dying there of thirst

Yesterday one of my students, a grade ten boy from Kenya and to whom English is a second language, was very happy to see me. (He wasn't happy to see me because I am me, he was happy to see me because he needed me to sign his fieldtrip permission form.) Nonetheless, I felt extremely flattered when he dug for an English statement to express his pleasure at finding me and said, with his beautiful African accent, "Teacher, you are more than luck!"


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This morning I attended an acting workshop which alarmed me greatly.

The facilitator of the workshop was a professional actor and director and I don't doubt his methods are effective for working with professional actors. In fact his workshop reminded me of being in acting classes in university in which we were sometimes challenged beyond breaking point to dig for elusive emotions. The problem I didn't have with it back then that I'm old and cynical (or aware?) enough to have a problem with now, is the fact that the average untrained person doesn't have the necessary skill for digging around in the human psyche without risking potential harm. This man wasn't a psychologist, he was a director.

He was looking for a specific kind of vulnerability in one of the volunteer actors, and went rooting through her memories seeking for a moment that could evoke that feeling. He struck gold when he found a story about domestic violence. The volunteer actor kept trying to tell him her memory was too unpleasant for this activity, for this audience, and for her to handle right now... and he just wouldn't back off. He kept pushing her backward into that experience and if it made me as uncomfortable to witness as it did, I can't really imagine how uncomfortable it was for her. Finally, after revealing a portion of her story (leaving out the climax which my imagination has filled in) he asked her to rewind the story again and choose the evocative words from the story (birthday, blue and white striped dress, kids at daycare, etc.) and say those words to herself before attempting to act out the scene we were working on. She'd protested gently several times. Finally she just said, "No". Then the director was awkward. His technique had failed, he'd gone too far, and the workshop participants were uncomfortable.

And yet he kept pedaling forward. (I don't really blame him. There was no other direction to go if he ever wanted to find a door through which to escape.) He finally had the sense to stop cornering the actor, but still insisted on winding up with comments about how this type of exercise could be used in our drama classes with our students to add layers to their acting.

What this man didn't seem to understand is that this would be an irresponsible thing to do with a group of teenagers. Now that I have (a small amount of) training in counselling, my awareness of this danger is heightened. It's a risk. The average person may be able to pull someone's guts out and lay them on a stage, but the average person doesn't have the skill to tuck them all back in afterward. So someone is left raw and bleeding.

Watching this happen brought back a lot of memories about why I left acting. I had directors like this who left me feeling that way.

Somehow I was less sensitive when I was young and I could tuck my own guts back in. The older I got the more sensitive and less capable of doing that I became.



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