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Theatre, Metacognition and Belonging; or, How our Hearts Beat as One
Nicole Tremblay, Theatre Director

It’s opening night. We’re 30 minutes to curtain. Cast, crew, and directors are gathered in the studio theatre. We’re standing in a circle. There is a palpable hum of energy and anticipation. “What if I forget my lines?” “Where’s my prop?” “Will I get the costume change done in time?” Mr. Brokamp, Park Tudor’s Technical Theatre Director, begins, “Let’s circle up and hold hands.” Everyone in the room makes space for each other. We take a collective breath. One of our tech crew calls out, “Vim, vigor, vitality!” an homage to Jerry Grayson and Rob Hueni, former PT theatre and technical directors, and all the theatre makers who came before us. Everyone responds and repeats in unison. Silence falls over the room, and it begins: I pass a squeeze from my hand to the person on my right, and we watch silently as it is passed through the circle, to the next person, and the next, and so on. When it makes its way back to me, a wave meeting its crest, we take a breath in unison, call out the show's name, and “Places.” 

This ritual serves many purposes - a way to focus, to calm the myriad pulses of synapses and nerves whizzing around the room, to reflect on all the work we’ve done, and to focus on the performance ahead. It bonds us, connects us, and, as research led by University College London has found, it is the moment that our collective heartbeats synchronize. 

The pre-show ritual isn’t the only place I harness the power of collaboration.

The studio theatre is an excellent laboratory for the investigation of dramatic hypotheses - on any given day, there is a question: What is it like to be this character, in this moment? Across the theatre curriculum, students make observations, ask questions and test predictions through the act of doing. They use retrieval practice to sift through prior learning so they can experiment with tone and pace, or style and genre, until they achieve their desired outcome. The outcome, in this case,  equates to, “Have the audience felt what I intended them to feel?” If not, they start again: create, reflect, rehearse and repeat. The rehearsal cycle is metacognition in motion. 

Or, for example, in 6th grade, we are  creating scenes using “paper puppet people.” Groups work in teams of three to build a life-size puppet with paper and tape. The performance task is deceptively simple: show your puppet completing an athletic skill. The team has to collaborate, maneuvering the puppet to capture the essence of weight, breath, and focus. Working with paper to show muscle and weight defies the physics of reality, so students have to break down each movement through careful observation and reverse problem solving. One student will demonstrate how to throw the perfect pitch; observers pay attention to the minutiae of the movement, breaking down how weight is distributed through each action, and how pace and rhythm changes with breath. The group then works through how they can replicate this in their puppets' limbs. We spend time rehearsing and studying each other’s puppets. Formative assessment happens at breakneck speed in the rehearsal room, with micro adjustments, getting a performer ever closer to “truth” in performance.  We video record rehearsal work, much like a journal in the English classroom, so that each team can assess their own strengths and make further adjustments to capture their desired outcome. 
 

Video: Paper Puppets in action

In these ways, among others, theatre students demonstrate Park Tudor’s values of resourcefulness and intellectual engagement. 
 
Problem-solving through role play and puppeteering is deceptively complex from the perspective of Mind, Brain and Education research. Students are making neural connections, linking old information to new. By physically enacting a scene, the ‘circle of encoding becomes more richly rehearsed, richly personalized, and, therefore, richly consolidated into complex bundles of associated meaning’. In short, students are learning and retaining vast amounts of information in short amounts of time. We can never underestimate how passion and play are meaningful learning strategies that solidify students’ understanding of themselves and the world around them.
 
Park Tudor faculty started this year with a collective brief in mind: creating a culture of belonging. As a theatre director, “belonging” is my specialty; empathy is at the heart of theatre, performance, and education. I considered the role that theatre plays in creating belonging not just in my classroom, but in our community as a whole.  UCL’s research found that not only does a cast’s heartbeat synchronize, but an audience’s heartbeat, while watching a live theatre performance, also synchronizes. The team found that the audience members’ hearts were responding in unison, their pulses speeding up and slowing down at the same rate. This physiological synchronicity is a strange and beautiful phenomenon, showing no matter who you are, you belong in the theatre.