It’s hard to believe another school year is about to start. I want to get back to writing about process after sharing some news:
After 1 year as interim department Chair, we have a new chair starting at the end of the month. She is AWESOME and I am so excited to get back to what I love: Designing and teaching.
I have been promoted to full professor. This was a long process and I couldn’t have done it without an enormous amount of support from a lot of folks. I wasn’t sure I would be prepared for the full external review, but was encouraged by mentors and focused on process (not lack of professional work) and made it through.
In early June I was in a cycling accident and broke my left elbow. Not how I wanted to spend the summer. All in all I was very lucky and am regaining my range of motion. The day of the accident is quite a tale- my good Samaritans include a monk, and Linda from ski patrol, who knew exactly what to do until the paramedics arrived.
As I look back on this blog, I left my pandemic reflections dangling…I got mired in admin and I’m having a hard time even remembering what it was like before…I was primed for the deep reflection necessary to cultivate anti-oppressive teaching practices, but I am still grappling with how to prepare students for an industry that is still broken. There is tension in expecting students to show up to class, give them credit for completed work, work that we hope is creative, inventive, and growth-centered, while making sure they take care of themselves mentally and physically.
Trying to recalibrate here.
First a reflection on a 1 credit course I taught last term: Season Selection Advisory. Higher Ed is grappling with how to develop best practices in programming production seasons. These conversations converge at a very busy intersection: What is a pedagogical reason for doing a show? How do we uplift historically underrepresented voices? Who gets to tell those stories? Do we have the resources to produce this work? Do we have the greatest resource of all, TIME, to produce this work humanely and in light of critical conversations around work-life balance, mental health and no more 10/12s? How to do we balance the conflicting opinions about representation and identity? We have some students who would very much love for us to produce plays with casts that include specific identities that are aligned with their own. At the same time, we have some students who think those works are too narrow, even offensive to consider, and that we should only do plays where the casting is completely open. Whose voices do we silence in selecting the the latter?
In Fall 2020 during the throws of a bizarre and confusing hybrid modality, the students went on strike and made a list of demands. Many of those demands were quick fixes- reasonable accommodations in light of the pandemic, while others were a call for long term accountability work including student involvement in deciding the production season. That winter term, the chair at the time led a season selection committee that was comprised of students and faculty. I was not involved in that process, but everything I heard from both sides was that is was a big exercise in cat herding and very frustrating for everyone involved, and then due to a huge time crunch, the faculty ultimately “calling it” so the season could be announced. Reading a lot of plays takes a lot of time. Time that no one had, let alone a common time to meet. And while there was a lot of robust conversation, the context of those decisions was lost in the reveal and by the time auditions rolled around, there was lingering discontent.
In consultation with senior faculty, as interim chair I proposed a Season Selection Advisory class. With a class structure, we were guaranteed a meeting time, an expectation for outside work, and logistically, the Canvas platform (our LMS) to host discussion boards, share texts, and keep track of the schedule. I offered several readings to center the work including: Bank’s Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative and Herrera’s article But Do We have the Actors for That?, and on the first day of class we collaborated on a list of community agreements to guide our conversations. The group of ten students were aware that we were “building the plane while learning how to fly it” with two goals for the semester: a season for the following year, and a template for how to go about doing it with suggestions for how to adjust the process for the years to come.
We had discussions with each of the three faculty directors, the head of University Productions, and the Chair of Musical Theatre to learn what they were doing the following year. We zoomed in the Assoc AD at Portland Stage, Chip Miller, to learn how their theatre develops their season, and after identifying our guest director, invited him to the conversation as well. About halfway through the term, the students realized we weren’t just picking plays, we were charged with the season as a whole and had to ensure A LOT of different needs were being met. The students developed a community survey, and we all read many plays.
One thing we realized by mid-term is that this whole process needs to happen in the fall term, not winter term. Auditions for the fall shows happen in April, so we were in a big time crunch to identify those two shows. Less than ideally, we locked in those two fall shows, before we had decided the last two shows. One beautiful thing that was revealed however, was we had a possible theme emerging: Adaptation! As we batted about the last titles, we allowed that theme guide our final decisions. Another successful take-away is a public-facing document for answering the question “Why this play?” Student feedback was very positive-both the students in the class, and the department as a whole.
As I pass the baton to the new Chair, I will ease this transition by teaching this course again, this time in the fall. There are already new resources to share including the DLFD’s new Toolkit…Interestingly, there are only five students signed up so far, which I hope will change as we closer to classes beginning. I hope they realize this work will always be ongoing!
Second, I am setting an intention to design the musical, Bernarda Alba, which opens in November, with all the care and detail it deserves, modeling best practices for the students, and regain the joy in what I do. For the last two years, the only shows I’ve worked on were pandemic triage or wedged into my year of heavy administration. I’ve cracked the libretto and started my dive into the research rabbit hole…stand by!
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