DENNIS BAKER » Graduate School

Praxis Theatre’s Exit Interview Series

Dennis Baker — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:00:54 +0000

Simon Rice starts the Exit Interviews series with the idea that, “Theatre schools are indeed strange places, seemingly full of contradiction.” I am a big fan of Praxis Theatre’s blog, and would probably be a fan of their work if I was living in Canada. One can dream. I thought the series was appropriate for my readers, as many are hear trying to figure out of if BFA/MFA programs is what they need or want.

Some quotes from Horne interview:
“I spent three out for the fours years being really terrified of fucking up and getting kicked out. What you should be doing is fucking up.”
“There is the competition of who can cry the most.”
“I think there are three people still from my class that are acting.”

“You can’t get lower than a B without getting kicked out. Then it becomes a scare tactic if half way through the term when they show you your marks and its a C+ and your like fuck, I have to, but I don’t know how you get better. How did you come up with this number? It is not because I got a certain number of math questions wrong. Those numbers I understand. I am just not as interesting as this other person?

Exit Interviews Part I: Theatre schools are strange places
Exit Interviews: Christine Horne

Don’t Think, Act.

Dennis Baker — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:35:45 +0000

Doing a lot of reading in preparation for the Sojourn Theater Summer Institute. Here are some that are sticking with me:

Educating the Creative Theatre Artist by Sonja Kuftinec
“Should we be training students more pre-professionally, undergraduates for performance jobs and graduates for teaching jobs? Or should we focus more on interdisciplinary collaborations across fields that would redefine students as inquirers and artistic entrepreneurs? Surveys…suggest a focus on redefining undergraduates as artistic entrepreneurs, while experience with graduate students…suggests a model for more explicit teacher training.”

“…when asked what they would teach and what they wish they had been taught, reveal what might be lacking in some of our undergraduate training: collaboration, ensemble building, idea development, interdisciplinary approaches to creating art, listening, conflict resolution, community engagement, and application of artistic skills in a wide range of settings.”

“Conventional [undergraduate] production (and I would add BFA pre-professional) training tends to recycle a system that emphasizes the passivity of the individual actor rather than graduating students who can think critically and creatively about the value of theatre in society and who act upon those thoughts.”

Rehearsing Democracy: Advocacy, Public Intellectuals, and, Civic Engagement in Theatre, and Performance Studies by Jill Dolan
“A member of the acting faculty in my department at the University of Texas at Austin has a decal pasted on his office door designed in the ubiquitous Ghostbusters symbolic style that transliterates as â€œDonâ€™t Think, Act.â€ Although I very much respect this man and his work with students and department productions, walking past this declaration of his values each day challenges everything I believe in as a theatre educator.”

Must Read Theater Education Blog Posts

Dennis Baker — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:46:12 +0000

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.

Truth About Theater Education

Dennis Baker — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:37:27 +0000

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.

True Community Theater?

Dennis Baker — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 04:51:48 +0000

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 Cornerstoneâ€™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 donâ€™t go to the theatre really, truly donâ€™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 â€“ the assuaging of their guilt. Once you fully understand the reality that people who donâ€™t go to the theatre really, truly donâ€™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, donâ€™t you really want to produce theatre for those who want to be there, and can afford to be there? Isnâ€™t that what counts? Isnâ€™t that where the road to your professional success truly lies? You donâ€™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 â€“ and what an inconvenience that would be! I mean, you just canâ€™t get a good bagel and a smear out there! – Whatâ€™s all the fuss about? (Or why the NEA study shows how successful we are!)

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TEDtalks: Sir Ken Robinson says School Kills Creativity

Dennis Baker — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:19:09 +0000

“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 Workshopâ€™s Things of Dry Hours.

Video Excerpt of Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America

Dennis Baker — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:42:33 +0000

Tom Loughlin’s MFA in Acting

Dennis Baker — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:17:03 +0000

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. Daiseyâ€™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 â€œemperorâ€™s new clothesâ€ situation. It is not that universities are out there deliberately trying to defraud students of money (the â€œponzi schemeâ€ reference), but rather that they are simply refusing to acknowledge whatâ€™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 – itâ€™s now a castle in ruins.

MFA Theater Programs = Ponzi Scheme?

Dennis Baker — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 03:15:14 +0000

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 commonsâ€”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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Mike Daisey on MFA theater programs

Dennis Baker — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:57:14 +0000

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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