Читать книгу The Art of Foreign Language Teaching - Peter Lutzker - Страница 54

Vivian Gladwell regularly gives workshops not only for teachers, but for business executives, doctors, social workers, nurses, midwives and psychologists. In the context of this study, it seems most appropriate to focus on his work in the social professions. The course Serious Clowning is offered regularly at the Blackstone Trust Medical Centre in Maidstone, England. He describes the rationale behind his work with doctors:

In teaching as in medicine there is a similar theme to do with the individual’s relationship to knowledge. Both medicine and teaching refer to a concrete body of knowledge. So doctors need to know their stuff, they need to recognize symptoms, to prescribe drugs etc. which are part of a common, shared body of knowledge. But when you talk to doctors, they often don’t consider this knowledge as the most important part of their job. Perhaps these are just the doctors I talk to and who come to do clowning. They consider that the relationship they have with their clients and their professional relationship with their team and with their work is just as important. It is these aspects that will guarantee their professional survival in the years to come. It is the quality of this social dimension in their work that defines whether they are in a healthy or unhealthy relationship to their work. This is the dimension that clowning addresses.224

One of the participants in his workshops for doctors, the general practitioner Dr. David Wheeler, wrote an article about his experiences in these workshops and its relevance for his professional work. Wheeler writes,

The clown is a professional empathiser. He has to listen and respond to others on stage, to his own feelings and those of the audience. He is an improviser and has no pre-written script. If a problem arises on stage the clown is advised to “stay with it” in order to resolve the problem in an imaginative way. Improvisers on stage together are encouraged not to “block” ideas and suggestions from each other but to listen and respond to the other clown. However one clown does not have to give in completely to the other but express his own character too. He accepts the challenge posed by the other clown’s suggestion and then transforms it. The clown responds also to emotion but is not overwhelmed personally by it. He distances himself from it sufficiently to understand the drama objectively and to play with it.225

Achieving these delicate states of balance between empathy and distance, between responding to an impulse and expressing one, requires a heightened awareness of what is happening at each moment. Wheeler draws connections between these processes occurring in improvisations and his consultations with his patients:

Playing without a script was disconcerting but allowed me to observe more clearly what was happening around me. So, if I put to one side my “biomedical scripts”, my concern with disease descriptions, would I observe better my patient’s own stories? (…) This would mean listening carefully to the patient’s story and asking questions that clarify that story in preference to (though not to the complete exclusion of) pursuing ideas in the doctor’s own mind. If I could respond to my patient’s emotion without being overwhelmed personally by it then could I help to transform that emotion?226

He sees in the co-operative nature of this process a fundamental transformation of traditional doctor-patient roles:

Of course if, as a doctor, I involve myself in the patient’s experience of events, I am no longer the “expert” in charge of the consultation. My patient is regarded as an equal expert. The challenge in both clowning and doctoring is to listen and respond with no script or clear guide to follow and to trust that an outcome favourable to all participants will emerge.227

There are clearly emotional and behavioural dimensions here which are relevant to other social professions. Many of the qualities of empathy, listening, acceptance and risk that are referred to here also appear in the responses of language teachers.

In his workshops with psychotherapists there are the clearest professional parallels drawn to the ‘double nature’ of the clown who is fully engaged in the story, yet also has a certain distance to it. Rob Leiper, a clinical psychologist and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Kent Institute of Medicine and Sciences has attended Gladwell’s workshops as part of the Serious Clowning programme at the Blackthorn Trust. He writes,

Something you learn as a psychotherapist or counsellor and which is crucial to being a good practitioner is to both be in and be out at the same time, so you are in touch with the person – trying to access their experience, resonate to it, empathise with it and identify with it in such a way as to deepen it. But you are also trying to think about it and trying to know what is going on. And in order to do that you have to separate yourself. Sometimes it feels like one, sometimes like the other. That is a skill you have to learn in order to do the work well.228

Significantly, this dynamic is not only an essential element of the therapist’s role, but is also one of the key elements of the psychotherapeutic process itself. To no small degree, the well-being of the client also hinges on his or her attaining a healthy inner balance between these perspectives. In this context, Leiper also sees parallels between clowning and what he is then able to bring into his work as a therapist to help clients reach this state:

What you learn, almost more than anything else when you go through an in-depth psychotherapy, is the capacity to be playful. You learn to be playful in areas of your life in which there was no lightness. Psychotherapy loosens that up and gives some distance so you are not completely identified with something and you can start to play with it. This is the quality I have appreciated in clowning.229

Despite these parallels, there are equally clear distinctions to be drawn between clowning and therapeutic work. Neither Bataclown nor Gladwell view themselves as therapists or clowning as a form of therapy. Although there exist many parallels in the inner processes themselves, clowning is anchored in a theatrical tradition and herein lie its most creative possibilities. Jean-Bernard Bonange, one of the founding members of Bataclown writes,

Though we recognise our work has therapeutic effects, we do not define it as a therapeutic activity but rather as a theatrical activity within which the clown – as mediator – is at the service of those who wish to “find themselves” on stage (in both senses of the word). The role of the clown as mediator comes from using the clown’s nose which as a mask unmasks our inner self. To bring our clown to life requires that we bring ourselves and our “imagination” into play. This defines our approach to the clown – it is the imagination in action. Or as Henry Miller says: The poet in action.230