Research or Craft?: Nine Theses on Educating Future Performing Artists

1

When we talk about educating performing artists, we are speaking about the end of a very long chain. All our existing schools in theatre and performance-related skills and craft—for actors, dancers, singers, musicians, directors, stage set, and costume designers—are the result of an aesthetic convention developed over a long period of time. All educational institutions were founded with the sole intention of delivering new blood, trained personnel for the operative institutions to present, evening after evening, ballets, operas, concerts, plays, and musicals. They are the result of an existing artistic practice that is at least one hundred years-old; the founding principles for opera training are, in fact, quite a bit older. They were not conceived to renew or revise the aesthetic, much less consider questioning the structures and institutions, for which they are educating young aspirants. Because of this, the education for the existing “market” is the last and slowest link in a chain formed by art, art institutions, and training for the art institutions.

It’s fine and fair, an important goal, that upon graduation the alumni will be in line to get quite reliable jobs at theatres and opera houses, but it is irresponsible not to prepare them at the same time for an insecure and far more complex future. And with each generation of graduates we run the risk of legitimizing and stabilizing the prevailing view of artistic disciplines as they are conceived of by established institutions.

Instead of this we should educate clever young artists who are also capable of developing their own aesthetic. And we mustn’t do this, as if we, as teachers, know what it should be. We don’t know. The future of performing arts is, hopefully, not foreseeable; to prepare students for the approaching complex reality, we must involve them in our research and enable them to do their own experiments.

2

Every craft, every technique is ideological. Speech training can delete the sound of your personality; it can silence the biography, the accent, and the originality of your own voice in order to meet the requirements for a given aesthetic standard. This is also true for operatic voice training and for other performance areas, for learning roles in acting and in the directorial strategies in drama departments that are at a loss in how to deal artistically with non-psychological post-dramatic texts, those without characterization or linear narration. In acting training, you rarely find formal “external” techniques taught that go beyond “empathy.” Many training methods try to make us believe in the “naturalness” of classical conventions. And ignorance of the accomplishments of avant-garde theatre of the twentieth century continues deliberately to set us back. How long has it lasted (and how many stagings by Robert Wilson have we seen) before we seriously accepted what Adolphe Appia had already proposed more than a century ago, that stage lighting can be an independent art form and not just a means to enhance the visibility of the actors or the set design?

We urgently need the luxury of artistic research to replace the current concentration on classical craft and its training methods. If we teach training methods, then we need to acknowledge diversity and variety and always to be aware of historical implications. We need to foster wide openness in those who are studying in order to conquer the clichés that the seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds get about their future profession as actors or directors from film, TV, musicals, or high school theatre. For many, their professional decisions probably come too early. For this reason, consider this question: in auditions for these disciplines, are we attracting, considering, and choosing the right clientele?

3

Time is crucial—even in a longer perspective. We don’t have to dedicate every possible minute of the curriculum to skill and technical training, rather we should enable emerging young artists to constantly ponder the ever-changing concept of art and not simply to accept the repertory, the works, the genre as presented. It takes time to read...