Resource 25: Reflections on Assessing Multi-Disciplinary Processes and Products -  Assessing A Voice in the Chorus

As a result of being involved in a project to interrogate the methods used in assessing group practice I have been re-examining my own approaches to assessment. No matter how much a course document stipulates the criteria for outcomes and modes of assessment we are still faced with inherent human dynamics and contradictions on both sides of the fence. The tick-box mentality within arts education and arts funding systems has perhaps become an insidious aspect of late 20-early-21 vision. There are frighteningly Pavlovian implications in this climate that could seriously undermine styles of teaching and learning ultimately impacting upon the kinds of cultural products which could emanate from "rats and stats" laboratories formerly known as Arts Schools. As a member of a team investigating the current practices of assessment, I fall into a role easily interpreted as yet another sniffer-dog eroding the integrity and confidence of dedicated lecturers and researchers truly committed to developmental and supportive teaching. In an attempt to involve you, the reader in this particular piece of research I propose that you read the following commentary responding to the voices of students who were involved in collaborative/devised group work to create short performance pieces. I hope that their voices, sometimes naïve, sometimes sophisticated, trigger responses, associations and comments from you. These voices are perhaps similar to the opinions you hear from your own students in the way that they reveal their concerns and motivations when engaged in group work.

Devised theatre emerged out of recognition that theatre is an act of communication by humans to humans. Theatre became a conduit for ideas, ideals, concepts and images often generated in a very literary manner. The voice of one author and the visualisation by that author of the ways in which those ideas could be re-presented and enacted led to the evolution of the play-script. Such a product could be described as a piece of literature designed to be externalised by actors but able to exist as a dormant but latent code book. Devised theatre moves away from the literary by examining many codes beyond text and as such provides a very complex field for an examination of assessment processes. The dormant but latent human body awakened through physical and psychological play begins to develop other means of communication. In some cases this communication bears a strong relationship to pre-theatre forms found in ritual and dance or it reflects oral rather than written roots. In a contemporary context such processes of play-to-make-play are not necessarily anti-literary and are not concerned with romantic attempts at primitivism. Just as the blank canvas has been contested in visual arts, and silence has been explored in musical composition, in theatre, no space or place is empty of meaning or potential meaning.

The following transcript relates directly to a devised theatre process from which the students have just emerged. This de-briefing session was held shortly after a series of 20-minute, group performances. My intention was to discover some key elements concerning the collaborative process and the modes of operation adopted by the students during the devising of these works. In part the session was designed to get the students prepared for immanent group vivas following their performance showings.

Stage 2 Theatre Degree (BA Hons) students are assigned to work in companies of 12 to 15 persons under the direction of a tutor who supervises and directs this devising and composition, double module. After an initial period of working as large companies, the students begin to identify smaller working groups with the intention of making 20-minute performance compositions. These small groups of 3 to 5 members identify aspects of the major company work that they would like to pursue. Sometimes this may relate to the thematic drive of the company work or it may concern a particular process that has arisen. Each small group writes an initial proposal negotiated with their tutor. These groups then begin their own devising processes through to production. During this period the tutor becomes observer/adviser rather than director of the work.

Assessment includes:
1st Module: Continuous Assessment of Individual practice in the large company + written assignments.

2nd Module: Assessment of performance (Group Mark) + Assessment of group viva (Individual mark) including individual documentation.

TRANSCRIPT:
 (Recorded at Dartington College of Arts, Theatre Department, 9th February 2001)

L: Tape Starts…We started out by talking about how people decided to work together and how people ended up together. Some people were friends already so they figured out that they had some shared ideas….. We talked about the idea of trusting people; negotiating through the work; negotiating how much of your ideas you put in and how much you would hold back to allow the piece to develop- the idea of letting the ideas go for the sake of the piece. If a piece has taken a certain direction which maybe you wouldn’t have chosen yourself, just trusting that it was going to go that way…. We were giving ideas to the group and not being precious about them and at other times being precious about them as well. The idea of listening to the direction that the work was going in, at the same time listening to personal needs of the people in the group; getting a balance. We were talking about the idea of ownership….letting ideas become the property of the group, maybe letting it develop and then letting it be rejected or take an unexpected direction.

SP: Those points lead me to think about how people-specific the devising process might be and what the outcomes might be as a result of a particular grouping of people. You talk about the material of performance but the bodies that make up the particular company- how much do they impact upon the outcomes of the work?

F:  There are different strengths and weaknesses in each person in the group. Somebody who is not confident about physical or vocal work. That’s obviously going to effect the nature of the work. Deciding whether to punch through the barriers or whether you decide to work with the strengths and weaknesses as they stand. That’s a decision that has to be made.

LA:  But doesn’t that lead on to the whole thing of challenge and being clear about what your aims are for the project within the group at an early stage? A sense of being able to support each other; to find new skills or maybe to do something that they haven’t done before physically…

SP: Could you give me any examples of skill transfer? There’s quite an interesting dynamic in the first part of the module because it is led by a
member of staff in the role of supervisor or director but you also have skills that are external to your course experience that you may share with company members.

G:  That was a big element because we had Jamie the carpenter in our company, which was exceedingly important and valuable and meant that we could get our vision up and seen…it was a big influence upon our end product. The fact that I brought the singing and the storytelling; Beth brought in the physical skills, as did Fergus with martial arts. It was more built around our experiences and knowledge outside of theatre….
 

SP: Moving away from the skills issue; what about the material of the performance, for example the texts or the sensibility of the work- How people-specific do you think that is within the collaboration?

T:  Well we had a great problem initially. We were split- two men/two women and I don’t think anyone was interested in making a piece about gender politics. The way the group was operating was in two partnerships- two double-acts.  In that case we were fighting with the very obvious material being brought up by that and we were trying to bury that. So that caused quite a lot of problems.

L:  Our group had similar problems. Not only was there a gender issue, there was also race and identity which is a big thing. I really wanted to go with these things but with the other people it was difficult for them to discuss within our work process.  But in the end the people; what we are and who we are, made the piece, so that the material we performed was based upon the whole struggle of creating the piece and setting our identities. In the performance D and I fought a lot because we actually fought a lot making the thing. We decided to make that our work- so people-specific was very important.

SP: Can I pursue that in terms of collaboration. I have noticed quite often that the mentality of the work itself sometimes impinges upon the individual, personal mentality of the performers. By that I mean that sometimes there is a sense that you have become infected by the material.

H:  Yes, I think there’s a point where you have to define whether you are talking about personalities or characters in the piece or whether you ‘re talking about yourself. You have to state the obvious sometimes because you are creating it rather than being given script or characters. Obviously you bring in something to the piece but you don’t have to be that person in the piece- there’s a line between.

SP: Is this where issues of ownership come into play? Are you able to separate your ideas within the work from interpersonal issues?

A:  We talked about letting go and ownership (of ideas) but we came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a pure idea…. All the different individual contributions are like fragments of ideas or beginnings, which can be pushed in many different directions. And these directions often happen out of misunderstandings. Someone would propose an idea but because language is not able to convey the idea it is misinterpreted and once it is misinterpreted and placed in the space it becomes something you could not have predicted. This made us think that the process, the collaborative process is not so much an image or reflection of the group but is something which runs parallel having a kind of  “life of its own”.

SP: How important do you think it is to have a shared ethos as a collaborative group? “Manifesto” comes to mind. Do you think that within your initial proposals (to make the work) there were implicit or explicit examples of a mode of operation containing an ethos about working processes or material process?

A:  I think that’s fundamental but I don’t think that is something that can come from the individuals as representative of what the people are individually. I think you find it. I think it’s fundamental to find a group ethos that arises as something parallel to the group practice.

SP: You are saying that it would be artificial to state an ethos at the outset. We are talking about representation and you are putting up a piece of work that is
re-presenting ideas, images, etc. What about the re-presentation of you as a company.

D:  I think that the piece you present is in the most part a representation of the collaborative process but in the end it may not represent elements of an individuals’ contributions to that collaboration. For example if you were an ideas person you wouldn’t necessarily be the big performer up front. But the piece itself, in general is a reflection, somehow distorted of the collaborative process…It’s filtered so many times through different conjunctions between people, ideas, times, spaces that I don’t think you can ever say that the piece is what the performers are but just a minor part of the meeting.

V:  Perhaps ethos is not the right word. The performance is more a representation of the criteria that you are following- rather than following an ethos.

B:  We talked about how it helped if there was some kind of shared intention from the beginning about the kind of work we were all interested in making. We could follow that through, and that perhaps that would bring the group together…with some kind of shared motive. We discussed how this had not really happened. Our motives were not the same; the intentions were not clear. We had these fragments of individuals’ things linked together sometimes tenuously.

E: It may have been helpful if everyone did have a manifesto to share with the company before they got into groups.

L: There is a danger that if you have really clear intentions that it could be an imposition…

H: Some people come with fixed ideas and some with fragments of ideas. What approach works for the best in a collaboration?

SP: If you were to put a headline over your process would you describe it as Organic or Systematic?

F: I think in our work we had both. I work very much from a structural pint of view. I wanted a start, middle and an end. I worked on a script whereas a lot of people came in continuously with ideas, trying this and trying that. That was going on until about two days before the performance. It was growing and changing; going with the flow; waiting and seeing what happened while I was panicking: “Oh my god, we haven’t got a structure. And the script, where’s that gone?” So we had conflicting ways of working because we did not sit down and say: “ We will work like this.” So we ended up with a mixture of system and flow. Sometimes we would improvise and at other times we would try to script a week’s ideas into something we could use.

T: We talked a lot about common languages and integrating people. And we realised that for a lot of people, their second language is English and this was a huge barrier in some respects. Finding a kind of common and critical vocabulary takes time to develop. So the barriers are not always within the work itself.

B: It’s not just about second languages. There can be misinterpretations or lack of understanding in one language- TAPE ENDS

The exploration of codes beyond words, marks beyond depiction, sounds beyond notation have opened the fields of practice in all art forms to generate fresh ways of perceiving and generating cultural products. The laboratories of devising have produced multi-disciplinary expositions of simultaneous process and product. The authorial voice has been challenged by communal, group, collaborative modes of operation and whilst we may be able to perceive the chorus created through collaboration, we still find ourselves in a position where we need to identify and assess the individual voices in that chorus.
 

Simon Persighetti, Dartington College of Arts :