When I moved to Manhattan, Kansas in 1999 to begin teaching playwriting and drama therapy at Kansas State University, I met Ariadna Martin, the Russian wife of the Executive Director of McCain Auditorium, at a university reception. She told me she had been an actress in her native land before moving to the U.S. I asked if she had ever heard of Nicholai Evreinov or Vladimir Iljine, two Russian directors in the early years of the 20th century who Phil Jones had identified in his book Drama as Therapy, Theatre as Living as early Russian drama therapists. She knew of Evreinov and was impressed that I had heard of him. After I told her more about drama therapy, she began to tell me about Nikolai Govorov, a director with whom she had worked. As she described his work with “common people,” I realized that he was also doing drama therapy. On June 2, 2004 Ariadna agreed to let me interview her so that I could preserve her impressions of Govorov’s work. What follows is an edited version of the interview.
A few notes before we begin:
The Russian word rasskaz means both the genre short story and also the process of storytelling.
When they were performing, Govorov always encouraged his performers to call the character they performed “I.”
Teatr rasskaza (The Theatre of Storytelling) and Nicholas Sergeyevich Govorov:
An Interview with Ariadna Martin
ARIADNA: I met and worked with Nikolai Sergeyevich Govorov actually twice in my life. The first time was sometime in 1956. At that time I was with him and his group about half a year. Later I had to leave the city and when I came back, he was somewhere else. It was 18 years before I met him again in the fall of 1974, just unexpectedly, in the hall of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, where he was supposed to give a lecture that evening. I asked him what he was doing then, and he invited me to that lecture and said that he had a new group and was involved in an innovative workshop and that I was welcome to come. So, actually, there were two periods of his work. Different, but, of course, he was always trying to find something new to enrich the technique of his work.
When I met Nikolai Sergeyevich for the first time, he came to the University, where I was a student. Already he was working with a group of amateur performers from different walks of life, you know, people from factories, technical institutes, and so on. He came to the University to enlarge his group, specifically to recruit students of the humanities. He tried to persuade us that he was doing something very interesting. The name of his group was Teatr rasskaza (The Theatre of Storytelling).
Of course, there are many, many short stories in literature and they mostly are written in the form of monologue. An artist or storyteller can stand on the stage in front of an audience pretending that he is the main character of that story, talking about himself. This was the practice of most of the theatres. Often such an actor chooses someone in the audience as his main listener and addresses him. Sometimes this makes the chosen person feel uncomfortable, sometimes quite happy.
Nikolai Sergeyevich’s idea was that the absence of a real social relationship, contact with the person listening to the performer, the isolation of the performer – who only pretends to have that relationship – led many artists to mental illness. You need to tell your story to somebody and you need his or her reaction, which means you need a reason for telling your story; it should be motivated somehow. That’s how you are all involved while you’re telling it: how your story makes sense to you and your listeners. So the listeners were allowed to respond, to say something to the actor, to express themselves.
SALLY: How did Nikolai Sergeyevich set up the performance? If he had the storytellers on stage and the listeners all in the audience, then he would have had the old convention of the actor telling the story to nobody.
ARIADNA: He put the storyteller in a situation similar to regular theatre, where there could be at least one listener, or more. There was a table or sofa, or whatever, suited to the situation. Some stories included the situation where the storytelling begins. But many did not.
My role in the group at first was, not as much to perform, as to find stories in the literature which had the needed situation. We called it predlagayemye obstoyatel’stva or suggested circumstances. If there was no specific situation in which the story was told, I had to invent a situation for the telling so the storytelling was motivated. I would also make some lines for the listeners to respond to. Nikolai Sergeyevich encouraged improvisation – when the listeners could say something that I didn’t write for them in order to react as in real life – so there was a life-like interaction between the storyteller and his listener(s).
One story I myself presented later on was Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady’s Story” or “Madame N.N.” I put the storyteller, played by me, and my niece, a character I invented, on stage and I told my niece my story. I was a spinster. My niece came from the country to the city to visit me. We were sitting near the fireplace and I looked at her and said, “You look somewhat different. What’s this?” She was sad and told me that she had fallen in love with someone, but her parents were against it because he was not of her class. As we continued talking she asked me, “But where is your husband? Did he die? Or is he somewhere else?” And then I told her my story. To finish the story I invented a maid. After I rang my bell, she came in and said, “The samovar is ready. Shall I serve tea now?”
SALLY: So you became one of the characters in the story, telling the story?
ARIADNA: Yes. There were different “suggested situations.” In some books the storyteller was the author or narrator; sometimes he was one of the characters. One example, the storyteller is on the train and goes into his compartment. He begins a conversation with his neighbor and then his story comes out. So it looks realistic, psychologically justified.
I don’t know when and where he started Teatr rasskaza, but at the time I met him in 1956 he belonged to a so-called Palace of Culture – in Leningrad there were many Houses of Culture and four Palaces. At one of the Palaces we’d get together twice a week in the evenings. He knew how to keep strict discipline. You were not supposed to miss a session without a serious reason. You could not be a smoker. He got the room there for rehearsals and conversations. He did not call them lectures, but he told and taught us a lot about the history and the theory of the theatre, including curious and witty anecdotes about theatre life. In the Palace there were two auditoriums, one with a big stage for professional artists and ensembles, and a small one for various amateur groups working in the Palace, including regular theatre groups, singers, dancers, even a circus. Our group was performing on that small stage before an audience. People really loved to work with Nikolai Sergeyevich. Everyone was very enthusiastic; he simply infected everybody. There were mostly young people, but some older people, too. And the audience loved this theatre.
He, himself, was really brilliant and enthusiastic. You know, sometimes it seemed that if you looked at him, he had something demonic in him. He was lean, relatively tall, with beautiful long fingers and black, just burning eyes…. So enthusiastic!
When I met him later, he continued working on the idea that theatre should heal people. He actually called his method “the theatrical way of developing a person’s social behavior.” He helped people to be social, not shy, lonely, depressed, apathetic.
SALLY: So he used theatre to make connections between people.
ARIADNA: Yes, to make connections, to allow them to articulate their thoughts and feelings. Often people did not talk to others because of shyness or because they thought they didn’t know anything interesting, that nothing interesting happened to them. They thought they were not able to improvise anything, so he encouraged them to tell a story written by a writer. He said they first should read the story and then try to tell the other people in the group.
He told us some stories of his success, his achievements, during the past years: how one very shy working man finally became the center of attention of his colleagues because he became able to learn by heart a lot of stories by Leo Tolstoy: large excerpts from books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The man would later tell the stories to his colleagues while working and they would happily listen to them. Nikolai Sergeyevich encouraged people, but he never expected them to learn a story by heart from the very beginning. He’d say, “Read it. Try to tell as much as you remember. Don’t be shy. Don’t be ashamed that you tell it wrong – just go on, the next time it will be better.” And he encouraged you to do this time after time, as long as you needed. And finally, you learned the piece by heart.
SALLY: So he would say, “Don’t memorize it.”
ARIADNA: Right. Don’t memorize it. After a while the story would be somehow memorized indeed – and if you forgot part of it – you would continue it in your own words. Of course, he’d say, after a while you can re-read the story again. During the sessions where people would be very, very timid he would say, “Just read a paragraph now. Then put the text aside and try to retell it.”
In the 70’s he had a sort of forum room, a round room with raised seating, like an amphitheatre, at the Bekhterev Mental Institution (referred to as Békhterevka colloquially). It wasn’t very big and many of his group members were actually patients at this mental institution. He had a group of about 30 people. Outsiders like me were also welcomed. Attendance varied from 23 to 30. And Nikolai Sergeyevich’s work with them turned out to be a healing work. The floor of the amphitheatre served as our stage and everybody was supposed to participate in the work – there were no outsiders who just looked on. He had these sessions on Sundays from 10 till 10. Of course, we got some breaks and people usually went for short walks or to eat in the café or to eat what they brought with them, but we worked there the whole day.
He would start his sessions with asking everybody present to write on a slip of paper just a few lines of dialogue, three or four lines without any given background, involving at least two people. Sometime just two lines were enough. He’d say, “If you cannot come up with anything, just maybe you can remember something.” One participant came with lines from a poem by M. Lermontov where a boy was asking his grandfather about the war with Napoleon – just one question and one answer. A smart way out, wasn’t it? Each person would write as many copies of the dialogue as there were participants in it and give these copies to people of his choice. Those people would read the dialogue to themselves, then aloud for the rest of us. In other words, the actors would perform it just the way they felt, not knowing anything about the background. Of course, when someone reads something, the listeners get some psychological impulse or some indication of how to react.
SALLY: It’s almost impossible not to put emotion into what you read and not to project some kind of relationship into a dialogue.
ARIADNA: Absolutely. Especially, if the first performer gives a certain impulse, the other people catch it and get involved. Nikolai Sergeyevich did this with all the participants. Then the second stage of work began. Nikolai Sergeyevich would ask someone to volunteer to be the leader in making up a story. If no one volunteered, he would choose someone. That person could choose a number of dialogues – five or six probably – from those freshly written. The leader had to start thinking how those dialogues would fit in his story. He could choose anybody to act in his improvised story. He could even make changes: if in the original presentation of a dialogue, a man and a woman read the parts, he could instead cast two women or two men. He would ask the chosen actors to perform all those five or six dialogues first without any giving any background just to see what they came up with.
The third stage of the process began when the leader chose someone to be a listener and started creating a story from the dialogues. He presented a motivation for why he was telling this story to this particular listener. The rest of the class along with Nikolai Sergeyevich became the audience. The leader usually gave some kind of background about the characters in the story: who they were, how they were related, and so on, so the actors performing the dialogues in the story could adjust their attitudes to the leader’s concept instead of how they might have performed them when they read them together for the first time. He would start the story and continue it up to the point when he thought it was time to include the characters with the first dialogue. He le them say their words and if he chose to continue himself from this point, he could participate in one of the dialogues and interact with characters in his story or he could let the characters continue the dialogue, improvising on their own. He would listen to their improvisation as long as he thought it didn’t break his original conception. Then he could interrupt them and continue his story, now actually including something new that came up in the improvised dialogue. What the storyteller says forces the actors to actively interact during the improvisation. This is a creative act, just on the spot: both the characters and the leader can change the conceptions they held in the beginning. The storyteller needs to be especially alert all the time.
Here is a curious story about being a storyteller/leader. A young man (the leader) told a story about his mother. He himself also was a character in the story, a high school teenager.He said to his listener that his mother was divorced. He had formed indeed a basic idea of his story from start to finish. Before he started the story, I read the dialogue given to me, which said that his mother asks him, “Son, do you remember that I told you that I wanted to introduce you to my friend, don’t you? He said, “Yes, I do.” I, as the mother, replied, “Okay, he’s here now. So we can do it right now.” He said, “Okay.” And when the man came in, the son (the storyteller) desperately exclaimed, “Sergei, is it you?! How…?” He looked repeatedly at Sergei and then at me, and almost screamed, “Mama?! You know one another?!” That was in the dialogue. Something, a certain conflict, was already present in the dialogue which he recognized. Some people who worked there for a long time and were quite experienced knew about the “right” beginning which makes the whole story. All the conflict is there.
SALLY: Yes, it is all there. And anything could happen, but it’s a big mystery, the drama unfolds for you.
ARIADNA: I need to go back and explain one thing. Before starting to improvise the drama-story, the participants just read the dialogue first without having the background conceived by the storyteller. But the words and lines already hide something of what we feel somehow. There was an interesting psychological situation with myself in this instance, how in the course of preparation and the future playing I changed what I felt myself as a person, not only as a character. First, before the storytelling started, I felt somewhat awkward. I opened the drawers in the desk on the stage and looked for something, not knowing for what. I found a comb and picked it up, thinking I would use it myself. But his hair looked messy and was standing up, so I mechanically tried to comb it and make it lie down, which irritated him enormously. He was, you know, just furious with me. [Ariadna gestures and makes a facial expression to express the son’s feeling as if to indicate the attitude, “You are being so fussy!”]
SALLY: [speaking as son] “Oh, mother!”
ARIADNA: Yes, something like that. Then when he started the story, he gave some fuller background for himself and me. He said to his listener, “But don’t think that she’s an unhappy woman and you have to sympathize with her. She’s a very strong woman and she herself can sympathize with anybody in a situation similar to hers.” Maybe after noticing my uncomfortable behavior, he decided to add these words about my being strong. I’ll tell you, IT HELPED me, unbelievably!
You know, the night before that Sunday I had a very bad, quite sleepless night and I came to our session very tired and didn’t know what I was going to do. At first I even thought of refusing to participate in this improvisation, but the storyteller said about me, “She’s a strong woman and she can take care not only of herself, but of anybody else around.” It just poured into me in an instant – all the strength, all the self-confidence, and everything. And the next time when we were in the right part of the story, I didn’t behave awkwardly, felt no confusion or embarrassment. I was just very proud of what I was doing and then he said suddenly, “Sergei?! Mama?!” He looked lost and frustrated, but I remained calm and self-assured.
Everybody was listening like that – with full attention, but for some reason we were not able to find a way out. I thought of two or more ideas to solve this situation – to untie the knot of whatever was happening in the scene – but my son would say something else to take away from me the opportunity to straighten things out. In his role, he chose to be a stubborn boy. And it seemed the audience liked it.
But Nikolai Sergeyevich thought it was taking too long and finally said, “Stop.” I said, “No, no, please,” and everybody else also said, “No, no. Please, let them go on.” But Nikolai Sergeyevich said, “No; it will have no end.” Then someone said, “But let her tell what she meant.” I said that I was just going to say that Sergei and my husband knew one another because they were at high school together, but I hadn’t revealed it at the beginning of the scene because of everything else that was happening. It was very, very emotional. Everybody liked it. Nikolai Sergeyevich was so sorry that he interrupted us. He said, “That was a good conclusion.” And the “son” said that he had thought we, Sergei and I, were both betrayers, we were hiding from him that we knew one another, but actually Sergei didn’t know that his young friend was my son.
So that was the way that Nikolai Sergeyevich was working in his workshop. He developed creativity in people and first and foremost self-confidence. Later I realized that most of his very intelligent, intellectual, very smart people who seemed to be the core of his group were actually all from the mental institution; they were his patients! They attended his workshop and they helped him because they liked it and were quite enthusiastic.
SALLY: And were they currently in the institution?
ARIADNA: Most had been released. A few were still there, but nobody talked about that.
SALLY: And those that had been released were willing to come back… how wonderful.
ARIADNA: And some people would come, like me, from somewhere else, and some who knew him from a long time ago. After all, I had known him from 1956.
Once, after we met again, he told me that some years before a TV producer became interested in his work. So his group showed this man three different pieces. One was a story by one of the writers that was not improvisation. I don’t know about the second. After seeing the third piece, the TV producer said, “Oh, this was the best. You probably worked very hard on this one.” And Nikolai Sergeyevich said, “That was all improvisation – right now, on the spot.” Nobody could believe it.
These sessions started, as I said, at 10 o’clock in the morning and we began with writing the dialogues and the centerpiece was this sort of improvised performance with the leader. Then after some rest we were supposed to sit and write what we thought about it – no matter how many pages, the more the better. He always collected our papers for his archive. And then we all discussed it. Nikolai Sergeyevich liked how the people in his group performed; he was not focused on the acting, but on what they tried to do with the story, especially with the conflict in it – how they tried to solve it. He always emphasized to us, “You see what you’re doing. You try to do it morally, humanely, in the best ways.” If there were any hints of the opposite behavior on the part of the participants in the story being performed, then during the discussion, the rest of the people would point it out with dissatisfaction. He used to say that this was a very good way to educate people about how to behave. And he called this theatre – probably in translation it would sound very heavy and awkward – theatrical methods of activization and enhancement of social behavior of a person. Certainly it helped to change, to improve personality.
Besides this didactical part, when we had discussion, we were also supposed to talk about the process of performing itself: how the beginning was done and how the story and the characters developed, like analyzing the play and performance.
SALLY: It seems that because people were able to just allow the emotion of the story to come to them that they must have felt very safe in the group. What did he do to create that feeling of safety and trust?
ARIADNA: Safety – that’s exactly what he cared about. Nikolai Sergeyevich told us that we should never laugh at anybody if they did something wrong. Of course, we could smile and somehow encourage people and just be friendly and supporting all the time. Earlier on I spoke about his recommendation of what to do if the actor didn’t remember the story they were telling. But I didn’t say that part of his Sunday sessions were sometimes devoted to storytelling of the writers’ own personal stories, especially for those who needed to learn how not to be shy and needed to become articulate. In other words, he alternated the sessions’ programs from Sunday to Sunday. Another part of his sessions, an hour or two, would be devoted to talking. He told us of some experience with theraputical theatre in the West, about European experiments. Of course, I heard from him about Nikolai Evreinov and his “Theatre for One’s Self” and “Theatre for Others.” He also knew many, many interesting stories. Sometimes he would tell us wonderful stories about old writers and actors. And I remember that he told us that while he was never able to remember a single foreign word, he could read any book of any philosopher and would know it by heart right away. He even helped some university students who were in the group to pass their exams. He would just walk one evening with them along the streets, almost like those philosophical walks in ancient times, and tell them about the history of philosophy and the basic concepts from various philosophers of particular periods so the young men would pass their exams easily.
SALLY: Much of what he was doing is what today we would call drama therapy. He was helping people to find and tell their own stories. He would start out with a story that they knew and then allow them to get to their own stories and to make up stories, too.
ARIADNA: You know, those storyteller-leaders, they made up stories just by improvising and so logically, so interestingly, using just the material which came… from nowhere, only a few disconnected dialogues they chose from those which were written by us before their eyes. It’s creativity.
SALLY: The highest form, because you are spontaneously creating in the moment with other people.
ARIADNA: And Nikolai Sergeyevich developed their creativity. People who worked with him become so confident, self-assured… and respecting of the other people as co-creators.
Almost 30 years have passed since I left Russia, and here you are asking me about him! My husband opened for me a web site and what we found first was his obituary. He died May 9, 2002 at the age of 81. It was sad to read that, though I really suspected that by this time he might no longer be alive. But what was really comforting and made me happy was to know that he was finally recognized. He even had his own center called “Nikolai Sergeyevich Govorov’s Center: Adaptation and Development of the Individual.” It became a serious business. Who would even think! The news just made my day
—SECTION: News CAT: Articles
PAGE: Incorporating Multiple Intelligences into the Advisement of Theatre Students
This article was presented as part of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Symposium: Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Theatre at the ATHE/AATE’s Joint Conference on Risking Innovation in New York City on August 11, 2009.
The Purpose of Education: Understanding
We are educators and that common focus brings us to this symposium. But what is the purpose of education? Is it about the accumulation of facts, the acquisition of a set of skills, or the development of understanding, a way of thinking about and solving problems within the disciplines and domains being studied?
Different approaches to education focus on one or a combination of those purposes. School systems that drill students in memorization of names, dates, theories, literary passages, and equations of an identified core set of material value the “accumulation of facts” method. Proof of successful learning in this kind of system is evidenced by the passing of tests that elicit the one correct answer to each specific question. There are many educational systems which value this from high powered Asian schools where students study and drill daily to Mid-Eastern madrassases where students memorize religious texts to our own U.S. public schools where much instruction has become focused on teaching to standardized tests in order not to lose federal funding under the regulations required by “No Child Left Behind.”
Many classrooms in technical academies, business schools, and even artistic training programs for artists, actors, and designers focus on teaching students a process or series of processes through which they will develop skills and an approach to create a product or work of art. The basic knowledge and facts of the discipline are learned and then scaffolded with the required skills which are practiced until they become part of the student’s procedural memory. Whether an acting student is learning Stanislavsky’s Method, Viewpoints, or another approach to creating and performing a role, the elaboration and internalization of the process is the focus, so that in the end the student can take the techniques and apply them to different characters in different performance situations.
I believe education as the development of understanding in a scholarly area asks something more of educators and students. In his book The Unschooled Mind (1991), Howard Gardner defines understanding as the ability to apply knowledge, concepts, and skills acquired through education to a new situation in which that knowledge is applied for solving a problem that has never been solved before. It requires an ability to recognize patterns, to hypothesize a new application of old knowledge and then test that hypothesis to see if it holds up, and often to synthesize information from one discipline to another, applying it in a new context. In a sense this kind of education is the ultimate version of “If you give a man a fish, he eats for today, but if you teach him to fish, he can feed himself for a lifetime.” It is a form of education that ultimately frees the student to become an initiator, a creator, and his/her own teacher once formal schooling is done.
Once we leave school, we are no longer asked to perform tests in order to demonstrate mastery; we are given real-life projects to complete on our own or with others. Some of these projects may require knowing certain facts or following a specific process, but others may not. Those unique projects require thinking and applying information in new ways and, therefore, will be accomplished by those who have achieved a true understanding of the domain. As Gardner aptly says in Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, “In life, most problems are not presented ready-made to the solver but must be shaped out of events and information from the surrounding environment…we need a deeper understanding to delve into these problems” (2006, p. 210-211). If we have not achieved an understanding of our discipline, we are stuck.
Gardner suggests in his book Five Minds for the Future that with the globalization of the economy and the immense growth of information, technology, and science, the valued cognitive abilities will grow beyond the requirement of an educated person achieving a mastery of his or her own domain or discipline; those who lead and excel will also need to develop cognitive abilities to synthesize understanding from different disciplines, to create new knowledge and solve brand new problems and invent heretofore unknown products, to respect and appreciate others and their contributions, and to approach work and life responsibilities from a stance of ethics – keeping oneself working within and towards recognized standards, principles and values, above and beyond personal gain, for the greater good of all humanity and the planet.
This need for understanding as a primary outcome of education has been acknowledged by others. In his book A Whole New Mind Daniel Pink (2006) identifies a paradigm shift in the global workplace which has already begun to impact every worker in the 21st century. He believes we are moving into what he calls “The Conceptual Age,” a time when the workplace will demand a different, more holistic set of skills from workers than were required in previous work paradigms. These skills require employees to use their knowledge and skills at a much higher level than previous paradigms – at the level of understanding. How we advise students as we guide them through their courses of study will determine whether they will be employable when they leave school, and if they will be able to change and grow along with the world.
I want to first describe this new work paradigm so its different requirements are clear and explain how they interface with the Multiple Intelligences. Then I want to share how courses already offered in our theatre curriculum naturally embody the Multiple Intelligences. Theatre faculty as advisors can build an academic course of study for our majors that will open up opportunities for dynamic careers for our graduates, whether they end up employed within the discipline of theatre arts or in another area of endeavor. But we do not want to limit our vision to our own departments. These same courses – taken by students from other disciplines in the university – will prepare them for success in the Conceptual Age as well. We have the ability to become a general resource to the entire university community.
The New Paradigm
Humanity has experienced a number of workplace paradigm shifts in the 7 million years we have been on this planet. Early humans were hunter/gatherers focused on foraging and hunting for survival. Then 11,000 years ago – only 11,000 years ago! – our now Homo sapien ancestors learned how to cultivate crops so they could stay in one place. In the shift to the Agricultural Age, hunter/gatherers were transformed into farmers, and later, with domestication of animals, into herders (Diamond, 1997).
150 years ago the Agricultural Age gave way to the Industrial Age. With the advent of machines, manufacturing, and the assembly line, many farmers became blue collar laborers who followed routines and took specific repetitive actions in order to move the product from one station to the next in the assembly process. Rank and file workers did not need to problem solve, as much as to follow orders and be “part of the machine.” Even management fit into the well-oiled engine of the corporation. While managers might be called upon to solve problems, they really were encouraged to think inside of the box. Then in the second half of the 20th century the workforce began to shift again.
To get a more specific handle on the seismic change in workforce employment, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2001) show that at the turn of the 20th century (when the paradigm shift to the Industrial Age was building steam) approximately 38 percent of the workforce was involved in farming, 38 percent was involved in mining, manufacturing, and construction, and 31 percent was involved in service. (If you add those numbers up they actually come to 107 percent, but those are the figures the U.S. Bureau of Census reports in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, Series D 152-66, p.138). By the end of the 20th century less than 3 percent were farmers, 19 percent were involved in manufacturing, mining, and construction, and 78 percent were involved in service and information processing (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2001, p.3).
What happened? By the 21st century the farmers are in insignificant numbers and the industrial workers have declined, too! What happened was the fourth paradigm shift – to the Information Age. As computers and technology exponentially advanced in the second half of the 20th century, workers left the factories, moved into the office place and the service sector, and became “knowledge workers” who spent their time entering and manipulating data. Information Age jobs asked workers to acquire facts and apply them theoretically and analytically. This definitely called upon understanding knowledge in a different manner than workers laboring in factories; it required left-brained manipulation of knowledge and technical savvy. However, many knowledge workers were employed in the storing and transfer of old information rather than the creation of new.
The instant availability to information has changed the way we all function. In the last ten years we have become so accustomed to clicking on the internet to bring up facts, statistics, news, gossip, whatever information we need in order to do our work or entertain ourselves, that it is hard to remember the long hours we spent researching for those items in the library years ago.
Now just as we’ve accustomed ourselves to the speed and glut of the Information Age, Daniel Pink says another change is coming. With the growth of technology, the automation of so much information and operations (done much faster and more cheaply by computers) and the ability to move many knowledge operations overseas to less expensive, but more plentiful knowledge workers in Asia, workers who access, enter, and manipulate knowledge are less and less necessary here in America. Pink says that high-tech, left brained abilities are still needed, but they are no longer enough; workers in the Conceptual Age must be able to master six aptitudes to make them competitive: Conceptual Age workers must be able to Design. They must be able to communicate through Story. They must be able to see and work with the whole picture, not just the parts – in other words be able to Synthesize (Pink calls this “Symphony” as he likes the image of many parts playing harmoniously as one). They must be able to forge relationships through Empathy. They must learn how to Play in order to access their creativity. And they must be able through all of these skills to pursue Meaning. Obviously, the skill set required of workers in the 21stcentury will be different across the board. These are much more complex skills and I believe they require what Gardner would identify as an Education focused on Understanding.Interestingly enough, they are all aptitudes that we incorporate into our theatre curricula.
How Multiple Intelligences Fit the Conceptual Age.
Before moving on to identify how to use MI Theory to inform advisement in this new Conceptual Age, I want to spend a few minutes making more connections between Pink’s six required aptitudes and how they dovetail with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences. To make sure we are clearly defining terms, I want to go back to Gardner’s definitions. An intelligence is “a capacity to process a certain kind of information that originates in human biology and human psychology,” which leads naturally to the solving of certain kinds of problems that are valued by society or the making certain kinds of products used by society (p.6). Each intelligence relates to a specific domain of knowledge – which we could also call a discipline or a craft – and is processed in certain pathways in the brain (p. 31). All intelligences can be symbolized in some way and have a unique developmental profile. Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence deals in working with words and language; Logical-Mathematical Intelligence deals in working with numbers, sequences, and logic; Visual-Spatial Intelligence deals in working with images and dimensions; Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence deals in the use of the body in practical and artistic ways; Musical Intelligence deals in working with music, sound, tempo, rhythm, and silence; Interpersonal Intelligence deals in understanding and working with other people; Intrapersonal Intelligence deals with understanding and managing oneself; Naturalist Intelligence deals with the patterns and the cycles of nature or biology; and Existential Intelligence deals with ultimate meanings, of finding our place in the universe.
Three of Pink’s aptitudes directly require the application of a team of intelligences: Design requires understanding of Visual-Spatial and Logical-Mathematical, as well as Naturalistic Intelligence, particularly in regard to our current need for green solutions, taking the survival of our natural world into the solution of our design problems. Story relates directly to Verbal-Linguistic as well as to Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Intelligences, since stories communicate complex human behavior through narrative. Empathy, connecting to and understanding what others are thinking and feeling, requires both Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Intelligences. Empathy can only happen when we experience within ourselves the emotion, situation, idea, or attitude of another, and in that moment put ourselves generously and non-judgmentally into someone else’s shoes to imagine what their experience is like.
Symphony/Synthesis requires students to begin thinking interdisciplinarily, making connections between the patterns, knowledge, and skills that derive from a variety of domains and learning how to incorporate more than one intelligence into the development of a product. This is an aptitude that can be intrinsically found in all of the arts, but particularly in the dramatic arts where we incorporate many elements and ideas seamlessly into a harmonious whole. Theatre itself is a synthesis – of acting, design, music, dance, and poetry. The perfect example of a theatre artist who used symphony or synthesis in his approach to his craft is Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays call upon a rich use of Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence in order to create dialogue and story, and his expert employment of rhythm and iambic pentameter in that dialogue (plus his inclusion in some plays of song) makes full use of Musical Intelligence. His deep understanding of human behavior, demonstrated through the plays’ plots and the characters’ actions, present a skillful understanding of Inter– and Intra-personal Intelligences. Naturalist Intelligence is pulled into the mix through his frequent use of symbols from nature to express and represent the human actions in his plays. Deep themes and meanings, expressed in all of his plays explored and analyzed for centuries by artists, critics and scholars, testify to his employment of Existential Intelligence.
Daniel Pink talks about the aptitude to Play as another important skill for successful workers in the Conceptual Age. Play involves an approach to learning that brings into the mix safety, structure, experimentation, joy, creativity, imagination, humor, stress-release, distance, and multiple perspective-taking and through which relationships and trust can be built with other workers. Play allows everyone to be on the same team and join together in a positive creative process. All of the intelligences can be played with – and are played with joyfully by those who have had crystallizing or positive experiences with them. Most of us chose a career in theatre because of our love for Play, plays, and playing. Our jobs provide us with not only permission to play and imagine, but demand it!
Meaning, of course, is over-arching. We are all – as conscious, meaning-making creatures – existentially on a journey to discover the meaning of life and to make a meaningful life. As theatre artists, we have taken on that task as part of our artistic purpose. To make meaning requires synthesis of all the intelligences in the service of Existential Intelligence.
As I read Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind I recognized myself and my theatre training. Each course I had as a theatre student worked at a symphonic level to teach me about design, story, empathy, symphony, play, and meaning. I realized that not only was I cross-trained for life and art, but that I am passing the same aptitudes on to the students in the classes that I am teaching now whether they are majoring in theatre, psychology, social work, business, or agriculture!
School as Preparation for a Career and for Life
When high school students and their families set out to choose a college and curriculum of study, most are focused on choosing a course of study that will get them a degree that will lead to a secure, well-paying job, and ultimately, a career. We have all encountered students who love the arts and wish they could major in them, but are told bluntly by their parents that if they major in theatre or music, they are on their own. On the other hand, say the parents, if the student will choose a more “realistic” major, the parents will willingly underwrite a Bachelors of Science in education, business administration, chemical engineering, or pre-medical studies.
Over the course of the last 20 years, with more emphasis on running higher education on a business model, students are more and more seen in the role of consumer rather than scholar. The luster of an education focused on the development of understanding the world has dimmed in the eyes of our potential consumers and their parents. They see themselves as paying for a product; that product being a degree that will guarantee them a job – one that pays very well. Academic programs, feeling the pressure of this business model, have begun focusing their curricula more narrowly on developing a limited set of skills that will prepare students rigidly for a small, specialized field so that graduates can step directly from the classroom into the office.
I have experienced this shift just in the nine years I have taught at Kansas State University. When I first started teaching, my Creative Drama and Drama Therapy with Special Population classes consisted of one half to two thirds education majors. They had an open slate of electives from other disciplines outside the College of Education that they could pick from in order to learn hands-on skills for motivating children to learn. They chose courses in music, art, drama, sociology, psychology, and other areas that related to their natural abilities, interests, and crystallized intelligences which could enrich their future teaching in a wider sense. Within three years of my arrival at K-State all the education students in my classes disappeared. The state of Kansas mandated a change in the education curriculum, replacing electives from other disciplines with additional required education courses that focused on regulations and standards to help future teachers attain achievement levels on testing mandated by the state and No Child Left Behind. Instead of gathering new skills and materials to bring into their classrooms for enriching and inspiring their students, education majors’ vision and skills as educators has been restricted.
If students are being steered away from Gardner’s vision of Education that values deep understanding toward the more practical goal of finding of a job by parents, state boards, and university administration’s new business model, does this mean we, as educators, should be advising students away from courses in the arts? Away from exercising many of their intelligences that may or may not be obviously involved in what will become their day-to-day job description? Not if Daniel Pink is right about the paradigm shift to the Conceptual Age! The Conceptual Age requires the development and interaction of all of the intelligences for not only employment, but for sustained success and mastery in the job place. Theatre departments are actually on the cutting-edge of the new paradigm.
A fully rounded, grounded curriculum in theater that includes acting, dramatic literature, design, tech, directing, playwriting, theatre management, and criticism already entails training all of the intelligences and can incorporate ways of connecting many different disciplines and domains through creative understanding. Acting courses address bodily-kinesthetic, verbal-linguistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences. Set, costume, and lighting design as well as technical theatre courses mine logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, naturalist, and bodily kinesthetic intelligences. Management requires logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, and interpersonal intelligences. Playwriting, dramatic literature and criticism develop verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential, and even the sequential, logical aspects of logical-mathematical intelligences. Dance/movement classes develop bodily-kinesthetic, visual-spatial, and musical intelligences. Directing courses, which teach how to put it all together, perhaps call upon the widest variety of intelligences as students learn to form an overall artistic vision for a production and communicate it to all the other artists in the theatre.
Hamlet tells us, the central purpose of theatre is “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature,” making theatre a mirror for all of life (Hamlet, III, ii, 24-25). Drama can be said to be the study of human behavior embodied and reproduced for an audience to reflect on – which means that all the skills in all the domains required in life must be learned by the theatre student for that mirroring to be valid and true. Besides tapping into multiple intelligences, what does a theatrical production do, but provide us, the audience, with all of the Conceptual Age’s required elements: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning! These intelligences and elements which our students are learning to use skillfully in order to be able to function in this “mirror world” of theatre can be synthesized and transferred directly to the “real world” outside the theatre’s walls.
Beyond their theatre coursework, young theatre artists must be cross-trained outside their department in all the domains – humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, philosophy, ethics, and so on – so they can bring that knowledge back to the stage with understanding. In our approach to teaching within our departments we would do well to also teach our students how to weave what appear at first to them to be independent disciplines together symphonically (in a synthesis), so they can make these connections across the entire academic curriculum.
Finally, beyond advising our own students to develop their intelligences in as many domains and disciplines as possible, we, as faculty of the university, need to be proactively reaching out to faculty advisors of the rest of the student body to communicate with them about how the aptitudes of the Conceptual Age can be accessed so directly through our discipline. The case has not yet been made to the university at large and needs to be. Theatre departments offer invaluable resources to the entire student body. If students majoring in math, science, psychology, sociology, education, business, agriculture, and architecture were advised into a variety of theatre courses, they could develop a deeper understanding of design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning and find new ways of accessing their intelligences.
I am starting to make this case on my campus. While I have lost the education majors who used to take my courses, I have actively connected with advisors from many different departments to explain the intelligences and aptitudes my courses can offer their students – and they have responded positively! My Creative Drama class which includes units on play and improvisation, storytelling, story drama, and puppetry, has been approved as a professional elective for Speech Language Pathology students who need (among other skills) to learn how to engage their clients through play, for Graduate Accounting majors who need to be able to work with others creatively, think outside of the box, and tell stories effectively in order to sell their ideas, and for Leadership Studies Minors who need to learn how to lead and participate creatively and positively in groups. It has also been approved for University General Education because it offers a structure for active learning, self-reflection, and interdisciplinary thought.
My Drama Therapy with Special Populations class, which brings in people with disabilities from the community once a week to participate in drama activities with K-State students, has become one of the most popular fine arts electives for pre-medical profession majors (This includes students who wish to be doctors, dentists, nurses, speech pathologists, nutritionists, physical therapists, and occupational therapists) because in addition to learning how to effectively, actively communicate understanding of important concepts through action to future clients who will need to know how to follow healthcare instructions, they learn empathy for others who are not like them, who are often stigmatized and dismissed from society, and they learn how to break down the barriers of communication through dramatic, playful means.
The psychology, family studies, and social work professors have realized how drama provides valuable skills their students need, but which they do not teach. They regularly send their students to our department to take creative drama, acting, improvisation, drama therapy with special populations, and other courses. I currently have two students in educational psychology who have opted to take graduate drama therapy courses as an integrated part of their doctoral program.
The word has gotten out to the professional world. I have been told that K-State Business School graduates who can say they have taken Creative Drama often get preference in hiring at certain Kansas City business firms who have been impressed with the flexibility and creativity of previous hires who were Creative Drama alums. I have also heard that a nursing school in Kansas City looks for applicants who have taken Drama Therapy with Special Populations at K-State.
I have even brought drama to the K-State Office of Evaluation. The Evaluators are researchers who handle the statistics and evaluation component of research projects run by professors in different departments across the university. Typically they have the logical-mathematical know-how while the professors they work with have the naturalist know-how. As in any working team, interpersonal miscommunications can happen on many levels, but none of the team members knew how to evaluate the social situation and develop more effective approaches. The Evaluators got so excited about learning how to deal with social issues through drama that they created a role-play presentation for their national conference last November to teach other evaluators a dramatic new way to access communication problems on teams. These statisticians have expanded their intelligences through drama, added to their employment skills, and bravely joined the Conceptual Age!
Our American culture has long been suspicious of the arts and our fine arts programs at the university level often languish from lack of funds, interest, and support. Instead of being on the “outs” of academia, our theatre programs have the opportunity to be in the center of education, to be providing the very educational components that are necessary for not only survival, but success in the 21st century. We as theatre educators need to use our highly developed multiple intelligences, as well as our aptitudes for story, empathy, play, design, symphony, and meaning to communicate our value to the new Conceptual Age both on campus and off.
References:
Diamond, J. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel: The fates of human societies. New York: W. W. Norton.
Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (2006). Multiple intelligences: New horizons. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Pink, D.H. (2006). A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Books.