Core Pedagogical Beliefs
Model Failure.
I believe deeply that failure should be embraced as a positive educational tool that signifies growth and discovery. In pursuit of this idea, I model my own failures, biases, and knowledge gaps to my students so that they understand that knowledge, expertise, and artistry are a journey rather than things to be “achieved.”
Embodied Engagement.
I begin with the assumption that students join theatre programs for the craft rather than an insatiable love of literature and history. As such, I try to vary my approach to avoid an overemphasis on textbooks, lecture, and testing. Instead, I draw on a range of modalities and incorporate workshops that draw on skills and exercises more traditionally found in production classes.
Create Community.
I seek to create a classroom community that is equitable, collaborative, & safe. Whether in an acting workshop or a theatre history course, students cannot learn, cannot contribute, and cannot fail productively if they do not feel supported and respected by their classmates and teacher.
Co-Producing Knowledge.
Most students enter my classes with the faulty assumption that knowledge is a finished thing, agreed on by experts, to be received by the student. To challenge this assumption, I highlight questions that don’t have answers, areas of scholarly disagreement and controversy, and frame knowledge-making as a conversation to be joined and reveled in.
Training citizen/artist/activists.
The world is changing at an incredible rate. These changes often occur amidst violent social and political tensions. In preparation for facing the climate in which they must create, I focus on training citizen/artist/activists who are aware, critical , responsible, empathetic, and flexible in their approach.
Mentorship & Content Creation.
Social and professional contexts have changed in recent years and the content creator is everything. Instead of an over-emphasis on testing and point-crunching, I build my classes around doing. I believe in de-mystifying writing/creating, encouraging students to value their own creative impulses, and helping them figure out the approach that works for them.
Theatre History I & II
My theatre history sequence is built around primary and secondary source reading, weekly contextual or associative podcasts, in-depth discussion, embodied workshop-style activities, and a semester-long research/writing sequence designed to help students develop substantive arguments/contributions by the end of the semester. The structure is “open” and flexible to allow us room to pursue the topics and discussions that the students find most interesting, vexing, relevant, etc.
This “micro context” lecture was recorded after the move to online classes in the Spring of 2020. The purpose of each of these podcasts was to give snapshots of relevant issues, historical context, and theory that inform the readings they were assigned for the week. There were designed to be built quickly and to be fairly silly in tone, given the severity of what many students were experiencing.
Carnivalesque Exercise: During the Theatre of the Middle Ages unit, the focus of one workshop is on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. In the spirit of the carnivalesque, I give over control of the class to the students. They elect a King of Fools, to whom I give the attached instructions, and I leave. Then, with Bakhtin’s framework in mind, craft a carnivalesque performance about the course content and my instructional style. After I return and they perform the piece, we have an extensive discussion about the ways in which the experience acted as a “relief valve” versus the knowledge that, at the end of the class, my presence and authority would be reasserted and even strengthened.
Neoclassical Workshop: During the Neoclassical unit, I assign an adaptation, explanation, and defense activity based on the controversy surrounding Corneille’s Le Cid. For this exercise, I am not only concerned with the students memorizing and understanding neoclassical aesthetic conventions and rules, but also how these were actively (and publicly) negotiated and the political implications of the decisions made. Along with the attached instructions, I give each group a bit of “received history” to adapt. These are usually descriptions of big blockbuster films that are huge in scope and have difficult narrative, technological, or mythological challenges to overcome. Each group is tasked with adapting their assigned narrative to conform to French Neoclassical rules before explaining and defending their adaptation in front of the class. Every group not currently presenting acts as the “French Academy” and does their best to poke holes in the opposing adaptations. After considerable debate, there is a vote and the winning group is showered with candy.
Theatrical Backgrounds I & II
The Theatrical Backgrounds sequence mirrors the time periods of the history curriculum, but with a focus on play reading, analysis, and discussion. The first class in the sequence (Ancients-1700) has an emphasis on aesthetic structures, the power implicit in those structures, and adaptation. Projects include an opinion paper about the success and/or failure of a selected adaptation, and a capstone group project built around conceptualizing an adapted text that both honors the original and speaks to our current moment. The second course in the sequence (1700’s-present) focuses on dramaturgy and includes a semester long dramaturgy project that concludes with a final “poster presentation” of the dramaturgical work completed across the term.
Position Paper: This assignment asks students to “take a stand” on an adaptation of their choice. For the purposes of this project, they can choose a text that is a complete adaptation, one that adapts through “sampling” from other works, or one that adapts through drastic conceptual choices in production. Along with the attached instructions, we spend class time discussing each of these approaches and their implications for the text and for contemporary production.
Dramaturgy Project: The dramaturgy project is a semester long analytical/research assignment that asks students to pick a text in the first two weeks and to turn in a research/writing component every other or every two weeks. By the end of the semester, students have a huge range of material to draw on as they assemble dramaturgical statements and final presentations in the form of packets, posters, or websites. The semester concludes with a public potluck/poster presentation where each student presents their materials to classmates and guests.
Directing I
My Directing class is roughly divided into two parts. In the first half, we focus primarily on the steps and mechanics of directing from script choice, to blocking, to working with actors, to communicating with designers, etc. In the second half, we turn to focus on the “how and why” of directing through the writing of famous contemporary directors. The goal of the second portion of the course is to introduce students to the bigger philosophical and aesthetic questions in our discipline. Throughout the course, students share directing projects, beginning with an in-class “AB” scene, followed by more fully realized scene work.
Open Scene Assignment: This first directing project asks students to group up and, in turn, direct a simple AB/open scene. I begin this course with an in-class directing assignment to give students the time they need to take those first stumbles as they try to figure out how to talk about text as a director, how to talk to actors, and to put into practice the basic mechanics of directing without putting them into high-stakes situations. The other goal with the assignment is to get them to focus on physical action and story telling rather than text as they must choose and communicate a scenario/context and relationships for their scene. The first question asked during feedback for these scenes is always, “what was the scenario and the relationships?” Then we spend time with each scene talking about how those choices could be strengthened without the luxury of textual support.
Directing Philosophy Project: This capstone assignment is designed to build on the aesthetic questions raised in the second half of the course. The goal of the project is to get students to start thinking about why they want to work in theatre, how they want to work, and what they want to accomplish with their art. The are asked to submit a mini directing “manifesto” that includes their core “rules” for directing as well as research on a notable director that they must evaluate, incorporate, and/or challenge in their paper.
Introduction to Performance Studies
This Performance Studies course is a new addition to our curriculum and is meant not only to introduce the topic, but also to give it a global focus. The first part of the semester is devoted to working through the basic concepts and theories of the field. In the second half, we deal with “world performance case studies” organized roughly around a range of topics, including participatory eco-performance, humanitarian crisis/refugee performances, indigenous performance art, diaspora performance, and performances in world religion/culture. The goal with this structure is to learn the basics of the field in the first half before applying those concepts to complicated (and often controversial) world performances based on video, podcast, and essay formats written by people involved in those performances. Students also perform multiple times across the semester.
Plantón Móvil & Refugium at Federation Square: The attached website and video clip, along with relevant scholarly articles and multimedia essays, are part of the Eco-Performance world performance case study. They deal with the relationship between human and ecosystem and seek to find unique, and ecologically beneficial, ways of exploring/performing that relationship.
Performance Studies Capstone: The attached capstone project was rebuilt as the semester moved online in Spring ‘20. The intention for the project was to allow students to draw on their new skill set and new awareness of worldwide performance issues to select their own topics and create their own unique projects in a format of their choice (including research papers, filming a self-performance, creating an interactive website, building a narrated presentation, recording a podcast, etc). One of the primary goals of the assignment was to get students thinking about the relationship between form and function and how their selected media might contribute to the subject of the project.