Paul Kleiman

Predictive Texts

The full text of the opening ‘provocation’ presented at the Future of Performer Arts Training symposium, Coventry University, UK, 4-5 November 2016. This article first appeared in the Theatre, Dance and Performer Training blog. An adapted version was also presented as a keynote at the Innovations in Performing Arts Education (IPAE17) conference in Hong Kong in June 2017.

Paul Kleiman is Senior Consultant (Higher Education) at Ciel Associates, and Visiting Professor at the School of Media and Performing Arts, Middlesex University and Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.

In the process of thinking about this and putting it together, it appeared increasingly like one of those fiendish jigsaws, in which there are not only loads of pieces, but there are several possibilities. It is not even certain if all the pieces fit together, as some are located in the past, some in the present and some in the future. In the end I gave up trying to weave a compelling linear narrative and accepted the fractured, uncertain nature of what I was confronting….what we are confronting.

So, what I have are just three of the pieces, which I’ll present in the form of three different narratives: two short ones – one from the past and one from the present – and a longer one from the future, in the hope that some connections and sense might be made.

NARRATIVE ONE – THE PAST

It is somewhere around 1990-91. I am sitting around a large table in an upstairs office in The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. The reason I’m there is that I am involved in setting up what was to become the Arden School of Theatre, established in partnership with the Royal Exchange and whose two degree courses – Acting and Technical Theatre – were being validated by Manchester University. Also around the table are three of the Directors of the Royal Exchange, one of whom is an eminent actor, a professor from the university’s drama department, a university administrator, and the person who was to be the Director of the new school. I‘m there as I am helping them to create and write the validation document.

We are discussing the typical things one discusses at these sort of meetings: curriculum design, assessment, quality assurance, resources etc. . It was a bit heavy going, and at one point – I can’t remember what precisely set him off – the eminent actor banged the table and then started thumping his chest wth his right hand: “This is all fucking bollocks!” he shouted, “No one needs a fucking degree to be an actor. It’s all here.” He said, thumping his heart. “It all comes from here!”

And looking back, there’s always been that tension, between what Simon Murray, in the provocation written by him, Mark Evans and Jonathan Pitches, refers to as the ‘spurious binaries’ between art and craft, vocational and academic, theory and practice etc. and, on the whole we’ve managed to navigate our way through those tensions with creativity, rigour and integrity.

NARRATIVE TWO – THE PRESENT

This features Michael – not his real name, but a real person (though there is a degree of irony in that in relation to the tale I’m about to tell) – who is an actor who I know very well.

His backstory is as follows: double first in Classics from an ‘elite’ university followed by a year at a leading London drama school. Parents both theatre people – one’s a former actor turned playwright, the other a former actor turned director and producer. He’s in his mid-thirties and is doing quite well having appeared, in major roles, in several critically acclaimed plays at the National and in the West End. He’s also had some significant roles on television.

Not long ago he received a call from his agent: “Remember that video game you auditioned for about three months ago? Well, they want you.”

Michael has a vague recollection of a casting session, doing some scenes with another actor, feeling it went OK, but kind of knowing he wasn’t right for it, seeing a guy from Eastenders waiting to go in, forgetting about it, moving on to the next thing as he knows you have to learn to do in this business.

Now Michael hasn’t played computer games since the days of Chuckie Egg and Horace Goes Skiing. But he’s intrigued. It’s new, different, and perhaps the future – or at least part of the future, of the acting industry. He knows hardly anything about the project – the level of secrecy is beyond extreme. They won’t tell him the name of the game or even his character. But he’s heard about Motion Capture or MoCap, and the funny suits with lights all over them. He pictures himself crawling around like Andy Serkis playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings. So with no idea of what he’s doing or what he’s let himself in for he finds himself on a plane to Toronto.

On his first day at the studio he’s in the green room-type area. There’s coffee, tea, snacks etc, and a bunch of people wearing black onesies covered with little flourescent balls, their faces have black spots all over them, and they have weird vice like contraptions with cameras attached to their heads. They’re just chatting away, drinking coffee, checking facebook and twitter on their phones like it’s the most normal situation in the world. These are the other actors and soon Michael is suited up and joins them.

Then he’s called to go into THE VOLUME, which is just a big white room with a rig running all the way around. On the rig are a hundred or so cameras, so all those fluorescent dots people are wearing can be captured from all directions. Michael gets ‘measured’ for his ROM – or Range of Motion. He says it’s a bit like an aerobics dance class. They play music and the actors all stand in a line and have to copy a series of movements.

Michael says you get used to all the tech stuff pretty quickly. But when it comes to filming the actual scenes, what is really interesting and so different from being on a film or tv set, is there are no set ups to do. There is no hanging around while 50 lights are rigged, and no turning around to do the scene from another angle. No hair and make up touching you up seconds before action. All that stuff is done in post production. So in the Volume, it’s just you and the other actors playing the scene. It’s all about capturing the performances.

Michael wonders why – with all the extraordinarily sophisticated and powerful technology at their disposal – they go to such trouble to get professional actors in and dress them up in these funny suits. He realises that it’s about breathing life and soul into the computer generated animations. And he finds it thrilling. He’s realises that he’s part of this multi-million dollar project, using the most sophisticated technology, and the filming process is all about the actors.

Sure, most of the money, time and expertise goes into creating the digitally animated world, long after he’s back in London waiting for the phone to ring. But he says that when he was there in The Volume, doing the scenes, it’s like being in a rehearsal room. It’s like being back at drama school. A block of wood becomes a newspaper. A wooden crate becomes the bank of England. It’s fun. It’s playful. It’s magical. And he knows that a few months down the line millions of people around the world are going to see a weird animated version of him doing extraordinary things in the latest title in the one of the biggest game franchises in the world.

I somewhat cheekily asked Michael how much he got paid for that job, and how did it compare to what he was paid, shortly after, for a leading role in a hugely successful but relatively short run of a play in the West End?

He laughed. He said the daily rate was pretty good, certainly much more than he earned per day doing the West End play. But he stressed that the two aren’t really comparable. For example, the budgets for these games are massive – hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s the equivalent of a Bond film or something. And they make huge profits. So when you think of it in those relative terms, the pay’s not actually that great, and the main point is that performers don’t get any residual profits if the game does well – whereas when you do films or tv, you would usually get some kind of residual deal for later profits made from dvd sales, video on demand etc.

I asked him, finally, if he thought the increasing sophistication and power of the technology would eventually make using real actors obsolete? His view, and he said there’d been a lot of discussion about this, was that while the technology would speed up the processs, and enable the creation of increasingly sophisticated humans, it was unlikely that real actors would be replaced due to cost, efficiency, and just plain old ‘essence of humanity’.

NARRATIVE THREE – THE FUTURE

It is the late autumn of 2026. We are in a central European city and we are attending an international conference on arts higher education in Europe. Today’s keynotes, papers, workshops and discussions are focused on the live performing arts.

Over the course of the day certain common themes and patterns emerge. Alongside the passionate talk about the importance and role of drama, dance and music in European education, and the contribution of those disciplines to European culture, there is also a rigorous and pragmatic analysis, understanding and assessment of the sociological, technological, economic, environmental and political realities that confront the live performing arts.

Just after lunch, the speaker from what used to be known as the United Kingdom steps up to the lectern. A widely respected academic and practitioner, with a long and distinguished track record of work and research in the performing arts and education, she starts by giving the ‘long view’ of what’s been happening in the country, or countries formerly known as the UK.

She starts by talking about her own education and her own journey. At her primary and secondary schools in the late 1980s in Wigan – a working-class, mining and textile town in the north west of England that had suffered greatly during the recession of that time – she and her schoolmates had been surrounded by the full panoply of the visual and performing arts. There were artists and composers in residence in schools, arts centres and galleries across the borough. There were resident theatre companies, there were youth orchestras and jazz bands. That’s where and how she –and some of her peers – caught the arts bug and went on from there, journeying into a landscape full of creative opportunities and potential, and actual success.

She goes on to say, with the benefit of hindsight, how that relatively short period seems like a final, burst of creative sunshine before the storm clouds gradually rolled in. She talks about what some might call a ‘Golden Age’ for the live performing arts – between the late 1960s and the millennium. Despite (or perhaps in reaction to) Thatcherism and its neo-liberal legacy, and despite some significant pressures and changes, the performing arts flourished in many and varied ways: big companies and small companies, established companies and new companies; building based companies and touring companies; dance, theatre and music venues in big cities and small towns, presenting popular ‘traditional’ work and popular ‘experimental’ or ‘alternative’ work. There is relatively significant public funding for the arts, particularly during the first half of that period, which, shrinks significantly towards the end of that period.

Over the same period, in education, as she experienced for herself, the importance of the arts from early years education through to higher education went almost without question, and there was an exponential growth in arts activities, in courses and programmes in schools, colleges and higher education. Many of the established, dance, drama and music conservatoires who previously hadn’t seen the point in diluting their high-end professional training by requiring students to write essays and dissertations became higher education institutions –some in their own right, others as part of universities. Again reflecting her own experience, higher education performing arts also sees an exponential growth in research, transnational research groups and projects, publication, conferences, exchange programmes, etc.

But now, she says, its 2026, and the possibly rose-tinted glasses through which she has been gazing at the past are now well and truly discarded, and she begins to describe a performing arts landscape that is very different and far more challenging. Mentioning, almost in passing, the financial crisis of 2008 and its long-lasting repercussions, the election of a Tory government in 2010 and 2015, the Brexit referendum of 2016, and actual Brexit in 2019, she notes that some of the trends and drivers of change that began to emerge towards the end of that ‘Golden’ period had not only accelerated dramatically in the past two decades but they had also wrought some significant changes on the performing arts sector

She talks about a ‘light-bulb’ moment, somewhere around 2015 when she discovered that more people watched a live Royal Shakespeare Company HD-broadcast on one night than attended the theatre in Stratford over the whole year. And she goes to talk about how digitalisation and the internet had also brought the large-scale transmission of performing arts products increasingly under the control of wealthy media companies or broadcasters, who in turn began to be threatened by the transmission of television and films through the Internet, using enhanced broadband.

At the same time the always high proportion of part-time and short-term jobs, and of self-employment and freelancing, had grown even higher, while digital and technological developments had provided greater resources to performing artists, or others, to promote and market their work, thus facilitating the persistence and growth of micro-enterprises across the sector.

She talks about how across Europe, the dependence of the arts, and particularly of the performing arts, on public funds and private sponsorship are very old European traditions, based on a complex web of beliefs about the value of the arts in terms of national prestige and their social benefits. But that had now changed considerably, due to a number of significant economic, cultural and political shifts. Budgetary constraints – mainly as a fall-out from the financial crisis – had certainly played their part, but the most significant factors were, first, the focus on the Creative and Cultural Industries and, in particular, the policy and financial focus on the audiovisual industries as the main drivers of social well-being, economic growth and employment.

She notes that you can see this development in a number of countries, and she recalls the shock and the fuss, a decade earlier, when the Australian government declared that virtually all creative and performing arts courses, apart from a few audiovisual courses, were now ineligible for government subsidies on the basis – according to the then Minister of Education and Training – that only courses that would benefit Australia economically in the 21st century would be supported i.e. STEM or agricultural courses, and that ‘lifestyle’ courses that don’t lead to employment did not represent national economic priorities.

The second factor was the growing belief among politicians and policy-makers that, even without the contribution of the audiovisual sector, the performing arts DID have an important role in employment creation and urban regeneration, BUT ONLY as one part of a multifaceted ‘recreation, culture and sport’ composite.

These two factors had resulted in a situation whereby funds had been only been made available for performing arts activities within wider projects of urban renewal, and for media or science parks in industrial areas around cities. It had led to far greater uncertainty within the performing arts sector, and the increasing development of the role of the performing arts in activities outside their traditional domains.

Now, in 2026, she observes a cultural landscape in which the arts have largely been stripped out of the educational experience of children and young people. She also sees the consequences of that policy on the live performing arts sector which was now being by-passed by a generation of students who did not receive consistent, or in many cases ANY, arts education through primary and secondary education where the focus was on STEM education. She reflects on how that educational neglect had led to a kind of cultural blindspot or illiteracy which, in turn, had led to a severe decline in arts attendance as that generation of millenials now sought other avenues for their entertainment and spending. That generation now had a seemingly endless array of entertainment choices to choose from, and the cost of those choices had been falling as rapidly as their number had exploded. At the bottom of the list for most were expensive live performances of traditional art forms with which they have never seriously engaged.

She reflects on the fact that many of the pessimistic or even ‘doomsday’ scenarios for the live performing arts that the eminent arts producer and impresario Michael Kaiser had predicted in his 2015 book Curtains? (with a question mark) had either already happened or were looming on the horizon. She recalls a sentence from Kaiser’s book that has always stuck in her mind, referring to the theatres, art centres and other performance venues hit by the decline in audiences, or funding, or both: “Many will sit vacant, reminders of a different era, not unlike the Colosseum in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens”.

She is about to comment on the fact that the decline in demand and the consequences of the long-term and persistent lack of encouragement and, indeed, disparagement of the performing arts had impacted significantly on higher education, and that she herself had managed to move from her previous institution before they had actually closed her department. But she stops, realising that her audience – among them colleagues and friends – perhaps needed to hear something positive, something hopeful…and the thought crosses her mind that she herself needs to grasp onto something positive as well.

And two words fall into her head. Improvisation and Creativity.

And she snaps out of her momentary reverie.

“Look” she says, “I know I’ve painted a picture of doom and gloom, and yes, life in the performing arts has become particularly hard…but when was it ever easy.”

She starts talking about an arts ecology and about the way arts education, generational values, social norms, press coverage, public funding (or lack thereof), technology, etc. all fit together, and how a change in one can echo across the others. She goes on to say that, yes, some companies, venues, training schools and university departments had closed, but others were thriving. If you took a close hard look at the ones that were struggling or had gone, they were the ones that had adapted least well to a significantly changed and rapidly changing environment.

She talks about the digital shift, more educated populations, greater competition for leisure time, demographic change including declining and ageing audiences for some art forms. Standing still, even momentarily, is not an option: there is immense pressure to innovate, to adapt, to really understand and develop audiences, to diversify revenue streams.

She goes to talk about the paradigm shift that has occurred. No longer were cultural institutions able to reflect and share the dominant cultural values, no longer were they able to act as mediators between the artist and the audience, as gate-keepers to what the public would and could access or see.

The arts ecology was now, more than ever, multi-dimensional, highly complex, interactive. Technology had transformed the way we create, distribute, access and monetise cultural content. Audiences were no longer passive receivers. They were creators and/or active users of cultural content without needing to pass through intermediaries. Their behaviours and expectations had changed significantly. They were, in a number of ways, empowered. No longer passive spectators, they wanted greater interaction and dialogue in all walks of life.

Those who failed to recognise and understand this paradigm shift struggled, inevitably. They were the ones that had failed to improvise, or improvised too little too late. They were the ones that had tried to stick to the well-trodden path (even though it was leading to the cliff edge), rather than focus their energy and creativity on forging new paths, taking risks, creating new models and ways of working.

Those who had successfully improvised and had devised creative solutions had discovered that, despite the prevailing climate, there were, indeed, audiences and demand for their work. Some had successfully turned the prevailing dysfunctional models on their heads- driven by a mission to create thrilling work alongside financial sustainability, and to offer art to the public – and in a number of cases theatre training – at low or even no cost while paying the artists who created it a living wage.

They did so by enthusing support for their work through great marketing, exploiting the opportunities provided by digital technologies, developing creative and financial partnerships with organizations, institutions and companies (particularly those who liked to be seen as creative innovators); enlisting the generosity of donors, corporations and foundations in support of artist salaries and subsidized ticket prices.

But, she says, we also need to look to the East.

Can you imagine, she says, a government requiring all schools to provide high quality dance, drama and music courses? Can you imagine a government tackling head-on the problem of the arts being ignored in schools and the obsession with exam-oriented teaching and training? Can you imagine a government encouraging well-known artists –from the performing and visual arts – to visit campuses and to join the teaching initiative?

Well, she says, the Chinese did precisely that in 2015.

Five years later they had established a system of arts education encompassing colleges, schools and kindergartens, alongside a heavy investment in increasing the number and enhancing the quality of arts teachers.

The Chinese understood the necessity of cultivating creative human capital in an economy where value is produced through innovation. They had recognised, while the West had managed to forget, that creative science and technology develops only in conjunction with creative art. They had cottoned on to the fact the developed world’s most innovative tech hub cities were also also global leaders in the arts.

Our speaker, reminding herself and the audience that this was conference of arts higher education in Europe, not China, says “OK, let’s take a look at the performing arts landscape we’re in now, and what are we preparing our students for?”

She notes that changing trends in the performing arts rarely manifest themselves with dramatic abruptness. More often than not, they creep up silently, diverting the flow of continuing traditions and practices stealthily but resolutely. As the relentless tidal wave of globalisation, digitalisation and technological innovation has swept across the world, the performing arts have been tossed, turned and, in some cases swept aside, without many even noticing that some of the great rivers of performing traditions and systems had changed course or, at times, had been reined in.

But, continuing the watery metaphor. She says “Yes, waves can drown you and currents can drag you away, but you can also ride the waves and exploit the currents”.

As wave after wave of new technologies have emerged and are still emerging, different ways to creatively interact and collaborate have arisen with them. In this context, play has become a persuasive and powerful tool. The invitation to play can bridge the gap from observation to participation. The key, however, has been ensuring that these playful interactions are not about our relation to technology, but about creating new ways of experiencing culture.

Finally, reflecting on her own journey, and looking at her own institution and her own students, she talks of the many creative, STEAM-driven, cross-discipline conversations with, and projects around, the vast wealth of possibilities presented by emerging technologies; of the fruitful creative collaborations between artists, performers, writers, designers, coders, scientists, technologists, medics, engineers, bioscientists. And what’s been interesting, she says, is that the requests for those creative conversations have come from both directions.

And she ends thus:

Every age has its storytelling form, and everyone likes a good story but, as the wonderful Dario Fo once said: “A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.”

And with that, she closes down her screen.

SOME READING
Creative & Cultural Skills, 2010. The Performing Arts Blueprint, London: Creative & Cultural Skills.
EU Commission, 2012. European Audiences: 2020 and beyond – Conference conclusions, Brussels: European Commission.
Hadley, B., 2015. Improvising a Future in the Performing Arts: The Benefits of Reframing Performing Arts Entrepreneurship Education in Familiar Terms. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 11(4).
Kaiser, M. J., 2015. Curtains?: The Future of the Arts in America, Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press.
Tambling, P., 2015. Freelancing and the future of creative jobs. [Online]  Available at: https://ccskills.org.uk/supporters/blog/freelancing-and-the-future-of-creative-jobs
Tepper, D., 2016. Creative Skills Europe, Trends and skills in the European audiovisual and live performance sectors, Brussels: Creative Skills Europe.
The State Council, 2015, ‘State Council seeks to enhance arts education in China’
[Online] Available at: http://english.gov.cn/policies/latest_releases/2015/09/28/content_281475200223293.htm
Weir, E., 2015, ‘Tepper: Bright Future for Creative Careers’,
[Online] Available at: https://www.mtholyoke.edu/media/tepper-bright-future-creative-careers

Nice, July 2016 and remembrance of things past

A Madeleine biscuit did it for Marcel Proust, and the horrific events in Nice did it for me. As soon as I heard the news and saw precisely where that truck of death had finally stopped, by the Palais de Mediterranean just past the Hotel Royale, virtually every detail of the holiday I took with my parents and younger brother in July 1959, when we stayed at the Royale, fell into my head.

Our high ceiling rooms overlooking the Promenade des Anglais; the beach; me being ill with what turned out to be Whooping Cough and going to the doctor for pills…and suppositories, which my mother couldn’t believe: “What? For his chest?”; my mother teaching me to play gin rummy, then leaving me in the care of two kindly, gin rummy obsessed ‘grandes dames’ who sat on the shaded hotel terrace all day while my parents and brother enjoyed the sea and sun; eating at Poznanzky’s Restaurant in the Old Town; visiting the old walled ‘artists’ town of St. Paul de Vence and remembering what I now know was the distinct and overpowering smell of old sewers and rat poison; the drive along the high Corniche to Monte Carlo looking down at the blue bay and all the yachts; and the flower parade when thousands of people lined the Promenade des Anglais to watch dozens of neon-lit, horse-drawn floats pass by, each decorated with hundreds of pink flowers, accompanied by what, to an impressionable 8 year old, seemed to be extraordinarily glamorous and exotic women also dressed in pink, who smiled and waved and threw petals in the air.

Parade des Fleurs, Nice, 1959. I and my family are somewhere in that crowd.

Perhaps even stranger than the crystal clear vision of that holiday appearing in my head, the next day an email appeared in my inbox. It had been sent from a mobile phone number that I (and my contacts list) didn’t recognise. I opened it carefully, fully expecting to delete it as spam, when I noticed the actual message.

“Terrible news from Nice. Do you remember us at the flower festival many many years ago with our families? Hope you are well, Jenny”

Jenny? Jenny who? But of course I already knew. Back in 1959 we had met and become friendly with another English family who were also staying at the Royale. They had two young girls, about the same ages as my brother and me. And one was called Jenny. She is on the right of the photo of us all sitting in the sea, sitting next to my brother. Like me, the news from Nice brought back the memory of that holiday and she had found my email by googling my name.

On that night of the flower parade 57 years ago we all stood together on the Promenade des Anglais, somewhere between the Hotel Royale and the Hotel Negresco amongst the crowd in the photo above, watching the magical procession if not on then certainly very close to where, last Thursday night, dozens of bodies lay broken, dead and dying in the wake of that horrific, murderous, barbaric rampage.

Back then, in those days of relative innocence, people of course still died in tragic accidents or by purposeful hand, but on the Promenade des Anglais that night it was inconceivable that someone would drive a 19 tonne truck at high speed into packed crowds of people, driven by an overwhelming, maniacal desire to kill as many as possible.

It was also probably inconceivable to the many thousands who thronged the Promenade last Thursday, enjoying the fireworks. But, objectively, we know only too well that there are inviduals and groups for whom such acts of barbarity are not only conceivable but also achievable.

After the death – from natural causes – of our baby, I became and still am acutely aware of just how thin and fragile is the fabric of everyday normality, and how easily that fabric can be torn and ruptured in the space of seconds. But we cannot live our lives, or be forced to live our lives, in perpetual fear: that would be a victory for barbarism. So I take some comfort in the wise words of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh:

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

The Story of D.

“Arts education is a seriously funny business. We demand that students conform to the formalities of the university and yet we secretly hope they will practise wild, if subtle rebellion. We require them to be versed in inherited theoretical vocabularies, but need them to energise us with some previously unseen thing. Besides, these days their lecturers are generally up to something even more weird, spending day after day away from the studios in interminable admin meetings. The very fact that so many students survive the contradictions is in itself wonderfully encouraging.”

(Robert Clark, The Guardian 1998)

Some years ago I was in central Europe interviewing applicants for the performance design degree course that I ran at one of the UK’s arts-based higher education institutions. Amongst those interviewed was a young woman, D., who immediately struck me and my co-interviewers as a real ‘creative spark’. It was also obvious that she possessed many of the qualities and attributes that are characteristic of highly creative people (see table, below). We also recognised that if she were to accept the offer of the place that we made, her relationship with the course, the institution and the system would not be unproblematic.

Characteristics of highly creative individuals

 High curiosity
 High idea generation
 High risk-taker
 Lots of questions
 Openness to experience
 Self-confidence
 Broad range of interests
 Collector of the Unusual
 Lateral thinking and responses
 Uninhibited
 Radical
 Tenacious, determination to succeed
 Intellectual playfulness
 Preference for complexity
 Concerned with conceptual frameworks
 Keen sense of humour (often bizarre, irreverent, inappropriate)
 Highly self-aware and open to the irrational within themselves
 Heightened emotional sensitivity
 Non-conforming, accepting of chaos, not interested in details
 Described as ‘individualistic’ but not afraid of being classified as ‘different’
 Unwilling to accept authoritarian pronouncements without overly critical self-examination

(compiled, adopted & adapted from several sources including Craft, 2000; Simonton, 2010, Martinsen, 2013 and others)

Our assumptions proved correct as D. challenged, often in a very creative way, the course work and assignments that were set. We would set an assignment that we felt best met the needs and aspirations of the students and also met the learning outcomes of the programme. Inevitably there would be a knock on the office door, and there would be D., always polite – within bounds – but fiercely determined.

“Hello D. Can I help you?”

“Yes. You know this assignment that you have set us?”

“Yes, of course. What about it?”

“I’m sorry, but it is shit. I have a much better idea.”

And usually it was. Leaving us – the course team – to wonder why we hadn’t thought of that!

To give you some sense of the sort of mind we were dealing with……

It is early in the first semester of the first year. I am standing in an alcove, half way up the institution’s rather grand staircase, that leads from the pillared and porticoed foyer. I am having a heated discussion with D. about the importance – in the visual arts – of labelling one’s work. D. is having none of it.

LIPASTAIRCASE

‘I just want people to experience my work’.

And I’m trying to explain that giving a piece a title – even if it’s called ‘Untitled’ – accompanied by some form of description is part of the discourse and practices of the visual arts disciplines.

A day or so later I am walking up the same staircase, and on reaching the alcove I see that someone has dropped a crumpled up piece of A4 paper. I bend down to pick up the litter, and can’t – well not easily. It’s heavy. And it’s not paper. It’s a perfectly formed piece of crumpled A4 paper made of some form of plaster. Then I notice a pair of small binoculars attached to the cast-iron banisters of the staircase, and an arrow pointing upwards. The foyer wall goes up the entire height of the building. Taking hold of the binoculars and training them upwards in the direction of the arrow, I spot – high up on the foyer wall – a little white label which says, in clear printed lettering: ‘Little Rubbish Thing No. 1′ by D.’ with its dimensions and the material it was made of.

But it didn’t stop there. Every week for the rest of the year a ‘little rubbish thing’ – different every time – would appear somewhere around the building, with an appropriate label located nearby.

We were caught in a dilemma. We had in D. someone was clearly an exceptional, highly creative person. Moreover, and importantly, she was generally recognised across the institution, which prided itself on its fostering of creativity and innovation, as one of the most creative individuals in the building. Many students (and some staff) wanted to work with her. Yet her refusal to comply with and conform to the regulations and procedures of the university put her at severe risk of failure.

There was a consensus amongst the course team, supported by the external examiner, that we would do all we could to keep D. on the course, even if it meant bending (but not breaking) the regulations. Our reasoning went as follows: The institution was dedicated to excellence in the creative and performing arts. The institution and its courses were designed to attract the most talented and able students. We taught a subject that placed a high priority on creativity and creative solutions within an institution that espoused the same values. If we could not keep someone like D. on the course, then we had to seriously question ‘what are we doing?’ and ‘why are we doing it?’. Or, as our external examiner put it: “If, in an institution like this, you can’t keep someone like D. on the programme, then you might as well go and work in a cake shop!”

In the end there was a compromise. D. agreed to undertake those parts of the course that were essential to her staying, and we would endeavour – with the encouragement of the external examiner – to ensure that we could fit her work (and her!) into the assessment system of the validating university.

Until the end, D. remained politely but fiercely determined to follow her own vision, producing sometimes exceptional work – which frequently didn’t fit comfortably into the assessment expectations.

D. graduated, with a reasonable but not exceptional grade.

She is now a successful artist/designer/maker, based in her home country.

* * * * * *

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”

Martha Graham

Among HE’s dark academic mills

A recent anonymous long diatribe in the Guardian Higher Education from a “semi-employed thirtysomething on a zero-hours contract, sitting at home in pyjamas, staring at a hopeless pile of marking, as hopes of making it to the shops for a pint of milk today fade” complaining bitterly about the conditions under which they are forced to work, provoked a storm of comment – some supportive, some not – from other academics. At the same time the lecturers’ union, the UCU, has called a two-day strike about pay and conditions, after an overwhelming ‘Yes’ ballot. This just happened to coincide with the publication of Vice Chancellors’ salaries which showed an average increase of 6.1% (with one VC of a small specialist arts institution being awarded a 25% increase) against the lecturer’s offered pay rise of 1.1%. Other statistics showed that the overall pay of those same lectures has fallen by 14.5% in real terms since 2010.

The reference in the title of this piece to William Blake’s 1808 poem is deliberate. As our HE system, in the course of a couple of generations, has shifted from an ‘elite’ to a ‘mass’system, the parallels with what happened two hundred years ago during the course of the Industrial Revolution, though by no means identical, are still striking (no pun intended).

Consider this:

“Factories began to replace small “cottage” industries. Manufacturers realized that bulk production was cheaper, more efficient and provided the quantity of items needed. As a result more and more factories sprang up. Skilled workers, such as hand weavers, saw their talents and experience become useless because they could not compete with the efficiency of the new textile machines. In 1832, one observer saw how the skilled hand weavers had lost their way and were reduced to starvation. “It is truly lamentable to behold so many thousands of men who formerly earned 20 to 30 shillings per week, now compelled to live on 5, 4, or even less”. (from Social Studies: The Industrial Revolution)

Our universities have become education factories, and many skilled and experienced academics are the equivalent of the hand weavers, struggling to adapt to life in the Age of the Educational Machine. And it’s not just education. What is the junior doctors’ dispute if it isn’t a row about industrial efficiency being placed above genuine healthcare and family life?

The Vice Chancellors, on the other hand, resemble the early factory and mill owners, happy to exploit their positions of power (protected by the ersatz probity of the ‘Remuneration Committee’) demonstrating scant regard for common sense and decency in the drive to ensure their educational-industrial complexes thrive in the ultra-competitive and expanding world market for educational goods and services.

Consider this from 1776:

“We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate…When workers combine, masters … never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers and journeymen.” (from Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations)

OK, I might be pushing the industrial revolution analogy and hyperbole a bit too far: Higher Education in the UK was never a cottage industry and has its origins in a closeted and cosseted elite, unlike the craft based practices that were subsumed by the industrial revolution*. But the hand loom weavers, like academics, certainly saw themselves and were seen as elite workers, with high degrees of autonomy over how and when they worked – as long as their ‘pieces’ were delivered in time. That autonomy was rudely taken away by mill and factory work where, in some establishments, it was a sackable offence to bring a timepiece to work because the mill and factory owners literally owned and controlled one’s time.

It’s difficult to avoid the sense that we are – and have been for a while – in a very interesting, challenging and possibly paradigm shifting period. The words of another William, this time Yeats, come to mind: “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” (from The Second Coming). We are caught between two models and two conceptualisation of higher education. One is the industrial model that harks back to that earlier traditional model, and the other is the post-industrial model: digitised, customised, individualised, connected, fast-changing, non-linear, super-complex, occasionally chaotic.

It is not coincidental that the companies and organisations that are thriving tend to be those that have shifted away from the traditional model: creative, not risk-averse, with lean, flexible systems enabling them to move very fast when the opportunity arises.

There is, of course, no easy answer. The exploited self-employed lecturer on zero-hours and relatively low wages faced with an unmanageable pile of marking is the inevitable consequence (and victim) of the logic of that old industrial model. Many academics, like the hand weavers of old, are faced with a stark choice: accept the conditions of work or else someone else will. There is of course the recourse to collective industrial action by the trade union (another model that traces its roots to the early days of industrial revolution) which may or may not result in a positive result.

But in an Age of Uncertainty and Complexity (let alone Austerity) the question of whether the old model of higher education can still ‘hold’ is perhaps a moot point. What new forms may emerge from out of this transformative moment are yet to be established. Meanwhile, the education factories increase the output from their academic machine-shops and production lines, and academics fight hard to maintain the values, discourses and practices of genuine, meaningful, life-enhancing education in the face of the obsession with industrial effectiveness and efficiency that now permeates higher education’s mean unpleasant land.

* My thanks to Prof. Carole-Anne Upton for her comments.

‘Hitler was a Zionist’. Really?

The suspensions of Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah has brought the bubbling issue of antisemitism in the Labour Party to the boil. There seems to be general agreement that Naz Shah’s apology was sincere and heartfelt. But not only has Livingstone failed to apologise, he has a long history of ‘form’ when it comes to going out of his way to offend Jews. There was, for example, that incident when he accused a Jewish journalist of being no better than a ‘Nazi concentration camp guard’ when the journalist was simply doing his job.

But let’s get one thing out of the way. Livingstone’s claim that Hitler supported Zionism is based, presumably – because he didn’t actually state it at the time – on the Haavara agreement (1933 -1939) and other well documented links between Nazi Germany and Zionists. This excellent and informative review by Hugh Murray of Francis R. Nicosia’s The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985, from the respected journal New German Critique, Number 42, Fall 1987, 176-180 and republished by Anthony Flood, outlines the history and details of that relationship.

There can be no doubt that the Nazi-Zionist relationship was born out of desperation and the sense of impending tragedy. In the years before the outbreak of WW2 the Nazis just wanted rid of Germany’s Jews, and they really didn’t care where they went. Many countries including the USA and the UK had strict Jewish immigration quotas, which – shamefully – shrank significantly as the crisis for Jews in Germany worsened and increasing numbers wanted to leave. So if someone came along and offered some sort of deal to help Germany cleanse itself of its Jewish population, why on earth wouldn’t the Nazis accept that – even if those making the offer were Jewish and Zionist, and the destination was the then British Mandate of Palestine?

As Nicosia makes clear in his book, those links and agreements probably saved more German Jews (c. 60,000) than the ‘closed door’ policies of the USA and other countries.

All that came to an end with the war and the German occupation of large parts of Europe. The Nazis now found themselves with a massive ‘Jewish Problem’, which they ‘solved’ by devising and implementing the industrial-scale genocide of the ‘Final Solution’. Livingstone even manages to reduce the Holocaust to a mental aberration on the part of Hitler, because madness reduces the moral content of actions and belittles the horror and evil of the events.

As for Hitler, his loathing of Jews was well established, and while there is no evidence that he actively supported those Nazi-Zionist links, there is some evidence that he tried to stop them. Later, in 1942, he promises the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that once the Middle East is ‘liberated’ the Nazis will leave the region alone except for ensuring the complete annihilation of the Jews currently living under the British Mandate of Palestine. So much for his support for Zionism.

What Ken Livingstone has done has been to take what is an historical fact i.e. the Nazi – Zionist links and distort it in such a way that it feeds directly into the current and virulent anti-Israel, anti-Zionist agenda amongst some sections of the Left, which itself then bleeds – sometimes unconsciously, sometimes imperceptively, sometimes explicitly – into outright antisemitism. One has to wonder why such an informed and intelligent person as Livingstone, who clearly know his history, stated that Hitler supported moving the Jews ‘Israel’ when he must have known that there was no Israel in the 1930s. Livingstone also – although I’m sure he doesn’t intend it – provides succour to the ‘classic’ antisemites on the Right, and it was instructive to see the Fascists and Holocaust-deniers coming out in ‘We’ve always told you so’ support of him on Twitter and other social media.

It appears, judging from the media coverage and the reactions both within and outside the Labour Party, that we have now reached the chaotic ‘moral panic’ stage in regard to anti-semitism. Hopefully, at some point, we’ll all ‘Calm down, dears’, and be able to have a rational debate about Israel, Palestine, Jews, Palestinians, Zionism and Antisemitism…but somehow I doubt it.

* * * * * * * *

Some useful further reading:

The Left’s problem with Antisemitism – Colin Talbot’s (Prof of Govt., Manchester University)

Statement on “Labour’s problem with antisemitism” from the Jewish Socialists’ Goup

History teacher John Blake’s blog on historical truth and warped history

Yf’aat Weiss, The Transfer Agreement and the Boycott Movement: A Jewish Dilemma on the Eve of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center (Note: very long, very detailed)

Patt on Nicosia, ‘Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany’