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| STEFAN MOBERG |
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 Photo: Sten Lövstrand |
The following article was written for an educational company with which
I have co-operated since the early nineties. The intention was to give
their employees some arguments to convince customers of the positive effects
of including a tailor-made stage show in the educational programmes these
customers were interested in. It also wanted to warn against some common
errors teachers commit when referring to a play in group discussions or
such.
Why use theatre to introduce serious questions in an educational programme? If your only aim is to inform, instruct or teach hard facts of whatever kind you are probably much better off using any pedagogic approach but a theatre performance to get the desired result. Theatre speaks more to your senses than to your reasoning, more to the pit of your stomach than to your intellect. You could say that the theatre is a lot better at asking questions than at supplying answers. But - the questions have to be asked and understood before they can be discussed. And this is where the theatre is outstanding. Because in the theatre, you can create characters. Try describing any human dilemma in long essays, draw graphs on overhead film, and sit through long group discussions in order to reach an understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved. Then stage the same situations with a few actors, using a minimum of dialogue, and within moments every person in the audience has seen, recognised and understood the very core of the problem from his or her personal experience. The theatre offers a simple shortcut to understanding of all that is possible to express in terms of human relations. It creates an identification for the spectator, who experiences that he or she also has been seen and understood. To put it paradoxically, using drama takes the drama out of the issue at hand. A delicate question is a lot easier to come to terms with when you have had a few good laughs over it together with others. A theatre performance dealing with a specific subject often breaks the ice. Suddenly you find yourself engaged in a talk on subjects you have been keeping to yourself, or thought you were the only one to be mulling over. But it is dangerous to try and provide a set of correct answers to the questions posed in a play or show of this kind, and use them when chairing a discussion. Every one in the audience has had a unique experience, and it is the comparing of these experiences that result in rewarding talks. It made me think about...., I recognised..., or I did not like... are all of them interesting reactions. It is, on the other hand, completely uninteresting whether the spectator has understood what a scene or a sequence was about or not. I could go so far as to claim that the less an audience has understood, the greater are the possibilities that something might happen to influence their set of beliefs and values. When it comes down to it, I find that there is only one question really worth putting to someone who just has seen a stage performance. That question is: What do you remember? In my experience that question may get a shattering answer, an unexpected answer or a funny answer, but never an uninteresting answer. Feel free to copy and use the above, but please refer to the source. Stefan Moberg |