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Expert teachers and expert directors continually review and revise their practice in what might be described as a restless search for quality. Our sense of quality involves making judgements. We may describe something as ‘quality’ if we feel it is a superior example of its kind; or we may describe ‘a quality’ that we feel represents a certain kind of something that instinctively feels good or bad28. An influential report from Harvard’s Project Zero into excellence in arts education plays on both these meanings in its title: ‘The qualities of quality’ (Seidel et al, 2009). The report finds that what constitutes quality is hard to define because it is inextricably linked to personal identity, values and meaning. Quality involves judgements but cannot be easily measured. Richard Deasy’s introduction to the report describes how ‘quality is a constant and persistent quest and not an end game’ (2009, p.i). The report concludes that it is the continuous quest itself which is valuable: ‘An overarching theme across many of the findings of this study is that continuous reflection and discussion about what constitutes quality and how to achieve it is not only a catalyst for quality but also a sign of quality’(2009, p.iv).

The OECD report on ‘Teaching Excellence’, authored by Andreas Schleicher (2016), recognises the ‘intangible qualities that are difficult to quantify’ in how teachers work

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Quotations for Gonsalves are taken from an interview with her carried out on 03/06/16 and subsequent email correspondence to confirm that her views are fairly represented in this chapter.

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with their students (2016, p.3) and explains how today’s teachers need to ‘do more than transmit educational content: they have to cultivate students’ ability to be creative, think critically, solve problems and make decisions,’ and in order to do this they need to ‘nurture the character qualities that help people to live and work together’ (2016, p.9). Schleicher asserts that the ‘quality of education can never exceed the quality of teaching and teachers’ (2016, p.12). In defining the quality of teachers, his report cites Hattie’s definition of expert teachers as those who ‘make better use of knowledge’: using their subject and pedagogical knowledge flexibly and adaptively in response to each student’s needs in a collaborative environment (2016, p.26). Schleicher emphasises that today’s teachers are preparing today’s students for unknown tomorrows, suggesting that striving for quality and reflecting on what it can be is therefore a useful and continuous process. A director’s process of helping actors work together and strive for quality may then be a useful model of practice for the classroom. Introducing himself to a New York audience who had come to hear him speak about ‘Theatre and new communities’ Boyd (2008) explained, ‘I’m here to talk about theatre and that’s not what I do. I make theatre. I’m a practical person. I make it. I stumble through the dark and feel my way along and make things.’ This analogy is disingenuous since Boyd’s stumbling is borne from rich

experiences of international practice and attention to scholarly work, but he is

emphasising the quality of his role as pragmatic, a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘speaker’, which might mark him as a ‘dancer’ not a ‘thinker’. Boyd’s expertise in ‘making’, however, comes from the synthesis of dancing and thinking as he leads a company in a creative and critical engagement with an inherited culture.

Brook connects a sense of quality with a sense of rhythm and traces this back to a question planted in his mind by a music teacher who asked ‘Why is rhythm the common factor in all the arts?’ (1998, p.19). Brook describes how his sense of rhythm developed through his experiences as he made decisions about design, proxemics and intonation based on what ‘feels right’: ‘I became more and more convinced that behind taste, artistic judgement and cultural habits lay proportions and relationships that touched us because a quality of emotion is integral to their nature’ (1998, pp.63-4). Brook terms this ‘the dimension of quality’; and claims rhythm as ‘the common factor that underlies all human experience,’ a living tempo that connects how the ‘‘here’ and ‘now’ are always arising out of what was and transforming themselves into what will be’ (1998, p.132). This poetic phrase is reminiscent of Dewey’s understanding of quality and his continuity of

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great admiration for John Gielgud as an actor comes from what he describes as ‘an intuitive sense of quality’ (1998, p.103) and a restless search to find it. Quality, as Dewey asserts, and Seidel’s team find, is individualised and hard to define but it is not often found easily or accidentally. In a rehearsal process directors support actors in working hard to explore possibilities for how their character might think and feel and respond, in order to discover what ‘feels right’ in a moment of performance; something like Oscar Wilde’s definition of spontaneity as ‘a meticulously prepared art.’ In every essay of The Empty Space (1968), Brook returns to Shakespeare to illustrate his ideas emphasising how the quality of any play lies in the rhythms, the rise and fall of tensions, at which

Shakespeare excels. Dewey (1938) describes our response to quality as an often ineffable response to rhythms and harmonies. Brook (1998, p.131) explains how a director must consciously tune into these rhythms, noting: ‘the five acts of a play by Shakespeare make up one long phrase, a phrase that accelerates, slows down, pauses, but never stops […] Whatever the way in which it is staged, even when the order of the scenes is rearranged, or the text is drastically cut, this pulse needs to be there.’

For Gonsalves the tacit knowledge of a director is in being aware of the different energies of her actors and how to balance them within the rhythms of conflict and harmony, ‘the pulse’ of the play. Expert directors tune into the rhythms of Shakespeare’s plays created from the juxtapositions of words, lines, scenes, characters and plot, but also the rhythms of how their actors work together. They evolve a visceral sense of these rhythms which Gonsalves describes as ‘a strong sense of things spatially not being right. I literally wince if people are standing too close together – it’s like with Shakespeare when the scansion’s not right, it jars really deeply and you go ‘eeurgh’.’ This ‘eeurgh’ factor she identifies seems a more visceral term for Brook’s ‘dimension of quality’. Gonsalves is passionate in her belief that ‘The use of theatre is to get people to feel – and feel real feelings’ in order to ‘tune them into what’s opposite them in the world’ so that they can notice and try to understand the condition of fellow humans around them. As a director, she sees her job as ‘to get the actors to act truthfully onstage because it helps people in the audience connect to truth in their own lives’. Her technique requires actors to truthfully feel an emotional response moment to moment, which is given verbal expression through the words spoken and non-verbal expression in the behaviour that it causes. Meisner (1987, p.34) himself described this as the principle of ‘pinch and ouch’: if someone pinches you, your response is to feel and instinctively speak the ouch. He advises his actors: ‘Don’t do anything unless something happens to make you do it.’ In performance that ouch should

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be ‘magnified to suit the optics of the theatre’, but it should be truthful because ‘It’s the reality of the emotion which makes the lie [the act] convincing’ (1987, p.110). In this way ‘as ifs’ can be seen as tapping into an actors’ somatic markers.

Gonsalves follows Meisner in making her actors learn their lines flat, so that the quality of the emotion can be found in the rhythm of the moment rather than pre-learned through a fixed interpretation of the text. She describes how emotions in Shakespeare are magnified and the actor has to match them: ‘they have to have permission, they have to go there because it’s so big, so full, the actor’s experience is expanded so then the feeling for the audience is expanded. Shakespeare pushes you beyond your everyday experience of hurt or anger or jealousy.’ She gives as an example Lady Macbeth and how her plan to kill Duncan is not a common experience but watching her provides ‘a magnifying glass for the audience because the audience certainly aren’t experiencing wanting to murder people, hopefully - but it allows them to feel that jealous or that guilty – it connects them to real feelings.’ She gives an alternative example of the balcony scene in Romeo & Juliet

which, rather than being admired for its beauty ‘should connect us right back up to these raw feelings of how we felt when we first fell in love’.

The pleasure of working with Shakespeare for Gonsalves is that ability to express emotion because:

other writers just aren’t good enough – they let other things get in the way. Something about Shakespeare’s text is working on us in a way we don’t understand – the rhythm and the vowels and consonants banging against each other in a certain way – I think they do create a vibration with the rhythms that goes underneath our awareness, into another level, which is just like music.’ Cicely Berry (2008, p.2) also compares Shakespeare’s text readily to music, which allows character to emerge from how the rhythms of thoughts ‘knock against each other’. Gonsalves compares Shakespeare’s text to the direct emotional effect music can have on us but with the caveat that an artist ‘must be rigorous in searching for the authentic specific truth of that moment which the ‘music’ can illuminate, not just lull the audience into generalized feelings’ as, for example, a commercial musical can do. Meisner’s central metaphor (1987, p.115) is of the text as a canoe which is carried on a river of emotion. The canoe can be used again and again but the journey will always be different according to the environmental conditions of the river just as each actor brings different conditions to playing the text. The quality of Shakespeare’s text then becomes a pragmatic tool, a canoe shaping the emotion of the river it rides, expressing a quality of communication in

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a cultural moment. Brook (1998, p.134) describes how his early work with Paul Scofield led him to understand and respect the instincts of an actor who is deeply connected to how meaning is expressed through the body. In response to Brook’s esoteric theory on Lear’s inability to let go, Scofield explained how such negative actions are unhelpful for an actor, allowing Brook to reflect, ‘At that moment I saw unforgettably the trap of yielding to the intellectual excitement of “having ideas.”’ He concludes that although ideas must be expressed, it is important, ‘to separate the useful from the useless, the substance from the theory’, or what we might characterise as the pragmatic symbiosis of thinking and dancing. For Brook, ‘Learning to assemble ideas and thereby live in a palace of glittering thoughts’ should not be an end in itself divorced from empirical experience (1998, p.66). In books, the actions of Shakespeare’s plays are carved up, dressed, prepared for the reader’s digestion, but always referencing the ideal meal, the larger significance, with a gourmet’s delight of glossaries and analysis. A production, by contrast, can merely supply the satisfaction of a hearty meal, enjoyable for that moment of company and context as much as content. A production provides a narrative for learning from a moment in a search for the quality of that moment and makes ‘acquaintance with the past a means of understanding the present’ (Dewey, 1938, p.78).