Let's Go, Defence, LET'S GO!!

It’s the shuffling of your feet as you wait in line for the usher to check your ticket, it’s the jostling of other bodies as you climb the stairs to find your seat, it’s the tingling crinkle of cold in your nose as you breathe in the smell of the arena, and the crackle of the loudspeaker as the unseen announcer introduces the home team.

That’s right, friends and neighbours – it’s hockey night. In Halifax.

Tonight I’m going to a Halifax Mooseheads hockey game, and I’m thrilled. For someone who didn’t play many sports growing up, I have since found my competitive streak, and it’s manifested in cheering ardently and one-sidedly for whatever team I support (generally decided by choosing the team with the better uniform, or the team that is not expected to win, or the team that is playing against Australia). 

In fact, sports games seem to be the ultimate communities of practice: those people who support one team throughout their lives are easily within the boundaries of that group, hockey jerseys and ball caps featuring favourite teams are boundary objects that connect and disconnect (Wenger, 1998, p. 107) fans, even those people who go only occasionally to watch games have a role: as peripheral participants.

As a sports fan, I occupy a peripheral position with the community of practice of, in this case, Moosehead fans, who offer me “casual but legitimate access to a practice without subjecting [me] to the demands of full membership” (Wenger, 1998, p. 117). That is, I can go to the game tonight and cheer for the Mooseheads without having to pay season ticket-holder prices or knowing the name of every team player. I am on the edge of the community of practice representing regular Mooseheads spectators.

And frankly, I like it that way. Throughout my life, I’ve interpreted many of my experiences (and therefore negotiated meaning) as peripheral connections: I was smart, but not quite smart enough to finish a doctorate; I was an actress, but never committed to the practice enough to make it my craft; I was a Canadian living and working in New Zealand with residency status, but didn’t complete the paperwork to attain dual citizenship. I was and still am happy to move along the fringes of other communities, dipping my toe in to test the waters from time to time but not jumping in.

But I wonder to what extent are we ourselves creating boundaries around communities of practice? I’m sure that if I had the means, and interest, in purchasing Moosehead tickets from now until the end of time, I could easily do so and join that community of practice, but I’m making the choice to observe the boundary that identifies that group, and possibly even manufacture that border when it doesn’t exist. 

In 1975, Michel Foucault claimed in Discipline and Punish that our omni-surveillant society, in which everything is witnessed, recorded, monitored and accessible to others, has created people who take on the trappings of self-monitoring and self-regulation: 

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. (Foucault, 1975, pp. 202-203)

Am I observing boundaries that aren’t even there? Have I become so sensitive to monitoring – to being inside and outside of communities of practice that I encounter, and subject to the practices of its members – that I’m imagining restrictions where there are none? 

And does everyone else do this, too?

I have been, for twenty years past, admittedly the greatest magician in the world. I have held my place with such style and flourish that I have raised what is really a very pretty achievement to the dignity of art. Do you imagine that in my best moments when I have had very distinguished audiences—crowned heads, as all magicians love to boast—that I have not thought fleetingly of producing a full chamber-pot out of a hat, and throwing it into the royal box, just to show that it can be done? But we all hug our chains. There are no free men. (Davies, 1975, p. 110-111)

Yet we know boundaries create exclusion and, in uninformed or malevolent circumstances, racism and homophobia and other prejudices. Instances of rioting between rival fans at football games, such as that which recently caused 79 deaths at a game in Egypt, are commonplace, and demonstrate the extent to which communities of practice can enforce the boundaries of its membership. Could we possibly be creating these boundaries that have life-or-death potential even in seemingly benign conditions such as a sports game?

Such is the urge to belong, and an interesting discussion that Wenger alludes to implicitly in his repeated cautions that communities of practice can have negative consequences as readily as positive effects. We learn these boundaries, perhaps add to them, and observe them, and transgress them at our own cost. Being on the periphery doesn’t save one from these risks, either; history is full of stories of those who refused to take sides and were annihilated for the same reason.

Gives a new twist to the old joke, “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”, doesn’t it?... 

REFERENCES:

Davies, R. (1977). World of wonders. Toronto: Macmillan Canada.

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

There are no small parts, but I was a small player…

I was six, I was dressed in a white sheet, and I was angry.

I had just found out that Anita DiPinto, and not me, had been chosen to be the Head Angel in our kindergarten class’s performance of the nativity story. Normally, this would not be cause for concern, but I think I knew, even then, that in the world of acting you were only as good as your last performance. I decided I would hone my acting skills with bigger and better roles (featuring a stellar Old Mother Hubbard in grade 3 and, later, a compelling turn at age 13 as the singing she-devil Vampira). I continued acting throughout high school and university, and, as of the last show I performed in (http://www.bedfordplayers.ns.ca/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=434 – that’s me in the pink), have appeared in more than 25 theatrical productions. Take that, Anita DiPinto...  

As I completed one production, then the next, and then the next, I began to recognize that I loved more than just performing. I liked the way that the cast of actors would develop its own inside jokes (like what a ‘Radiohead’ rehearsal is), that newer actors would be instructed by older actors to ‘cheat’ more (for the record, ‘cheating’ means to angle one’s body or object towards the audience), that technical terms actually contained specific instructions (for instance, ‘86ing the upstage spot’ means to shut off the spotlight focused on the rear part of the stage), and so on. Yet, despite minoring in drama, I recognize that it’s only thanks to Wenger that I now have a framework – communities of practice – through which I can understand how the meaning of this practice is negotiated.

The examples I mentioned above – a cast’s ‘Radiohead’ rehearsal, transmission of expertise from experienced to inexperienced actors, specialized technological understanding – correspond with Wenger’s conception of community, and precisely those parts that foster coherence: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared resources (Wenger, 1998, p. 73). The ways in which an acting community of practice operates are represented clearly by these and other instances, but this community's negotiation of meaning, which, as Wenger states, is made up of alternating participation and reification, features these constituent elements linked much more closely than I would have guessed.

Most of the first rehearsals I’ve attended begin with the actors receiving a copy of the script, which is a reification of the playwright’s ideas. Wenger uses this term to “refer to the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’” (Wenger, 1998, p. 58); a script is exactly that ‘thingness’. It contains the language and instructions for action that ‘give … form’ to a playwright’s ‘experience’ (in some cases, an imagined experience, but an experience nonetheless…).

But the script, reifying the playwright’s experience, has to then be realized, or turned into participation, in order for a production to take place. I can assure you, I have many memories of reading a script (reification) that called for surprising onstage interactions with others (participation). For instance, cast as Katharine in a university production of William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, I performed on rollerblades for Acts I and II.* Onstage I’ve had to dance, weep and wear a tutu. And appearing in Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, I as Sue was excited to portray the intensity and desperation of this woman, who crashes a neighbourhood dinner party to confront her husband about an extra-marital affair, until I read the stage direction “[…SUE begins a slow striptease]” (Thompson, 1992, p. 24).**

A good test of Wenger’s framework, especially as regards the nature of meaning-making, is the role of the audience in a theatrical production. Strictly speaking, many performers believe that the craft of acting is meaningless without a body to witness it. But an audience isn’t required in order to perform the script, or re-enact the experiences, so the place of the audience would appear to be outside the community of practice. However, Wenger neatly allows for the audience in his brief reference to complementary contributions:

Mutual engagement involves not only our own competence, but the competence of others. It draws on what we do and don’t know, as well as our as well as on our ability to connect meaningfully to what we don’t do and what we don’t know – that is, to the contributions and knowledge of others (Wenger, 1998, p. 76).

Many of the people close to me (wonderfully supportive people, all of you) would prefer to remove their own gallbladders rather than perform on stage, and though they can’t conceive of why I want to perform, or even how I can do so, they will be in the audience for more than one performance of the same show, and their contribution is meaningful, for me, beyond words.

The miscreants, misfits, misinformed and mistaken individuals who make up the community of practice of acting (and I number myself among them) are infinitely special to me, because of the negotiation of meaning that I have been fortunate enough to participate in for many years now and hopefully more to come. Wenger’s theory has given me a deeper appreciation of the function of this strange little hobby.

And now, end scene (luckily not, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, “pursued by a bear” )…

* Not, strictly speaking, a stage direction appearing in Shakespeare’s 1623 version of the script

** In case you wanted to know, yes, I did it, and I fear it’s preventing me from ever being considered as a serious actress.

REFERENCES:

Thompson, J. (1992). Lion in the streets. Toronto: Coach House Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.