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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Shakespeare Handbook

December 20, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

I created a Shakespeare Handbook as part of my final project for my Shakespeare I class. It can be used as an aid for teachers, students and artists. There is a list of group exercises we did with the Youth Ensemble, as well as observations, play analysis and dramaturgy. There is also a journal where I recorded my thoughts observations about each class session and our rehearsal process for our class presentation. I will continue to blog next semester during the Shakespeare II class.

Filed under: Acting, Graduate School, NYU Steinhardt, Shakespeare, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Abolish Undergraduate Art Majors

November 3, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

Article Review
“A Modest Proposal” by Tony Kushner, American Theatre, January 1998
Keynote address to Association of Theatre of Higher Education Conference

I don’t think you earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, the artist is what you do, whether or not you’re paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation. What we call education in the arts is mostly training; it is, in fact vocational training.

This being the year of my ten-year high school reunion I could not help but look back to see what has become of my twenty-eight years of living. While the creation of social media outlets like facebook and myspace allows one to easily connect with people from the past, one’s ideals, hopes and goals of days gone might not so easily within reach.

The summer before my senior year in high school I just had been through a “mountain-top” experience at the two-week seminar for high school juniors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. With all the passion and drive of a hormonal seventeen year old, I was ready to enter my senior year and begin my life devotion to the theater. I quit the basketball team to assistant direct the one play that was produced that year and pursued acting and auditioning outside of school.

That January I read the article “A Modest Proposal” by Tony Kushner published in the American Theatre magazine. I was floored by his premise to abolish all undergraduate art majors. Being from a small town in central California, where the cows at times out numbered the people and my total graduation class was a couple of hundred students, I thought maybe this was crazy east coast, liberal arts ideals rearing its ugly head. As I read the article I grew to appreciate the ideas Kushner proposed, specifically the desire for young artists to receive an education and not merely vocational training. I wished I could say I followed his advice, but I fell into the trap of training. I moved to Los Angeles so I could get an undergraduate degree in communication and theater. Like many students I thought it was the best situation. I was able to get a degree, study theater and pursue acting in Los Angeles. Many good things came from that decision, a beautiful wife, life long friends and studying with some great mentors, but looking back I wonder if I sacrificed formative years of education at the alter of vocational training. As I pursue a graduate degree in theater education I decided to re-read Kushner’s article to see what has changed, if anything. Undergraduate art majors are growing more than ever so what can be taken away from the article now?

Kushner’s proposal is simple: abolish all undergraduate art majors. His thesis is wrapped in the idea that the institutions have exchanged education for vocational training, “since the undergraduate arts majors mill is almost as profitable for cash-strapped institutions of higher learning as pesticide development and biochemical warfare research, certainly considerably more profitable than liberal arts departments”. Colleges and universities main goal is to make money and with so many people wanting to pursue the arts, the schools are going to go where the money is flowing. What college would deny eighteen year old students the “right” to pursue a major in theater, visual arts, writing, filmmaking, photography or musical composition? According to Kusher, schools that elevated education over training. “Education, as opposed to training, I think, addresses not what you do, or will do, or will be able to do in the world. Education addresses who you are, or will be, or will be able to be.”

How is one supposed to study to be an artist? Vocational training in of itself is not bad. The article points out there are many graduate programs, conservatories and private schools in all major cities that will be happy to take your money for exchange in how to make it in the profession. Seventeen through twenty-one year old undergraduate students don’t need vocational arts training, they need an education. “Think of the liberal arts, in other words, as meta-Acting Training for Life.”

Kusher continues, “The vocalization of the liberal arts undergraduate education echoes the loss in the world at large of interest in the grand dialectic of life, in all dialectics, in breadth, in depth, in thinking as a necessary luxury, in the Utopian.” Jill Dolan in her book Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre and in her speech to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education entitled “Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students” continues where Kushner left off. She is a practioner of the idea that education should be the focus and models this at Princeton University where the school’s motto of arts education seems to echo what Kushner recommends.

Believing that the best training for a career in the theater is a broad-based liberal arts education, Princeton does not have a concentration in Theater. Instead, we offer a certificate in Theater and encourage students, should they have the inclination, to make connections in their artistic work between their fields of concentration and their love of the theater. The program offers the kinds of courses and co-curricular activities that will allow the student, upon graduation, to move into the best graduate conservatories to pursue advanced training in playwriting, acting, directing, design, stage management, and dramaturgy. But most students who take courses in the program do not elect to enter the certificate program; they simply enroll in the courses that interest them. Students with a particular interest in and commitment to the arts, however, may want to obtain the program certificate.

This mindset seems to be echoed in the work of Dr. Scott Walters in the writings of his blog Theatre Ideas and his work at University of North Carolina-Asheville. In a recent post he describes the sympathy for the students in trying to embrace this type of arts education.

And so when they arrive in a class like Dolan’s, or in my own, they revolt against the attempt [from teachers] to encourage them to think, to develop their own ideas, their own beliefs, and develop them as part of a rich conversation that has been ongoing for 2500 years — because they know that it is a lie; that once they leave that particular classroom, they will once again be forced to erase themselves. Why go through the pain of developing as a unique individual when one must rejoin the masses again in order to survive, to be cast? I have sympathy for them, because they have been told that there are no alternatives, and those who have revolted against those limited opportunities by college have self-selected themselves into other departments, other field of endeavor.

In a undergraduate performing arts program the mentality is to shape the curriculum based on the industry. The problem is that colleges and universities are not supposed to be extensions of the entertainment industry, but rather they are to produce what Dolan calls artist-citizen-scholars. Artists that question society and through their art speak for those that do not have a voice. Instead performing art students are trained to accept the fact that they are viewed by all in the industry as an equivalent of a coke can, a product that is to make money for agents, managers, producers, advertising firms and production companies and if they are lucky have some money left over for themselves.

As Kushner pointed out ten years ago, “I can say let’s get rid of it and we don’t have to worry that anything will actually happen.” The same holds true now. As long as it makes money the schools will not get rid of undergraduate art majors or offer sufficent alternatives. As an educator what can I hope for is that there will be more teachers like Dolan and Walters who try to change the system from within. Teachers who show the students an alternative so that one or two might see the current form of arts education as a facade and that an education that can truly benefit an artist is much bigger and broader than what is currently being offered. How is this specifically to be done? Kushner’s suggests, “What I would hope you might consider doing is tricking your undergraduate art major students. Let them think they’ve arrived for a vocational training and then pull a switcheroo. Instead of doing improv rehearsals, make them read The Death of Ivan Illych and find some reason why this was necessary in learning improv.”

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Filed under: Acting, Auditioning, NYU Steinhardt, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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Theaterosphere thoughts on Educational Theater

August 10, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

Educational Theater is getting talked about on the theaterosphere.  Laura mentions over at Trailing Spouse 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 Steinhardt.  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.

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Educational Theatre – NYU Steinhardt

May 31, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

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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Filed under: Graduate School, NYU Steinhardt, New York
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School: Teacher & Student

February 12, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

So you might be wondering what is next in regards to school for me. I applied/auditioned to four MFA programs: USD, Delaware, Fullerton, and Shakespeare Theater in DC. I have the Shakespeare Theater audition this Saturday and I have completed the other auditions. Fullerton at first seemed like they were interested, but I have researched and heard that the main acting teacher is very similar to the one at Rutgers. If that is the case, I will probably not attend. Unless the Shakespeare Theater audition goes amazingly it looks more and more like an MFA program will not be in my future.

We know we will be living in the east coast for at least another year so I applied to the M.A. in Educational Theater at NYU Steinhardt. I have mixed feelings about the program. They have a focus for people that want to teach at the college level which interests me, but I always told myself that I would not fall back on an MA program. With that said this has been a year of complete change and slowly comes the realization that one does not get to choose everything in life. Some paths in life are chosen for him/her. The program is 36 units total and can be completed in three semesters. If I am accepted and start this summer I could be done in the spring. That sounds very appealing.

In regards to teaching, I have applied for a part time drama teaching position at the Brearley School in New York. It is a position that will begin in the fall. It would work well with the NYU program as I could teach during the day and take classes at night and on weekends. I was also was hired on last week as a substitute teacher for the Grace Church School. They hired me and put me in a classroom all in the same day. I spent most of the week teaching various subjects from ages K-8th grade.

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Filed under: NYU Steinhardt, New York, Teaching, Theater/Theatre
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