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.
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