Filed under: art institutions, education, theatre | Tags: Arts Education, cook, curriculum, education, teaching artist, theatre education
It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom but an interview about my time at BAM and a journey through some old files have gotten me thinking about it some. It feels like I miss it a little bit and I’ve been trying to work out what part of it is still calling to me.
I’m not nostalgic for being in a classroom. I suppose I miss being with the students some but I don’t miss the toxic environments that most schools tend to be. I think what I really miss is inventing exercises. That’s the creative bit. For me, it was a satisfying stretch of my artistic muscles to create an experience for students that will help them discover something about a work of art. I was pretty good at it, I think.
Was everything I made up a hit? Hell no. There’s a high rate of failure in creating curriculum, especially when results can be so uneven. I’ve taught exercises that were tried and true across many schools and then, for whatever reason, it would just tank in a random class, for no obvious reason. Teaching Artistry can be a little like stand-up comedy in that success and abject failure are on either side of a very thin knife and you can never be sure your best bit is going to work.
But still – I made up some good stuff, some of it as ephemeral as an improvised scene and some of it has made its way through the channels such that I sometimes found my own invented exercise coming back to me from elsewhere.
Arts Education – and maybe just education in general – tends to be a haphazard collection of what a teacher has learned from elsewhere. In classrooms, teachers are hungry for things to try, games to explore, warm-ups to add to their repertoire. These are the things that can keep an arts teaching experience fresh – especially for a teacher who has a room full of expectant young people to teach and hours of class to fill.
Good exercises are good food to hungry teachers. And food is actually a good analogy, I think. For me, some parts of teaching are like being a chef. I’m creating new things, putting unexpected ingredients together, presenting new ways of looking at old material. And in other moments, teaching can be more like being a line cook – just getting the menu items the way they’ve always been prepared on the table as fast as possible.
So what I’m realizing is that I miss being a chef sometimes though not being a line cook. This is actually one of the things that made me quit my job at BAM back in 2013, even though it felt like an artistic home and the place where I did some of my best work. The main program I worked for changed from one where they needed three consummate chefs to one where they just needed some line cooks to execute some dishes they’d hand down to us. And after 13 years of cheffing, I just couldn’t become a line cook.
For an administration, standardizing the curriculum is very sensible. They can clearly articulate their product. They know that each classroom is getting more or less the same experience. They can, more or less, mass produce an arts education experience. You don’t need to pay chef wages. You can even hire people who’ve never cooked before and just give them the recipe. I understand the appeal. Divorcing the art on the stage from the work in the classroom means you can replicate the same thing over and over. You can have mass produced marketing materials. That’s all very convenient and I do understand why it seemed like the right thing to do. But to me, it was like taking a Michelin star restaurant where a chef tailors the meal to the diners and turning it into a McDonalds. And from what I understand, even the McDonalds is out of business there now.
I suppose when I think about the circumstances under which I would return to teaching, it’s clear I could only come back to a place that hires chefs. I’m not interested in being a line cook at McDonalds. Or, given that it seems to be the invention of curriculum that still interests me – maybe I should just write a cook book.
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Filed under: art institutions, education, Shakespeare, theatre | Tags: access, accessibility, Arts Education, arts institutions, education, fiction, hip-hop, literature, Marvel movies, Shakespeare, theatre
In an interview about my work in Shakespeare education, I was asked what we did to make Shakespeare accessible to the students. I couldn’t help but laugh. To me, it’s like asking, “How do we make hip hop accessible to the students? How do we make Marvel movies accessible?”
You don’t have to make Shakespeare accessible. It just is. Does everyone love it? Nope. That’s ok. Not everyone loves Marvel movies either, believe it or not. But put a really fantastic Shakespeare play in front of students and they’re just as likely, if not more likely, to enjoy it, as a fancy grown-up crowd would.
Are there tools to help them engage with it more deeply? Absolutely. I use them all the time. But the only preparation the entire student audience at BAM had for Ralph Fiennes’ Richard the Second was a 45 minute workshop from me in their classroom. And those students were INTO that show. Richard the Second! Not A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard the Freaking Second. They get it. They got it. It wasn’t that hard.
This is true of most rigorous art works. My friend has his students watch four hours of a Wagner opera in his class. Not all at once, granted. But despite lots of people declaring that those students aren’t really capable of engaging with complex music, they love it. They’re into it. They benefit from context, sure – certainly in the way that I’d maybe enjoy a Marvel movie more if someone broke down some of the related back stories for me before I went. But – ultimately – it’s not a special skill to be able to enjoy or engage with a work of art.
The conversation around accessibility is entirely backwards. We don’t need to be discussing how to make things like Shakespeare accessible to students, in terms of their understanding, because it is easily done. Open the door to the work. Put powerful words in their mouths, maybe just a few at first but eventually they’ll be ready for all of them. Let their bodies be animated by exciting language and the access has happened. The real difficulty of access is making sure everyone is welcome in the building. It’s making sure people with disabilities can come and experience everything. It’s making sure there are affordable tickets for people who want to attend. That’s the main accessibility issue as far as I’m concerned.
Many times, I’ve been a part of breaking open a student’s world by bringing them to see some amazing show and they fall in love with the language and the feeling and the world. But how will they return? How could they afford a ticket without the grant funded student trip? How could they bring their grandmother to see what they have seen? That’s the accessibility I’m concerned about.
I’ve seen too many students, who others have counted out, take hold of Shakespeare’s language and shake the very foundations of their school. I will never forget the student who no one wanted to work with, who was a real pain in the ass for his teacher and whose school was in real trouble – and he took hold of Launcelot Gobbo’s speech in Merchant of Venice and showed us all. He thought he was rebelling doing it by himself – because I’d structured the speech as an Angel/Devil exercise for groups of three students. But he wanted to do it alone – and was so good – we brought him to BAM to showcase his work. That speech was his. He owned it. No one imagined he could do it but he was extraordinary.
I’ve learned that the program I spent thirteen years teaching Shakespeare for is gone. First, they cut off its limbs by separating it from live performance and then they just ran a sword through it so they don’t teach Shakespeare there at all anymore. That’s how you really make something inaccessible – you no longer give students access to it.
And on one hand, I understand it – Shakespeare’s hold on the American Theatre is extreme and it prevents the work of women and people of color from rising through the ranks. It is very important that we give voice to writers other than Shakespeare. But it’s not as if this theatre, that killed its Shakespeare for students program, has stopped producing Shakespeare for adult audiences. It’s just not for young people anymore and I’m afraid it’s from some misguided idea that they just can’t get it, that they are unable to understand it. Often people with fancy degrees think you need a fancy degree to be able to relate to Shakespeare. And I’m sorry but your fancy degree doesn’t give you special powers that a kid from East New York doesn’t have. You may be able to analyze the trochees but that kid knows how that show made him feel.
I feel like denying kids access to Shakespeare is denying them a multitude of valuable experiences. Could they learn to explore juicy language, expand their sense of possibility and self, discover a sense of size and power through another writer? Sure. Of course they could. Will they though? The movement has been toward non-fiction in schools. Shakespeare was the only one left. He was the only writer named in the Common Core. Sure, it’d be amazing if schools started teaching Adrienne Kennedy all of a sudden but I think it’s unlikely to happen. Students will just get less literature in general and they’ll see less live performance.
We have decades of Shakespeare education. The culture is rich in references to his work. Giving kids access to his language means they’re part of that conversation, not excluded from it. Giving kids powerful speeches to say means we’re giving them powerful models that they may have in their bones when they run for office down the road. It may mean they have richer images to be inspired by as they write the great works of the future. The more exciting rigorous and visceral language we can give young people to say, the more tools they’ll have for whatever they do.
Does it have to be Shakespeare? No. You could try some Christopher Marlowe. I’m a big Thomas Middleton fan myself. But trading one dead white man Renaissance writer for another doesn’t really help. And our culture has done a real great job of burying women and BIPOC writers so sometimes it’s hard to find writers that a school will recognize as “literature” but you know, please teach them anyway. Find the ones that get students fired up and please show us all. But meanwhile, we’ve got Shakespeare. His work has inspired people for hundreds of years. Don’t deny kids access to that power. That’s the real accessibility issue.
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Filed under: American, art, education, Justice, theatre | Tags: 12 Angry Men, Close Reading, education, educational theatre, fiction, jury service, Justice, law, learning, literature, Macbeth, Night Court, Obama, Shakespeare, The House of Blue Leaves, theatre in education
I don’t know why I think of this one classroom at a high school in Brooklyn – but every time I think of this bizarre turn that education took in which it decided that fiction no longer had a place in American schools, this moment when it leaned hard into non-fiction, I think of that classroom. It must have been where I heard that news, where I heard that this was a policy Obama supported and dropped my mouth open in shock. “Obama?! What is he thinking?”
This was a class for which I was doing workshops for the Broadway production of The House of Blue Leaves, a work of dramatic fiction that the students went to see. When the student next to me gasped with recognition at something the character did and later told me it was like her family member – well, I wished Obama could have been there to see the power of fiction.
I was thinking about how important the study of fiction has been to me and to my peers and what a shame it is that these muscles have been un-exercised in many American schools. I was thinking about it because I was on a jury and the process of deliberation felt familiar somehow and it wasn’t just because I’ve had to teach 12 Angry Men a few times. One of the things that surprised me about my fellow jurors was how much they were inclined to just make things up. Several of them came up with “theories” about the case, adding events and possibilities that had nothing to do with the question at hand. Over and over again I found myself saying, “Let me read the actual question.”
If these folks had been my students, I’d have done exactly the same. I would have asked where they saw that idea or concept and what was the evidence. In literary circles, we call this practice Close Reading. When you write a paper, you need to point to the place in the text where you got this idea or information. You can’t just make stuff up. I’m so practiced in this I don’t even know that I’m doing it sometimes. I mean, I like to make stuff up more than most people but there are the things we make up and things we don’t and even fiction has rules this way.
I feel like, if we’re going to ask people to sit on juries and deliberate and evaluate the evidence, we really need to give them practice and we need to give them practice on fictional people. There are no consequences to a misinterpreted fictional character. You can’t ruin a fictional person’s life by charting out the series of events they go through in the course of a work. Your conclusions about a fictional person have no power to send them to jail or condemn them to death. Maybe you think Macbeth didn’t kill the king. You’d be wrong. But, hey, why not? Kick that idea down the road. Show me the evidence. That search through the play will be illustrative and, in exploring it, you (hopefully) will find all the evidence that he did, in fact, kill the king.
I’ve been in a lot of classrooms where some well-meaning teacher puts a character on trial. They’ll put Macbeth in the witness box and have some kids play lawyers and interrogate him. While this is fun, sure, it’s almost always a mess, pedagogically speaking, because the kids will inevitably make stuff up that’s not in the play and suddenly the whole case will hinge on what Macbeth had for dinner. (This is something that almost happened in the jury deliberations I was in, by the way, when a juror wanted to send a question down to the court to ask what the plaintiff had had for dinner one night. This was just as irrelevant to the case as what Macbeth might have eaten at any point in the play.)
As we deliberated, I found myself in a fairly active role, bringing us back to the question we had to answer over and over and, at first. I didn’t understand why I fell in to that position then. I have no interest in the law. I have no law training. I’m not even a big Law and Order watcher. (Night Court, though – big fan.) But what I DO know how to do is analyze a character and the sequence of events of a narrative. I know where to look for evidence and I know not to make things up. That’s the main thing.
Students need to study fiction as much, if not more than, non-fiction for a whole lot of reasons beyond this skill of analysis, close reading and finding evidence. (Such things as empathy, aesthetics and imagination.) But the skills of analyzing literature, in particular, are what I found particularly useful in that jury room. (In addition to the practice of working quickly in a group that I learned and practiced in theatre.) I’m still shocked that Obama couldn’t recognize this when this policy began. He studied law. I know he’d want people to learn skills to help them be better citizens, to be better jury members. Learning literature is actually vital for our democracy, I think. If we care about having careful jurors, we might want to teach some fiction again.
JK – it’s the banquet scene from Macbeth. But what is on the table? What are they eating? What do ghosts have for dinner?
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Filed under: Acting, art, Art Scenes, dreams, education | Tags: disappointment, Oscar speech, potential, teachers, teaching
An artist friend told me about a dream they had in which one of their artistic teachers asked what they’d been up to in such a way that suggested great disappointment in this artist’s achievements. The artist was stunned and speechless. For a lot of artists, this is a highly relatable dream. Many of us had teachers or colleagues that felt we had a lot of potential in our youth and while most of them don’t come right out and say, “What happened?,” we can feel their disappointment. They thought we were going to make it and we didn’t. How disappointing for them!
I can tolerate this sort of thinking from bystanders. For all the people in my high school classes who told me to thank them in my Oscar speech, I do not carry your expectations heavily. I never thought I’d get an Oscar. I am not sorry I don’t have an Oscar and I’m not worried about my old classmates’ possible disappointment that they never saw me make an Oscar speech. My teachers, though – those responses have always carried more weight. They wanted me to succeed. I wanted to make them proud. It’s a bummer to feel I’ve disappointed anyone.
But the thing – when I look at this from the outside – at other artists’ feelings of disappointing their mentors, I just get angry at those mentors. Do you know how people succeed in the arts? (I mean, aside from being born to celebrities.) They succeed because someone helped them. No one, not even the children of famous people, gets anywhere without help from someone further up the ladder. Success in the Arts is not the wizardry it seems to be. It’s not like a young artist has some kind of magic that will lead them to make it. There is no enchanted sparkle teachers can spot or not spot. A teacher cannot wish a young artist out of obscurity. You can’t just hope your student will make it. If you’re invested in them, you have to actively help them. That’s how they do at Yale and Juilliard and that’s how those places maintain their hold on the American Theatre. Teachers introduce their students to people who can help them. They give them opportunities. I’ve been a teacher. I’ve done this to the best of my meager ability for the students I really believed in. There weren’t a lot of those – but the others, I have no right to be disappointed about. If I didn’t try to help, I get no say.
I had some amazing teachers. Some of them really continued to show up for me long after most people would have given up. They did what they could but when you don’t have a lot of power in a field, there’s not much to do. But if you DO have power in a field and you don’t try and help the students you were invested in? You lose your right to disappointment. It’s hard out there and you know it. If you gave someone an opportunity and they tanked it, okay – you can be disappointed, that’s fair. But you can’t be disappointed in your student for failing to get lucky.
We all hope the magic star will hover over the heads of people we believe in but magic stars are rare. They’re so rare they don’t even exist. People who end up with success end up with those successes because someone helped them. If you’re a teacher, you can be one of those people. Go ahead and help an artist out. You can feel proud of both the artist and yourself! If you’re not one of those people, you better rein your disappointment in, that’s not fair.
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Filed under: Acting, education, theatre | Tags: Acting, actor, actor training, monologues, theatre, theatre education, theatre training
Despite having written and created an audio drama podcast made up entirely of monologues, before now, I’d have told you I hated monologues. When casting actors, I would never ask for a monologue for the audition. I felt sure they could tell me nothing about what an actor would do in a show. I know I have delivered a few rants on the subject before. I could not fathom why preparing one classical and one contemporary monologue became a norm. As a director, I found them useless. My feeling was a monologue performance could only tell me whether that actor could do that monologue performance and not much more. It told me nothing about what they were like with other people, what their choices might be like for my show. Why did training programs rely so heavily on them when most directors I know prefer to see sides of the work they’re casting?
Today, I finally get it. I find myself intensely grateful for the way theatre trains actors with monologues. I feel like I finally understand why everyone bothers.
Because I’m in the middle of casting the second season of my audio drama, I have gotten a fresh perspective on what theatre folk do and what it takes for us to do it. This didn’t happen with Season One because every single one of the actors was a theatre person (among other things, of course). But the main thing was, I could give them pages of text and they could read it back into a microphone in such a way as it all made sense, that had a rhythm and a music to it. Every single one of the actors gave their work a shape and an arc and a series of beats. You would not believe how little direction I gave these people. I did not need to. They all just did it naturally. I thought at the time that it was just because they’re all good actors, but I think now it is specifically because they are good theatre actors.
Because Season Two is set in another country, I have to draw from an unknown acting pool and I began to listen to a lot of acting reels from voice over actors. They are incredibly skilled. They can do animated character voices. They can make a bank ad sound like silk. They can stretch sound into moments you would not believe. I have found myself impressed. Believe me, I have tried reading ad copy before – it is a lot harder than I ever imagined. These folks have skills. But do they have the skills I need?
I’ve dipped my toes into the film world a little bit more this year and one thing I’ve noticed about the difference between film and theatre is the rhythm of the making. Most everything in film is in small bits. You do one line in a multitude of ways (or the same way over and over) and then you move on to another one. If you had a long passage of text (unlikely in a film, but, just for the sake of argument) you wouldn’t shoot the whole thing all at once, you’d get two lines here, two lines there, another from the other side and so on. The rhythm of the speech would happen in the edit. It only matters what each individual line is like, not the whole. The whole gets created later.
In the theatre, however, you have to say the whole thing, all at once. You need a plan of attack. You become a one person band, orchestrating the speed, the tone, the ups, the downs. When you’re giving a speech in the theatre, it’s all you. You’re it. It is a much more sustained experience.
It turns out that reading a monologue is more than just saying the words in a reasonably correct way. It is taking an audience on a journey and that is what we train actors for. That’s why we teach monologues. I apologize for every bad thing I ever said about monologues. It turns out that training actors to deal with large swaths of text is exactly the training I need as a creator right now. It may be one of the theatre’s defining characteristics actually.
Theatre educators – thank you for continuing to teach actors to do more monologues, even in the face of cranky people like me who didn’t understand the value before. Please keep doing it.
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Filed under: art, community, economics, education, Leadership | Tags: Arts Education, arts in education, City Council, culture, music, politicians, Shakespeare, Supporting the Arts, the Arts, theatre
We had a hopeful politician come to our door, campaigning, and so we asked her about what she’d do for the arts. She said she understood the value of the arts, that they kept kids out of trouble, the way sports had for her as a kid so she supports them. It’s a sweet story, really.
I enjoyed that story and I like this politician a lot but I hate this reasoning. First, supporting arts programs for kids is not supporting the Arts. It’s great and I spent many years in those trenches but Arts Education is not the entirely of The Arts. This is a common conflation, though – and artists do it as much as anyone, usually when they’re trying to raise money for an arts program.
The other part of it I hate is the way it sets up art as just a method of keeping kids busy. It’s like an after-school job or a club or something. This framing also tends to travel hand in hand with setting art up as a savior for troubled children. I’m particularly sensitive to this one because I used to believe it. I used to be in classrooms trying to SAVE THE CHILDREN with Shakespeare or music or whatever. In some cases, the people who sent me into these classrooms also wanted me to SAVE THE CHILDREN with my theatrical magic.
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I’m not saying it’s not possible for a child to discover an art and find their way to a new future that might be seen as saving them. That sort of thing DOES happen. I have seen it happen myself. But it does not happen often. And it can’t be planned for.
But it’s also not unique to the Arts. Anything could save a wayward child. It could be sports. It could be cooking. It could be knitting. It could be watching Wheel of Fortune. Basically, anything that lights a person up and gets them going can “save” a person. The arts are perhaps more likely than Wheel of Fortune to engage a child but it’s all really up to chance.
Why should we support the arts if not to save wayward children? What are they good for besides keeping kids out of trouble?
The arts are good for our souls, okay? Maybe we’re not supposed to use words like that when it comes to finding funds and government support – but that is fundamentally what is at stake. When the going gets tough, people turn to the arts. During this last year of trauma and lockdown – when so much became inaccessible – many people turned to music, turned to stories in multiple formats. It’s not a hug from your mom but it’ll do you good.
A culture is judged by its arts and a culture that doesn’t support its artists is going to lose them. They’ll emigrate or cease to be artists or their wells will dry up and the faucet that pours out stories and meaning might not deliver like it needs to at some point.
What do we need to say to our politicians so they understand? How do we help them see artists as more than an after-school program? For years, our arts leaders have been attempting to make the economic argument about how much the arts contribute to the economy and if, after this year of artistic devastation and all the economic devastation that surrounds that, they still don’t get it, I don’t know that they ever will. I think we have to just talk about the source. That arts are good for our culture, our souls and our social identity. The politician who came to our door was elected while the more Arts forward candidate lost – so now the task becomes how to help her do more than just say she supports the arts. Now we have to help her learn how to actually support them.
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, education, Imagination, Leadership, theatre | Tags: collaboration, Creative Process, creativity, Leadership, new WPA, pas de Bourre, performing arts, pick up the pace, problem solving, problematizing, theatre, theatre training
A lot of my theatre friends have been working in other fields lately, partly due to not being able to actually work in theatre in these times. I’ve had a fair number of conversations about how weirdly non-theatre people do things. (Apologies to all you non-theatre folk. I know we’re really the weird ones but you’re weird to us in some ways!) This has made me think about some of the things the performing arts train us for, that aren’t just singing high notes and how to do pas de Bourrees.
One thing I’ve really come to value about theatre people (and performing arts people in general but I’m going to let theatre people stand in for everyone since I know them best) is our ability to collaborate. And I know, blah blah, we all know collaboration is a thing. I can’t tell you how many theatre education meetings I’ve sat in where we sell the fact that we teach kids how to collaborate. But what does that really mean? We teach folks how to work together. Okay. Who out there in the work force thinks they didn’t learn that? Everyone thinks they know how to collaborate. The thing is that theatre people know how to collaborate in a very particular way. We know how to work with a group of disparate people with multiple specialties and work together to get something done on time and on budget. Theatre people are always on time and on budget when it comes to deadlines. This means we not only know how to collaborate, we know how to do it quickly. The curtain is going up at a particular time on a particular day and we are built to make sure that happens to the best of everyone’s ability. Show folk know how to do things quickly. We know how to get on with it. We know how to make it fast and we know how to pivot on a dime.
Example: We can’t afford the orange shoes? Ok. Maybe we get some white ones and dye them or shine an orange light on them and how much do we really need these orange shoes? Can they be purple or can we just do the show without them? And show people will make that call in a few minutes.
One thing I’ve noticed about meetings or collaborations with non-theatre folk is that even the smallest decisions can often take an unholy amount of time. And by unholy I mean infinitely frustrating to a theatre person who is used to working quickly. If you are in a meeting with a theatre person, you should know that they are very likely imagining clapping their hands and thinking, “Go, go, go, go, go!” Sometimes I feel like half of the job of theatre directing is telling everyone to pick up the pace. And I’ve also wanted to say it at every non-theatre meeting I’ve ever been to.
Another thing I’ve come to appreciate about theatre is our understanding of the need for a leader. I think this is related to the awareness of the curtain time. Even the most collaborative of processes, the most communal of groups, recognizes the need for someone to be the voice of leadership even if they’re not the boss. We have stage managers who will make sure we take a break. We have directors who make the final call on a lighting question the designer’s been wrestling with the costume designer about. There is always someone to decide. There is always someone running the show. And if no one is running the show in another context, outside of the performing arts, I can almost guarantee you that the performing artist will step up for that role if they care at all about what the group is doing. Theatre people sense a leadership vacuum and almost everyone will step in to fill it if necessary. If the dance captain is not there to run the rehearsal, someone else will do it. Same goes for the marketing meeting.
Theatre people would almost always prefer to be doing instead of talking about doing. We want to get through a meeting quickly because we need to get back to rehearsal. And we open in three days! Also, moving quickly is a great way to actually make things happen instead of getting stuck in talking about them. Sometimes I think 90% of my work as a theatre educator was just shouting “Five more minutes” even if we actually had ten. I’m sorry I lied to you, students – but it was the best way to get you moving.
Another obstacle my theatre friends are running into in other fields is a lack of creativity, particularly in problem solving. Theatre folk love to solve a problem. Sometimes we make problems just so we can solve them. Ever hear about someone making drama? That’s us. (Though we really do prefer to keep it onstage.) But really, we make problems to solve. Sometimes those problems are relationship or story problems (What will the Prince do when the ghost of his father tells him he was murdered by the current king?) and some are design problems. I used to describe the heart of my theatre making as just problematizing. I’ll give you an example from my real creative life. First day of rehearsal/devising on a project. I brought a bunch of newspapers, tape and string and asked my actors to stage scenes inspired by several highly visual paintings. This is a problem. There isn’t a logical solution. Whatever they invent is not going to look anything like the source material. But results are a study in creativity. That’s exciting stuff for me.
Theatre people are built to find a way. It’s part of the reason we can be kind of annoying when someone tells us something is impossible. We can make the sun rise in a small space using only light and imagination. We’re not inclined to believe that things aren’t possible.
In other fields, when someone says, “Oh, we can’t change that rule because we don’t have the data,” the non-theatre folk will shake their heads and say, “That’s too bad. Oh well.” The theatre person asks, “How do we get the data?” And eventually this leads to a heist movie with six union reps breaking into an administrator’s file cabinet. No, no, it probably doesn’t. But we would entertain it as a possibility! Theatre folks don’t give up when a problem is on the line.
This is part of the reason that I’m convinced that if someone had entrusted the vaccine rollout to theatre people we’d all be vaccinated by now. Seriously, there’s an entire field of people out of work who are used to managing large groups of people, who do things quickly and efficiently and are not daunted by impossible tasks. Let’s get ourselves a new WPA and our first show is The Vaccine Rollout.
Can theatre people be annoying? Yes. The most. We are the worst. But we tell good stories and there are a lot of things we learn to do that are worth every silly penny of our theatre training education.
It might seem like I’m here to pat theatre folk (and therefore myself) on the back – to give out some awards in a year where there definitely won’t be any – but really, it’s a plea to recognize that some of the gifts of an arts education are not obvious and yet also extremely valuable. Arts funding has been gutted. Money for arts education in the city where I live is gone. I understand why that happened. (How do you teach theatre on Zoom? Personally, I don’t know but I know a lot of people who’ve figured it out, so hey – bring it on back!) but the results have an impact on things far beyond the artists who lost their jobs or the students who lost their art class. Every time I hear about my theatre friends’ experience in other fields, I am reminded of the gifts of an arts education that even I hadn’t noticed. Sometimes we try to sell our work as good for collaboration! Or great for teaching empathy and tolerance! Or – I don’t know what we say any more. But maybe we need to get more specific. Maybe we need to lay it on the line. Talk ourselves up. Give ourselves some awards.
Also – if you’re looking for an employee who completes projects on time and on budget, who knows how to take charge in a group and who can problem solve creatively and quickly, might I suggest a theatre person? They’re all out of work right now. You could probably get any one you wanted. And you’re sure to get some good stories to go along with them. Just be prepared to pick up the pace.
Photo of Research and Development of Messenger Theatre Company’s The Door Was Open by Kacey Anisa Stamats
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Filed under: art, education | Tags: Arts Education, arts in education, education, TA, teaching, teaching artist
In the comments on the Gothamist article about 4,500 Teaching Artists losing work, someone said “Do you mean Art Teachers?” Here was a major publication addressing what was once my profession perhaps for the first time and the comments all suggested a complete and total lack of awareness of what the job was. One comment suggested all these out of work artists go join the army. Nice. Nice. And also hilarious. Can you imagine the guy at the recruitment office if 4,500 visual artists, musicians, actors, composers, directors, writers, filmmakers, puppeteers, dancers, cartoonists, choreographers, clowns and more (who can all teach killer workshops) showed up to join the army? That recruiter would not know what hit him. Believe me, 4,500 artists would not be a benefit to an organization that values obedience. If the organization was in the mood to shake things up, re-evaluate, maybe use their resources differently than, say, shooting people, then 4,500 artists might not be a bad idea. If you want an army of creativity instead of an army of soldiers, it’s genius – otherwise? Total disaster.
Anyway – I used to talk about teaching artist stuff quite a lot here on the blog, back before I quit doing it. I had a lot of worries about where the field was going and what was going to happen to the veterans of it as well as the new ones joining the ranks. I was worried about the professionalization of a profession that had no security. I was worried about people investing a lot of resources into programs to certify them that would never give them secure jobs or a safety net.
And here we are. I mean. Everyone is in crisis. Teaching Artists are not the only ones. A lot of Arts Administrators who had secure jobs don’t have them anymore, so it’s not just Teaching Artists in the Arts and Arts Education who are now in dire trouble.
But – most Teaching Artists I know were generally living right on the edge, picking up work when it was available, piecing together a living out of a class here and a workshop there. There is no net for most of them. They probably have no savings account nor a house they bought.
The thing I keep thinking about is how Teaching Artists were invented as a stop gap measure when the arts were cut in the 70s, here in NYC. With no actual arts classes in schools anymore, arts organizations stepped in to supply the one thing there is always an abundance of: artists – to teach at least a little bit of art in little chunks of time. It was not a solution. But decades later, it was what everyone was still doing and the stop gap measure grew and grew and no one complained because schools were getting world class artists for cheap, artists were getting flexible work that utilized their art making skills and organizations were raking in grant money. The job got more and more formalized and yet never more secure, with no benefits or guarantees of work, depending on the whims of a (rapidly) rotating cast of administrators. And the arts did not return to the public schools in a meaningful way. There wasn’t, say, recruitment from the Teaching Artist ranks to join the faculty at a school and be the drama teacher, the art teacher, the music teacher or run an arts program in-house.
Now the arts budget that brought Teaching Artists in and sent students to Broadway shows or to see the symphony or a museum have been reduced to almost nothing. There is almost no reason to bring a Teaching Artist into your Zoom classroom. The stop gap is now just a gap. The gap reveals all the ways this was all just built on sand. The degrees and certifications that people went into debt for to do this job, the job itself, the investment arts organizations made in these programs. It’s all just – gone. A part of me just wants to shout, “I told you so, I told you so!” But that would be a real jerk move given that everyone involved has probably lost their entire livelihood.
The thing is – if, instead of building these haphazard arts programs – the city had rebuilt its arts programming in schools, things would be a whole lot less precarious. It’s easy to let 4,500 artists fall through the cracks because they never really existed for the schools or even a lot of arts organizations. Not in a meaningful way. When I was doing this work, I had to consistently explain to multiple people who I was and what I was doing there just to get a key to be able to use the bathroom. That’s both in the schools and at some arts organizations I worked for. But what if, instead of a teaching artist doing a 12 day residency once a year, the school had a drama teacher? That person is a lot harder to get rid of. The people in the school would know their name and would at least throw them a party if they got fired. And the union would certainly have something to say about it, if it were a public school. I’m not saying I would have liked to have been a drama teacher. I 100% would not. Popping in once a week was exactly the right speed for me. But I know a lot of Teaching Artists who would have loved to be invited to teach in more secure circumstances, who would have appreciated the opportunity to get health insurance, a pension, etc.
I imagine there’s around 4,500 of them who would especially appreciate that now.
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Filed under: age, anger, education, feminism | Tags: creeps, Edith Wharton, girls, seventeen, The Buccaneers, young women
I sort of thought I was all done sorting through my past and re-evaluating. I’d scanned through it during the various waves of Yes All Women and Me Too. But the other day, I found myself suddenly absolutely newly furious about a relationship I had when I was 17. Before this moment, I had mostly fond memories of this relationship and, despite some ups and downs, I remained friends with the man. Until now, I’d seen this relationship with the eyes of the seventeen-year-old girl who was in it. Now I’m 46 and I realize that I had no business being involved with a twenty-three-year-old man. He should absolutely not have been messing around with me, a seventeen-year-old girl.
At the time, it all seemed very reasonable. I saw myself as an unusually mature young woman who’d outgrown boys my own age. To be involved with a man who’d already graduated from college, had jobs, even gone to war, well, there was no question I was into the idea. His attentions seemed to confirm what I imagined about myself – that I was a grown-up person ready for grown-up relationships.
But the woman I am now has suddenly realized that I was not nearly as grown up as I imagined myself and that this experience, while not all that bad, was also not good. One of the things that suddenly dawned on me was a new interpretation of his friends’ behavior. I thought they didn’t like me. I thought they thought I wasn’t good enough for their friend. I thought they were underestimating me, that they didn’t know me well enough to understand how mature I was. I realize now that they were trying to protect me. It wasn’t that they didn’t like me – they just didn’t think a twenty-three-year-old man should be messing around with a seventeen-year-old girl. They told their friend not to mess around with me and I suppose he got sort of half the message – because he told me we couldn’t date – we could only be friends. And we were. Except for when we’d make out. Except for when we’d roll around in his bed. Except for when he’d try to sneak past my boundaries. But it had to be a secret. Which now I recognize as a giant red flag – but at the time just seemed necessary, since his friends did not approve.
Now, I know his friends were right but I wonder if their attempts to help actually made the situation worse. So much of the damage was around the secrecy. Because I was a kid, I thought the secrecy was because I wasn’t good enough to date out in the open.
When this guy remarked that all of his girlfriends had been extraordinarily beautiful, I felt that the reason I wasn’t his actual girlfriend was because I lacked this essential extraordinary beauty. The whole situation was an exercise in shame. But the seventeen-year-old me could never have been convinced that this was a bad idea. Any questioning of it seemed like a knock against my own sense of maturity. Now, I know I was still a kid but, at the time, I genuinely thought I was grown.
I think this is a major factor in a lot of these predatory scandals we see. The girls think of themselves as grown-up women who are suddenly being welcomed to the grown-up world by actual grown-ups – and it is not until decades later that they realize the damage.
I’ve been trying to think of what anyone could have said or done at the time to shift my thinking around it and all I can come up with are a couple of things that shifted my thinking now. One of those things was reading Edith Wharton’s novel, The Buccaneers, and the other was watching the TV series version of the same. I feel it may have been a combination of the two. I’ll walk you through it a bit.
The central character of the story, Nan St. George, is fairly childlike when we meet her. She’s just been given a governess to look after her and she resents being given a babysitter when she feels grown but then comes to adore Miss Testvalley, her English governess. Her older sister has just come out (in the debutant sense) and so they all troop over to England for the London season. Nan meets Guy Thwaite on a tour of his house and they have some stimulating conversation about the estate, the landscape and the paintings and it’s clear they like each other but it’s also clear she’s a child.
So he goes off to South America to make some money and she meets the Duke. And the Duke is charmed by her and asks Miss Testvalley what he should do about proposing. She tells him to wait, and that, “in many ways Nan is still a child really” and he replies that that is what he likes about her.
This moment is gross in the book but it made an even bigger impact on me in the TV show somehow. Because we have seen how like a child she is, because the actor (Carla Gugino) is playing her as this vivacious, luminous, enthusiastic creature that, of course, we find charming. But we can also see how she is still a child, even though she has a woman’s body.
Suffice it to say that this marriage does not end well for The Duke and Nan. She grows up and he doesn’t like it.
There’s something about watching a girl, who, of course, is longing to be seen as an adult, end up in the hands of a man who doesn’t recognize that he should wait for her to grow up that turned on a series of lightbulbs for me.
I have no idea what effect it would have on an actual teenage girl. Would she recognize her own vulnerability as a child who feels ready to be an adult but isn’t quite? Would it help her avoid the Dukes of this world?
The educator in me really wants to be able to solve this for future generations. And, of course, I think stories are the answer because stories are powerful. The plethora of stories, songs, plays, movies, TV about a man falling in love with a young girl have played a role in how normal this feels to everyone. She was just seventeen, if you know what I mean. It’s not just Lolita. It’s story after song after film after novel after opera after play after book.
We need more stories that show us why the girl dating the older man is not a great idea. From this angle, the red flags are legion but how do we help girls see the red flags when they are blinded by the romance of being brought into the grown-up world by a grown-up man? More importantly, what stories would help men to see that underage women don’t exist? Underage women are girls. They are still children, even when they look like women.
Because I’ve spent time in a lot of high school classrooms, I know the difference. I’ve met a lot of highly mature, intelligent, vibrant teenagers. They are extraordinary humans but they are clearly still children. I cannot imagine how a healthy adult person could see them as a prospect for a romance. They are children. Intelligent, energetic, passionate children but still children.
No teenage girl wants to be seen as a child, though, which is why this problem is so hard to shake. There is nothing anyone could have said to me that would have convinced me that a relationship with a man was a bad idea. This is true for my friends at the time, too, who also got involved with men much older than themselves. None of us could have been convinced we were still girls and that these relationships might have consequences beyond us feeling grown up and ready for the world. Stories that shift this might be good for the girls but given that they are still children, I think it’s actually more important for men to see these stories, to learn the difference between a woman and a girl, to recognize their own power as adult men and wield it for good. It shouldn’t take an unfinished novel written in the 1930s to show us the way. There should be more stories. And if you’re seventeen and reading this, maybe just realize that that older man who is after you is kind of a creep, even if he seems cool now. You don’t need to wait 29 years to discover his creepitude. I’m here to tell you, if he’s a man and you’re a kid, he’s a creep.
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Filed under: art, class, education, movies, Racism, theatre | Tags: cultural imperialism, movie, movie theatre, Racism, Roma, theatre, This American Life, white people at the movies
They were doing a screening of Roma in my neighborhood so I went. The theatre was dotted with audience members – so everyone sort of had a little bubble of space for themselves.
About two rows behind me sat two elderly Latino men. They were possibly the only Latinx people in the place. Once the movie began, they spoke to each other in Spanish. In a movie that is so much about atmosphere, their voices added to the experience. I was only sorry that my Spanish is not good enough to eavesdrop a little.
But some guy on the other side of their row was not happy about their conversation. He shouted at them to be quiet. His shouting was very jarring. And he did it again about ten minutes later. He was really mad about those old guys talking. The third time, he shouted “Be quiet. You’re disturbing the movie.” Which was ironic because to my mind, it was him who was disturbing the movie. (Also – it’s a movie. It doesn’t care what happens out in the audience. I think you mean the movie going experience.) I turned around to glare at him and of course he was a white guy. He was a white guy who was convinced he was being a white guy hero. However, I’m a white lady so I used my disapproving white lady glare to hopefully disabuse him of that position.
I don’t know if it worked or it didn’t work. He shut up after that. If it was my glare, I wish I’d used it sooner. And I don’t know if I ought to have said something to the shouter who was disturbing the movie by declaring the movie disturbed, I somehow didn’t feel like more white people shouting would help the situation.
But I did find it ironic that this white guy had decided to come to this movie about a working class Latina and did not want his experience disturbed by actual (I’m assuming) working class Latinos in the theatre. It felt a bit like all the folks who love tacos and nachos and celebrate Cinco de Mayo but are fine with separating Latinx children from their parents at the border.
It’s all of a piece, it feels to me. It is a control of the space, any space. This attempt to keep spaces like theatres and movie houses quiet and in control is an attempt to exclude, to state who is welcome and who is not. The attempt to dictate how we experience culture is generally classist if not explicitly racist. I’m thinking of that story I just heard on This American Life about a group of kids going to see a movie on a field trip and getting kicked out of the theatre because they had a visceral response to what they were seeing and no context for it. And the racism that they encountered on their way to their seats didn’t help either.
I’m particularly sensitive to this because of my previous work as an arts educator wherein it was my job to prepare students for whatever they were about to see in a theatre or on a screen. Performers loved our audiences because they were vocal and responsive. But if they were ever mixed in with a general audience, the general audience became a problem. It’s almost as if we ought to have been leading workshops for the adults in how to be less classist, racist or uptight before we let them watch a show with a bunch of kids. (Watching shows with bunches of kids is great. People should pay extra to do it.) The kids generally just need a little context and a heads up about stuff that’s going to be new for them. Adults usually need far reaching lessons in cultural imperialism.
In the end, back at Roma, I was more interested in what the two old guys thought of the movie than the movie itself (that’s another post, coming soon) and I definitely hoped to never have to see (or more importantly, hear) Mr. White Savior again – especially at the movies. He very definitely disturbed that movie for me.
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