Educating artists
Bonnie Marranca
T his issue of PAJ 103 highlights our ongoing interest in arts education in a spe-
cial section entitled “The Education of the Artist.” In recent years considerable
attention has focused on rethinking the arts and the university, which have
always had an uneasy relationship, while the number of arts training programs has
grown decade by decade. In particular, discussion in the visual arts has produced
several publications that address art history, the curriculum and studio classes. In
the theatre, pure, books, articles and blog posts have focused on the status of the
playwright, graduate degrees, programs and the curriculum.
Over the last thirty or forty years the basic framework of undergraduate theatre pro-
grams — that is, the mix of theatre history, dramatic literature, and productions — has
changed little, except to have evolved more and more into acting programs and
reduced scholarly focus. On the graduate level, the MFA emphasis on practical train-
ing and workshops has recycled the same educational models. One sharp distinction
between visual arts training and theatre training is that art departments embody
a critique of institutions, curation and exhibitions while theatre study offers no
grounding in institutional critique that would examine theatre production, festivals,
cultural policy, funding and institutional structures. There is no comparable body of
literature in theatre with the range of the art world’s attention to institutional cri-
tique. This tendency also produces a type of theatre criticism that is unsophisticated
in the politics of culture.
For PAJ’s theatre training focus, the German composer, director, and professor Heiner
Goebbels presents his “nine theses” on educating performing artists, pointing to the
outmoded specialization in traditional training and text, and preparation of students
merely to fill the rigid demands of established institutions, as detrimental for open-
ing up new directions in the 21st century. He writes: “In acting training, you rarely
find formal ‘external’ techniques taught that go beyond ‘empathy.’ . . . And ignorance
of the accomplishments of avant-garde theatre of the twentieth century continues
deliberately to set us back.” For Hillary Miller, in her “Advice to Applicants,” MFA
Playwriting programs present a vision woefully ignorant of the business and legal
implications of theatre-making and short on strong intellectual foundations. Since
graduate theatre degrees are no guarantee of a living wage in one’s profession,
© 2012 Bonnie Marranca
PAJ 103 (2013), pag. 1–3. 1
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she reiterates the Theatre Development Fund’s recent report that one third of all
playwrights earn less than $25,000 per year. It is widely evident that artists are the backbone of arts programs nationwide, luring students to expensive schools that deny them a living wage, benefits or any track to promotion, and so the facts grow more dismal: 12% of them earn over $30,000 yearly; 25% of teaching artists earn
only $10, 000–$20,000 per year. Yet, 42% of them hold Masters Degrees. Universities
pride themselves on being the home of progressive social thought, but they have
ignored the ethical implications of educating too many arts students who can never
earn a decent living in the profession.
New York City is overflowing with colleges and universities offering undergradu-
ate and graduate programs in theatre — close to twenty, according to Peter Zazzali,
who in his article surveying actor training, questions “the practical and educational
rationale of these programs.” Add to that the hundreds of NYC private acting schools
and independent teachers, and the inevitable conclusion is that the field is super-
saturated, notwithstanding the fact that the median salary for members of Actors
Equity is below $7500 per year.
For decades we have lived with the same problems but now that the high cost of
tuition has become a national issue in the 2012 election, and resources are dwindling,
attention has turned to practical and ethical concerns. Students need to take more
responsibility for their education and not accept without question what it is they are
signing up for. The curriculums and exploitative adjunct system are long overdue
for an overhaul. Theatre training is largely based on a model that would prepare
students for Broadway or the equally commercial and conventional off-Broadway
or regional theatre, as well as for television. This educational strategy makes them
unsuited for new modes of writing, or performing with media that destabilizes the
idea of the “live” and bypasses psychological conflict as the basis of drama, besides
ignoring the impact of visual arts and dance in influential theatre practices here and
in Europe. Most training provides no artistic vision for theatre in the twenty-first
century. The fact that theatre is pandering more and more to audiences, and increas-
ingly mimicking television and interactive media, only emphasizes its problematic
situation. The questioning of theatre as spectacle further complicates the issues that
are now unfolding.
In my view, theatre study should be expanded to train students in producing, curat-
ing and archiving. On the level of curriculum theatre can no longer afford to gradu-
ate students who lack basic knowledge of important ideas and artworks in dance,
video, music and visual art. Today it is questionable whether discipline-based study
is preferable to interdisciplinary arts, but that is a much larger challenge to academic
convention and more difficult to transform in the university structure.
One of the central issues of our time in performance is the intermingling of theatre,
art and dance, as the contemporary arts themselves demonstrate, and the museum’s
turn toward performance confirms. We are now faced with parallel cultures in which
large numbers of theatre students remain ignorant of the contemporary processes in
2 PAJ 103
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their transformed art form — stuck in decades-old models of training and practice,
fostered by all delivery systems in the profession, that have obsessed over “craft”
while neglecting conceptual range and artistic daring. Only a small percentage of
artists outside the mainstream engage in the research/experimentation that moves
theatre toward a future.
In 1995, PAJ 50/51 comprised an entire theme issue, “The Arts & the University.” At
that time in an essay entitled “Theatre and the University at the End of the Twentieth
Century, I wrote:
Theatre departments give no significant attention to the visual arts, or to
dance history, or to music-theatre and opera (in which so many Western
theatre directors have worked in the last two decades. (…) Neither is there
any attempt to organize knowledge in the art world crossovers such as
body art, installations, and video. Yet, the art world has become increasingly
theatrical, and many artists are working in multimedia forms that combine
image-text-music-movement, here and abroad.
Nearly two-decades later those remarks still describe theatre training. Even more so,
in the intervening time, PAJ has been forcefully articulating the relationship of theatre
and the visual arts in a more comprehensive view of performance. That is why we
changed the name from Performing Arts Journal to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and
Art in 1998 (PAJ 58) and also began publishing the Art+Performance series of books.
From the perspective of 2012, I would venture to say one of the biggest failures of
arts education has been the lack of foresight in art departments to integrate theatre
history (and dance) with the history of visual art performance, a loss which accounts
for the art world’s uninformed critical and historical understanding of performance
ideas and processes; likewise, theatre departments’ (especially those offering the
MFA) inability to open up to textual practices, art forms, and media identified with
the visual arts. These crossovers have been apparent since the seventies and have
come full-blown into the realm of “performance,” even as they remain separate
histories. To bring them together for a larger view of performance, testo, Immagine, E
design would be of enormous benefit in influencing new approaches to educating
and training artists.
MARRANCA / Educating Artists 3
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