Citizen-Scholar-Artist

September 30, 2008 by dennisbaker 

Dr. Scott Walters writes an excellent post entitled Teaching Alternatives around an excerpt from Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre.

Walters goes on to describe theater schools as “the place where actors had their individuality erased, where they were beaten down and taunted and diminished as part of a ‘reshaping’ process that is called ‘training’”. The excuse is that the world and the industry will be even worse so the schools have to act in the same manner. Through Walters and Dolan’s classes hopefully students will be able to recognize and desire alternative ways of exploring what it means to train as an artist.

The summary on Amazon states:

What is it about performance that draws people to sit and listen attentively in a theater, hoping to be moved and provoked, challenged and comforted? In Utopia in Performance, Jill Dolan traces the sense of visceral, emotional, and social connection that we experience at such times, connections that allow us to feel for a moment not what a better world might look like, but what it might feel like, and how that hopeful utopic sentiment might become motivation for social change.

She traces these “utopian performatives” in a range of performances, including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner’s production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. While the book richly captures moments of “feeling utopia” found within specific performances, it also celebrates the broad potential that performance has to provide a forum for being human together; for feeling love, hope, and commonality in particular and historical (rather than universal and transcendent) ways.

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No Audition Class for Rutgers Graduate Acting Students

September 24, 2008 by dennisbaker 

The Rutgers graduate acting program is not supplying its third year students with an auditioning teacher.  The teacher for the course went on sabbatical and the administration decided not to pay for a replacement. A student brings in audition material to perform and the other classmates critique it.  Most of these classmates have no professional acting or audition experience. And they are paying for this?

How can this be okay in an MFA acting program. The big sell of these programs is that they will prepare you for the professional life of an actor. Last time I checked the major component of an actor’s life is auditioning. Actors audition far more than they are actually hired to perform. This is completely baffling. How is Rutgers expected to be taken seriously as an graduate MFA acting program when the administration is not willing to pay for a teacher to help in such an essential component of an actor’s career? As prospective students begin to research acting programs for auditions at the end of the year/beginning of next year I hope they highly question attending (and paying) an institution who is not willing to put resources into such an important aspect of an actors training.

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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.

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Educational Theatre - NYU Steinhardt

May 31, 2008 by dennisbaker 

Monday I start a new chapter in my graduate school education. I will be starting the educational theatre program at the Steinhardt school at New York University.

The NYU program emphasizes the applications of theatre in a range of community and educational settings, with concentrated study in drama education, applied theatre, and play production for artists and educators. The program is recognized as a national and global leader in theatre and drama education; artist-in-residence strategies; theatre for and by young people. They produce plays year-round with accompanying workshops and applied theatre projects in the Black Box Studio, the Provincetown Playhouse, and community venues. The program has recently committed to a prison theatre project in New York where our students have opportunities to devise and implement work in the most challenging of environments.

The program offers teacher certification degrees at the B.S. and M.A. levels. Here, students are trained as theatre educators and are placed in field settings with cooperating mentors. As well, students can take the M.A. and Ph.D (Educational Theatre for Colleges and Communities) where they explore and research the power of theatre in a range of contexts. I will be taking the MA course for Colleges and Communities. This means that I will only have to take 36 units (three semesters) of classes verses the two year program in which the second year is spent on a working towards a teaching credential.

As I plan to still work full time during these three semesters, most of the classes I will be taking will be at night. The two night classes offered during the summer are Problems in Play Production: The Development of New Plays and Drama Education I. Each run for three weeks Monday through Thursday. I will also be taking a one unit two day course entitled Exploring Social Issues and Conflict Resolution through Drama.

Problems in Play Production: The Development of New Plays is the first class I will be taking. The course is described as studying theories and methods of play development including script analysis, rehearsals and presentation of works-in-progress. Development of student written scenes through in class performances and an overview of recent scripts and new trends in theatre for young audiences. This class follows the rehearsal process of staged readings of the New Plays for Young Audiences. Three plays will each rehearse for a week and then performed for the public that weekend.

At first I was precarious taking a class in “Children’s Theater”. I have not seen a lot of children’s theater and what I have seen did not interest me too much. Reading through the assigned articles for the first class I came across an article by Maja Ardal that I really enjoyed. In it she describes that there should not be “Children’s Theater”, but plays that can interest adults and tell stories that young audiences can relate and connect with. In describing the play of I Claudia by Kristen Thompson she says,

Thompson created a work from the depths of her passion and imagination that happened to connect with a broad range of ages. She did not plan the production for young people, and so her material was never tailored or compromised to attract and suit students and families. It simply did. That is the perfect scenario, yet I believe it is almost impossible to achieve in a theatre that only has a relationship with parents and teachers, because the TYA [Theatre for Young Audiences] theatre is utterly dependent on the attendance of young people.

She goes on to explain about a show that was written for a children’s theater in Toronto. It was recognized by colleagues and with awards, but since it started at a children’s theater people did not come to see it. It moved to an adult theater and the audiences showed up. The adults would either bring their children or once they saw it realize their kids would enjoy it as much as they did and would come back with their familes. “The city of Calgary was represented at the theatre! This was, in my opinion, the perfect theatre experience. The play was successful because it was produced by adult theatre companies. It became a ‘Theatre’ and not an ‘Educational’ experience.”

Ardal sees a clear reason for this. She goes on to explain that a mixed audience is the perfect atmosphere for children to learn and that the play does not need to control all the details of work on stage in fear that the children’s moral lives are at stake.

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.

This article gave me hope that this class will be something that I will enjoy. If the discussions are anything like this article than I think I will fit right in.

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Rutgers MFA Acting Program

April 13, 2008 by dennisbaker 

Students who have been applying and interviewing at Rutgers have found this blog and been emailing me to ask my experience with the M.F.A. acting program. I thought about what to say as my goal was to share the facts more than give my opinion. Below is the email I sent out. My opinion is clear but I based it on the facts of what happened in the last three semesters and the mindset of the program.
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There is a lot to say about the Rutgers MFA acting program. Know that I was recently dismissed from the program, so I am speaking from that perspective. I would recommend NOT applying for Rutgers. The head of acting flat out lied to a class about the dismissal policy. She told the class at the beginning of their first year that no student would be ambushed in a meeting in regards to being dismissed. Students would be given clear communication if they were going to be kicked out. Then they tried to kick out a student the end of their first year without any communication that they were in trouble or on probation. In fact that student asked specifically of their progress and the teacher said that one would know if they were on probation and if one was not on probation then that means things are going well.

Their point of view is to have students come to Rutgers to “see if they are actors”. Anytime during the three years they deem that you are not an actor, they have the power and desire to kick you out. That way of thinking is based on faulty logic because wasn’t that same student a good enough actor to be selected out of a thousand people that auditioned? In fact some students were good enough actors to be accepted into multiple programs. “Being good enough” is not a measurable quality.

I know when one is auditioning for graduate schools they are excited about any school that is interested in them because they are so hard to get into. Note that Rutgers’ audition process is seeing your monologues in New York, Chicago or California and then having a five minute meeting if they ask you to visit Rutgers. That has changed this year as I hear they had “callback” auditions which means performing your monologues again for a different professor. What more does that tell you about the student? If the faculty are looking to see if a student fits into their specific acting program would not a weekend of classes and workshops be a better way to measure if a student fits the program? (This is done is some programs like Yale, Denver, and Delaware who call it (forced attrition) Each year Rutgers selects fourteen students, and the last two years they have only graduated eight people per class. If they had a more detailed audition process they might select less students and the dismissal rate would decrease. I think most students would rather not be selected into a program then being kicked out half way through.

Therefore the question to ask yourself is are you willing to pay $12,000 a year with about a 50% chance of not getting your degree and being stuck with the debt?

Lastly, I will end on the idea of the reputation of the graduate acting program. The rumor online and one I unfortunately blogged about is that Rutgers is the #3 graduate program in the country. I wonder if this is a left over idea from when William Esper was teaching and head of the program. His studio is consistently been ranked #1 in Backstage Magazine polls which is voted on by subscribers. One should take poll results lightly, but at the same time the results do say something. Also when Esper left most of the faculty left with him, the core of what makes a program great. In my opinion what was good about Rutgers happened when he was here and the current program is not the program that Esper created. Yes, Meisner is still the foundational acting philosophy, but I am talking more about the mindset of the faculty and how the school is run as a whole. I could be wrong as I was not at Rutgers during Esper’s reign, but something to think about.

The links below have to do with MFA theater education and something I wish I read before applying:

More Theater Education ideas found at: http://tribaltheatre.pbwiki.com/Education

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No Time

October 15, 2007 by dennisbaker 

I look back to former Rutgers MFA student, Chris Halladay, and noticed that he had three postings on his blog during his second year. That is how crazy it is for us.

To briefly update you, Anne Frank is going well, we had our designer run through and it was okay. No major hick-ups, but alot of work till the November 2nd opening. Classes are busy and take up all our time, and I also am in a reading for a directing class and performing in a scene for another directing class.

Personally I feel on a roller coaster. There are days when I feel like I am doing good work and there are other days where it feels like I am counting the days before they kick me out. The first month was hard and I felt the weight of being on probation. I feel like I am getting more into a groove, but only time will truly tell.

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Life at the moment

October 7, 2007 by dennisbaker 

[IF]

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling

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Start of Second Year

September 6, 2007 by dennisbaker 

The first week is almost over and things are beginning to shape up. I am excited with our new acting class taught by Billy Carden. We are going through A Challenge for the Actor by Uta Hagen. It will be a fresh change from the Meisner focus we had the first year. It is very useful to have a book that goes along with the class. We are currently treating it as a workbook and will be going through the exercises.

We also continue in one more year of Meisner. We will be working on impediments and opposite point of view. I am not looking forward to it all that much. It will be stretching, but I am concerned at the moment that the impediment work will get me in my head.
We are also working with the Michael Checkov technique. I do not know much about it so I will update as we get more into it. We also continue with dance as well as voice and speech. The last class we have is a dramatic literature course with the famous and talented playwright Lee Blessing. He seems like a down to earth guy and the class should be fun. I have been focusing more on being conscious of my speech work. We had general auditions last night and later in the evening I was called by a director telling me that my speech was clear and it was noted by people in the room. That felt good.

I was cast in Diary of Anne Frank. I was hoping not to do that show as I have already done it in the past. The role is only in two scenes (it will be a continuation of The Country Wife were I spent nearly a whole act sleeping backstage). I knew it was coming as I had a feeling the director was going to cast me in the role and when I did not get cast in the first show of the season, that was what made it a for sure thing in my mind. As always I will try to do my best with what is given to me and keep telling myself I am not at graduate school to be cast in plays but to do the work and learn from the training.

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Speech Therapy

June 2, 2007 by dennisbaker 

So I was placed on probation the end of this last semester (could not think of an introduction so I thought I would just throw it out there). I was debating if I wanted to write about this, but then I thought apart of creating this blog is to show the ups and downs of an actor and so here it is.

The faculty decided my speech is not up to standard. What probabtion means is that I have the following semester (and the summer) to “fix” the problem or they have the option of asking me to leave the program. This leaves me with some heavy work to get done. I was given a recomendation to work with Tom Burke and have met with him three times already. He is a great teacher and brings objectivity and specificity to the work. It is a little frustrating for Tom to give me an adjustment and realize if I was given that adjustment during the school year I might not need to be paying for extra work. He says I am doing well and we can change to half hour check-in sessions instead of the hour sessions we have been doing. This bodes well for me financially as the hour session is $80 as well as the $18 train ride to get into the city. I am nervous that my work I am doing this summer will not translate during the school year. Hopefully the trust will grow, but I also know that I have the paper work (Tom is wonderfully thorough is this area) to prove how hard I have worked. Removal from the program is not an option for me and my family. We moved across country, left family and friends, and it will not be in vain, hopefully…

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The month of April

April 6, 2007 by dennisbaker 

There is a month left of school! The work is beginning to pile up as we prepare for finals. Below is a list of the work that needs to be done. We will have to perform our acting scenes, Shakespeare monologue, and dance final for the faculty during finals week. School if officially over on May 9th. All the work below has to be memorized, which is what I will be doing this weekend:

1. Final scene for acting class

2. Final scene for directing class

3. “Chicago” poem for speech class

4. Final scene for Stage Combat

5. Shakespeare scene for Voice and Speech class

This year has FLOWN by and seems only recently that I started this program. This past month about twenty to twenty-five prospect students came out to visit. It brought back all the memories of coming to visit last year. Seeing how tired the students were, intrigued by the classes, and excited about beginning my studies. The students brought a refreshing energy and the feeling that we as first years need to remember how hard it is to get into a program like this and that we still need to be grateful even though we are tired and frustrated at times.

With the end of the semester upon us I have also began to think of procuring work for the summer. It has been difficult to do with so much going on. I have put out some feelers to the graduate students of different acting programs regarding web design. Some interest has been expressed and I hope to turn those prospects into a couple of jobs. I have auditioned for a couple of summer stock theaters, but nothing has come of that to date. I have a audition for the Princeton Summer Theater tomorrow. That being twenty minutes away, it would be a nice gig to do.

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