I’d like to begin by engaging you in a discussion and by inviting if not answers to, then reflections on a few questions which will help both to focus and to prompt thinking on my topic: Why are you here? What is your experience? Who here actually does theatre in the classroom? Who uses performance (even on video) as a teaching tool? What type of class? Drama? Literature? Language? What kinds of plays or scenes do you study? And finally what problems have you encountered? What success have you had?

Next, I need to ask you to bear with me just a little. Much of what I’ll be saying at first will seem very subjective because it’s drawn from personal experience. Also I am, in short, delivering as a paper what I usually do in workshop form. In the latter portion of my presentation,  I’ll give you a handout maybe even show a video segment, and  if we don’t have time for discussion or an exchange of ideas, my hope is that I can set you to thinking about different methods for implementing performance activities in the classroom, the use of which (in the United States at least) has become an increasingly important pedagogical tool. I maintain that the act of performing (or simply viewing) plays, secular or religious, live or recorded changes the student’s (and often the teacher’s) perspective and opens up the classroom to a variety of questions of both pedagogic and scholarly interest: linguistic significance, historical placement, textual analysis, staging considerations and audience reception.

By way of an introduction, I have throughout my teaching career put on plays with my students or for them. In 1994 I created a troupe, French Farce in Action, as vehicle for introducing early French drama to university students. We have since expanded our scope and now stage comedies from the 15^th and 16^th Centuries in the original French for conferences and festivals both nationally and internationally. The troupe is composed of students and professors from different universities whose teaching and research extend to the field of performance studies.

Why the farces? Well, first, I readily admit that much of what I’m going to say about the “putting on of plays” as a teaching tool can be easily applied to other genres at other periods. [For example, as a scholar teaching French language and literature, I think of and also use Ionesco . . .  a Roumanian . .  . in class.] But, second, my area of research is medieval and Renaissance drama and I recognize that through their sheer numbers and variety, the French farces offer us a rich menu of insights in to the social and cultural conditions of the period.

A word about the plays themselves. With the exception of the well-known Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin (ca.1460) the typical medieval French farces are short comedies of approximately 400 lines in octosyllabic verse with real people as characters. Their plots, often  ending in the “trickster tricked,” depend on stock situations: husbands and wives fight, merchants and customers cheat each other, stupid students study Latin, soldiers brag, priests seduce, women lie and old men are cuckolded. Some 150 examples of the genre have survived, practically all anonymous. Normally played during festivals, carnival times or moments gras, their stage was that area in front of a church or, often, on the back of a wagon. Comic rather than satirical, delightful in their ambiguities of language and their treatment of plausible situations, the French farces make for good theatre even today.

But not only are they good theatre, these short comedies are particularly well suited for a teaching curriculum in medieval or performance studies and even, as I have often done, ideal for an advanced level foreign language classroom. Again, while this can be said about other kinds of drama, it is particularly true of the farce: performance restores the theatrical dimension to comedies which in modern times are primarily read but not seen. Specifically, making the leap from page to stage includes: the recreation of performance conditions and understanding of the popular, historical and non-politically correct context of the medieval festival (certain modern perspectives feminist or gender oriented, for example, are simply not applicable); study and apprenticeship in the comic (linguistic) metaphor; learning to derive expression, gesture and movement from purely textual clues; practice and delivery of physical comedy and belly laughs. The farces, given their brevity and limited number of characters, are easily playable and portable; they also provide an intensity of impact and clarity of message which (these days) might be called post-post-modern.

For a teacher, the crux of the matter is that medieval and Renaissance theatre is anything but arcane or esoteric. The plays, ranging from the more serious miracles to the wholly comic and even slapstick farces treat situations and problems, as I’ve said, of everyday life. The ethical and moral questions raised are the very same questions that students wrestle with in their own lives: fidelity to a spouse or lover, honesty in business, family interaction, being afraid, in doubt. An understanding and appreciation of this theatre therefore greatly enhances students’ understanding of the medieval mind, allowing them to make rapprochments. They’re afforded a precious glimpse into another world, discovering at once the commonality of human experience and the specificity of a particular moment in history.

For anyone who hears or has heard a second paper that I’m presenting at this same conference they’ll recognize the following quote from Gérard de Vivre, a 16^th Century school master, who recommended the staging of comedies in the classroom:

. . . given that there is no better means to make young men (who are universally bashful when speaking) hardy and fluent in any language (to teach them to speak clearly and to have proper bearing; to avoid bad habits and poor morals, to appear modest) than this, when done well, to act and present characters.

The exercise is not without it’s problems. Student’s, in most cases, who have a hard time grappling with a modern text have an even harder  time accommodating themselves to or being enthusiastic about a text from the distant past. Language bars their entrance to the medieval world depicted in these plays. The pedagogical problem is this: the teacher has on the one hand an excellent series of texts through which to study the medieval mind, and, on the other, students who are having great difficulty comprehending those texts. How can we use these, teach these in a class?

I intend, in short order, to give some answers to these questions and in so doing also open the discussion out to the classroom use of plays or taped performances of plays, not just from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but generally any and all types of drama.

How do we get off the page, make the jump (along with our students) from seeing plays as purely literary or historical texts to performable pieces?  In the case of the medieval farces, these comedies are foreign not just linguistically but in a temporal sense, time wise they are very far away. And here I’ll quote my students, who almost solely prefer things contemporary, and who informed me one day that “we don’t like anything we don’t know.” Since it’s an education that we teachers are offering, we’ve  got to break down this barrier, which is one of “foreign-ness,” if I may, of familiarity or lack of same, of alterity, of difference.

Initially, we need to look at a text with an eye to performance. How do we extract information from the text? A decidedly difficult task when considering plays earlier than the 19^th Century – the age when (textual) stage directions appeared. The farces (and Shakespeare) present a barren page when it comes to anything beyond the verbal. Gesture, movement, costume must be derived from the text. [This has been the work of John Barton with the actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years.] And here I’ll inject an anecdote: I wanted badly to stage the Pasté and the Tarte but I wanted even more for my students, first, to recognize how funny it was and so want to do it. Simply reading it would have been insufficient. It’s a farce about two poor, hungry and profoundly dumb thieves who plot to steal food from a baker and his equally dumb wife. They mess up. They get caught. And everyone takes a beating. Nothing on the page, other than the lines, tells them any of this. I wanted them to understand that they were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. [Things happen providentially sometimes.] While I was preparing to direct the Pasté and the Tarte, I saw Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks. There it was, I found it. I wanted the actors to see the movie, particularly the scenes in the cellar where this group of bumbling criminals tries to tunnel. And then I told them: “That’s you, only in the Middle Ages.”

At this point I’d like to show you just a short video clip which will give you a better idea of just what we did with the text and how from the verbal we derived the physical, the gestural.

                                                                      Show clip

What happened first was that, via Woody Allen, they were able to have an idea of character. They had a context, even if it was a modern one, from which to work. The transposition backward (in time) suddenly became easier. But how to accomplish it fully. They have character now they need the world.

The teaching exercise becomes very interdisciplinary at this point. We can get at notions of costume, gesture and movement through the visual arts, illuminations, illustrations and the like. In my particular case, I had recourse to the work of Breugel the Elder for costumes, colors, scenes of festival and daily life, etc. [And again, it always helps to send students to the movies for notions of period and behavior. I think of The Advocate, Martin Guerre, and others.] I found that both gesture and movement were also well informed by such documents as the 16^th Century Recueil Fossard. And here I’ll send around an example of what I mean, the first is an engraving from Fossard and the second a performance photo shot which it inspired.

                                                        Show Engraving and Photo

Finally, to conclude that part of my presentation which includes only me by saying  that there are many ways to communicate our enthusiasm for the drama of a given period to our students, to give them curiosity, to show them the relevance of other cultures and the meaningfulness of practicing drama.

With this in mind, I have prepared handout for you on some useful strategies which I have used in classes either simply watched or where we’ve actually put on plays.

Textual Strategies:

Read for understanding

Write out text in prose

Students write similar dialogues or write from a situation (i.e. wife dupes husband, thief tricks baker, etc.)

Offer/write alternate endings

Writing in a new character

Transposing/making contemporary

Playing Strategies:

Working from character models (the servant, the fool, the knight etc. in a particular film/video)

Handing out roles instead of a complete text

Improvise on a scenario

Switching roles (husband/wife, first shepherd/second shepherd, etc.)

Playing in different registers (mockingly, angrily, sadly, etc.)

Accelerated run-throughs, silent run-throughs, etc.

Research Strategies:

Describing the world of the play

Forming groups for different tasks: costume design, decor, props, music, etc.

Forming groups to develop a concept from beginning to end: choice of text, design, staging, etc.

Forming groups and assigning roles: director, designer, actors, stage manager