John Fines (1938-1999) was a practitioner who used dramatic techniques to teach history. Steeped in studying the past in an academic way, he had a sudden realisation that the teaching of history should involve children directly with the experience of meeting people from the past through the record that they left behind.
The University of Exeter described him as an expert teacher who drew upon an extensive range of teaching strategies, among which was ‘historical story telling, a way of bringing children face to face with people of the past’.
This plan is designed for UK Key Stage 4 (14-16 years). It acknowledges history as living and when harnessed with other art forms, makes a successful drama and performance project.
The First Step
Take a slice of history. True events, people or places can be localised. A particular house may still be occupied, a site may have become something else. A gravestone may exist. A link with a murder, suicide or something a bit edgy is a head start on appealing to the teenage mind.
Old or former theatres, cinemas, prisons, workhouses, hospitals, pubs, restaurants, stations, hotels, harbours, factories are good starting places. Diaries might survive. The birthplace or death-place or setting for a crime whets appetites, and usually has records to support research.
Ghosts can be effective, although the historical basis may be tenuous. A lost baby, time in a lunatic asylum or the site of a fire/drowning/execution/shooting or hanging, all lend atmosphere. There is much site-specific theatre about that draws on history.
Any one of these events/people/places, the main stimulus, can be introduced by factual evidence, or turned into a piece of improvisation and set in a modern context, to grip with the human drama, before the depth of the history is tapped into. Or go straight for the history, finding real past people and understanding their lives and tragedies.
The Second Step
Take art works inspired by the event/person/place. Paintings, etchings, litho-prints and drawing are a rich source of historical commentaries. Photography and film opened a new vista on safeguarding historical perspective.
Check grand houses, museums and galleries, newspapers and magazines. In April 2012, the centenary of the sinking of The Titanic will be marked. All the victims came from some community, somewhere.
Plays, movies, diaries, court records, songs are made about key events. At executions, songs were often sung marking the reason for the occasion. Ballads arose from tragedies (rail crashes, floods, war time losses).
Specific days, locally and nationally, are good pegs. There is Remembrance Day (around 11th November every year) celebrating wars since the First World War. January sees Holocaust Memorial Day. Bonfire Night (5th November) marks a specific act of terrorism planned but thwarted in 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
The Third Step
Take an arts practitioner with a distinctive style. Stanislavski with his system (‘Now I am somebody else’) or Brecht with his demonstrating acting ('Now I am being somebody else'). Artaud with his ‘theatre of cruelty’, getting the audience to confront their demons, is a winning one.
If it is to be melodrama, circus, thriller, sci-fi, comedy, rom-com, musical theatre, satire, surrealist or political, there are books and articles to assist in devising a framework. None of it should be too restrictive, it’s a framework for collaboration and creativity.
One Example
Take student instinct to work on revolution, rebellion and regime change. Perhaps some student has fled from a country where such unrest has occured. Or somebody is struck by the human tragedy of just one person that went on, almost unnoticed, during the uprisings.
Take the French Revolution (1789-99) as a stimulus to explore issues, ideas and feelings. The painting by Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, (1793) is a superb visual opener. The artist was in sympathy with the revolution, elected a deputy in Paris, voted for King Louis XVI’s execution and signed death warrants for over 300 ‘enemies of the people’.
His friend was fiery Revolutionary orator Jean-Paul Marat who suffered from a disfiguring skin disease requiring him to sit hours a day in his bathtub. A young Royalist, Charlotte Corday, tricked her way into his apartment on 13 July 1793 and stabbed him. David had visited him only the day before, so recalled every detail of the room for his painting.
The dying man, eyelids drooping, head on shoulder, pen in hand and peace after suffering make this a murder picture of evocative imagery, a dramatic interpretation. Such are the great ingredients of teenage drama: pain, trickery, murder by a young woman and death. It‘s also inspired adults.
Peter Weiss wrote a play, Marat/Sade, The Persecution & Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, in the 1960s. First performed by Royal Shakespeare Company, it’s a clever, twisted play within a play, drawing on the Terror of the Revolution as well as the popular practice of public watching performances and behaviour by lunatics in asylums.
The play itself is fascinating as a large cast spectacle. But if directed in the style of Artaud, as ‘a societal psychiatric treatment’, then a new dimension is encountered. Artaud explored the audience in the middle of a swirling vortex into which a performance could explode.
Peter Brook’s 1967 film of the play was described by Fright.com as ‘infamous’ and ‘one of the screen’s great depictions of unfettered insanity, as well as a historical drama with definite contemporary relevance’. It’s confrontational, provocative and stunningly filmed; ideal for teenagers.
So one incident gave rise to many creative works in different genres. Almost any historical subject is suitable for researching, making and refining performance drama with young people.
Sources:
- University of Exeter, History Resource. Web 27 August 2011.
- Teaching Primary History, by John Fines and Jon Nichol (Heinemann Education), 1997. Chapter 14 ‘Story Telling’.
- Art and History, The Death of Marat. Web 27 August 2011.
- Fright.com, Marat/Sade. Web 27 August 2011.
David Porter - Member of Parliament (1987-97), district councillor, party political organiser, former teacher of drama and now retired Head of Performing ...
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