Theatre Education Part 1: How We Got Here

There’s a series of posts appearing over here. I can’t remember where I found them; probably it was a Google Alert on stagehand. For the Green Page I have alerts set with Google and Yahoo on “Stagehand” and “IATSE” as they seemed like to fairly uncommon words that are significant to me. I cross posted one of the articles to the Green Page, and the author tracked it back and left a comment. I always think it’s cool when that happens. Next, several students read that piece and chose to comment on it for their weekly Green Page commitment. This year we have a Freshman, Sophomore, and a Junior class all required to follow the page and do five comments a week as verification. I think its coming along nicely. We’re actually getting some cross-talk going and I think community awareness is building – and that was the whole point. Some of the Seniors are even still reading even though we don’t have a requirement for them.

So after several students comment on how CMU is developing in reference to the original article, the original author placed another comment asking for some specific examples of what they were talking about. I then emailed him and he emailed me and I sent him the answers which he asked if he could post. Being that I am as conceited as any other blogger, and also because there were some details that ought to be redacted, and to allow me to add a little bit more I suggested that I would post here and he could link to me, and I would link back to him and we could have our own little promotion party.

So here we are.

Here’s the starting point: Theatre Ideas: Theatre Education Part 1: How We Got Here

And here are the student comments: News From the “Real World”: Theatre Education Part 1: How We Got Here

Here is the question:

David -- I am looking for theatre departments that have created a curriculum that would help students question the status quo, think outside the box, and lead them to explore the larger questions that inform the practice of theatre. In other words, a curriculum that helps students to knowledgeably create their own aesthetic and worldview rather than develop skills that simply fit into the current aesthetic and worldview. Several people seemed to post about CMU, so I was curious how this was happening!

And here, is the answer:

So I should set this up by saying that we've been in the midst of something like a 4 year process of enforced navel gazing. CMU has an advisory board system and the last advisory visit produced a report that said that we weren't necessarily supporting our mission and that curricular decisions didn't always make sense internally or in how they interfaced with production. Coming out of that were a Mission/Vision project and a top to bottom curricular review. I don't think that in the absence of that process that we would have come to be thinking about many of the things that lead to some of the changes students were talking about on the green page.

The mission is about what you'd think it would be. The more important thing was the group produced five supporting "pillars" of that mission. For all the decisions that followed we always measure the ideas against the rubric of the pillars. Those pillars are: Education, Leadership, Experimentation, Diversity, and Community. I'm sure that sounds bland and it's true that nearly everything can be fit into Education or Community, but having them as a measuring stick really has forced us to evaluate decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and production with a much clearer focus.

Also, having a rubric at all gave us permission to throw out "that's how it's done" as justification for anything.

So, some examples of how that played out…

Season Selection. We've completely turned upside down our season selection process. Instead of having standard scope of production and a "big show in the big theatre" mentality each teacher submits a "lab request" detailing the kind of experience they feel like their students need at that time. The requests are then "matched" into productions of all flavors. The result of this has already produced a "mainstage" in our studio, an off site, site-specific production, a multi-venue, multi aesthetic Orestia, and this year a period, traveling Comedia wagon. There's still the more traditional discussion of titles, but the new process has really thrown open the range of possible modes of outcome.

Playground. We've instituted a student festival. For one week each year we cancel all classes and students can mount their own projects start to finish. Really the only parameters are that it has to happen during that week, it has no budget, and it must include at least one School of Drama student. At the end of the week, the shows are presented in a sort of marathon-fringe. We've had cabarets, 90 minute versions of just about every kind of play or musical, we've had site-specific work, murals, light shows – last year there was a game of Monopoly "performed" on a 30'x30' board in our lobby. Students are encouraged to cross disciplines: designers direct, technicians act, and so on. For the part of the population that doesn't elect to simply take the week off it's been electric.

Hit/Lit/Crit. In the curricular review we committed to making course content in History, Literature, and Criticism equally important as craft and skills. Along with this we placed a real emphasis on writing. The consensus was that these fundamentals were critical for students to be able to produce more than the status quo. We're also working with other schools here in the College of Fine Arts on a sort of "Connections" style Arts Histories class tying art of all kinds to history and context. In the School of Drama all students have to take six semesters of Drama Lit.

Basic PTM/PINO. In Design & Production we've always had a Basic Design class. This class abstracts the elements of design that will be applied to theatre on down the road: line, shape, symmetry, color. As part of the curricular review we created a similar course for Production. One semester abstracts technical subjects: tension, compression, shear, mass, acceleration, frequency, amplitude. The other semester abstracts management subjects: Communication, Sequence, Capacity, Critical Path, and Leadership. As part of the development of this course we discovered a raft of meta-skills we now call "PINO" for Production Information Nuance, and Organization – also because Joe Pino teaches the classes, but mostly because the working name "Too Stupid to Teach" seemed like it wouldn't look right on a syllabus. The germ of the thing is here: Common Sense Items but you can think of it as "turn on the light" or "work on a table" or maybe even "walk and chew gun at the same time." I guess the real application to what you were asking is that this is intended to stimulate lateral thinking and to get people to look at themselves in context.

OSWALD. I swear to God the thought behind the OSWALD class is "help students question the status quo, think outside the box, and lead them to explore the larger questions." Another creature largely of Joe Pino, but also Anne Mundell our Design Coordinator and then to a lesser extent the rest of us OSWALD is intended to help people learn to think, challenge assumptions, broaden horizons, and form their own measuring sticks. Like P.I.N.O. above, OSWALD stands for –REDACTED-. For a while the course was called "&^$%&#$." The problem was that in development, as soon as we put a more conventional name on it like "charette" or "practicum" or "sandbox" we found that the name brought with it expectations. For our own ability to break the mold we had to come up with not only new content, but new language. As a sideline, the students are going NUTS trying to figure out what it stands for. I can't tell you what they're doing in there because it's the first time through and I am not one of the teachers. I know the first day was a sort of scavenger hunt taking them all around campus looking for clues. There's a day coming up where –REDACTED-. There was talk of having someone come in with no preamble and start teaching –REDACTED-. There's no course outline; in the university catalog it says "a course sophomore Design and PTM students have to take, bring tools." It's taught as an 8 week intensive, meeting five days a week. Are we hitting our target? Is it working? We don't know, but so far we're happy with where it's going. Evaluation will have to wait a few years I think.

There are other things that might fit into the vein we're discussing, but I think those are the biggest contributors. I should say too that we're not all in agreement about the validity of these initiatives. There's a big population that says "our people are already successful, why are we monkeying with this?" But to many of us it does seem essential.

So, that’s where the discussion is here. I apologized for the editing, but there are students that read this blog and things pertaining specifically to the OSWALDs that we don’t want to tip.

There are a couple more things I should mention too.

The season selection not only turned to “lab review” based on the needs of courses, but in a fairly shattering moment is also supposed to be the end of the service posture. By this I mean that nobody is ever supposed to have to do something with their students exclusively because another program needs it for their students. This is I think groundbreaking. My impression is that a fair number of design and technical programs really only exist as service providers to acting and directing. This really wasn’t the case at CMU, but we still often found ourselves supporting shows because someone else “needed” a show. Since the lab review doesn’t allow for something to happen that isn’t directly related to pedagogy, if one group needs a show, and the other group doesn’t have someone for whom that production experience is manifestly constructive we're supposed to hire the missing piece rather than coerce someone into a service assignment. So far for one show or another we’ve hired designers, technical heads, technical crews, and even actors (we’d been hiring directors all along for another reason). It’s proving a tough transition culturally, and it is playing havoc with budgeting, but I think it is so special I sometimes can’t believe we managed to get here. While this doesn’t specifically relate to the idea of innovation regarding artistic development, I think it is absolutely groundbreaking with regard to Drama education.

I should also add for my Dramaturgy colleagues that there is a second component to the lab review to build on top of the nature of the pieces. We’re also charting each production against a rotating checklist of sorts guaranteeing that within a three year window students see something (if not a fairly equal representation) from several specific categories which I will now forget, but I think I might be: Classical Antiquity, Renaissance, Post War, Modern Drama, and World Stages. We’re told by our literature faculty that the investment in tying dramaturgy to season is fairly atypical, happening in something less than 5% of programs.

Probably worth mentioning as well was that the idea for the creation of the News From the “Real World” page and the reading requirement were also a direct result of the strategic plan and the curricular review. So in some small way an individual commitment to innovation was what made this discussion possible.

For me though, I think, we’re only just beginning. We still haven’t really figured out how to implement many of the decisions we made, we’re far from comfortable with the implementations we’ve undertaken, we’ve got two more years of classes to revise – and then the grad program to look at, and even then it could be years before we get any real indication of if the things we’re doing are having a positive effect. But I think this is a good thing. Although it has fostered quite a bit of turmoil in our school, and made for a lot of work for many of us I believe that the commitment to leadership demands that turmoil and work; and if we don’t get to stop, and have to keep adjusting that those adjustments are the process of innovation at work in our program. Even though they are tough, these are probably all things to be embraced.