We’re at the end of one semester and approaching the start of another. The middle point of an academic year (or just year) that – let’s be honest – none of us really expected. It’s a world changing, life-changing time. We’re all engaged in trying to find creative solutions to it all. Ways to keep teaching, to keep learning, to keep making, to keep researching.
To just keep going.
I don’t know about anyone else, but for me what we might call the uncertainty of the moment – and all the busy-ness and anxieties that it can create – means that most of the time I can feel like I am a bit too focused on the here and now. Sometimes it even feels like I am fighting with it. Constantly wondering what this present is going to present next, in fact.
At the start of last semester – which feels like a very long time ago – we launched a project called 60 words for 60 years as a way to celebrate and mark the approaching anniversary of Drama as a subject at Manchester. Next year, Drama as a subject will have been here in Manchester for 60 whole years. Think about that.
In the invitation to participate in the project I wrote this:
To mark this, we are asking alumni of the department to compose/write 60 words on their time in the department. Just 60 words. One for each year that the department has been active. 60 words. No more. No less.
As caretaker of this project, these sixty-words have been emailed to me. This has meant that while dealing with the all the present and immediate and sometimes difficult (as well as often creative and joyful) challenges of my work as a lecturer in the last semester, I would occasionally receive an email with a contribution on it. They are like postcards from a past. A succinct reflection on a different time. A time spent in and at Manchester engaging with this subject. A reminder that we are 59 years in.
These short texts would offer me information on something that had happened, perhaps how it happened and what it had meant. Often they manage to do all three of these things, like in this one, for example:
Originally came to study English, stumbled upon a newly opened Drama Department, immediately transferred to a Joint Degree – and never looked back! Abiding memories of two ‘giants’ among the staff, Hugh Hunt and Stephen Joseph – poles apart in style and approach but generating a powerful stimulus to think afresh about what drama was, how it worked and why it mattered.
When they arrived, these would lift my working day a little. Give it and me a bit of impetus and momentum. In a time and situation that often felt challenging they would bring a different light to what I, what we, are all involved in doing. Looking at it, the example above reminds me of some things it’s often easy to forget: the importance of a difference in styles and approach. The need to recognise, grow and foster a diversity across our staff team, the student body, and the wider theatre and education landscape. Some things that perhaps also need to be given some space and time.
In these pandemic circumstances, these sixty words also simply made me reflect differently or even more on questions of what drama is, how drama works and why it matters.
The original invitation also outlined that all contributions would be ‘partially anonymous’. This meant that though their name would appear somewhere when we finally get to present all these reflections, it would not be alongside what the alumni contributing had written. It was and is my hope that this would offer some opportunity for what I think is an important critical reflection. The possibility to acknowledge and even admit that sometimes the navigation and negotiation of all this doesn’t go the way we expected and can even be difficult. Even though I am all up for a celebration, I wanted to allow us to admit we are not always involved in something going right. And that we’re perhaps more involved in something bigger; working on and working out ways that we might move forward together, as this contribution revealed:
We were a mis-match. I wanted professionalism, passion, poetry. Encouragement, sensitivity, humility. You were the opposite, or so I felt.
Unsurprising perhaps that I became a university lecturer, striving to be what I had wanted you to be. Yet I ask myself now, after all these years: am I what my students want? Or do they want the opposite too?
Reflections like this offer me a different kind of motivation. This one in particular leads me to think a lot about what things like professionalism or passion really are and what we value. What our expectations and desires might be and how they might be met. As well as well as the ever-complex notion of if we are ever doing or able to do something in a totally satisfactory way. I wonder how and why we might work toward that, and what we might even mean by that. That feels like a lot to get out of just 60 words.
I also think these are important things to be considering at this time. A time where questions of what might be achieved by the studying, making of and searching and re-searching of all aspects and areas of this broad and (for me) brilliant discipline are hanging around.
Sometimes the contributions I have received are short scripts. Some are poems. Some are funny. Some attempt the capture of three whole years, some only one moment that summed it up. Many (perhaps inevitably) often involve the pub, like this one in which we meet Hugh Hunt again:
Professor Hugh Hunt took us to see some Yeats plays. After five minutes he got up:
If they haven’t got the beginning right it won’t get any better “
He took us to the pub and talked brilliantly about Irish Theatre. It was the sixties and was a joyous place to learn the mysteries of a great job.
Thank You!
Perhaps it’s just the context in which I am receiving and reading them, but in all these contributions I think I see notions of possibility, failure, disagreement, opinion, joy, change, difficulty, challenge and discovery. Combined, these might be something like the mysteries that this contributor talks about. I don’t know that I would use that word myself, but I am grateful that they have.
What these contributions have done, and what I suppose I am trying to share a little here, is offer me a longer view of what we are up to. All of us here are at a point where for 59 and a half years this subject has been studied, explore and researched at this university. We are, and have always been, engaged in the process of finding creative and engaging solutions to keep learning, to keep making, to keep researching. Maybe, hopefully, for another 59 and a half. Who knows.
It all might feel particularly acute and difficult at times at the moment, but rather than be defeated by the present situation I hope that we can all work through and with this historic moment together, however hard that might be and however had it might sometimes feel. It looks and feels a lot different, but it’s still the start of another semester, in the middle of a year none of us expected, a world changing, life-changing time.
Let’s keep going.
I’ve now received exactly sixty contributions to this project, but there are many more people that have passed through our department, and I am still looking for more.
As well as reflect on it all so far, and offer some thoughts to those who are here with me in this fifty-ninth and a half year, this blog is also of course an opportunity for me to advertise the project further, and say that if you are reading this and you are or you know an alumni of the Drama Department at The University of Manchester then this is your (or their) invitation to also get involved.
I’m open for contributions (and little lifts to my working days) until quite a long way into this semester. To the end of it, in fact.
Please feel free to email me your 60 words (or any questions you might have about the project) at andy.j.smith@manchester.ac.uk
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Andy Smith
Lecturer in Theatre Practice
Manchester Drama 