Still Here, Still Making Theatre, Still Working

 
dominicpower@nwkcollege.ac.uk
Director
 
The Miskin Theatre’s acting course on which I have now worked as both an Acting Coach and Theatre Director for 10 years has seen many changes in its time and has grown in size and scale. However one thing that has stuck is the Miskin Theatre’s ethos - we train together and as actors we have a social responsibility.
 
A Shared Experience
It has always been fundamental that we avoid the old paternalistic teacher – student relationship whilst instilling passions and thus empowering the learners. The “teacher” is no longer merely the-one-who-teachers, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the “students”, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. I achieve great job satisfaction if among the Actors and Training Artists there are those who become sufficiently critical to correct mistakes and misunderstandings (theirs or my own), to deepen affirmations and to point out aspects I have not perceived.
 
This approach seems to awaken them from their educational lethargy and they become anxious to participate.
 
A Social Awareness/Responsibility
Although ongoing throughout the Actor’s time here, this largely comes in the form of Theatre In Education. The sharpness and intensity of the work they produce reflect the response of creative minds and sensitive consciences to the extraordinary human injustices one usually discovers in research during a TIE process.  
 
Those who, in learning to be an actor, come to a new awareness of self and begin to look critically at the social situation in which they find themselves, often take the initiative off stage and attempt to transform the opinions of those around them. Education is once again a subversive force.
 
“There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes ‘the practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” Richard Shaull.