by Anna Santucci (Phd Candidate, Brown University)
The theatre, sum of all languages, helps make dialogue possible.
If I do not understand the word, I understand the gesture;
if not the gesture, the sound; if not the sound, the silence;
if not the silence, the tone; if not the tone, the movement.
If I understand none of that, I understand the whole,
which is greater than the sum of its parts.
Our communication is rational, aesthetic and sensory;
conscious and unconscious. The mind also speaks through the senses.
(Augusto Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed, 116-7)
Introduction
In many ways, the classroom has a lot in common with theater: it is a place of vision, understanding, communion, learning, and collaborative creation. Research on drama in education in general, and in more recent years on drama in foreign language and culture teaching in particular, has been constantly growing; engagement with the theater and performing arts has repeatedly been praised for promoting embodied learning, facilitating the dissolution of cognitive barriers, fostering cooperation among students, stimulating critical thinking, and supporting the development of trans-cultural competence. In my research and teaching practice, I strongly advocate performance-based teaching of language and culture at all levels of the curriculum, from improvisational and culturally meaningful participatory activities for the beginner classroom, in which students fill information gaps and create meaning together through both verbal and non-verbal communication, to full-fledged theatrical productions for the advanced classroom.
Pirandello is extremely exciting to teach, precisely because theater in general, and Pirandello’s theater in particular, are particularly productive channels in order to reflect on what it means to interpret a text, and on the crucial role played by the body in the learning experience and in the creation of language and culture. I propose here some short prompts and cues for approaching Pirandello’s Questa sera si recita a soggetto in the classroom. The activities are meant for advanced learners who are able to read and discuss the text in Italian; most of them can be adapted for intermediate students as well, but this would of course require additional time and linguistic support, as this play is quite challenging in terms of both language and content. Depending on the level of the students and the length of the sequence, students may be assigned different portions of the text to read as assignment. In the following example, I am envisioning a sequence of 5/6 sessions over 2/3 weeks, followed by a final class project in which the students collaboratively write an adaptation and stage a production of the play based on their own adaptation. This should not be considered a lesson plan to follow step by step, as of course classroom interactions are personal and specific to the teachers and students involved; my intention is to provide a few ideas for instructors to consider, experiment with, and make their own through recombination and adaptation to their own syllabi and teaching practice.
What follows is generally inspired by my personal teaching experience with other texts and by several resources for teachers and educators (which are cited in text when quoted directly). I would like to spend a few words on the slippery nature of authorship when it comes to pedagogical principles and activities: these are meant to be shared and are often impossible to track back to an original creator, since they evolve so much in the hands of the diverse educators that implement them. For these reasons, I cannot possibly fully describe all the genealogies that influence my practice as a teacher. What I can do is list a few resources that I find particularly meaningful, and which I encourage interested educators to look into; this list is necessarily extremely reductive, but it should provide the reader with a decent starting point to explore the field: The Habla Center for Language and Culture (http://www.habla.org/en/for-educators). The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University (http://www.artslit.org/). The journal Scenario http://www.ucc.ie/en/scenario/). Bräuer, Gerd, ed. Body and Language: Intercultural Learning Through Drama. Westport, CT: Ablex Pub., 2002. Blau, Sheridan D. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Ryan, Colleen, and Nicoletta Marini-Maio, ed. Dramatic Interactions: Teaching Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Through Theater – Theoretical Approaches and Classroom Practices. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.
Pre-reading activity
Students are asked whether they have ever participated in a live theatrical performance. If yes, can they recall their experience? If not, what do they think it would be like? In what ways did/might it differ from reading a book or seeing a movie? Students discuss the prompt in small groups (2-4 people) and then report to the class. If students mention live performances that are not strictly speaking theatrical, a conversation may ensue on what makes theatre recognizable as such. Each group is then asked to decide on three core points that summarize what they are taking away from the conversation. The entire class listens to the core points report. As an assignment for the following session, students may be asked to write a reflection on one of the core points of their choice.
Having students discuss in small groups is generally a wise idea, as it lowers the stakes and provides them with a contained environment in which they can express and test their ideas more freely; students usually contribute more easily to class discussions after engaging in smaller debates. This activity also prepares them to the reading of Pirandello’s text through a reflection on their personal experience, fostering a more immediate engagement with the materials.
The beginnings – After reading Act I
Comprehension check: It is always a good idea to start each session with a check of purely linguistic comprehension of the assigned readings. Students should be encouraged to read the text portions assigned for home with a dictionary, and make note of the passages whose meaning they have difficulties understanding. At the beginning of the class, students discuss in small groups the passages they have marked and try to help each other with comprehension, then the instructor solves any remaining doubts (the instructor should of course always monitor the small groups discussions).
From the literary to the theatrical creation: Students are encouraged to reflect on the process of creating a play. Additional materials on the history of the play and on Pirandello’s rewriting of his short stories may be distributed; the instructor should keep in mind that the goal is to provide the student with the necessary contextual information, no less but no more either, so that they can build their own analysis of the topic at hand (for example, a topic one might want to discuss when teaching this play regards the funding of the arts during Fascism, but this would require a separate additional session). Students are ask to reflect on what we mean by “author”, on how reception and transmission affect a literary work, and on how theatre complicates this discourse. In order to facilitate the students’ engagement with the discussion, students may be asked to imagine how they would go about writing a play, and then to imagine seeing their play interpreted in a way that is very different from what they had envisioned. To deepen the conversation on this topic, an excerpt from Pirandello’s Illustratori, Attori e Traduttori could help frame reading and writing as interpretational processes. After this discussion, students are directed to look again at Hinkfuss’s initial statements and select one line or sentence that they find particularly interesting or puzzling; they share the lines in small groups and try to analyze them, and then report to the class. Throughout these activities, it is crucial that the discussion stems from the students themselves, and that they are given enough time to process and express their own ideas; this is again why small groups are helpful, as they create a situation in which it is far less likely that the instructor does all the intellectual work and the students are merely passive recipients, which unfortunately still happens in many classrooms and which is pedagogically counterproductive.
Engaging in prediction: In preparation to the following session, students are asked to imagine how the action will unfold. In small groups, they prepare a plot outline and then improvise its performance. The purpose is to foster the students’ imagination and interest in the text, as engaging in prediction stimulates the students’ attention and involvement. This activity also allows them to experiment first hand with the concepts of “canovaccio” and “recitare a soggetto.” After the practical activity, the instructor leads a discussion on what just happened, linking students’ reflections to Pirandello’s text, and possibly introducing the students to the history of Commedia dell’Arte with a few additional materials.
Exploring the theatrical creation – After reading Act II
The theatrical roles: Students are separated in three groups, and each group is instructed to identify with one of these three roles: the director, the actors, the audience. At first, they have to consider their role as it relates to theatre in general, not to Questa Sera in particular: what are the expectations of the director/actor/audience member? What are their responsibilities? What makes them nervous? What makes them happy? What are they striving towards? What do they want to happen? What would they never want to happen? In the second part of the activity, students are asked to reflect on these questions in relation to Pirandello’s play specifically, imagining an actual staging of the play: are the expectations met? Are the responsibilities clear and fair? How do the events affect each role?
The theater within the theater: While engaging in the second part of the previous activity, students should start questioning the definition of the roles they were given, and therefore unfolding the complicated structure of the theater within the theater. The purpose of the activity is precisely to have them reflect on the implications of the meta-theatrical construction: by focusing on the task they are given, they should be able to start teasing out they hows and whys this play is so fascinatingly problematic to stage. The following discussion prompt will be: To what point can/should Hinkfuss and the real-life director conflate? The activity from the previous session on the meaning of authorship should help them discuss the issue. And to what point can/should the real-life actors and the character-actors conflate?
Characters’ portraits: After students have started exploring the above question about characters, the instructor might want to provide them with an excerpt from Sei personaggi in order to deepen the discussion on characters’ agency and on the theatrical “revolution” initiated by Pirandello’s trilogy. In the following activity, each group of students works on a specific (hyphenated) character: Leading Actress-Mommina, Lead Actor-Verri, and so forth. Students are asked to choose the most important lines for that character from the text they have read so far, the lines that best identify their personality, their desires, their evolution. They then craft a performance around those lines and present it to the class.
Creating original monologues: As a final activity or an assignment for the following session, students have to create a monologue for one of the characters of their choice for the beginning of act III, which portrays what the character thinks and feels at the end of act II. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage students to verbalize their personal interpretation of a character, and to have them engage in predictions to foster their interest in the following portion of the text. (The monologues can be edited together and incorporated in a final production of the play, which could constitute a final group project for the class – see below)
The themes – After reading Act III
See-think-wonder: Some of the themes an instructor may want to address in relation to Questa Sera are gender roles and the condition of women in the early 20th century, Italian society and the southern question, the relationship between fiction and reality. Depending on what they want to focus on, instructors can either guide the choice of the themes to discuss by selecting some passages to use for the following activity, or can ask students to come to class having chosen some passages they want to focus on. Students are instructed to discuss the passages in small groups according to the following sequence, and then report to the classroom:
- See: What do you see in the text? Discuss only what you notice and try not to interpret or analyze the text. Only point out the people, objects, and/or events that are in the text.
- Think: Now based on what you noticed in the text, how do you interpret what is going on? What do you think about the people or events in the text? Now, using evidence from the text, you can share their own thoughts and ideas.
- Wonder: What questions do you still have about the text? What questions are unanswered in the text? Does this text make you wonder about ideas or events in the larger world?[1]
Concept maps: An alternative or additional option to start the discussion is creating collaborative conceptual maps. Provide each student with a big piece of paper and ask them to write in the middle of the sheet either a quote from the play that they find particularly interesting or a big idea or question that they have derived from their reading. All the other students then respond in writing to the core concept on the sheet of paper: they can write additional quotes, questions, thoughts, elaborations, textual references, personal connections,… The pieces of paper can be hung on the wall or spread around the room, so that students can move in the space and contribute to all of the maps. The completed maps can be used as brainstorming for individual response papers or as launching points for group discussions.
Themed performances: In small groups, students choose a theme they want to focus on and a scene from the play where they see the theme emerge. They then have to try and perform the scene with the specific intent of conveying a message about the chosen theme, and present the performance to the class; the rest of the class can try to identify what the theme and the message are. The class then discusses the experience. The purpose of the exercise is to allow students to personally embody and experiment with the complications of the theatrical interpretation process, linking the discussion back to Illustratori, Attori e Traduttori and the issue of theatrical authorship.
“Tutto il teatro recita!”: Students are asked to reflect on the many components that constitute the theatrical experience. The prompt for group discussion is: “What does Pirandello’s quote mean? We have already worked on the human components of theatre (director, actors, audience); what additional components can you identify?” Students are then asked to select passages from the text that allow, even call for, explicit experimentation with the theatrical form, and to reflect on how they would play with these passages in a theatrical production. An actual production would be an excellent final project; a few ideas on the topic are presented in the next session.
Cultural comparison – adapting the play
Theater is marvelously equipped to respond to the MLA call for Foreign Language curricula able to support students’ development of trans-cultural competence. Theater is at the same time culturally encoded and able to speak trans-culturally; to use Patrice Pavis’s evocative expression, theater sits particularly productively “at the crossroads of culture”, and this is why it can be a powerful tool for crafting trans-cultural experiences in the Foreign Language and Culture classroom.
Recapitulating the story: In this activity, students review the content of the play by engaging in collective story-telling. In small groups, they retell the story of the play in their own words, thus interiorizing the vocabulary learnt: taking turns in a circle, each student contributes a sentence to the narration, acknowledging the portion previously heard and continuing with the story where it was left by the previous student. The entire class then repeats the exercise together; the instructor always monitors and offers guidance, as in all the previous activities.
Across space and time: Now that the students have a refreshed, clear picture of the play, and after having discussed all of its themes and complications in the previous sessions, they are ready to engage in a complex interpretation project requiring both analytical skills and creativity. The task is to brainstorm ideas for, and then draft, an adaptation of the play: “How would you adapt this play for a modern audience? How would you make this text speak to your specific cultural context? Which aspects are relevant and which would need to be altered? What are the challenges? What are the interesting intersections?” This collective creation process allows students to personally and meaningfully explore the fabric of the text; the exercise allows them to come to a deeper understanding of the issues at play, as for example the specific cultural relevance of theatrical entertainments like Opera, and how exquisitely culturally contingent is the conception of the theatrical space.
Final project: Depending on the instructor’s preference, and on the time available, this activity could stop at the brainstorming stage and remain a hypothetical plan, or it could be developed into a full-fledged written composition and theatrical production. Students could work on the adaptation in small groups as a homework assignment, and then workshop their ideas into a class group project to be then rehearsed and performed. This would of course be a long process, which cannot be effectively summarized here, as it would develop according to the specific class’s interests, possibilities and needs. Students could then be assigned a final paper in which they reflect on the theatrical experience and on what they have learnt from it.
Final considerations
A final performance could constitute an extremely rewarding final project for all the class participants, as it would offer countless occasions for more profoundly involved reflections on the play. Of course a theatrical production project cannot fit everybody’s teaching needs and contexts; however, as the activities listed above exemplify, smaller and simpler performance exercises can provide excellent entry ways into the text and launching points for discussions.
As I have already mentioned in the introduction, all of the above is meant to encourage teachers to experiment with different techniques, adapt and modify them, and make them their own. Most of the strategies I have suggested can be recombined and recycled; for example, asking students to phrase three core points or ideas, as I suggest at the end of the pre-reading activity, can of course be a useful way of concluding other discussions as well.
Awareness of one’s learning process is a crucial component for deep and effective learning and retention; it is therefore always advisable to engage students in explicit reflections on processes. All the activities here proposed are intended to encourage such reflections and to sparkle productive discussions, which, differently from what instructors sometimes hope or expect, rarely just happen out of the blue. As educators know very well, lesson plans and syllabi should be carefully designed so that students are engaged in active learning, are guided from easier and lower-stakes activities to more complex and higher-stakes tasks, are supported in developing the skills we want them to acquire, and are provided with frequent occasions for formative feedback. The approaches and tasks here suggested might help instructors achieve these goals and build a community in which students can work within an enjoyable and safe learning environment.
A final word on the role of the instructor/teacher/facilitator/educator/… (the literature is indeed rich with terms that attempt to describe this complex figure): so much has been written on this delicate, exhausting, gratifying, impossible role, and I obviously cannot hope to address the topic in a few words; I just want to conclude by saying that it is imperative that we know both our students and ourselves really well, so that we can comfortably embark on wonderful journeys together.
Anna Santucci
(PhD Candidate, Brown University)
[1] From the Handbook of The ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University.