An Open Letter To Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

When I received an email from you (yes, from you directly, not from "The Obama Campaign" or anything like that) inviting me to apply for an Obama Organizing Fellowship, I was thrilled.

First of all, I was thrilled that you had even thought to ask me to apply in the first place. Secondly, I was very excited about the opportunity to potentially work on your campaign, thanks to the generosity of your Fellowship Program.

I'll tell you; I seriously considered applying, even though I knew that fellowships didn't tend to pay much and that it would mean living in penury a while longer. I would continue eating cheese-and-mustard sandwiches if it meant I got to work for you.

Then I clicked on the link and discovered that your fellowships were, in fact, unpaid. They also required a minimum of 30 hours/week time commitment.

Senator Obama, you do realize that asking the young people of this country (as I assumed your fellowship was intended for students, since it was a summer program only) -- you do realize that asking the young people of this country to apply for unpaid, nearly full-time positions on your campaign will only appeal to a particular subset of applicants, don't you?

Your Organizing Fellows will be a collection of the well-heeled, with a few kids here or there who are practically going bankrupt doing this and trying to hide it.

The fact that you didn't at least offer minimum wage, that you didn't at all try to make this opportunity possible for the students who have to work through the summers, who can't make it on a full-time volunteer gig, breaks my heart.

The fact that you are offering "fellowships" that in truth must be paid out by either the parents of these students or by the students' own credit cards and loans, astounds me.

No doubt this kind of thing happens all the time; asking for campaign volunteers is no big deal, in fact, and I've got no problem with that.

But you called it a fellowship, and insisted it be a full-time commitment.

Next time, just call it an unpaid internship and have done with it. At least the poor students of America won't get their hopes up.

Yours sincerely,

Blue

More Short Fiction

From the same "book:"

Annalie sat somewhere in the middle third of the lecture hall. She was wedged inbetween the metal chair and its battered desk-like offspring, as well as inbetween her own backpack and the bags of the students on either side of her. Having managed to pull the miniature pretend desk out of the metal arm of the immobile chair, she had discovered that it operated on a slant, which kept her heavy Physics textbook in continual danger of sliding down into her stomach. She wondered where she would find the room to take notes, should notes ever become necessary.

Note-taking, however, wasn’t very important at the moment. Annalie was in the 10:00 section of PHY 101, “Physics and You.” The electronic registration program Annalie had worked with over the summer had suggested PHY 101 as an ideal way to fulfill part of her general education science requirement, and Annalie’s father had suggested that it was best to get all of the gen-ed stuff out of the way as soon as possible.

So Annalie sat, five minutes into the first class session of “Physics and You,” listening to the instructor explain the course syllabus. She wasn’t quite sure why the professor wasn’t really a professor but rather a graduate student who looked down at the overhead projector as he read his own syllabus aloud, and she wondered vaguely why he didn’t trust any of them to be able to read it on their own. Annalie had already been to a music history class earlier that morning, and the professor had started them right away on a discussion of the differences between music and other forms of organized sound; now Annalie was stuck in “Physics and You,” listening to a shaky-voiced graduate student explain the attendance policy. College was strange, and – in Annalie’s mind – inconsistent.

Annalie could feel a slight breeze coming from one of the open windows. She ached to go outside. She had spent most of her free time outside when not busy with the demands of Orientation Week, wandering all around the campus. She had gotten Danielle to go with her once or twice, but it seemed like whenever she stuck her head into anyone’s dorm room, they were either logged onto their computer or attached to their cell phone. Libby, in particular – Annalie could not even begin to describe how disappointed she was about Libby. She had never had a sister; only Chris, who teased her and who was too old to be a really good kind of friend (besides the fact that he was her brother, which made some kinds of friendship difficult), and although she had had several friends in high school (mostly other choir dorks like herself), she liked the novelty of having a very close, sister-type friend. Someone she might actually be able to talk to.

For a while Annalie had tried to count the number of words Libby had said to her, but somewhere around forty she lost count and stopped caring. Libby’s mouth seemed to be continually moving, but none of her words were particularly directed towards Annalie. They were directed towards Troy, Libby’s boyfriend, who went to the nearby state school and who was on Libby’s cell phone so often, it was as if he were pumping some kind of vital life force into her ear.

Meanwhile, in “Physics and You” – Annalie had gotten distracted in her own thoughts – a real cell phone rang. Half the students in the room bent down to fumble with their bags. It played through a hyper-speed version of Pachebel’s Canon in D twice before its owner finally retrieved it and turned it off, tossing her permed hair over her shoulder and saying, for the benefit of everyone in the room, “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m so sorry.” Annalie shifted in her seat as much as she could, then stopped her Physics book from exercising its rights to the law of gravity and pressing itself into her ribs. The graduate student, irritated at the phone interruption, went back to describing his grading scale. The breeze was becoming more and more imperceptible by the minute.

*******************

(Clearly I have not managed character delineation; while Miri and Anna have different backgrounds and personal struggles to resolve -- the whole book got outlined as part of the assignment -- they seem to have the same opinion and viewpoint on the gen ed experience. ^__^)

Short Fiction on the Undergraduate Experience

Continuing the ideas from my last post: the following is an excerpt from a project I did for an undergraduate "writing for teenagers" course. Our assignment was to write the first chapter of a book (not the book itself, mind you) which could be marketed to high-school students.

My first chapter, incidentally, was determined to be too "complex" for teenagers to understand, and was judged to contain "too many references."

I'll let the story speak for itself. (It speaks best in Firefox; it'll look all jumbled in IE.)

********************

When Miriam had been in sixth grade, her parents had let her attend a camp for young gifted students. At the time, Miri had loved it; even the goofiness of the icebreakers and the other organized events like Pie Fight and Pajama Day. Now, however, she felt ridiculous.

She had just finished writing in her journal about Orientation Week, the oddly-chosen name for the four days before classes officially began in which first-year students were subjected to all kinds of team-building torture inbetween mini-seminars on important details such as How to Use the Library. The 120 residents of Bryson Hall had all had to run through an obstacle course, sing the Name Game Song, and then sit quietly while a university staff member explained to them how their meal plan worked.

Miri hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but she hadn’t expected this. She had, she supposed, expected something along the lines of Dead Poets’ Society, where intimidatingly charming professors engaged bright young intellectuals in stimulating discourse about life, truth, and the hidden secrets of literature.

Of course, Dead Poets’ Society was actually about a prep school.

This, however, had never appeared in any movie or book about college life that Miri could remember – the experience of being told how to do everything, from using an online card catalog (with which Miri was already rather familiar) to making new friends (Risa had already divided the third floor into clusters, and at the end of each day the clusters met for a few moments to talk about their experiences and play more goofy games). In the meanwhile, there seemed to be continual candy. The RAs were practically plying them with candy. In cluster meetings, every time a resident was able to call anyone else by her correct name, Risa threw that person a Tootsie Pop or a Mini-Snickers. Candy and ice cream and freezer pops – it was still much too warm in the un-airconditioned dormitory.

Miri was baffled, and more than disappointed. She had applied to college, but found herself back in summer camp.

**************

(Yes, before anyone asks, she's got the same name as my cat. ^__^)

Process V. Product: Classroom Edition!

While I was directing Tempest in Hyderabad, I wrote a few posts about the idea of process vs. product. We know, for example, that "process-based" rehearsals are often more fun, but that "product-based" rehearsals often yield better results for an audience.

(For the uninitiated: "process-based" refers to a system which allows the actors in a performance to create "freely," without any fear of being right or wrong; while "product-based" refers to a system which focuses on eliminating certain choices in favor of better ones, and, while not necessarily dividing things into right/wrong, requires a director to say the dreaded word "no" to an actor -- often many, many times.)

I'm going to write about process v. product in terms of my current theatre production shortly, but right now I want to focus on the idea of process v. product in the classroom.

As a TA, I generally get a section or two of "Introduction to Theatre" every semester. It's the typical American gen-ed course, in which students are exposed to the barest fundamentals of a subject in the name of furthering liberal education.

Like many gen-ed courses in the humanities, this Intro class follows an almost entirely process-based method of teaching (and grading). Effort counts more than result, and participation is valued over content. Papers are graded on whether they answered every question in the prompt, but not on what those answers actually are.

(Incidentally, even though our students were told, repeatedly, that their grade was based on whether or not they addressed every question in the prompt, many wrote papers which did not answer -- or even hint at -- one or more of the questions. Baffling.)

Just as a process-based play is easier to direct, a process-based class is much easier to teach. Everyone feels great, lots of people get As, good times are had by all.

However, today I spent a few hours grading my students' "ten-minute play assignment." (The assignment was... um... to write a ten-minute play.) Because they fulfilled the structure of the assignment (they had characters, speaking some dialogue, with some stage directions) I sat and wrote "nice job! 100%!" on student plays which were, in fact, dismal.

I wished I had the time to sit down with my students and talk to them about what makes a successful play; how to create conflict between characters, how to create believable rising action, how to build to an appropriate climax and resolution. Even more than that, I wanted to talk to them about the very nature of storytelling. Why do we tell stories? What differentiates a story from, say, an anecdote -- or from a description of an event? (Many of these plays were just that: descriptions. Two guys sitting in a dorm room talking about girls and sports and cars for ten pages. No conflict, no momentum.)

I know that the assignment was pure process-based, intended to give students an idea of what playwrights do by having them write a play -- but if the product they turned in wasn't actually a play, then did they really learn anything by going through the process?

But we don't have time to teach them how to really write a play, because next week we're moving on to acting, then directing, then design...

I remember being infuriated at this when I took gen ed courses as an undergrad. I recognized all these easy-peasy courses as simulacrum of the real thing, and I wanted the real deal. I didn't want "Physics and You;" I wanted physics. Eventually, I gave up and decided I wanted to play Earthbound (and write a three-act opera based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses), and became grateful for any gen ed course easy enough to require no mental effort.

I know I've written about this before on this blog, but this whole thing... makes me sad. It also makes me feel like a really bad teacher.

People have been telling me, throughout my entire university career, that I need to spend less time worrying about product and more time experiencing the process. "Put that intellect aside; roll around in the unknown!" Lord knows I tried. I gave up what I knew made sense, and I rolled. But as I approach the end of my graduate career, I'm becoming more and more infuriated with anything that doesn't actually connect process to product. Let's lay it on the line, team: some products are better than others. How do we create them? How do we teach people to create them? That, at the end of all this, seems to be what's important.

Audiences, References, and the Benefits of Getting A YouTube Video Six Days Later!

Wow. Nearly a week after I tried to get YouTube to embed this video onto the blog, it shows up!

Here's the related post.

Audiences, References, and the Benefits of "Over The Head" Learning

I haven't done an education post in a while, but a recent conversation brought this to mind.

To wit: we were having a discussion in our theatre class about whether or not you can present an audience with material that they might not understand right away. Specifically: if a play uses a reference that an audience might not get, do you cut the reference? If an entire scene might be too "over their heads" for university undergrads, do you cut the scene?

I've had this argument in other classes as well. Once I took a "writing for teenagers" class where the professor insisted I remove almost all cultural references from my story since "most teenagers haven't read the books you've read or listen to the music you listen to." (This was years before Family Guy and Juno and our current trend of inserting as many references into a creative work as possible.)

Her argument was that teenagers would read my work and become alienated/bored because they didn't know why a particular composer was important to the story's characters. My argument was that including unfamiliar references in a creative work -- whether literary, theatrical, or otherwise -- actually inspired learning; it forced the reader to interact with the material because it was no longer a matter of simple understanding. Whether the reader created his/her own meaning via context clues, or whether the reader hauled out the dictionary to look up the meaning, the reader was actively working with the text and actively learning from it.

(In the class, of course, I cut the references from my stories. Profs give the grades, after all. But I still believe in my argument.)

I wanted to share this clip with you because it was from my favorite childhood television program, Square One TV. I started watching this show when I was six years old and continued watching until it went off the air when I was thirteen.

(I've been trying to get the video to embed for about an hour now. YouTube doesn't wanna let me embed it. Until I can get the vid up, watch it here.)

Note the references packed into just the first few minutes of this clip:

Missing person? No, missing avis.

Hollywood Boulevard.

Angelenos.

Roscoe "Fatty" Tissue.

Taxidermy.

And that's even before you get to the math. None of them are references a six-year-old would understand; few of them are references a thirteen-year-old would understand. But the words enter our heads, and years later if we read a reference to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle we know, without having to look it up, that he was an entertainer and comedian whose career ended in scandal.

Long story short: leave the references in. A reader/audience member shouldn't have to understand everything about a piece right away. If they're the eager type, they'll go home and Wikipedia Soupy Sales or the Texas Two-Step; if they're not interested at the moment, the references will still provide them with a cultural background which will return to their memories at surprising moments.

It's worth noting, unfortunately, that PBS no longer shows children's programming more complex than Postcards from Buster, and even the highly meta Sesame Street has devolved into the over-obvious Elmo's World. (Early episodes of Sesame Street are sold on DVD with the note that they are no longer determined educationally appropriate for children. Wow.)

Midterm Threats

Two days ago, someone at my university discovered a piece of graffiti written in Sharpie inside a bathroom stall.

The message was determined to be a potential threat to university safety.

Campus officials responded by (among other things) increasing police presence on campus and sending a university-wide email announcing that students who do not wish to come to campus during this potentially dangerous time cannot be penalized for missing class.

As this email went out, the campus became awash in threatening graffiti. Students woke up to find "you're next" written on their dorm room doors. Emergency residence hall meetings were called, to try to establish some kind of safety guidelines for residents. The graffiti didn't stop.

I'm of a cynical mind, and my instant reaction is "midterms begin next Monday, and someone -- or a group of people -- is trying to get the university to shut down the campus."

The undergraduates, however, have told me that they are legitimately afraid. Never mind that this additional graffiti appeared alongside the university's "you can skip class" policy; never mind that none of the previous school shootings have been predated by a graffiti outbreak. The undergrads are afraid, and they have good reason to be.

One student even asked me where the safest place would be in a lecture hall, in case of a shooting. Near the door (for possible escape), in the center (surrounded by a mass of bodies, able to duck and hide behind a row of chairs), in a far corner (potentially inconspicuous)??? I didn't have an answer for her.

What does a university do in a case like this? Clearly, if something were to happen, they would be liable. They also want to ensure student safety, and so taking some kind of proactive action is both appropriate and necessary.

At the same time, announcing that students can skip class if they feel afraid (and, in fact, do not need to write their professors any note explaining or acknowledging such fear; they can simply not show up, which essentially meant carte blanche for anyone who missed class today) would seem to offer students a seductive opportunity: want to get out of midterms? grab a pen...

I guess we don't know where to sit in a lecture hall anymore, or what to do in response to threatening messages.

What would you do, if you were a university administrator? What would you do if you were a student?

HALP! SKOOLS IZ EATIN ME!

Back to being a graduate student.

Doing something constantly. 33 contact hours/wk plus homeworks.

That means... the lovely yoga practice schedule I set for myself while temping (which basically involved me doing yoga during the hour of daily syndicated Simpsons episodes on Fox) has gone out the cliched window and is being replaced by unenviable softness. (Someone remind me that guys like a little softness, 'kay?)

It also means I have no clue what happened in Michigan on Tuesday, except it involved Romney doing something and Clinton doing something else which she shouldn't have done because the DNC hadn't approved Michigan anyway.

On the plus side, I really like my coursework this semester. I convinced my advisers that every theatre person should be well-versed in the art of running a business, and so I am taking two grad-level business courses. It's such an interesting dynamic to go from grad seminars which are all about the interpersonal (i.e. "working with actors") and which contain very few "right answers" (but plenty of wrong ones), to a course where I can, quite satisfactorily, point to figures and numbers and have them lead me to a logical, viable conclusion.

So if I post sporadically for a while... well... yeah. I'm in teh classroom, teachin' teh undergrads. Etc.

College Student Leaves "Ambiguous" Status Message On Facebook; University Responds By Slipping Expulsion Letter Under Dorm Room Door

We're back to the serious now, Team Readers.

Do you remember Allen Lee, the high school student who got arrested for following a “do not judge or censor what you are writing” classroom journaling project and writing the phrase "Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab?"

(Incidentally, although the story was in several major newspapers when it first broke, none of them followed through with what happened to Mr. Lee after his arrest. Allen Lee was charged with disorderly conduct, but nowhere on the internet can I find out if he was actually convicted.)

Now Valdosta State University, Home of the Blazers, has expelled sophomore T. Hayden Barnes. The reason?

In a letter apparently slipped under his dorm room door, Ronald Zaccari, the university’s president, wrote that he “present[ed] a clear and present danger to this campus” and referred to the “attached threatening document,” a printout of an image from an album on Barnes’s Facebook profile. The collage featured a picture of a parking garage, a photo of Zaccari, a bulldozer, the words “No Blood for Oil” and the title “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage,” a reference to a campus environmental group and Barnes’s contention that the president sought to make the structures part of his legacy at the university.

Using the word "memorial," even in satire, now apparently constitutes a death threat.

It gets worse:

As additional evidence of the threat posed by Barnes, the document referred to a link he posted to his Facebook profile whose accompanying graphic read: “Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is searching for the next big thing. Are you it?” It doesn’t mention that Project Spotlight was an online digital video contest and that “shoot” in that context meant “record.” The appeal also mentions that Barnes’s profile stated, at one point, that he was “cleaning out and rearranging his room and thus, his mind, or so he hopes.” That was likely a status update, commonly used by Facebook members to update their friends on what they’re doing at a particular moment — whether literally or metaphorically.

Emphases mine. Both quotations come from Inside Higher Ed.

Wow. Barnes had been trying to organize students to protest the building of the aforementioned "Zaccari Memorial" Parking Garage, while simultaneously exploring amateur filmmaking and cleaning out his dorm room. Sounds like an average hyper-involved college sophomore to me (well, except for the "cleaning the dorm room" part). Does not sound like a threat.

And yet that expulsion notice got slipped under Barnes' door (was campus mail not working that day?), all the same.

On a slightly unrelated note, Taser International has just released the world's first "taser which is also an mp3 player!" It should come with a complimentary mp3 of Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta:" Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me...

Tested: Teaching Teachers to Teach Students to Take Tests

Today I read a book called Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, by Linda Perlstein.

I read it because of my continuing fascination with all things "educational theory;" I am a person who, after all, reads the Chronicle of Higher Education first thing every morning, even before glancing at the NYT.

It's about a Title I school in Maryland (Title I referring to the act which granted public schools extra funding if over 40% of their students came from low-income households), and its struggle to pass the standardized testing required by No Child Left Behind. Actually, the trouble isn't that the school couldn't pass. It's that NCLB requires successively higher scores every year. (NCLB's plan is that every student in every classroom will achieve "proficient" scores -- the highest possible rating -- by the year 2014. I am not making this up.)

The school, then, spends its entire year trying to cram test-taking skills into its elementary students' heads; skills for tests so subjective that a kindergartener asked "which picture starts with a B?" and points to the picture of a bear will be scored as answering wrong, because the bear picture is actually a "cub" and is reserved for the question about the "C" sound.

Anyway. What struck me about this article was how familiar many of the teaching methods were. I don't think I went to a Title I school when I was growing up, and the standardized testing movement was just beginning to get its feet off the ground in the early 1990s, but I recognized all too well the techniques these teachers were using.

(Interestingly, Perlstein notes that these techniques are not developed by the teachers themselves, but instead sold to the school by a corporation in the name of teaching teachers how to teach kids to take tests. The teachers, in turn, are required by administration to follow the techniques to the letter, even to the point of being given scripts to memorize before the school day begins.)

Let's take, for example, the "how to write a complete sentence" technique. On a standardized writing exam, answers must be in complete sentences to receive full points. Instead of teaching fifth and sixth graders about subjects and verbs and direct objects, the corporate technique is to require a student to rewrite the entire question and then add his/her answer at the end.

As Perlstein notes: If the question is Brer Rabbit is a tricky fellow. Give examples from the play that prove this., then a student must begin his/her answer with "Brer Rabbit is a tricky fellow because...." A student who begins her answer with "Brer Rabbit tricked," even though this too will lead to a complete sentence, is told to rewrite.

That was my sixth grade year. I figured out pretty quickly what was going on, and adjusted my sentences accordingly, but it drove me crazy.

As did the "objectives," another corporate technique, which suggests that teachers write out objectives, business-style, on the chalkboards every morning and the students copy them down into notebooks (copying being a memorization tool, after all). But the objectives can't be any old "to-do list." Perlman cites examples of objective lists which include The student will use the comprehension strategies of monitoring and clarifying, making connections, and visualizing during the first read. This was on the chalkboard in a fifth-grade classroom.

Truth be told, the real reason I hated the objectives was because they took so long to copy down; time that I could have spent free reading at my desk (I think I viewed most of school as an obstacle that kept me from reading). Likewise, I found "the comprehension strategies of monitoring and clarifying" repugnant. I preferred Roald Dahl's advice to let long passages of books "wash over you, like music." There was, after all, always the dictionary, if you really didn't know what was going on.

The last chapter of the book notes that during the final month of classes, after the standardized tests are over and the teachers given permission to teach outside of the corporate box, the students not only seem to learn more, but also stop fighting with one another.

Anyway. Part of the reason I posted this is because I was chatting with a friend about our respective educational experiences, and my friend could not believe the stories I was telling about my underfunded rural school. (For example: in high school "calculus," the math teacher -- who was also the girls' basketball coach -- told us that every time the girls won a game, we wouldn't have to have homework or a lesson that day. We could sit in class and play cards and listen to the radio, which we did nearly every day that semester, since our girls were the strongest team in the district.)

So now I'm curious. Is it just Title I schools and Rural Route schools who use the corporate method of education? Or did we all have objectives on the blackboard every morning, and learning that forming a complete sentence required copying down the question?

More on Theatre and Education

An insight that came while I was brushing and flossing my teeth (and, btw, if you get a piece of floss stuck between your teeth, what then do you use to get it out?):

The myth of theatre is the myth of the broken convention.

The story of our namesake, Thespis, is the story of a broken convention. People were used to hearing actors tell stories as a chorus; suddenly, one actor stepped forward and began telling a story as a character.

And then it's a trail of broken conventions all the way through Corneille, Moliere, Racine; realism, A Doll House and "the door slam heard 'round the world," and then naturalism, with the shock of "recreating a working restaurant onstage;" then Brecht, Joan Littlewood, Robert Wilson, Joanne Akalaitis, etc.

For the musical-theatre dorks, there are the myths of Showboat, Oklahoma, Allegro, Company, and Rent, among others.

And so theatre students believe, fervently, in the necessity of breaking convention. Which means, sometimes, defying (or, more accurately, ignoring) technique, teachers, advice, the audience response ("they just didn't get it!"), and common sense.

I understand this. I've been there. I've... um... done that. But looking backwards, I realize how much time I wasted because I didn't learn the technique first. I didn't understand the purpose of the conventions beyond the most superficial, Wikipedia-esque level.

Art students spend time copying masterworks. Perhaps theatre students should have to learn to copy a particular performance. One that is difficult physically or emotionally; one that requires a lot of focus and specificity. I'd love to design a class around this idea. I wonder if it would... work.

On Mamet and Education

I went last night to see a student performance of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago. (Which, despite its title, is not particularly "perverse.")

This is part my department's Student-Directed Production Festival; every year, at the end of the semester, the students are given the space (and a tiny, tiny budget) to produce... whatever they want. Tired of studying boring old Chekhov? Tired of being told by your acting teacher to do this, do that? This festival has become, like student evaluations, a way of "getting back" at the faculty.

And so we get Sexual Perversity; or Killer Joe, a play notable only for its gigantic bloodbath at the end, which was performed with enough fake blood to leave the classroom-cum-stage ketchup-red for weeks.

These plays, like high school musicals (and High School Musical), inspire a lot of good feeling in our students. They're fun. Like all plays, they require some work to stage, but they're relatively easy to put on. They're also intensely self-gratifying. They're the students saying "this is what I would do if I could do anything I wanted."

And they're usually awful, just as the Mamet was last night. The performance's lack of knowledge about Mamet rhythms and technique; about staging; about sexual chemistry, for that matter, was oh-so-apparent.

But it made the undergrads laugh because the characters kept saying "f*ck," "c*nt," and "p*ssy." Thus, it fulfilled its purpose and will be remembered fondly.

Now, the education part.

When I was a first-year grad student, I also staged a Mamet piece. My adviser let me pretty much alone because he wanted to see me "explore." So I explored.

My actors and I explored so much that it became the longest, most subtext-laden performance of Speed-the-Plow anyone had ever seen.

Afterwards, another faculty member caught up with me in the student lounge and performed, for me, a short Mamet monologue.

"That's how you do Mamet rhythms," he said.

"Got it," I said. (I'm a quick study.)

He looked a little perturbed. "Why didn't anyone talk to you about that before you staged the play?"

I didn't know, then, why no one had mentioned it; but now I'm beginning to understand. Because theatre education is about exploring impulses rather than reining (or training) them in; about breaking away from the masters rather than trying to copy and understand them; about feeling rather than discipline.

Yes, you need feeling. Of course you do. But the more I study and direct performances the more I understand that discipline and specificity are the two most important things a play needs, more important by far than anything else.

It's like a piece of music. Before you can add your own style, you have to learn how to play the note at the right pitch, with the right duration and intensity. Even the great jazz improvisers are playing within a very specific framework.

When I was in Hyderabad, I asked myself the question "which is more important in theatre? the experience, or the final product? and how does the audience factor into this?"

I wrote that I loved working within a "process" framework (exploring the experience, playing), and my casts responded very well to this kind of direction, but it "always felt a bit like cheating."

Now I understand why. After watching my university's Student-Directed Festival, I 100% understand why.

The point of theatre isn't that you play. The point of theatre is that you produce.

But this is not what our students seem to be learning.

Another Cross-Cultural Similarity: Students Like Free Food

Gulzar (yes, that Gulzar) visited our campus this week. It was the university’s Founders’ Day celebration, and so Gulzar was there to give a lecture on “Language and the Evolution of Indian Cinema.”

The auditorium was packed. We waited with bated breath through three introductions (the introduction of the person who would give the introduction of the person who would introduce Gulzar, etc.) and a forty-five minute PowerPoint presentation on the fiscal achievements of the university, including its recent upgrade from a “National University With Potential For Excellence” to a “National University of Excellence.”

And then, at last, Gulzar spoke.

In Hindi.

There were a few murmurs of consternation in the largely Telugu- and English-speaking audience. And then we settled back and started practicing the art of listening attentively, and laughing/clapping along with the ten percent of the audience who understood what he was saying.

(Actually, truth be told, even I was able to get the gist of the lecture, thanks to a few key words like “Independence” and “Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit,” etc. He was telling the story of how language developed post-Independence, and how Hindi began to dominate over Urdu, and how the popularity of Hindi-language films helped to speed this process. The lecture ended, of course, with a nod to the film industry’s role in popularizing Hinglish.)

About halfway through the lecture, there was a power outage. The lights popped back on a moment later to reveal the aisles packed with students trying to leave the auditorium. However, the majority of us stuck it out to the end, including a lengthy Q&A and the presentation of the thank-you certificate and the introduction of the person chosen to escort Gulzar off of the stage.

And then it was announced that high tea would be served in the garden.

We went to the garden and began to form a queue. I was actually close to the front because I had been sitting in the back row of the auditorium and was right next to the door. They had piles of sweets and snacks; samosas, gulab jamuns, cake, biscuits, etc.

But before I could make it to the sweets table, the rest of the 500+ crowd descended. Ignoring queues, students pressed themselves towards the table like ants swarming jelly. Meanwhile, the people who had been queued began to push back. University par Excellence, indeed. It was clear, both by the way I was being shoved around and by the handfuls of sweets being grabbed by those closest to the table that – well, first of all that there might be nothing left in a few moments, and second that I was in serious danger of being crushed in the stampede.

I’d had plenty of lovely sweets in Bangalore, and so I didn’t need to risk my neck for any of these. I ducked underneath the swinging arms and escaped the melee.

I think we made Gulzar proud, don’t you?

A Tempest of Pictures

The chorus of Ariels sink a ship. Totally did not steal this idea from Peter Brook. Not one iota.

Miranda and Ferdinand make censor-safe love (no kissing!) while Prospero and an Ariel watch.

Trinculo and Caliban. I love this shot.

The magical banquet, and moveable feast.

Group photo. Obviously. ^__^

Yay! Show!

Well, we had us a show.

The house was packed. People were sitting in the aisles. My students were energetic, and (thank goodness) focused. They held for laughs. They didn't forget any props. They told their story neatly and succinctly -- and with a bit of flair, too!

Afterwards, there were two kilos of ladoos waiting for them. (That comes out to two per student, but it sounds better by weight.)

I want to post pictures. I desperately want to post some pictures. But I know I should ask their permission first, and I don't know how to mention "I want to put your faces on the internets" without mentioning where, and... so... yeah.

In the meanwhile, you may have my picture. In the sari, of course. The face is my "you have a show to prepare for, why are you taking this time to take my picture!" face. ^__^

Oh, and to the right you can see Prospero's winged staff. The one the students built, after all. Doesn't it look great?

Opening Night

Well, we're getting our little show off of the ground today.

The team has done so much in this past week, and they've finally pushed the show towards something that is, if not "artistic," then at least capable and entertaining and -- most importantly -- well polished.

(Though I haven't been able to completely stop the squirrely-ness; one of our actors last night did not have his costume -- at our final dress rehearsal -- because he had worn it home from rehearsal yesterday without thinking about it and then left it wadded in a ball on his hostel room floor. Um... *facepalm*)

I'm actually very proud of this show. I think prouder of it than any show I've directed. Certainly I've had to work harder, and improvise more.

And these students have come so far. You wouldn't believe it unless you had been through the process, but they've made so much improvement.

They'll have a good show tonight. They deserve it.

Director's Notes for Tempest

One day to go.

Here's what I wrote for the program:



The Tempest in India.

No. Better still. The Tempest in Telugu in India.

No. Better yet. The Tempest, in Telugu, with an international cast and an American director, created improvisatorially, adapted into the vernacular, costumed in the hodge-podge of our contemporary world, built on a very small budget, staged here, at [mumble mumble mumble] in Hyderabad, here in India.

Everything you see tonight has been created by the students you see performing. They have not only been working as actors, but also as set designers, light board operators, props builders, scene painters, etc. We have worked very hard to bring our talents and influences – culled from America, Iran, Iraq, Andhra, and India across the country – into a cohesive whole. We have spent many hours (over a month of hours) studying and preparing Shakespeare’s complicated text for you, our audience. It has been very hard work, but a labor of love, as they say.

We hope you enjoy our Tempest. Thank you for joining us tonight, at this play.

"You will be the twelfth in a long line of governesses, the last of which stayed only [checks paper] two hours."

Transcript of a conversation between myself and my departmental advisor (“A”):

A: What time should I stop in to watch you rehearse tomorrow?

Me: Well, we start rehearsal at 9 a.m., which means the students will start showing up by 10, so… any time after that.

A: You are lucky that for you they are only late by one hour. It means they like you.

Me: Really? But I asked the other faculty, and the students are never late to their classes.

A: Those are classes. Yours is a performance workshop, and you are only visiting the university. But you are doing very well. You see, we’ve been trying to have guest directors for a while now, but they have always had problems. The last one who came could not even stage his play, because the students decided to stop coming to his rehearsals. So… do not worry about this one hour lateness. In a few days we will have a play. That is what is important.

Thanking My Students, Part Two

Now that I have "singled out" a few students who have worked exceptionally hard, I want to also note that the entire class has, just in these past few days, improved considerably. I think it has something to do with the old cliche that nothing ever happens in the theatre until the week before production. (Makes me wonder why we have all those other weeks of rehearsal, especially at such miserable -- or nonexistant -- pay.)

I've tried to analyze it and I think the moment when I grabbed some paint and slapped together a staff for Prospero (because it needed to be done, and my students weren't doing it) was actually a turning point. They immediately swarmed around me to protest that they were going to do that, and I told them that they hadn't done it yet, and it needed to be done now.

It felt afterwards, and still feels, like my worst moment as a teacher. I wasn't thinking like a teacher, and I wasn't even thinking like a director (there's a very specific hierarchy in the theatre about who does what, and one of the rules is that the director does no actual build work). I wasn't thinking about how my actions would impact my students, or whether I would teach them anything. I was just "these fucking props aren't getting made" and so I went to make them.

And after that the students started showing up outside of class, working late, etc. They were led by a few individuals, some of whom I mentioned in the last post. On the first day, as I noted, there were two students; on the second day there were six; and when I came in this morning they were all there, all working.

So... why did the one thing I did that seemed anti-educational (and, in fact, asshole-worthy) turn out to have the biggest effect?

And, to my entire class: thank you.

Thanking My Students

I only learned, when I got to India, that saying “thank you” was an American thing. I say “thank you” automatically, to waiters and store clerks and everyone – and, of course, to my students, who like to tease me about saying it. Every time I say “thank you” in the rehearsal hall I hear my students parrot it back, imitating my accent and giggling.

But I have a few special thanks for a handful of students who have really worked hard; above and beyond, as they say. Without them, there would be no show whatsoever.

To Student #1: You have risen to leadership without trying, simply because you saw that the work needed to be done and you took the initiative to do it. Now the entire group looks to you. You took charge and built the majority of the set, and delegated what you could not build yourself. At the beginning of the workshop I gave you a very small part in the show because you seemed shy and hesitant to take risks and make big acting choices. Now you are no longer shy, and your talents are very clear. I would like to ship you to the National School of Drama in Delhi and have them train you to become a first-class technical director.

To Student #2: You grab my attention every time you step onstage. Your commitment to your work shows both in your focus to your part and in the millions of questions you ask me after every rehearsal, many of which reveal parts of the play I hadn’t thought about before. You’re the kind of actor who forces me to work harder. Keep at it.

To Student #3: If I had to do it over again, I would cast you differently. Maybe. The trouble is that you’re one of those “triple threat” types – in addition to being a strong actor you’re also an extremely strong dancer and musician. So of course, looking at the needs of the group, I chose to make you the leader of our chorus of magical spirits, because it was a role that demanded rhythm and movement. I know that disappointed you. You would have been good in many of the principal character roles as well. Thanks for choosing to work hard with the part you were given.

To Student #4: You showed up two weeks after the start of class and wanted to be a part of the show. So I made you “assistant stage manager,” a role which is pretty much a title that allows you to watch the rehearsals. Then, when my assigned stage manager took on a different project and stopped coming to rehearsals, you stepped up. You’ve been an invaluable help since.

To Student #5: I know you stayed up until midnight for three days straight translating the script for us. Thank you.

To Student #6: Your Thermacor sculptures are lovely. I’m sorry I thought you were working too slow and tried to take your props away from you. I didn’t know then that you would decide to put so much extra time into what you were making. The finished product is absolutely worth it.