Teaching is performative.
Think about it. Teachers wear costumes; alter the way they act, and change how they present themselves. For instance, one might alter the way they physically stand to signal a level command (no teacher wants to be walked over and lose their position of authority). Or on the contrary, one might enact the opposite to display a sense of calmness, tranquility, and patience. After all, no decent teacher wants to create an environment of distress.
This seems obvious. Of course teachers are performing while in the classroom. Who doesn’t perform when in a work environment?
Furthermore, we can always take it to the next echelon and say something like: we’re performing as one character when we’re with friends and summoning a different character when with family. It’s not that any of these iterations of yourself aren’t you – they all are; we just present these different roles of ourselves in different situations. Even “alone you” is a unique version of yourself that is just as true and sincere as the others.
I find these ponderings fascinating. I have for quite some time. That’s why I have spent an ample amount of time over the years trying to delve further into these ideas.
The amalgamation of teaching and acting is a natural one for me; I have graduate degrees in both education and theatre, so I couldn’t help but notice the overlap.
I went to college wanting to be a writer. I thought I couldn’t do much with an English degree so I majored in English Education. Prior to college the only acting experience I had was my riveting portrayal of Tree #6 in my Kindergarten production of The Three Little Pigs. It was during my undergraduate studies though that I discovered a newly formed acting club called E.S.T.A (Emerging Student Theatre Artists) and an Improv club to boot. I joined both and instantaneously got bit by the proverbial acting bug. In many ways, I was learning the crafts of teaching and acting simultaneously.
I enjoyed performing so much that when I completed my student teaching, and was offered a full time job at Long Beach Middle School, I turned it down to study and subsequently pursue an acting career.
When I was a freshman in college I took a course in Educational Philosophy. It was one of the best college courses I ever took and certainly my favorite Education course. In it, we studied the pedagogy of the great educators - instructors like Socrates, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William James, John Dewey, Maxine Greene, Nel Noddings, Paulo Freire, and Cornel West.
The success of the course and the impact it had on me was in no doubt due to the individual who taught it: Doctor Joan Walker. I would later find out, she too, coming from a music background, had a keen interesting in the relationship between teaching and performing.
Doctor Walker soon moved on to Pace University and in 2012 (after I had earned my graduate degree in Education and was currently enrolled in my graduate studies for acting), she invited me to teach a workshop in her class. The topic she suggested? You guessed it.
I rattled my brain, trying to come up with an exercise that adequately showcased the performative nature of teaching.
Could acting techniques help both professional and aspiring teachers? Do both acting and education boil down to the same concept?
I thought they might. The concept I wished to probe was Listening and Responding. Sounds simple enough - but any actor will tell you it’s harder than it sounds. Being in the moment allows your body and mind to take in any incoming stimuli and act accordingly at a relatively fast pace. This concept is (or at least should be) the cornerstone for any acting program. Listening and Responding refers to truly taking in one’s partner and what they say and truly responding based off what they have given you. This simple notion allows the actor and the teacher to be in, as I just mentioned, “the moment.”
What I often find is that many of us take for granted what being in the moment means. If you are standing in a classroom and do not hear the sounds of the air conditioner or florescent lights you are not truly in the moment. If you walked into a building and could not tell me the color of the flowers outside – you were not in the moment. Where were you? In your own head!
This concept helped me in the classroom by allowing me to take control of distractions. When you stand in front of a class and you are thinking about your car at the mechanic, or how you feel you are unprepared for the day, or how your significant other is home sick, or why Johnny is walking in late – being in the moment acts as a tool or technique to better your concentration and awareness skills.
Be in the moment, teach!
I decided to test this idea at Pace University, though I was nervous about how a graduate education class would respond to theatrical activities like improvisation. I decided to start with theatre games as they are a rudimentary way to teach “listening and responding” and “being in the moment.” Luckily, they more than obliged. I taught a game entitled Zip-Zap-Zop.
If you are unaware of the game here are the basics: I gathered all the students in a big circle. You start the game by pointing at another person in the circle and say "Zip!" That participant, with no hesitation, must immediately point to another player and say, "Zap!" That player must, in turn, immediately points to another person and say, "Zop!" And that person must immediately point to someone else and say, "Zip" and on it on it goes until someone makes a mistake by either saying the wrong word in the wrong order or by hesitating too long. When this inevitably happens that player is eliminated, and someone starts the cycle again.
When the education students began playing, I suddenly saw a transformation in the classroom. Those who seemed uninterested in the beginning began to have an acute awareness about was occurring around them. They were using the majority of their senses and they were engaged and focused. I thought perhaps I was on to something.
When I was an undergraduate I felt the most practical aspect of my education training was student teaching. When I stepped into the classroom every theory went out the window. Those greats I mentioned before – people like Jean Piaget, John Locke, and Nel Noddings - became strangers.
Thus, while I was teaching this workshop I wanted to do something practical. So I turned to improvisation and created an activity. I took numerous strips of paper and wrote an action and a number on each slip. For example: Slip #1 read: Go to leave the room. If the teacher questions you, shrug your shoulders and sit back down. Another read: Start coughing – you don't mean to be rude – you just can't stop. I made enough slips for almost every student. Then I asked for a volunteer to teach the class a mini-lesson – anything they wanted. Someone volunteered and he began numbering the board and told us we were going to learn the seven-step process on how to correctly throw a football. He told us the first step and wrote it on the board. I consequently called out a number and the person who had the corresponding slip acted out the instruction, providing a distraction. When the teacher finished dealing with the issue, I called another number. And then another. And then two at a time. Then three. The student giving the lesson was overwhelmed. He had no idea how to act. In twenty minutes he got through two steps of his seven-step lesson. He had wasted all of his time attempting to deal the issues I had constructed. His remedies, however, were only hurting him in the long run. We had numerous students attempt to teach a mini-lesson. No one got through their plan completely in the allotted time. After the activity, we had a discussion and attempted to answer how each potential teacher could have performed better.
For me, it was an eye-opening experience. Through this activity I witnessed how the merging of the acting world and the education world benefited both teachers and students. I had the opportunity to reflect upon the experience the following year when I was asked to give a lecture at the 10th Conference of Elementary-Secondary Teaching & Learning (CESTL) in 2013.
Sponsored by the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, College of Education, Information and Technology, Provost's Office, and Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLI) Instructional Innovation Grant, the Conference of Elementary-Secondary Teaching & Learning (CESTL) is a semi-annual one-day conference on teaching and learning at both the elementary and secondary school level. If you made it through that – congratulations.
Doctor Dengting Boyanton originally founded CESTL in 2007 at University of Texas at Brownsville. It was Doctor Boyanton herself who invited me to share my experience.
Doctor Dengting Boyanton and I after she came to see me perform as Laertes in a production of Hamlet in 2013. Some professors really go all out.
Aside from describing and reflecting upon my specific experience at Pace, I used the opportunity at CESTL to dispense more observations and pose more questions.
I realized acting could help many non-actors outside of Education as well. After some research I learned that successful business companies often hire improv troupes to teach their employees to think better on their feet, in the moment.
I also told the story of a friend I had with confidence problems. He was not someone comfortable in his own skin. I recommended acting classes. A major byproduct of acting class is confidence. Students are encouraged to be themselves without judgment. Anything goes in acting, so students are taught that they can be themselves and be confident. Ideally, students get over debilitating shyness and become proud of who they are.
A good acting program will teach students about speaking skills; pronunciation, volume and elocution are all covered. Students learn how to speak in front of others and conquer their fears of talking in front of a large crowd.
I ended my lecture with a mental keepsake: “I leave you with this simple reminder: Live in the moment and whenever you are feeling anxious or overwhelmed, simply listen...and respond.”
I have gone back to Pace University many times since the aforementioned workshop to continue this journey alongside Joan Walker.
The second time I visited her classroom at Pace, which was in 2013, Joan threw an interesting curveball into the mix.
She wished to blend together technology and the performing arts in an educational setting. That is, she envisioned using technology to arouse student interests and to present them with problem-solving challenges. She brought me in along with another artist – Anna Savant. We would then, to quote Joan, “Magically, on the fly, using our wits and inspiration, use acting methods and our knowledge of classroom teaching to offer them some strategies for: managing their anxieties, looking like a teacher even when they are uncertain, the importance of speaking clearly and firmly, and "flipping" a challenging student into a cooperative one.”
Anna, Joan, and myself magically using our wits.
The technology she was speaking of was known as an Avatar Session – a program where potential teachers (the students) would interact with a group of fictitious students. I remember getting nervous myself at the thought of it!
On the day, once IT had the program launched, Doctor Walker gave a demonstration of the technology. Cue freaked out students. Anna and I had the pleasure to, as Joan put it, “Coach em’ up!”
Anna explained the concept of status (in improvisational theater, status refers to the power difference in the relationship between two characters) to the students and interacted with the avatars using high and low status personae. This gave the students a sense of how it worked and how the avatar students were likely to respond. Anna then led an activity called The Master-Servant Disaster (sometimes it’s called I’m Sorry, Sir).
The game requires two players and as you might have guessed - one is a master and the other is a servant. The master asks the servant for something simple but the servant will always deny the request by explaining why this task is impossible. The master always accepts this and asks for something else, which also turns out to be beyond the bounds of possibility (each question the master asks must make logical sense, as if that’s the next appropriate question). Every time the servant has to explain why the demand is not possible, the situation gets worse, until the big-picture circumstance turns out to be an absolute disaster.
The aim of this activity is cognitive flexibility. It is a way to teach adaptable and responsive thinking. Participants almost always have fun.
The students themselves transferred this concept of status via a brief interaction with the avatars.
Joan also wanted to stress the value of improvisation in the classroom and that’s where I came in.
I recalled some anecdotes on how improvisation (usually defined as the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found) had helped me in teaching situations. Then we played some improv games – games that made them think and act quickly.
After all of this, the students interacted again with the avatars, trying to incorporate, as Joan referred to it as, “the joie de vivre of improv and/or the posture of high status into their interactions.”
It was a riveting and wonderful experiment in the exploration of this seemingly symbiotic relationship between acting and teaching.
Me improvising the joie de vivre of improv
Joan and I collaborated in other ways as well over the years. She directed an industrial where I had the privilege to act opposite the great Benjamin Moore (a Designated Linklater Voice Teacher who holds a Diploma from the Moscow Art Theatre School). We played Mr. Gaita and Mr. Bolden in a project for students wishing to become teachers. In it, we acted out different versions of a parent-teacher conference. It was sort of a “this is the right way to handle this situation” versus “definitely don’t do this in this moment” kind of thing.
We did a similar project at the end of 2015, this time focusing on Latina mothers and a non-Latin teacher in a set of simulated parent-teacher conferences. In these filmed scenarios, the teacher makes several mistakes and the conversation is not a success; in the “do-over” scene the teacher uses different tactics and the conversation is more productive. Creating and comparing the scenes is intended to demonstrate that teachers can engage parents as partners, no matter their cultural and economic resources.
The icing on top of the cake for me was that I was given the freedom to cast my peers and colleagues. I was honored to have the talents of Talia Marrero, Emily Tafur, and Amanda Dupuy come in and play.
Talia, Greg, Amanda, and Emily. One Pace Plaza, New York, NY!
On a personal note, the experience was unexpectedly personal for me as someone who is half-Hispanic. My mother was born in Spanish Harlem to Puerto Rican parents. English is her second language. It made me wonder if any of the simulations we were creating, were relatable to her to some degree when I was an elementary school student.
I digress.
In 2016, Joan Walker temporarily moved to DC to work at the National Science Foundation. She’s been unsurprisingly busy in her career, being promoted to Associate Provost for Academic Affairs at Pace just last year.
This March I was once again a guest speaker in one of Joan’s education classes; only this time it was via ZOOM due to Covid-19. Obviously, my function was to discuss the connection between performing and teaching. This time, however, felt a bit different, not just because of ZOOM, but because I was joining a different course than usual. This particular class was anchored in the examination of history, philosophy, legal and social responsibilities associated with schooling. There was a particular focus placed on the role language serves across all interactive domains of society and the role of the teacher as an agent of change and empowerment. I found it all very fascinating. The key ideas addressed that day were:
What does it mean to have a ‘teacher presence’?
In terms of managing performance anxiety, what can you do to ‘psyche yourself up’
I didn’t really teach a lesson per se but rather I was there to answer questions in relation to these concepts. The task had me thinking of the relationship between teaching and acting in a distinct way.
Actors often seek out that esoteric, mystical enigma called presence. They say you either have it or you don’t. Contrarily, one of the aims (or at the very least – an outgrowth) of the acting technique I was taught, Suzuki, is to teach or command stage presence through the utter control of your body and a character’s physical life.
Teachers require a presence too. Their demeanors must exude control. They are the person in charge; the person students should want to look up to as a guiding light in their educational journey.
When actors audition, especially for theatre, we very often hear the phrase fill the space! It means be aware and take advantage of the space you are occupying. Use it to your advantage. Get creative with it. You want your energy to fill the room.
When I was a college student, unlike high school, I would never sit in the back or in the corner of the classroom. I no longer wanted to give the impression that I would rather not be seen; I wanted my teachers to know that I wanted to be there and nowhere else. Conversely, this is doubly important for teachers. If students can sense, through body language, that you would rather be somewhere else, you’ve already lost them. Why should they give their maximum effort when you aren’t giving yours?
Be aware of your body. The cliché’s hold weight. Stand up straight. Plant your feet firmly on the floor (I can go into a whole tirade on the foot to floor relationship but that sounds like another article entirely). Keep your chin parallel to the ground.
Any good actor knows there is power in stillness. Nervous and unsure characters move around a lot. Steadfast characters are grounded. The same is true in real life.
Of course you don’t want to be an overbearing authoritarian in the classroom either. You want to be caring and compassionate. Make eye contact, smile when others are excited, be open to that sense of wonder students experience.
Be able to modify your physical life depending on the situation at hand. Sometimes teachers need to manifest a greater sense of leadership. Other times, it can be advantageous to be more sensitive. Listen more, talk less; let them know you care and are concerned. Sometimes it’s perfectly okay to express your humanity through vulnerability in your posture.
Presence is, of course, not limited to the physicality of the teacher. It also takes the form of speech. The way one speaks has a direct correlation to presence. Theatrical actors must hit the back row of the theater with their volume. So too must the teacher with the back row of the classroom.
When acting, I’m very aware of the pacing of my lines. There should be peaks and valleys in your speech so that nothing sounds like it exists on the same plane – that gets boring real quick. Be conscious of when your speaking quickly and when your speaker slowly. They both have their advantages. Slowing down allows you to highlight a point.
Statements should sound declarative. Questions often end with a higher pitch in your voice so make sure you end assertions on a descending pitch. It helps sell your declaration.
Your tone should match the subject matter – serious matters call for reverence. There’s a time and a place for humor – choose selectively.
I can hear playwrights and screenwriters shouting, “Less is more!” This is true for creating a linguistic presence as well. There is something to be said for being concise and decisive. Obviously, use these tools sparingly as you also want to be able to admit your mistakes and listen to challenges in an open and respectful manner.
And don’t go off on tangents! Not everything needs to be a monologue.
A teacher’s presence and an actor’s presence are not mutually exclusive concepts. They require awareness and the wisdom to know when to implement specific techniques.
Okay - on to the second topic of the ZOOM class – managing performance anxiety!
To this day I get butterflies right before I go onstage. I also get jitters right before stepping into a classroom. I think this is not only normal but essential to some degree. It means you care. Also, I have personally found that nervous energy translates really nicely into a lively, spirited energy once you are “performing.”
Everyone needs that point of access into a character, whether that character is fictitious or just another iteration of you. For many actors, it may be the shoes, costume, or makeup that separates them from who they are portraying. The same applies for teachers.
I reported to the students how their very own professor once told me that she became “Miss Walker” when she applied her lipstick in her office moments before entering class. That was how she got into “character.”
For some it may be the tie; for others it might be a belt. It doesn’t really matter – it’s just something that helps get you in and out of character in order to help maintain stability. After all, actors don’t want to bring those less than desirable characters home with them.
Imagine if Daniel Day-Lewis taught “Acting” Like a Teacher!?
As an actor I also have a pre-show routine. I shared my custom with the students, as I believe it can be just as helpful to teachers.
Before a performance I carry out a series of vocal warm-ups to prepare my voice. Not only does it help warm up my vocal chords, it also reminds me to speak from my diaphragm and not my throat. Teachers and actors both engage in a lot of speaking and so it becomes imperative to not misuse your instrument. For us, our voice is everything; we need to take care of it. Decaf tea with honey is the go-to pre-performance drink for me (especially when I’m on tour and have many shows in a row for an extended amount of time). I try to avoid caffeine, sugar, and alcohol before a performance as I find they dry out my voice.
I also meditate before “the big moment.” Whether it’s a performance, audition, or a lecture, mediating sooths my nerves and helps me focus. If everything around me is chaotic and out of my control, I turn to my breath as the one thing I surely have command over in any given moment. It allows me to take all my thoughts and attempt to wash them away as I continue to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. It’s rejuvenating. For me, it acts as the calm before the storm that allows me to walk straight into the tempest with a greater sense of control and a bit less anxiety.
My sense was that the students responded well to the conversation. I left feeling extremely refreshed knowing that these students were expanding the scope of effective teaching. The experience also allowed me to expand my own connection to performance and teaching in relation to combating bias. I think Doctor Walker and I stumbled onto some interesting discoveries and ideas that day (as I’m sure she does everyday!). I'm always honored to get a glimpse into what will be the next generation of educators.
This is where the journey currently, but not permanently, ends. I would like to thank my good friend, Doctor Joan Walker, for including me on this captivating adventure. Acting and Education represent two major parts of my life. I very much hope to continue exploring the conjunction between the two disciplines as they never cease to amaze me the more I think on them.