As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.
随着我的成长，一切都开始变得灰暗和沉闷。我仍然记得我还是个孩子时所生活的世界是多么的紧张，但是我认为随着年龄的增长，就像眼睛的晶状体会逐渐变暗一样，知觉的迟钝是不可避免的。
I've since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours. For example, if I have a group of students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, I get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for everything that their eyes light on. Maybe there's time to shout out ten wrong names before I stop them.
从那以后，我发现了一些技巧，可以使世界在大约十五秒内再次起火，效果持续数小时。例如，如果我有一群彼此感觉非常安全和舒适的学生，我会让他们在房间里大声疾呼，喊出他们眼睛所看到的一切错误的名字。也许有时间在我阻止它们之前大喊十个错误的名字。
Then I ask whether other people look larger or smaller-almost everyone sees people as different sizes, mostly as smaller. 'Do the outlines look sharper or more blurred?' I ask, and everyone agrees that the outlines are many times sharper. 'What about the colours?' Everyone agrees there's far more colour, and that the colours are more intense. Often the size and shape of the room will seem to have changed, too. The students are amazed that such a strong transformation can be effected by such primitive means-and especially that the effects last so long.I tell them that they only have to think about the exercise for the effects to appear again.
然后我问其他人看起来是大还是小——几乎每个人看到的人都是不同尺寸的，大多是小的。“轮廓看起来更清晰还是更模糊?”我问，每个人都同意，它的轮廓要清晰许多倍。“那颜色呢?”“每个人都认为那里的色彩要丰富得多，而且色彩更强烈。通常房间的大小和形状也会发生变化。学生们惊奇地发现，如此原始的手段竟然能实现如此强烈的转变——尤其是这种转变持续了如此之久。我告诉他们，他们只需要考虑练习的效果再次出现。
My own rediscovery of the visionary world took longer. At a time when I seemed to have lost all my talents as a creative artist I was driven to investigate my mental images. I started with the hypnagogic ones the pictures that appear to many people at the threshold of sleep.They interest me because they didn't appear in any predictable sequence; I was interested in their spontaneity.It's not easy to observe hypnagogic images, because once you see one and think 'There!' you wake up a little and the image disappears.You have to attend to the images without verbalising about them, so I learned to 'hold the mind still' like a hunter waiting in a forest.One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of anxiety on the musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?). I was relaxing myself and conjuring up horrific images. I had recalled an eye operation I'd had under local anaesthetic, when suddenly I thought of attending to my mental images just as I had to the hypnagogic ones.
我自己对幻想世界的重新发现花了更长的时间。曾经有一段时间，我似乎失去了作为一个有创造力的艺术家的所有才能，我被迫去研究我的精神图像。我从催眠状态的图片开始，很多人在临睡前都会看到这些图片。它们让我感兴趣，因为它们没有以任何可预测的顺序出现;我对他们的自发性很感兴趣。观察催眠状态下的图像并不容易，因为一旦你看到一个，就会想“那里!”“你稍微醒来，图像就消失了。你必须专注于这些画面，而不是用语言来描述它们，所以我学会了“保持头脑冷静”，就像一个猎人在森林里等待一样。一天下午，我躺在床上，研究焦虑对肌肉组织的影响(你是如何度过下午的?)我放松自己，想象着可怕的画面。我想起了我在局部麻醉的情况下做过的一次眼部手术，突然间我想起了我的精神图像，就像我对待催眠状态下的图像一样。
The effect was astounding. They had all sorts of detail that I hadn't known about, and that I certainly hadn't chosen to be there. The surgeons' faces were distorted, their masks were thrusting out as if there were snouts beneath them! The effect was so interesting that I persisted. I thought of a house, and attended to the image and saw the doors and windows bricked in, but the chimney still smoking (a symbol for my inhibited state at the time?). I thought of another house and saw a terrifying figure in the doorway. I looked in the windows and saw strange rooms in amazing detail.
效果令人震惊。他们有各种各样我不知道的细节，我当然也没有选择去那里。外科医生的脸都变了形，他们的面罩都伸出来了，好像下面有鼻子似的!效果很有趣，我坚持了下来。我想到了一所房子，注意到它的形象，看到门窗用砖堵住了，但烟囱还在冒烟(象征着我当时的拘束状态?)我想起了另一座房子，看见门口有一个可怕的人影。我朝窗户里看，看到了一些奇怪的房间，细节之美令人惊叹.
When you ask people to think of an image, their eyes often move in a particular direction, often up and to the side. I was placing my mental images upwards and to the right-that's the space in which I 'thought' of them. When I attended to them they moved into the 'front' of my mind. Obviously, at some time in my childhood my mental images had frightened me, and I'd displaced them, I'd trained myself not to look at them. When I had an image I knew what was there, so I didn't need to look at it-that's how I deluded myself that my creativity was under my own control.
当你让人们想象一幅图像时，他们的眼睛通常会朝一个特定的方向移动，通常是向上或向一边。我把我的脑海中的图像向右上方摆放——这就是我‘想到’它们的空间。当我照顾他们的时候，他们进入了我脑海的“前面”。很明显，在我童年的某个时候，我的脑海里的图像让我害怕，我把它们移开，我训练自己不看它们。当我有了一个图像，我知道那里有什么，所以我不需要看它——这就是我如何欺骗自己，我的创造力是在我自己的控制下。
After a lot of practice at attending to the images I conjured up, I belatedly thought of attending to the reality around me. Then the deadness and greyness immediately sloughed off-yet I'd thought I'd never move through a visionary world again, that I'd lost it. In my case it was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. I'd learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.l
在对我想象出来的画面进行了大量的练习之后，我终于想到要关注我周围的现实了。然后那种死气沉沉、灰蒙蒙的感觉立刻消失了——然而，我以为自己再也不会进入一个虚幻的世界了，我已经失去了它。对我来说，是我对艺术的兴趣摧毁了我周围世界的一切生活。我学会了透视法，学会了平衡和构图。就好像我学会了重新设计一切，重新塑造一切，这样我就能看到应该存在的东西，当然，这些东西远不如存在的东西。迟钝并不是年龄的必然结果，而是教育的结果!
Contrariness
At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true. This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I'm doing it any more. As soon as you put a 'not' into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out--especially in drama, where everything is supposition anyway. When I began teaching, it was very natural for me to reverse everything my own teachers had done. I got my actors to make faces, insult each other,always to leap before they looked, to scream and shout and misbehave in all sorts of ingenious ways. It was like having a whole tradition of improvisation teaching behind me. In a normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.
大约在九岁的时候，我决定不再相信任何事情，因为这很方便。我开始颠倒每句话，看看反过来是不是也对。这是我的一个习惯，我几乎没有注意到我正在这样做。只要你在一个断言中加入一个“不”，就会出现一系列其他的可能性——尤其是在戏剧中，无论如何一切都是假设的。当我开始教学时，我很自然地会把老师们所做的一切都颠倒过来。我让我的演员们做鬼脸，互相侮辱，总是在他们看之前跳起来，尖叫，喊叫，用各种巧妙的方式胡闹。这就像我身后有一整个即兴教学的传统。在师范教育中，一切都是为了抑制自发性，但我想发展它!
Cripples
I made a two-minute film for a TV programme. It was all in one shot, no cuts. Everyone who saw it roared with laughter.There were people rolling on the cutting-room floor, holding their sides. Once they'd recovered, they'd say 'No, no, it's very funny but we can't show that!'The film showed three misshapen but gleeful cripples who were leaping about and hugging each other. The camera panned slightly to reveal that they were hiding around a corner and waiting for a normal person who was approaching. When he drew level, the cripples leaped on him, and bashed him to pulp with long balloons. Then they helped him up, as battered and twisted as they were, and they shook hands with him, and the four of them waited for the next person.
我为电视节目拍了两分钟的电影。这一切都一口气完成，没有割伤。看到它的每个人都大笑起来，有人在更衣室的地板上滚动着站着。一旦恢复，他们会说：“不，不，这很有趣，但我们不能显示！”这部电影显示了三个畸形但幸灾乐祸的残废者，他们四处跳跃并互相拥抱。相机微微摇动，以显示他们躲在拐角处，并等待正在接近的正常人。当他拉到水平时，残骸跳到他身上，用长气球将他撞碎。然后他们帮助他，就像被殴打和扭曲一样，与他握手，他们四个等下一个人。
A Psychotic Girl
I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed 'mad' when she was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask (see Masks, page 143)-that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn't try to impose my reality on her. One thing that amazed me was her perceptiveness about other people-it was as if she was a body-language expert. She described things about them which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be true, although this was at the beginning of a summer school and none of us had ever met before.
我曾经和一个十几岁的女孩关系很好，她和别人在一起的时候看起来很“疯狂”，但和我在一起的时候就相对正常了。我对待她就像对待一个面具(见《面具》第143页)——也就是说，我很温柔，我没有试图把我的现实强加于她。令我惊讶的一件事是她对别人的洞察力——就好像她是一位肢体语言专家。她描述了她从他们的动作和姿势中读到的关于他们的事情，我后来发现这些都是真的，尽管那是一所暑期学校的开始，我们之前谁也没有见过面。
I'm remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few minutes,so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would look after her. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: 'Look at the pretty flower, Betty.'
我现在还记得她，是因为她和一位非常温柔、慈母般的学校老师有过一次互动。我必须离开几分钟，所以我把手表给了那个女孩，说她可以用它看看我离开的时间很短，学校的老师会照顾她。我们在一个漂亮的花园里(就是那个小男孩刚刚看到上帝的地方)，老师摘了一朵花说:“贝蒂，看这朵漂亮的花。”
Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, 'All the flowers are beautiful.'
'Ah,' said the teacher, blocking her, 'but this flower is especially beautiful. '
Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming 'Can't you see?Can't you see!'
充满灵性光芒的贝蒂说：“所有的花朵都是美丽的。”老师阻止她说：“啊，但是这朵花特别漂亮。贝蒂尖叫着在地上滚动，花了一段时间使她平静下来。似乎没人注意到她在尖叫：“你看不到吗？你看不见！”
In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent.She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one Bower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of Bowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I've noticed such behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.
以最温和的方式，这个老师曾经非常暴力。她坚持分类，坚持选择。事实上，坚持一个凉亭在整个凉亭花园中是特别美丽的，这是疯狂的，但老师可以这样做，理智的人不会认为这是暴力的。人们期望成年人以这种方式扭曲孩子的认知。从那时起，我就经常注意到这种行为，但是这个疯女孩让我睁开眼去发现的这个！
'Education' as a Substance 以“教育”为实质
People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his students on the Boor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the concrete.)
人们认为好老师和坏老师从事相同的活动，就好像教育是一种物质，坏老师提供的东西很少，好老师提供的东西很多。这使人们很难理解教育可能是一个破坏性的过程，劣质的老师正在破坏人才，优劣的老师从事相反的活动。（我看到一位老师在Boor上放松他的学生，然后通过将脚抬高18英寸并将脚跟放到混凝土上来测试放松情况。）
Growing Up
As I grew up I began to feel uncomfortable. I had to use conscious effort to 'stand up straight'. I thought that adults were superior to children, and that the problems that worried me would gradually correct themselves. It was very upsetting to realise that if I was going to change for the better then I'd have to do it myself.
当我长大后，我开始感到不适。我必须有意识地努力“挺身而出”。我以为成年人比孩子优越，让我担心的问题会逐渐纠正。意识到如果我要变得更好，那我就必须自己去做，这让我很沮丧。
I found I had some severe speech defects, worse than other people's (I was eventually treated at a speech hospital). I began to understand that there really was something wrong with my body, I began to see myself as crippled in the use of myself (just as a great violinist would play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad). My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination-it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me?
我发现我有一些严重的语言缺陷，比其他人更严重(我最终在一家语言医院接受了治疗)。我开始意识到我的身体确实出了问题，我开始意识到我在使用自己的能力上是有缺陷的(就像一个伟大的小提琴家在一把便宜的小提琴上比在一把Strad上演奏得更好一样)。我的呼吸被抑制了，我的声音和姿势被破坏了，我的想象力出了严重的问题——实际上我越来越难以获得灵感。国家花了这么多钱来教育我，怎么会发生这种事呢?
Other people seemed to have no insight into my problems. All my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner. I wanted to stand like Gary Cooper, and to be confident, and to know how to send the soup back when it was cold without making the waiter feel obliged to spit in it. I'd left school with worse posture, and a worse voice, with worse movement and far less spontaneity than when I'd entered it. Could teaching have had a negative effect?
其他人似乎对我的问题一无所知。我所有的老师关心的是我是不是一个赢家。我想像加里·库柏那样站着，要自信，要知道如何在汤凉了的时候把它送回去，而不会让服务员觉得不得不往里面吐唾沫。离开学校时，我的姿势和声音都比刚入学时糟糕，动作也比刚入学时糟糕，自发性也比刚入学时差得多。教学会有负面影响吗?
Emotion
One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I'd had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I'd have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond. (In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they're watching, and crossing their arms tightly, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less 'involved', less 'subjective'. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)
有一天，当我十八岁的时候，我读了一本书，我开始哭泣。我吓了一跳。我不知道文学会对我产生这样的影响。如果我在课堂上为一首诗哭泣，老师会感到震惊。我意识到，我的学校一直在教导我不要做出回应。(在一些大学里，学生们会无意识地模仿教授的身体姿势，在看戏剧或电影时身体后仰，双臂交叉，头向后仰。这样的姿势有助于他们感觉不那么“投入”，不那么“主观”。未受过教育的人的反应是无比优越的。)
Intelligence
I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school's seemed to coincide: in writing, for example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency). I forgot that inspiration isn't intellectual, that you don't have to be perfect. In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough. Everything had to be corrected and brought into line.
我试图抵制学校教育，但我接受了这样的观点:我的智力是我最重要的一部分。我做什么事都力求聪明。在我的兴趣和学校的兴趣似乎重合的地方，损失最大:比如在写作方面(我写了又写，完全失去了流畅性)。我忘记了灵感不是智力上的，你不必完美。最后，因为害怕失败，我不愿尝试任何事情，我最初的想法似乎总是不够好。一切都必须纠正过来，使之规规矩矩。
The spell broke when I was in my early twenties. I saw a performance of Dovzhenko's Earth, a film which is a closed book for many people, but which threw me into a state of exaltation and confusion.There is a sequence in which the hero, Vassily, walks alone in the twilight. We know he's in danger, and we have just seen him comforting his wife, who rolled her eyes like a frightened animal. There are shots of mist moving eerily on water, and silent horses stretching their necks, and corn-stooks against the dusky sky.
当我二十出头的时候，这个魔咒就被打破了。我看了一场Dovzhenko的《地球》，这部电影对很多人来说是一本绝版的书，但却让我陷入了一种兴奋和迷茫的状态。有这样一个场景，主人公瓦西里在暮色中独自行走。我们知道他处于危险之中，我们刚刚看到他在安慰他的妻子，她像受惊的动物一样转动着眼睛。水面上有雾诡异地移动的镜头，沉默的马伸长脖子，玉米杂碎在昏暗的天空中。
Then, amazingly,peasants lying side by side, the men with their hands inside the women's blouses and motionless, with idiotic smiles on their faces as they stare at the twilight. Vassily, dressed in black, walks through the Chagall village, and the dust curls up in little clouds around his feet and he is dark against the moonlit road, and he is filled with the same ecstasy as the peasants. He walks and walks and the film cuts and cuts until he walks out of frame. Then the camera moves back, and we see him stop. The fact that he walks for so long, and that the image is so beautiful, linked up with my own experience of being alone in the twilight-the gap between the worlds. Then Vassily walks again, but after a short time he begins to dance, and the dance is skilled, and like an act of thanksgiving.
然后，令人惊讶的是，农民们肩并肩地躺着，男人们手插在女人们的上衣里，一动不动，呆呆地望着黄昏，脸上挂着愚蠢的微笑。瓦西里身穿黑衣，穿过夏加尔村，尘土在他脚边结成小团，他在月光照耀的道路上显得黑压压的，他和农民们一样，心中充满了狂喜。他走啊走，电影不停地剪辑，直到他走出画面。然后镜头移回来，我们看到他停了下来。事实上，他走了这么长时间，那景象是如此美丽，这与我自己在黄昏中独自一人的经历有关——世界之间的差距。然后瓦西里又走了，但过了一会儿，他开始跳舞，而且跳得很熟练，像一种感恩的行为。
The dust swirls around his feet, so that he's like an Indian god, like Siva-and with the man dancing alone in the clouds of dust something unlocked in me. In one moment I knew that the valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself-word-bound and unable to dance. From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.
尘土在他的脚周围打转，所以他就像一个印度神，像西瓦——和这个男人在尘土的云中独自舞蹈，某种东西打开了我的心灵。刹那间，我意识到，以智力来衡量人的价值是疯狂的，那些仰望夜空的农民们的感受可能比我更深刻，那个会跳舞的人可能比我这个不会跳舞的人更优越。从那以后，我注意到许多高智商的人是多么的扭曲，我开始重视人们的行动，而不是他们的思想。
Anthony Stirling
I felt crippled, and 'unfit' for life, so I decided to become a teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly,and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example.
我感到自己瘫痪了，对生活“不适应”，所以我决定当老师。我需要更多的时间来整理自己，我相信培训学院会教我说话清楚，站得自然，有信心，以及如何提高我的教学技能。常识使我确信这一点，但我错了。幸运的是，我有一位才华横溢的艺术老师，他叫安东尼·斯特灵，我所有的作品都源于他的榜样。
It wasn't so much what he taught, as what he did. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher.I'll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating.
他所教的并没有他所学的那么多。我一生中第一次被一位伟大的老师接管。我将描述他给我们的第一堂课，这是刻骨铭心和完全迷失其中。
He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn't like,but which I thought I understood-'He's letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,' I thought.He made us mix up a thick 'jammy' black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he said,'paint the mark he leaves on your paper I' I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I'd always been 'good at art', and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student.
他对待我们就像对待一个八岁的孩子，我不喜欢这样，但我想我能理解——“他让我们知道作为受训者的感受，”我想。他让我们混合一种浓浓的“jammy”黑色颜料，并让我们想象一个骑着单轮自行车的小丑踩着颜料踩着我们的纸。“别画小丑，”他说，“把他在你纸上留下的记号画下来，我想展示我的技能，因为我一直‘擅长艺术’，我想让他知道我是一个培养价值的学生。
This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill?I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks?'He cycles on and off your paper,' said Stirling, 'and he does all sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very interesting .. .'Everyone's paper was covered with a mess of black lines--except mine, since I'd tried to be original by mixing up a blue. Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me.
这个练习惹恼了我，因为我该如何展示我的技能呢?我可以画小丑，但谁在乎轮胎印?“他在你的纸上骑来骑去，”斯特灵说，“他做各种各样的把戏，所以他在你的纸上留下的线是非常有趣的……”斯特灵严厉批评我不能混合黑色，这激怒了我。
Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had made.
'What kind of colours?'
'Any colours.'
'Yeah ... but ... er ... we don't know what colours to choose.'
'Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like.'
We decided to humour him. When my paper was coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the outlines black.'Johnstone's found the value of a strong outline,' said Stirling, which really annoyed me. I could see that everyone's paper was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody else's-but no better.
我们决定取笑他。当我的纸面上色时，我发现蓝色消失了，于是我将轮廓重新粉刷成黑色.``约翰斯顿发现了轮廓浓密的价值，''斯特林说，这让我很烦。我可以看到，每个人的论文都陷入了一片泥泞，而且我的并不比其他人差，但也没有比这更好。
'Put patterns on all the colours,' said Stirling. The man seemed to be an idiot. Was he teasing us?
斯特林说：“在所有颜色上加上图案。”这个男人似乎是个白痴。他在逗我们吗？
'What sort of patterns?'
“什么样的模式？”
'Any patterns.'
“任何模式。”
We couldn't seem to start. There were about ten of us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this madman.
我们似乎无法开始。在我们这个疯子的手中，大约有十个人，彼此都是陌生人。
'We don't know what to do.'
“我们不知道该怎么办。”
'Surely it's easy to think of patterns.'
“当然很容易想到模式。”
We wanted to get it right. 'What sort of patterns do you want?'
我们想做对了。“你想要什么样的模式？”
'It's up to you.' He had to explain patiently to us that it really was our choice. I remember him asking us to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which it didn't. Somehow we finished the exercises, and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor,and it was the same exercise done by other students.
“由你决定。“他必须耐心地向我们解释，这确实是我们的选择。我记得他要求我们把我们的形状想象成从空中看到的田野，如果这有帮助的话，但它没有。我们完成了练习，不知怎么地，四处呆呆地四处张望着我们的涂抹，但斯特灵似乎没有那么动静。他去了一个橱柜，拿出一大堆画作，将它们散布在地板上，这和其他学生一样。
The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive--clearly they had been done by some advanced class. 'What a great idea,' I thought,'making us screw up in this way, and then letting us realise that there was something that we could learn, since the advanced students were so much better!' Maybe I exaggerate when I remember how beautiful the paintings were, but I was seeing them immediately after my failure. Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. 'Wait a minute,' I said, 'these are by young children!'
颜色是如此之美，图案也是如此富创意-显然，它们是由一些高级班完成的。“好主意，”我想，“这样让我们搞砸了，然后让我们意识到，有一些东西可以学到，因为高水平的学生要好得多！”当我记得这些画作多么美丽时，也许我会夸大其词，但是我在失败之后立即看到了它们。然后我注意到这些小杰作都是用非常草率的笔迹签名的。我等一下，“等一下，这些都是年幼的孩子！”
They were all by eight-year-olds! It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they'd done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. I was speechless. Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered.It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.
他们都是8岁的孩子!这只是一个练习，鼓励他们使用整个区域的纸，但他们做了这样的爱，品味，关怀和敏感性。我说不出话来。就在那一刻，我发生了一件事，从此我再也没有恢复过来。这是对我的教育是一个破坏性的过程的最后确认。
Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad .. .'
斯特林认为艺术是在儿童中“存在”的，它不是成年人必须强加的东西。老师并不比孩子优越，也永远不要表现出来，也不要强加价值观：“这是好事，这是坏事……”
'But supposing a child wants to learn how to draw a tree?'
“但是假设一个孩子想学习如何画一棵树？”
'Send him out to look at one. Let him climb one. Let him touch it.'
'送他出去看看。让他爬一个。让他触摸它。
'But if he still can't draw one?'
“但是，如果他仍然不能画一个？”
'Let him model it in clay.'
“让他用泥土为模型。”
The implication of Stirling's attitude was that the student should never experience failure. The teacher's skill lay in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed.
斯特林态度的暗示是学生永远都不会经历失败。教师的技能在于以使学生注定要成功的方式来介绍经验。
Stirling recommended that we read the Tao te Ching. It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual. Here are some extracts: ' ... The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words .... When his task is accomplished and his work done the people all say, "It happened to us naturally" . . . . I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves. I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block ... One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them. This is known as the virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of others .... To know yet to think that one does not know is best ....
斯特灵建议我们读《道德经》。现在在我看来，他实际上是把这本书当作他的教学手册。以下是一些摘录：“是以圣人处无为之事，行不言之教；万物作焉而不为始，生而不有，为而不恃，功成而弗居。夫唯弗居，是以不去”“我无为而民自化”，我好静而民自正，我无事而民自富，我无欲而民自朴。
The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.' (Translated by C. D. Lau, Penguin,1969·)
圣人不积：既以为人己愈有；既以与人，己愈多。 天之道，利而不害；人之道，为而弗争。
Being a Teacher
I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new teachers avoided-but I'd been a postman there, and I loved the place.My new colleagues bewildered me. 'Never tell people you're a teacher!' they said. 'If they find you're a teacher in the pub, they'll all move away!' It was true! I'd believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Blittersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as 'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive.
我选择了在工人阶级聚居区巴特西教书，大多数新老师都避开了这个地方——但我在那儿当过邮递员，我喜欢这个地方。我的新同事把我弄糊涂了。“永远不要告诉别人你是老师!””他们说。“如果他们发现你在酒吧里当老师，他们都会搬走的!”“是真的!”我原以为教师是受人尊敬的人物，但在布莱特西，他们可能是令人害怕或讨厌的。我喜欢我的同事，但他们对孩子的态度像殖民者;他们称他们为“穷孩子”，而他们恰恰不喜欢那些我认为最有创造力的孩子。
If a child is creative he's likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn't a reason for disliking him. My colleagues had a poor view of themselves: again and again I heard them say, 'Man among boys; boy among men' when describing their condition. I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant,or rather that the school was something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you'd remove him away from his parents (which is what my education had done for me).Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn't want their children alienated from them.
如果一个孩子有创造力，他可能更难控制，但这不是不喜欢他的理由。我的同事们对自己的看法很差，我一次又一次地听到他们说:‘男孩子中有男子汉;当描述他们的情况时。我发现，他们的不快乐，以及他们在社区中缺乏认同感，来自于一种感觉，即他们无足轻重，或者更确切地说，这所学校是中产阶级强加给工人阶级文化的东西。每个人似乎都认为，如果你能教育一个这样的孩子，你就会让他离开他的父母(这是我的教育为我做的)。受过教育的人是势利小人，许多父母不希望他们的孩子与他们疏远。
Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. Mine was a mix of twenty-six 'average' eight-year-olds, and twenty 'backward' ten-year-olds whom the school had written off as ineducable. Some of the ten-year-olds couldn't write their names after five years of schooling. I'm sure Professor Skinner could teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I couldn't believe that these children were really dull: it was more likely that they were putting up a resistance. One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren't being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated.
和大多数新老师一样，我上的是别人都不想上的课。我的学生中有26名8岁的“普通”学生，还有20名10岁的“落后”学生，学校认为他们是不可教育的。一些十岁的孩子在五年的学校教育后不能写他们的名字。我相信斯金纳教授能在几周内教鸽子们打名字，所以我不能相信这些孩子真的很迟钝:他们更可能是在反抗。令人震惊的是，当孩子们没有被要求学习的时候，吓呆了的、看起来毫无生气的孩子们会突然容光焕发，看起来很聪明。当他们清理鱼缸的时候，他们看起来很好。当他们在写一个句子的时候，他们看起来很麻木，很挫败。
Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. My case was peculiar in that I'd apparently been exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven,winning all the prizes (which embarrassed me, since I thought they should be given to the dull children as compensation) and being teacher's pet, and so on. Then, spectacularly, I'd suddenly come bottom of the class-'down among the dregs', as my headmaster described it.
几乎所有的老师，即使他们不是很聪明，在学生时代也能相处得很好，所以他们很难与那些不及格的孩子产生共鸣。我的情况很特殊，很明显，我在11岁之前就已经非常聪明了，赢得了所有的奖项(这让我很尴尬，因为我认为这些奖项应该给那些迟钝的孩子作为补偿)，成为老师的宠儿，等等。然后，令人吃惊的是，我突然在班里垫底了——就像我的校长所描述的那样，“落在渣滓中间”。
He never forgave me. I was puzzled too, but gradually I realised that I wouldn't work for people I didn't like. Over the years my work gradually improved, but I never fulfilled my promise. When I liked particular teacher and won a prize, the head would say: 'Johnstone is taking this prize away from the boys who deserve it!' If you've been bottom of the class for years it gives you a different perspective: I was friends with boys who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as 'useless' or 'ineducable'. My 'failure' was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.
他从来没有原谅我。我也很困惑，但渐渐地我意识到我不会为我不喜欢的人工作。这些年来，我的工作逐渐改进，但我从未实现我的诺言。当我喜欢某个老师并获奖时，校长会说:“约翰斯通把这个奖从该得的孩子手里夺走了!”“如果你多年来一直是班里的垫底学生，它会给你一个不同的视角:我和一些失败的男孩是朋友，没有什么能让我把他们说成是‘没用的’或‘不可教育的’。”我的“失败”是一种生存策略，如果没有它，我可能永远也不会走出我的教育为我设置的陷阱。我的意识会比现在被阻隔得更厉害。
I was determined that my classes shouldn't be dull, so I used to jump about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up-which is exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline.My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of themselves as 'being educated'.
我下定决心，我的课不应该是枯燥的，所以我过去常常跳来跳去，挥舞手臂，通常是搅拌东西——这是令人兴奋的，但不利于纪律。如果你把一个没有经验的老师硬塞进最难对付的班级，他不是沉下去就是游过去。不管他多么理想主义，他总是倾向于用传统的方法来加强纪律。我的问题是要顶住压力，使我成为一个传统的教师。我必须建立一种完全不同的关系，才能希望释放孩子们的创造力，这种创造力在他们不认为自己“受到了教育”的时候非常明显。
I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I'd also type out their dreams-and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me.
我不明白为什么斯特灵的想法不能适用于所有的领域，尤其是写作:识字显然是非常重要的，不管怎样，写作让我感兴趣，我想用热情感染孩子们。我试着让他们互相发送密信，写一些关于我的粗鲁评论，等等，但结果是零。有一天，我把我的打字机和美术书带到课堂上，说我要把他们想写的关于图画的任何东西都打出来。后来我又想了想，说我也会把他们的梦打出来——突然间，他们真的想写了。我按他们写的一模一样把所有东西都打了出来，包括拼写错误，直到他们发现了我
Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)--but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct, because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in schoolhence the misbehaviour.
在50年代早期(可能现在也是)，把拼写错误打出来是一个很奇怪的想法，但它确实奏效了。纠正错误的压力来自孩子们，而不是老师。孩子们表达出的强烈的感情和愤怒，以及他们坚持正确的决心，让我感到惊讶，因为没有人会想到他们会在意。即使是不识字的人也让他们的朋友把每个字都拼出来。我取消了时间表，在一个月的时间里，他们每天都要写几个小时。我不得不强迫他们离开教室去休息。当我听说孩子们的注意力持续时间只有十分钟，或别的什么时候，我很惊讶。十分钟是无聊的孩子们的注意力持续时间，这是他们通常在学校里的时间——因此才会有不良行为
I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I'd never seen any examples of children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in !). By far the best work came from the 'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation. He'd found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces-they'd made them in art class and I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them. There was a cardboard tunnel he was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk around. I'd stuck all the art paper together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning forest.
我对孩子们写的东西的质量感到更加惊讶。在我的训练过程中，我从未见过任何儿童写作的例子;我以为这是一场骗局(我的一个同事一定偷偷带进来一本现代韵文的书!)到目前为止，最好的作品来自那些“不可教育的”十岁孩子。在我的第一年结束时，师长拒绝结束我的试用期。他发现我们班的学生在做算术时，脸上都蒙着面具——他们是在美术课上做的，我不明白为什么他们不应该戴上面具。教室里有一条硬纸板做的通道，他应该爬过去(因为教室兼作冰屋)，地板上有一个假想的洞，他拒绝在里面走动。我把所有的美术纸都粘在一起，钉在后墙上，当一个孩子感到无聊时，他就会离开他正在做的事情，在燃烧的森林里再贴一些树叶。
My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher: 'You're not the right type,' he said, 'not the right type at all.' Now it looked as if I was going to be rejected officially. Fortunately the school was inspected, and Her Majesty's Inspector thought that my class were doing the most interesting work. I remember one incident that struck him as amazing: the children screaming out that there were only three chickens drawn on the blackboard, while I was insisting that there were five (two were still inside the hen-house).Then the children started scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard. I shouldn't think half of them had ever seen a chicken,but it delighted the Inspector. 'You realise that they're trying to throw me out,' I said, and he fixed it so that I wasn't bothered again.
我的校长曾劝阻我成为一名教师:“你不是合适的类型，”他说，“根本不是合适的类型。”现在看来，我似乎要被正式拒绝了。幸运的是，学校被检查了，女王陛下的督学认为我们班做的是最有趣的工作。我记得有一件事让他很吃惊:孩子们尖叫着说黑板上只画了三只鸡，而我却坚持说有五只(两只还在鸡舍里)。然后，孩子们开始疯狂地乱涂乱画，写一些关于鸡的故事，并大声说出他们想在黑板上拼写的任何单词。我想他们中间不会有一半人见过鸡，但这使巡官很高兴。“你知道他们想把我赶出去，”我说，他把它修好了，这样我就不会再被打扰了。
Stirling's 'non-interference' worked in every area where I applied it: piano teaching for example. I worked with Marc Wilkinson, the composer (he became director of music at the National Theatre), and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my typewriter had.He soon had a collection of tapes as surprising as the children's poems had been. I assembled a group of children by asking each teacher for the children he couldn't stand; and although everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be very talented, and they learned with amazing speed. After twenty minutes a boy hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, 'It's the Japanese soldiers from the film on Saturday!' Which it was. We invented many games-like one child making sounds for water and another putting the 'fish' in it. Sometimes we got them to feel objects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so that the others could guess. Other teachers were amazed by the enthusiasm and talent shown by these 'dull' children.
斯特灵的“不干涉”在我应用的每一个领域都很有效:比如钢琴教学。我和作曲家马克·威尔金森(Marc Wilkinson)一起工作(他后来成了国家剧院(National Theatre)的音乐总监)，他的录音机扮演着和我的打字机一样的角色。他很快就收集了一批磁带，其令人惊讶的程度不亚于儿童诗歌。我召集了一群孩子，问每个老师他无法忍受的孩子;虽然每个人都对这样的选择方法感到惊讶，但这个小组证明了他们是非常有天赋的，他们以惊人的速度学习。二十分钟后，一个男孩敲出了一首不和谐的进行曲，其他人喊道:“这是周六电影里的日本士兵!””“是的。我们发明了很多游戏，比如一个孩子在水里发出声音，另一个孩子把“鱼”放进去。有时我们让他们闭着眼睛去感觉物体，让他们去玩那种感觉，这样其他人就能猜出来。其他老师对这些“迟钝”的孩子表现出的热情和天赋感到惊讶。
The Royal Court Theatre 皇家法院剧院
In 1956 the Royal COurt Theatre was commissioning plays from established novelists (Nigel Dennis, Angus Wilson), and Lindsay Anderson suggested that they should stop playing safe and commission an unknown-me.I'd had very bad experiences in the theatre, but there was one play I'd liked: Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which seemed entirely lucid and pertinent to my own problems. I was trying to be a painter at the time, and my artist friends all agreed that Beckett must be a very young man, one of our contemporaries, since he understood our feelings so well. Because I didn't like the theatre-it seemed so much feebler than, say, the films of Kurosawa, or Keaton-I didn't at first accept the Royal Court's commission; but then I ran out of money, so I wrote a play strongly influenced by Beckett (who once wrote to me, saying that 'a stage is an area of maximum verbal presence, and maximum corporeal presence'-the word 'corporeal' really delighting me).
1956年，皇家宫廷剧院委托著名小说家(奈杰尔·丹尼斯、安格斯·威尔逊)和林赛·安德森(Lindsay Anderson)创作剧本，建议他们不要再故作谨慎，应该委托一个不知名的人来创作。我在剧院有过非常糟糕的经历，但有一部戏剧我很喜欢:贝克特的《等待戈多》，它似乎完全清晰明了，与我自己的问题有关。那时我正努力成为一名画家，我的艺术家朋友们都认为贝克特一定是个非常年轻的人，是我们同时代的人之一，因为他非常了解我们的感受。因为我不喜欢剧院——它似乎比诸如黑泽明或基顿的电影要弱得多——我起初不接受王室的委托;但后来我没钱了，所以我写了一部深受贝克特影响的戏剧(贝克特曾写信给我，说“舞台是一个最大的语言存在的领域，最大的物质存在”——“物质存在”这个词真的让我很高兴)。
My play was called Brixham Regatta, and I remember Devine thumbing through the notices and saying that it was sex that had been intolerable to the Victorians, and that 'whatever it is now, Keith is writing about it'. I was amazed that most critics were so hostile. I'd been illustrating a theme of Blake's: 'Alas! The time will come when a man's worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family ... 'But in 1958 such a view was unacceptable. Ten years later, when I directed the play at the Mermaid, it didn't seem at all shocking: its ideas had become commonplace.
我的剧本叫《布里克斯姆赛船会》，我记得迪瓦恩翻阅布告，说在维多利亚时代，性是无法忍受的，“不管是什么，基思都在写”。令我吃惊的是，大多数评论家都对我怀有敌意。我一直在为布莱克的一首曲子配图:“唉!总有一天，一个人最大的敌人将是他自己的家庭和家人……但在1958年，这样的观点是不可接受的。十年后，当我导演《美人鱼》时，它似乎一点也不令人震惊:它的思想已经变得司空见惯。
I've been often told how weird and silent I seemed to many people, but Devine was amused by my ideas (many of which came from Stirling). I'd argue that a director should never demonstrate anything to an actor, that a director should allow the actor to make his own discoveries, that the actor should think he'd done all the work himself.I objected to the idea that the director should work out the moves before the production started. I said that if an actor forgot a move that had been decided on, then the move was probably wrong.
我经常被告知在很多人看来我是多么的古怪和沉默，但是Devine被我的想法逗乐了(很多想法都来自于斯特灵)。我认为导演不应该向演员展示任何东西，导演应该让演员自己去发现，演员应该认为所有的工作都是他自己做的。我反对导演应该在演出开始前就安排好动作的想法。我说如果一个演员忘记了一个已经决定的动作，那么这个动作可能是错误的
Later I argued that moves weren't important, that with only a couple of actors on a stage, why did it matter where they moved anyway? I explained that Hamlet in Russian can be just as impressive, so were the words really of first importance? I said that the set was no more important than the apparatus in the circus. I wasn't saying much that was new, but I didn't know that, and certainly such thoughts weren't fashionable at the time. I remember Devine going round the theatre chuckling that 'Keith thinks King Lear should have a happy ending!'
后来我说，搬家并不重要，舞台上只有几个演员，他们搬到哪里又有什么关系呢?我解释说，《哈姆雷特》在俄语中也同样令人印象深刻，那么这几个字真的是最重要的吗?我说布景并不比马戏团里的器械更重要。我没有说太多的新东西，但我不知道，而且这种想法在当时肯定不流行。我记得迪瓦恩在剧院里笑着说:“基思认为李尔王应该有一个幸福的结局!
They were surprised that someone so inexperienced as myself should have become their best play-reader. Tony Richardson, then Devine's Associate Director, once thanked me because I was taking such a load off them. I was successful precisely because I didn't exercise my taste. I would first read plays as quickly as possible, and categorise them as pseudo-Pinter, fake-Osborne, phoney-Beckett, and so on. Any play that seemed to come from the author's own experience I'd then read attentively, and either leave it in Devine's office or, if I didn't like it, give it to someone else to read.
他们很惊讶，像我这样没有经验的人竟成了他们最好的剧本读者。托尼·理查森，当时迪瓦恩的副主任，有一次感谢我，因为我帮他们减轻了这么大的负担。我的成功正是因为我没有锻炼自己的品味。我首先会尽可能快地阅读剧本，然后把它们归类为伪品特(pseudo-Pinter)、假奥斯本(frank - osborne)、菲米-贝克特(phoney-Beckett)等等。任何剧本，只要是出自作者本人的经验，我都会认真阅读，要么把它留在迪瓦恩的办公室里，要么，如果我不喜欢，就把它交给别人去读
As ninety nine per cent of the plays submitted were just cribs from other people,the job was easy. I had expected that there'd be a very gentle gradation from awful to excellent, and that I'd be involved in a lot of heartsearching. Almost all were total failures-they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.
由于提交的剧本有99%都是抄袭别人的，所以工作很容易。我本以为会有一个非常温和的从糟糕到优秀的转变，而且我还会参与很多内心的探索。几乎所有这些都是彻头彻尾的失败——它们不可能被放在村政厅里招待作者的朋友们。这不是缺乏才能的问题，而是错误的教育。伪戏的作者认为写作应该以其他作品为基础，而不是以生活为基础。我的剧本受到了贝克特的影响，但至少内容是我的。
Sometimes I'd read a play I liked, but that no one else would think worth directing. Devine said that if I was really convinced they were good I should direct them myself on a Sunday night. I directed Edward Bond's first play in this way, Lut the very first play I directed was Kon Fraser's Eleven Plus (which I still have a fondness for,although it hasn't prospered much). I was given advice by Ann Jellicoe-already an accomplished director-and I was successful. It really seemed that even if I couldn't write any more-and writing had become extremely laborious and unpleasant for me-at least I could earn a living as a director.
有时我会读我喜欢的剧本，但没有人认为值得导演。迪瓦恩说，如果我真的相信他们是好人，我应该在星期天晚上亲自指挥他们。我以这种方式导演了爱德华·邦德的第一部戏剧，我导演的第一部戏剧是康·弗雷泽的《十一部加》(我仍然很喜欢它，尽管它没有太大的成功)。安·杰利科(Ann jellicoe)给了我建议——她已经是一位颇有成就的导演——我很成功。看来，即使我不能再写作了——写作对我来说已经变得极其费力和不愉快——至少我还能以导演的身份谋生。
Obviously, I felt I ought to study my craft,but the more I understood how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were. Then as now, when I'm inspired, everything is fine, but when I try to get things right it's a disaster. In a way I was successful-I ended up as an Associate Director of the theatre-but once again my talent had left me.
显然，我觉得我应该学习我的手艺，但我越了解事情应该怎么做，我的作品就越无聊。和现在一样，当我受到鼓舞时，一切都很好，但当我试图把事情做对时，那就是一场灾难。在某种程度上，我是成功的——我最终成为了剧院的副导演——但我的才华再一次离开了我。
When I considered the difference between myself, and other people,I thought of myself as a late developer. Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry.
当我考虑到自己和其他人之间的区别时，我认为自己是一个迟来的开发人员。大多数人在青春期就失去了天赋。我二十出头的时候就丢了。我开始认为孩子不是不成熟的成年人，而是萎缩的成年人。但当我把这番话告诉教育学家时，他们生气了。
Writers' Group 作家团体
George Devine had announced that the Royal Court was to be a 'writers' theatre', but the writers weren't having much say in the policies of the theatre. George thought a discussion group would correct this, and he chaired three meetings, which were so tedious that he handed the job over to William Gaskill, one of his young directors. Bill had directed my play Brixham Regatta, and he asked me how I would run the group. I said that if it continued as a talking-shop,then everyone would abandon it, and that we should agree to discuss nothing that could be acted out. Bill agreed, and the group immediately began to function as an improvisation group. We learned that things invented on the spur of the moment could be as good or better than the texts we laboured over.
乔治·迪瓦恩曾宣布皇家宫廷将成为一个“作家剧院”，但作家们对剧院的政策没有多少发言权。乔治认为一个讨论小组可以纠正这一点，于是他主持了三次会议，会议非常乏味，于是他把工作交给了他的一位年轻董事威廉·加斯基尔(William Gaskill)。比尔曾指导过我的戏剧《布里克斯姆赛船会》，他问我如何管理这个团体。我说，如果它继续作为一个清谈俱乐部，那么每个人都会抛弃它，我们应该同意不讨论任何可以付诸行动的事情。比尔同意了，这个小组立即开始作为一个即兴表演小组发挥作用。我们认识到，一时兴起而发明出来的东西，可能和我们苦读的文本一样好，甚至更好。
We developed very practical attitudes to the theatre. As Edward Bond said, 'The writers' group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters.' I've since found that my no-discussion idea wasn't original. Carl Weber, writing about Brecht, says: ' ... the actors would suggest a way of doing something,and if they started to explain, Brecht would say he wanted no discussion in rehearsal-it would have to be tried ... .' (A pity all Brechtians don't have the master's attitude.)My bias against discussion is something I've learned to see as very English.
我们对戏剧形成了非常实际的态度。正如爱德华·邦德(Edward Bond)所说，“编剧”团队教会了我，戏剧是关系，而不是角色。从那以后，我发现我的“不讨论”想法并不是原创的。卡尔·韦伯在写到布莱希特时说:“……演员们会建议一种做某事的方法，如果他们开始解释，布莱希特会说他在排练时不想讨论——必须试一试……”(遗憾的是，所有的布莱希特人都没有大师的态度。)我认为我对讨论的偏见是非常英国式的。
I've known political theatre groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a discussion. My feeling is that the best argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter,rather than to the excellence of the solution advocated. Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like Edison's, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically.
我知道欧洲的政治戏剧团体很乐意取消排练，但从不讨论。我的感觉是，最好的论证可能是对演讲者技巧的证明，而不是对所提倡的解决方案的卓越性的证明。此外，大量的讨论时间明显地占用了与要解决的问题无关的状态事务。我的态度就像爱迪生一样，他找到了一种橡胶溶剂，在他能想到的每一种溶液中加入一些橡胶，打败了所有那些从理论上研究这个问题的科学家.
The Royal Court Theatre Studio 皇家法院剧院工作室
Devine had been a student of Michel Saint-Denis,who was a nephew of the great director Jacques Copeau. Copeau had been an advocate of studio work, and George also wanted a studio. He started it with hardly any budget, and as I was on the staff, and full of theories, he asked me if I would teach there. Actually William Gaskill was the director, and they agreed that I should teach there. I'd been advocating setting a studio up so I could hardly refuse; but I was embarrassed, and worried. I didn't know anything about training actors, and I was sure that the professionals-many from the Royal Shakespeare, and some who shortly afterwards went into the National Theatre Company-would know far more than I did.
迪瓦恩曾是米歇尔·圣德尼的学生，米歇尔·圣德尼是伟大的导演雅克·科普奥的侄子。科普奥一直是画室工作的倡导者，乔治也想要一间画室。刚开始的时候，他几乎没有预算，因为我是教员，而且充满了理论，他问我是否愿意在那里教书。实际上William Gaskill是导演，他们同意我在那里教书。我一直主张建立一个工作室，所以我很难拒绝;但我很尴尬，也很担心。我对训练演员一无所知，我确信专业演员——许多来自皇家莎士比亚剧团，还有一些不久后进入国家剧团的——知道的比我多得多。
I decided to give classes in 'Narrative Skills' (see page 109), hoping I'd be one jump ahead in this area. Because of my dislike of discussion I insisted that everything should be acted out-as at the Writers' Group-and the work became very funny. It was also very different, because I was consciously reacting against Stanislavsky. I thought, wrongly, that Stanislavsky's methods implied a naturalistic theatre-which it doesn't, as you can see from the qualifications he introduces as to what sorts of objectives are permissible, and so on. I thought his insistence on the 'given circumstances' was seriously limiting, and I didn't like the 'who, what, where' approach which my actors urged on me, and which I suppose was American in origin (it's described, in Viola Spolin's Improvisation/or the Theatre, Northwestern University Press,1963; fortunately I didn't know about this book until 1966, when a member of an audience lent it to me).
我决定开设“叙述技巧”课程(见第109页)，希望自己能在这方面领先一步。因为我不喜欢讨论，所以我坚持所有的事情都应该被表演出来——就像在编剧小组里一样——结果这部作品变得非常有趣。这也很不一样，因为我是在有意识地反抗斯坦尼斯拉夫斯基。我曾错误地认为斯坦尼斯拉夫斯基的方法暗含着一种自然主义的戏剧效果，但事实并非如此，你可以从他所介绍的关于什么类型的目标是可允许的等等的限制条件中看出。我认为他对“特定环境”的坚持严重地限制了我，我不喜欢我的演员们强加给我的“谁、什么、在哪里”的方法，我认为这种方法起源于美国(这在维奥拉·斯波林的《即兴创作/或戏剧》中有描述，西北大学出版社，1963年;幸运的是，我直到1966年才知道这本书，当时一位读者把它借给了我)。
Lacking solutions, I had to find my own. What I did was to concentrate on relationships between strangers, and on ways of combining the imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than subtractive. I developed status transactions, and word-at-a-time games, and almost all of the work described in this book. I hope this still seems fresh to some people,but actually it dates back to the early sixties and late fifties.My classes were hysterically funny, but I remembered Stirling's contempt for artists who form 'self-admiration groups' and wondered if we were deluding ourselves. Could the work really be so funny?Wasn't it just that we all knew each other? Even considering the fact that I had some very talented and experienced actors, weren't we just entertaining each other? Was it right that every class should be like a party?
由于缺乏解决方案，我不得不自己去寻找。我所做的是专注于陌生人之间的关系，专注于将两个人的想象力结合起来的方法，这将是加法，而不是减法。我开发了状态事务、word-at-a-time游戏，以及这本书中描述的几乎所有工作。我希望这对一些人来说仍然是新鲜的，但实际上它可以追溯到60年代初和50年代末。我的课非常有趣，但我记得斯特灵对那些组成“自我欣赏小组”的艺术家的蔑视，我怀疑我们是不是在自欺欺人。工作真的会这么有趣吗?我们不是彼此都认识吗?即使考虑到我有一些非常有才华和经验的演员，我们不是只是互相娱乐吗?每一节课都应该像一个聚会，对吗?
I decided we'd have to perform in front of real audiences, and see if we 'lOere funny. I took about sixteen actors along to my contemporary theatre class at Morley College, and said we'd like to demonstrate some of the exercises we were developing. 1'd thought that 1'd be the nervous one, but the actors huddled in the corner and looked terrified.Once I started giving the exercises, they relaxed; and to our amazement we found that when the work was good, the audience laughed far more than we would have done! It wasn't so easy to do work of a high standard in public, but we were delighted at the enthusiasm of the spectators.
我决定我们必须在真正的观众面前表演，看看我们是否有趣。我带了大约十六位演员去莫雷学院上当代戏剧课，我说我们想演示一下我们正在开发的一些练习。我本以为是我紧张，但演员们缩在角落里，看起来很害怕。一旦我开始练习，他们就放松了;令我们惊讶的是，我们发现，当作品很好的时候，观众笑得比我们多得多!在公共场所做高水平的工作并不容易，但我们为观众的热情感到高兴。
I wrote to six London colleges and offered them free demonstration classes, and afterwards we received many invitations to perform elsewhere. I cut the number of performers down to four or five and, with strong support from the Ministry of Education, we started touring around schools and colleges. There, we often found ourselves on a stage, and we automatically drifted into giving shows rather than demonstrations. We called ourselves 'The Theatre Machine', and the British Council sent us around Europe. Soon we were a very influential group, and the only pure improvisation group I knew, in that we prepared nothing, and everything was like a jazzed-up drama class.It's weird to wake up knowing you'll be onstage in twelve hours,and that there's absolutely nothing you can do to ensure success.
我给伦敦的六所大学写了信，给他们提供免费的表演课，后来我们收到了很多去其他地方表演的邀请。我把表演者的人数减少到四五人，在教育部的大力支持下，我们开始在中小学和大学巡回演出。在那里，我们经常发现自己在舞台上，我们不由自主地进入了表演而不是展示。我们称自己为“戏剧机器”，英国文化协会派我们周游欧洲。很快，我们就成了一个非常有影响力的团体，而且是我所知道的唯一一个纯粹的即兴表演团体，因为我们什么都没准备，一切都像是一节热闹的戏剧课。一觉醒来，你知道自己还有12个小时就要登台了，却发现自己根本无法保证成功，这种感觉很奇怪。
All day you can feel some part of your mind gathering power, and with luck there'll be no interruption to the flow, actors and audience will completely understand each other, and the high feeling lasts for days.At other times you feel a coldness in everyone's eyes, and deserts of time seem to lie ahead of you. The actors don't seem to be able to see or hear properly any more-they feel so wretched that scene after scene is about vomiting. Even if the audience are pleased by the novelty, you feel you're swindling them. After a while a pattern is established in which each performance gets better and better until the audience is like a great beast rolling over to let you tickle it. Then hubris gets you, you lose your humility, you expect to be loved, and you turn into Sisyphus. All comedians know these feelings.
一整天，你都能感觉到自己的一部分意识在积聚力量，如果运气好的话，这种力量不会被打断，演员和观众会完全理解彼此，这种兴奋感会持续好几天。有时，你会觉得每个人眼中都有一种冷漠，而时间的沙漠似乎就在你面前。演员们似乎再也看不清、听不清了，他们感到非常难受，一场接一场的戏都是关于呕吐的。即使观众对这种新奇的东西很满意，你也会觉得你在欺骗他们。过了一段时间，一种模式就建立起来了，在这种模式下，每一场表演都变得越来越好，直到观众像一头巨大的野兽一样翻滚着让你去逗它。然后傲慢让你失去谦逊，你希望被爱，你就变成了西西弗斯。所有的喜剧演员都知道这种感觉。
As I came to understand the techniques that release creativity in the improviser, so I began to apply them to my own work. What really got me started again was an advert for a play of mine in the paper, a play called The Martian. I had never written such a play, so I phoned up Bryan King, who directed the theatre. 'We've been trying to find you,' he said. 'We need a play for next week, does the title The Martian suit you?' I wrote the play, and it was well received. Since then I've deliberately put myself in this position. I get myself engaged by a company and write the plays as I'm rehearsing the actors. For example, in eight weeks I did two street theatre plays lasting twenty minutes, plus a three-hour improvised play called Der Fisch, plus a children's play lasting an hour-this was for Salvatore Poddine's Tubingen theatre. I don't see that the plays created in this way are inferior to those I struggle over, sometimes for years.
当我开始理解即兴演奏中释放创造力的技巧时，我开始把它们应用到我自己的作品中。真正让我重新开始的是报纸上我的一个剧本的广告，一个叫《火星救援》的剧本。我从来没有写过这样的剧本，所以我打电话给导演布莱恩·金。“我们一直在找你，”他说。“我们下周需要一个剧本，《火星救援》这个名字适合你吗?””“我写的剧本很受欢迎。从那时起，我就故意把自己放在这个位置上。我和一家公司签约，在排练演员的时候写剧本。例如，我在八周内完成了两出街头戏剧，持续20分钟，外加一出三小时的即兴戏剧《费斯奇》，再加上一出持续一小时的儿童戏剧——这是为萨尔瓦托·波丁的图宾根剧院创作的。我并不认为以这种方式创作的戏剧不如我努力创作的那些，有时甚至要好几年。
I didn't learn how to direct again until I left the Royal Court Theatre and was invited to Victoria (on Vancouver Island). I directed the Wakefield Mystery Cycle there, and I was so far away from anyone whose criticism I cared about that I felt free to do exactly what I felt like. Suddenly I was spontaneous again; and since then, I've always directed plays as if I was totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions possible.
直到我离开皇家宫廷剧院并被邀请到维多利亚(温哥华岛)，我才再次学习如何导演。我在那里导演了韦克菲尔德的神秘怪圈，我远离那些批评我的人，所以我可以随心所欲地做自己想做的事。我突然又自然了;从那以后，我就一直在导演戏剧，好像我对导演一窍不通似的;我只是在常识的基础上处理每个问题，并试图找到最明显的解决方案。
Nowadays everything is very easy to me (except writing didactic things like this book). If we need a cartoon for the programme, I'll draw one. If we need a play I'll write it. I cut knots instead of laboriously trying to untie them-that's how people see me; but they have no idea of the turgid state I used to be in, or the morass from which I'm still freeing myself.
如今，一切对我来说都很容易(除了写一些说教的东西，比如这本书)。如果我们需要为节目画一幅漫画，我就画一幅。如果我们需要剧本，我就写。我剪开绳结，而不是费力地试图解开它们——这就是人们对我的看法;但他们不知道我曾经处于的浮华状态，也不知道我现在仍在摆脱的困境。
Getting the Right Relationship 获得正确的关系
If you want to apply the methods I'm describing in this book, you may have to teach the way that I teach. When I give workshops, I see people frantically scribbling down the exercises, but not noticing what it is I actually do as a teacher. My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method.
如果你想应用我在这本书中所描述的方法，你可能必须以我的方式教学。当我开讲习班的时候，我看到人们疯狂地写下练习，却没有注意到我作为一名教师到底在做什么。我的感觉是，一个好老师可以用任何方法得到结果，而一个坏老师可以破坏任何方法。
There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members,and that it's more powerful than the individuals in it. A great group can propel its members forward so that they achieve amazing things.Many teachers don't seem to think that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all. If they're working with a destructive, bored group, they just blame the students for being 'dull', or uninterested.It's essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren't in a good state.
毫无疑问，一个团体可以成就或毁灭它的成员，它比其中的个人更有力量。一个伟大的团队可以推动其成员前进，从而实现惊人的事情。许多老师似乎根本不认为操纵一个群体是他们的责任。如果他们是在一个破坏性的、无聊的小组里工作，他们只会责备学生“无趣”或不感兴趣。如果小组状态不好，老师有必要责备自己。
Normal schooling is intensely competitive, and the students are supposed to try and outdo each other. If I explain to a group that they're to work for the other members, that each individual is to be interested in the progress of the other members, they're amazed, yet obviously if a group supports its own members strongly, it'll be a better group to work in.
正常的学校教育竞争激烈，学生们应该努力并超越彼此。如果我向一群人解释，他们将为其他成员工作，每个人都将对其他成员的进步感兴趣，他们会感到惊讶，但显然，如果一个团队强烈支持自己的成员，那么这个团队将是一个更好的团队。
The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is (probably) to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I'll explain that if the students fail they're to blame me. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it's obvious that they should blame me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they'll succeed.
当我遇到一群新同学时，我做的第一件事就是(可能)坐在地板上。我装出一副低人一等的样子，我会解释说如果学生不及格，他们会怪我的。然后他们笑了，放松了，我解释说，很明显他们应该责怪我，因为我应该是专家;如果我给错了材料，他们就会失败;如果我给他们正确的材料，他们就会成功。
I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don't want to be higher than me. I have already changed the group profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. They'll want to test me, of course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them to be patient with me, and explain that I'm not perfect.
我在身体上的地位很低，但我的实际地位在上升，因为只有非常自信和有经验的人才会把失败的责任推到自己身上。在这一点上，他们几乎肯定会开始从椅子上滑下来，因为他们不想比我高。我已经深刻地改变了这个群体，因为失败突然不再那么可怕了。当然，他们想测试我;但当他们失败时，我真的会向他们道歉，请他们对我耐心一点，并解释我并不完美。
My methods are very effective, and other things being equal, most students will succeed, but they won't be trying to win any more. The normal teacher-student relationship is dissolved.When I was teaching young children, I trained myself to share my eye contacts out among the group. I find this crucial in establishing a fair' relationship with them. I've seen many teachers who concentrate their eye contacts on only a few students, and this does affect the feeling in a group. Certain students are disciples, but others feel separated, or experience themselves as less interesting, or as 'failures'.
我的方法非常有效，在其他条件相同的情况下，大多数学生都会成功，但他们不会再试图去赢了。正常的师生关系被打破了。当我教小孩子的时候，我训练自己在人群中分享我的目光接触。我发现这对与他们建立公平的关系至关重要。我见过很多老师，他们的目光只集中在几个学生身上，这确实会影响群体的感觉。有些学生是徒弟，但也有一些学生感到孤立，或者觉得自己不那么有趣，或者觉得自己是“失败者”
I've also trained myself to make positive comments, and to be as direct as possible. I say 'Good' instead of 'That's enough'. I've actually heard teachers say 'Well, let's see who fails at this one', when introducing an exercise. Some teachers get reassurance when their students fail. We must have all encountered the teacher who gives a selfsatisfied smile when a student makes a mistake. Such an attitude is not conducive to a good, warm feeling in the group.
我也训练自己做出积极的评论，并且尽可能的直接。我说“好”而不是“够了”。我曾经听老师在介绍一个练习的时候说:“好吧，让我们看看谁这次不及格。”有些老师在学生失败时得到安慰。我们一定都遇到过这样的老师，当学生犯错时，他会露出得意的微笑。这种态度不利于在团队中产生一种良好、温暖的感觉。
When (in 1964) I read of Wolpe's work in curing phobias, I saw a clear relationship with the ideas I'd got from Stirling, and with the way I was developing them. Wolpe relaxed his phobic patients and then presented them with a very dilute form of the thing that scared them. Someone terrified of birds might be asked to imagine a bird,but one in Australia. At the same time that the image was presented"the patient was relaxed, and the relaxation was maintained (if it wasn't maintained, if the patient started to tremble, or sweat or whatever,then something even less alarming would be presented).
当(1964年)我读到沃尔普在治疗恐惧症方面的作品时，我清楚地看到了我从斯特林得到的想法和我发展它们的方式之间的关系。沃尔普让他的恐惧症患者放松下来，然后给他们展示一种稀释后的、让他们害怕的东西。害怕鸟的人可能会被要求想象一只鸟，但这只鸟是在澳大利亚。与此同时，图像被呈现出来，“病人放松，放松被保持(如果它没有被保持，如果病人开始颤抖，或出汗或其他什么，然后一些更不令人担忧的东西会被呈现出来)。”
Relaxation is incompatible with anxiety; and by maintaining the relaxed state, and presenting images that gradually neared the centre of the phobia, the state of alarm was soon dissipated-in most calles. Wolpe taught his patients to relax, but soon other psychologists were using pentathol to assist the relaxation. However, there has to be an intention to relax (muscle-relaxant drugs can be used as a torture !).
放松与焦虑是不相容的;通过保持放松的状态，并呈现逐渐接近恐惧中心的图像，警报状态很快就消失了——在大多数calles中。沃尔普教他的病人放松，但很快其他心理学家开始使用戊醇来帮助他们放松。然而，必须有放松的意图(肌肉松弛药可以被用作一种折磨!
If we were all terrified of open spaces, then we would hardly recognise this as a phobia to be cured; but it could be cured. My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage,and that this responds very well to 'progressive desensitisation' of the type that Wolpe advocates. Many teachers seem to me to be trying to get their students to conceal fear, which always leaves some traces a heaviness, an extra tension, a lack of spontaneity. I try to dissipate the fear by a method analogous to Wolpe's, but which I really got from Anthony Stirling.
如果我们都害怕开阔的空间，那么我们很难将其视为一种需要治愈的恐惧症;但它是可以治愈的。我的观点是，我们有一种普遍的被人盯着看的恐惧症，这对沃尔普所倡导的那种“渐进式脱敏”反应很好。在我看来，许多老师似乎试图让他们的学生隐藏恐惧，这总会留下一些痕迹，一种沉重、额外的紧张、缺乏自发性。我试着用一种类似于沃尔普的方法来驱散恐惧，但实际上我是从安东尼·斯特灵那里学来的。
The one finding of Wolpe which I immediately incorporated into my work was the discovery that if the healing process is interrupted by a recurrence of the total fear-maybe a patient being treated for a phobia of birds suddenly finds himself surrounded by fluttering pigeons-then the treatment has to be started again at the bottom of the hierarchy. I therefore constantly return to the very first stages of the work to try to pull in those students who remain in a terrified state, and who therefore make hardly any progress. Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher's relationship with them.
沃尔普的一个发现我立刻融入我的工作是发现如果愈合过程打断了总恐惧，也许病人的复发治疗恐惧症的鸟突然发现自己周围飞舞的鸽子,然后治疗必须再次开始底部的层次结构。因此，我不断地回到工作的最初阶段，试图吸引那些仍然处于恐惧状态的学生，因此他们几乎没有取得任何进展。我们可以把他们看成是恐惧症患者，而不是没有才能的人，这完全改变了老师和他们之间的关系。
Students will arrive with many techniques for avoiding the pain of failure. John Holt's How Children Fail (Penguin, 1969; Pitman, 1970) gives examples of children learning to get round problems, rather than learning to find solutions to problems. If you screw your face up and bite on your pencil to show you're 'trying', the teacher may write out the answer for you. (In my school, if you sat relaxed and thought, you were likely to get swiped on the back of the head.) I explain to the students the devices they're using to avoid tackling the problems-however easy the problems are-and the release of tension is often amazing. University students may roll about in hysterical laughter. I take it that the relief comes from understanding that other people use the same manoeuvres as they do.
学生们将带着许多避免失败之痛的技巧来到这里。约翰·霍尔特(John Holt)的《孩子是如何失败的》(Penguin, 1969;Pitman, 1970)给出了孩子们学习解决问题的例子，而不是学习寻找问题的解决方案。如果你皱起脸，咬着铅笔表示你在“尝试”，老师可能会帮你写出答案。(在我的学校里，如果你放松地坐着思考，你的后脑勺可能会被重击。)我向学生们解释他们用来避免解决问题的设备——不管问题有多简单——紧张的释放往往是惊人的。大学生可能会在歇斯底里的笑声中打滚。我认为，这种解脱来自于理解其他人也在使用和他们一样的策略。
For example, many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in a rather feeble way. It's as if they're ill, and lacking in vitality. They've learned to play for sympathy. However easy the problem,they'll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to bring greater rewards if they 'win'. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them. No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such an attitude, but when they were children it probably worked. As adults they're still doing it. Once they've laughed at them·· selves and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students who look 'ill' suddenly look 'healthy'. The attitude of the group may instantly change.
例如，许多学生将以一种相当无力的方式开始一场即兴表演或一个场景。就好像他们生病了，缺乏活力。他们学会了同情。不管这个问题有多简单，他们都会用同样的老把戏来掩饰自己的不足。这种策略是为了让旁观者在他们“失败”的时候同情他们，而如果他们“赢了”，则会带来更大的回报。事实上，这种自言自语的态度几乎注定了失败，并使每个人都厌倦了他们。没有人会同情持有这种态度的成年人，但当他们还是孩子的时候，这种态度可能奏效了。作为成年人，他们仍然在这样做。一旦他们嘲笑了自己，明白了这种态度是多么没有成效，那些看起来“有病”的学生就会突然看起来“健康”。团队的态度可能会立即改变。
Another common ploy is to anticipate the problem, and to try and prepare solutions in advance. (Almost all students do this-probably it started when they were learning to read. You anticipate which paragraph will be yours, and start trying to decipher it. This has two great disadvantages: it stops you learning from the attempts of your classmates; and very likely you'll have calculated wrongly, and will be asked to read one of the adjacent paragraphs throwing you into total panic.)
另一个常见的策略是预测问题，并尝试提前准备解决方案。(几乎所有的学生都这样做——可能是从他们学习阅读的时候开始的。你预期哪一段将是你的，并开始尝试破译它。这有两个很大的缺点:它阻止你从你的同学的尝试中学习;很有可能你算错了，而且会被要求阅读相邻的段落，让你陷入完全的恐慌。)
Most students haven't realised-till I show them-how inefficient such techniques are. The idea that a teacher should be interested in such things is, unfortunately, novel to them. I also explain strategies like sitting on the end of the row, and how it isolates you from the group, and body positions that prevent absorption (like the 'lit-crit' postures which keep the user 'detached' and 'objective').
大多数学生都没有意识到——直到我向他们展示——这些技术是多么的低效。不幸的是，一个老师应该对这些事情感兴趣，这种想法对他们来说很新奇。我还解释了一些策略，比如坐在后排的最后一排，以及它如何把你和整个群体隔离开来，还有一些防止吸收的身体姿势(比如让使用者保持“超然”和“客观”的“小不点”姿势)。
In exchange for accepting the blame for failure, I ask the students to set themselves up in such a way that they'll learn as quickly as possible. I'm teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn't try to control the future, or to 'win'; and that they're to have an empty head and just watch. When it's their turn to take part they're to come out and just do what they're asked to, and see what happens.It's this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous.If I'm playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain.
作为接受失败的责任的交换，我要求学生们把自己的学习安排得尽可能快。我教的是自发性，因此我告诉他们，不要试图控制未来，或‘赢’;他们只能空着脑袋看着。轮到他们参加时，他们就出来，按要求去做，看看会发生什么。正是这个不去尝试和控制未来的决定让学生们变得自然。如果我和我三岁的儿子玩的时候，我打了他，他会看着我，寻找将这种感觉转化为温暖或痛苦的信号。
A very gentle smack that he perceives as 'serious' will have him howling in agony. A hard 'play' slap may make him laugh. When I want to work and he wants me to continue playing he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would,their work would become a constant pleasure.
一个他认为是“严肃”的非常温和的耳光会让他痛苦地嚎叫。狠狠的一巴掌可能会让他发笑。当我想工作时，他想让我继续比赛，他会发出强烈的‘我在比赛’信号，试图把我拉回他的比赛中。所有的人都是这样相互联系的，但大多数老师都不敢向学生发出“我在玩”的信号。如果他们愿意，他们的工作将成为一种持续的乐趣。
NOTE
I. If you have trouble understanding this section, it may be because you're a conceptualiser, rather than a visualiser. William Grey Walter, in The Living Brain (Penguin, 1963) calculated that one in six of us are conceptualisers (actually in my view there is a far smaller proportion of conceptualisers among drama students).I have a simple way of telling if people are visualisers. I ask them to describe the furniture in a room they're familiar with. Visualisers move their eyes as if 'seeing' each object as they name it. Conceptualisers look in one direction as if reading off a list. Galton investigated mental imagery at the beginning of the century, and found that the more educated the person, the more likely he was to say that mental imagery was unimportant, or even that it didn't exist.
如果你理解这部分有困难，可能是因为你是一个概念化的人，而不是一个形象化的人。威廉·格雷·沃尔特(William Grey Walter)在《活着的大脑》(The Living Brain，企鹅出版社，1963年出版)一书中指出，我们中有六分之一的人是概念化者(实际上，在我看来，戏剧专业学生中概念化者的比例要小得多)。我有一个简单的方法来判断一个人是不是视觉化者。我让他们描述一下他们熟悉的房间里的家具。观影者移动他们的眼睛，就好像“看到”了他们所称的每一个物体。概念化者朝一个方向看，就好像在阅读一个列表。高尔顿在本世纪初研究了心理意象，发现一个人受教育程度越高，他就越有可能说心理意象不重要，甚至根本不存在。
An exercise: fix your eyes on some object, and attend to something at the periphery of your vision. You can see what you're attending to, but actually your mind is assembling the object from relatively little information. Now look directly, and observe the difference. This is one way of tricking the mind out of its habitual dulling of the world.
一个练习:把你的眼睛盯在某个物体上，并注意你视线外围的某个东西。你可以看到你在关注什么，但实际上你的大脑是在从相对较少的信息中组合物体。现在直接观察，观察它们的区别。这是一种使头脑摆脱对世界的习惯性迟钝的方法。
