Currents in Literacy

Drama Literacy: Center Stage

By George Branigan

I began teaching public school in 1968 in a school that served an entirely African American neighborhood in Washington, DC before busing began to desegregate the school districts. By middle class norms, these kids were functioning below grade level and, not surprisingly, showed the symptoms of living in a world that cared little about them. They were poor, isolated, brutalized, undertaught, and underappreciated. I searched for ways to get them active in their learning and stumbled upon drama. What my students seemed either unwilling or unable to read (on grade-level notions of fluency), they were perfectly capable of memorizing. What they could not extract from a text, they could inject into a character who had to interact with other actors around a defined situation. What eluded them when they had to render a text, was readily available when they were invited to invent.

The students understood characters best: hen-pecking mothers, no-count fathers, conniving cousins, scheming siblings, secretive lovers, nasty landlords, power-hungry politicians, exploited children, humorless businessmen, slightly psychotic neighbors, and a whole host of other situation-driven characters. They had plenty from their own experience that they could bring along when I brought the text to them. And the text was there for them to build a story out of. All I did was alter their relation to the text -- to the meaning making activity. And their grasp of text through drama forced me to analyze as a teacher how I could spark and nurture that connection in the classroom.

Act I: Learning to read through acting

"Let's pretend!" Who hasn't said this as a child coming home after a Saturday matinee movie or after a gripping television drama?

"I get to be Luke Skywalker!"

"I'll be Han Solo."

"I'll be Princess Leia."

"Aw, who's left. Who can I be?"

"You can be Jabba the Hutt. You've already got enough blubber, sneaky eyes, and a runny nose!"

"But I don't wanna be Jabba. I want to be a good guy!"

Sound familiar? Could it be that these reactions could be our first lessons in the elements of dramatic form? Of theater literacy? Without any fancy terminology, as kids we knew the protagonists and antagonists in our stories. We intuited conflict, action, plot lines, resolution, conventions of "moving the story," dramatic tension, willing suspension of disbelief, use of props, narrative devices and above all, character. How is it that our ease of access to these fundamental components of drama as children become inaccessible when we encounter written dramatic forms in school? Why, one might ask, do school children have such difficulty in recognizing theme, character motivation, images, representational use of props, ambivalence, contradiction, double-entendre and conflict when they read a play or story? How do they not see subtext in the text?

Since my public school teaching days, I've kept wondering about the ways that drama, as a literate form, and acting, as an activity that recruits that form, can serve the ends of literacy. Here I mean to use that word in both its plain sense (to master the conventions and mechanical techniques of reading and writing) and in its larger sense (to become aware of the social and political consequences of the invention of writing and the creation of a text world).

We all know that there are many "senses" of the term literacy being kicked about the discursive landscape of education and culture. To me, literacy has to do with powerful ways of understanding and interpreting a world invented by and structured by print. This is the world of contracts, news, laws, sacred texts, dictionaries, and declarations. It is the world of prose, poetry, and drama. It is equally the world of formulas, calculations, blueprints, and maps. It is a planned world, a constructed world, a world built out of words. It is a world that, once constructed, gives us ideas about words, and, through words, gives us ideas about ourselves. It behooves us to understand the world made out of words, or as Olson has said, the "world on paper." I consider the acquisition of literacy to be a gradual process of "demythologizing" the world made on paper by print. We learn to see how this world is constructed by people who are functioning within social, cultural, and political spheres and to realize that we could be one of those creators of the worlds on paper just as easily as the next person. This realization exposes the arbitrariness of power within this dynamic and realigns the controlling functions exerted by print. For example, the dictionary loses its "mythic" authoritative status as the final word on meaning or spelling or pronunciation when understood to be the product of teams of people combing through other texts to first produce the work and only to revise it periodically as meanings, pronunciations, and spellings change.

To help children see how they can be co-constructors of these worlds of meaning -- either through engagement with someone else's text or through their own production of a text -- is the task of literacy education. I have found that learning to "read" dramatic productions of texts and to monitor our reactions to performances of those texts (either our own or those of others) provides an access to expanding literacy.

What of the elementary school and children who are just learning to cope with written texts? What does sophisticated theatergoing have to do with their emergent literacy? Think of kids as audiences for bedtime story readings. Think of kids as natural actors in touch with very pure emotional resources. Think of them as powerful meaning-makers ready to observe that the king has no clothes. Situate them in a relation to meanings as producers rather than consumers. And what have we got? A head start on literacy of all kinds.

Carol Chomsky very cogently argues that writing is more accessible than reading for young children. Among her reasons is the observation that the child's relation to meaning differs in the two tasks. For reading, meanings are unknown to the child, while in writing meanings originate with the child. Thus, when children come to read their own writing, they already know the meanings and can spend some cognitive time exploring (and gradually discovering) how what is read is organized to represent the meanings that it does. She made a similar argument when called in to the Randolph schools to address a problem they had with some of their fourth graders. These children had learned to decode, that is, they were successful with phonics tasks in isolation. However, they still could not read. She aptly asked: After Decoding: What? Her answer seemed somewhat surprising -- memorize. But in light of altering one's position to meaning, it makes perfect sense. If children were helped to memorize whole texts (as actors do), just like beginning writers, they would already know the meanings encoded in the print. Cognitive space could then be freed up to explore how the text said what it did. Thus, any kind of re-instruction in letter-sound systems could be built upon their prior knowledge of those texts.

Other reports in the reading literature make partial reference to this altered relation to meaning when they describe the attributes of self-taught readers. Both Dolores Durkin and Margaret Clark report that self-taught readers generally memorize one or more of the books which their parents read to them. Frank Smith recognizes this as well. That single feat may well constitute a very important building block in the acquisition of literacy. Remember round-robin reading in middle elementary school where we would count around the circle to find which number we were and then rehearse the matching paragraph before being called on to read?

I think we can see how learning to read like an actor can actually happen by learning to read as an actor. With one quick flip in working with a script, we can get children as young as first grade (and probably younger) into a performance mode. Start with recordings or memorized line readings with familiar stories. Then, match these with a script. Then, construct instruction around these scripts. Where does your text say the same as my text? What if we change some words to new rhymes? How many ch- words do you have in your script? All of the types of phonics-based questions we might want children to confront can be educed from their scripts. From here, we could move from fully memorized texts to familiarized texts, those that have been read for/to children frequently enough for them to be familiar but not frequently enough to have become fully memorized. After a final reading by the teacher, the students are released to cope with their texts by themselves.

These interactions are quite close to what actors do to memorize their scripts and to familiarize themselves with an entire play before they discover the nuances of the inter-text and work on their character choices. Production generally begins with a non-dramatic read through, then proceeds to "table work" (continued readings interlaced with discussion). In some styles of directing, actors don't get off their seats and onto the stage until their intentions are fully understood in the context of the play. Even then, actors hold on to their scripts for some time before trying to get "off book." This is where margin notes about blocking and attitude and motivation and cues are made, changed, and re-entered.

And here is another advantage to understanding a text that accrues to actors that doesn't necessarily obtain for solitary readers. First, actors repeat their text over and over and over, often with discussion about isolated lines along the way. Second, lines are tried out in different ways, waiting for that moment of discovery of the "right" rendering. Actors are challenged by their directors to make their renderings "make sense" in the overall context of the play. Moreover, actors are challenged by other actors to be responsive to the tone required by a scene. If one actor is working at an emotionally charged level and the co-actor is low-key, the scene won't cohere. Thus, the meanings that are arrived at are collaboratively and interactively worked out. What this means is that each line of a script is co-read, negotiated, and often altered many times. Although solitary readers may re-read a passage several times, they don't have the advantage of interacting with other readers. And, finally, full understanding of the text is socially determined with the assistance of other readers who have invested considerable stock in versions of what the text means.

Act II: Learning to read like an actor

When I came to train teachers after graduate school, I found a way to return to theater, this time as a participant. I have had ample time to reflect on how these experiences transcend my personal activities and reveal an avenue to deepening "theater literacy." This path begins with a text, moves to the demands of character, and arrives at shared collaboration, discussion, and critique. In a sense, the text first exists without participants; next it invites each participant into its story (each actor) in a limited and focused way; then it demands interaction, transactions, and negotiations among the "meaning-makers;" and finally it gives itself up to a judgmental audience. No single reading of a text creates the multi-layered experience of the text demanded by acting.

The educational problem for a teacher of literacy is to discover how audiences become participants in the reconstruction and reinvention of dramatic texts, thus learning to be literate through theater. The trick is to show students how to think like an actor or a director and how to notice both the elements of a text which direct choices and to understand that the fact that "choices" exist in the rendering of a performance text means that interpretive possibilities are not fixed. The power to see how meanings are made, one meaning in one context and another somewhere else, is returned to the "reader/viewer" -- the meaning-maker.

Aren't all versions of Hamlet different, even though the actors say the same words? The fixed text is only the beginning. What was it that the actors did differently that led us to see the text differently? In Lawrence Olivier's film of Hamlet, the famous "To be or not to be..." speech is delivered at the edge of a cliff in a raging storm with his dagger drawn and poised at his breast. A desperate man with a troubling dilemma on the verge of suicide is what we read from that constellation of choices. Alternately, in a Phillip Burton production (live stage, Sylvan Theater, Washington, DC, circa 1970), Hamlet enters reading a book. The speech becomes a text which he is reading -- not something he is thinking. When he comes to the line, "...to sleep, perchance to dream no more...", the actor slams the book shut and begins to think about what he has read, "Ah, there's the rub." Aren't these two choices wholly different renderings of the same text? If there are two choices, there must be more. Recognizing this fact invites us to ask on what basis choices are made. What do actors see in their demands to perform a text that we don't see in simply reading the text? We want to talk out these contrasts with others by engaging in comparison, evaluation, and critique -- literate behaviors all. We can learn to read like actors.

My double life of actor and teacher educator merged when I was commissioned to write study guides for Chamber Theatre, Inc. of Boston, a national touring company that has adapted short stories (Twain, Poe, Saki, etc.) for the stage. Each company presents five stories commonly found in school curricula for upper elementary and secondary school audiences. My task was to show teachers how to prepare their students to visit the theater and to integrate that experience into their classroom study of the prose text.

My guiding principle was to help the students to view theater as a set of artistic, interpretive decisions aimed at creating an effect. This effort became an exercise in designing guidelines for teaching "theater literacy." My design was broken into three parts: pre-viewing activities, viewing activities, and post-viewing activities. This simply means that the students should prepare to experience the theater performance through thoughtful anticipation, they should think actively about the performance during viewing, and they should come together as co-experiencers after seeing the performance to compare, evaluate, and critique.

One of the touring companies stages "The Telltale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe. In that tale, the sex of the narrator is unspecified. While this may seem irrelevant to a reader, it becomes a concern for a dramatic production. Depending on casting, sometimes the narrator was male, sometimes female. Does this variation, this "choice" make a difference? The story remains unchanged, but dramatic choices have an effect on the viewing experience. The driving compulsion of the tale is the narrator's obsession with the "Evil Eye." For all of us who have read the story, can we recall whether and how the narrator disposed of the eye? The "text" is silent. But the stage-play invents a dramatic moment which is sensitive to the sex of the narrator. When the narrator is female, the narrator might begin the tale sitting in a rocker knitting. As she begins to break from narrative to dramatic action, she mimes her preparation, she rehearses her silent motions, and portrays her frozen determination to wait, wait, wait for her moment. When she finally attacks the "eye," she uses (what else?) the knitting needle. As she continues her narration, she deals with the troubling eye by knitting it shut with her knitting equipment! If a male actor plays the role, a different choice of props may be made.

The difficulty in preparing students for this dramatic presentation entails not knowing which version the audience will see. But this is the perfect opportunity to really give students something to watch for (active viewing) when they see the performance. So, the pre-viewing activities would include leading students to consider whether or not the unspecified sex of the narrator matters at all. Next in the thought process is to have students anticipate how the representation of the text (and ultimately, an interpretation) would be different, depending on the sex of the character. The next step is to get them to think about whether the narrator would do anything special about the "eye" before placing the body beneath the floor. After all, the narrator is an obsessed character. Here, one might suggest that the students brainstorm the types of props that either a male or female narrator might have on stage (including ones that would challenge gender norms) that could be used in the murder and stage that scene in as many ways as they can devise before they go to the theater.

None of this gives away the dramatic moment on stage; it simply calls attention to it so that the viewers will be watching for something to happen, not knowing what. That moment may be greeted with moans and ughs and "Oh, gross!" but the students will have something to talk about when they return to class. They may find the moment "over the top" and unnecessary or perfectly consistent with the actions of an obsessive character. They can compare the staged murder to their own trial stagings. In their post-viewing breakdowns, they are compelled to engage in reflective evaluation and critique. If they then go back to the story text, they might search for clues in Poe's original that would support or undo the dramatic interpretation.

In an interesting way, theater literacy becomes a model for textual literacy. Olson reminded us that texts only say what they say and readers can only pay attention to what a text says. In oral discourse, listeners pay attention to what a speaker means; we ignore slips of the tongue, unclear grammar, and misnaming. Listeners see through those slips or ask for a correction saying, "Oh, I get what you mean," even when the saying is in error. When reading, however, it makes no sense to yell at a page of type, "What do you mean! Can you rephrase that so it's clear to me?" The print just sits there and keeps on saying just what it said before.

But think of what I've been arguing about texts (dialogue) in an actor's grasp. Actors make decisions that make the words mean more than they say in the mechanical act of reading. If we learn to watch for the choices actors make and how they convey them to an audience of theater readers, then we can find ways to read like actors -- asking static texts to reveal nuances of meaning. Let me give another example. We all know the phrase: "The play must go on." Imagine that it hadn't been invented yet. In the current film Shakespeare in Love, the line is divided between two characters. The first says, "The play must..." and hesitates. The other character, seemlessly, says as an interested listener, "Go on," encouraging the other to continue. This wholly different parsing is only evident in the dramatic rendering of the language.

If we learn to read like actors, we parse texts or add to texts and thus give them permission to mean many things at once. When we read like actors, we replace the absent author with ourselves and co-construct a meaning. This type of reading is not a deconstructive reading where texts can mean anything, but a social reading that recognizes that no text is limited to meaning only one thing. The language (its images, its potential for double-entendre, its inherent ambiguity) still guides the possible meanings.

In 1995, the Young at Arts Program at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts asked me to help train community group leaders and teachers to prepare their students to attend major performances at the Wang. Young people are sponsored to attend major productions of touring shows (Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserable, Miss Saigon), and dance revues (River Dance, Bale Folklorica de Bahia), and less well known but artistically acclaimed show (Umabatha Zulu MacBeth).

This presented a new educational challenge for me. At least with the major productions, the libretto provided a text to work with, but for the dance shows there was no text and Umabatha was spoken in Zulu. Moreover, many of the young people in these groups were not in schools but in community groups. The core of preparing to view dramatic presentations remained the same, but I needed a new focusing device. As a common starting place, all dramatic performances have actors, all have a space to move in, all have to light the space, all have interactions among characters, all use costumes or props, all have stories to tell. The approach is the same, I asked myself: "How can we find elements of the presentation that allow viewers to anticipate what they will eventually see? And how can guided viewing lead to rich interpretation?"

For Umabatha I devised a training session for the group leaders that challenged them to take descriptions of interior states of mind and represent them non-verbally, simply through acting choices. I selected some of the scenes from Shakespeare's MacBeth where a scripted situation or monologue explicitly described state of mind. Groups then worked on physicalizing the interior states through non-verbal devices -- action, props, light, sound, costume. Each group acted out their scene and the audience then shared what they "read" of the interior state from what they saw. Of course, all of these elements actually enter into textually based plays as well. We are often less aware of them because we rely on the language to tell us the story. And, of course, actors are usually working on intentions, images, or subtextual signals as they move about the stage and deliver their lines. Deprived of a text, audiences need to learn the vocabulary of dramatic movement and form to construct a narrative.

For Bale Folklorica de Bahia, dances performed by an Afro-Brazilian dance troupe, I needed other devices to lead people to discover the vocabulary of stage movement. I focused on exercises in stage blocking (designed, synchronized movement) standard fare in theater training. I first had the students separate into two groups, one on stage right, the other on stage left. Then I asked them to walk into the stage space and keep moving. (Total chaos -- no design.) Next, I directed them each to decide on a space they wanted to get to and claim as their own. (Intention and occasional conflict.) Then, they had to enter with an idea of what they were going to do when they got to their space, ie, a dressing room, an office, a grill, a shop. Next, they had to pick someone else they wanted to interact with, and do so before going to their space. Any number of complicating permutations can be added to the single activity, all leading to the same principle of "theater literacy": everything that happens on stage is a matter of design and choice. By layering definition and intention, the movement gradually shapes itself to reveal meaningful movement. Once one experiences the "theater training," one can look for such blocking devices on stage and interpret their place in the larger design.

I also used a direct intellectual approach. The Afro-Brazilian forms are laced with history -- inter-ethnic mixing, slave origins, religious contests, myth, and struggle. Artistic forms arose out of these intersecting social conflicts. But, here again, learning how to look -- being theater literate -- helps viewers detect these undercurrents suffused into an artistic performance. One does not need to know of the African origin myths to carefully watch the dance of a sea goddess who ultimately unfolds her skirt, transforming it into a net the lower class, co-rebel? This question has the potential to wholly alter our attitude towards Marius and Cosette and lead us to a new reading of the play as betrayal of class interests by the idle rich who always land on their feet, in charge, on top in an unchanged social order.

See what I mean? Learning to recognize these features of theatrical performances feeds back on our ability to "read" non-performance texts and it feeds our developing literacy with all texts. Reading like an actor helps us read both the word and the world. Just as we would prepare students to go to the theater, as teachers we need to prepare our children to enter into dramatic texts, participate in the rendering of those texts, and then re-experience those texts in shared interactions with others. Through "theater literacy" texts become subtextual, intratextual, and intertextual. Meanings start with the actors, slide into texts, and then resurface in the public domain to return to the actor in richer and fuller ways. Prose texts reveal themselves more easily when we learn to read like an actor.

References

Chomsky, C. After Decoding, What? Language Arts, March 1976.

Chomsky, C. "Approaching Reading Through Invented Spelling." In L. B. Resnick and P. A. Weaver, Theory and Practice of Early Reading, Vol. 2, pp 43-65. NJ: Erlbaum, 1979.

Clark, M. Young Fluent Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1976.

Durkin, D. Children Who Read Early. New York, NT: Teachers College Press, 1966.

Olson, D. The World on Paper. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Smith, F. Joining the Literacy Club: Further Essays into Education. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988.

George Branigan earned an Ed. D. in Applied Psycholinguistics at Boston University. He formerly taught 8th grade English and currently teaches in the Education Department at Stonehill College. He has produced study guides for Chamber Theatre, Inc. and occasionally leads workshops at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, Young at Arts Program.