Certainly for concise teaching experiences, embedded, engaged, workshop type pedagogy, this was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.
On Monday morning we had nothing. Myself, nearly 30 students at Westerdals, Høyskolen Kristiania in Oslo and Bard Torgersen - the brilliant poet, novelist, performer and teacher, who invited me to lead a four day workshop in the Norwegian capital, working intensely with those students.
By Thursday evening the students performed 5 plays in a perfectly paced, blocked show to a packed room. 70 people witnessed really challenging group collaborations, made from scratch, each responding to an experimental poetry methodology and then taken on into proper pieces of theatre.
A relentlessly impressive display by the students, who were self-motivated, mature, insightful, generous to each other, witty and clever. And this through Bard Torgersen’s unique approach, a constantly challenging, holistic, weird and wise course that had been built over 20 years. I have never seen a structure like it for higher education creative writing. A kind of conservatoire model for poets, not mirroring academic subjects, but taking poetry as a vocation, or something into every corner of life and knowledge.
I felt, over those four days, I barely did anything. I gave an overall direction, posed questions, came up with some obstacles, played a few tricks, leant on some previous experiences, but really did very little. It was uplifting to feel my practical experience was as important as my academic knowledge. To feel that the students would work it out themselves, in their self-made groups, always putting their best in, showing up and really thinking carefully through how they would provoke and challenge the audience. We spent as much time talking about timing, nerves, space, pacing, drafting, body language, visualisation, expectation and rhythm as we did about technique, content or method. In the end, I was really so happy for them they got such a good turnout and performed the final night without a single falter or hitch. I was more than a bit proud. And the day after, trapped in Oslo by storm eunice for a day or two longer than planned, the week felt surreal, dream-like, that so much was done so quickly, and was over so rapidly on such a high note. I’ll probably never see any of the students again and maybe this is due to this kind of thing being denied during the pandemic, but this all had the effect of making me feel how singular such experiences are. They happen once like this, and are over as they begin, precisely because they require such concentration on the moment of their happening.
