the techniques of Stanley McCandless, whose A Method for Lighting the Stage (1932) was the first formalised method for lighting a production. While knowledge of McCandless’ method can be useful for lighting design students, it is limiting in both scope and potential for creativity; it belongs, as Linda Essig (2007) maintains, in “the lighting history curriculum” (p.66, emphasis in original). Paradoxically, however, McCandless’ techniques form the basis of contemporary pedagogy. In the UK, Richard Pilbrow’s (1997/2000) Stage Lighting Design is often the “go-to” handbook for novice, amateur or student lighting designers. Pilbrow’s method draws heavily on McCandless; while acknowledging that McCandless’ “formula should be loosely and freely interpreted” (p.13), he also states that lighting designers “would be foolish to forget the basic precepts of the [McCandless] Method” (ibid.). In the US, the McCandless method has given rise to another in recent years, the so-called “jewel” method of lighting, which builds on McCandless’ but takes into account not only the availability of new technology but also the expectations to use it.

As Zazzali and Klein argue, “We are selling our students short if we strictly focus on their job placement and prospective careers in the conventional sectors of the entertainment industry” (p.262). They note that employment statistics and the ability of an undergraduate programme to prepare students for a “conventional” and “stable” job in the arts upon graduation are often the measure of “success”, presumably as these are easily quantifiable measures. In the United States, “approximately 900 undergraduate programs mimic an estimated 1,773 regional theatres for which they are presumably training students for employment” (p.262). However, according to German director and theatre educator Heiner Goebbels (2013), many fail to recognise that theatre education is “the end of a very long chain” that is “not conceived to renew or revise the aesthetic, much less consider questioning the structures and institutions, for which they are educating young aspirants” (p.43). Goebbels maintains that educators should be facilitators whose aim is to encourage students to develop their own aesthetic. They should further be encouraged to challenge the existing structures and hierarchies that exist within established institutions, and he cites in particular the case of teaching theatre design. There is therefore a tension in education between the need to prepare students for employment and the need for students to explore and develop their own aesthetic. In the UK, there is a further tension between those courses that provide very specialised training (for example, in lighting design or lighting programming, usually at drama schools rather than universities) and the types of companies in which recent graduates will most likely find themselves working. A recent review of the UK’s offstage workforce noted this discrepancy in training versus the reality of employment. One focus group participant stated: “As a generalisation, there’s an awful lot of students that I’ve spoken to recently that are really focused on lighting design. And I think ‘good luck with that one’, because there are thousands of lighting designers out there. It might be great to do that, but you need to get the basics, because on your first day in the theatre you’re not going to be doing the lighting design. Not enough are getting the basics” (Nordicity, 2017). More and more work is happening outside theatre buildings, in environments with flatter hierarchies (or even heterarchies), including tandem directing teams and collectives who devise productions together (as demonstrated by the case studies in Mermikides and Smart (2010)). Duška Radosavljević (2013) refers to “deprofessionalisation” – an unwillingness of company members to adhere to “traditional” roles, instead taking an interdisciplinary approach to collaboration in which they might fulfil multiple roles, at least initially, though specialisms may start to emerge at later stages in the process (see Mermikides’ chapter on Shunt in Mermikides and Smart (2010), for example).

Therefore, it seems that the aim of theatre education should be to prepare students to be excellent collaborators and to allow them the time and space to, as Goebbels (2013) advocates, “renew or revise [their] aesthetic” (p.43). More attention could be paid to these areas, particularly by UK drama schools, which are producing graduates with very specialised skills, rather than an overall knowledge of contemporary theatre-making practices; with this comes empathy for their fellow collaborators and an understanding of the process as a whole – all of which make for more competent collaborators.

Kelli Zezulka, Postgraduate researcher, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds

References
Essig, Linda. 2007. “Stanley McCandless, lighting history, and me”. Theatre Topics, 17(1), pp.61–67.

Goebbels, Heiner. 2013. “Research or craft?: Nine theses on educating future performing artists”. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 35(1), pp.43–48.

Isackes, Richard M. 2008. “On the pedagogy of theatre stage design: A critique of practice”, Theatre Topics, 18(1), pp. 41–53.

Mermikides, Alex and Jackie Smart. 2010. Devising in Process. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nordicity. 2017. Workforce Review of the UK Offstage Theatre and Performing Arts Sector. Available at http://www.nordicity.com/media/2017622ddqyvkkek.pdf [accessed 30 December 2017].

Pilbrow, Richard. 1997/2000. Stage Lighting Design: The Art, the Craft, the Life. London: Nick Hern Books.

Radosavljević, Duška. 2013. Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zazzali, Peter and Jeanne Klein. 2015. “Toward revising undergraduate theatre education”. Theatre Topics, 25(3), pp. 261–276.

Reflections on Task 33 and Task 34 – The Breath and the Gaze

Dear Marie,

many thanks for your reflections on Task 32. As it happens often with this back and forth between Task and Reflection, your response to Task 32 took me entirely by surprise. Reading the post again, it strikes me that you have put together a score and I do wonder how this score could with different kinds of material, say torn pages from a diary, and how it might shape into a piece. Maybe something to return to?

And thank your for Task 33. Below you can find my reflections and below that the instructions for Task 34.

Reflections on Task 33

The task still doesn’t make sense and I suppose this is part of its charm: an incredulous ‘What If?’ barely making it through the barriers of meaning. I wonder if it is precisely because the task is unwieldy to intellectual understanding that it may open up different ways of making sense.

I have no idea how to go about the task. Perhaps, the easiest way is to let it be. I read it once, I get confused, there is so much information coming at me that day, I turn the Blog off and move onto something else.

Every now and then, the task reminds itself to me. What if…the words jumble, what are the instructions again? What if every cell could feel every breath? Before I even manage to put the words in order, or check on the Blog to read the task again, something has happened to the breath. One breath, this one breath  becomes fuller and seeps deeper. So breath in-breath out, a week passes again, punctuated by Task 33, which –  it seems more accurate to say – engaged with me, rather than the other way around. This leads me to think about the duration of the tasks. Is Task 33 finished then? Have a I done it? Is it done with me? Is this reflection a marker of its/my accomplishment? Or, once planted, the Task takes a life of its own, demanding to be done, meddling with the horizon of those things that rise to consciousness? Maybe something to return to?

Task 34: The Breath and the Gaze

I am aware this sounds like the name of a pub and maybe a pub should be named thus. This task takes you back to Task 33, which this time I would like you to do following the instructions of the task and adding one more step.

Without planning in advance, you decide on the spot and say ‘Now I am going to take a breath’. Wherever you are, close your eyes and take one breath. Try to inhabit and be present to this one breath as best you can. The first day you take one breath, the second day two and so on until on day 5 you take 5 consecutive breaths.

I invite you to pay attention to the impact this task may have on your gaze. How do you look at the world before and how  do you look at the world after the task? What happened to the eyes and the musculature around and behind them? What is the connection between breath and gaze?

As an additional and final step to this task, I would like you to  photograph the first thing you see once you open your eyes after the breath. You don’t need to take the photograph straight away. You can go back and search for this exact thing you looked at and take a photo of it later. Bring the photos and any other aspect of your response back to the Blog.

 

 

Reflections Task 32 and Task 33 – ‘What if…?’

Dear Maria,

Many thanks for your task 32. Find my reflections on the task below and your new task 33 – ‘What if…?’

Reflections – Breath

Shortly after reading your instructions for task 32 – Breath, I opened an email from Independent Dance in London that advertised a workshop aimed at dance artist named The Breathing Archive. It is described thus:

I was intrigued by the sound of this work and wanted to attend the workshop, but alas, it being in London, that was not an option. What I could do was adopt some of these ideas and fuse it with my Breath task. I don’t know of Anouk Llaurens’ work, so the adaptation invented below is purely from what I imagine components of the workshop might be like.

What I did

Three ideas came to mind from your task and the workshop description:

  • Breathe once, twice etc and inhabit and be present with the breath
  • ‘Crumple and un-crumple printed A4 pages’
  • Texts, scores and pictures that represent a physical manifestation of ephemeral work

I print out 6 pages (I was going to print out our entire 71 pages of Two Trainers Prepare correspondence but didn’t feel it was justified to exploit nature for my reading/crumbling experiment) and lay them out. How can I breathe and be present with the work and relate directly to the documents?

I begin by crumbling the first page while I read out the text. I notice the connection between reading out loud and breathing. Was I ever aware of how/when I breathe when I read? On page two I make a little ‘tick’ on the text for every breath I take while reading. Page three becomes a mark-making experiment where I keep the pen on the paper, I follow my reading with the pen and make a little peak for every breath. Page four takes into account your instruction to breathe more than once. So instead of taking one I take three breaths when stopping to inhale while reading the text out loud. It becomes a question of ‘words-appearing-between-breaths’ rather than the breath merely being a necessity for speaking. Page five is an image from my yoga lore from task 30 and portrays Surya Namaskara A. I practice Surya Namaskara A while crumbling and un-crumbling the page for every breath. Finally, I combine them all for the last page; I read out, I breathe three times when I run out of breath and crumble and un-crumble the page and lift up into Urdhva Dhanurasana. The (un)crumbling reveals a pattern of how the paper folds when the action is repeated. The breathing that connects with this action has a similar quality and I connect with the image Llaurens gives above about the cells breathing and moving. The folds create a landscape across the page and the pages laid out together become an illustration of the stages of the breath.

Task 33 – ‘What if…?’

Thinking about cells and the body as cellular draws my attention to Deborah Hay. Her work has been very influential in my thinking and approach to my own choreographic work. She practices exploring questions in her dance beginning with ‘what if…’, allowing the response to be open and playful. I will borrow a question of Hay’s and give it a twist to satisfy my idea for your next task:

Explore your yoga practice with this question in mind:

‘What if every cell in my body at once has the potential to perceive every breath passing?’

Enjoy

Challenging the Challenges Facing C21st Theatre Training: Technology in Learning and Creative Contexts

The following post is part of a series of responses that are framed by Jonathan Pitches here.

Previous posts can be found here.

Technology in Learning and Creative Contexts

Let me start by saluting Zazzali and Klein’s chief aim to ‘offer initiatives for revising an undergraduate theatre curriculum’. Indeed, such an aim resonates with ongoing discussions taking place in the UK, both across the Higher Education sector, for example at the TaPRA Performer Training WG, as well as specific institutions, such as the PTPP Research Group at the University of Leeds, which frames the set of the responses this post is part of. I also support the authors’ decision to position theatre training in relation to the pressures academic institutions are facing on both sides of the Atlantic. However, despite this solid set of aims, I find the positions argued by Zazzali and Klein problematic on a number of fronts. The focus of this blog post is on the way technology is presented in their article. Specifically my aim is to foreground the contradictions apparent in Zazzali and Klein’s view of technology.

First some caveats: I am aware that the use of digital technology and especially investment in digital technological infrastructure in schools and universities has often been related to a neoliberal agenda and a concomitant drive not only to privatise and instrumentalise education but also prevent students from developing their identity as citizens (McCafferty 2010; Monahan 2004). My aim here is neither to apologise for the use of various technologies in academic institutions nor suggest that technology is in and of itself a bonus in learning. Rather, my intention is to problematise the implicit assumptions that seem to underpin Zazzali and Klein’s view.

A general overview of the article demonstrates that Zazzali and Klein oscillate between a rather uncritical repetition of negative, and often alarmist in tone, accounts of technology on the one hand, and a kind of reserved acceptance of the possibilities offered by digital technologies, especially social media, on the other. Adjunct to these predispositions, is a fairly obvious dislike for Blackboard, an online platform for distant and blended forms of learning often used in undergraduate degree programmes.

Let me start with the negative position, which also appears first in their article. Drawing on Giedd (2012), Junko and Cotten (2012), Zazzali and Klein suggest a cause and effect relationship between the use of social media and a decline in academic performance. They make the explicit claim that ‘multitasking with social media […] further harms the ongoing physical maturation of their [students’] brains’ (2015: 262). Later on in the article they repeat Mark Bauerlein’s assertion that current college students are ‘“the dumbest generation” while depicting troubling declines in their skills relative to what employers require’ (2015: 263). Zazzali and Klein are concerned, in other words, not only with the long term cognitive effects that use of digital technologies may have, but also with the way these effects may jeopardise even further the already restricted employment opportunities of theatre graduates.

In accordance with the negative impacts of technology on the brains and lives of young people, Zazzali and Klein are also concerned with the role that live theatre can play in a technologized world. They ask: ‘What can our field offer a society in which technology outpaces the more natural rhythms of daily living? (2015: 263). A similar tension is evident in the dichotomy they draw between ‘“off stage” activities’, like the ones taking place on the Blackboard platform, and ‘“onstage” classroom time cultivating students’ imaginations and creative skills by researching, developing, and producing live performances […]’ (2015: 264). It seems to me that Zazzali and Klein situate theatre, both as product and training process, as an antidote to the ills of technologized life. They are not alone in supporting this view. Theatre director Mike Alfreds goes as far as equating the use of technology with junk food and accordingly positions the genre of theatre storytelling as a form of detox (2013: 33-34). A similar position is repeated by Kathryn Hunter, who in an interview on her collaboration with Peter Brook in The Valley of Astonishment argues that ‘there will be a time when people will wake up because they will have grown bored with the isolation that technology has brought on to our lives. […] In the future, theatre will be even more popular, because people need it’ (Hunter in Loverdou 2014: 3, my translation). We might do well to remember, that despite their negative tone, these articulations are expressed against a background of technological infrastructure in theatre buildings, including University theatre spaces that is taken for granted, for example, central heating, house and theatrical lights, sound systems and illuminated exit signs. I will return to this point, but let’s first have a look at the positive effects Zazzalli and Klein identify in technological use.

This is expressed in relation to social media, especially when the latter are used to foster interdisciplinary learning communities. Drawing on several examples of theatre projects across various institutions, Zazzali and Klein argue that ‘a selective and strategic use of the internet and social media, for instance, could help reframe theatre courses by empowering students to connect to one another and have greater ownership of their work’ (2015: 264). Social media and blogs then can help both students and educators to transcend ‘disciplinary and geographical divides toward creating learning communities that are as diverse as they are distant’ (2015: 266). As long as, of course, that the use of such media is limited to the educational and creative purposes it is supposed to serve.

Let us pause for a moment to take stock of the evaluations of technology presented in the article: on one hand, technology renders students ‘dumb’ and even less prepared for employment; on the other hand technology – once harnessed – can serve ‘desired learning outcomes’. In addition to these two positions, Zazzali and Klein purport that ‘students are wasting valuable time using inflexible learning-management systems (e.g. Blackboard) […]’ (2015: 262). I have no wish to argue for the existing or imaginary benefits of virtual learning environments. (The interested reader can look at Selwyn’s 2016 article who pays attention to the language in which these systems are often described and calls for an evaluation of the actual benefits they are having.)

What I wish to point out is that Zazzali and Klein’s thesis is underpinned by the implicit assumption that technological devices are ‘neutral’ tools, the use and impact of which can be dictated by (intelligent) human agents. Put simply, the good or bad use of technological artefacts is a matter of human decision, if not will. According to such conception then, when social media use becomes a source of distraction and impedes academic performance, this is seen as a failing of the students to be disciplined enough and impose their will on the technological device. It is in this way, also, that Zazzali and Klein resolve the apparent contradiction of their argument. By suggesting that social media use within a theatre project needs to be ‘selective and strategic’, Zazzali and Klein can both accept the position that social media render students ‘dumb’ and advocate for the very same technology to be used in the classroom.

We could assume that the way this pronouncement would translate in an actual project would be that a student would be expected to ignore notifications coming on the social media feed that are irrelevant to the project and only engage with the relevant ones. Similarly to the binary between a destructive/distracting technology and a beneficial theatre expressed by Mike Alfreds and Kathryn Hunter respectively, such a position fails to acknowledge that western societies are technologised to such an extent that a great number of devices and functions have been rendered invisible. And even if we take into account those technological devices that are not yet transparent, there is no consensus which of these devices or cultures of use should be permissible and which should be banned and under which circumstances. If for example, our imaginary student, let’s call her Sarah, receives a notification that has not been posted by the project team, but is relevant to the project, should she ignore it or engage with it? Who or what is going to guide Sarah in making this decision? Should this guidance be part of the kind of broad theatre education, Zazzali and Klein are arguing for?

Alongside this lack of normative criteria and established protocols, a more immediate concern is that Zazzali and Klein’s ‘strategic selectivity’ position fails to account for the intentionality of the technological artefact. This is not a shade of technological determinism. It rather aims to elucidate two important aspects of technology. One is that technological devices may not determine, but ‘inflect’ the way we use them (Ihde 1990: 102-3). The other is that our relations to technology are not only informed by the actual functions a device might offer, but also by the potential actions we know are available to us (Kiran 2012). Let’s return for a moment to Sarah. Even if Sarah is determined to use social media ‘selectively and strategically’ and even if she is really clear about what a selective and strategic use amounts to, an educational project would need to take into account that a) social media feeds are optimally designed to attract the user’s attention; and b) that the user has already been conditioned to expect frequent notifications. I do not mean to let Sarah off the hook. But I do wish to argue that ‘selective and strategic use’ is not a solid pedagogical recommendation either.

Finally, another assumption that underpins Zazzali and Klein’s approach to technology relates to the issue of attention. The studies that Zazzali and Klein cite early on in their article are often premised on an understanding of attention that is based on an economic model. Drawing on such studies, Tiziana Terranova notes that ‘statements about the attention economy and the crisis of attention point to the reconfiguration of the attentive capacities of the subject in ways which constitute attention at the same time as scarce, and hence a valuable resource, while also producing an impoverished subject’ (2012: 7, emphasis original).

Echoing Terranova’s challenge to such a model, Katherine Hayles (2007; 2010; 2012) argues that theses on the effect of digital technologies on cognitive abilities are often steeped in specific assumptions about the nature of attention and specifically the kind of attention that is required/expected by Humanities. Hayles (2012) challenges these assumptions – including Bauerlein’s work, whom Zazzali and Klein cite – by pointing out that modes of ‘hyper’ and ‘machine’ reading cultivated by the use of the internet may enable the development of a different set of skills, which might also be useful in Humanities. In other words, both Terranova and Hayles emphasise that a valorisation of deep attention and a pathologisation of hyper or scarce attention are no longer adequate explanatory frameworks. More to the point, Hayles further suggests that in Humanities we often grapple with texts that would benefit from a ‘hyper’ mode of reading, now associated with the internet, rather than the deep one associated with the novel.

I propose that this is a fruitful question to ask in relation to theatre education. Are there aspects of theatre practice that would benefit from the fragmented mode of attention apparently demonstrated by the Millennials? Can theatre education become a ground where students and tutors can rehearse alternative relations to technology? Can theatre education enable students to think/use existing domestic technologies in new (unexpected) ways? This is not intended to cultivate some kind of ‘edge’ that certain graduates may have over others. It is rather proposed as a contributing factor towards developing performing arts pedagogies that have at their centre notions of citizenship, activism and public engagement. And this brings us full circle to the key aim of Zazzali and Klein’s rationale for a revised undergraduate curriculum, which, as I said already, I heartily celebrate.

– Dr Maria Kapsali, Lecturer in Physical Performance, University of Leeds, School of Performance and Cultural Industries

References:

Alfreds, M. 2013. Then What Happens?: Storytelling and Adapting for the Theatre, London: Nick Hern Books.
Giedd, J. 2012. ‘The Digital Revolution and Adolescent Brain Evolution’, Journal of Adolescent Health, 51 (2), pp. 101-5.
Hayles, K. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
________ 2010. How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine. ADE bulletin, 150, pp 62-79.
________ 2007. ‘Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes’, Profession, 13, pp 187- 199.
Junko, R and Cotton, S. 2012. ‘No A 4 U: The relationship between multitasking and Academic performance’, Computers sand Education, 59 (2), pp. 505-14.
Ihde, D. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Kiran, A. 2012. ‘Technological Presence: Actuality and Potentiality in Subject Constitution’, Human Studies, 35, pp. 77-93.
Loverdou, M., 2014. Interview with Kathryn Hunter, To Vima, 24th April 2014 (translation mine).
McCafferty, P. 2010. ‘Forging a “neoliberal pedagogy”: the “enterprising education” agenda in schools, Critical Social Policy, 30 (4), pp. 541-563.
Monahan, T. 2004. ‘Just Another Tool? IT pedagogy and the commodification of education, The Urban Review, 36 (4), pp 271-292.
Selwyn, N. 2016. ‘Minding our Language: Why education and technology is full of bullshit…and what might be done about it’, Learning, Media and Technology, 41(3), pp 437-443.
Terranova, T. 2012. ‘Attention Economy and the Brain’, Culture Machine, 13, pp 1-19.