Bren Weatherstone is the ACT's representative in the National Association for Drama in Education, and recently attended the International Drama/Theatre Education Association's Congress in Kenya representing Australia.
She is, of course, not merely a peripatetic representative but is a teacher of Drama at Hawker College, where she has established a reputation since 1995 for intense, stage-wise student productions.
Drama is not only theatre, but is a vehicle for learning social skills and artistic understanding. Many Drama students never perform in public but gain confidence and appreciation of theatre from "workshop" classes. Bren Weatherstone does it all.
So why did she go to Africa? And how did she get there? And what really happened?
Addiction to cross-fertilisation is Bren's first concern. Working "in a dark room with students all day" causes professional stimulus deprivation. Meeting a core group of drama education professionals each year, as she has done regularly for the last 10, stops sterility which even academic reading can't do. One special experience was learning how to put the theories of Augustus Boal into practice. Learning the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed, Bren's students have identified oppression in Belconnen. Usually they feel stymied by such problems, but have worked out alternatives and voluntarily followed up with 2 days' workshops with Community Aid Abroad.
At the Congress in Kenya, Bren was able to follow this theme further, meeting French clown Alberto and a Dalit, Nicholas Chinnapan, who use Boal's methods with Untouchables in India. And so the educational process circles around from theatre practitioners across the world through teachers like Bren Weatherstone to students in our schools.
Going to an education focussed conference was not enough for Bren, however. A friend had left South Africa when she was 18 and wanted to retrace her early steps from Cape Town through Botswana to Zimbabwe. Bren's archaeologist husband, Geoff Hope, wanted to study the latrines of the rock hyrax in the Drakensberg Mountains (hyraxes poo in the same place for millenia: digging in poo is a great dating technique for archaeologists, or so Geoff claims).
So after camping out with wild animals which, for some reason incomprehensible to Bren do not invade people's tents at night, the party wended their way to Grahamstown, a university centre some 40 kms inland from Port Elizabeth, for 9 days of theatre at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival (e-mail: sbnaf@foundation.intekom.com).
Here was white theatre for whites, like King Lear which mainly Afrikaans people attended, and ballet which even Bren's Afrikaans hosts found almost too expensive. Here too was white theatre about white on black experience, like Athol Fugard's The Island, reflecting on the past and future of Robben Island, directed by Jerry Pooe for the North West Arts Drama Company.
Most significantly for Bren Weatherstone, drama teacher, black theatre for blacks provided the most powerful examples of theatre as part of changing understanding inside one's own culture. From the townships and villages came works like Market Theatre's Koze Kuse Bash, conceived and directed by widely respected actor/director Sello Maake ka-Ncube. "It is as if the schizophrenia and madness of the township has taken human form" wrote Anton Burggraaf, guest writer at the Festival. "It is a horrifying indictment of a society that proclaims its freedom in so many ways, but that is trapped in a never-ending cycle of abuse."
It's certainly Bren's approach to teaching drama that her students should, like the African performers at Grahamstown, show the reality of their lives in theatrical form for their own understanding and for others to reflect upon.
What goes around comes around, always to the benefit of her students. But what doesn't go around is funding. Teachers, like so many of the artists Bren met, have to rely on almost no financial help for their own professional development. Hawker College has done its bit, providing $200 towards the Congress registration of $US400 and the ACT Drama Association will help. But when it comes to reality, delegates from developing countries need all the assistance the first world can give, so IDEA maintains a fund for this purpose, even though there are considerable difficulties about equitable distribution of the money.
Even using her long service leave and her school vacation, and some claim on tax, it's an expensive business obtaining such intensive PD. Well into thousands of dollars. At the very least we should appreciate the people, teachers and artists, who put so much into all our cultural development. At best, we should look forward to a society which provides the support these people deserve.
Yet, I suspect, Bren Weatherstone would also point out that a large proportion of the performers and teachers she saw in Kenya and South Africa need the greatest support - including, as she noted about one teacher from Sudan, the basic human right to teach according to personal integrity without fear of arrest and torture. At least she has that right in oppressed Belconnen.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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