# Rethinking theatre education



## derekleffew (Aug 2, 2013)

Link purloined from the SML.
A New Education for a New Theatre | The Clyde Fitch Report

> ... I know these are radical changes I propose, and academia is deeply resistant to even the smallest change. And I suspect there are other models that would be equally radical and equally effective. Let a thousand flowers grow in place of the plastic bouquets clogging the landscape. _But something has to change_. We’re stuck. Each generation of theatre teachers, decade after decade, reproduces they way that they were taught, in spite of the major changes that have occurred in our society, our economy, our communities, our technology and our expectations. It takes innovation, a quality all too often in short supply in academia.



Thoughts/opinions/perceptions?
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## MrsFooter (Aug 2, 2013)

Yes. Yes.

*Disclaimer* Being now five years out of undergrad and in the real world, I'm very disillusioned with the university system. I feel as if the theatre that I was taught in classes, by faculty, that I paid to learn about, in very few ways resembles the theatre that I am working today. In college, I can't tell you how a single one of the shows that I was in or worked on sold. Not a one. It didn't interest me at the time because in educational theatre, audiences are taken for granted. There was a "If you produce it, they will come," sort of mentality. Now, in the real world, I can give you an audience count within 50 seats of probably the last 30 or so shows I've worked on, because in the real world THOSE THINGS MATTER. Just because you have a vision to share, a message to express, art to display, or a pirouette to execute flawlessly, it doesn't mean anyone in the community is going to give two sacks full of rat crap. And budgets? What's that? Sure, certain shows in college were given spending limits, but they were arbitrary, numbers given to us with no concept for where that money came from or how the amount was arrived upon. Now? Just yesterday I had a 45 minute discussion with the Artistic Director of the ballet company I'm working for over every single penny of the $2,500 show I'm working on is going to be spent, and you know what she told me as we wrapped up? She told me that she totally supports my ideas and thinks they're great, but if we're going to be spending more than usual I have to make big, bold, ridiculous choices so that they're obvious enough for the board members in the audience to see where their money went. These. Things. Matter. Except in college theatre, where they were never discussed because they weren't important. We can talk about theatre as an art form all day long, but whether we like it or not, the "biz" part of "show biz" stands for _business_, and there's a huge reluctance to treat is as such. And when you're a starry-eyed graduate fresh out of college, that realization is a hard one.

And now, some thoughts and comments that I'm too lazy to string together into a nicely structured stream of thought, that may not make sense if you didn't read the article. So go read it. (It's good.)

*That "Use me, choose me" mentality is _exactly_ why I stopped dancing and acting. From about the time I was 14 until I left performance behind for good when I was 23, that's how I felt all. the. time. Desperate. It wasn't a good way to feel, especially during my impressionable teenage years. But the performance world breeds it in spays. Don't believe me? Watch Dance Moms for 15 minutes. It's easy to write that woman and the terrible head games that she plays with those little girls off as hyperbole, just more reality tv, but the truth is, the only difference between that woman and many of the studios, companies, and college faculty I studied and performed with is that she says everything out loud and uses easily followed charts. In the real world, all that still happens, just not out loud.

*The begging. Oh my god, the begging. Now that I'm five years out, there's been a rash over the last two years of former classmates starting their own dance companies/theatre troupes/improv group/etc. I guess that's how long it takes for performers to become sick of begging for work and decide that they want to be the ones making people beg. Problem is that all that really happens is they're still begging, only now it's for money. _Weekly_ I have to turn down Facebook invites for "events" that are really just a former classmate (who never really talked to me while we were in college and I haven't spoken to once since graduating) begging for money. "Just _five_ dollars," they say, "Just _ten_ dollars," "Just _twenty-five_ dollars," will apparently make all the difference between their little company failing and becoming the next Alvin Ailey or Second City. It's getting to the point where I'm not excited about the art their creating or the message that they're sharing, I'm resentful as hell and secretly hope that their little company fails so they can go back to their job as a waitress and shut the hell up.

*I want to say for the record that I did actually learn a lot about production from my college, but not a lick of it came from the classroom. Everything that I learned that I still use today, every experience that I had that helped move me towards the job I have now, came from working in Pipe Dreams Studio Theatre on student productions. It was a tiny black box shaped like a wonky triangle with no square corners, a touring dimmer rack, a handful of fixtures, a CD player, and a couple of ladders. And little to no faculty involvement. Were our shows elaborate, or even pretty? Hell no. Were they safe? Mostly. But without the facilities and equipment of the big theatre on campus and the ready-made solutions of the faculty, the shows, the problems they produced, and the solutions we came up with were entirely ours. And that taught me more than any class did.

[/diatribe]


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## derekleffew (Aug 2, 2013)

Am I a Dancer Who Gave up? | Shawn Renee Lent


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## SteveB (Aug 2, 2013)

This comment of Clyde Fitch's "When people conceive of themselves as a product to be sold, they are no longer artists." is wrong.

Steph's comment " We can talk about theatre as an art form all day long, but whether we like it or not, the "biz" part of "show biz" stands for business, and there's a huge reluctance to treat is as such" is exactly what part of the problem is that Fitch doesn't deal with.

You can't do 'nuttin without money and that's not specific to the performing arts. EVERY artist sells themselves in one form or another. If they call themselves an artist, they are selling their product so as to make more art. Or they are doing something else for a living. 

So first and foremost might be a re-examination of the reality that every artist is going to face out in the real world, which is how to make a living at it.

I don't see that taught in school and maybe it should be. Trouble is, the reality is that most performers are not going to make a living at it and many on the technical side will barely scrape by. That kind of reality check is not the kind of thing a college wants to be teaching. It's like telling law school students that it's all fine and well to learn the law, just don't ever expect to be actually PRACTICING law !. No school is going to open that can of worms.


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## MrsFooter (Aug 2, 2013)

derekleffew said:


> Am I a Dancer Who Gave up? | Shawn Renee Lent



Very poignant. (Especially when I saw that the author is a fellow alum. That's some Twilight Zone right there.) Sadly enough, I still have family who view me, not as a successful Lighting Director/Designer, but as a failed dancer. I actually had one running around my hometown during my second summer stock season telling people that I was working as an electrician "as a means of getting my foot in the door as a dancer." As if that's how it works, one of the dancers goes down and the director frantically runs out on stage yelling, "Can anyone here do a triple pirouette?!" And I would rip off my blacks like Superman, (under which would naturally be a leotard,) yell, "I can!" and next thing I know I'm on stage. Or some bullsh*t like that. It still hurts to have my current work discounted in light my previous goals, but that's how the world works.

From the article:

"A career as a professional dancer focuses on one's faults, not one's contributions." 

I wonder if this is part of the reason that so many of my fellow classmates are finding themselves wanting to start their own companies and troupes. Maybe you can only be someone's puppet for so long before you start yearning to be the master.


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## JChenault (Aug 2, 2013)

I would like to take a slightly different point of view. Almost no schools do a good job of training a student in the day to day things they will be doing in the workplace.


For a number of years I worked in the world of software engineering at Amazon.com. At Amazon we hired a LOT of engineers, and we hired a lot that were fresh out of graduate -or- undergraduate programs. In general most of these hires were useless for a year to a year and a half. They just did not understand how to produce software for a large company in a production environment at scale.

For those beginning software engineers, the purpose of school was not to 'Teach me what I know to do the job ' it was 'Teach me the basics so I can learn what I need to know once I get a job". I believe a similar argument can be made for theatre education.

So the question becomes 'What is the best way to train a student in the fundamentals of the art / craft so he can develop as an artist / technician when he gets in the real world?

I happen to be a big believer in internships. You give a student the basics in the art/craft ( of theatre design, or set construction, or computer science) - and you find a way to throw him in the real world with folks who know what they are doing. My final year in graduate school I spent building sets for the Asolo theatre as part of FSU's internship program. It was a year well spent in that at the end of that time I understood how to build scenery out of wood. At Amazon we would take in computer interns and put them in the real world and would show them how to build on the skills that they learned in school.

That said, I don't buy the authors idea of encouraging entrepreneurial theatre organizations by the students ( with guidance by the faculty). Several reasons for this. 

I think you are likely to have a better result when the student is working with a professional instead of just doing it themselves. You can learn and observe much more quickly. You don't see medical students starting their own hospital, you see them joining a teaching hospital and working as interns, residents, and fellows as they perfect their skills and abilities.

Being an entrepreneur is a totally different skill set from any theatre art / craft ( or any skill in computer science for that matter). Trying to get someone who wants to be a lighting designer to start a company makes as much sens as asking Jeff Bezos (Amazon's CEO) to write a real time distributed inventory system to keep track of items in a warehouse. The student will fail and be miserable ( unless creating a theatre is what he really wants to do - in which case he should not be in the lighting design program). 


Now that said, a student's train should make him think like an entrepreneur. IE to be keenly aware of the costs of what he is doing, how the organization is going to get an audience and money to pay for his salary and supplies, how the organization works financially - but that is different from starting a company.


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## Footer (Aug 2, 2013)

MrsFooter said:


> I wonder if this is part of the reason that so many of my fellow classmates are finding themselves wanting to start their own companies and troupes. Maybe you can only be someone's puppet for so long before you start yearning to be the master.



Or getting their MFA's so they can go teach...

The big issue here is theatre education for the most part is designed to do one thing, produce someone who can go work in repertory regional theatre. That right there is the big issue with theatre education. Rep theatre does not have a business model beyond "give us money, we are broke". No one trains for for-profit theatre. This is one page we really need to take out of the music industry... if it don't put butts in the seats you should not be doing it. A few promoters I work with will also say if it does not put people at the bar and at the merch table its not a show worth doing.

We train people to be the lead actor, the head designer, etc. I was actually told by multiple professors "you don't need to know that, someone who works for you will know how to do that". This is why power distribution is not taught at most colleges. We are teaching people how to work in a business model that is doomed from the start. How many rep theatres in the country are doing well right now? How many of them are doing well compared to the for-profit entertainment sector? You can say all you want that the non-profits are producing great art, but if they are not viable as a business then that art is wasted. Here in town New York City Ballet used to do a 4 week summer residency in our shed. This season due to budget they did 5 days. The rest of their 3 weeks were handed to live nation to book bus and trucks. People are making money in the business, why aren't we teaching how to do that? Can you not create art AND make money? Why are we teaching that you can not?


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## echnaret (Oct 4, 2013)

Just to throw my two cents in, I definitely feel like I learned more from my summer tech internships than I did from my theatre classes. This may have been partly due to the fact that the faculty was getting up there in age, and many were close to retirement. But overall, I feel like there were a number of things missing from my education. First, maybe it was the school, but there were very few student designers when I went through. So, I was always working under faculty. Second, there were no business-for-theatre classes offered. One of my biggest regrets was not taking any business classes. Most of my work has been with small, low-budget theatres, where money is tight and every penny counts. Last, I wish that faculty had pushed more for student leadership. Except for a small percentage of tech theatre students, leadership roles were positions that needed to be filled, not goals that should be worked towards.


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## JohnD (Oct 5, 2013)

Well alrighty, I've read the OP article several times and my first reaction is still the First Rule of Academia--------Publish or Perish! How is Mr. Professor any different from "Cassie" in CL. 
Then his solution is to have the students take on the "Hey kids, lets put on a show" model. 
Then you get into the teaching versus let them learn issue. 
The school of architecture thing was interesting, but I don't know if I would really want architects actually building something. Now if they partnered with the structural engineering department, that would be interesting. Remember that Frank Lloyd Wright frequently got it wrong. I think I better stop here since I could go on for a long time.


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