“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
That’s all he needs: someone to do and someone else to watch. Everything else is gravy—or, sometimes, a distracting nuisance. Even the stage itself may be unnecessary. These days, I spend my time thinking and worrying about education and schooling. And so, today, I wonder: what would a Peter Brook say about the classroom? What is the minimum that’s required for an act of schooling to be engaged?
I think his answer would be pretty similar to his original formulation. As I wrote a few months ago, in a Substack post about the learning triad: “Learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires at least one kind of relationship—a bringing together of separate things so that those things can affect and change each other.”
It’s not really that different, is it? Into an empty space come two people: someone willing to teach and someone willing to learn. Is anything else actually required?
I don’t think so. Not even a classroom.
As Brook says of the theater, which I think applies equally to the classroom: “A stage space has two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.” The “something” can’t happen for only one of the two people involved. The mere existence of two people in an empty space is not sufficient. Interaction and relationship are crucial. In a theater, someone must be doing and someone else must be watching. In a classroom, someone must be willing to teach and someone else must be willing to learn. Close your eyes, your ears, or your mind, and the thing, the magic, will not happen. The empty space can be any space that creates room for interaction to occur. It does not have to be a purpose-built space, any more than a cathedral or a synagogue is required for prayer to happen. Plato established his academy in a grove of olive trees. My first teaching gig, at the Benjamin Franklin Academy, in Atlanta, took place in a small, one-story house, where kids sat around tables, drinking coffee and eating bagels (it has grown quite a bit since then). Some profound and purposeful learning happened in that little house, because the students had made a choice to come there and complete their high school education.
The empty space is a space of potential. We can fill it with anything. All I need is students who are willing to look and notice and wonder. Is that tremendously hard work? Do we assume that our students have no curiosity about the world around them—that they take everything for granted with a bored shrug? What’s the blandest, emptiest, most yawn-inducing space you can think of. For me, it’s a hotel conference room. Definitely less engaging and compelling than a classroom. But even here, I think you could find something to explore, something to engage young minds and make them go “huh.” For example: look at that chair. Is it an ordinary, unremarkable chair? It absolutely is. There are hundreds of them here in the room—arranged around tables and stacked up against the wall. But have you ever thought about a chair? Four legs, a seat, and a back? Who invented that? What’s our earliest evidence of a chair like this? Well, here’s one from Egypt, used by Hetepheres I (c. 2,600 BCE), a queen of Egypt during the Fourth Dynasty. Over four thousand years old, and it looks like it could have been made yesterday: There are depictions of backless chairs going back centuries before that, from China, Greece, and Mesopotamia. There are carvings of Aztecs sitting on chairs in Mexico, centuries before their encounters with Europe. Did everyone come up with the idea of a chair independently, because it’s just something we humans do? Is there some ancient, ur-chair that our ancestors invented, the idea of which was carried across continental migrations, even across the Bering Strait into the Americas? What does it make us think about and wonder about, when we look around our world at the simple devices we take for granted? What does it tell us about human creativity?
And that stack of chairs…it makes me wonder: how many would you need to stack up to reach the moon? Is that a thing students could figure out, with a tape measure and access to the Internet? How did people figure out the distance between Earth and the Moon before the Internet?
And how about this terrible hotel coffee? Coffee beans come from a lot of places around the world, but who first came up with the idea of making a drink out of it? And how on earth did they figure out all the steps needed to get this hot drink? (And why on earth would they have been tinkering around enough to figure those things out?)
And forgive me, but while I’m thinking about all of this, what’s the deal with the hotel? How ancient is the idea of a hotel or an inn? Did something in history have to happen, to allow or encourage people to travel long enough distances that they needed to spend the night somewhere far from home? Would students find it interesting to connect their local Motel 6 with an ancient caravansary from Turkey? Would it blow their minds to know that something like a hotel has existed since at least the 9th century, BCE—eleven thousand years ago? Would it change their assumptions about life in the ancient world? Would it lead them to ask their own questions—questions that branch off into a hundred strange side streets and shadowy byways? And if it does…would you be willing to go there with them?
If there is this much to explore in the blandest of rooms, why should any classroom be a place of drudgery and deadness?
Some if it might be our unwillingness to follow students where their curiosity leads them—to restrict learning to only what’s on the pacing plan because we have to race to the next thing we’re required to “cover.”
Some if it might be the space itself. The empty space is a space of potential, as we said. We can fill it with anything. Sometimes we fill it with too much.
Does a thousand-page textbook engage student curiosity, or does it deaden it by overwhelming students with content, deciding for them what’s important, making no room for their tangential questioning, and communicating to them in the blandest language possible? Does an abundance of technology in the classroom engage student curiosity, or does it deaden it by providing too many distractions, too many windows, too many flashing lights—maybe even too many invitations to engage in social media nonsense during class time? Even before we had technology mandates, we tended to create sensory overload in our classrooms by plastering every inch of wall space with colorful posters shouting trite messages at students and sparkly mobiles dangling from the ceilings. We blast stimuli at our students and then complain that they can’t focus on what we’re saying to them. Why do we feel that the teacher—the single, human, teacher, expert in her field and committed to her mission—is suddenly, uniquely to this historical period, insufficient?
I think again of Peter Brook. He describes four varieties or flavors of theater. The first, he calls, “the deadly theater.” This would be, for example, a Shakespeare play dressed up in leggings and ruffles and hats with feathers, delivered with fake English accents because “that’s how it’s meant to be done.” A dull, dead, and mindless adherence to tradition for its own sake, that buries the urgent, beating, heart that can speak to us across centuries.
What is Brook’s solution to deadliness? Strip it all down. Get rid of the clutter. Build a rough, or a holy, or an immediate theatre, that focuses intensely on the thing that must be expressed. the person who must express it, and the person who has a genuine, human need to hear it.
Yes. The doer and the teacher must love what they do. They must love the story they came to tell, or the knowledge they came to share. And they must love the people they came to speak with—individually or in aggregate, in some way. They are not speaking into a void. They are not speaking simply to hear their own voices. They came here to connect. They came here because they care.
It’s the power of their love that makes the audience or the students wake up, sit up, lean forward, and attend. Love imparts a sense of urgency and necessity. They have to be there, saying what they’re saying. It matters.
Or…you know…it doesn’t.
“It’s going to be the on the test,” or “it’s next on the pacing plan,” or “I don’t know, but it’s required” will not make the magic happen in a classroom or in an olive grove. Neither will a new textbook. Neither will the bells and whistles of technology.
We make it matter with our love. That’s what fills the empty space.
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