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  • A Note from the Editor
  • Sandra G. Shannon

The recent release of the movie Star Trek offers an interesting example of the innovative yet risky spirit that informed ATHE 2009. It also provides a convenient springboard for introducing the eight essays in my final issue as editor of Theatre Topics. "To boldly go where no one has gone before" is the universally recognized mission of the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Searching out new worlds and venturing into unchartered territory became nothing short of an art form for Captain Kirk and his iconic cast of crewmembers as they battle intergalactic aliens and encounter dangers beyond their wildest dreams. While innovating theatre today does not entail clashes with aliens or desperate pleas to the mother ship to be "beamed" back to safety, it does quite often involve waging battles on a number of fronts to penetrate the force fields of stagnation. "Risking innovation," in this sense, becomes a vital mission for all involved in advancing theatre—both onstage and in the classroom. In many interesting ways, the September 2009 issue of Topics continues the inspiring discourse of the conference by not only teasing us with "what ifs," but also by providing the actual groundwork for success at risking innovations.

Contributors to this issue dare us to think outside the box in devising new approaches in theatre education, in innovating strategies in actor training, and in capitalizing on the power of live performance. Linda Essig pushes for across-the-curriculum entrepreneurship training in today's theatre education programs. She argues in "Suffusing Entrepreneurship Education throughout the Theatre Curriculum" the advantages of courses that afford playwrights, designers, directors, or actors a real-world education in the free enterprise of bringing their creative products to their audiences while still engaged as students. Her essay offers several definitions of entrepreneurship, looks broadly at academic offerings in the field and how they relate to teaching entrepreneurship within the theatre curriculum, discusses the potential for entrepreneurship education in a theatre arts curriculum, and shares some current practices in theatre entrepreneurship education.

In "Preparing to Devise," Joan Herrington and colleagues Susanna Morrow and Gleason Bauer offer a convincing argument targeted at shaking up "the established curriculum," which does not offer training in skills needed to facilitate the devising process. "Students must learn to think and work as an ensemble," they argue; "[a]nd they must learn to be specific in their ability to identify viable creations-moments / frames-effective units of performance that can be collaboratively cohered to form fresh, original theatre." In addition to raising awareness of this void in theatre curricula, the authors offer some pedagogical tools that can be used in devising in the classroom as well as in preparations for production—tools that train the participants and facilitate the creative process.

In "Writing as Performance: Using Performance Theory to Teach Writing in Theatre Classrooms," Shelley Manis extols the advantages of infusing writing in theatre education classes while passionately arguing that "now is an ideal time—with composition theorists increasingly open to the idea of performance's importance in the writing classroom—for theatre educators to take an even more active role in reimagining efficacious ways of bringing writing into the theatre classroom." Her conviction evolves out of concern about the difficulties undergraduate theatre students face as they rigorously practice their chosen aspects of theatre arts without practicing the critical thinking (and, in most cases, research) skills that writing requires. [End Page vii]

Anne Fliotsos believes that it is high time to reverse the binary that has historically privileged text over intuition in studying play scripts. In "From Script Analysis to Script Interpretation: Valorizing the Intuitive," she explores alternative lenses through which to view the script, arguing that intuitive, subjective interpretation is not only valid, but a necessary complement to traditional analysis. To build upon this premise, she advocates removing bias from the class by substituting the term script interpretation for the more traditional script analysis. In essence, she concludes, the question to the student interpreting a script shifts from "How do you work on the play" (i.e., the analysis of a text) to "How does the play work on you?"

Tara McAllister-Viel...

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