Theater For The Future

I’m cross-posting my comment on a thrilling post from Laura at Trailing Spouse Blues - “What’s wrong with Educational Theater?” - which is itself a response to The Next Stage’s lament over the the perceived loss of opportunity as the next generation grows up without a broad exposure to theater.

I’m doing this cross-posting: Because it is apropos.

This is a freaking amazing thread, Laura.

Just got back from teaching 168 high schoolers in a summer program (Cherubs - Check it Out) , and let me tell you: the name of the game is immersion.

I’ve taught technical theater electives at a few high schools and middle schools, and I have to say the kids are always on your side to learn more. If there is a roadblock to learning coming from them, it’s that they don’t trust the motives of authority figures, which is a pretty simple roadblock to subvert. You work earn their trust - If a teacher demonstrates genuine excitement about a subject - which most of us are more than capable of - it NEVER fails that the kids pick up on that excitement. Do something jaw-dropping. We can all do it if we’re skilled at our craft. Reach into that little showstopper bag of tricks that you have - a directing exercise, a quick self-deprecating story, a design trick, or simple acrobatics. You’ll have ‘em hooked and you can begin the lesson. Maintain that trust and you may lose them - but they’ll come back to you to learn more.

From what I’ve seen, the structure of primary and secondary Education with a capital E these days is challenging. Distractions are everywhere - classes are blazingly short, filled with cell phones, and many parents encourage a compression of their children’s lives with too many AP classes and extra-curriculars. You know. For a good college. You know. For a good job. You know. For happiness. Later. When it’s too late.

Now theater can be just another extra-curricular to stress kids out, to be sure. But while this schedule takes up their whole day, I’d argue that this structure isn’t really immersive - it’s full of stuff, but fails entirely when it comes to having the kids, you know, engage with the material.

Theaters are actually really well equipped to provide a rich learning environment, but not in the form that we first think of - performance and talkback. That’s simply asking kids to be polite, shut up for a while, and then reengage without really understanding the context of how theater gets made. The thing that kids need the most exposure to - if the goal is creating the next generation of theater appreciators - is the doing of theater - the choices that get made, and the excitement of text -> rehearsal room -> design -> stage. A small theater is a great place to learn the most basic of communication and teamwork skills.

When you immerse kids in a learning environment - with multiple teachers or even authority figures who are all committed to the idea of engaging, teaching, and pushing the student to explore the material on their own - amazing things happen. It’s actually a simple equation, but one that requires too many resources for most schools to provide. But theaters CAN provide those opportunities if they were to structure their educational initiatives with some care.

Just imagine the difference between a performance and talkback where the kids show up moments before curtain and when they show up two weeks before opening.

Let’s say you give a student or a small group of students an opportunity as say interns for a small theater. Don’t make them do your dirty work for you like bathroom cleaning - have them help you rehearse and make their own choices as the cast and crew make their choices. Have them watch your designers as they build sets, props, hang lights, program boards and set sound levels. Clue them in on WHY you’re making choices, and WHY other choices would change the show. Help them see how a big, unified production can be created by hundreds of small choices.

That is valuable training for any child. And if it makes them appreciate the work of the theater artisan, so be it.

I should add - my theater company New Leaf is really trying to make this kind of program happen right now - thanks in no small part to the lessons we’ve learned from teaching at the Cherub program, a program that as I’ve mentioned many times changed my life as a theater educator. New Leaf has already had our first successful high school-level internship (go Emma!), a student who assisted the sound department in designing two shows in our last season. We’re really looking forward to trying the format out in the directorial department and potentially formalizing the program after trying it out a bit more this season. Because we do want to teach, and it’s not about a revenue stream for us - unless you count a group of people who will be fans of theater forever a revenue stream.

So yeah, to The Next Stage: You’re right. College isn’t the time. It’s younger. But all is not lost on our hipster youth, and we definitely need to approach the problem with both seriousness and enthusiasm.

It’s time for some more CTDB’ing it up.

There’s been some really surprising (to me, anyway) buzz on the project in the last week, and most exciting to Dan and I, there’s been some ideas coming forward about how exactly the darn thing is going to be useful to people.

Of course, like any project this complex (like say, a production!) it needs be tackled one step at a time.

This week’s step involves you. As Dan has mentioned, we’re teaming up with Performink to create a cross-referenced survey of all the productions and the people and companies doing it for the upcoming season. Because the user interface is still in progress, we’ve decided to run the survey through another site that will allow us to compile the data and merge it with the existing information on the CTDB.

What does this mean for Chicago theater companies? This survey is your first shot at entering your own data into the CTDB and seeing what you can learn from that data.

What do I mean by “what can you learn?”

How busy is the venue that I’m renting at? What other shows are going on at the same time as mine? Are they LOUD shows?

How many people are doing the play that I’m doing, and how recently?

How busy are my performers and designers? What else are they doing this year? How can I support their work as they support mine?

What other shows open on the same day as my show?

These questions are running around in my head today because I just listened to a rather stellar interview that Anne Nicholson Weber conducted with Chris Jones, Tony Adler, and Kerry Reid on the question of what gets reviewed in this town and why. There’s a lot to be learned and culled here, and before now it required let’s say a decade of experience to really be able to predict if producing say the Cherry Orchard was a good move for a young storefront. Of course, adding in historical data into the mix may make that experience easier to come by for younger companies. In any case, Anne’s been really notching up the quality of the industry news on the Talk Theater in Chicago podcast, and if you haven’t heard it in a while, just grit your teeth through that theme song and give this episode another shot.

We’re going to be putting together some quick and dirty reporting tools in the next few weeks to help answer these questions in a single click - and as we all see what becomes useful and revelatory in the data, I encourage you to ask your own questions of us on the CTDB Forum. We are learning, as we collect this data, how to process the data as fast as possible into a granular form that is more and more useful - the $2 programmingspeak word is “extensible.” We are learning that when you have data like this captured in one community pool, there is a lot of quick and efficient coordination that can be done that just wasn’t possible before.

But it all starts with the data. So jump in and good luck in planning your season.

It’s hard to put into words what teaching at the Cherub program is like. So I give you this.

I feel positively renewed.