 My name is Dr. Dr. Holdkamp. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at Tulane University. And I'm here to talk about my book, Interchangeable Parts, Acting, Industry, and Technology in US Theater. The big idea behind this book is that I was curious about how people learn how to learn to act. How did we end up in a place where there were schools of acting where someone could learn how to be an actor but perhaps be on stage very little over the course of their actual educational career? And that idea that there was a way to become an actor without just acting is actually a relatively recent innovation in the world of theater and dates to the late 1800s, the latter part of the 19th century. And so what I decided to do was sort of look at how this came about. How did we create this system where people could figure out what it meant to be an actor independent of being on stage every day? Now, prior to this period, the way that you became an actor is very much like I was describing an apprenticeship model. You would apprentice yourself to a theater company, you would play small, very small roles, servants, spear carriers, that sort of thing. You'd watch other people and what they were doing, people who had more experience and bigger roles and you'd watch what they would do and then you would try to copy that and then eventually you'd get your chance to give that a try. And this changes again starting in the late 1800s. Suddenly people are starting to say that maybe acting was a little bit more than just copying what somebody else was doing. There might be a system that could be worked out that would make somebody a better actor and that could be separated from just acting. And this was created with a great deal of suspicion by folks at the time who felt that trying to systematize something like art was antithetical to the very nature of the process. And a lot of people got flacked just because they were proposing any system at all, regardless of what the content of that system might be. But the idea that there could be a system proved remarkably seductive. And one of the reasons that I posit that it was seductive is because it intersected with another strong strain and cultural currents at this time, which was the increasing embrace of industrialism and industrial philosophy and rhetoric. The same time that you start to get these schools of acting, let's say that you can break a part in a play down into a series of sort of component skills that you could then build back together. Interchangeable parts technology as far as a manufacturing practice was also really coming into its own and was proving itself incredibly influential and popular and powerful. And so it's the intersection of these two areas, the rhetoric of industry on one side and the rhetoric of theatrical practice on the other that I try to explore in this book. Originally I'd only planned on looking at live theatrical practices, but I determined as I was continuing to do research that there might be something sort of interesting to look at in film practice as well. And so I got a chance to dive into what was going on, both in the silent film era and in the sound film era during the golden age of the Hollywood studio. And what I found is that there was a frank acknowledgement of the fact that it was not just looking good or the camera liking you that would make somebody a good actor or a bad actor that there was in fact a sense that there was a skill that could be learned and that could be learned in a class before you actually got in front of the camera itself. And so I got a chance to sort of look at how that argument was played out both in the live theater world and in the film world. And there's a lot of intersection between the two of those things. And as we head closer to our own time in the late 20th, heading into the 21st century, what emerges is that some of the most influential acting practices and techniques and people from the 20th century, whose influences definitely still felt today in a number of programs really have a lot of their roots in this same batch of industrial rhetoric that I explore from this time period. So that's sort of an overview of the book itself. I was really excited to get to dive into this and now I get to spend some time with some of the writings of again, some of the most influential teachers of acting in the United States in the 20th century. And I also got a chance to do some really fun archival work as well. I went out to Los Angeles and spent some time in the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences Archive. So the people that brought me the Oscars, they have an archive as well. So I got to spend some time digging through studio files there. Warner Brothers, the studio, all of their papers were stored at the University of Southern California. So I spent some time at USC as well doing some research there. And I spent some time in the New York Public Library getting to do some research in their archives as well as pulling a few books from our own special collections here at Tulane. My hope is that if people read this book, they'll come away with a better sense of what are the underlying assumptions behind a lot of approaches to acting technique and methodology that are still around today. And they'll have a better sense of the way that theater is not separate or independent from these larger cultural currents that in fact it reflects them and can influence them as well as I think the overlap of these two particular areas really shows. The next thing that I'm interested in looking at seems like it might be somewhat different. I'm interested in looking at stage and screen representations of New Orleans. So on the one hand, it's definitely not as practice focused as my look at acting technique and pedagogy. But on the other hand, for me it encompasses that same idea of trying to look at how theatrical practice and how screen practice reflect these larger cultural concerns and influences. So that's a little bit about me and the book. Thank you so much for watching. And I hope that if you have any questions, I'll get a chance to answer them. Thanks again.