Stephen La Frenie is the artistic director of Graphic Mime Theatre. His forte is mime and physical theatre, which is mainly based on physical expression as opposed to acting or spoken theatre. Stephen has always considered himself primarily a teacher, although he writes, directs and performs as well.

He believes that he has a real empathy for the quiet, seemingly withdrawn students in the classes he has visited. "When I was a teenager, I was very shy and withdrawn. I had no self-confidence whatsoever. To be perfectly candid, I was sort of a geek." Therefore he was left with a lack of confidence but a strong desire to express himself. His parents were separated when he was five years old. "My Dad walked out. My Mother, although I experienced a lot of her frustrations, never discouraged me from what I wanted to do. So, from her I get a strong sense of will and stubbornness." She taught him to have a strong sense of "who you are " and that, he believes is what’s most important.

He was seventeen when he settled in Vancouver and started acting classes with Gary Pogrow. Pogrow who was from New York taught theatre from two perspectives: Drama as Theatre and Drama as Therapy. He was, therefore, experiencing the classes and exercises with people who were non -actors. They were psychology students and therapists who wanted to take the classes specifically for the Therapy techniques. "This created a very interesting duality within the group." Stephen spent the next two and a half years (1976-78) with Pogrow, studying theatre and, getting therapy at the same time. Pogrow brought in a lot of aspects of Gestalt therapy. ‘In pain there is humanity’ is a quote that Steve associates with the Gestalt exercises he did and found very frightening at the time. The workshops had two purposes for Steve: for personal therapy in order to learn about yourself and why you do what you do, or as legitimate acting exercises for character study. It was always the student’s choice though, and some of the acting students constantly went back and forth between the two.

The exercises were designed to bring out emotions. Some people broke down and cried but Gary made this duality of purpose clear and always gave the students a choice to do an exercise. Sometimes the students were specifically warned that an exercise had more of a therapeutic application than a theatrical one. Stephen remembered having to stop some exercises before they finished because he felt things were "getting out of hand".

We did one exercise that was very scary. This is the one that is still a mystery to myself. I have always been very hard on myself mainly because I am really trying to prove something to myself as opposed to proving something to the world. Upon entering the room everyone was told to lie down in the dark. The exercise was to have a fantasy. You lie down on the floor and start to fantasize about anything. My fantasy is that I am up on stage, a small stage, like the coffeehouse in Vancouver, called the Classical Joint. This was a coffeehouse in Vancouver where I loved to play chess. I had always wanted to perform there. So, I am up on stage and I am doing a mime routine and it is a café with candles on the tables. There are tables, chairs, and the stage. Then there is this presence in the back watching me and I am very aware of that. I don’t know but it was much more real than the third eye watching. It was not me who was watching the fantasy take place; there was some thing, some one within the fantasy, at the back, that couldn’t be seen. In retrospect, I believed this was me. This very large ‘presence’ watched everything I did. I also remembered that there was no audience; just the presence.

After a certain time, the teacher asked everyone to get up and asked for a volunteer to go first. Stephen volunteered and related to the class his coffeehouse fantasy. Once he was finished the teacher asked the other students to go up one at a time and "perform" Stephen’s fantasy. He was a spectator watching his fantasy come to life. Then they all started talking about who they were in the fantasy, simply describing literally what they are in the fantasy. It was somewhere in the midst of all of this that Steve remembered becoming very scared watching his fantasy unfold. "I felt like something was being ripped out of my body. Something deep inside was surfacing. I broke down, started crying and asked them to stop."

He doesn’t remember to this day why he stopped the exercise or why it was so frightening for him. He never followed up on it because he invoked the workshop's most important rule. He chose to stop and not talk about it. "I was given time to compose myself. Since I did not want to talk about it, Gary let the matter drop and proceeded with the next person".

Some of the other students appreciated Steve’s willingness to stop because they too were there to study acting and were feeling pressured to reveal things they did not wish to. He knew that if he had wanted to dig deeper into the reasons for his breaking down he could have. "I never felt obliged to go further and I had already tuned in to the fact that I could always do it as a form of self therapy."

Stephen believes strongly that there is a mythology in the theatre that you have to reveal everything about yourself in front of the audience. Hollywood magazines and publicity machines deliberately push this myth. Some actors themselves, according to Stephen, enforce this myth with a perverse desire to expose themselves personally in public.

There was, however, an exercise during which Stephen made a very Dramatic discovery that influenced the rest of his life. The exercise involved taking an event that was happening in your life and telling it to the class as if it were a stand up comedy routine, in the style of Lenny Bruce.

At the time Stephen was working in the optical industry. There was a union problem and a vicious attempt to decertify the union. He had decided to become a shop steward and represent his section. He emphasized that he got along very well with his bosses and other employees. He heard, first hand, a lot of nasty things that the company was doing, especially in its treatment of women. So, after Stephen became a shop steward everything changed. All of a sudden, people wouldn’t talk to him. Some people were even dismissed at the end of their three-month trial period. The anti-union employees and some management people even spread rumours and told outright lies to new employees. "My favourite was finding out that I was living with my brother in a sexual relationship." He said that on one occasion he was even threatened physically in front of the other employees in his section. "Now he was in a situation which reminded him why he had left home at seventeen. With his mother’s stubborn streak, he decided to stick with the union and at the age of 19 became its vice-president and even president for a while."

So, this was the situation that Stephen chose to speak about in his stand-up comedy routine and specifically about the time his manager came into his section with copies of recently-filed grievances. "In front of everyone he told me to take the grievances and shove them up my ass and tell the Labour Board he said so. This was always a big joke around everyone because I knew that if I had said that everyone had heard him say that, everyone would have denied it."

Stephen told me that in his routine, he talked about how after he joined the union he had stopped existing for everyone. "I didn’t exist anymore for some people and I remember saying off the top of my head in the routine, ‘ Well yes. Sorry. I do exist. I exist for the one brief moment it takes him to tell me to take the grievances and shove them up my ass and tell the Labour Board he said so.’ And everyone looks at me and laughs in my face."

At the end of his routine Gary asked him what he thought the point or message of the routine was. "That talking to my manager was like talking to a brick wall." Gary disagreed that that was the point of the story. Stephen became very uncomfortable and afraid and said, "I don’t care what you think". Gary apparently took this in stride, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Then you’re wasting our time." At that point Stephen gave up fighting the revelation that was coming and asked Gary what the real point of the story was. "The point to the story is that you don’t need those people to tell you that you exist. You need to tell yourself that you exist." That may have seemed like standard advice but it really hit home and Stephen said that it has shaped his life ever since. "For someone who needed to find a validation for his existence, that was a very important discovery." Stephen explained that that was what the workshops and exercises were designed to do: "to bring about a self -awareness that could be applied to yourself and consequently help you understand a character from a play." Therefore, Stephen had two choices: to therapeutically keep doing exercises like that to work on his self-esteem or use the exercise of shaping personal experiences into a stand-up comedy act. He felt that Gary was capable of taking his students in both directions.

I asked Stephen to clarify if this story was about a real situation in his life. He said that it was. I inquired further as to whether Gary allowed the students to use the exercise for extended role-playing in which Steve would have played the steward and someone else role-played Stephen. For Steve, it was important to tell his personal story as a joke, not to use it as a role-play situation. "One of the hardest things to do is laugh at yourself and as far as I am concerned, there is not enough humour in the world."

The exercise brought out a real sense of objectivity and that was a real challenge for Stephen because he couldn’t just look at himself as a victim. "Everyone else is laughing at you and there you are shaping it into a joke. You wanted people to laugh at you." To Stephen, therapy comes naturally through the theatrical process.

You naturally reveal things about yourself. You can reveal very specific things that are too difficult to reveal through your normal daily experiences and that alone is therapy. Theatre itself is the therapy. Once you reveal something to yourself or out loud, you can speak about it. It doesn’t have to happen through role-playing. Therapy does not have to happen in a private session between patient and therapist. If group therapy works for people, then that is very good.

But Stephen doesn’t feel he has the qualifications to dispute it. For Stephen, what he has seen coming from his students, and from his own experiences is that the process takes a longer time than any group therapy can give. He used the stand-up comedy exercise as an example. "If somebody had played my boss, well big deal. If I could have said in an improvisational situation, ‘Ok, you jerk, you asshole!’ That is not therapy because you have said that already; so saying it in a role-playing environment doesn’t do anything for you; you are saying out loud what you have already said in your head and you can never say it as strongly as it is in your head."

Stephen feels that therapy has to happen in public, as an expression. This is why he feels art, as an artistic expression, is much stronger than doing group therapy in terms of role-playing. "Someone pretends to be your dad and you say whatever comes into your mind. Actually to talk out loud in that sense is very good but you don’t need the other person playing the other role. All you have to do is storytell, to verbalize, to start talking."

One of the techniques that he uses for teaching is to have the student talk as fast as they can and he feels that does the trick.

If you talk as fast as you can and sometimes even as loud as you can, things come out of nowhere; they just start appearing. Through rapid storytelling one expresses sensory images. This is how most people think and dream. So, the images don’t always make sense. The challenge of this technique is to remember what was said and start associating the images, which changes them, but at least they have been expressed.

From a theatrical point of view your body has a memory and remembers on a subconscious level. "If I slip and am about to fall, my body will grab something and then, only afterwards do I react with awareness. Oh! I almost fell. However, my body has reacted already and says, ’I know. If it wasn’t for me you’d be down there!" Stephen has worked with students who have been heavily medicated and yet, to the surprise of their caregivers, have been able to remember physical activities week to week.

His first experience applying this technique was in a clowning workshop for prisoners at a medium security prison in Guelph, Ontario. He told me that during the exercises, the prisoners talked about why they were there and how they felt about it. They did this both as a clown routine wearing a red nose and as a movement piece. The clowning techniques Stephen used came from his experience in the workshops of Dean Gilmour, a graduate of Ecole Jacques Le Coq. One of the techniques was to play the role of an authority figure named Monsieur Loyale, an authority figure who would pick on the clowns and even at times give them a little slap on the back of the head. He would place the clown under extreme pressure, always grilling him/her about what they were doing. The clown had to keep constant eye contact with the audience or with the authority figure, which is very difficult for most people to do. "You discover your clown by discovering how you react to pressure."

One of Stephen’s exercises involved the men choosing an emotion and expressing it in a simple movement sequence. "You started on the floor and proceeded to rise to standing and return again to the floor. How you did this was your choice." Later on, Stephen told me, they performed this for the other prisoners in the program. He specifically remembered a prisoner who had been given a jail sentence for his ninth drunk driving offence.

He had a real addiction to alcohol He was extremely angry and couldn’t figure out why he was in jail.. He was always fighting and this was how his clown would reveal himself. He would say that they were always making him do things he didn’t want to do. Denial and anger emerged as he talked about why he was in prison. And, of course, he refused to put on the red, clown nose for the exercise.

He finally did the movement exercise and it was very simple, direct, and self-revealing. He started by sitting on the floor. He had his head bowed and was very tense. He kept looking to the left at a very specific spot. There was a definite struggle going on and finally he couldn’t stay where he was and got up and went over to the left and poured himself an imaginary drink and then sat back down. That was his problem. What he finally said in a short twenty-second or so movement sequence was more than he could get out in words. With words you can fight and dance around the revelation. He knew he had a drinking problem. He could express it without saying it in words. The men were free to make the movement abstract and just express a feeling but this man couldn’t because he was by then too self-aware of his problem from all the rapid talking and pressure. It was out in the open. It is not the public confession that is therapy; it is only self-revelation that is therapy and your self-awareness.

Stephen also believes that subconscious memories and feelings can be brought back through physical movement. He raised the subject of hypnosis and related the mistrust he has for it because he believes that you are turning your sub-conscious over to someone you don’t know, which, according to him, is a very dangerous action.

Physical memories, however, which come out through improvisation, place the control with you. Revealing something while you are in control, works therapeutically. To reveal something through hypnosis and be confronted with it is frightening. When you are not in control and must keep relying on the therapist, there is no therapy happening Therapy happens when you are in control. This was a vital thing that had to be taught to teenagers in the school system: to be in control and accept responsibility for their actions.

To Stephen, skills such as leadership, motivation, and self-confidence are just natural results of Drama and Theatre. I indicated that from the last twenty years of my teaching experience and readings, I had been aware, that the prime focus must be on those other aspects followed by theatrical skill development. Stephen appeared to be reversing this. "In my opinion, it is the reverse. There is no reason to do that. So, to teach theatre as social skills, you are getting into, what are ‘social skills’ and it damages the theatrical experience. This becomes a form of ‘theatre for social therapy’ with no clear idea what ‘social therapy’ is. You are not socializing teenagers by teaching them role-playing in the classroom." He said that that doesn’t work for him as a teacher and he doesn’t think it works for students. "If you taught theatre strictly as theatre, everything would follow suit; they would naturally become more confident and sensitive. The qualities that emerge from theatre naturally flow into other areas of the student’s life and school environment. In theatre, you have the confidence-building techniques that you need for presentation skills in other subjects. Theatre brings out the ability to learn math."

In Stephen’s opinion, this is not recognized enough. "Drama is watered down to a point where it is not challenging anymore." He believes that students are capable of meeting greater challenges. He also feels that high school Drama programs worked, only when they had a teacher that could inspire. "You should be hiring special teachers to teach that kind of thing. Unless you recognize the legitimacy of the art form, you can’t teach it as a technique in something else." I asked him if he meant professional actors when he said ‘special’ teachers.

Professional, theatrical persons, but not necessarily actors. Not all actors can teach. Teaching is a profession, an entity in itself. Just because someone is a professional actor, doesn’t mean that he can teach theatre skills. Someone can be a wonderful teacher and not necessarily be a great performer. It is one thing to understand the process and another to actually cope with being in front of people."

Although Stephen studied Drama as Therapy with Gary Pogrow and had read some of Carl Jung’s work he still has a great mistrust of therapists and Psychology as a science. "I criticize Art as Therapy in terms of the methods of using it. I don’t think it’s a science; maybe Psychiatry is because it is based on medical research but I certainly don’t think a lot of therapists are legitimate." In fact, he thinks that there is an oversell of therapy in our society. For him all therapists do the same thing which is "to take the authority to take the control of your own life away from you only to hand it back to you as the solution to your problem. Therapy steals that from you first."

I asked him how Drama could be different but still therapeutic. Stephen explained that he sees how Drama reveals your own feelings and forces you to deal with them. "For example, if you act a role of somebody who is really frustrated, then you naturally came in contact with your own frustrations." The one important thing that is missing is what he described as the myth that there must be somebody there to say, "Yes, you have solved your problem. Yes, that is the problem. Even though you have realized what the problem is, there still must be that formal confirmation to everything." Stephen could have gone to a therapist when he was younger, but by doing "theatre" he said that he had accomplished the same thing.

Therapy has become, according to Stephen, simply whatever a particular therapist’s personal opinion or philosophy is. "It’s not based on any scientific study or on any real factual evidence." He gave an example of a girl of eighteen he knew who had been raped and went to a therapist.

In her first session, the therapist said that he was going to pretend to be her attacker and that he wanted her to say whatever she felt she wanted to say to her attacker. This had a devastating effect on her. "Maybe he had a whole background of why he wanted to do something like that but the opinion of this young girl was, ‘fuck you. I am not coming back here any more because you are just weird’!" Stephen feels that therapy is really just talking and there is an over dependency on therapy. I guess it’s basically this: a good friend is as good a therapist as any Therapist is.

I asked him if he felt that a teacher could be as good a therapist as a professional psychologist? In certain areas he believed it was possible.

Kids aren’t as messed up as we think they are. They are neglected by their parents, and they need a role model and a listener, not necessarily a father or mother figure but simply someone older who they see as being older. They need a parent; they need an adult to go to and if you are always their buddy, you are no longer an adult. That line has to be there. Traditionally teachers were role models. Now, teachers are so overloaded with all their responsibilities and at the same time restricted in the way they can talk to students, that they can’t act as an effective role model. The danger with Drama as Therapy and other forms of Therapy is that therapists don’t necessarily take the responsibility for what they have" dragged out" of people.

I asked him if that was what teachers were afraid of? Stephen feels that teachers should be afraid of that because they have to accept the responsibility. "If a teacher provokes it, if it comes out of his class, he has to deal with it and not necessarily solve the problem, but acknowledge it and help the student over the initial shock of realizing that it is there."

The main philosophy behind his teaching is self-confidence, unfolding creativity and nurturing the independence that already exists in the student.

It’s all based on a ‘self-centered’ point of view. We have a mythology about what self-centred means, and believe that it is selfish to be self-centred. There is a difference between being self-centred and self-obsessed. Once you have confidence, you give more. You don’t have to teach a philosophy of giving; it’s usually there already. People who give without needing a return are people who have been given confidence. Some people give because they get something in return. This is only an exchange, not giving.

In our school systems and in therapies, Stephen believes that we are still grooming people to be subservient to someone or something else.

You have to be subservient to a philosophy, to a corporation, to a boss, your parents, teachers, and the school administration. We say we want students to have confidence but as soon as the students break out and begin to show independence and start to challenge things, then it is quickly squashed. Sort of have self-confidence. Be something and we’ll tell you it is good and then go out and get a job. That’s not really independence. It’s just grooming people to be good employees.

With reference to cultural diversity and its connection to developing self-confidence, the situation that Stephen has found in Canada is that students of different cultures have become ‘Canadianized’. "This means, that they have come to accept that it’s not their culture, and that for example something like eye contact is not impolite. So, although at times it would take longer, with the cultural aspects or backgrounds of the students, he has not experienced any problems teaching a culturally diverse student population."

You couldn’t tell somebody who had come from a different part of the world or a foreign country where their entire family had just died of AIDS or had been gunned down by whoever, that you know how to get them to express sadness. That’s not the point to Drama; Drama gives the self-confidence to be able to go into a math class and actually heighten learning skills. Drama allows you to go into science class a make the conceptual leaps and bounds that you need to make in science. Einstein was incredibly creative because he looked at a series of figures and conceived of possibilities but he first had to conceive it. That’s creativity. That’s what science needs; that’s what business needs. If we take Drama and Art or any form of personal expression out of the schools, then we would get a lot of neurotic adults wandering the earth.

Stephen doesn’t think that people really know what teenagers are like, believing that they are violent and pre-occupied with sex. "If you don’t give them a chance to express themselves personally and discover their true selves, then after a while they start believing the stereotypes."

Stephen feels a Drama teacher should be able to match the energy of the student or exceed it. He said that his excitement and joy rubs off on his students so, when he is telling them to speak as fast as they can,"he is not standing or listening impassively. He is matching the students’ energy and reacting to it."

To give inspiration to somebody else is to give them the confidence and the joy that what they are doing is good. And it is not rubber stamping either. A teacher has to have the confidence within themselves to let the student do and go; the teacher has to accept what the student does and put it into a framework that is there. And in the High school it is much more restrictive but you always have to work within that framework.

Today, Stephen is still concerned with the creative process in his teaching and believes that through this process, therapeutic results can emerge. He does not use any of the catch phrases belonging to Dramatherapy and continues to create his own Drama exercises. He has noticed a difference in the students over the past few years, though. "They have appeared to be less mature, and they are more reluctant to do things and even less willing to jump in and try new things."

He teaches less mime technique now, concentrating more on Commedia Dell Arte,which he described, "requires a lot of fast improvisations." This creative process, is the focus of his teaching that he wishes to continue. "The enthusiasm and dedication of the teacher himself is the key to a successful program in Drama. It is not the curriculum. It can’t come out of the curriculum but only out of the individual Drama teacher who is there."

He still sees many teachers using Drama class time to deal with behavioural problems. "Drama has the unstructured environment that allows that. It is not possible in a Math class, which has a specific structure that can’t be interrupted. Despite this though he feels that Drama is still used as a dumping ground for troubled kids who aren’t wanted in other classes.

I did teach one class where the entire class time was taken up because the teacher had to solve a problem that happened while she was away, a very abusive situation, so she sat down and all the kids talked about it. The problem was directly related to a project I was doing with the class the next day. It dealt with racism and racial beatings and so they had to deal with the same kind of abusive language. So I sat in the office waiting to start the class but unfortunately it took over thirty minutes because the students had to talk it out and wanted to talk it out. She has that kind of influence over her students. She also found it very frustrating that she had to spend a lot of her teaching time doing that.

I agreed that this is the double- edged sword that is Drama. Drama sparks those kinds of things. Stephen feels that what is important is students realizing who they are and accepting who they are in terms of their possibilities.

I get a lot of rebellion from students about how complicated the project they are doing appears to be. I tell them, "Well the words came out of you so those are your words and I know you can do it. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years and I’ve seen incredible work come out of students so I know that you’re capable of it so that’s why were doing it. There is no reason not to".

But why stop a student from expressing pure joy or pure abstraction? If he has a fantasy that he’s wearing a cowboy hat and riding an ant down a hill well we can play with that. We can play with those images and see where they go and what they can do. That is what I mean by students accepting themselves.

My philosophy of Drama is similar to Stephen’s and it is his background and training in the various contexts of Drama (Theatre, Therapy and as a Therapeutic medium) that connect his work to my thesis.