The Jury Is Out
Dunkirk NY -Although I haven’t written since the last day of November, it wasn’t because I needed a week off. It was because I went right into a very, very hectic week of juries and one-act rehearsals. From Monday through Friday of last week I think on average I did not come home from work before 11:00 PM. In the process I saw 62 juries, gave feedback to those 62 performance majors, and saw 14 rehearsals, giving feedback for those. Each rehearsal session lasts about one hour. Oh, and yesterday evening I saw two senior recitals. That was my week.
Acting juries are quite the process. What we do is have each BFA Musical Theatre or Acting major perform two short (45 seconds) monologues in front of all five performance faculty, so it’s formed like a mock audition. The faculty have evaluation sheets, and fill them out during the jury. It takes us two three-hour sessions to get through all the students. Then the following three days we have three four-hour sessions where the performance faculty deliver their feedback to each student individually. That’s about 10 minutes apiece. It’s an intense experience for the students and an exhausting one for us. By the end of juries week you’re pretty much talked out.
Is it a good process? Truthfully, I am not sure. Part of this process has been driven by external forces. The national movement towards more assessment in higher education has meant that we have taken this process, which has been in place for some time, and made an attempt to quantify it. So where as before the evaluation sheets were all in the realm of comments, now they are on a scale of 1-5, so a student can get a maximum total of 30 points overall, and have her score averaged across the five faculty auditors. We also have our categories (overall performance, acting technique, voice and movement) tied to our program’s stated learning objectives. As far as a process is concerned, I think it’s tolerable.
Perhaps of all the things I am discovering through this process is how often all five of us are in agreement about any given student’s ability and performance on that day. I think perhaps that’s the best sign of all, because it means that we are all on the same page when it comes to an individual student’s growth and development, and there is not sense of favoritism; each student hears more or less the same thing from all five of us. If the message to the student is consistent, then the student has little opportunity for playing one faculty member off on another, and can be relatively sure that what is being said has value and truth to it.
The human factor is of course another thing. For the students, the pressure factor comes into play. At the freshman and sophomore level, they understand that these first four juries mean they either get to continue in the program or get cut. Their fourth jury is called their barrier, and to continue in the program they must pass that barrier. We are usually pretty frank about letting a student know where they stand before they get to that point. If we think it’s necessary we issue warning letters beginning the end of the freshman year. We do all we can to make sure that, if we release a student from the BFA program, it comes as no real surprise. We also take into account things like work habits, attendance in class, work in productions; all the usual. I think in some circles it’s called “disposition.” Once they pass their barrier they cannot be bounced from the program unless the circumstances are extraordinary. So the juries from that point on tend to be meetings with the faculty to discuss growth, where they should progress next, and preparation for their final recital. They are not quite as stressful for the student.
The juries can also be emotional moments for students. For students whose work is not so good, they sometimes break out in tears as they hear the comments. Interestingly enough, we occasionally tell a talented student that, despite their talent, they are still exhibiting some bad habits they need to break, and that causes some emotion as well. They realize we are not giving them credit for what gave them success in high school, and sometimes that comes as a shock. But the reverse is true as well – when we see tremendous growth in a student, even when that student is one we know may not ever be a professional, we go to great lengths to let them know how much we appreciate and respect their growth and development, and that makes some kids feel pretty good. And again, the tears. You can see the relief in their faces; sometimes I can almost see the stress just melt away. Those are good moments.
So it’s one more week of classes, including the one-act festival this Tues-Thur., and then a week of finals and semester break. I have a great deal of re-organizing to do this winter break, which I hope will bear some fruit next semester. We shall see. -twl
