Vocational Higher Education in Theater

About every couple years we get an extensive article trying to define what baccalaureate graduates need to know for our "industry," and it always reads like a superman wish list. Usually it is a compilation of surveys or focus groups of people working in the theater and entertainment industry and it is always quite long and specialized. It has taken me a while to learn to read them with a little perspective.

Sure. You ask people what they want in a new employee, and you get a description of a superman/superwoman who has a fantastic set of chops and varied experience in every task of the trade and doesn't need to learn anything except local practice, who is brilliantly creative and capable of reinvention, who knows history, literature, and art with the perspective and detailed recall of a savant, who is fabulously humble and eager to learn and please and work with/under any oddball personality, who can direct and supervise others with skill and empathy, who is completely free of personal encumberments and commitments that might restrict night and weekend work and travel, who is ambitious but not threatening, and especially who is incredibly loyal and is committed to working for you forever. And who will start at minimum wage and take a seasonal hiatus. And who owns a van or pickup.

So you have to have that in mind as you read through something like Heidi Hoffer's Spring 2011 Theater Design & Technology article "Preparing design/tech undergraduates for the entertainment industry." She did a lot of surveying of industry vendors of entertainment products and services, stage managers, and others who employ theater production graduates. I'll quote from her opening summary:

"Many of the people . . . shared the view that the fast pace of change in the industry might require a different kind of undergraduate training today. There was a fundamental agreement that the practical knowledge learned in school was the most valuable in the workplace. They also agreed that too many new employees don't work hard enough, they expect instant gratification, and they don't have a professional work ethic."(p. 51)

But she also provided a quote from an industry leader admitting, "There's just so blasted much that you really need to know that it's tough for a student to be grounded in enough disciplines when they first get out of school to be ready to get a job and work effectively and successfully." (p. 52)

The article goes on to discuss knowledge bases in stagecraft, costume technology, hand drafting, cad drafting, traditional rendering, digital rendering, lighting design, costume design, scene design, theater history, theater literature, scene painting, stage management, internships, job-seeking skills and life skills.

So what does that mean to me and my students? Well, there really isn't a lot that is very new here except the list is longer. What we didn't know, we did suspect. There is a phenomenal knowledge and skill base that needs to be developed, and it takes commitment. Specialization is valuable, but of course the liberal learning is important, too. As theater work, it's slightly more reliable than acting and directing. I'll be thinking about this as I prepare my classes, trying to figure out how to cover the necessary bases in the time we have, and yet inspire students to pursue and commit to something. I really can't get at the whole list, but maybe I can encourage and help them find a part that can appeal to them. What will drive it ultimately will be their love for the art form, their love for the people who work in it, and the imagination and commitment to success in the work they do.

A lot of this they must have the drive to do for themselves. Actors, directors, designers, technicians. And teachers. Our working world is different, and is highly dependent on initiative. We can attack it directly or wander through and try to sort it out. But it really is up to us and to what we are willing to commit. That's how we're different. And we'll find ways to learn what we need to know to keep up.

On the Fringe - really

This is the month of the fringe festival in Washington, D.C. I have to say I wish I could be there. There appear to be some interesting conceptual pieces being done, and I would love to be able to see them. The descriptions suggest they are playful and challenge assumptions about the nature of theater, or at least about the seriousness of the art form itself. They suggest an openness to the theatrical experience and above all, they provide a stimulus for discussion about theater and what theater is.

The biggest and best international fringe began in 1947 and runs in Edinburgh, Scotland every August, but many other cities host their own fringes. New York, of course, as well as New Orleans, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Hollywood, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Orlando - all periodically have a festival for odd and innovative theater performance.

I had to look around a little to find out about the New England Fringe Festival in Burlington. It does come at a busy time - September 17 to October 2 - and it seems to be out of the way, certainly from south of the city. But now that I have my attention drawn to it, I hope to take in some of the work. The titles of past award winners look intriguing, although I hope it isn't dominated by solo artists. I also hope they can get some information out to the world about what is going on. The internet is great, but real promotion has to appear in your path.

I have to wonder why I have been unaware of the festival before, which has been going on since 2007. The Washington Post website is all over the festival there on a daily basis, but I don't remember reading anything about the New England festival in the Globe.

One problem with a Fringe Festival necessarily is venues. Theater art requires a certain amount of overhead - and for whatever reasons, not much of the fringe seems to occur in the city here. Maybe it is more cost effective to concentrate the festival in Burlington, but it's not getting the kind of visibility from Boston papers that the Washington festival is getting. I can't help feeling that attention to a fringe festival would inject some life into the world of Boston theater and challenge some conceptions about what theater can be.

Boston tries to maintain a sense of itself as a theater town. It does have a richer legacy of theater history than Washington and some of the other cities with festivals, but I wonder if it isn't weighing us down. I think there may be some things going on in the Boston area that rise to fringe kind of experiences, but there's no critical mass or media focus to project their influence and freshness into the art form at large. We hardly ever hear much about them in southeastern Mass.

I have a clipping I use of a group that did a play in a working, operating laundromat a few years ago. The patrons were the audience. It was a consciously scripted and intentional work, not just a "happening." Few such challenges to traditional presentation rise to media consciousness with a byline story and a picture. Some experiments may be occurring but there's little collective influence.

I have fond memories of some remarkable theater events that were created by Mobius members in their studios in the Fort Point district back in the 80s and early 90s. Some of the pieces were thoughtful and prompted real reflection, others were joyful and raucous, and still others were just odd. Nobody ever tried to define it all for you, but let you meet the work on your own, making whatever sense of it you might. Those events did have a certain amount of thoughtfulness to them and they did intend to shape an experience to a purpose. The organization gave it a focus of energy and critical perspective. It is notable that these generally were created by performance and media artists, not theater people.

I think audiences have the capacity to embrace the new. My students today are no longer surprised much by weirdness, because it has emerged as a kind of pop meme. From internet sites to cartoons to high school antics and youth oriented media in general. Given the intensity of feature filmmaking, there's little that can shock my students anymore. I think they can see silliness for its own sake and make some astute judgements. They seem to be a bit more ready to find meaning in an experience, and will apply a critical perspective if they are led to it a little.

One of the more important aspects of a fringe festival is that it de-institutionalizes the art form. Few major art forms have the institutional overhead of theater, but we keep pretending it can be be done on a trestle and board. A fringe festival reminds us that something interesting can be done with less. And new ideas can happen with minimum investment.

Under the best of circumstances, in a festival there is a critical mass of new experiences that allow audiences to explore and compare. The artists themselves are influenced by what goes on about them, and can work more thoughtfully in the context of the stream of current activity. It's all good for everybody.

But we have to know about it. Boston still pretends to be a theater town. It really needs to game up and the media should help. It's not like it costs them a lot. But of course it means less time and space for the latest outrage or sports win. On TV there's no longer time even for Joyce Kulhawik, who only reported on the most mainstream theater.

July 17, 2011
Scenemaker

Pushing the Bounds of Modernism-or not

I am a little fascinated when I think about the early evidence of change that I failed to grasp as change. You often can't predict the longer term direction or development of critical mass for change, but it's fun to reflect on how it played out.

While working on an article recently, I pulled up notes I made on a scenic choice I saw at the Huntington Theatre last fall. It was Bob Glaudini's Vengeance is the Lord's, directed by Peter DuBois and designed by Eugene Lee. It's a domestic drama about retribution in a family that boosts cars. It could have been written any time in the last 50 years and had a kind of made-for-TV feel.

The setting on the Huntington's full-stage turntable included a living/dining room, kitchen, bedroom, center hallway with stairs to a second floor and an outside porch stoop. There was a fence and some exterior scenic off the turntable. The entire show used only the living/dining room and the stoop. The turntable spun around between scenes and a character could be seen doing something mundane in the kitchen or the bedroom, but there was no action there. These richly propped rooms were totally unnecessary for the action of the play.

Many people know something of Lee's work as the designer for Saturday Night Live, but at Trinity Rep where he is resident designer he frequently likes a lot of iconic scenic atmosphere for the mostly open stages, though not usually naturalistic. Although it doesn't show on IBDB, I think he designed LeRoi Jones' (Amiri Baraka) Slave Ship in New York in the early 1970s that uniquely included the audience in the ship as if slaves. This was considered part of the "environmental theater" movement following the artistic upheavals of the 1960s. A few years later, Lee became well known for Sweeney Todd in 1979, when he had an old foundry dismantled and installed on stage to frame the setting that occurred in a more modest space within.

What is interesting - and challenging - to me is the sense of artistic progression and paradigmatic shift I've seen during my life in theater art. Artistically I've been a child of what I call Modernism as a style, which I interpret to be about economy of statement and finding The Essential, about the perfection of form and space and saying as much as possible with a single Picasso-like line. It is the essential economy of poetry and as a dominant style it described the world of art for more than a half century from about 1920 to 1980. As it evolved, in my view the style of Post-Modernism, for whatever else it is about, is about generating the most possible connections and associations for the perceiver/audience. It is about a richer associative experience that is not defined or controlled, perhaps barely even led by the artist. It's a more co-creative, ultimately democratic approach to meaning in art. It is antithetical to economy of statement.

Lee's use of unnecessary scenery reminded me of our BSU production of A. R. Gurney's 1981 play The Dining Room in 1986. The play is a series of scenes of different families' lives playing out in different eras in a generic upper middle class dining room. (An interesting precursor to Tom Stoppard's more complex conceptually challenging 1993 play Arcadia.) Our production, directed by Stephen Levine, emphasized the meaning of the dining room as an institution that was embedded in class. He also asked for a museum-like display of two other rooms in other areas of the theater space as institutions of social class.

In an idle exercise of retrospective rationalizing, I now wonder if these rooms (and perhaps Gurney's play itself) may have been a kind of step toward a Postmodern style. One reading of the event might be that although the rooms were not focused on generating random or uncontrolled connections, they were (self)consciously asking the audience to make their own associations related to the concept of the play. And one might imagine, to the concept of museums and, by extension, to the theater itself.

The pressures of schedule were too great and the other rooms were not propped appropriately or given the kind of presentation the concept required. As a Modernist, I felt like the rooms were a digression, a distraction from the through-line of Gurney's play. I think most of the audience thought they were a strange artsy idea. Only a few people actually spent a few minutes looking at them. The point to be made here is that although they had a more self-conscious purpose, the rooms had much in common with Lee's unused rooms on the turntable.

If I ponder this more, I recognize that Lee's extra rooms clearly were part of the scenic statement of the family home, emphasizing the normal domesticity of this criminal family. There was none of the real randomness of visual Postmodernism, and certainly none of its random eclectic references. I know that in both productions the concept was still pretty controlled, and that Postmodernism can be an influence on a style rather than a driving aesthetic. Neither production really tried to generate the kind of rich co-creative involvement of the perceiver that Postmodernism typically seeks. But both productions expanded the conceptual world of the play.

Within the next decade, we did a number of other productions that were more deliberately conceptually challenging, and I was teaching Postmodernism style as an aesthetic in my classes. Historic cultural evolution is so difficult to see in its time. You often don't know you are part of a movement until it moves on because it can really be defined only in retrospect.

The art world is different today than in 1986, and I think audiences have different expectations for a stage experience. They've seen it all, so ground-breaking has lost its cachet. The challenge today, more than ever, is to define the stage experience in relation to all of the entertainment technologies, from gigantic touring music acts to Cirque du Soleil to Disney entertainment environments to Spiderman on Broadway, all to compete with home electronics. And so we have swirling turntables with whole houses of strictly scenic rooms on them.

We seem to have returned to an era when spectacle and occasion have the most to contribute to the live theater experience. And incidentally, to most other traditional live art forms.

I view that with some concern. I think meaning is important, too.

Scenemaker
July 2011