Theatre Topics

When campuses across the country abruptly moved their classes to an online format in March 2020, the shift to distance learning was supposed to be temporary. Numerous US schools, including mine, even had tentative return-to-campus dates of sometime in April. Those dates were soon pushed back, however, and then pushed back again, and again. And now, at the beginning of the new year and in spite of the approval of a couple of COVID-19 vaccines, most universities still are not exactly sure when they will be reopening classrooms. Unfortunately, the current state of emergency that has become the rule is not disappearing any time soon. Thus rather than treating the internet-based classroom as a temporary, bothersome detour, it might be time to embrace it as the place where we teach, as well as an opportunity to revamp how we teach, including within the physical classroom.

I do not mean to suggest that remote teaching can be equivalent to in-person teaching, in spite of neoliberal arguments in its favor.¹ Although online lectures have become a defining feature of the pandemic university, effective teaching has traditionally been an intensely performative act that requires instructors to constantly read the room and adjust. Such dynamics simply cannot be replicated on Zoom, even during the rare moments when most students have their video cameras turned on. And teaching’s performative nature becomes even more crucial when performance itself is part of a course’s content, as is often the case in theatre classes.

While the main subject I teach, playwriting, focuses on the development of written scripts, the genre is also dependent upon performance. Within the playwriting workshop, in-class performances of new work, with students doubling as actors, provide novice dramatists an invaluable opportunity to hear what they wrote in front of an audience. Unsurprisingly, the online workshopping of plays through Zoom is not as effective as in-person workshopping, which is due not only to the lack of the physical presence of actors and spectators, but also to unreliable wi-fi connections, faulty laptops, and distracting cell phones.

Like most instructors, I would prefer to be teaching on campus. Yet working remotely has forced me to rethink some aspects of my pedagogy in ways that have been beneficial to my teaching in general. After touching upon my own sudden and anxious entry into online instruction, this note will examine a pandemic-related playwriting exercise, which my students completed back in mid-April of last year, within the context of Jacques Rancière’s radical ideas about pedagogy and the emancipated spectator. At the end of the note, I include some samples of student-written performance texts from the assignment.

In addition to playwriting, I teach performance studies, dramatic literature, and creative writing at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), a large, culturally diverse, urban university in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Last year, shortly after CSUN abruptly cancelled on-campus classes in mid-March “out of an abundance of caution,” I found myself scrambling to make my courses internet friendly during the campus shutdown, initially scheduled to end on April 19th. [End Page 137] When LA’s shelter-in-place order quickly followed on the heels of the university’s closure, I was most concerned at first with two very pressing matters: 1) how to effectively adapt, ten weeks into the semester, in-person workshop classes to an online format, and 2) staying alive.

I was also torn at first between making my classes less demanding (I nervously envisioned COVID-19 quickly morphing into something akin to the plague, as described by Artaud, and visiting my street) or going all-in with the new online format. Ultimately, I reluctantly decided to move my classes to Zoom, which I had never used before, and Canvas, our campus’s online teaching platform. The transition process required a substantial amount of work during my spring vacation, which happened to fall in-between our initial campus shutdown and the official start of online teaching. I spent ten days revising my syllabi while creating...