The Artist/Educator Gap
Dunkirk NY – The first thing that seems to happen when a person becomes a moderately successful artist is to reject their college education. Perhaps they will cling to the words of one or two individual professors, but by and large the process seems to be one where the education a potential artist receives at the college level becomes less and less valuable or meaningful over time.
College professors don’t often see this gap. Why? Because their education suited them perfectly for becoming college educators. Mine is a clear example. As I consider the question, I cannot help but admit that I am basically doing the same things I have been doing since 1972 – putting on college plays. It’s been the bulk of my artistic life. Yes, I have a résumé of professional acting credits, but in almost every single instance I have been involved with what I can only classify as “more of the same.” All three Shakespeare companies I’ve been associated with have roots in an educational situation. Much of the theatre in Buffalo is very standard in its approach, and three of the major theatres operating in Buffalo are in residence on a college campus.
The theatrical reality is, I think, quite different when you look outside the college experience. What I suspect happens to a lot of students upon graduating is one of three things: either they find a situation which closely matches the skills they learned in college, or they adapt and learn a new skill set, or they find something else to do with their lives. The statistical data indicates that the third choice is the one that prevails.
Theatre education at the university level is in large part a failure because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it provides students a skill set that is rapidly becoming outmoded and does not give young artists the tools they need to continue being artists. In fact, we actually set them up for failure, because we are creating a myth for them and feeding the unreal dreams and hopes with which they walk in the the door. We add to that myth, not only by the way we talk to them and the pseudo-professional jargon we speak with them, but also by bringing in guest artists who represent only a small minority of our graduates, those we consider “successful” in a professional sense.
We in the universities need to have a much stronger dialog with those who are out in communities creating theatre and art at every level, not just at the professional level. The trouble is, most artists don’t really have a strong feeling or see a need for improving theatre departments. It isn’t on their agenda. If they have some sort of “educational” mission or component, it’s for the K-12 set, because that’s where the money is. Bringing community artists, indie artists, and professional artists together to give us some idea of how to re-structure our educational practices and create young artists who continue throughout their working days to create theatre wherever they are will be a difficult dialog to start.
Where to start? I’m not sure. There are many things going on now across numerous circles, such as Scott Walters and I trying to refine and develop our presentation to the SETC Conference we gave last March. But one thing I do know: these ideas are not confined to theatre education alone. All of higher education is facing the same general dilema. There’s a lot of work to be done to transform a 13th century institutional model into something more adequate for the 21st century. -twl
