Jill Dolan’s “Unhappy Thespians”
August 25, 2008 by dennisbaker
I highly enjoyed Jill Dolan’s paper/manifesto that she presented at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Denver on August 1st entitled Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students.
There is SO much good stuff there and if you are applying for theater programs it is a MUST read. It is a true and clear depiction of the mindset a student has to deal with within a theater program. The best thing is that it comes not from a student, but from a professor! In the below description of the students at University of Texas, it sounds exactly like Rutgers (and I am sure most of the other theater programs).
But despite what might seem these successes, the students in our undergrad and graduate acting programs never seemed very happy. Many undergrads left, and many grad students complained about the narrowness of what they learned. The grad students suffered a schedule that prevented them from taking advantage of the department’s other curricula, including our flourishing graduate program in Performance as Public Practice, which aimed to expand applications for theatre and performance studies outside professional, mainstream theatre into community-based and socially active settings. With pre-professional programs intent on feeding the US regional theatres, if not Broadway, the majority of our students weren’t encouraged to imagine other ways of plying their trades, or of using their studies creatively and with more agency than mainstream theatre employment practices for actors often allow.
Most discouraging to me was watching graduate students who’d been through three years of rigorous training in acting, voice, and movement arrive at the showcase moment of their MFA program tenure. Thanks to Fran Dorn’s professional connections, the students traveled to New York and Los Angeles to present work for casting agents, directors, and other people in the business. But when they returned, many of the students reported that the feedback they received concerned their looks more than their talent. More than one went on a crash diet; the first three-year class started nearly in unison a version of The Zone diet that reduced all of them to wan and wasted stick figures in a few weeks’ time. Men and women alike were told by showcase spectators that they needed to lose weight, fix their noses, their teeth, their skin, their facial bone structures, all in the service of hewing closely to the “type” in which they’d inevitably be cast.
What I liked most of all (and gave me the “Why did I not think of that before” moment) was when Dolan mentions Paul Bonin-Rodriguez’s undergraduate senior seminar on the entrepreneurial creative artist. YES!! A thousand times yes. That is thinking outside the box.
Artists need to be read things like Entrepreneur Magazine and books like The 4-hour Workweek. Not to find a get rich quick scam, but to become independent so that they are able to create art on their own terms without having to be “chosen” by the current theatrical structure. Artists need to grab something that is common knowledge over in the business department. The idea of automated income. Finding a niche market where one can sell merchandise that can be done on an automated system. This brings income without a 40 hour work week (and yes it will take more than 4 hours a week). One of the biggest struggles with artists is how difficult it is to create art while still holding down a 40 hour a week job. Yes, this automated income will take many hours to create and one might have to put the art on hold until the system is created, but the long term benefits far outweigh the 60-80 hour weeks artists are trying survive in now.
This is a twist on the Tribal Theater idea from Scott Walters, but one that can be part of the overall vision. I would argue that once this automated income is found the artists not pour their money and “extra” time back into a dysfunctional system, but to use their resources to create an ensemble tribal theater. Help the ensemble theater (and its members) to also acquire as much automated income as possible.
I am not a business major and do not have a lot of real world experience with these concepts. There a lot of pros and cons about this automated income theme. So I throw it out to the theaterospehere. Have you personally tried to create an automated income stream through some product that you created for a niche market? Most small business fail, so what did you do right? What did you do wrong? For all who are wrestling with the tribal theater idea, how does this idea fit into your thinking? I found an excerpt of Kathryn Cornelius’s thesis entitled “Creative Entrepreneurship: The Business Art and Art Business of Contemporary Artist Collectives” to help get the entrepreneurial mind thinking.
Technorati Tags: jill dolan, scott walters, theater of higher education, denver, unhappy thespians, theatre training, rutgers, university of texas, tribal theater, theater tribe, entrepreneur magazine, 4 hour workweek, entrepreneurial creative artist, paul bonin-rodriguez, mfa acting
Free Acting Seminar in Los Angeles
August 22, 2008 by dennisbaker
Friend and teacher Mick Montgomery is holding a free acting seminar on Saturday, August 30th from 2-6pm at the Actors Workout Studio in North Hollywood. If you are reading this from Los Angeles, I highly recommend it! You can click on the image to enlarge it or read the details below.
The title of the seminar is “Discover the Actor You’ve always wanted to be!”
The class will include a discussion on discovering who your inner actor is and will feature an introduction to the Meisner Acting Technique as taught @ the Actors Workout Studio. This is not a sit down and listen to someone talk for four hours seminar. It’s an active and fun class designed to get you rooted in your body.
Space is limited so sign up today! You can call 310.754.9121 for any questions about the seminar. Also, feel free to send this to any acting friends who may be interested in attending.
Technorati Tags: mick montgomery, free acting class, los angeles, actors workout studio
Will Art Save Us?
August 17, 2008 by dennisbaker
That is what Joseph M. Paprzyck thinks. He is the artistic director & playwright of the South Camden Theater Company. The theater company has been performing in the basement of the Sacred Heart Church in Camden, New Jersey. Recently ground was broken across the street to build the Waterfront South Theatre which will house the theater company. The theater is being built across the street from Sacred Heart. The location was formally a bar that Mr. Paprzyck’s grandfather owned. That piece of information hooked me. It shows that this theater company is embedded in the community. Mr. Paprzyck comes from a family tradition with roots in the community and therefore has been able to create a professional “community” theater. His motto is Art Will Save Us. By being a playwright and artistic director he can bring stories that connect directly with the issues facing the community of South Camden.
Back in March the theaterosphere blogged around the idea of “What is theater good for?“. Steve Loucks describes theater as:
. . . the beauty of live theatre is the communal aspect of the shared entertainment experience. Sure, we can sit down to watch television with our friends, and we can certainly enjoy the same movie with an audience of strangers. But live theatre is the one singular opportunity we have to enjoy the telling of a story that evolves from one night to the next, often due to the audience’s response to the magic and artistry being performed live and in front of us.
Many regional theaters try to do this with a newly hired artistic director from another big theater. Along with actors, directors and writers flown in from across the country who will be there for six weeks and back to New York or their next gig. Paprzyck is doing it in a small way and seems to be a cornerstone in his community. Not a cornerstone because the theater does eleven shows a year and draws in all the tourists, but because the artist of the theater company grew up in the community and lives in the community. As the local bartender the grandfather served the community. Paprzyck has taken that tradition and is serving the community in a different way. Not by creating a one stop theater shop, but as an on-going, communal, missional theater experience. The communal experience is an easy comparison to a religious community. One that seeks to bring the community together from within, to heal wounds, celebrate triumphs and by doing this all together as one. In that sense art might just save us or at least South Camden.
Technorati Tags: south camden theater company, joseph paprzyck, theater, camden, new jersey, steve loucks
Theaterosphere thoughts on Educational Theater
August 10, 2008 by dennisbaker
Educational Theater is getting talked about on the theaterosphere. Laura mentions over at Trailing Souse Blues when asking:
Why are we dumbing stuff down for our children? I realize perhaps Sarah Kane is inappropriate for 10-year-olds, but not everything on the fringe is inappropriate. Wouldn’t we be serving our own long-term purposes better as an industry if we were able to introduce the theatre we really want to produce to kids and teens? Can’t we structure programs around that somehow? Why not have a teens-only open rehearsal so they can watch the process? Or invite them to a show with a special reception/talkback event? Or, better yet, go where they are. Can we Twitter the rehearsal process? Build some sort of Facebook application tie-in with the game? Blog something they’re going to seek out and read?
Laura is hitting on an “age old” struggle of theater for young audiences. The idea that theater for young people always has to be separate from the adult theater. This was a core discussion point in our Theater for Young Audiences class this summer at NYU. One that many practitioners have struggled through and thought about in the past. As I mentioned in my previous post, Maja Ardal is one of those artists. In the book, How Theater Educates, she writes an article about her experience working with theater for young audiences in Toronto. Her experience speaks directly to Laura’s questions.
Children are not literal-minded as many would have us believe. They understand metaphor and they understand imagery. They understand that theatre is an experience to reflect upon, not to obey, that theatre is an imagery world of ‘what if’ and not the ‘only world’. We need to show children the messy aspects of life. As artists we are not here to answer. We are here to question, and to invite our audience to question with us.
The second half of Laura’s quote intrigues me. Ryan Kuder was recently fired from Yahoo and twittered about the whole experience. Up to the minute accounts all on twitter. Through it he received condolences and job offers. The theater as a whole needs to embrace Web 2.0, but when it comes to educational theater and dealing with young audiences this is key! The young audiences of today are 2.0. The web for them is not 2.0 because many of them did not interact with the web before there was myspace, facebook, IM, etc. Theater needs to give priority to internet/social marketing and I think those involved in educational theater can be the ones to show the rest of the theater industry how it can work.
Nick picks up the discussion over at Theater for the Future and runs with the themes of experience and immersion. How through experience and immersion the kids will naturally be built into wanting to be involved long term with the theater. This seems like the natural next step from getting young people hooked online through social marketing. Maybe through the web a young person is convinced to see a show his/her friends are in. That leads them to be involved the next time something is available. One of Nick’s arguments for involvement is that young people are already over-committed with sports, AP classes, etc. That might be the case but a young person will commit to what he or she really wants to do. I played three sports till the end of junior high. In high school I committed to doing basketball and drama. My senior year I decided to “take it to the next level” and do community theater in the neighboring town and the show conflicted with basketball. I had to make a choice and I chose theater because I knew I wanted to be involved in theater long term and basketball was not going to last past high school.
This story does not compare to the story over at The Next Stage. A proactive twenty-year-old was inspired to produce a film of Kenneth Lonergan’s This is Our Youth. All while recovering from brain surgery! Check out the story as it is worth the read. Students who fall in love with film and theater will commit themselves to it. So lets keep working on giving students the opportunity to fall in love.
Technorati Tags: edcational theater, theatre blogs, nyu, maja ardal
One Man’s Method for Better Acting: Just Stop Doing It
August 7, 2008 by dennisbaker
The title of this blog comes from a New York Times article written back at the end of last year about the actor Bill Camp. I have been thinking about this article for a while. There is a lot in the story that I feel connected to in my current season of life. In it James C. Nicola, artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, is quoted describing Camp as a sterotype New Englander, stoic, decent. “I think he’s like like Jimmy Stewart: warm, decent guy, with a lot of stuff going on inside. But he’s not going to trouble you with his drama.”
In 2002 the talent agency that represented him suddenly went under, and he was asked to come and pick up his headshots. Other agents expressed an interest in taking him on, but he declined. “I needed to stop,” he recalled. “I wasn’t enjoying acting the way I do now. It became about getting the next job, thinking too much about that. It’s hard to stay away from that as an actor. The vitality of striving, the joy of making something was starting to wane. I needed to know that I can do other stuff, that I can live not being an actor.”
At the time he and Ms. Marvel were in California, where she was acting in the television series “The District.” Mr. Camp took a series of nontheater jobs. He cooked in a restaurant, worked as a landscaper and a night watchman; he repaired cars.
Ms. Marvel, who met Mr. Camp at Juilliard in the late 1980s, supported her husband’s decision. “It’s always up for debate whether we should keep doing this or not,” she said. “You’re really in a boxing ring taking blow after blow, and it’s really a matter of whether you can keep standing. Also, I think it’s important for an artist to live in the world.”
My life feels the same way. I am currently working full time in New Jersey and starting in September will commute to NYU three times a week for classes at night. This leaves no room for auditions or acting. The pros of working full time and still being able to go to school are obvious. My family is able to save money to move back to Los Angeles, save for retirement and begin to pay back school loans. Also the skills I am learning at this job can be done on a freelance level, which is good for the life of an actor. I could do this job anywhere, all I would need is a laptop and a internet connection. Pretty amazing if you think about it.
There is still something that plagues me. Since the debacle I have not been consistently auditioning for a couple of years and I feel rusty. More than that I feel I need to get out there and prove that all the negative things said about me as an actor in the last couple of years are not true and that the negativity can be overcome. With all this recent negative input into my art I have had very little positive to counterbalance it. That leaves me to question will I go back to pursuing acting as a career? Am I good enough? What expectations are lost and what need to be adjusted or regained?
I am always reminded of what the prof says, only 13% of equity actors are working at any given time. That is a lot of actors not working as actors. A veteran actor of twelve years is having the same doubts and wrote into Backstage asking, “Should I just face the fact that I’m not going to “make it”? If after all this time I can’t support myself, should I quit?” Jackie Apodaca’s answer was what has been said many times in the past. Do what you love and if it is acting, “Take this minor setback in stride, and try to look at your new job as research for all those working folks you’ve yet to play. With your track record, the drought is not likely to last long.” There are low points in everyone’s acting career. Points where they are not auditioning and wondering if they should quit it all together. Moving forward in one’s acting career does not mean he/she is always auditioning or acting.
Mr. Camp’s life has completely changed since his two-year, self-imposed exile, and not only in career terms. After many years of dating, he and Ms. Marvel finally married on Sept. 5, 2004. Shortly before the ceremony his father died. And in June 2006 Ms. Marvel gave birth to a son, Silas. That too has fed Mr. Camp’s acting, his wife said. “It makes you a better human being, doesn’t it?” she said. “Anytime we can make ourselves and our art less precious, it improves.”
Technorati Tags: acting, backstage, bill camp, jackie apodaca, james nicola, new york, new york theater workshop, new york times, robert simonson, theater