The Heart of Teaching: Empowering Students in the Performing Arts by Stephen Wangh (review)

Stephen Wangh’s pedagogical reflections begin with an epi-graph from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” Despite the deep sighs or the burdensome debt of impossible ideals this quotation may conjure in some of us, its placement sets the key signature for the mindful and provocative prose that follows it.

In Wangh’s own words, “The purpose of this book is to open a discussion among teachers of performance and of other disciplines, about the joys, the fears, and the unspoken (unspeakable?) travails of teaching” (xiii). For acting teachers, no doubt, this book contains valuable insights, not in the form of a checklist or how-to manual but, rather, as a blunt, honest, and charitable reflection on Wangh’s many years of teaching and performing experience. Other teachers won’t be able to transfer his insights directly into their teaching practices, but that’s not the point. Wangh has cultivated a “way of teaching” (xi) that provides lines of sight for all who struggle annually with the acts of transference and counter-transference unfolding through scene study, monologue work, and physical acting training.

As readers of his earlier An Acrobat of the Heart (2000) will know, Wangh grounds his teaching in the shifting sands of the via negativa, Grotowski’s philosophical first principle, “not a collection of skills but an eradication of blocks” (11). Wangh insists, however, that this is “a positive attitude toward teaching and toward our students, an attitude of inquiry, of openness and naiveté” (15). Teachers without a Grotowskian physical or theoretical vocabulary, however, will still benefit from Wangh’s examples, primarily insofar as they all illustrate a specific process of asking questions (see especially chapter 2), or “searching with one’s full body for images, associations, memories, and impulses that would open us to ourselves” (16).

The titles of all the chapters correspond directly to the concerns and questions of acting, directing, improvisation, and movement teachers. “Listening” (chapter 4) investigates the necessary task for actors of listening to each other during scene work as well as the teacher’s challenge of listening and responding to students’ problems and resistances. “Feedback” (chapter 5) provides suggestions for developing a critical pedagogical exchange in the classroom without stifling students’ desires to learn for themselves. “Eros et charitas” (chapter 9) addresses the erotic transference and counter-transference (also discussed in chapter 7) common to classes in which physical exercises aim to unleash the impulses of young actors. Here, Wangh is at his best as he speaks truthfully about his own wrestling bouts with eros in the classroom, without indulging in purely descriptive autobiography. As in each chapter, his goal is to leap into the thorniest of situations in order to propose methods for harnessing the power found there and to liberate his students and himself from static thinking and the atrophying effects of habitual behavior, which for actors can lead to creative dead-ends and for teachers can ossify into a stultifying pedagogy.

True to his words from the preface, Wangh’s reports from the acting classrooms of NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, Emerson, and Neuropa can also provoke thought for those of us who teach theatre history, dramatic literature, or any class offered within performing arts curricula. In addition to Grotowski, Stanislavsky, Hagen, and other actors/performers whose words we would expect to see here, Wangh enlists the work of scholars from the fields of educational theory, literature, critical race theory, poetry, and psychoanalysis. His chapter “Cultures of Oppression and Resistance” (chapter 8), for example, picks up the writing of Paulo Freire in order to dwell on students who, having been victimized by institutionalized racism and other oppressive forces, exhibit an active desire to not learn and who attempt to gain agency by combatting even the most inclusive pedagogical strategies. Since oppression and discrimination will...