Bards and Warlocks
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
— Shakespeare, As You Like It
We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.
— RuPaul
I’ve spent a lot of time in school. An undergraduate in environmental engineering and a master’s degree in industrial engineering has allowed me the opportunity to study countless hours of mathematics and physics, but also chemistry, economics, and the ethics of technology. I’ve done thousands of hours worth of problem-solving and projects, both individually and as a group. In my professional practice, the learning has continued: I’ve been privileged to participate in the design of equipment going into multi-million-dollar process chains — not to mention the continuing education credits required to maintain my engineering license. With all of the credibility that such technical education and experience lends, I believe that I never would have attained a managerial position by this stage of my career without an underrated tool in my kit: my theatre experience.
I went to a high school with an excellent performing arts program, and for years I had a required drama class. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the skills I learned there (and the summer I spent in my late teens co-leading a theatre program at a summer camp) would affect the trajectory of my life in an important way.
There is a dearth of humanities education in STEM. Generally the benefits of the humanities focuses on the content of the works studied: Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Williams all have a great deal of wisdom to offer on the human condition (at least from a European or American point of view). That said, I think the consideration of the values of the humanities to STEM based solely on the content of the literature is incomplete; the packaging also matters, and even a basic performing arts education equips the student with an arsenal of potent tools to use in any professional career.
Now, certainly, it is possible to be an excellent presenter without having any experience in the theatre. I’m sure some of us are lucky enough to have had an impactful teacher who managed to turn boring or mundane content into a fascinating course despite never having set foot on stage. Exposure to some theatre is not a necessary condition to be able to capture the attention of a room and add some dynamism to a powerpoint presentation — but I would argue that it’s sufficient: I’m sure far more of us have had an otherwise engaging presentation rendered an anaesthetizing drone by a presenter using a flat voice, limited body movement, and speaking directly to the projector screen. How many days’ worth of slog could have been rendered bearable — even entertaining — by just a few hours spent on a real stage?
A basic theatre class teaches more than just how to remember lines. It teaches the mechanics of delivery: how to project one’s voice to the back of the room without shouting, how to change intonation of a written line in a way that changes its meaning, how to use the body’s movement as a means of conveying information, and how to look like you’re turning your back to the audience without actually doing so. Theatre teaches persuasion, but more profoundly, it teaches charisma.
Persuasion has a bit of a bad reputation, as people often think that it’s about taking advantage of people. While it is true that charlatans and con artists use the tools of persuasion to the detriment of others, knowing how to recognize persuasive tactics allows us to protect ourselves from harm— and knowing how to use the tools of persuasion for good can help us protect others from dangerous situations or bad decisions.
For its part, charisma is more and more looked upon with suspicion. Pretty privilege is a welcome term in our modern lexicon, and much has been made of the ‘reality distortion field’ around business leaders like Steve Jobs. Glamour may be a term to refer to a celebrity’s elegance, but historically it has been referred to as a shapeshifting power, or a vampire’s ability to influence or charm. In any case, charisma does seem to affect us in a powerful way, and while we often attribute charisma to personal appearance, I’d wager that behaviour has an equal role to play. As the old rule goes: anyone on stage or behind a bar is 50% better looking.
But what’s with that 50% number? How does one quantify charisma anyway? Most tabletop gaming geeks will tell you that Dungeons and Dragons has made a valiant attempt. In D&D, charisma (CHA) is the measure of your ability to persuade, distract, lead, or otherwise project force of will onto others. Notably, two major character classes are built around taking advantage of this mechanic: Bards and Warlocks. In common parlance, bards are generally considered to be musicians of some kind — but they don’t have to be. A bard could be a dancer, or a circus performer — or playwright, for that matter. The success of the bard’s actions are generally determined by the CHA score. Warlocks, on the other hand, draw arcane power from a dark patron — say, a demon of some kind. There’s generally some kind of Faustian bargain at hand, and the character’s spellcasting ability is determined based on their CHA.
Now the Bard maps onto real-world artists fairly easy, but who is the equivalent of the Warlock? If one relaxes their constraint that the patron of dark power be metaphysical, then the archetype snaps into focus. Suddenly, the ruthless businessmen who has gained power by mortgaging their morality to the market and now uses the trappings of their title to excercise their will can fit the mold. Perhaps our minds go to politicans leveraging enormous campaign budgets to craft an unassailable public image in order to gain power. Their charisma is often enhanced by studying an ancient tome. In this way, the power of charisma can be seen to flow from surprising sources.
Powerful though corporate warlocks may be, there are comparatively few of them in the world. On the other hand, the performing arts are far more accessible than the C-suite, and can teach considerable defense against the dark arts.
Aristotle teaches us that persuasion was based on three elements:
- Ethos, an appeal to authority;
- Pathos, an appeal to emotions; and
- Logos, an appeal to logic and reasoning.
STEM education — indeed, most of academia — teaches us to restrict our mode of persuasion to logos only. When the message is important, however, it is important to use as many tools as possible to make the case. Some time in a theatre can provide tools to convey what numbers and graphs cannot. We need as many spells as possible in our book, to protect ourselves from being misled and to convey truth. So next time, instead of just reading the powerpoint slides, use your CHA to turn your presentation into an incantation.
“Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.”
— Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds
Epilogue: For those wishing a little practical theatre exercise: take a sentence and put the emphasis on different words to see how it changes. I suggest “I never said you did that”. Say the words out loud. Then, pick one of the words in the sentence and change the way you say it. Listen carefully to your own voice, and pay careful attention to how it feels. Once you’ve exhausted a few basic emotions, try for more complex ones. Play with the format. Cast your own spell.
