TACT

(Ed. note: cross-posted at a poor player)

Dunkirk NY – I have come to believe that data should play an important part in any discussion of the state of theatre and theatre education today. So it comes as a welcome treat that Broadway producer Ken Davenport has posted some really interesting statistics on the state of musical theatre on Broadway, as well on plays. His blog posts detail the decline in how much theatre Broadway actually produces, and by inference how many fewer jobs there actually are. The numbers are here, here, and here. The statistical reality (no surprise here) is that there is far less of anything being produced today. Size of musical casts went from 69% of musicals with casts over 30 in the 1950s to 27% today. In the 1940s, the number of new plays on Broadway averaged 49.4. In the 2000s, it’s now 11.7 (10.9 in the 1990s). New musicals? In the 1940s the number of new musicals each season was 14.9. In the 2000s, 9.3, an uptick from the 1990s (7.5). Broadly speaking (pun intended), Broadway is about half the size it was in the 1940s.

I came upon these statistics almost at the same time I had a typical visit from a young high school senior-to-be who was out shopping for colleges and musical theatre programs. I took her and her parents on my usual tour and then we spent time chatting in my office and they asked the usual questions. Of course, the topic of future employment came up, as it always does, and I always try to be honest with parents and students on this issue – future employment in the theatre is a slim proposition if you think of trying to make your living full-time in musical theatre. But I went a little beyond that this day, in that I began to mention that, when you really stop to think about it, there is not much work in musical theatre beyond NYC or tours. Regional theatres do not regularly do musicals because of the costs involved, and outside of Florida and a few other isolated regions like Boston or perhaps Chicago there is not much musical theatre being done in this country, especially at levels where one can reasonably make a living doing it. So why spend four years of your young life, as well as the dollars involved, to study musical theatre exclusively as a specialty, when the market is so bad and has been in decline for years?

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In the course of doing research to find small undergraduate colleges in small or rural communities that might be a good fit for the yet-to-be-developed CRADLE curriculum in arts leadership,  I came across an absolutely fascinating college in Ashland, WI: Northland College. Established in 1906 and with a current enrollment of about 600 students, Northland adopted in 1971 a mission to become “the nation’s leading environmental liberal arts college,” one that is “visionary by nature.” It asks potential students:

Are you independent-minded? Do you view the world differently than your class mates and often find yourself on the road less traveled? Do you stand up for what you believe in? Are you passionate about life and curious about everything? If so, we may be the place for you.

What could be more perfect for a CRADLE leader?

While there are many colleges that claim to focus on the environment, Northland College really seems to live that commitment, and you can see it in their curriculum. Their general education program, for instance, implemented in 2008 and known as the Integrated Core Curriculum, has three tracks, one of which is completed by every student within their first two years: Natural Connections, Growing Connections, and Superior Connections. “Each curriculum includes nine courses, eight of which are taught in integrated block formats and one of which focuses specifically on experiences beyond the classroom.” Natural Connections focuses on courses “organized around themes or questions, such as “Natural Hazards and Environmental Extremes,” “What is Success?” “Earth Keeping: Exploring our Relationships with Nature,” or “What Does Sex have to Do with It?” Growing Connections “focuses on the history, theories, and practices of sustainable agriculture.” And Superior Connections “focus[es] on the Lake Superior watershed. Students who enroll in Superior Connections develop expertise in the natural and human histories of the watershed, and then use these expertise to study and engage a variety of complexly interconnected environmental and cultural issues.” All three of these tracks, but especially the latter two, are highly focused on valuing place, something that is central to CRADLE values. As they say in their statement of values, “We value – as individuals and as a community – the place where we live and work, and we are committed to sustainability and good stewardship, in order to conserve this place for the generations that will follow us.”

Exploration of their majors and minors revealed, to my great excitement, a major in “Sustainable Community Development“! The Major in Sustainable Community Development

is designed for students who are interested in the interdependence of environmental, economic, and social issues and who want to strengthen their abilities to become effective community change agents. Sustainable Community Development offers courses in a wide range of areas including the theory and practice of Sustainable Community Development, community-building, co-operative economies, globalization, and social enterprises and leadership for Sustainable Community Development….Central to this curriculum is the development of the whole person—a process that emphasizes social values, creativity, and the recognition that community involvement is necessary for individual growth and the enrichment of our society.

The rich and fascinating course list includes “Introduction to Social Justice,” “Methods of Sustainable Community Development,” and the “Sociology of Community,” among others in this 49-credit major. But what I didn’t find included were any courses in the arts. No Drama Department, no Dance Department, no Music Department, a traditional Art Department and Writing and English Department. But the connection between the commitment to localism, environmentalism, and the arts hasn’t yet been made. Classical conductor Benjamin Zander, in his outstanding TED talk, opens with a joke about two shoe salesman who go to Africa. One cables back, “Bad news — none of them wear shoes.” The other cables, “Fantastic news — they don’t have shoes yet!” That’s how I feel about Northland College: good news! They don’t have a local arts leadership program yet!

This isn’t at all surprising, by the way, as even the national organizations and thinkers that focus on the development of strong local economies haven’t made this connection as yet, but to me, in order to change our relationship to the environment and to our communities, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves. As George Gerbner, a scholar of mass communications and a leader of the Cultural Environment Movement, has written, “Stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and often models of conformity or targets of rebellion. They weave the seemless web of the cultural environment that cultivates most of what we think, what we do, and how we conduct our affairs.” But, he warns, “stories no longer come from families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, and often not even from native countries. Increasingly, they come from small groups of distant conglomerates with something to sell.” In other words, “today [stories] are no longer handcrafted, homemade, community inspired.” As David Diamond says, “Today a vast majority of people buy theatre, buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc., to tell our own stories about our collective selves?” The human consequences of this, Gerbner asserts, are “far-reaching. They include cults of media violence that desensitize, terrorize, brutalize, and paralyze; the promotion of unhealthy practices that pollute, drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; portrayals that dehumanize, stereotype, marginalize and stigmatize women, racial and ethnic groups, gays and lesbians, aging or disabled or physically or mentally ill persons, and others outside the cultural mainstream.” One might add that these stories also encourage the constant moving from place to place that characterizes contemporary American lifestyles, a single-minded focus on the national over the local, and a disconnect from what Patrick Overton, head of the Front Porch Institute, calls the “poetry of place.”

David Diamond, the author of the excellent book Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of Community-Based Dialogue, asks “What is the result of the living community’s inability to use primal language to tell its own stories?” His answer: “Alienation, violence, self-destructive behaviour on a global level. Living communities have fallen into a stupor, hypnotized by a steady diet of manufactured culture.” This is how identities are created and commitments are formed.

Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs and Academic Dean Alan Brew, who has a passion for “literature and the natural world,” seems to fully understand the importance of stories to the development of a sense of place. As a teacher of courses that “reflect my special interest in exploring the relationship between humans and the natural world,” courses that take him and his students to “to the canyons of the Southwest, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and the lakes of the Boundary Waters,” Brew says that he is “committed to the preservation and exploration of stories, and I strive to connect individuals with narratives that comfort, challenge, guide, and, ultimately, place them in the rich complexities of the human experience.”

This is where, I would suggest, CRADLE comes in. The focus of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum would be an interdisciplinary program designed to teach students how to help small and rural communities preserve and explore their own stories, strengthen their identities, and enhance the social cohesion and confidence that allows small communities to thrive instead of wither. We must do something to balance the global corporate stories that reinforce the very behaviors that are destroying our environment. Clay Shirky, in his new book Cognitive Surplus, quotes a 2009 working paper written by Marco Gui and Luca Stanca that says, “television can play a significant role in raising people’s materialism and material aspirations, thus leading individuals to underestimate the relative importance of interpersonal relations for their life satisfaction and, as a consequence, to over-invest in income-producing activities and under-invest in relational activities.”  In other words, we spend less time with friends, family, and neighbors.

A CRADLE arts curriculum would not be about the selling of art to communities, art as commodity, but rather empowering communities to create its own art, to tell its own stories, to sing its own songs, and dance its own dances — to tell stories that are specific to the place, not simply buy the homogenized stories provided by the mass media. It would be as much about localization and import substitution as a farmer’s market or a small-mart.

Northland College’s mission, values, and overall approach to education is an inspiring example of how the liberal arts might be used to change the way we relate to our environment and to our community. Everywhere I looked on their website, I saw teachers, administrators, and students committed to creating a better future based on an understanding and appreciation of the local environment. I came away convinced that Northland College would be the perfect partner in the development of a CRADLE arts leadership curriculum. Even if they were not willing or able to implement such a course of study, I am convinced that the general orientation of the faculty would help release the collaborators from the pre-conceptions that tend to tether us to the current model of education.

That is why I am committing myself to contacting Dr. Brew to propose an exploration of how CRADLE and Northland College might explore a partnership for the development of a rural arts leadership curriculum. Until then, I urge you to spread the word to any future undergraduate students you know who are interested in environmental issues and the humanities to consider Northland College. It is the kind of school that, looking back, I wish I had attended as an undergraduate.

The bad news out of the Community Arts Network:

Community Arts Network Closing on Labor Day

The Community Arts Network had been filling a valuable space in terms of efforts to bring a more grassroots approach to theatre and all arts in America. This is a huge loss.

I just sent the following email to the faculty and staff at the university where I teach. I’m not certain what will come of it, but I have a sense that we are at a crossroads in our society. As far as TACT is concerned, I wonder whether a greater commitment to the development of creativity skills not only among arts students, but across the campus — teaching arts students how to facilitate creativity, for instance — might be useful. Again, I don’t know — and for those of you who know me, you know that not knowing is an uncomfortable place for me to be! Here is the email — let me know if you have ideas.

Dear Colleagues — If you would bear with me for a few paragraphs, I’d like to share a few thoughts that are rattling around in my mind. My hope is that I might find other people interested in pursuing these issues withme.
In the July 10, 2010 issue of Newsweek, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have written an intriguing article entitled “The Creativity Crisis” (http://bit.ly/dfTPhl), which discusses what seems to be a decline in creativity among America’s children. In this article, creativity is not defined as something artistic, but the “production of something original and useful,” which, of course, has an impact on all disciplines and all aspects of our society and economy. This definition of creativity comes from psychologist Robert Sternberg (http://bit.ly/9eWAYI), whose books on the creativity are based on a triarchic theory of intelligence that posits that there are three aspects of intelligence — analytic, creative, and practical — and that our education system stresses almost exclusively the analytical. In the conversation linked above, Sternberg is talking to Rex Jung, a Univ of New Mexico neuroscientist who is referenced in the Newsweek article. The article states:

Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Is this learnable? Well, think of it like basketball. Being tall does help to be a pro basketball player, but the rest of us can still get quite good at the sport through practice. In the same way, there are certain innate features of the brain that make some people naturally prone to divergent thinking. But convergent thinking and focused attention are necessary, too, and those require different neural gifts. Crucially, rapidly shifting between these modes is a top-down function under your mental control. University of New Mexico neuroscientist Rex Jung has concluded that those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

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Over at Parabasis, 99 Seats has reconnected with Cortney Munna, whose issues with student loans was used by the NY Times to illustrate the problems with the college tuition and financial aid process across the nation. I weighed in during the discussion of the original post at a time when I was taking a break from blogging, but now I want to go on record more formally with a full post.

If you have been reading this blog, you know that I teach at a public liberal arts college in North Carolina — the University of North Carolina at Asheville. I have been here since 1998, and prior to that I was Assistant to the Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Illinois State University, a largish (17,000 students or so when I was there) comprehensive state university. My educational background has all been public: the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, a HUGE (50,000 + when I was there, bigger since) Research 1 university; masters degree from Illinois State; and a doctorate from City University of New York Graduate Center. I also attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when I was 20. So my educational background encompasses direct experience of just about every form of university except private ones, and my indirect experience through friends and colleagues encompasses those as well. In my spare time, I read books about the education system and teaching (if you really want to know what a college ought to look like, read John Tagg’s and Peter Ewell’s The Learning Paradigm College). In short, I am pretty well-informed about the education system in this country.

So when I read the original article, and now this interview with Ms. Munna, I feel the need to speak out in order to warn other young people and their families before they make the same mistake as Ms. Munna and her mother made. No, I’m not talking about the financial aid process, which is problematic, but rather about the more insidious issue that serves as its foundation, and that is illustrated by the following quotation in 99 Seats’ interview:

“I probably could have gotten a pretty good package at a SUNY school, but for me, I believed a top school would be worth the debt…”

There, in twenty-six words, is the Minotaur at the center of the educational labyrinth: branding.

For me, Wendell Berry is the guiding light for CRADLE. His focus on the local, the particular, the agricultural as well as the cultural,  and his belief in humility and service, provide an alternative to the global, materialist, and shallow culture that America has embraced.

In 1989, Berry delivered a Commencement Address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine that included not Ten Commandments but ten hopes. They are:

1. Beware the justice of Nature.
2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

My question for TACT: what would a theatre education, an arts education, look like if it followed Berry’s precepts? This is more about values than the titles of specific classes and skill sets. It is about an orientation to the world, one that informs the kind of art you create, who you create it with, and how you create it. If you look at this list in terms of theatre, you will see that following the hopes would almost totally reverse our current orientation. Is it possible to teach the same things in the same way and still reverse the outcome?

As educators, we often feel a reluctance to explicitly address values. We are afraid that to do so will instantly turn us into William Bennett committed to brainwashing our young wards through the use of our classroom power. But the fact is that, explicitly or not, we are inculcating students with values by every class we teach, every show we choose to create. The mere existence of a class on auditioning, for instancem, implies a certain relationship to the power structure, and an endorsement of The Biz. A design course that teaches young artists to hang hundred of lights in the air or build massive sets out of unrecylable materials teaches them to ignore the ecological impact of their artistic choices, or at the very least to put their design choices first. Every time we dismiss our audience members as being unsophisticated rubes, we endorse a philosophy that puts artists outside and above their community.

What would an arts education look like if it followed Wendell Berry?

It’s been three weeks since my semester ended, and in that time I have been doing a lot of needed household chores, resting up a bit, and rehearsing for an upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing that I am in this summer. I’ve also been churning about in my head some of the observations I have made about my classes this past semester, and I think I am ready to write about some of the things that have crossed my mind. If there is one overriding theme in these particular thoughts, it is this: students have changed in many ways over the past 25 years, but theatre curricula has not. It seems to me that if we are going to think about transforming theatre curricula, we have to think about what kinds of students we are getting into our classes and studios, and how the changes in their attitudes and abilities affects how, what, and why we teach. So, in no particular order, here are my observations:

• Language. Of all of the observations I made over the semester, this one struck me the most. I taught an independent acting studio where the focus was on how language works within a scene and within the construct of a character, and it produced some interesting results. What was of most interest to me, however, was realizing that student actors today simply do not realize that theatre is a language-based art form. Generally speaking, today’s student actors do not understand how language works at all, let alone how it works in a script. They do not have an appreciation for language’s rhythms, rules, or subtleties, so as a result, they tend to run roughshod over the language, choosing instead to concentrate on over-emotional or forced acting. They do not realize that language can do so much more important work for them as actors. In this independent studio, we concentrated solely on letting language do the work, cutting out all excess action. By the end, it was as if a whole new world had opened up to them in terms of the possibilities that language offered the actor. For the first time, they all began to “get” Chekov and O’Neill, rather than dismissing them as boring. What this means to me is that, in our acting curricula, we must come to terms with the fact that student actors today do not have the language skills they once had, and we cannot assume that they grasp the essential language-based nature of theatre. Language is the primary means by which theatre communicates to its audience, and actors need to have an essential grasp of its nature, its function, and its limitations. Read the rest of this entry »