Thursday, August 25, 2011
Brian Cook: "“Alternative(s) in Education: Alternative Practitioners as Tutors in Drama Schools"
In this paper, I will use archival documents and interviews with cast and crew, to explore the work of an alternative company, Cherub and its artistic director Andrew Visnevski, in educational environments. I will first look at the company’s early production phase of tours to schools (Monster Man and Donkey Work) and doing set texts designed for secondary school audiences. While most of Cherub’s artistic work was either praised or reviled by those that attended (one of the the Arts Council’s reviewers notably calling its work “jerk-off theatre”), Cherub’s school productions were not dumbed-down for the younger audience.
In 1998, after nearly 20 years of producing with no government subsidy, Cherub undertook a co-production of Brecht’s The Life of Edward II of England with the acting conservatory programme at Arts Educational Schools London. The goal of the partnership, in part, was to allow the Arts Ed students to have professional experience prior to completing the course. Once again, the production was either loved or hated by those who saw it.
This paper will seek to sort out why an alternative director (especially one who had been labeled “stylistically incompatible” while in drama school himself) might seek to bring his work to educational institutions. Further, how did the landscape within these institutions shift during the course of the 1980s and 1990s? If Visnevski had wanted to teach at the start of his career in the late 1970s, would he have been welcomed as he was in the late 1990s?
2 comments:
Hi Brian, thank you your paper. It was educative on many levels (forgive the pun). I found that your opening with Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s ‘cultivated elite’ critique of the education system was a helpful frame for reading Visnevski’s place in British acting/theatre school. The two lingering questions I have for you are: 1) you mention Visnevski’s ‘spare’ style quite often, but I was hoping to hear more about this and how it relates being ‘non-compatible’; How exactly did this contradict the way the ACGB probably want him to ‘play the game’ 2) It seems that your argument is edging towards creating a binary understanding of Visnevksi’s role – uncanny Polish guy versus the British ‘boy next door’ prototype. At some points you acknowledge that he found a middle ground and I was interested in this way of understanding his role and development rather than what sometimes seems to be a binary drama (even at one point indicating the ACGB wanted Cherub to die). I guess I’m wondering to what degree the radical nature of Visnevksi’s story might be reflective of or influenced by his self-reporting?
There might be an element of that here, but you have to place the company within its proper historical context. What’s remarkable is how commonplace a lot of what they were doing in the 1980s has become today. Remember, it wasn’t until the late 80s that companies like Complicite were no longer classed and funded as “dance” companies; a visual take on performance was one thing; a visual take on Shakespeare was quite another. I think the ACGB documents make it fairly clear that Cherub was NOT a company that the ACGB wanted to fund, largely because it rejected the company’s specifically alternative mission.
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