Research or Craft?

: Nine Theses on Educating Future Performing

Artists
Heiner Goebbels, Emma Lew Thomas

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 35, Number 1, January

2013 (PAJ 103), pp. 43-48 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/paj/summary/v035/35.1.goebbels.html

Access provided by Universidade de São Paulo (3 Oct 2013 23:24 GMT)

 THE EDUCATION OF THE ARTIST

Research or Craft?
Nine Theses on Educating Future
Performing Artists

Heiner Goebbels
Translated by Emma Lew Thomas

1.

W
hen we talk about educating performing artists, we are speaking about
the end of a very long chain. All our existing schools in theatre and
performance-related skills and craft — for actors, dancers, singers, musi-
cians, directors, stage set, and costume designers — are the result of an aesthetic
convention developed over a long period of time. All educational institutions were
founded with the sole intention of delivering new blood, trained personnel for the
operative institutions to present, evening after evening, ballets, operas, concerts, plays,
and musicals. They are the result of an existing artistic practice that is at least one
hundred years-old; the founding principles for opera training are, in fact, quite a bit
older. They were not conceived to renew or revise the aesthetic, much less consider
questioning the structures and institutions, for which they are educating young aspi-
rants. Because of this, the education for the existing “  market” is the last and slowest
link in a chain formed by art, art institutions, and training for the art institutions.

It’s fine and fair, an important goal, that upon graduation the alumni will be in line
to get quite reliable jobs at theatres and opera houses, but it is irresponsible not to
prepare them at the same time for an insecure and far more complex future. And with
each generation of graduates we run the risk of legitimizing and stabilizing the pre-
vailing view of artistic disciplines as they are conceived of by established institutions.

Instead of this we should educate clever young artists who are also capable of
developing their own aesthetic. And we mustn’t do this, as if we, as teachers, know
what it should be. We don’t know. The future of performing arts is, hopefully, not
foreseeable; to prepare students for the approaching complex reality, we must involve
them in our research and enable them to do their own experiments.

© 2012 Heiner Goebbels PAJ 103 (2013), pp. 43–48.   43

2.

Every craft, every technique is ideological. Speech training can delete the sound of
your personality; it can silence the biography, the accent, and the originality of your
own voice in order to meet the requirements for a given aesthetic standard. This is
also true for operatic voice training and for other performance areas, for learning
roles in acting and in the directorial strategies in drama departments that are at a
loss in how to deal artistically with non-psychological post-dramatic texts, those
without characterization or linear narration. In acting training, you rarely find for-
mal “  external” techniques taught that go beyond “  empathy.” Many training methods
try to make us believe in the “  naturalness” of classical conventions. And ignorance
of the accomplishments of avant-garde theatre of the twentieth century continues
deliberately to set us back. How long has it lasted (and how many stagings by Robert
Wilson have we seen) before we seriously accepted what Adolphe Appia had already
proposed more than a century ago, that stage lighting can be an independent art
form and not just a means to enhance the visibility of the actors or the set design?

We urgently need the luxury of artistic research to replace the current concentra-
tion on classical craft and its training methods. If we teach training methods, then
we need to acknowledge diversity and variety and always to be aware of historical
implications. We need to foster wide openness in those who are studying in order to
conquer the clichés that the seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds get about their future
profession as actors or directors from film, TV, musicals, or high school theatre. For
many, their professional decisions probably come too early. For this reason, consider
this question: in auditions for these disciplines, are we attracting, considering, and
choosing the right clientele?

3.

Time is crucial — even in a longer perspective. We don’t have to dedicate every pos-

sible minute of the curriculum to skill and technical training, rather we should enable
emerging young artists to constantly ponder the ever-changing concept of art and
not simply to accept the repertory, the works, the genre as presented. It takes time to
read, to reflect theoretically about what you are working on, to listen to contemporary
music, to go to museums to see and to experience the related arts, and to try out the
latest performance strategies. Only in this way will students develop personal artistic
insight and be able to be drawn into contemporary artistic discourse. And only then
can the young presenters and performers become collaborators in the production
rather than being only portrayers. As singer or as dancer, can you be clear about what
your training is good for? What it means in the twenty-first century? What happens
in the spectator, when people on stage begin to sing or dance?

Time is crucial — even in a longer perspective. Artistic development, the growth of

taste and aesthetic criteria cannot be squeezed into three or four years. Instead of
deciding on a major too early, there should be time to develop a personal, enlight-
ened contemporary concept of performing arts before you have to decide whether

44    PAJ 103

to become an actor or set designer or director. Perhaps even question the strict
separation into diverse disciplines: the separation between director and performer,
technician and stage designer/constructor. If we want to prepare for ways of work-
ing that are less hierarchal, we should neither encourage the students to develop a
huge ego nor make them practice the division of labor as we learned it from recog-
nized institutions and have copied into today’s curricula. Rather, we should convey
to them their social competence in teamwork, capable of collaboration and mature
personal responsibility. Important directing and performance collectives are already
contributing to building widely recognizable alternatives.

4.

“Art” is — in a formulation by the German systems-theorist Niklas Luh-

mann — defined “  by the implausibility of its origination.” And when we apply this
definition to the conventional business of theatres, where a program is presented
every evening, we might realize that the theatre is not dealing with art at all, but
with conversation and craft. If art is the unpredictability of the anticipated, it means
working without compromises and allowing everything to be questioned.

We shouldn’t limit the possibilities of the stage to recounting all too well-known
stories, formulating messages for an underestimated audience, and making state-
ments about reality. We can understand theatre as artistic “ experience” using all
means at our disposal and be sure that the audience is mature, ready, and generally
smarter that the small team that has dreamed up the play. And if we can accept
that aesthetic experience is the experiencing of the unknown, of the “  other” — an
experience that opens our eyes, gives wings to our imagination, an experience for
which we have no words — then the performing arts, that is, opera, theatre, dance,
performance — must uncompromisingly reject the conventions that are hiding so
discretely behind many unquestioned assumptions.

One of the basic assumptions of theatre is the unquestioned value of “  presence”

and “ intensity.” Learning from the visual arts, you can also have the opposite
experience: in many contemporary works you can experience how “  absence” has
an enormous power of attraction for an individual viewer. The artistic experience
of the onlooker can be not only the direct mirror image and identification with a
virtuosic protagonist on the stage, but also — and theatre and opera can learn this
from the fragmented, abstract, deformed, and sometimes barely observable bodies in
contemporary dance — as indirect contact, as a mediated encounter with an unknown
third party.

An important part of the education for theatre must consist of teaching and research-
ing performing arts in the context of contemporary developments in their sister
arts — music, visual arts, non-dramatic literature. The fact that theatre publishers still
continue to print texts with characters and roles and the usual cast (2M, 3F), and
this, so many years after Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, and Sarah
Kane — that’s the real drama.

GOEBBELS / Research or Craft?   45

5.

We must not underestimate the power and gravity of the institution. In Germany
we have hundreds of publically funded city and state theatres: they are excellent and
internationally known for their performances and for cultivating their repertories, but
they constantly demonstrate how inflexible they are when it comes to structurally
developing new productions and presentation forms. They have a hard time dealing
with the unknown. They are based on the national German language only, ignoring
the internationality of art forms, society, and the “  foreign” language of others, and
aping other media.

As a spectator, you know the repertory, the plays, you know the spaces, if you sub-
scribe you know your seat-mates on the left and the right, you know the directors
and the members of the ensemble, and if not yet, at the beginning of the season they
become familiar to you in large head shots. Many theatres are based on recognition
and familiarity, and that is the opposite of artistic experience.

For the artists who work there, the institutional formulation is an a priori requirement
that rarely is questioned and seldom connected to a conscious decision. With the
exception of a few houses, the institutions can scarcely allow themselves the question
of what really defines a project; to do that, time and money are lacking. They answer
only the questions: what does the house need? what is good for the institution? the
actors? the singers? the orchestra? the workshops? the repertory? the season? the
public? Compatibility with the institution is the first requirement for artistic deci-
sions. Even in contemporary opera, in most cases only the sound changes — not the
standardized cast, not the dramaturgy, not the production relationships, and not the
relationship to the public or the structure of perception.

6.

Theatre is a collaborative art form. Even the technique and each of its elements
(lighting, costumes, video, sound, space, etc.) are never merely neutral tools. When
Brecht advocated “  separating the elements,” he imagined a theatre in which each
element would be developed so that it could show its own artistic strength and
power rather than remaining a useful illustrative accessory.

It is always obvious, how theatre functions. When you see a production in film or in
the theatre, you don’t see just the way the director works with the actors. You also see
how authoritatively (or ignorant or illustrative) other elements are used that are the
work of techies, collaborators and other artists. With a flat hierarchy and cooperat-
ing teamwork in which the participants have the space, the time, and the freedom
to further their own disciplines, a polyphony of elements can occur that allows the
piece to be experienced from different perspectives. A polyphony that provides many
approaches and allows the spectators to bring together their individual impressions
from the many that are presented.

46    PAJ 103

In many contemporary works the concept of “  Drama” has been shifting for a long
time, away from the psychological confrontation of representative roles and figures
on the stage towards a drama of perception, of feelings, of the elements.

7.

Fantasy is dangerous. Heiner Müller warned us about it: “  I have no fantasy. None
at all. People with fantasy are permanently in danger of the difficulties of reality. I
can’t imagine anything. I don’t even have ideas. I wait until something comes by.”
There are artists, who have visions, and they suffer from this — like their collabora-
tors — because it is so difficult to realize these visions in the face of so many dif-
ficulties. Everywhere people say: We don’t have the money, the dream cast, or the
time to rehearse.

And there are artists who prefer to observe, to look, to discover possibilities and try
to transform these into something never experienced before. This can make us happy
because the result for all participants goes beyond expectations and is surprising.
This way of working is not only cheaper but also costs less energy. You don’t have
to spend a lot to build ideal worlds, you can react to what is already there. A certain
amount of limitation is thoroughly helpful.

The theatre needs no artists with visions. What happens on the stage is not important.
It isn’t even important what we show on stage, rather what we conceal, in order to
allow the public to discover on their own. To create a space for the imagination of
the spectators, where the texts are unlocked and the images are opened to the eyes
of the spectators.

8.

Creativity needs time. Slowing down in the “  society of spectacle” (Guy Debord) is
increasingly seen as a subversive quality. We don’t have to copy the tempo that is
offered to us by media. Time is important, if we don’t want to repeat ourselves as
artists. We must resist — as artists as well as theatres — producing too much in too
short a time. More importantly we should concern ourselves with making a good
work and keeping it alive for a long time.

9.

Add to the statements that I that I most hear and most hate: “  That is a good story.”
The depth of a good story limits the rich possibilities of the stage. I agree with Ger-
trude Stein: “  Everything which is not a story could be a play.” For: “  What is the use
of telling stories, since there are so many and everybody knows so many and tells
so many? It is perfectly extraordinary how many complicated dramas go on all the
time. And everybody knows them, so why tell another one?” Theatre — as an art
form — can do so much more than that.

GOEBBELS / Research or Craft?   47

The ideas contained in this article were delivered August 2010 as the keynote speech
for a Symposium on Talent Development, sponsored by Festivals Edinburgh and
Arts Council England.

HEINER GOEBBELS is a German composer and director who has cre-

ated numerous music theatre works, staged concerts, and compositions for
ensembles and orchestras. His productions, several of which have been seen
at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, include The Man in
the Elevator, Black on White, Eislermaterial, Hashirigaki, Songs of Wars I Have
Seen. His concert with the Hilliard Ensemble, I went to the house but did not
enter, was recently seen in the White Light Festival at the Rose Theater. He
is the artistic director for 2012–2014 of the International Festival of the Arts,
Ruhr Triennale, where he staged John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2. Goebbels
is a Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig
University, Giessen, Germany. From 2002–2011 he founded the Hessian
Theatre Academy, the Hessian Film and Media Academy, tanzlabor_21 and
Frankfurt LAB. He lectures frequently on the performing arts and education.
He is the recipient of the 2012 International Ibsen Award.

EMMA LEW THOMAS, a Meisterschulerin of Mary Wigman, performed in

her works in the 1950s and also studied with Harald Kreutzberg, Rosalia
Chladak, Anna Sokolow, and Sigurd Leeder while dancing in Mannheim,
Berlin, Paris, and Zurich. More than two decades ago she became the first
guest professor of dance history appointed to a German university, at the
Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Giessen. With a PhD in German litera-
ture from Indiana University, she has been teaching dance history at UCLA
since 1971 (now as professor emerita) and continues to lecture, write, and
explore her passion for translating movement sources into historical dance
performance. Locally, she is president of the board of Lula Washington
Dance Theater, Dance History Project of Southern California steering com-
mittee member.

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