Curtains for Theatre & Performance

Fleur Kilpatrick, Monash University, Centre for Theatre and Performance

I’m standing in the garden thinking about a plan for my last class. I always tell my students.'Don’t think you’re starting from zero because you have a blank page. Thinking is writing.' Today, I’m holding my own words as I contemplate a plan for this last class in a job I don’t want to lose. Whilst I have a blank page, I also have five years of thinking non-stop about how to improve the lives, art, confidence and creativity of my students and fifteen years of practice as a professional playwright to draw on.

My department at Monash, the Centre for Theatre and Performance, is being disestablished. The major is no more, leaving a minor, now delivered through Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance (without a major in ‘performance’, these last two words make for a hollow duo). In a zoom meeting with the Dean of Arts, my colleagues were informed that three of the four of them need to take a ‘voluntary’ redundancy.

My contract, up for renewal in November 2020, made me one of countless invisible casualties of the Corona Cull. I received a stock Monash HR email saying my contract wouldn’t be renewed. So, receiving glowing unit evaluations and a teaching award hasn't saved my job! I replied saying this isn’t the way to dismiss an employee of five years. They sent a stock reminder to acknowledge receipt of my non-renewal. I told them to call me. They sent a survey of my recent Monash HR experience. I wrote ‘very unsatisfied’.

It’s a pointless little fight with a faceless entity. I’m ‘taking this personally’, something I’ve been warned against. I took my job personally and put so much of myself into it, that it’s impossible to separate my feelings from the erasure of the career I’m so passionate about.

For two months I’ve been navigating a language I don’t speak. What does ‘voluntary’ mean for staff of the one school being shut down? If this is a ‘consultation’, who is being consulted? Students haven’t been. Surely, they’re major stakeholders in this decision. Is the decision to disestablish the school up for negotiation? No? So, what then is being ‘negotiated’? In response to my queries I received either silence or directions to read appendix four of the attachment: more alienating language.

In the beginning, I received news about my school through all-staff emails. These emails filtered through to students – many of whom are also staff. Soon students sent emails: ‘Hi Fleur, we’re freaking out. Is this true?’ So, I’d go to Zoom classrooms, many full of weeping students, try to push my own emotions to the side, and guide students through the news with honesty and little drama. Each of us, navigating our own emotions, were left to interpret global emails and attachments alone. It was isolating.

Then Monash communication shifted to students telling them what was on offer for 2021 without mentioning the disestablishment of their school. We had to ask them to pass these emails on to staff to learn whose subjects had vanished.

Our students advocated for us, for each other and for their own education. They called to check on us, something our employer never did. I was reminded of a moment: at the end of first semester, I asked first years what they’d learnt about Monash and what we valued. They said 'mental health', 'community' and 'trying, even if it isn’t perfect'. In 2020, Monash turned into a series of tiny universities run from our homes: I am proud this was what they learnt from mine. I am proud that my students showed humanity in an inhuman process.

So, I’m planning my last class and I decide to make it theatre. I share it with you, my colleagues, in celebration of creative teaching and this year of grief and small victories we’ve had.

The Last Class

Objective: closure, a space for grief and celebration, acknowledge the community we’ve created together and the pandemic we’ve navigated. (These are, after all, some of the many beautiful uses of my art form.)

0-10 Check in

10-30 Writing task: Write the year 2020 as a recipe: ingredients, step-by-step instructions etc (Combine hope and optimism over a high heat. Cook until smoking and set aside. You won’t be needing it for a while.)

Create a communal hotpot in the chat section: one ingredient and one instruction from each of us.

Perform as a cooking show.

There’s symmetry in this: I delivered my first lecture of the year from my kitchen, whilst cooking soup, gesticulating with broccoli to make a point and pausing mid-20th century political upheaval, to recommend adding a parmesan rind.

30-45 Discuss: what did we think musical theatre was at the start of the year and how have our assumptions changed?

45-60 Lena’s provocation and writing exercise. O

ne of my students, who battles chronic disabilities, has had a strange and difficult year in lockdown. Lena and I decided to celebrate this year by asking students to consider what they’ve learnt about how they work and what they can do, embracing the neurodiversity, physical or mental challenges they live with and reframing them as an area of expertise. Lena shared their own lessons with me before class. 'Sometimes you can’t do what you want to be able to do. Always do what you can instead' has stayed with me; one of the many little gifts I’ll take with me into unemployment.

1’00-1’05 Break. We love breaks. Breathe. Look out at the garden. Remember you’ll teach again someday. Nothing you love this much vanishes without a trace.

1’05-1’15 Improvisation with limited palette to learn the method Verbal: Yes, no, each other’s names.

Actions: Not letting your face be seen, laughing.

Once they get used to it add: Create a secret handshake, zoom is cutting out, share a New Year’s resolution for 2020 or 2021.

1’15-1’45 Our farewell: an online improvised play in four acts.

Prologue: The play has a different title for each participant. It begins ‘The Year We -’. Type your title into the chat.

No faces allowed on screen in this prologue. You can run and grab a costume item.

This class were obsessed with making and posting hats and one by one the hats appeared in their little zoom squares: a tribute to the ways in which they’d connected over distance.

Act One: Meet the crew

Find a fun way to get your face back on screen.

Introduce yourself and your costume.

You can laugh. You can applaud. Say ‘yes’, ‘no’ or each other’s names.

The student in charge of the music played High School Musical. It was ridiculous, cheesy and joyful.

Act Two: Where we thought we were going

Share an image from January (chat bar or spoken is fine)

From February . From May. From July. From September

Smoke, shared memes, online games nights, isolation, thinking they wouldn’t be good enough, phone calls with me telling them they would be.

Act Three: Complete this sentence

This year I became.

This year I fell in love with. D

escribe the moment you cherished from 2020.

Act Four: Gifts

Make predictions for each other.

Freya and Tara, two of the student organisers of the SaveOurCTP campaign, will become arts advocates or student leaders. Lena will continue teaching others how to approach their disabilities and difficulties with compassion and pride.

The day after this class, Fleur will go on sick leave for anxiety and the exhaustion of performing class after class whilst in a state of grief and confusion.

Students will never forget this year and the joy and community we created in it. Students will never forget this year and the way their university devalued their achievements, their teachers and their artform.

Thank people by name. Present or absent. You can applaud. You can bow. You can find a way to leave the stage.

Curtains. ◆