The Teacher as Actor
There's no business like show business.
Irving Berlin
What are the technical differences between you, facing your class of 400 in Soc 101, and Sir John Gielgud, contemplating the skull of Yorrick as he performed Hamlet at the Old Vic in London? None. Both of you are working in front of an audience, whose seats are bolted to the floor facing the stage. Members of that audience have paid substantial sums of money to be there. You are in a theater. The person sitting in the back of the theater has a reasonable expectation of seeing and hearing pretty much what the person in the front row does. Information flow is primarily from the stage to the audience. And unless that audience connects somehow with the person on the stage, and the information being delivered, the results will be identical. The audience will pass into slumber. You are an actor when you teach a class, in the sense that you have the same delivery problems that the stage actor does. You both need to be seen, heard, and understood. You need to convince each member of the audience that you are speaking to them, personally. The skills that a stage actor uses to deal with these issues can be adopted almost without modification to the large class context. Using an actor's skills in a large class does not mean being hammy or histrionic. It simply means that to reach a student who is sitting perhaps 50-75 feet away from you in an auditorium, and have that student forget that he or she has hundreds of classmates involves some public speaking/acting skills that are too often neglected by large class teachers. An actor needs to know five things; his character, his lines, his stagecraft, his theater, and most importantly, his audience. We'll look at each of these things in turn---.
