Like they say is the case with the medical profession, theatre is also a field in which one never stops learning. The human condition, which provides theatre eternal inspiration, is vast and infinite, almost always beyond our grasp which is why we continue to grapple for answers. So too, conventions of live story-telling shift with the winds of change, clichés die out and resurface, and audiences acquire fresh agency and a pristine gaze. Lifelong education is as much as about discovering the ‘new’, as it is about excavating the ‘old’, because wisdom, even that which has once been acquired, can dissipate with time, and has to be relearned. Learning on the job, the qualified privilege of the intrepid practitioner, is brave and vital, but sometimes the rehearsal floor settles into becoming a comfort zone where new wheels are seldom invented, even if much fun is to be had.
Spreading the net
The good news is that the millennial-era all-access pass has spread its net to include university education, and there are now a variety of online courses available for the performing arts that can be enrolled into by anyone irrespective of credentials. There are free courses, most certainly, and there are those governed by different degrees of monetisation. Some can be worked through at the student’s own pace; others require an academic regime to be adhered to, with levels of difficulty varying considerably. These Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can get you a bona fide degree or a completion certificate, or simply the satisfaction of crossing a personal milestone. Of course, theatre is an area that is still pretty niche when compared to, say, cloud computing or structural engineering (one might wonder why), so you may not entirely be spoiled for choice when it comes down to it.
Beginning this week, and not just on a lark, this writer has ambitiously enrolled for two online courses. The University of Leeds’ Physical Theatre: Exploring the Slap, propitiously discovered on the FutureLearn digital platform, and Theatre and Globalization, offered by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich on Coursera, another popular online learning website. The first is a two-week affair that is focused on the techniques of Russian pioneer Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold, particularly his system of biomechanics. In India, physical theatre is still an emergent genre, but it is a mode of theatrical expression that is now extremely popular the world over. The course looks at translating Meyerhold’s “20th century acting into the 21st, scrutinising the documents of old, and developing new records of biomechanics using 21st century technologies.” Context being everything, the Russian Revolution of 1917 provides a compelling war-time backdrop to the origins of physical theatre.
The second course runs six weeks, and was the very first course on Coursera dedicated to theatre — its first run took place in 2015 and was taken by 5,000 learners from across the globe. Within its ambit, everything from Cold War rivalries to the modern festival circuit, from global media to the theatre of migration, is dissected and demystified. Once again, the call of globalisation is something Indian theatre must respond to, both as resuscitation and transformation. Not in an aspirational sense, but in the sense that being rooted need not necessarily mean being insular, and world influences, beyond the all-pervasive soft power of former colonial forces, must be embraced and welcomed. Globalisation isn’t just about the West. Coursera courses are often free to air, but if students seek graded assignments or certificates, then there are subscription plans that can be purchased, some of which are rather moderately priced.
Dissecting theatre
There are, of course, many more learning opportunities out there that are just a click of a mouse away. The right combination of keywords on an Internet search could reveal more. The diligence one might display in the privacy of our own homes isn’t at par with how we might invest with the same material in a classroom full of like-minded peers and a professor to boot (now available only via video link, somewhat futuristically). That’s a trade-off, and in the end, not being part of an educational institution does have its own dividends — no falling asleep during lectures, for instance. At the end of the day, who really wants to go back to school? However, it must be said that upgrading your knowledge and skills is proving to be more and more unnegotiable these days. I, for one, certainly hope to complete my courses with flying colours.