|
A
TEXT INSPIRED BY A WORK MICHAEL STROHMANN AND MYSELF DID AS PART OF “I LIKE TO
MOVE IT MOVE IT”, LINZ09
By
Yosi Wanunu
Level 1 – The Myth of the Hero Teacher
The hero teacher story is by now a staple
of Hollywood movies, like the lone cowboy or the singing babysitter. You know
the plot … a young teacher (on most occasions) arrives in a new school and
changes the lives of her/his teen-age students forever. The students are either
a bunch of poor low lifers from a bad neighborhood or some rich kids, in fancy
private schools, with parents that are too busy to notice them.
Like all good stories, the hero teacher
movies are used by different film makers to prop up different ideologies; often
it is used to support a claim that poorly performing schools are not caused by
a lack of funds, just by a lack of expectations. Thus we should not be tempted
to fix the problems by "throwing money at the schools which will just waste it
like they have wasted all that was given them in the past".
Another interpretation may be that an
excellent teacher with strong motivation can sometimes (often?) achieve what
seems like miraculous results in a surprisingly short time with an almost
superhuman work effort under even the worst of circumstances. But absent a
systemic change, these results will probably only last for as long as the hero
keeps up the superhuman effort. After he or she gives up, and leaves the field
to "ordinary" successors, the disaster returns to the status quo ante. Thus, in
the absence of the super hero teacher our schools have often turned into
permanent disaster areas.
Structurally, as a cinematic subspecies,
films about teachers working with throwaway kids tend to follow a predictable
arc involving conflicts and resolution, smooth beats and bitter tears. The
students are an unruly, education-resistant bunch, that is to say, a typical
supporting cast for the heroic-teacher genre. Funny how point of view works. If
so many films about so-called troubled teenagers come off as little more than
exploitation, it's often because the filmmakers are not really interested in
them, just their dysfunction.*
The drama, as always, lies in the
teacher's struggle to reach teenagers who don't see much point in learning
anything. The superhero teacher has to improvise. On the school battlefield,
one has to be flexible, capable of changing tactics when one finds her or
himself losing ground. The hero teacher will do anything for a reaction from
the students, whatever it takes. At its best, heroic teaching gives us the
pleasure of seeing teaching as a kind of comic performance art.
The problems inherent in representing the
educational process on the screen have to do with the fact that learning tends
to be a painfully slow activity. The hero-teacher movies speed up the process;
the cut-to-the enlightenment dramaturgy feels, as it usually does, desperate
and false. The speeding effect is necessary because teenagers turn into adults
in no time.
After working with teenagers in Upper
Austria, in the last few months, I'm happy to report – there is no need for the
hero-teacher kind or for superhuman work effort. The schools seem to be ok, no
crumbling walls or guns flying in the hallways. Yes, some of the schools are a
bit boring, a bit gray, but you can say the same about the country as a whole;
schools just mirror the reality outside. The work done by the artists will not
change the lives of the participants; it might spice it up a bit in the best
cases. After all learning is a very slow process, bunch of artists coming in
for two months won't speed things up …
*Being around schools, lately, it is easy
to see how some teachers, artists, producers and culture bureaucrats are not
interested in kids as kids, only in kids as problems. Schools, kids, teenagers
are a big business, kids as problems make a bigger business sense … In an ORF
reportage on "I Like to Move It Move It" one could see a lot of adult talking
about kids, creativity, education; there were hardly any interviews with the
kids themselves. As in the hero-teacher movies the kids served as extras in
their own film.
Level 2 – Move your Body
A teacher approached me one afternoon,
all smiles and enthusiasm. He just read the PR text of "I Like to Move It Move
It" and he was totally excited about the body-mind connection mentioned in the
text. Moving the body can trigger the mind, a big surprise, how come he didn't
think about it before?
In his 1999 book, Dependent Rational
Animals, British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out that philosophers
always seem to presuppose a physically healthy human being. It is true that we
can think more clearly if our hair is not on fire or our fingernails are not
being forcibly extracted; like a discreet waiter, the body is at its best when
we do not notice it. Most of the time, we are aware of it only when it goes
wrong, as we are of carburetors and central-heating systems. But this also
means that we forget to think about the body, and so overlook the fact that we
think in the way we do, generally speaking, because of the kind of bodies we
have. Our rationality and animality are bound tightly together. If a
caterpillar can be said to think at all, it cannot think about the world in the
way we do. This is not only because it is unlikely to have read Simone de Beauvoir
but also because its body, its sensory organization, presents it with a quite
different environment about which to think. You do not reflect upon nature in
quite the way that Wordsworth does if your senses allow you to see only one
square millimeter at any given time.
If the body is such a fashionable topic
at the moment, it is partly because it is nothing if not local and particular,
which suits a post postmodern age wary of universals and abstractions. Another
reason is simply that the body is a more sexy topic than, say, the moral
thought of Kant and thus likely to sell more books, workshops and events in a
ferociously competitive market. Twenty or thirty years ago, you were unlikely
to get your literary study published unless its title contained the word
"dialectic"; nowadays, the obligatory word is "body".
Bringing the body as topic into the
schools makes things complicated for a system that works hard at taming the
body into a state of non-existence. It is the body that lies at the root of
what we know as objectivity. This might seem odd, since many philosophers have
tended to see objectivity and the body as opposites, not allies. The body for
them, and for many people in the education systems, can only serve to undermine
truth, distorting our judgments with its noisy hankerings; its passions and
prejudices get in the way of our seeing things as they really are. "A
wretchedly foolish and selfish human creature" wrote the eighteenth-century
Earl of Shaftesbury, "thinks he has to do with his body … A wiser mortal thinks
his body no part of himself." Things haven't changed that much.
What is scandalous about the body, for
civilizations that believe they can master and manipulate everything under
their noses, is its sheer givenness. It is not something we get to choose, and
thus proves disquieting to those for whom life is all about options. In its
frailty and vulnerability, it reminds such societies of what they can least
stomach: failure. In all these ways, then, the body can act as a kind of
political critique. It reminds us of the suffering flesh and blood on which our
bodiless world is built, of the contradiction between the unavoidable local,
carnal nature of men and women and the oppressively abstract system in which
they live.
Level 3 – Finland, the land of best practice
After spending some time in schools in
Upper Austria I posed the same question to teachers I met: "What is the problem
with your school? Where is the big crisis?"
The answer I kept getting can be
summarized in one word: Finland! The teachers were alluding to some study where
test scores from different countries are compared in order to rate the state of
education on a global scale. Finland seems to do well, Austria so-so and that's
the reason for the panic.
The most striking thing about comparing
different test scores and level of knowledge between different countries is how
much they resemble, in language and philosophy, the industrial-efficiency
movement of the early twentieth century. In those years, engineers argued that
efficiency and productivity were things that could be measured and managed,
and, if you had the right inventory and manufacturing controls in place, no
widget would be left behind. Jump one century forward and what you get is a
complex apparatus of sanctions and standards designed to compel individual
schools toward steady annual improvement. It is hard to look at the new
measuring standards and not share in its new vision of the classroom as a
brightly lit assembly line, in which curriculum standards sail down from Global
Education INC. and fresh-scrubbed, defect free students come bouncing out the
other end. It is an extraordinary vision, particularly at a time when lawmakers
seem mostly preoccupied with pointing out all the things that government cannot
do. The only problem, of course, and it's not a trivial one, is that children
aren't widgets.
Suppose that you'd like to identify and
reward those schools, which do a good job of improving their student's
performance. That's the kind of thing that the industrial efficiency experts,
with their emphasis on "best practices", always said was a sound procedure for
companies looking to boost productivity – and the new school reformers have
made this idea a centerpiece of their new regime. But how do you measure the performance
of a school? Is happiness a criterion? The ability to dance, a criterion? How
well prepared are the students for life after school, a criterion? When it
comes to art and creativity, for generations the common sense was that a
traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare
students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and
historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities studies develop
have a different purpose: they are prerequisites for personal growth and
participation in free democracy, regardless of career choice. The problem with
all of these noble ideas is that they are un-measurable. So we are left with
Finland … The truth is, however, that standards are not possible without
meaningful systems of measurement, and learning cannot be measured as neatly
and easily as the devotees of educational productivity would like. The people
behind education as business would like you to believe that if schools were
factories, society would have solved the education problem a century ago.
Looking at the global economy right now, I'm glad schools are not.
Level 4 – Interface
"It should be noted that children at play
are not playing about," wrote Montaigne; "their games should be seen as their
most serious minded activity."
When working with children and young
adults one is tempted to look at the world via their prism/point of view. By
adapting their stories, their movements, the way they create metaphors, we, the
adults, have the slippery feeling that we are leveling with them. That we are
entering into their world. I read somewhere a video games expert who talks
about soccer as interface between a person and this round object that obeys the
law of physics. According to the expert, when you learn to play soccer, by
dribbling around the cones, you're just learning an interface. It's analogous
to having to master the array of buttons in Defender, or any other buttons
heavy game. I don't want to spoil the interface party, and I even find it really
interesting to think of actual soccer as an interface between your body and the
ball, etc. But shouldn't we be cautious about such metaphors? Don't the
privileges of reality need protecting? Doesn't it matter that in the case of a
soccer "interface" the moves that you make are the moves that are happening on
the field? Whereas when you press buttons on a controller, what's happening on
the screen isn't even mimetically related to what you do with the buttons.
What sort of interface one uses when leaving
the comfort of the controller's buttons, and being forced to use one's body in
real time? When the "player" goes out into the real world, I think there's a
real danger – and I see signs of this in the teenagers I worked with but also
with young people in general – of failing to understand not just the complexity
of the real world but also its mystery. I'm using "mystery" as opposed to
"problem" on purpose: problems have solutions, mysteries don't. People are
profoundly mysterious entities, I think, and understanding them in the real
world involves understanding that you're never going to entirely understand
them. To bring solely a gamist perspective to the world is a big mistake. It's
systems based thinking, model based thinking. Look at Donald Rumsfeld; probably
he was not a product of a video game education, but he definitely showed all
the symptoms of it.
Level 5 – The Me-centered World
As part of the project we designed a
video-hosting website for the purpose of documenting the various projects, and
creating a common platform for the schools involved. (See: http://www.i-like-to-move-it-move-it.at/)
The idea was/is to propose an alternative to the old and gray institute we all
know as the school newspaper. We wanted to build an open platform where
students can post their videos, write comments on each other's work, and
connect with other students their age across the region. We would like the site
to continue functioning after the project is done and over.
There is something problematic about the
so-called virtual social networking that in some ways is similar to the way
video games work. In video games you get to be the star on the screen and to be
the spectator at the same time. There's a huge narcissistic charge to that. A
video game makes the player the superstar, the central figure. It's very
me-centered. The player isn't curious about the outside world and how to fit
into it; it's the world that has to fit into his/her game. The world is just a
backdrop. Or a mirror. With video-hosting web sites similar phenomena occur.
The spectators are able to use all these new resources – virtual video games sites, but also
video-hosting sites like YouTube, social networking sites like MySpace – to overthrow
the whole idea of celebrity. You get all of the gratifications of
spectatorship, but at the same time you're also the star. And the closing of
that loop, the gratification of both watching and being at the center of
attention, the pleasure of that just goes on and on and on.
Level
6 – Gotta dance! or The Girls from Rohrbach
I worked with a group of 28 young women,
age 17-18, in Rohrbach, Upper Austria.
They study for their Matura with an emphasis on Wellness Studies; which
means they learn to cook, give massage treatments and create a PR campaign,
etc. In an interview we conducted with them at the start of our work together,
they revealed that they either want to make a lot of money in the future (have
a super job is the term many of them used) or find love, make babies, all the
rest. In an answer to the question "Where do you see yourself when you're
25?" one of them, Victoria, said that she hopes that by the time she's 25
she will know what to do with her life. When I was 18 I was running around in
uniforms entertaining soldiers as part of my mandatory army service in Israel.
It is nice to see that there are places where young people can afford not to
know.
They just wanted to dance and at times I
felt like Busby Berkeley working on a Hollywood set with a huge and quirky chorus
girls ensemble. Unfortunately we missed the big crane for the overhead shots. Berkeley created
spectacles, his films were pure escapist entertainment; a way to strip past the
chaos and grime of everyday life to create a space for dreaming. Back then,
dreaming was more than a way of passing the time. If "The Gang's All Here" was
created as a wartime diversion, "Dames" fits the bill for escapism in hard
times. (Both, unfortunately, qualify for the present.) Just as Berkeley
detached cinematic dance from its proscenium trappings, he also liberated the
viewer from reality. As layoffs pile up, and it seems that there will be darker
days ahead, rarely has there been a better moment to plunge into his world of
enchantment. Sometimes there's nothing more relaxing than watching nubile
chorines – with their underlying twinkle of humor and intelligence – gliding
along contentedly in Berkeley's silver-screen sea.
How often does one get a chance to work with so many wonderful performers
in the free scene? So, we spent a lot of time doing the big chorus movements, staging extravagant dance routines with a contemporary twist a la Matthew
Barney. The challenge was finding a way to create a class dance piece, but
still keep the individual touch of each member. Berkeley's famous precision was
not what we were after, just the sheer fun of dancing non-stop, together. So we
danced in the gym, in the school's kitchen facilities, in the town's swimming
pool, in the dining room, in the school's hallways, in the class. I have no
idea what we taught each other; I know I learned a lot. I loved every minute of
it.
Artists:
Yosi
Wanunu was born in Israel. He studied art
history, theater and film in Israel, Europe and the USA. During extended
business trips throughout the world over the course of many years, he has
acquired a wide variety of techniques and styles for staging dramatic works.
Since the 1980s, he has been active at the interface of film/video/new media
and theater/performance. Up to 1996, Yosi Wanunu lived and worked in NYC as a
director, stage designer and lighting designer at such venues as BCBC, Ohio
Theatre, La Mama ETC, Here and in Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric
Theatre. He is co-founder and artistic director of the Vienna-based label toxic
dreams (more than 20 independent productions since 1998; most recently "Die
Milosevics," "Meet the Composer," "Titus 3," "Jabberwocky," "De Lady in de
Tutti Frutti Hat," "Vanja 1," "Kongs, Blondes, Tall Buildings," and "The
Mystery of the Enchanted Cars." He also works with other indie-scene groups and
performers in Europe.
Michael
Strohmann was born in 1972 in Kirchdorf. He
studied computer music and electronic media, and began his career as a composer
and media artist. Since 1992, he has been bassist and composer with the group
Fuckhead. In 2004, "Ich bin traurig," a music video he produced with Didi
Bruckmayer (vocals), was singled out for recognition with the Diagonal Prize
for innovative cinema. Michael Strohmann is a long-standing member of toxic
dreams, a Viennese performance group. Its productions include "Die Milosevics,"
"Meet the Composer," "Titus 3," "Jabberwocky," "De Lady in de Tutti Frutti
Hat," "Vanja 1," "Kongs, Blondes, Tall Buildings," and "The Mystery of the
Enchanted Cars." In conjunction with the Winter Academy held by the Theaters an
der Parkaue – Junges Staatstheater Berlin, he and Yosi Wanunu conducted a
multidisciplinary laboratory for youngsters. Wanunu and Strohmann have jointly
created numerous video works including "Jabberwocky," "Headache Symphonie" and
"Sleep."
(23.6.2009)
|
