Dr Neil Béchervaise

NB Consulting (Australasia) Pty Ltd

Ambiguity, Narrative and Cultural Conflict: Dramatic Tension or the Impossible Dream?

© Neil Béchervaise

Abstract

While many of the accepted pedagogical principles underlying both research and teaching in Drama have been directed towards commonality and convergence, recent research and significant changes in migration have established the need for comprehensive rethinking of past assumptions. The closure of the western narrative form and the pursuit of unambiguous learning outcomes can be seen as antithetical to both culturally sensitive pedagogy and to post-modern interpretations of the intention of Drama Education. This paper explores the emergence of an increasingly coherent and shared set of principles for a culturally sensitive pedagogy in Drama Education while proposing potentially fruitful research directions.

Introduction

This paper is predicated in three major areas of pedagogical and philosophical concern:
the role of narrative in personal development;
the increasing prevalence of cultural diversity in urban school classrooms, and
the place of ambiguity in providing space for a resolution of the potential conflict generated by the need for personal identification within a multicultural context.

This school's educational provisions arise [from] the perceived need to recognise and celebrate difference and to try to weave from the many cultural threads a fabric, a unity that retains the colour and texture of each. (Principal's Report, 9 February, 1988 in May, 1994, p.174)

When Betty Jane Wagner (1997) described the classroom practice of a British teacher who recreated an incident from his school's history when the boiler of an adjacent factory exploded and killed a number of students, she described a teacher giving permission for his students to resurrect an historical event. More importantly, however, he gave his students permission to respond empathically to the emotional context of the event in dramatic, visual and literary forms. Excited by the results, this [young?] teacher sought approval from the parents for the literary response as the only writing done during a week of apparently intensive engagement with the topic.

In a period when 'Drama in Education' remains problematic within the curriculum of schools, I remain confounded by Wagner's anecdote. Having established an evidently compelling Heathcotian context within which to conduct an exploration of the historical event, the teacher is, nevertheless, uncertain/unable to justify his pedagogical decisions in terms other than the production of a literary work. The personal involvement of the students, the experiential base from which they have been extended into their Vygotskian 'zones of proximal development' and the quality of the empathic attunement they have mirrored back to their teacher are all ultimately reduced to and justified in terms of literary output.

As Grumet (1997) stressed from her role as observer and critical friend to the conference, we have, as Drama Educators, a responsibility to the curriculum - but whose curriculum; and which students are to be empowered by this curriculum? Augusto Boal (1997) in his recently released 'Rainbow of Desire' speaks of the confounding of his actors when the audience accepted the clarion-call of the drama, rose up to throw off the yoke of the oppressor and invited the actors to join their revolution. Reflecting on the power of his theatre to motivate an audience to action, Boal observes the inability of the actors [and the drama] to follow through. The actors are, in the final analysis, no more than actors. Revolutionary theatre is no more, in the end, than theatre. It may speak for the oppressed and it may speak to the oppressed but it does not act for the oppressed. This same inability is reflected in Wagner's young teacher who, having empowered his students to empathise through drama, art and literature, ultimately admits to theatre, to a need for passive, assessable literary product.

The demand for closure displayed by both Boal and by the teacher of Wagner's anecdote remains the single greatest weakness in the pedagogical proposition of the Drama in Education practitioner. For closure suggests product and the educator's fundamental objective is growth. In effect, the Drama Educator's objective is a maintenance of ambiguity. The drama becomes and remains an educational experience because of the inability of closure to provide a sensible resolution. The factory explosion is a narrative opening but there can be no closure. The first scream - which is the focus of the teacher's intention - is infinitely replicable. It is, at once, timeless and continuous. And this is its power.

In his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell proposed the view that thoughts which can't be articulated cannot be thought. Few of us would accept the reality of the proposition and, indeed, Orwell's own resolution of the anger generated by intellectual suppression was to feed his Proles a copious diet of sex, alcohol, gambling and pornography while presenting his intellectual elite with an ever-changing political engagement [perhaps little has changed!!]. In an atmosphere of political correctness which insists on the discharge of a female bomber pilot from the Airforce for adultery but which seriously proposes mitigating circumstances for the mass destruction and mayhem of the Oklahoma Bomber, the level of ambiguity we all accept in our daily lives must lead us to consider how ambiguity might be resolved by children in the classroom.

Erving Goffman (1959) observed that, as educators, we are paid to allow people to stare at us - we are performers - it is our role to take the space. This being the case, it is our responsibility to know who we are performing for and what they have a right to receive in return for allowing us the space (cf Boal, 1997).

To introduce the central dilemmas discussed in this paper, I want to share with you an obscene story. It results from a discussion between a drama teacher and a father at a parent/teacher interview at a school in Victoria, Australia in the 1980s.

We hear the father's voice as he responds to the teacher's school report comment:

"They came in the morning. When we were all asleep. They took us out into the street and beat us. They beat my wife and my daughter who was 8 years old then. Then they beat me again while they raped my wife and child. And then they killed my wife. I won't tell you how."

"Many months later we were able to leave that place. And we came to Australia. My daughter is 14 years old now. She is very quiet."

The presumption that migrants leave their home country to settle in a country of choice "because they want to" is a powerful myth in most western countries - in most countries where Drama is taught in schools. It underpins most of our social structures and it underpins most of our school structures, syllabus offerings and pedagogical assumptions. The need to question this presumption is critical if we are to increase the level of congruence between home and school experience and provide a place for the level of ambiguity which must always remain in the mind and life of the young woman whose childhood narrative is related above.

The proposal that we should "work from where the students are at" is, at best, a dubious proposition. In fact, to know 'where the students are at' may take a more skilled psychologist then most Drama educators would claim to be. To work from an externalisation which the students might recognise as a potential position - so that they are protected in role - might be a more appropriate strategy. The recent hand-over of Hong Kong to the People's republic of China by the British has been a much rehearsed event. The conclusion, the closure, determined by Hong Kong residents has been vastly different for different individuals and groups. The buoyancy of the Hong Kong economy, the robustness of Hong Kong society, the need for a credible conduit to the west, have all been cited as elements in the individual and collective narratives deriving from Hong Kong as the hand-over approached. The need to see the place of Drama as the place where ambiguity can be sustained rather than resolved may be a more empowering suggestion than the resolution to continue with narrative as a tool for congruence. Congruence, in fact, may be a potentially psychotic state demanding the submersion of cultural contradictions and experiences too horrific to maintain, it may be - an impossible dream.

The Literary Narrative

The western literary narrative can be characterised, at the risk of oversimplification, by four essential elements:

a beginning;
narrative continuity;
temporal and spatial coherence;
and closure.

For reader satisfaction, this essentially literary model of the narrative, requires the transmission of a linear story, or dreaming, with an identifiable and motivating opening point; with a strong sense of continuity in time and character; with evident causality of events and an apparently related closing point providing a satisfactory resolution to the characters who are involved in, who generate or who are influenced by the events occurring within the narrative.

The western literary narrative, by virtue of its framing aesthetic, necessarily excludes unforeseeable events, unmotivated actions or characters and disconnected effects and causes. The power of the narrative aesthetic is quite evident in the increasing inability of society in general, to accept - or even to conceive of - dreamings which do not follow the rules of the aesthetic. A story must have an ending, "Once upon a time" must end at some time ...'ever after'. What goes up must come down. There's no such thing as a free dinner.

If the aesthetic of the western literary narrative is applied to the events of the Drama classroom then we impose a tyranny of western cultural tradition which is antithetical to the stated intentions of most Drama classrooms.

But what if it were not so? What if Alice did not fall down the rabbit hole? The March hare never alludes to the rabbit hole, nor the mad hatter. Their reference points remain unspecified - as do most of ours, most of the time. They live with ambiguity. Their way of seeing the world, their construction of reality, their dreaming, equips them with roles which are different from those we are familiar with - different but no less useful. In a dreaming, there is a narrative line - in the traditional Western literary sense, there is linearity, there is character and there is causality - though the causes may be inexplicable. Things happen. There is no necessary explanation in the ambiguous world of a dreaming. There need be no defined beginning and there need be no traditional closure or 'end'. "And then I woke up" is not the end of a dreaming, it seldom provides closure. Instead, perhaps, it is an externalisation of the narrative as it approaches conscious reality. We do not die in dreams though at times we may rehearse the event while, at the last possible moment, avoiding it. This externalisation, this protection offered by the exploration of role allows us to deal with the essential ambiguity of our existence. In life we can rehearse death, in sleep we can rehearse the conscious moment. The nightmare of the unconscious, for most of us, is never revived in our consciousness, in reality.

So how is the world of the Salvadoran student affirmed in my Drama class. How is her dreaming affirmed while she is protected from the nightmare reality of her conscious experience, her literary and literal narrative? And, at least as importantly, how are the other students in my class affirmed without the need to confront a childhood reality of Central American politics?

Roslyn Arnold's (1994, 1997) identification of growth templates, experiential bases from which, and with which, to measure personal and social experience confirm my own (Bechervaise, 1996) work in early reading development. Not only do we need prior experiential templates or frameworks to measure our experience and to provide a range of meaning or dreaming within which we can explore the new experience, but we need this experiential framework to provide ourselves with a means for the acceptance of ambiguity.

Apart from a certain vicarious experience of terror as the armour-plated Tyrannosaurus Rex crowds us into the back of our padded cinema seat, it is difficult to see why and how the current spate of 70mm dinocinematic thrills continues to attract an audience. It is even more difficult to establish an intelligent rationale for the longevity of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Swartzenegger and the steroid-charged ecstasy generated by Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Willis and the Kung Fu Killing Brigades. Difficult but not impossible. To process new experience has never required an established framework. But it has required the wherewithal to codify, to elaborate and to empathise with the characters and events initiating the experience.

If Drama Education is still about self awareness and self development and self knowledge then it is not about the impregnation of future generations with the narrowing, enervating and literary narrative aesthetic represented by the cinematic experiences depicted above. Development cannot be articulated in a fine set of behavioural objectives and measured on an economic-rationalist inspired skills spectrum. To establish whether "the key competencies of the latest syllabus draft have been achieved at band four level for descriptive criterion referenced profile development" purposes so that the student can move to some school in another Province or State without evident loss of credit points is still not the purpose of Drama Education.

So what are we doing when we take a group of students into a drama class? What do our familiar exercises really teach?

Suppose we consider the common mirror movement exercise.

As initiators of action:
We are initiating/generating action. Yes.
We are experimenting with/extending physical limitations. Yes.
We are, sotto voce, working to create a pattern of action which our reflection can anticipate and follow as smoothly as possible. Yes.
As reflectors of action:
We are developing cooperative skills. Yes.
We are learning to anticipate action. Yes.
We are seeking to understand the physical prowess and limits of our partner. Yes.

In total, we are respecting the spatial coherence of the others' actions, we are matching the temporal coherence established, we are anticipating the narrative coherence of the action and we are looking for closure to the exercise. In effect, we are accepting the regulatory framework of the western literary narrative structure. The beginning is, in fact, the only problematic part of the exercise. How do we start?

It is almost twenty years since Ben Benison first came to Adelaide from the Barbican Centre in London to work with the conferees of a NADIE conference. Almost twenty years since he asked the participants all to say 'yes' to each other's performance -to accept each other's strengths and weaknesses as people and as performers.

But I remain concerned today by exactly the same niggling concern I had then. If I say 'yes' to you then I say 'yes' to what you stand for, to what you believe. Most importantly, I say 'yes' to the framework within which I'm saying 'yes'. I accept the principle of the mirror itself. As I say 'yes' to the teacher in role, I say 'yes' to the intention of that teacher and her designs for my development. In essence, I abrogate responsibility for my own development and assign it to the leader.

Such is the power of the aesthetic that, nowadays, many of us have become familiar with, and even willing to accept, to say 'yes' to, the concept of virtual reality. We are willing to accept that what is behind the mirror is as much a reality as we are ourselves. We begin to construct ourselves in some apparently acceptable image before we begin to construct ourselves intellectually and emotionally.

This is a logical extension of acceptance of the aesthetic of the western literary narrative. We are as real as the image we generate so the image itself must be real. The resolution of this form of ambiguity allows us to be both real and not real simultaneously. We kill as copy-cat killers because we saw it on television. We buy what is available and we know it's available because we saw it on television. So we are not responsible. We tell our stories with strict adherence to the rules and values of the narratives we saw on television - whether they are morally and intellectually tenable in a wider social context or not.

I believe that this is a form of cultural assimilation which is totally unacceptable to the educator who believes in individual freedom, in the development of a coherent and harmonious society wherein each is empowered to grow and to act because of the individual empowerment of the other. It may be an acceptable world-view in the content-driven classroom but it has no place in the room or the pedagogy of the Drama Educator.

Psychodynamics and ambiguity

As previously discussed, Roslyn Arnold (1994,1997), in proposing a psychodynamic approach to student development, to the educational process, identified growth templates which can be confirmed, modified or denied in empathic social practice. Arnold identified the teacher as mirroring, and thereby confirming, the growth of powerful personal knowledge. Her model is useful because it allows the student to select appropriate learning from the range of experience available. Further, it generates a dialectic between the teacher and student wherein ambiguities can be identified, critiqued and, only if necessary, resolved. From the viewpoint of the Drama educator, Arnold's psychodynamic approach necessitates an active and empathic attunement or relationship between equal stakeholders in the formalised educational endeavour which has come to be known as 'school' but which, by definition, nevertheless, is not equal. At this point, then, the theory needs further development. To avoid the copy-cat, virtual reality, "yes in performance' agenda previously discussed, Arnold's theoretical construct must be expected to address the imbalance in power established both implicitly and explicitly in the bureaucratic structure called 'school' because growth, in which the apparently ordinary becomes the object of critical examination and reflection, Freire's (1984) 'conscientization', can only occur when a student acts with it (Courtney, 1982)

As it is currently articulated, Arnold's approach appears to presume that the resolution of conflict, the establishment of social harmony and the elimination of ambiguity are socially, and therefore educationally, desirable outcomes. The model appears to presume that replication of, or at least accommodation to, the dominant social paradigm is the objective of the schooling process. The approach is certainly well tried - the development of formal schooling to establish sufficient literacy to reduce accidents and increase productivity in the 'dark satanic mills' of the industrial revolution has been well documented and the inability of schools to respond to social change has been equally well noted (eg Bordieu, 1971; Glasser, 1990; McLaren, 1986).

In an increasingly multicultural society, social cohesion will only be established by the acceptance of cultural diversity. The extreme right-wing monoculturalism of a Parti Quebecois' Rene Levesque or an Australian Pauline Hanson merely highlights the view that the cultural difference between individuals within a given culture is greater than the difference between cultures in that same society.

Monoculturalism and ambiguity

Australia's cultural diversity is not, as some seem to believe, an overnight -or even a post 1945 phenomenon. At the height of the first great Australian gold-rush to far northern Australia [immediately following the 1849 rush to the Yukon], 100 000 people lived in the gold-fields. 90 000 of them were Chinese! Sugar cane was largely grown by immigrants from the Indian sub-continent using slave labour impressed from the Pacific Islands, and the first regular transport into the deserts of central Australia was developed by the Afghans with their camels which now roam in feral herds across th ecentral Australian desters and form the basis for an export trade to Saudi Arabia. The 128 non-indigenous languages now spoken in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996) reflect this legacy. Australia is one of very few countries to have published a National Language Policy. Nevertheless, governmental policies of assimilation have been no more effective in generating a monocultural society than the wholesale repression, dispersion and extermination of our indigenous peoples has been in reducing their cultural breadth. As Simons (1997) has pointed out, in paraphrasing Cowlingshaw (1997), the palimpsest is a more powerful descriptor for multicultural diversity than any hybridisation which might arise from pro-active integration policies. Suppression does not lead to extinction though it does implant a level of anger which is close to debilitating among some cultural groups (eg May, 1994; McLaren, 1986).

In elaborating her view of ambiguity as a desirable state, Jennifer Simons (1997) echoes an increasingly popular observation. In 'The Origins of Virtue' (1995), the British zoologist Matt Ridley asks how it is that altruism and cooperation can co-exist in an evolutionary system which appears to favour the ruthlessly self-interested. In asking such an essentially simple political question in an overtly scientific context, Ridley opens up one of the most intriguing questions of this postmodern, poststructuralist period.

The recent, and heavily reported, anti-immigration commentary of the politician, Pauline Hanson in Australia has led to what I must call the 'Australian Paradox' It is identified and excused as 'freedom of speech' but it is more easily recognised as abrogation of social responsibility - 'My culture is valuable and yours is not - and I can promote this view with impunity. It is my right. It is freedom of speech. It is a freedom which you cannot have.' Pauline Hanson sits as an independent parliamentarian. She is responsible to no identifiable social group though she comes from a State of vast distances, small population and considerable wealth. Cultural capital in Australia tends to remain with the farming and mining lobbies.

Paulo Friere, who died in May in Sao Paulo accepted Bordieu's concept of cultural capital but likened the convention and compulsory education system to a banking system. Cultural capital is like money in the bank. But whose money and which bank - and what are the withdrawal costs? These are the questions which generate the ambiguity which leads to the cultural conflict which becomes the daily content and concern of the Drama educator.

Alanis Morisette's hit song "You Oughta Know" (1995) does not deal with the traditional political and economic concerns of the protest song of the 70s but rather with betrayal and anger initiated by unrequited and deceitful love. However, what is more interesting for me as an educator is that the song, in all its lyrical and instrumental anger, seems to be a means of psychological therapy for the singer. She uses the visual perception as a means of revenge. So what about the Chinese immigrant child in my class whose sense of cultural need for harmony demands acceptance rather than revenge? Chinese psychologists developing culturally specific personality tests identify an element they call 'somatisation' - a passivity which is essentially psychotic and which western psychologists might see as a withdrawal response to stress - a non-violent response to increasing violence. Mahatma Ghandi called it 'Satyagraha'.

Migration itself might be seen as enforced withdrawal - more like that necessarily practised by Nelson Mandela on Roben Island - or the remaining Vietnamese in Hong Kong - but it has the strong potential for establishing irreconcilable ambiguities in the make-up of the immigrant - as the story of the young Salvadoran woman illustrates.

Unless we are willing to set ourselves up as psychodrama therapists and seek to involve our whole class in the task of emotional rehabilitation, we are met, I would suggest, with an impossible task. The life narrative of the Salvadoran woman is neither appropriate material for inclusion in the Drama classroom nor is it simply resolvable in that context. Trauma counsellors are far better equipped to handle such events.

But is this self-censoring? Is it avoidance of the reality of the multicultural classroom? After all, every action and every learning experience is culturally bound because our culture is an essential part of who we are - and it is an integral part of who we have permission to become. It is a dreaming which becomes, with some degree of disambiguation toward the host society, our identity.

Cultural context and 'permission to become'

Sometimes it is not a matter of students not wanting to learn, it is a matter of their having no cultural framework, no 'growth template', with which to make the particular learning meaningful. When we provide the bridges between student's cultural frames and our own, we provide permission to integrate our teaching with students' learning (Freire, 1978).

If we are the way we see ourselves then we can only learn when we have permission to accept new constructions of ourselves. Goffman's (1959) idea of personal frames becomes useful in identifying where we belong, who we belong with and what is acceptable and necessary to that belonging. The frames fall short of providing us with an explanation of ourselves in relation to the frames of others. Our self is identifiably culturo-centric but our culture is co-determinant with our host culture - at each and all of class, gender, religious, ageist and ethnic levels.

Onstage and back-stage performance (Goffman, 1981) differs with ethnic mix. Acceptable behaviour in front of one group is not acceptable in front of another. Gaining permission to enter a new group is largely dependent in open society on familiarity and our gaining a critical population mass. Cultural capital becomes simultaneously co-determinant to our acceptance as migrants and exclusively crucial to our retention of personal identity.

Conclusion

The maintenance of ambiguity provides us with a psychological, an emotional framework within which we can maintain our sense of personal identity relative to a home culture. From within that framework, we have permission to explore the potential for integrating congruent elements of our host culture while we integrate, reject or accommodate the incongruent elements of that host culture. There is no 'watering down' in this process. Making meaning is serious business; life and death business. It is our reality because it is our identity. Role play has its place in the process of multicultural development but not in the product, the individual we must necessarily become.

The role of the Drama educator in this ambiguous development is to act as a facilitator for the acceptance of the new experience, to provide a model [but not a mirror] for the appropriation of change and to represent authoritative permission for the acceptance of incongruent elements from the host culture; to valorize the role of ambiguity in our pursuit of a harmonious multicultural identity.

Narrative, with its demand for entry, linearity, spatial and temporal continuity and closure, is not an appropriate tool for the accommodation of multicultural education, but this is not the end of life as we know it. Rather, it is a recognition of the quixotic challenge that many of us have set ourselves in accepting ambiguity as a necessary social condition while maintaining the potential for a range of narrative dreamings in the Drama classroom. Permission presented by the acceptance of ambiguity in the multicultural classroom provides exciting opportunities for the development of a consistent pedagogy and, consequently, the legitimate inclusion of student-centred action research in the Drama Educator's classroom. Most importantly, the acceptance of ambiguity provides permission to establish and maintain a dreaming which may look like coherent narrative but which represents a far more coherent identity.

References

Arnold, R. (1994) "The theory and principles of psychodynamic pedagogy". Forum of Education. Sydney: University of Sydney Arnold, R. (1997) "The drama in research and articulating dynamics: a unique theatre". Keynote address to Second International Drama in Education Research Institute. University of Victoria, British Columbia. Canada. Australian Bureau of Statistics ABS (1996) Schools in Australia Canberra BÚchervaise, N.E. (1996) "From Crib to School". The Primary Educator 2(1), 1-6 Benison, B. (1978) "Saying 'Yes' in performance". Address to National Association of Drama in Education conference. Adelaide, Australia. Boal, A (1997) Rainbow of Desire. New York: Routledge. Bordieu, P. (1971) 'Systems of education and systems of thought', in M.D.F.Young. Knowledge and Control. London: Macmillan. Courtney, R. (1982) Re-Play: Studies in Human Drama and Education. Toronto: OISE Press Cowlingshaw, G. (1997) "Race, culture and palimpsestry". Unpublished paper delivered at University of Sydney, 1st May, 1997. Freire, P. (1978) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey. Glasser, W. (1990) The Quality School. New York: Harper and Row Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. U.S.A.:Anchor. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Grumet, M. (1997) Comments in response to observations made to conferees at Second International Drama in Education Research Institute. University of Victoria, British Columbia. Canada. May, S. (1994) Making Multicultural Education Work. Toronto: Multicultural Matters Ltd. McLaren, P. (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ridley, M (1995) The Origins of the Future. U.K.: Viking. Simons, J. (1997) 'Drama pedagogy and the art of double meaning' Paper presented to Second International Drama in Education Research Institute. University of Victoria, British Columbia. Canada. Wagner, B.J. (1997) "Drama as a way of knowing". Lansdowne Lecture to Second International Drama in Education Research Institute. University of Victoria, British Columbia. Canada.

Discussion Questions

1. Conflict tends to arise from the refusal to accept ambiguity. To what extent does conflict resolution rely on submersion of monocultural identity rather than multicultural accommodation?

2. Audience response has been seen to rely variously on 'suspension of disbelief' and on reflective 'distancing from difference'. To what extent do these approaches actually interfere with an appropriate audience response and, ultimately, a reduction in directorial and authorial experimentation?

3. An ethical question. Much of the research in Drama Education has been initiated by the researcher, for the benefit of the researcher, to a design established by the researcher. What potential exists for encouraging a research paradigm in which the question is identified by the students, and the design is established with the permission of, and in collaboration with the students for the benefit of the students?

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