Rehearsal Methods Research Articles

‘Best Betrayal’: the Documentation of performance on Video and Film, Part 1

Whether described as adaptations, documentations, translations, or transcriptions, the video cassettes which allow us to see performances on video are proliferating. Not always easily available for begging, borrowing, or buying, not always willingly turned over by the theatre companies who hold them for in-house use, often lost or erased by television channels, and always beleaguered with copyright problems, these electronic arts ‘documents’ are none the less causing a revolution in teaching, rehearsal methods, and research. In what constitutes a first detailed mapping of the territory, Annabelle Melzer's two-part article deals with the theoretical and aesthetic questions surrounding performance documentation, with some of the hands-on issues of such filming – and with her own journey to seek out the documents themselves. Annabelle Melzer, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Tel Aviv, is completing ten years of research on the adaptation and documentation of theatre through moving image documents. Shakespeare on Screen, the first volume of her multi-volume filmography,Theatre on Screen, appeared in 1991, receiving theChoiceand American Library Association awards as outstanding reference book of 1991. Her articles on avant-garde performance have appeared inArtforum,Theatre Research International, andComparative Drama, and her Hazan Prize-winning bookDada and Surrealist Performancehas just been reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press. She is at present writing a book on the theatricality of war.

Integration, Elaboration and Recollective Experience

The relationship between integration and elaboration and consciousness in memory was investigated using the digit recall/distractor method of maintenance rehearsal. Subjects learned words either intentionally or incidentally while retaining three two-digit numbers. List items were rehearsed one, three, or six times. Subjects were given an immediate recognition test in which they were required to indicate, when recognising a word, whether or not their recognition was accompanied by conscious recollection of the item’s previous occurrence. Effects of intention to learn and number of rehearsals were found only for recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. The effect of rehearsals was found only for one to three, and not for three to six rehearsals. Further analysis indicated that the level of conscious recollection was a function of the amount of resources devoted to the rehearsal process, but no such relationship existed for recognition in the absence of conscious recollection. The results are taken as suggesting that consciousness in recollection is due to the retrieval of elaborated traces, while recognition in the absence of such consciousness is based on integrated traces.

Joint Stock: From Colorless Company to Company of Color

Joint Stock: From Colorless Company to Company of Color Joyce Devlin The Joint Stock Theatre Company did not begin from an ideological viewpoint , but acquired a point of view through the development of their work. Aesthetics took precedence over politics. In this way, Joint Stock differed from many of the socialist theatre companies of the period. In 1977, Max StaffordClark , co-founder of the company, described Joint Stock as "a rather colorless company, in the sense that we take on the color of the material and of the writer we're working with" (Bradby 305). Colorless in a different sense, the company was all Caucasian. Gradually, over a period of years, Joint Stock transformed from a Caucasian company into a committed, multi-racial collective. This diversification made a significant impact on the content of their scripts, the actors' ethnicity, the audience composition, and the organizational and artistic policies. For many years Joint Stock had a poor record of representing people of color on stage. It was not until their nineteenth production in 1981, Borderline by British Pakistani Hanif Kureishi, that black actors joined the company.1 In 1984 Joint Stock employed black actors again in Sue Townsend's The Great Celestial Cow, and again in 1985 in Egyptian-born Karim Alrawi's Fire In the Lake. Yet ultimately Joint Stock became a totally integrated multi-cultural company. We can gain an understanding of this radical transformation through a brief examination of the company history. Joint Stock was founded in the summer of 1973 by Max Stafford-Clark, David Aukin and David Hare. The three men had considerable theatrical experience—Stafford-Clark had been the artistic director of Edinborough's Traverse Theatre, David Aukin had co-founded the touring company Foco Novo, and David Hare had co-founded Portable Theatre which dated from the late 60s and became one of the earliest political theatre companies. For their first production Bill Gaskill joined Stafford-Clark as adaptor and co-director of the Heathcote Williams book The Speakers, a documentary about four Hyde Park speakers in the early 1960s. In an unpaid workshop, the two 63 64 Joyce Devlin directors and the actors explored the text through a variety of acting exercises— both borrowed and discovered. At the end of the workshop, they applied for an Arts Council project grant, compiled a script, rehearsed and toured. The production was innovative in its use of space—the audience was free to move around the actors, becoming part of the performance. According to Gaskill, "The success of The Speakers and the pleasure we all had in working together made another show inevitable" (Ritchie 105). However, this production, and the following four, contributed little to the creation of Joint Stock's distinctive working method or to the company's cultural diversification. During the course of the next ten years Gaskill and Stafford-Clark directed or co-directed nineteen productions for the company. While Gaskill's interest was in creating a common method of work and Stafford-Clark's was in altering methods to suit the particular material, between them they developed what became known as the Joint Stock method: a workshop in which directors, actors and writers research and improvise around a particular subject, a break where the writer writes the play, followed by an extended rehearsal period. Some of Britain's best known political playwrights have used this method when writing for Joint Stock: David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Snoo Wilson, Howard Barker, and Hanif Kureishi. Joint Stock's reputation as one of Britain's leading touring theatre companies developed while they actively produced an average of two new plays a year. They are noted for their consistent originality, their method and the range and style of their work— sparsity of sets, directorial clarity, and committed ensemble acting. Although the rehearsal methods in their early productions were unique, in 1974 Joint Stock's sixth show, co-directed by Stafford-Clark and Gaskill, effectively politicized the company and profoundly changed its organizational structure, disrupting the traditional hierarchy and the conventional patterns of production. The company became a collective in an attempt to understand the content of the script, David Hare's Fanshen, based on William...

Elaboration in Vocabulary Learning: A Comparison of Three Rehearsal Methods

Elaboration in Vocabulary Learning: A Comparison of Three Rehearsal Methods

The Effect of Visualized Instruction and Varied Rehearsal and Evaluation Strategies (Verbal and Visual) in Facilitating Students’ Long-Term Retention on Tests Measuring Different Instructional Objectives

SummaryThis exploratory study investigated the effect of different rehearsal strategies and different immediate test formats on delayed retention of content material. It also explored the effectiveness of visualization on the acquisition and retrieval of content material. Findings indicate that different rehearsal methods are not equally effective in facilitating student achievement of different instructional objectives, different methods having different effects in facilitating delayed retention. This effect may be explained by the fact that the immediate tests, themselves, functioned as a rehearsal strategy in facilitating the organization and retention of the instructional content. Differential effects on the criterion tests may also be explained by the depth of information processing required by the type and intensity of rehearsal activity (overt/covert) employed. Additionally, the findings would tend to support the contention that although information acquisition may be facilitated by visualization, ...

Rehearsal Strategy Effects on Developmental Differences for Recall of a Movement Series

Abstract When learning verbal information, an important aspect of practice is the method of rehearsal, which has been demonstrated to vary developmentally. A young child practices on an instance-by-instance basis (passive rehearsal), whereas older children and adults practice several items together (active rehearsal). This study investigated the effects of passive and active rehearsal on developmental processing differences for movement reproduction. Three methods of rehearsal were used at ages 5, 7, 11, and 19 years. A child-like strategy forced the subjects to practice location cues for each of eight movements, which were presented one at a time. The mature-strategy group practiced each new position presented with two previously presented positions. A subject-determined strategy group which allowed subjects to choose their own methods of rehearsal was included as a control. Significant ANOVAs supported the hypothesis that quality of rehearsal (active over passive) is important. For the 5- and 7-year-old...

Creative collaboration: The rehearsal process in chamber theatre

The extensive use of improvisational techniques in rehearsals for chamber theatre productions develops for the performer a strong engagement with the text. The director can channel the movement and gesture that emerge from these techniques into the production itself with results that more effectively convey the literature than traditional rehearsal methods usually evoke. Such a process has benefits for the performer as well as for the production.

Effect of Mnemonic Encoding Techniques on Immediate and Delayed Serial Learning

60 undergraduates participated in a serial learning task comparing three instructional strategies: the story and pegword mnemonic techniques (which both stress order relationships between test items) and an uninstructed control group using subject-determined, idiosyncratic study and rehearsal methods. All subjects learned four 10-item lists followed by an immediate recall after each list presentation and a delayed recall after completion of all four lists. Results showed no significant differences between the three strategies on immediate recall. However, by the delayed retention test, recall by the story-technique group had decreased 12%, recall by the control group had decreased 28%, but recall by the pegword group had decreased 52%. Differences in retention were related to the underlying organizational structures of the mnemonic techniques. Thus, this study showed the story technique to be the most effective mnemonic strategy when retention of ordered items is desired.

Narrative stories as mediators for serial learning

Subjects learned 12 serial lists of 10 nouns by one of two methods: a control method of normal study and rehearsal, or a narrative-chaining method, where S was instructed to construct a meaningful story woven around the words to be remembered. Each Narrative S was permitted as much time as he needed for constructing each story, typically taking 1–2 min. His yoked control mate was given the same amount of time to study each list. Recall of each list immediately after it was studied was perfect for all Ss. However, after the 12 lists had been studied, a probe test for longer-term recall of each list showed Narrative Ss recalling six-seven times as much as their yoked Controls. Average median recall was 93% vs 13% for the Narrative and Control Ss, respectively. The results appear to demonstrate the role of thematic organization in increasing learning, decreasing interlist interference, and guiding reconstructive recall.

Chained paired-associate errors and method of rehearsal

The Ss alternately practiced and were tested on a PA list employing dual-function terms so as to include a three-pair chain (pairs AB3, BC3, and CD3), a two-pair chain (pairs AB2 and BC2) and two single pairs (AB1 pairs). Groups receiving instructions either to rehearse by pair repetition (Group R) or by free association (Group FA) were compared with a group prevented from rehearsal (Group P) and a control group (Group C). Group R learned most readily with Group C next. The hypothesis that backward learning is a result of repetition rehearsal was not supported. AB2 and AB3 were more difficult than AB1, and BC3 was more difficult than BC2, suggesting forward mediated associations supplement backward associations in making chained PA lists difficult to learn.

Repetition interval and rehearsal method in learning equivalences from written sentences

Summary The role of rehearsal in verbal learning and the learning effects of the interval between the initial presentation of an item and its subsequent rehearsal were investigated in a factorial experiment. Three types of rehearsal were compared: stimulus anticipation, response anticipation, and simultaneous presentation. The Ss practiced either exclusively with one rehearsal mode, with a mixture of two, or with all modes. Rehearsal was either immediately after the initial presentation of an item (zerointerval) or a randomly determined number of other items were interposed between initial presentation and rehearsal. The experimental materials consisted of 8 sentences, each intended to establish a relationship of equivalence between two nouns. The sentences were presented within the context of an informative passage about the superstitions of a fictional primitive tribe. Acquisition was self-paced. Recall, as measured on tests administered about 5 min. after completion of practice, was the chief dependent variable. Clerical personnel (N = 544) served as Ss. The data supported the following main conclusions: (1) Zero repetition interval was appreciably less effective than randomly determined interval. (2) Rehearsal through active anticipation with zero repetition interval was the worst practice condition. It depressed recall performance to the level of a no-rehearsal control group. (3) When Ss operate under simultaneous presentation throughout the experiment, this method is as good or better than active anticipation. (4) Active anticipation is a more effective form of rehearsal than simultaneous presentation when the two conditions are compared for Ss who used both rehearsal modes in practice. (5) Response anticipation is more effective than stimulus anticipation when Ss operate under only one rehearsal mode. The superiority of response anticipation is diminished for Ss who practice with both stimulus and response anticipation, but the results are not conclusive in this respect.