Ethical Considerations in an Overtly Political University Show

COMMENTS ON PROCESS Ethical Considerations in an Overtly Political University Show Jill Taft-Kaufman As purveyor of illusion, theatre has always been at the nexus of how we think we see ourselves and how we think we would like to see ourselves. The power of theatre to arouse and influence audiences is indisputable. From Brecht to Boal in this century, the concomitant use of theatre as a tool to channel that arousal into social awareness has stimulated political engagement with ideas in a variety of public arenas. In university settings political theatre is not new (see, for instance, Capo, Langellier). Yet as different materials for performance are continually emerging, the notion of what is political expands. Whether one holds the broadest view, that everything is political, or a more circumscribed perspective on what might be considered so, it is clear that directors face increasing challenges regarding how to handle material and students in ways that acknowledge the political, optimize respect for texts and students, and at the same time create effective theatre. Directing a political show within a university setting evokes issues that are tied not only to the political subject matter but also to questions of the dual role of educator-director. As Jim Merod points out, "Provocative teaching often stages itself as active, as disruptive, as capable of inducing curiosity" (189). The same can be said for the functioning of the director as teacher. The university director stimulates student actors to question, explore, pry, and dig deeply as they prepare for a role. In the foment that such a quest sets in motion, the fervor of the student actor's search for congruence with a role can produce insights that are problematic. As Suzanne Burgoyne Dieckman asks: "Given that each play communicates the world view of an individual author, what is the impact on embodying that world view on the artists who bring it to life on the stage," particularly the actors? Burgoyne Dieckman questions the "ethical responsibilities of directors and theatre educators towards actors who explore their own psyches in the process of creating a character" (1). The exploration of the psyche may be intensified when the ideology upon which the student predicates his or her sense of being in the world is directly challenged by politicized theatre. 95 96 Jill Taft-Kaufman Student performers may not consciously consider themselves to be ideological, but as Raymond Williams explains, ideology, which refers to formal and conscious beliefs, may also be embodied in "less conscious, less formulated attitudes, habits and feelings, or even unconscious assumptions, bearings and commitments" (26). Issues of ideology and influence raise questions about ethical standards of conduct for directors in university and college settings. In 1991, Burgoyne Dieckman challenged the field to discuss such issues (1). While we have been slow to answer this challenge, we can look about us and see that in other academic fields, investigation of professional ethics has been going on for quite some time. Ethical codes of conduct for the hard sciences have long been established. Within the social sciences, attention to ethics has varied. Psychologists and anthropologists have discussed, though not always agreed upon, ethics in relation to the people who form the subject they study. Surprisingly, in sociology, ethics and human rights are, according to sociologist Larry T. Reynolds, the most neglected areas of inquiry. Many of us are aware that oral historians, who have "grappled constantly with developing and promoting professional standards" (Ritchie iv), have had written goals and guidelines since 1968 and have recently revised them. Within the field of communication and performance studies, scholars such as Dwight Conquergood have acknowledged the strong role that drama and performance play in defining a culture's values. In a 1985 essay in Literature in Performance, Conquergood emphasized accountability to informants whose stories provide the basis for ethnographic performance. Yet, in practice, misuse of ethnographic material is still in evidence, suggesting that warnings about ethical dimensions of performance work are either not always known or understood. If ethics refers to the awareness, questioning, and justification of what we believe and how we act (Rosenstand 5), then the surge of recent interest about those concerns in the field of theatre...