TACT

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

If you spend any time looking at university theatre curricula, you will come to a couple conclusions very quickly.

First, that there is a complete lack of curricular creativity in the field. Everybody is basically doing the same thing in the same order. The only variation is in the amount of the same thing that students are required to do, and the degree to which those same things are granulated. BFA programs require more courses, BA’s fewer; departments with large faculty break the major categories of subject matter into smaller pieces, so that instead of offering Acting I, II, and III, they have classes in specific period styles, for instance. But as my wife once said on vacation when we were trying to decide what to eat as we pulled off the freeway, “Who cares? It’s all the same crap.”

Second, the focus is relentlessly on “how.” Most of the classes could have are prefixes “how to”: “How to Act,” “How to Design Scenery,” “How to Stage Manage,” etc. Even the so-called “book classes” like theatre history are “how to”-focused, but in this case the focus isn’t “How to Do Theatre History,” but rather “Here’s How They Wrote, Acted, and Designed in the Past.” In other words, “How Did.” But you can search high and low and not find a class focused on “why.”

“Why do theatre?” “Why did they do theatre in the past?” “Why do people go to theatre? “Why did they go in the past?” Theatre curricula resemble fundamentalist religious instruction in this way — the foundational questions are never addressed; it is all an act of faith. If you have to ask “why,” then you don’t belong here. Go off and sing the songs from A Chorus Line until you get your heart right.

But I believe that the “why” question should be central to any theatrical curriculum, because every other aspect of theatre flows from it. In Marxian terms, the “how” classes are the superstructure to the “why” classes’ base. Depending upon how you define “why,” the nature of how is shaped accordingly. Historically, the purpose of theatre, its function within the society, changed from time to time and place to place. The community and religious function at the center of the Ancient Greek or the Medieval Mystery theatres is very different from the pure entertainment function at the heart of the Roman theatre, and both of these are very different from the class branding function of the French Neoclassical theatre or the English Restoration theatre. And the praxis, the “how’s,” of each time and place reflects the underlying “why.” A community-based theatre has a vastly different “why” than a commodity-based theatre, as Dennis Baker explores in his post “The Future of Theatre” through the words of Michael Rohd and Ben Cameron, and each demands different skills.

A theatre department should have a clear “why,” agreed upon by its faculty, from which flows the “hows” to support it. A faculty should have clear values, and design its curriculm to support it, always allowing sufficient room for challenges to those values, for heretics. And students should be introduced to the process of deciding on a “why,” and be encouraged to develop their own “why” that will inform their “how.”

So last night was the Lilly Awards in NYC, which describes itself on Facebook as “An annual awards party to celebrate the work of women in the American theatre.” Lest we forget the discussions we had surrounding Outrageous Fortune, let’s take a look at the educational background of the six winners in the playwriting category:

• Melissa James Gibson graduated from Columbia University and from the Yale School of Drama with an M.F.A. in Playwriting.
• Chisa Hutchinson got her undergraduate degree at Vassar and an MFA in playwriting from NYU.
• Deborah Zoe Laufer is a graduate of The Juilliard School.
• Annie Baker graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
• Sarah Ruhl studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001)
• Young Jean Lee attended college at UC Berkeley, where she received an Phd in English. She went on to receive an MFA from Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College.
• Lucy Thurber — I was unable to find any information on her educational background.

So here’s the list in another form:

• Columbia
• Yale
• NYU
• Julliard
• Brown
• Brooklyn

It isn’t that these playwrights are not deserving — I’m certain they are — or that they all have privileged backgrounds — several of them don’t. But rather that the track of success in the field is very, very narrow. If we are looking for diversity in our plays, we just might want to look at diversity in the way our playwrights are educated.

Back in late January, Dennis Baker posted this video on his website. And while he got the acronym wrong (it is NYLACHI, Dennis, not NYCHILA!), he got the point right: this is nuts.

In my opinion, this video ought to be shown prior to every SETC keynote speaker’s remarks, before every university drama department’s NYLACHI showcase, before every episode of Inside the Actor’s Studio or Taking the Stage. And afterwards, there should be a 60-second PSA defining the concept of supply-and-demand and showing the recent Actor’s Equity employment figures. Furthermore, any teacher who tells his or her students that it is all about “desire” and “talent” and “commitment” ought to be required to stand in a line outside of the Public for a week in January. No potty breaks.

That people will take Tom Loughlin to task because they thought he was “squashing” a young person’s “dreams” by trying to make them aware of the realities of life in the arts (even though his blog post said nothing about actually telling his student these facts, but were rather simply his internal thoughts) reflects the level of brainwashing that permeates the theatrical milieu. It is unconscionable that we continue to promote NYLACHI as the sole career path. We might as well be pushing crack.

A few weeks ago I saw this comment come in from a young reader under one of my posts talking out the “big lies” that theatre departments use to recruit students. The comment was as follows:

Dear Tom,
I found this blog to be very interesting. The quote at the end was very thought provoking. I am not graduated from high school yet. I want to major in theatre and minor in theatre education. Your blog talked a lot about certain fears I have myself for my future. I would love to be a theatre actress, but realize the chances for success are slim. I want to get my degree from theatre and graduate from college. I do not know where the best school is. Do you have any suggestions?
How do we (students) know when a college is lying? How can we find a college that will tell us the truth and properly prepare us for the world beyond college? Your article scared me, but in a good way. Do you have any suggestions for a theatre major hopeful?
Sincerely,
Katherine

Now we talk a lot about what’s wrong in theatre departments, so I thought I would answer Katherine’s questions with a post about what to look for in a theatre department. Many students are shopping right now. We just finished our audition season at Fredonia and are now seeing juniors coming for visits to look the place over. So if you’re a high school student out there looking for a theatre department that will be a good fit for you, here are a few suggestions.

• Expand your understanding of the art and world of theatre. My own personal experience here tells me that most high school students become enamored of theatre through doing the high school musical. As a result their own perceptions of what they want to study in college is more musical theatre. As a high school student, what you need to understand is that the world of musical theatre is extremely small and limited, and requires a combination of skill sets that is difficult to attain. Just because you did well in your high school musical does not mean you’re cut out for a musical theatre career. I see far too many auditionees who have been told they are wonderful in their high school musical, but in fact they are just the best in their high school at that time. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t study theatre. it just means that they may have to consider other possibilites beyond musical theatre. There are many other opportunities for a career in theatre, some that you may not know about until you begin to study at college. I see lots of students who thought they wanted to be in musical theatre become designers or stage managers. Keep an open mind and look for a program that offers you options beyond musical theatre (most do). Read the rest of this entry »