Recently I have come across a situation which really underscores why it is so important to be sensitive about how the way you talk about your art is perceived by people who are not familiar with it.

For the first time in a long time, a couple sections of the Acting I courses are really under enrolled. One theory attributes it to the extremely low unemployment in the state. In an attempt to attract more students to the classes, the drama department put signs up all over the campus, some of them saying “Give Your Brain a Break, Take Acting.”

Now I understand the point of the posters. The class has you getting up and moving around. One of the key steps to acting well is not to over analyze or allow your ego to edit what you do. On the other hand, preparation involves a lot of hard work. There are so many intangibles involved, studying harder doesn’t necessarily improve you.

What the students see on the poster is–easy class. I know this is already the case thanks to an online professor rating site which had comments about the course being too hard for fine arts elective.

I am glad that the course does have rigor. I have stated my concern though that while the students who do enroll will be disabused of the notion that the class is easy, the students who don’t enroll but see the flyers will have a false impression about acting.

Of course, a lot of people have an incomplete idea about the arts anyway. Acting, you just get up and pretend something, right? Yell when you are saying something important. Dance you just do like you see on MTV, right? Doing old style painting is tough. Can’t do a Michaelangelo. Jackson Pollack’s style is simple though!

Part of the problem is, if you are good at your art, you make it look effortless. Other part of the problem is that familiarity breeds contempt, as it were. Used to be circuses could sell themselves on the thrill of high wire and trapeze acts alone. These days it takes no less skill and discipline than it did to swing around 70 feet off the ground, but people are blase and want something more.

Most times when I talk about learning to speak to the uninitiated about ones art, I refer to language that might alienate. I suppose being too simplistic and lowering expectations is just as bad in the course of arts advocacy.

Appropos to yesterday’s entry I came across this article in Arts Presenter’s Inside Arts Magazine today. (minor registration of email address required)

Steven Tepper discusses the Creative Campus trend which includes the type of activities my campus has been involved with in the past and was trying to encourage more faculty to become involved with in the future. (While I mentioned that none of the faculty approached me yesterday, I should note that I had already gotten the ball rolling with faculty on 3-4 projects last spring and over the summer.)

University leaders are also beginning to recognize that fostering a lively creative campus is essential to attract and retain the best students and to prepare those students to thrive in an economy increasingly reliant on intellectual property and creative content. Moreover, there is evidence that students are looking for more “creative experiences,” opportunities to explore their own expressive capacities….

“…Today’s students are no longer content to experience education and culture in a top-down, passive way. Instead, growing up with a “do-it-yourself” ethos, students want to create their own culture, whether through blogs, writing and recording songs, amateur films, podcasts and other forms of art, entertainment and media.”

There is actually some money out there in support of these efforts. Arts Presenters with the Doris Duke Foundation is going to be funding a handful of programs with an eye to using the results as a template for other campuses across the country to emulate. My school actually applied for one of the grants. We had already started down the road to expanding past efforts so I was quite pleased to see there was some money in support of these types of things.

As Tepper (and Richard Florida in his books) points out, the creativity does not necessarily equal fine arts.

“It is also entrepreneurship and innovation in science, business and media. Within the arts, it includes the activity of architects, campus radio stations, multi-media designers and filmmakers. A lively artistic scene is critical to creative work in these other domains. But we must pay attention to how the arts connect to other areas of campus and to the broader conditions for stimulating creativity across the curriculum in multiple domains.”

I daresay, there is nothing to say that these efforts can only occur on campuses with fine art programs. Similar programs with local arts organizations, while more difficult to achieve than with on campus departments, can only serve to strengthen the perceived value of both entities in the community.

I took advantage of the college convocation scheduled in the theatre today to address the professors and suggest ways in which performances in the theatre might be used as anchors for classroom instruction and other activities. My unit is not organized under any academic division so I don’t get a lot of group interaction with faculty. But there they were all gathered in my lair. What more could I ask for?

Last year I worked with two literature professors on a series of events connected to the 400th anniversary of the performance of MacBeth. We presented MacHomer, a really fun show where one man channels the voices and personalities of the Simpsons performing the Shakespeare play. Then we followed with screenings of Orson Welles’ MacBeth and Akira Kurasawa’s Throne of Blood. Finally, we had an evening where student presented projects in the courtyard and students and faculty performed scenes from MacBeth and music from Elizabethean times.

I made suggestions of similar connections with shows this season. Some of the performances have clear associations with botany, astronomy, literature, language arts, music, cultural heritage so it was fairly easy to suggest. I reinforced the point that instruction topic and the performance don’t necessarily have to coincide but that the faculty could use it as an anchor for discussion throughout the semester.

Alas, no one approached me with any ideas for connections during the breaks. I did get to do some additional evangelizing about some other arts organizations during those periods though. I promised to send some additional information out with pictures to the campus faculty email list so they haven’t escaped me yet!!!

One of the other things I specifically mentioned (and do so again here so you can go out and make the same point) was that theatres are essentially big illustrations of practical applications of physics. We deal in properties of light, additive and subtractive color, focal lengths of lenses, calculation of wattage on circuits, rigging of pulleys and counterweights.

If ever a student asked, what will I ever need this for. It is easy enough to point out that even if you never have ambitions to work in theatre, film/tv and dance clubs where theatrical equipment is used, there is always careers such as commercial electricians, engineers, construction et. al. where the skills learned in physics and performance tech classes can be employed.