Anna Scher, Learning, Pacifism and Depression

Anna Scher

I have just listened to Desert Island Discs. I love listening to DID; always have done so, and I know I have commented on this blog before about the competence and compassion of the current presenter.

Kirsty Young comes across as a thoughtful and empathetic person who puts her guests at ease and enables them to discuss some often painful experiences in their lives.

Today was no exception.

Her castaway this week was Anna Scher, a drama teacher who has incorporated a pacifist philosophy into her teaching, a women who seemed to have the real interests of her individual students at the forefront of her mind, a woman who wants young people to learn that their own glory and career is nothing in comparison with the need for a peaceful world order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Scher_Theatre

She has had a string of successful students passing through her doors, and I am sure there are an equal amount of struggling thespians who have not hit the heights of the likes of Kathy Burke, for instance (who incidentally was on Marcus Brigstocke’s “I’ve Never Seen Star Wars” this week).

However, there have been successes and Anna Scher appears to be one of the reasons for these actors prosperity, in the widest sense of the term.

A theatre school is a strange place, I have always thought. The hoards of folk to emerge from the Sylvia Young School or the newer version of the Fame Academies all seem to have one thing in common; a complete belief in themselves. However, as I said before, we only hear about the successful ones, and some of them are clearly good enough actors to make us think that they have a total belief in themselves. There must be plenty who do not make it, and if they are not good enough at acting and have only really been trained to do that one thing from an early age, I wonder what happens to these young people and what sort of state of wellbeing they are in at the end of it.

This is an all too familiar theme. It is not really very different to the sort of schooling that Michael Gove is trying to create, i.e. that we expect our young people to be proficient in academic studies and those who do not make the grade, literally, are deemed as defunct, lesser people, failures – by the age of sixteen.

What a tragedy, what a criminal act of indifference, what an assault on the rights of each and every child.

What I found interesting about Anna Scher was her approach to teaching that seemed to have the child at the centre. She was, and is, concerned about preparing them with the skills of the trade but she also seemed to be equally determined to ensure that many of their other needs were met too. Her final track, for instance, was one that she uses at the end of lessons to ensure that the students depart on a high note with positive criticism from the peers.

“Compliments on your kiss” – Red Dragon.

That is precisely the sort of thing we ought to be complimenting people on; not just their ability to cram facts into their heads and regurgitate according to the doctrines of academia but to concentrate on the things that actually mean something to our young people, and adults alike.

“So, you have a Baccalaureate full of A stars but my, you can kiss!”

Which of those compliments would satisfy you the most?

Her starting point for every lesson was also upbeat, encouraging, willing. Her chosen record for this was “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison. I cannot remember her exact words but she said it was melodic, full and uplifting. It gave her students energy and vivacity.

That has to be a good way to start anything; a day, a lesson, whatever.

But the most striking thing about Anna Scher’s schools that appears to be different from other within the genre is her determination to insist that all students should partake in Peace Studies.

At one point, when she had had to take some time out of her role through illness, the governors of the school appointed a new principle or head teacher. With Anna out of the way, they disregarded this notion of peace lessons, claiming them to be unnecessary. This was theatre school and that is what they should be concentrating on, not this purple patch of pacifism. Where did that fit in to the greater goal of refurbishing the cast of Eastenders?

Anna Scher was resolute. She felt that the peace lessons were an absolute necessity and now she travels the world with her lessons, ensuring that people consider the words of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and that they don’t just listen to these great speeches but incorporate them into their lives, their thinking, their philosophy.

What Anna Scher seems to be saying is that whilst her aim is to support young people into the world of stage and screen, there has to be an underlying learning about the world too. There has to be, in any curriculum in any school, whatever their supposed primary purpose, the desire and function of educating children and young people to be empathetic whilst simultaneously developing their own passions, creativity and wellbeing.

Now that is an intelligent sort of approach to teaching and learning, in my opinion.

My final comment about Anna Scher is regarding her debilitating illness.

She suffers from depression.

She described its symptoms with horrifying accuracy. Anyone who has suffered from depression or has been close to someone with this illness may well have shuddered as she explained the lead weight that hangs around obtrusively, determining whether you will yourself out of bed or not. Anyone who has known depression will have empathised with what she said about how all-consuming depression can be, often without any obvious determining factor.

When there is a determining factor and the sufferer is faced with knowing what the cause is and the inability to do anything about it, then the depression can spiral into something deeper and more tragic, and it is only the person at the centre, the one who is suffering the illness itself that can draw themselves out of this void, though help from others is usually gratefully received.

Depression is awful.

And yet, in the most bizarre of ways, there is something that I personally find comforting about listening to others describing their experiences. It makes one feel less alone, for certain, but it is greater than that. It makes one realise that there are possibly some positives for those who are susceptible to this illness.

This may sound strange and hardly a comfort when you are at your lowest point, but I do wonder whether those who suffer from depression do so because their levels of empathy are such that they can see the problems of the world before many others have got up to draw the curtains.

I am not suggesting that all depression is the same and I am certainly not suggesting that all depressives are full of empathy. Sadly, that is one of the qualities that so frequently disappears with the onset of a bout of the illness but perhaps the incidents of depression in these cases are the body’s response to an overload of empathy!

Anna Scher appeared to be an extremely empathetic person who has episodes in her life where the extent of woes subsumes, so that for all her empathy and for all her self-knowledge, this illness creeps in and whacks her where it hurts the most.

There are many who suffer from depression who have plenty of knowledge of what to do when it comes upon them and yet still fall foul of its effects. It is not a simple illness and it cannot be eradicated or placated simply either.

We all hope that we can live in the now and accept our world and our ways and be demonstrative in doing something positive for the world and for ourselves, but sometimes, just sometimes, everything seems a little impossible.

And sometimes it is good to hear that successful, empathetic, creative and passionate people understand and experience that too.

So, back to Desert Island Discs. Robert Hardy next week. I hope that is not going to be a disappointment. I wonder if that particular thespian will demonstrate the kind of empathy and thoughtfulness that this week’s castaway has implied.

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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

                    When You Are Old

    WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

    How many loved your moments of glad grace,
    And loved your beauty with love false or true,
    But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
    And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

    And bending down beside the glowing bars,
    Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
    And paced upon the mountains overhead
    And hid his face among a crowd of stars

Books, Amazon and Desert Island Discs

It is Friday night; shortly to be Saturday. Everyone has gone to bed and I have a sudden urge to write. I don’t have a sudden urge to read at the moment. In fact I am a little perturbed by my recent lack of reading, other than excellent articles on the internet and a whole load of extremely tedious documents for work.

But that is all in the past. I have a new awakening, and I am ready to read; even discipline myself to do it regularly. And the fact that I have just been made redundant will hopefully give me a little flexibility to fit all manner of reading into my daily discipline of meditation, calm and a little dose of self-indulgence.

Which is why I am utterly delighted to have discovered a couple of things that will assist me in my task.

A few months ago, I downloaded the Amazon Kindle application to my phone. I then loaded a few free books that I thought I might like to read one of these days; “Diary of A Nobody” by George Grossmith which is a book I have been meaning to read for decades, ever since I spotted it in my Mum’s downstairs loo (the room, that is!) or a mass of books on Zen. Having read part of another book, “Sophie’s World” by Jostein Gaarder, I felt a need to look more closely at some of the philosopher’s mentioned and so I have also recently downloaded “Ethics” by Aristotle and with a healthy amount of synchronicity, “The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates” by Xenophon who just happened to be the subject of “In Our Time” on Radio Four this week. How spooky is that!

They are all there, ready to be read, as are the masses of hard copy books that are collecting at the side of my bed shouting, “read me, read me!” as I guiltily fall into my nightly coma.

Now, the thing with the phone application is that it is brilliantly convenient. When I am travelling now, I tend to read rather than play endless rounds of word games. Although the phone is relatively small it does the trick and I love flicking through the “pages” with speed as I engross myself in a book. And I am not alone. There are masses of people on the trains these days with electronic reading matter rather than a solid book in hand.

At this point, I feel a need to reiterate that nothing beats the feeling of real page flicking and holding a real book in your hands. Furthermore, I love nothing more than browsing peoples’ bookshelves to see what they are reading. Maybe that is my implicit nosiness because the books on peoples ‘shelves (or lack of them) says quite a lot about an individual or a family in my opinion. And whilst I embrace the ease of the Kindle and other electronic forms of reading, I feel it would be an immense pity to hide one’s reading material so that other’s cannot get a glimpse of who you are and what makes you tick when they walk into your house.

As it happens, the head of Amazon was on the radio this week and he mentioned that the electronic book sales had outstripped hard copies for the first time this month; an astounding amount of downloads and he carefully reminded potential customers that there are hundreds and thousands of titles that are totally free; accessible to anyone.

But, I hear you say. Not everyone has a Kindle or and iPhone that they can transport around. In fact some people would see such purchases as irrelevant.

And in some ways they would be right, for as I was researching the Kindle machine the other day, I came across a link which said you could download a programme that would turn your laptop, tablet, netbook etc into a Kindle.

I immediately downloaded the programme and as if by magic, all the books that I had purchased with my phone application appeared in front of me on my netbook computer. How brilliant is that!

Not only that but as I turned to “Sophie’s World”, the book I am currently reading, it managed to synchronise as though by default to the chapter I had been reading on the train earlier in the day via my iPhone.

I’m not a scientist and I have no desire to know how that happens but I do marvel at the brilliance of such technology and the ability for me, as the consumer, to link between phone and computer without too many unnecessary tapping on the keyboard to find my place.

So if you haven’t done so already – here is the link to the Kindle for the PC.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000423913

But this is not all in my ongoing literary exploration. There is another website that is going to help me on my journey of learning.

Recently the BBC has developed their Desert Island Discs site. Gradually they are uploading more and more programmes from their archives and you can now see the choices that the famous and the interesting have made over the many years since Roy Plomley first introduced us to this incredible island.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs

So, if you want to know how many people have taken Bob Dylan songs for a trip overseas to the deserted island, all you have to do is place the great man’s name in the search engine and you will find that his discs have made it to the island 90 times. The Beatles have been transported 250 times whilst Elvis has made it over 71 times.
“Land of Hope and Glory” is a top hit with some folk, making an island journey 56 times, and oh how interesting it is to see who has chosen that one!

But it is not all about music.
For instance, I now know that 43 people have chosen to take “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy on their deserted island, including this week’s castaway Deborah Harry.
Although Ms. Blondie didn’t ooze with personality during the interview, I did empathise with her at the end when she was horror-stricken at the thought that she could only take one book other than the bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

“Can I take some Dostoyevsky books?” she asked. Kirsty reminded her that she could only take one. At that, Debbie decided she needed a book to keep her going so chose the infamous Russian tome that most people have not read and everyone says they will do one of these days.

So what other choices have people made?
Three people have chosen “Wuthering Heights”, dear darling Tony Benn took Das Kapital with him, five people have taken “Catch 22” (and an interesting lot they were) and Shami Chakrabarti decided to choose one of my favourites, “To Kill a Mocking Bird”.

In order to help me with my choice of reading, therefore, I can go to the website and start snooping around to see what people have read. For instance, having heard Deborah Harry discussing Dostoyevsky, I decided to look up how many people had chosen this particular author. When it then became apparent that nine people had chosen his books, seven of whom had chosen the same title, one of whom was Martin Sheen, I decided that perhaps I ought to read “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor.

And of course, where better to look for the aforementioned book in haste but to visit the Kindle bookshop on the Amazon website, whereupon I found a free copy of the book that I have now downloaded to my phone.

Isn’t life sometimes incredibly magical!

Of course, I think someone at the Beeb ought to compile these lists into some semblance of order. Perhaps with redundancy now in place, I ought to suggest myself for this task for I am sure that a compilation of books as a “Top Choices for the Island” would be a best seller – similar to the summary book that the BBC produced a few years ago, the 100 favourite books of the nation.

And here I come along to my final point of writing for the day, for it has turned well into Saturday now.

I adore listening to DID as those in the know call it. I am fascinated by the choices people make; sometimes horrified, sometimes moved to tears. The website is now calling members of the public to place their eight discs, luxury item and book on the site and one day soon I might get around to doing that, though I honestly don’t know where I would start to get a mere eight choices together, let alone choose one book.
And this made me think. Surely, it is time for Desert Island Discs to move a little with the times. As millions of people have Kindles now and that many books are at the tip of our fingers through internet downloads, then surely we should think about what could be taken on the island and what should be left behind.
I am not suggesting that Kirsty offers them an unlimited amount of Kindle downloads otherwise there would be no fun in listening to the castaway’s choices. However, I think the time has now come for them to consider giving each island dweller a loaded Kindle with 100 set texts. They could even use the 100 reads that the BBC produced a few years ago.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
This would still enable the island dwellers to choose a book of their own, and it also might sort the men from mice in getting people to choose something different and not too predictable.

Also, if people desired, they could choose between this and the Bible perhaps or it could simply be an additional thing rather than an either/or. And whilst we are on the subject of the Bible, perhaps DID could be a little more flexible in the alternatives for this book. They offer the Koran when necessary but perhaps they could have a shortlist of other religious or philosophical books that castaways might like to take instead. How about, for example, a compilation of Confucius comments or Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching; neither of which, unbelievably, has made it onto the island. (I tell a lie. The pianist Lang Lang chose the Analects of Confucius last year – another piece of synchronicity as he was on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday!).

My only problem with all of this is that there are not enough hours in the day. I need to play the piano, to swim, to gym, to walk, to look up, to smell, to feel, to write, to eat, to do all the things that every human being should be doing daily; after their own individual needs and desires.

But I will try and read a little more and these two findings of mine are going to help me, and I hope they are going to help any reader of my blog also.