'"Putting It Together": Teaching Musical Theatre in UK Higher Education'
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Bath Spa University, 27-28 March 2009, Palatine
Paper:
The Importance of the New in Today’s Music Theatre.
Music theatre is by its nature interdisciplinary. As a form it provokes complexity because it requires performing and creating skills to be developed, honed and executed symbiotically. Our educational heritage rather expects us to atomise disciplines into smaller units, separately, often leaving the performer with an impossible task of juggling too many balls for the first time in public.
This paper underlines the symbiotic connection between performing and creating, and from there the inherent unity of performance through singing, acting and movement. Central to this educational experience lies the concept of ownership of material; a method by which students may gain a new perspective of authority over material, rather than subservience.
The history of music theatre starts with the student today.
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The Importance of the New in Today’s Music Theatre. Or how to take a shot at Shakespeare Paul Barker ABSTRACT Music theatre is by its nature interdisciplinary. As a form it provokes complexity because it requires performing and creating skills to be developed, honed and executed symbiotically. Our educational heritage rather expects us to atomise disciplines into smaller units, separately, often leaving the performer with an impossible task of juggling too many balls for the first time in public. This paper underlines the symbiotic connection between performing and creating, and notes the inherent unity of performance through singing, acting and movement. Central to this educational experience lies the concept of ownership of material; a method by which students may gain a new perspective of authority over material, rather than subservience. The history of music theatre starts with the student today. PAPER:
I would like you to imagine yourself in London 400 years ago. You are a jobbing actor. Someone you knew told you about someone they knew and all of a sudden you have a job in a company, because someone else got ill. It’s the first day and you have your words on the cue-sheet in your hand, and you know you will have to sing and dance a bit, but you will pick it up as you go along. Because that’s what actors do. It’s the first performance and the guy who wrote the play has come to wish you to break a leg. That seems good, because you heard he also controls the purse that pays you. He has just left, and – damn it – what was his name? Oh yes, Bill. You remembered that because he will help you pay those bills. Bill Shakespeare. This imagined story is an illustration of an often quoted gem by Stravinsky, who said he wished people would love music more and respect it less. Music and theatre share more in common than they contrast differences. For the purposes of this talk, they are considered part of a continuum of performance. But you may be wondering what Shakespeare and Stravinsky have to do with music theatre. Firstly, songs that we hear students perform often come to us third hand: the song is famous, and there is this favourite recording of it by a famous singer. So the student learns to ape the performance, on the mistaken principle that it represents the correct way the song works. The student sees it as a short-cut: you don’t have to read the music, and you don’t have to think about it too much because the famous singer already did that to make a hit. And this process
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effectively allows you to not face the thing you fear most: how the hell are you supposed to sing Sondheim? And why is he different? This all-too-common process helps no-one. Least of all the student singer who thinks they are able to copy the sound of another singer’s recording with their voice. They have to learn, often painfully, that their voice is unique and will not necessarily work in the same way another’s will; recordings are rarely unedited, and at least influenced directly by the microphone. And then they also have to understand they cannot even hear their own voice, nor make aesthetic judgements on its sound; it is inside them – they are the voice. It is the same with acting: copying someone else’s delivery is a desperate act which arises out of not understanding how context critically affects text. The first context is the unique human frame and voice which is the actor. Instead of relying on emotional intuition or rigorous application of technique (or both), fear of “getting it wrong” and of the perceived reputation of the famous writer, the famous composer or the famous singer allegedly conspire to drain the student of any real creative impulse. I encourage all my students to write their own songs, even their own texts, or to sing/act the work of their peers. “Writing” is a word I use creatively, not literally. The effect on the student in performance is instant: ownership of material empowers any such performance to a creative area they may not have experienced before. The audience become aware of the symbiosis of material with the performer – no filters, no pretension, no fear. The result might be said to be more authentic or truthful. Those are just adjectives we use – the importance of the exercise is how access to creative authority empowers a performer. Once that experience has been established, the next step is to apply the lesson to Shakespeare, Sondheim or Stravinsky; to approach them with the same simple honesty, without baggage. Without this primary approach, there is no creative space in which to grow, and performance as a singular act of creation, is impossible. You may have noticed that I am wilfully blurring the barriers between music and theatre and I continue to do so between the traditional separation between “creatives” and “performers”. This is another deliberate choice which I hope increases the awareness of the essence of a performer, with the objective of empowerment. Of course this is just a first step: working with directors, MD’s and coaches will deepen and extend the work and shape it to the deeper context of the performance and the collaboration that supports it. It is many decades since classical pianists successfully
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challenged the concept of merely accompanying art-song, and the collaborative act between piano and voice or instrument is now simply accepted as such. Unfortunately too often in music theatre, the ubiquitous backing-track - a one-size-fits-all commodity replaces this creative collaboration with a deaf technology. And it endows the cause of live performance with little benefit when it occurs professionally. Music theatre is a commodity-led industry, an artefact which at one extreme end of the market is global and catering for millions. The sheer size and power of the industry leaders disguises for many students the reality of its roots in an interdisciplinary art-form. In most of the twentieth century new material was the next exciting thing, and it was perhaps less of a big thing for performers to collaborate directly with the writers and directors. The situation is very different today and this distant perception of creative teams has the effect of distancing the student from the work and challenges the concept of the creative as opposed to interpretative performer. At the other end of the music theatre industry are thousands of people of all ages, furiously writing, collaborating, trying ideas, fund-raising, encouraging and producing new work. This abundance of activity contains the kernels of whatever will be the future of music theatre. It will come as no surprise to many of you that the popular success of music theatre as a genre has come at a price. We mostly work within theatre or music schools, falling precisely between the avowedly serious endeavours of both. This separation of music theatre from both music and theatre studies, or its isolation from them, may have many motives but the effect is surely damage on all sides. The situation is worsened by the number of books which through their titles refer to acting or singing for music theatre as if it were a cohesive style in contrast to “other” acting and singing. A brief look around the hundreds of musicals around today will confirm the reality to be an extraordinary stylistic plurality of styles and genres from opera through rock, from realism to surrealism, burlesque and circus. This richness deserves to acknowledge its roots in theatre and music, for the artforms to connect rather than isolate. It may be too much to expect a general public swamped with media messages to understand this, but we may well be failing our students and stunting their career development if we neglect to at least guide their perceptions to this bigger picture. And the key to this is not someone like me standing here and pontificating. For many of our students there is a hunger for
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experience which may not be satisfied by words alone or academic ideas. The hunger may be unarticulated but is driven by an identification and excitement for an art-form which captures them emotionally, physically and intellectually. This formative experience is where newness is common and oldness is an inheritance, where composers, singers, actors and writers (often the same people even) habitually collaborate and experiment, sometimes leading to a dead-end, perhaps, sometimes opening doors to things unimagined before. The energy that is created in such a process may in fact often lead in turn to the discovery of a need to discuss and analyse academically the process. These are all crucial stages in the path of self-awareness. Removing the fog of mystery and awe which a star-system inevitably emphasises can only empower students to engage more honestly with their material, to discover and nurture that indefinable uniqueness they possess. Performers today are the equivalent of guns for hire. Just like the imagined actor above, who found himself working with Bill. Their reality is only positive when frequently negative responses can be absorbed without damage, when differing opinions about technique or a performance from within a team can be negotiated and when resilience and adaptability conspire to permit a long career to be sustained. This is only possible when students may discover their own authority over themselves and their material, irrespective of who the author is. If we want our students to create a future for themselves in musical theatre, let us promote a future where it may serve them, as well as one in which they may serve. The history of music theatre starts with the student today. Paul Barker Central School of Speech and Drama University of London March 2008
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