Must Read Theater Education Blog Posts

February 10, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

I am a HUGE fan of the newly created website Theatre Arts Curriculum Transformation (TACT). ‘Tis the season where I am receiving emails and questions about my process for applying to MFA acting schools and my experience with the Rutgers MFA acting program.

If you are considering applying to theater schools, or considering what schools to attend, you need to stop everything you are doing and read TACT’s five blog posts about Theater Education written by Tom Loughlin, Professor of Theatre at SUNY Fredonia. Start here with Tom’s experience with MFA programs, and note that unfortunately the mindset in MFA programs have not changed much from 1977.

Filed under: Educational Theater, Graduate School, Rutgers, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Truth About Theater Education

January 28, 2010 by Dennis Baker 

I am catching up on the last week of theatrosphere blog posts, and while Scott Walter’s whole blog post is a must read, his comment about what he tells his theater students, is what stuck out to me.

I say: “You are getting a degree at a liberal arts university. I am not offering you ‘pre-professional training’ because, frankly, there IS no profession. I am educating you, not training you. I am offering you a lens to see the world through that, should you decide to try to make a life of artistry (which is different from a CAREER in the arts), then you will have four years of reflection and experiment from which to work. If you want to be buffed up for the so-called profession, you need to go down I-40 to Winston-Salem and the NC School of the Arts.” Now, what are others saying? I conjecture that they are selling the Cinderella Myth, pointing at a couple alums who are working occasionally, and teaching their students that what separates the successful from the unsuccessful is that the successful want it more (which is a huge lie, but that shifts the blame for their failure to the students’ shoulders and absolves the teacher entirely). It is a con game, plain and simple.

Filed under: Acting, Educational Theater, Graduate School, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Epic Theater Citizen Artist Conference

August 27, 2009 by Carrie Edel Isaacman 

I attended an amazing and inspiring workshop few weeks ago at the Citizen Artist Conference hosted by the Epic Theater Ensemble. I appreciate Epic Theater’s approach to working with kids is their work with community through Augusto Boal’s Exercises. These exercises empower the students to connect to community and to feel responsible for change.

We opened with Boal’s The Great Game of Power. After the game, four students who have been part of Epic’s summer workshop entered and read scenes from their adaptations of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. It was great to see well-crafted scenes about current topics based on the themes of Enemy of the People of course, but even more inspiring, these were young people in high school who were just crafting their playwriting skill. What I didn’t know at the time was that these were the type of plays that we would be creating over the course of the weekend. Epic has many curriculum. The Enemy of the People curriculum is just one.

On the second day of the Conference, we had the chance to create our own works based on Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, just as we had seen from the students the previous day. As one of the Epic Theater member’s explained, to be able to give this lesson, a person has to really know the play. The class was divided up into four groups. There were five categories that we used in order to create our own idea for a new play. The main idea was that the play had to have a main character that would be an enemy of the people in some way. For example, an owner of a hotel who was covering up health issues like eroding pipes that were of real danger to the guests. The next step was that all four groups had to pitch the ideas to the class. Then we had to vote as to which story was the strongest. The idea that was the strongest was the one that we would write scenes about.

What was important was the reactions from people as the group did not accept their ideas. We talked about this afterwards. This was a lesson for all of us in the room. It is hard to produce artistic projects. Really hard. Things do get… complicated.

The following exercises we created characters and did improvs on the main idea for the story that we chose. In our case it was a school meeting where there was a debate about the use of styrofome plates and the health of students who use those plates. Afterwards, we broke up into groups and wrote individual scenes using a very simple format that the Epic Theater uses. After that we shared our improvs that were based on the checklist each group produced.

How I Hope To Use These Exercises

I would like to have my own classroom one day and I’d like to include the study of various forms of historical drama. I am sure that I will find my own way of teaching, of course, but I admire the use of Boal’s exercises and Critical Thinking exercises of classic plays in the way that Epic teaches. I would like to borrow these ideas and techniques for my future students.

And I know that Epic is happy to pass on their ideas, as at the end of the conference, we received a Curriculum Guide.

Integrating Epic’s Techniques To My Teaching Artist Work

I have taught techniques to kids to play and understand Shakespeare’s words. Epic’s lesson plans teach students to put stories into the present day and empowers them to create their own stories while they are learning a story that is very removed from them. Using these techniques would ultimately help me, to help students understand and gain a world of knowledge about the story that they are working on. It would also help me ,to help students create their own stories and learn more about their own world.

I hope that you will all get to experience the workshop the next time around.

Also, be sure to check out Epic Theater Ensembles upcoming production: Mahilda’s Extra Key To Heaven by Russell Davis and directed by Will Pomerantz, September 16-October 11.

Carrie Edel Isaacman is a regular guest blogger, look for her monthly posts to come out on the 27th of the month. She is currently working as an Adjunct Lecturer through CUNY and substitute teaching in the NYC Public Schools while she pursues her MS in Educational Theater at City College. She is also involved in TA 101 with New York State Alliance for Arts in Education.

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Filed under: Acting, Educational Theater, New York, Theater/Theatre
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Artists and Money

June 29, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

It Is Okay for Artists to Make Money…No, Really, It’s Okay
From a Harvard Business School ‘Working Paper’ published June 3, 2009 by Robert D. Austin and Lee Devin:

When art and commerce are mentioned in the same sentence, many people become bad-tempered or think something needs fixing. This paper argues that more artists ought to make more money more often. Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and theater dramaturg Lee Devin identify and undermine three fallacies about art and commerce, and suggest that it is necessary to carry on a more careful and less emotional conversation about the tensions between art and business and to overcome a general aversion to business common among artists and their patrons. They also stress the need to develop better theories about how art and commerce can achieve integration helpful to both. Key concepts include:

  • The interests of art, artists, and business can be best served if more commerce enters into the world of art, not less.
  • There are three fallacies, often implicit, about relationships between art and commerce: (1) art is a luxury and an indulgence, (2) art is clearly distinguishable from “non-art,” and (3) commerce dominates and corrupts art, and subverts its purpose.
  • Good art should achieve appropriate commercial value consistently, not just occasionally. A conversation takes place when art and commerce are in tension, a conversation in which neither artists nor managers should dominate.

Pay My Rent
Alan M. Berks, writing on the blog Minnesota Playlist, June 28, 2009
Would you feel comfortable with a part-time dentist? Someone who’s got some talent filling cavities and performing root canals but who only squeezes them in at night, after she comes home from the full-time job she does all day, typing at a desk, let’s say, to pay the bills? Or, do you think, the work is going to be a helluva lot better if your dentist could concentrate on the job full-time, all year round? What about your plumber, lawyer, electrician, and accountant? Why then do we accept a system where performing artists have almost no expectation of making a real career in their chosen profession?… I don’t believe that everyone who wants to do theater deserves a living wage. For most people, theater is always going to seem like more fun than dentistry, so more people will want to do it. I think that a market that squeezes young performing artists a little so that they have to choose whether they’re really committed to it is probably appropriate. But anyone who doesn’t think that theater is already a ruthlessly competitive market has no idea what an audition is.

Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Educational Theater, Film, Los Angeles, Music, New York, Theater/Theatre
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Theater Heals

March 14, 2009 by Carrie Edel Isaacman 

Yesterday I went to a teaching artist observation as part of my class in Special Topics with the Manhattan Theater Club. The company has a playwriting/acting residency where students write on themes from current plays they have seen. I visited a school where the students have very advanced life experiences for their age. Some of the students have been in jail and some have just had really rough lives. The writing that the students produce is so full of feeling. As the teaching artist observed, “They get conflict really fast”. That day a situation came up where in a writing exercise that the students prepared, a scene between two characters on the theme of betrayal, a female student wrote on some serious issues involving suicide. The theme of betrayal came from the recent viewing of the MTC’s production of American Plan. The teaching artist and the two visiting actors handled the situation with such sensitivity. During class, they discussed the scene by asking the female student how serious the character is about the violence? After the students were dismissed the teaching artist, actors and our class instructor discussed the student’s writing and the possible issues behind it. Apparently the teacher had already talked with the student at the end of class and there were further plans to talk with the school about it. At that point I said my goodbyes and thanked the teaching artist. I asked if it would be alright to come back. (Technically in the Special Topics class we visit twice for field observation for each play.) He invited me to visit for the culminating event. I will do this, so that I can see the very rich plays that the kids produce, but also to see how that student that I mentioned is doing.

I left the field observation having felt great concern for the student, but also relieved that she will get the help that she needs. In a way, healing took place through the fact that the girl revealed something that she needed: help. And because she asked for help via the writing she may just get that. In this case Theater may have just saved a life.

Carrie Edel Isaacman is a regular guest blogger who is currently working as an Adjunct Lecturer through CUNY and substitute teaching in the NYC Public Schools while she pursues her MS in Educational Theater at City College. She is also involved in TA 101 with New York State Alliance for Arts in Education.

Filed under: Acting, Educational Theater, Teaching
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Living Underneath the Hyphen

February 11, 2009 by Carrie Edel Isaacman 

On one of the first days of class with Jennifer Strycharz at City College of New York in the Drama in Education, the first course in the MS in Educational Theater, she stated, and I regretfully do not remember who she was quoting, but she was quoting someone who talked about being a teaching artist as “living underneath the hyphen”. I really liked this saying about teaching artists and what they do. We are artists who teach.

I hate to sound too over the top but it is just the truth when anyone says the arts will inspire and motivate in a way that traditional learning may miss. In today’s economy where arts are being threatened it occurs to me that to make a commitment to work as a certified teacher in the arts and as a teaching artist it is not enough just to teach, but I have to be an arts advocate.

Some areas that I have taken a real interest in towards including in my work and education is Disabilities in the Arts. During the Teaching Artist 101 course I was so inspired by the representatives that talked about the organization of VSArts.org. I am thinking about purchasing the diversity kit from VSArts.org site. I was so inspired by all that I found there. They even have forms that can help a teaching artist to adjust lesson plans to the particular population that they are working with. I also love all of the informative articles there as well.

I also love to work in any grade level including college age students. I am really enjoying being in education again.

FOLLOW UP: It is Jonathan Neelands is the one who started the term “live beneath the hyphen” . He has several books with wonderful games and exercises that we use in class. Enjoy!

Carrie Edel Isaacman is a regular guest blogger who is currently working as an Adjunct Lecturer through CUNY and substitute teaching in the NYC Public Schools while she pursues her MS in Educational Theater at City College. She is also involved in TA 101 with New York State Alliance for Arts in Education.

Filed under: Educational Theater, Teaching
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