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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True Community Theater?

December 25, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

Given the reputation as one who is possibly more tenacious than The Prof about the necessity to make artists part of a community, I could not pass up reflecting on Tom Loughlin’s post about the 2008 NEA survey. Loughlin’s reflection/passion reminds me of a need for what Cornerstone Theater Company did between 1986-1991. According to their website, they created twelve musical productions in ten states. These shows were epic interactions between classic plays and specific American communities: Moliere’s disintegrating and combative families in the Kansas farmland, Shakespeare’s civil strife in the streets of Mississippi, and Aeschylus’ ancient rituals on a modern Native American reservation.

“With each of the 13 communities that Cornerstone visited, one of their goals was to leave behind a group of local people, experienced in how to do theater and infused with the love and understanding of “community theater”. The community residents involved with Peer Gynt formed Stage East upon Cornerstone’s departure. Beginning with their first performance of Play Boy of the Western World in the fall of 1990, Stage East has provided a wide range of theater, three and four productions every year, involving audiences and young people and adults both on and back stage, in the creativity and excitement of the theater experience.” (Stage East Bio, Picture from production of Peer Gynt)

During graduate school, my Applied Theater class watched a documentary on Cornerstone’s work during that time and it has stuck with me. Due in part to the cast being a mix of professional actors from Cornerstone and the community members, it was even more of an incentive to attend the production as the audience wanted to see their fellow community members, but also the productions were speaking to the issues within the specific community. The power of communal storytelling created a “reality that people who don’t go to the theatre really, truly don’t want [wanted] to go to the theatre”. I have been wondering if what Cornerstone did could be replicated over twenty years later. Is there enough artists out there who would be willing? What would such a project look like now? Does it have to be a traveling company? Can the same work be done within the community in which the theater practitioners live or are the theater artists minds focused on the gigs that will get them to NY/LA/Chicago? I am concerned that if the mindset/work of theater practitioners continue to focus on those reflected in the NEA study, true community theater will be lost.

Below is a paragraph from Loughlin’s post. There is no summary I can give that would give this post justice. All I can do is to implore you to read it.

Hopefully by pointing all this out I have given the theatre world a holiday gift it can truly appreciate – the assuaging of their guilt. Once you fully understand the reality that people who don’t go to the theatre really, truly don’t want to go to the theatre, you can then stop feeling guilty about declining attendance, lack of diversity, class inequities and the like. After all, don’t you really want to produce theatre for those who want to be there, and can afford to be there? Isn’t that what counts? Isn’t that where the road to your professional success truly lies? You don’t really want the American public in your theatres, do you? Why, that might mean getting theatre out into America, and having more artists live out in America, and meet everyday Americans of all sorts of backgrounds and income levels and ethnic backgrounds and political persuasions – and what an inconvenience that would be! I mean, you just can’t get a good bagel and a smear out there! – What’s all the fuss about? (Or why the NEA study shows how successful we are!)

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Filed under: Acting, Chicago, Graduate School, Los Angeles, New York, Shakespeare, Theater/Theatre
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TEDtalks: Sir Ken Robinson says School Kills Creativity

May 25, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

“In the next 30 years more people world wide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything. When I was a student if you had a degree you had a job and if you didn’t have a job it is because you didn’t want one. Now you need an M.A. where the previous job required a B.A. and now you need a PhD for the other. Its the process of academic inflation. It indicates the whole structure of education of shifting beneath our feet.”

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4 days left to win the Twitter Ticket Contest. Click here to Retweet (RT) the free one ticket giveaway for the May 31st performance of New York Theatre Workshop’s Things of Dry Hours.

Filed under: Creativity, Graduate School, Teaching
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Video Excerpt of Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America

March 9, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

Filed under: Acting, Graduate School, Theater/Theatre
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Tom Loughlin’s MFA in Acting

February 12, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

Go right now and read Tom Louglin’s journey to getting an MFA in acting. Below is a preview:

Let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Daisey’s point of view. Taken as a whole, MFA programs are by and large selling a false product. But rather than seeing this situation as deliberately fraudulent, I would prefer to cast this more in the light of understanding it as an “emperor’s new clothes” situation. It is not that universities are out there deliberately trying to defraud students of money (the “ponzi scheme” reference), but rather that they are simply refusing to acknowledge what’s right before their very eyes – that the system is stark naked of value or meaning. Mr. Daisey is merely the young child in the crowd pointing that fact out.

What is fundamentally wrong with the MFA system today is exactly what was wrong with it 27 years ago when I was an MFA candidate. Its only true market value lies in the fact that it is a terminal academic degree. Every college professor who has an MFA knows this in their heart, and yet MFA programs in this country by and large are simply unwilling to admit it. Beyond a handful of very exclusive and well-connected programs, it has very little value in the actual theatrical marketplace. Just ask the thousands of unemployed or underemployed actors out there with the degree.

MFA programs are selling an expensive and crumbling myth. If the model had any promise at all – and it probably did when the regional theatre movement had its own promise of community-based ensemble companies – it’s now a castle in ruins.

Filed under: Acting, Graduate School, Theater/Theatre
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MFA Theater Programs = Ponzi Scheme?

February 9, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

Various reactions have come up in regards to Mike Daisey’s original blog post about MFA theater programs.

I like how Daisey responds and reminds the readers that his focus was on “institutional choice to charge tuition that have no relationship with the craft they are teaching.” and “If a teacher is teaching in an MFA program that charges a tuition its students can never pay through the craft, the onus is on the teacher to justify for his or herself how this can be ethical.”

Does the teacher, that is within the academic system that charges a total sum of money that can not be paid off within the profession they are being trained for, have a responsibility to justify why this is ethical? Or do they turn the blind eye because they are getting a steady pay check? I agree with an additional post by Daisey when he states:

I would argue that perhaps one of the largest pitfall network effects of a capitalist society is the tragedy of the commons—in this case it is possible that a universally needed resource (future artists) is being exploited to ensure economic stability for the system today. By telling theater artists today that they must have training, and then making that training out of context to the industry they will be practicing their craft in we hurt the art form as a whole. I’ve had some fantastic teachers in my life, and I love teaching myself. That doesn’t absolve me or anyone else of the responsibility to call out a broken system for its problems.

The thrust of Daisey’s argument lies in the idea that it is very difficult for future theater artists to create theater when they are racked with debt from MFA programs. Most MFA acting programs pride themselves with the notion they are creating professional artists and not teachers. Yet many MFA actors have to look for teaching jobs when they graduate to pay off the debt from school as well as to sustain a living. We might not see the ramifications now, but like the Ponzi Scheme, this pattern of behavior will soon catch up with us.

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Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Graduate School, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Mike Daisey on MFA theater programs

January 25, 2009 by Dennis Baker 

Mike Daisey has written an excellent post about the cost of MFA theater programs and how that affects artists. Some highlights are below, but I recommend reading the whole blog post.

“This deepens these programs’ legitimacy, and the participants dig themselves in more and more. When I talk to young people in schools, I am constantly asked which MFA programs I would recommend. They are routinely lied to and told baldly that without MFA training they couldn’t possibly be ready to perform for the public. In undergraduate programs professors of the theater (who very often have never come near the professional theater) push students on to further studies, encouraging them to believe they need further training before working.”

“Where is this process happening in theater? Where are older actors and artists advising the next generation on what to do with their debt? This is an essential process, and we learn nothing if each generation has to blindly stumble forward.

I’ll tell you where they are: they are nowhere. They have no answers, and no venues to speak them in. Artists in the American theater see a life devoid of support, to such an extent that they have no answers for themselves, much less the next generation.”

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Filed under: Graduate School, Theater/Theatre
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NYU Educational Theatre Blog

December 24, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

I have worked up a relationship with the marketing department at NYU Steinhardt and they are having me write a blog of my experience in the NYU Educational Theater program that they will feature on their student blog page. I was happy to do this as I found the blogs very helpful when I was applying and waiting to start classes. In the graduate program you are thrown in pretty fast without much preparation. I am sure the administration figures we are graduate students and don’t need help finding the bookstore, classes, etc. While all this is true its good to hear from the students about what they are learning and experiencing in their classes and as a whole being at NYU. So most of my school related educational theater topics will be posted over there, but no worries I will still keep the DENNIS BAKER LLC readers informed of any broader news.

Filed under: Graduate School, NYU Steinhardt, New York, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Artistic Diversification

December 22, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

There has been a couple of things rolling around in my head and I think they are all connected. It started when I was talking with a fellow NYU Educational Theatre student who works in the office a major theater here in New York. He was telling me that three other major theaters let go of all their teaching artists, some that were hired as recently as September. New York City is getting sacked with major layoffs, with the national numbers reaching 533,000. The arts in general are getting hit pretty hard as it seems theater across the nation are closing on a weekly basis as the National Endowment for the Arts found that the audiences for straight plays are in decline. There are a couple of students I know from the program who are graduating with the disheartening feeling of entering into a field that is not hiring anyone. Then again does the arts really ever have enough jobs and funding?

Which leads me to the idea of diversification. If any one has been listening to the news recently many people, corporations and foundations have lost millions of money from investing with Madoff’s alleged Ponzi Scheme. Some loosing everything as they invested 100% of their savings. This reminded me of the discussion that is taking places over at the post Abolish Undergraduate Art Majors. I think artists have been sold a bill of goods that tells them they must pursue their art at all cost and be one with the starving artist persona. They must have those low paying jobs (waiter, bartender, etc.) so they are flexible for auditions and workshops. Though with those jobs its hard to pay for the actor’s life of headshots, classes, workshops and have any real sort of savings for emergencies and retirement. That’s not to even mention health benefits. So what happened if the students I mentioned above, and all the other BFA and MFA theater students who will be graduating this spring, thought to diversify themselves. What if they also took classes or got a second degree in business, computer graphics, or web design? They could take jobs in another field to build up a savings and afford to pay for all the actor necessities. If you think you can afford to be an actor because you don’t need to take classes as you just graduated with a theater/acting degree, than pause here and go read a great article over at Art of Function about university ego.

Masi Oka, who currently plays Hiro on Heroes, did something similar. Oka decided to take a risk putting his digital effects career on hold as he pursued acting in Los Angeles. “While I was working at ILM [in San Francisco], I also studied acting and I got my SAG card.” Taking a leave of absence from ILM, Oka moved to Los Angeles to immerse himself in auditions. “Six months passed and I ran out of money very quickly,” Oka says. “So when I was looking for a job, ILM told me that they had a LA commercial division, which unfortunately now is defunct, so at the time I worked from there. My intention was never to leave ILM, I just wanted to try acting while I still could. However, I had it in my contract that if I didn’t get a supporting role or recurring role in a pilot in six months I would have to go back to ILM in San Francisco. At that time I was very naive, thinking getting one pilot should be enough to know if I was going to make it as an actor or not. Anyone pursuing a creative career knows that it’s about persevering. It’s a marathon, not just a sprint. So it was a gamble in many ways.” After landing many guest spots, and bit parts in movies, he landed his current role in Heroes.

The key was Oka had diversity and was able to work on digital effects (which I am sure paid better than a waiter) to help sustain his acting career. In computer related jobs many people are capable of working from home. So once you put in the hours of working at the office, and show that you are an asset, some companies will want to keep you and will let you work from home (or give you a more flexible schedule) so that you can still pursue other careers.

So you graduate and are ready to hit the pavement, get those auditions and nail that job you have been training the last four years for at your undergraduate theater program. Instead, maybe you take the next year or two and land a job that pays pretty well and has the potential of being flexible in the future. You might say I could never take a year off to work in a cubicle. Really? The entertainment/theater industry is not going anywhere. And who knows, after that year you might have a good paying job that you can work from home and can afford to go to auditions, classes, workshops and also save money for health benefits and retirement. Believe me in that year most (if not all) your theater classmates will not have gotten so far in their careers that with a little hard work, you would be able to catch up. Remember its a marathon, so set your self up with a firm finical foundation to be able to run that marathon and enjoy the scenery along the way.

Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, Chicago, Film, Graduate School, Los Angeles, NYU Steinhardt, New York, Theater/Theatre
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