 Oh you did it, thanks Phil. Welcome everybody. We are actively working on trying to get sound on some of our presentations, so hopefully that will come to pass. Again, my name is Cecilia Rubino. I'm a teacher at Lang College at the New School and welcome, we weren't quite sure how many people would come for our physical theater session, but I want to welcome my colleagues who are also presenting with me today. Leonard Cruz from St. Mary's College, Megan Frank from Del Arte International, Liz Hussler, Liz and Lane Sabada, am I pronouncing that correctly, and Melanie Stewart from Rowan University. So I just wanted to start with a little bit of a dialogue and in the hopes that my friend Phil can get the sound working. Otherwise, Peter Brook in his lovely text, The Open Door, wrote that theater is a wide open term. He says it's almost a word that's meaningless because it creates confusion, one person speaks about one aspect and another speaks about something very different. The word he says is like speaking about life, it's too big. But he goes on to say theater has nothing to do with buildings, text, actors, styles or forms. The essence he says is within a mystery called the present moment. The present moment he says is astonishing like a fragment broken off a hologram. Its transparency is deceptive and when this atom of time is split open, the whole universe is contained in infinite smallness. So in this session we're going to talk about physical theater and I want to suggest that those two words together are just as multifaceted and complex and many of us have all kinds of notions of what physical mean and also what theater means. But I'm going to pause it and the title of our session comes from Tang Xuying. Tang is his family name, but Xuying from Hong Kong who made the statement that all theater is physical theater. The body is engaged in the act of storytelling. But physical theater practice goes back to the ancients from Greek choral dances all the way through to no theater who no has obviously influenced many current practitioners from Suzuki to Bogart and on from there. But also our 20th century practitioners. Stanislavski was introduced to yoga by one of his colleagues and working on physical practice particularly at the end of his career in his life. He catapults Meyerhold Grotowski and on from there. We could go on with these lists of names. But my hope is to, if Phil has got sound going, my hope is to share a little bit of Xuying Tang's work with you. I had the privilege of being in Hong Kong and meeting him and having a series of long interviews about practice. He actually comes out of a yoga tradition. He went to India and studied and is a yogi. He also uses Tai Chi work in his practice. But interestingly enough this conference is about this convergence between universities and ensembles. And he said something very interesting. He said he studied in Paris, but he came back to Hong Kong in 1992 and working as a professional director. And then in 1997 created a theater company called No Man's Land and started working physically also with video and movement practices. But it was when he was hired at Hong Kong Academy for Arts that he then said he had the time working with his students to develop physical practice. And that really transformed the way he worked. In 2012 the Globe Theater was, actually it was 2011, was hunting the world for pieces of Shakespeare to bring to the Globe in 2012. And Xuying had done a piece called Tidus Andronicus. And he was invited, his company was invited. And at that moment he had actually two versions of the piece. He had a piece called Tidus Andronicus which was text-based and he had another piece that then he distilled called Tidus 2.0 which was really just a physical theater piece. It stripped the language away. His actors were down to the seminal essence of the rage and trauma that's embedded in that play. When the producers from the Globe looked at both of the pieces they opted for the text-based piece as a safer bet to bring to the Globe in London. They're really interesting pieces of work. His next piece then actually stripped language altogether. It's really a dance piece called Thunderstorm. And we just don't have sound, Phil. No luck, Phil? All right, cool. But like all the many of you making your work he's always pushing the envelope. So coming out of a very physically-based work that he'd been making his last piece, oddly enough, is all text-based. He grabbed his ensemble of actors. He's no longer at Hong Kong Academy but he runs his ensemble out of the Hong Kong Arts Center and they created a piece called Why Are You Not Steve Jobs? It's all spoken text. But I'm hoping that I can show you a little bit about his pieces and then I'm going to allow the next group of presenters to come up. Again, interestingly enough, so much physical practice even through the centuries has been influenced by Eastern practice and it's really interesting to watch this astonishing director in Hong Kong melding different traditions. So you can just watch the images. Yeah, no sound. I think Phil is trying to work it out. I'm not sure that it's actually coming out of the computer either. So here we are. Welcome to technology. Physicalize it. Yes. So there's a beautiful traditional flute music that's playing over this and again this is the piece Titus 2.0 that you're looking at. And if any of you have been lucky enough to see the piece, the Korean piece on Wojciech done with 13 chairs, you can see some of that vocabulary in his work here too. This is not No Man's Land. This is a piece called Titus 2.0. No Man's Land was a company that he ran back. He has evolved and has had several different ensembles. From what I understand, this particular company has a number of his former students from Hong Kong Academy of Arts and that he's worked with he has been working with a group of physical actors and dancers over time. But in each new piece he also includes other people. Yes, this one really eliminated most of the Shakespeare text. There is text in it. But I can show you also the one that he took to the globe which includes in Cantonese a lot of Shakespeare's text. Yes it is. Correct. And Tang Shuiang, his center, also has them posted. So he also runs an intense training session in January. He'll be running a session for graduate students which is over a six-week intensive period in his practice. Actually his study of yoga happened after he was a professional director. So I think in my dialogues with him I kept prodding him about practice and just because I'm so fascinated by it. And he said he reached a moment physically that he then needed to go and train and deeply fell into yoga practice and wanted to become a master teacher. He uses that in his work with his ensemble and with his students. But he also says he couples it. So I said, do you use it in every session? Is that how you start? And he says, you know, he can't. It's not codified. So one day it's Tai Chi and one day it's yoga. But using the breath. So this is a really, again, he's got some really stunning visual moments. It is kind of cool without sound. I'm going to actually play the, just so that you can see it, the one from the globe. You do? Wow. I think it's okay. I think for the sake of time we can leave this one out. Let's see. Just so that you can see it visually, this is the piece that he took to the globe. So you can see the same configuration of chairs. But again, he's using Cantonese. So you just get a little bit of a taste of this. And again, I recommend you perhaps finding his work online as well. So I'm going to turn the microphone over to my colleagues here. And to move on to your discussion of your practice at Rowan. Is it university? Okay. Liz. Thank you so much. I know that we have a lot to cover today. And I'm really excited that already there's so many intersections. I thought that what Liz Lerman and Mark Valdez was saying is exactly what we had to propose to talk about today. Which is in some ways this dichotomy and the way that we tend to think of ourselves as either artists or educators in the way that we think about ourselves as being theater practitioners or dance practitioners. And how the institution, by its very nature, institution versus the profession, which tends to be more fluid, is automatically creates a sense of boxes. And how difficult it is for us to see outside the box. And I think Liz was quite beautiful in her articulation of how easy it is for us as artists to negotiate that territory. We often get stuck in that too because we were trained in a certain way. And because that training gets codified and solid in us. And back when I was younger, I went to a BFA program and it was at VCU. And we had the theater program and we had the dance program. And we took a couple courses with each other. But we never talked. We never really talked. So I was trained as a theater person with text and all this stuff. And I took movement classes, but I didn't know what that was. Now fortunately we have Melanie Stewart on our faculty. And she took the time as a dancer to really learn and bridge that gap. And you have to take that initiative yourself. And she came to Rowan University. And Rowan University had a theater and dance department because of financial institutional situations. It was more because theater was a major in dance, wasn't a major. But these boundaries were still there even though we were in the same department. But at least that institution necessarily only had one faculty. And this was a place of growth for Melanie to come into because she understood both languages and she was able to reverse that territory. So what started out as just a fluke or a necessity of the institution became ultimately a mission to be able to train that. Not just that, but the intersection between her professional practice and the education, which at the time when she came to Rowan University wasn't supported. The idea that she was doing work in Philadelphia had nothing to do with the fact that she was a professor at the university. So I think she hit her head up against the wall for many years against the old boys network in the way that this was sort of set up as dichotomies. But after they all retired she had the benefit of being able to forge the vision of really, really merging theater and dance and making that a central mission and really, really merging professional practice and academia. And while it's still in its infancy I think this is something that we all need to be able to do. And so I just wanted to, as the current chair of theater and dance, invite my two colleagues to speak about those two intersections and how we look at professional practice and we have this aesthetic of movement theater that we see up here. And even as this gentleman is trying to do is to look at this practice of the art of the product and then figure out how we at the institution can serve that product by training young people to be able to do this kind of work and get outside of these boxes. It's not easy because the art is always evolving but the curriculum tends to stay the same. So I think we all sort of face this and I was just wondering if my two colleagues could speak a little bit about how they've managed to do this and how they've managed to go from here to here. I think in most programs you will have a sense that especially if you have a department of theater and dance that you will have theater and dance as the kind of bastard child and dance has always reached out for collaboration I think as a way to exist or to justify itself in some way. So the way that dance at Rowan really moved from here to here was to, I think we began in 1990 to do full length extant works of dance theater. So we went away from this idea of doing small little pieces by individual choreographers but gave one person the authority and the autonomy as an artistic director choreographer to do a full length extant work that was often devised originally with an ensemble. And that ensemble started to include the theater majors. And so really because of the faculty interest and the interest in the students that became one of our main stage offerings, this original work of dance theater. And out of that came more and more conversations among the faculty about what we were doing in our curriculum. Many of our faculty are professional practitioners which I'm sure is true everywhere. We were doing work, we were being produced in Edinburgh, we were being produced all over the place doing original work. And while our program isn't focused on original work, the idea of resourceful collaboration came up as something that we wanted to embed in the curriculum of our program. We also began to acknowledge that improvisational skills were at the core of what was needed to inspire our students to honor one another's practice, whether they identified themselves as, hey, I'm musical theater, or I'm a techie, or whatever, to drive them to work together as a collaborative team and as an ensemble. So we came together in an intensive retreat and we rewrote all the curriculum. We begin all students at Rowan begin their practice with dance improvisation and that's a huge, if any of you know or come from these backgrounds, that was huge, you're kind of nodding. It's massive. So we also, we wanted to create real significant bridges to the professional community. One way is to prepare the students to be ready for the work that ensembles are making in the world. The other is to create internships and real opportunities. I was producing a festival in Philadelphia called New and I had a foundation funding internship, so students were able to come and work side by side with artists, not as filers or data collectors, but actually working with the artist as assistant directors in the creation of ensemble-based work. Whether you call it dance, which we try not to do, we try not to categorize but say that this is all theater and physical theater, a lot of my training comes from Europe from the school of Philippe Gaullier and so yes, I understand that physical theater has a certain definition in the world but we're continuing to evolve and defy and define and redefine that definition with each work we make. So whether it's an extant work of literature that we're reinventing, re-imagining or something that we're devising from the ground up by bringing an artist from one of the fantastic ensembles that exist in the world or from one of our own faculty members, we're trying to make it new, we're trying to make it fresh but more than anything relevant so that our students can make meaningful relationships so when they graduate with $60,000, $100,000 of debt that they can go into the world. Thank you for the thumbs up. They can go into the world with some kind of sense that what they did, they did with a purpose. Thank you. Yeah, I'll just try to add some sort of like nitty-gritty specifics to what Melanie's saying and how it sort of functions in the day-to-day practice in the university. I want to reiterate that what made what happened at Rowan possible is Melanie over and over again and we're talking in faculty meetings, we're talking in front of the student body, we're talking in classes. Keep changing the, keep removing the word dance or keep removing the word actor, changing it into performance and near a week goes by where the students don't hear that and where the faculty doesn't hear it in meetings and that's absolutely essential. Though I'm the head of acting and directing or head of performance depending on who we're selling it to and that there's tracks in design tech, tracks in musical theater and now a separate major in dance, we look to blur those boundaries at every single step of the way. So all tracks have the same freshman year and as she said, they each take a semester of dance improv, one and two, their freshman year. They also take a class with Melanie called Intro to Performance which is really, I think, the centerpiece for the program in that they're doing only ensemble-based work. You know, the kinds of things that each and every one of you can teach and would teach with a different flavor but it's about ensemble-building work with the body and the voice. That means freshman year they're not touching text. There's not a single actor in the program touching text their freshman year, not as far as acting scenes. Acting one is actually a class that begins second semester sophomore year after they've had dance improv, one and two, Intro to Performance, voice and movement for the actor with me all before they take acting one. And it's a real clear and it's said to them again and again why that's happening which is that you must develop the tools before you bring on the text and we will add very rigorous psychological acting after the tool of the body is created. So, pedagogically what's going on there is we're saying that at its very core performance is about sensing the world with your body and responding physically. And in the great world of viewpoints those two things should become one and the same. So it's not a receiving, responding anymore but the receiving and responding is one unified physical relationship to the world. That that is at its essence what theater or performance or dance is and then you can begin to put strictures on it to control the creative process. One of those strictures can be a pre-existing script. One of those strictures is psychological acting. They all have perfect interplay within it but the very core, the DNA of performance must be developed first before you start putting the restrictions on it. So for me, for movement for the actor and viewpoints for everybody in the theater program is a baseline course. They take a full semester of nothing but viewpoints with me and it's actually with Cecilia that I began developing at Playwrights Horizons I began developing viewpoints into a practice for directors. So it also is a source for our directors as well. They literally direct with viewpoints as their main tool. And it's not a contradiction and this is where I think there's certain practitioners trying to move city company forward which city company had at its very core is always a very vocal and active rejection of psychological acting. It's not that for us. It's working the DNA of performance and then psychological acting can be added very easily and fluidly over the top of it. If you add what your objective is in a single moment that doesn't inhibit your ability to listen to your partner and respond physically. It's just adding a restriction to that. It's focusing it down, the moment down. So it's hugely important that that is understood across the faculty because where a very deep sense of hurt can happen between faculty is a sense of rejection of psychological acting or text work or a sense of rejection of vocal or physical work. If any of those four things are felt somebody in that faculty is going to be very hurt and feel like they're being told they're a bad person or unwanted in the department. Before it gets cut out of the core of a BA and that's really problematic is to develop what courses a student really needs to have and then how to get that practice that we're trying to go into the pedagogy without making it become really rigid. So it means that our new head of musical theater is a long time viewpoints practitioner so he's excited about it, loves getting up in my classes when I go around teaching high school kids and that's important because I know I feel already appreciated and valued by him so it's working in that direction and he knows that I love the idea of vocal work moving forward into song and blurring that boundary and so we're both, you know, we both are partners in the same journey. That is fought by Melanie and Liz in faculty hiring step by step there's no way that you can just declare this vision and have it happen. It really is fought day to day. In the field, what's going on with the love of the idea of physical theater is we as Americans know nothing better than to go well, we'll start throwing courses out in various physical practices. Here's a yoga class, here's a commedia class, here's a clowning class and they do not have a dialogue with what the kids are learning in their acting classes and so it's actually a rejection of physical theater to go down that path. You're saying physical theater is an addendum and auxiliary that you figure out and we all say, oh it's tools on your tool belt and the more tools you have on your tool belt the better. No, that's not true. I mean if you give a carpenter a paint brush and have never really talked about how painting is related to carpentry that tool is actually really in the way and really confusing and so the tools have to be integrated if they don't know how to do psychological and physical acting together one of them is going to get really severely rejected in one way or another and so I think it's important to figure out how us as a field need to figure out what Europe has been doing very fluidly for 20 years which is letting a unified practice be at the base of an ensemble not these little glimpses at various things that we are in a sense being cultural tourists of as opposed to deeply integrating into our work so I stress that everybody be careful about cultural tourism when it comes to physical theater it's actually more negative than not bringing it in period in my mind the final thing I want to do is add something to what Melanie said that's really the linchpin of all of this which is that if they don't participate and see in performance the result of what you're teaching forget about it because these kids can't you can speak about Pina Bausch all you want and show her on a video but if they're not making dance theater they'll never conceive of what it is and so when Melanie says that there's a dance theater piece that a big one that happens every fall she means it and we're talking 25, 30 kids in a dance theater piece which up till a couple years ago none of them were dancers and I'll give an example you can go to the dance festival but we can't take our work to the Kennedy Center American Dance Festival or whatever it is because our work doesn't fit that definition and hasn't for almost 20 years so we bring it to the theater we bring it to the theater KCT, whatever the acronym is but just to say that we haven't fit any definition for a very long time and it's kind of awesome that we're not that we that we're continuing to find that definition or just say it's fine that we're not defined and that we keep evolving to discover who we are and it's extraordinary how an actor's life is changed by spending two months inside a dance theater piece I mean profoundly changed and their practice within naturalism as actors will be permanently altered but it's got to be part of the production season Thank you guys I know that we have a participatory experience and I want to make sure we give ample time to our other colleagues on the panel thank you so much I hope that we can have this discussion about how the institution can respond to practice so we actually have sound now but I'm not which will really help Megan Frank who's going to have a presentation at the end if there is time I'd love to show you the clips that I wanted to share with you but right now I'd like to introduce Leonard who will be inviting all of you onto the stage for an interactive session here so Leonard, please So that's right I'd like you all to participate in this I'm Leonard Cruz I'm a professor in dance movement in theater at St. Mary's College I just received my PhD last year it's interesting because I danced with Pina Boush as a guest she's here at BAM right now she's having her season and I will hand out a syllabus that I created with spoken word music and dance and intersecting these three art forms and we're going to just do an exercise with these three art forms but first I'd like you all to come out and just do a little bit of paper and pens do you have paper and pens? if not, Celia has paper do you have paper? yes it would be nice I think it would be nice to have everyone I was just when Liz Lerman had said to speak with someone nearby and what resonated with you it was interesting because when she spoke about love, purpose and risk I was like this is why we're here I think it's important that we're passionate about what we do and what we share and we also have to take risks and the purpose is to share what we love which is dance or movement theater and so that resonated with me so let me do a breathing exercise and then I'll give you the task do I have something about who is the mover or the choreographer and how do you start to explore and certainly use it is there a song that you need to come up with to have to create a calm soundscape with noises or creative rhythm but within 10 minutes work with open words then you can but I would say find one that won't be shared for a really spiritual purpose so should justice or it could be about identity how I don't fit in or it could be about love it could be about gender it could be about discrimination this and how we need to be yes right right you can most definitely so if you want to improvise the spoken word you can so you don't necessarily have to write text if you all have a theme and you want to come up spontaneously with the words that's fine as well so there's three forms movement, spoken word and some sort of rhythm musicality sound collage or song so try to do this within 5 minutes the discussion and writing and then I would suggest like 5 minutes rehearsing and trying it out so you have like 3 minutes 3 minutes if you want to improvise it you can improvise hi of the spoken word yes you can do that right you can figure out where you want to be in space how you want to I think it's important like where in space do you want to be right with the ensemble yeah with your group okay so 2 more minutes and we'll informally show the work if you need to 2 more minutes according to authorities the car was possibly speeding through this residential neighborhood when it slammed into the teens neighbors say they know the children who died at the scene whose names haven't been released my dad is really sad because one of them was her best friend it just happened unexpectedly like you never know when found but officers are still looking for two men according to authorities the car was possibly speeding through this residential neighborhood when it slammed into the teens neighbors say they know the children who died at the scene whose names I think Mary's college it's very south of Maryland okay so one minute y'all are ready one minute okay okay so we have to slowly close it out so we can see the the informal showings so we have time for the next speaker okay y'all be first since y'all are okay everyone let's close out because we need a show and then the next speaker we only have 10 minutes to show you'll be second who wants to be third third fourth I'll put them fourth oh fifth you'll be last okay let's sit yes yes I mean that's up to you or if it's spoken word already what okay okay so let's sit Cecilia we're gonna sit and watch group two no I think it was them sorry working brought 60 of the 80 first second and third graders that they're working with up in Harlem obstacles and circumventing obstacles we began walking down Lexington Avenue and realized that we couldn't take the students that way because then we would have to cross three blocks of to 125th street which has subway ratings with black and brown bodies all over them so we circumvented and we went down third avenue and got them to the subway station as they got onto the subway many of them were terrified Ebola Ebola Ebola with hand sanitizer so they started rock and roll we've got soul and we got here that's our story thank you so thank you so much for the participation this is my syllabus if you want to use it an example but really what happened was I put like social justice themes and the students didn't go that way it was very much about their identity it was about what they were going through chronic illness gender gender inequality so it was interesting that they really didn't take the social justice themes and put them into heart the piece became very much about them and their identity and it was it was interesting it was not a very easy process I would try to do it again yeah no it wasn't it wasn't what I expected to be it was a very more about the students experience and their stories instead of reaching out globally to what was happening but just to have a basis if you want to use it and then probably start thinking and creating so no thank you so our next presenter is Megan Frank so here we go did you like me to pull that up first for you oh sure hi guys my name is Megan maybe people can get a little bit closer I've never used this Prezi thing before so wish me luck oh and there's dance music so that's good too the stage must remain a dangerous place let's start with this it wasn't the beginning the actor poet being a member of an ensemble a community of theater makers must be imaginative and skilled in manifesting all aspects of the theatrical world holding tenaciously to the belief that the worlds manifest before the audience need not be representative indicative of the incident of our time the actor poet must be diviner of the want of our time seers, indwellers capable of manifesting the other no longer content to reflect reality but who invent, imagine stories capable of speaking through time with a voice that bears witness to the world that we know it is the fire of inspiration the tenacious imaginative reaching the rigorous invention the disciplined pursuit of clarity that manifests poetic prophetic epics capable of igniting a flame illumination for a path to the future the question then who will step into this charged space with the heart to discover to find in one himself the other treacherous deceiver the noble, the valiant how to strike the bell that is not there to sound the alarm, to play the pipe to pluck the unseen strings and cause sound to be resonant conduit of an impulse a tone that would remain otherwise inaudible ever the story the story must be witness of the basic impulses of our lives those things that are necessary if I don't know him and we're angry at each other not the willing suspension of disbelief but a theater like the circus where the actors are doing something manifesting a world not just imitating reality there must be something else okay so welcome to the world of Del Arte International I'm gonna go back to the beginning of the presentation, this was the end which is exciting because I think that the voice you heard is of Ronlin Foreman the director of school at Del Arte International and I'll tell you a little bit about our school and our company which exists simultaneously together as you can tell he has a very an idea of provocation which is kind of the basis of our work there yeah let's go back to the actual presentation part of it there we go okay let's start here so Del Arte International is pretty unique we're the North American center for the actor creator theater, performance training and research so I can go into a little bit of what our mission is but we might skip that and go on to our rural location and our international scope so Del Arte is in a very small town called Blue Lake California it's five hours by driving north of San Francisco it was founded by our founder Carlo Mazzone Clemente and Jane Hill in 1971 but they moved to Del Arte or our current building which is in an odd fellow's hall and the school itself well to talk a little bit about Carlo was very interested in bringing the European physical training tradition to the United States and his major influences and mentors were Le Coq, Marceau and Barot so here we are 1975 the school opened in Blue Lake and in 1976 the ensemble theater the Del Arte Company also started with this idea of company school school company that they exist simultaneously together and feed each other's work so based in Coupeau's ideas of Vieux, Columbia which is basically the idea that the school exists with a company and you want to be in a rural space so we're in this beautiful place amidst the redwoods and why rural because we are inspired by our natural world and we can go back to that idea that that the body is a primary conduit as a lot of the language that Ronlin used and I think it's evident also in your guys' talk about the idea of combining both the mind the sentient mind and the sentient body into one force so the nice thing that a rural place combines is that it is actually rural so we have space that's affordable both for the company to exist and also for the school to flourish and we also have a real local and global scope so our local scope is that we live in a small town of 1200 people our international scope is that we tour internationally and we bring students from all over the world to our location and that we both have an idea that both of those place both out there and in there directly influence the work that we do so Joan Shirley who's also a co-founder of the school coined a phrase theater of place which I think is quite quite appropriate here especially as we start to talk about how ensemble can be in a university setting or even in a setting in general and also talk specifically about the place of Blue Lake and how it influences us so the model the company school school company model okay so we talked a little bit about theater of place the amazing thing about our place is that it's artist run ensemble based and as I just talked about there's a real large idea of the international and the very local happening simultaneously again that paradox in the inner or the outer all existing in one body so what does that manifest as we're an international professional touring ensemble company called the Del Arte Company this is a recent work called Elizabeth's Book which is going to tour to Eastern Europe we have a five week festival in the summer called the Mad River Festival as well as many other community engagement models we got a grant from Art Place America this year to be involved very directly in the idea of creative place making that our school the arts drive the economy of our place and how do we change the narrative of what we do into that context and how do we understand our existence in the whole as well as we collaborated with a lot of really cool partners from in town and around to create some really cool community projects it was a big community pageant we did to celebrate some micro grants that we gave the community this year and the third is Del Arte International School of Physical Theatre which this is our 40th anniversary year which is a pretty exciting thing for us so we have 50 students from 12 countries this year including Iran, Sweden, Ireland Denmark, South Korea Greece, Republic of Georgia Norway, Germany, Canada Puerto Rico and the USA so it's quite a diverse group that we bring so our programs we have the professional training program which is a one year certificate program we have an MFA an ensemble based physical theatre which is a three year program and as far as we know and please correct me it might be a really unique one in the world we haven't found something that's quite what we offer in the US for sure and it's a new thing we're starting as the AEP program which is basically for people very interested in the masters program but have not graduated from a university program so they can take our MFA course and still get a certificate but they don't get the MFA we also have a summer workshop intensive and exchange program in Bali where you get to learn a lot about the mask great so our training mission to serve train and provoke the next generation of theatre makers to assert that profound possibilities come into view only when confronted by the impossible to confirm that all things change and that movement is the basis for life so if I were Ronlin and he's the director of school and I stepped in for him and his profound way of being articulate about this but I could break it down again I'm also an MFA graduate of the program I forgot to mention Megan Frank I'm the community programs manager of the MFA that in essence we teach ensemble based physical theatre and in the essence of that we like to think that the actor is the creator of the work in all forms and all aspects this doesn't mean that it's not a collaboration with designers but it again invokes and empowers the actor or the performer to have a voice in their own process and we deal a lot with the essential idea that the body in space and time is the basic genesis for the work when I say the work it could be theatre work it could also be life work so I'm just going to end with a quote and then that's it so I'll just do Carlos because I think this is a really great summation so characterization must come at home in the body some of us are not at home in our bodies we must discover what that means therefore the main emphasis of my work is physical self discovery in the walk we learn to literally understand the character the nature of any tree begins at the roots the body must adjust to the foot there is no choice so on that thank you very much I'm going to invite my fellow presenters to come up and grab a chair and join me we're going to have just a brief moment for some discussion we have about 15 minutes left just going to leave this up thank you excellent thank you so much so we're going to pass the mic around but on that note we got more chairs than we needed there you go cool musical chairs so I'm grateful that Phil was able to get sound up for Megan at the very end as you're leaving maybe I can pull up some of Tang Shuang's work his interviews are also really really interesting and they're on YouTube he has a very cheeky way of talking about his codifying some of his practice physical practice he calls them the six and a half I'm not going to quote him here he calls them the six and a half methods of discovery as opposed to say seven viewpoints but spatial placement, facial expression eye contact, voice breathing gesture and the half is percussion so his statement that we started our discussion with all theater is physical theater I want to put it out there and say just have everybody maybe dialogue a little bit about that and then have questions or thoughts that have come up I know that some of you had some thoughts or questions but does anyone want to chime in just in terms of wrapping up their thoughts or responding to the work of your colleagues that you saw today there's been intersections all day I mean I think all of us it's not there to understand it by the very nature of just using the body that that's what we do but I really do like how there's been communication about the idea that everybody defines it differently still we all think we're talking about the same thing but we all have our unique elements of it that we value and then how do we find that common vocabulary it's live so let's just open it up does anybody have thoughts or questions that they wanted to ask any of the presenters or perhaps have their own thoughts and questions hi so I'm in a position of being a guest artist going into universities and one in particular has a it's a department of theater and dance that hasn't undergone the curriculum overhaul that Rowan has but I think they're working toward it and I'm in a position coming in for a week or two or three weeks with both theater and dance students and I'm just wondering if you can speak to what my role as guest artist can be to help that program in the process of honoring each other's discipline and viewpoints is great and I do a lot of it but I'm just wondering if you can speak to that what are you doing are you a guest artist teaching or teaching it's a performance lab we're sort of helping other pieces that are in development we're not directing you just must absolutely must have them all in the same room for a portion of that time whatever it takes to get that and to achieve something with them even if it's just what we did today so that they begin to be in the room together they have to be in the room together not just them but their faculty maybe that's true too if you're helping individual projects that are already in process you have to respect that okay dance has a practice in theater but could you carve out a time in which part of what you do is about bringing the two communities together to make something we do we have those times but I'm finding there's this usually there are more theater than dance students in the room and the dance students have this inferiority thing of oh I'm just a dancer so we're working on it might be that way initially yeah I mean I would say also just try to be really respectful of the people whose our entire artistic lives are invested in that place and know that it's important if you've never been in that situation to know how much emotion is loaded with that like literally that's the rest some of those faculty that's the rest of their life will be there and so maybe all that you can do is really excite a group of students and maybe whatever faculty come and then leave it at that and let it be let it take off how it will take off or not I was, my name is Steven Hitt by the way I was very interested in what you guys are doing at Rowan because here in the city I find more and more that our young artists don't want to be actors they don't want to be singers they don't want to be dancers they want to be artists and as a musical theater person myself going through Broadway and going through concert dance world am I a dancer, am I an actor, am I so I I try I can't speak I try very hard in my work with students to try and train the body to do whatever it is they can do when they're going to make their own work and so how do we start as the people who are carrying this out in the world start making this message move out across this country and match what we and the universities are saying to what the students are longing to do when they're making new work because particularly with me I have such a diverse student body I have trouble finding straight white males to play roles because our population is so very different that the work that's written for people to perform from the 50s from the 60s from the 70s none of these students relate to that so they're having to make their own work I'm going to be provocative in my answer and I'm not sure this gets right at it but maybe it does I don't know I guess the question is what do you mean by make your own work do you mean devising new pieces I'm going to be provocative even to my colleague sitting next to me purposefully which is that when we teach devising it's kind of like the danger of it I think it's great to teach it I think it's great to set it out as a possibility for students to do when it becomes and I'm being purposely provocative when it becomes a permanent part of the curriculum as if this is a base that you need to learn the danger is we're rebelling for our students rebellion to choose to make their own pieces away from us because they need or want to make their own pieces by teaching the techniques at which you approach existing work you are giving them I believe virtually every tool they need to then go this work's not good enough for me I want to create my own work and not my colleagues at all but I have seen other in other places I do mean this that devising is a way of going you don't need to learn how to confront pre-existing text and potentially as an I know and this is purpose to see here's the provocation and maybe as so I think it's very important to do both I think it's very important to go here's the challenges of working within very tight containers and here's respect for the work of an actor respect for the work of a director respect for the work of a playwright and now if you want to blur those lines awesome and let me even help you and encourage you to blur the lines but let me show you where those lines are or blurring them doesn't mean so I just have to say that in dance in dance we've been making our own work since we were born so we've been making as I said a row and full length extent works that were if you call it devising I mean I've been devising with European artists for a long time and we brought them to Rowan who used the term devising since the early 90s we've been bringing them as guest artists in like a theater slot but that took forever for me to convince the theater folks that we should bring someone to actually devise with the students whether it's something you can teach I don't know but I think this is key that dance has been making work from nothing and so right now at Rowan University they've been working since September to create they slice the air they're bringing in some fantastic artists they're making all their own music this piece is so it's been going on whether you call it devising or choreographing we get so caught up in these terms and devising has just become a buzz word for work that's already been happening in and along all of our ensembles for a very very long time yeah please I guess I was just going to add to that that that it also could be perspective to really empower a person an art maker to understand what their own productivities are or what their own perspective as an art maker is and this in both ways language or not provides this opportunity to really especially at a developmental stage as a student to essentially develop that skill which I think is essential right along with that the two words that I've been using and our practice is definitely as performer as artists you can be both you can be both generative and interpretive those two tracks but just do both it's fine right but I think the difference is that at the university level not as involved as you you know that the old school if you will is still entrenched in just the interpretive right and so your new students want to make their own work but they might not have the tools that they need from the old school I don't know those two those two words specifically have helped a lot but I and further than that I think that in the professional community right when we bring in artists from the outside to these universities they're still tracking the industry which is not supporting the generative model at all it's only supporting the interpretive model and I don't think until that changes for the most part I think that there are a few right there are the grand few that have made their name now to be able to say I will come see anything by city company but there aren't a host of them like you can name a director or a playwright or a right agreed and I think this is where exactly the crux of this argument and I think we have these discussions as faculty all the time but but I think the key is is when I went to my BFA program as an undergraduate acting student we were not allowed to take directing let alone think of ourselves as being independent artists like you were just there to learn how to do it and then maybe eventually you would be smart enough to put it together yourself but you were never given empowered with the voice of an artist you were never like smart enough to create your own thing and so we just kind of grew up with that and we had nothing but their body it's a whole different way of working it's a whole different aesthetic right from the get go and I think you're right and I also think though that creating a program like this is also hard because he's had a recruitment retention so you label yourself this and you tell your dance students that have been in dance studios for their entire lives no you're gonna have to take acting classes or you tell the actors that you have to take and you know so even recruiting this and defining it is really in terms of this institutional because again the old structure versus new structure and then you know the language of dance and how we learn about dance and how we learn about theater is still embedded in us from being small children right? Yeah I think the really exciting thing that and this really connects what Melanie says is that in a sense devising or generative work has existed within each of these disciplines it always choreography directing playwriting acting are all generative and that if we can simply start to and if we can and encouraging the students to train in all of them to cross disciplinary train is in fact training them to devise it's training them to be independent theater artist who will carve out exactly the niche that is right for them in their voice it doesn't mean getting rid of the disciplines it means cross training in all of the disciplines and that's I think that's a really important distinction and I think then ideally in a utopian world the lines between generative and interpretive actually start to dissolve once we respect directors for being generative as well even if they're taking on Hamlet. I wanted to say something about the creative process and why we had a problem with this course in particular was that as the director and then taking students work I think students how do I alleviate this competitiveness and what gets in what's edited and what's out and not have this sort of well how am I doing there's a grade here why did he cut my piece of work and this is something that I'm struggling with and I don't know if y'all can help me with that in terms of as the lone professor and the director but it is about the students works and what gets in and what gets out and how do you still how do you still nurture the students work so that they don't feel like they've been sided I think in some ways you know you talk about ensemble theater a lot as this as this lateral thing and that there are real structures to it and we don't usually use the term director necessarily we use something called the outside eye and that it becomes an essential thing for the student to both inside the work be able to develop that outside I and outside the work be able to see what it is that best projects what you want to tell and I think that can also be the you know that's what the role of obviously the teacher is to but that to develop that in the student themselves is not at all a bad thing I mean without editing without the sculpting of things I mean that's the world that we live in and that's the one thing we want to transfer on to the students that make the work and I think that we all know that the platforms for performance and the structures for performance are evolving and changing and that the work that our students we're not going to see around that corner to see the work that our students will make they will change the world so all we can do is equip them with the best tools possible and I'm a strong advocate of instilling this idea for each student of a personal practice for them from day one they come in and they begin to define themselves as artists but what kind of artists particularly and what platforms are they interested in because not everybody is going to be on the new school stage or you know as Liz said not everybody is getting to bam and it is not it's not a ladder that goes like this it is very horizontal so each student needs to be thinking about how their kind of theater is going to exist in the world and where they fit and whether it's on the streets up in Harlem and you know stepping over bodies and changing a student's life or on the stage somewhere and you know I don't know, Catawissa, Missouri it's got to be defined early and cold and developed out of this practice. So we're going to take one more question here and then we're going to wrap up. One thing I keep hearing and it might be a theme that would be worth exploring for the rest of the time is there's this idea of students and then and then our work and in this conversation I've yet to hear student as ensemble as artist. So if you all could just insert that ensemble idea into everything I actually run a professional company in Philadelphia and there's a really fluid relationship between the professional work and the students and it's looking at a real apprentice model that exists in a lot of the world especially Asia right now much more than it exists in the U.S. and it's a real I think we all know what that is and I don't need to go into detail about it but doing the hard work of actually creating that apprentice flow from student to professional is really important and in relationship to that if you truly respect your student as an artist the way a yoga teacher respects their student doesn't stop them from minutely changing the foot position in warrior one that doesn't mean they don't respect their yoga student it's actually an act of respect to go I'm gonna give you the structure and you're gonna live freely inside of it so to limit to give your student structure is also to trust when you graduate or in your student directed work outside of my class you go right ahead and rebel you go right ahead and decide I'm gonna try my foot in a different position it's a respect for them as an artist to say here's what I think is a best practice direction and try it with me and then what you do away from me is fine so this is an ongoing conversation but again I think all of us exist in a world where there is no teaching without learning and reciprocity and is the essence of ensemble but it's also the essence of theater and it's the essence of teaching practice so lots of questions and still dialogue I'm hoping that we can continue to talk to each other in further sessions and I want to thank you so much for joining me in a very eclectic look at this practice of physical theater but thanks a lot you guys appreciate it