Amy Herzberg

University of Arkansas, National Co-Chair

This is no overstatement: the Teacher Development Program changed my life. A lot of us feel that way. After years in the acting profession and the acting teacher profession, the opportunity to renew my passion for acting and for how acting works was unexpected and extraordinary. Studying with teachers who themselves were at the absolute top of their game, who took their stewardship of the craft so profoundly seriously, and who had in fact cracked the secrets of that craft, and over decades of practice had developed a deep understanding of acting and how to teach acting, reawakened the passion in me to keep this art alive, and bring it to life in my students.

And then I hear of teachers – some at the very top of the profession – who want to get out of teaching. It breaks my heart. Whether it’s in the face of the logistic or bureaucratic hurdles in the institutions, or because they’ve lost faith in the system of passing along our art form, or because the profession has seemingly become so mired in mediocrity, they’re leaving and they’re taking their passion and their knowledge with them.

Why? Is it, at least in part, because there’s nowhere to turn? No support system? It’s true that, when you look around, there really is no structural support for us acting teachers beyond a thin network of friends – often merely commiserators – facing similarly insurmountable odds.

That’s where the idea of this Alliance comes in: an organization designed to promote a set of best practices that will (1) lend what we do as acting teachers the highest level of respect, (2) help us shape an ideal teaching environment, and (3) help us gain access to the resources we need. Ultimately, of course, the Society is about insuring that the American theatre remains the vibrant, superb art form that we all fell madly in love with when we ourselves were students.

There are such strengths to being part of a university – it’s the world in miniature, crammed with passionate people pursuing every kind of knowledge under the sun, not to mention the arts more closely allied to theatre – an environment that should be ideally suited to training actors who are aware. And there’s the reverse benefit – again for the survival of theatre at large – our ability to introduce excellent theatre to students at a crucial point in their young lives.

But being part of a larger system comes with its own challenges. Our training requirements are unique. They don’t necessarily fit the academic model that many institutional leaders are accustomed to. Class size, class length, the multifaceted nature of our curriculum, the balance of adjunct vs. full-time professors – these and other aspects of actor training often run afoul of institutional priorities that tend to be ever-changing, and increasingly bottom-line driven.

With the Alliance, we have the opportunity to establish a nationally supported set of recommendations – recognized best practices – that will give acting teachers and their departments a firmer, more deeply rooted footing amid the shifting priorities of the academic world.

Here’s my hope, or, rather, my expectation: that the Alliance will encourage us to be more proactive, less reactive. The more reactive we are forced to be, the more vulnerable our art – training young actors – becomes. The Alliance can help us lead the conversation, set the agenda, and support one another in our quest for outstanding actor training.

Hugh O’Gorman

California State University, Long Beach, National Co-Chair

When my mind turns to all that I have taken away from my summers in the Teacher Development Program I am flooded by images, theory, technique, emotions, and yet most of all, love: the love of acting, teaching, colleagueship and the pursuit of further knowledge. This love is a beautiful thing, and not to be underestimated or cynically dismissed.

Michael Chekhov professed that all actors deep down inside harbor the desire for transformation. And, he wrote, this transformation happens on the level of the higher ego, of the artistic soul yearning to expand; this transformation is fueled by love.

Of course it goes without saying that the Teacher Development Program is a transformative experience for all who pass through it, driven itself by beautifully crafted moments of teaching from theatre Sherpas who love their art down the marrow in their bones. But what I wasn’t expecting when I crossed the threshold of the Actor’s Center in 2003 for the first time, was that I would not only find a community of teaching artists who love the craft of acting as much as I, but that these people would enter my life in a profound way. They have become my dear friends, teaching colleagues, touchstones, sounding boards and collaborators. My life is much fuller and richer across many arenas because of them. Yet it is the singular love of the craft of acting that binds us all together. The National Alliance of Acting Teachers is a concerted effort to extend this artistic kinship as far and wide as feasible.

What we do as acting teachers matters. It matters not only to us and to our students, but also, perhaps more importantly, to the integrity and artistic fabric of our society as a whole. Standards in our profession matter. The pursuit of truth and excellence in the work matters. Detailed craftsmanship matters. Collegial support matters. Yet the priorities of the world in which we work don’t always support our ethos. We are met quite often by dissonance and discordance, not to mention downright resistance to the work we do.

This organization aims to be a beacon of integrity that shines across the ocean of actor training, one whose light pierces the vast darkness of commercialism providing respite for those tired of navigating the tempestuous and empty waters of the quick fix and instant reward.

Michele Shay

New York University

I want us to find and share resources that mine the collective wisdom in our community. I want us to explore and unpack the critical question of what’s missing—as well as have the opportunity to ask questions that are not yet being asked.

Our work can address how we as acting teachers can better deal with and serve the growing diverse population of acting students. This can be a place to come to build awareness, share information and experiences. This can be a place to confront assumptions and speak to the challenges being faced by both teachers and students alike in the pursuit of artistic excellence.

In the past, student populations may have been predominately Caucasian with a few African-American students. Times have changed. Now, there are more Asian, Latino, Indian, African, Middle-eastern students in addition to an increase of women, gays, bi-racial, transgender and students with disabilities.

What is a program’s responsibility to these students? What do they need to thrive? How do you cast them?

Our goal here is to help build awareness and reveal information about these and other hot topic issues that are being faced daily.

Some of what I look forward to is:

• Cutting edge learning about bias and designing cross cultural communication from experts
• Tools that empower students and teachers to create optimal creative learning environments
• Multi-cultural material for training that reflects a diverse population
• Articles, videos, links, Q&A’s sharing experiences from the field
• Interviews that clarify how identity, race and gender impact performance

I hope we can look at how we use language to create reality. By reality I mean the systems of thought, discourses, practices and tools we use to co-ordinate action and pursue desires. Socially constructed created reality. Bringing into focus that which has become transparent in how we operate automatically—when it comes to our selection process for inclusion and exclusion—will be essential to developing the freedom to change or make new choices in any given instance.

How we make our assumptions without grounded investigation is one key area of inquiry to explore, and how those assumptions were born historically. What is our tolerance level for change? When we have been so comfortable with the way things have been because we are employing fundamental sorting principles based on same (what’s like me and my community) and different (what’s not like me is another)?  Who has the power in these circumstances?

For our students I think perhaps that choosing to be an actor automatically may place one in a down position, therefore issues of empowerment are crucial to assess in building resilience, in generating identity and success. How many one down discourses are operating for each student of the diverse populous at any given moment in any given exchange? How is that affecting there ability to function creatively?

These boxes were created by human beings living in language making declarations about what is so, gaining agreement and then choosing those agreements to be reality and then “forgetting” that that reality was an INVENTION. Not a truth. He who possesses the strongest interpretation has power.

As in the time when people believed that the world was flat, it was threatening to suggest that it was round. That threat is an emotional space of resistance, and that space needs to be acknowledged, navigated and dismantled individually as well as culturally for us to move forward. So, our level of thinking needs to be different to discover a way out. The level of thinking that got us into this is not the level of thinking that will get us out.

Theater by its nature is a transformative art intended at its best to release us from the boundaries of 9-5 reality. I suggest that we still suffer from a certain degree of cognitive blindness as a field, about the very water we live in. The exciting thing is the desire for it to be different is emerging. That is the world we are encouraged to prepare our student to live in. It is coming. They are the future of the American Theater.

Peter Jay Fernandez

Columbia University

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character, in speaking to the players, advises them that “the purpose of playing” is “to hold as twere the mirror up to nature.” I find that (now as well as then) to be an apt description of the artist’s task; particularly the theatre artist. As we consider the future theatre artists that we are training and how we can best serve them and ourselves in the process, I am increasingly led back to the mirror. I think it goes without saying that the world in which we live and its “nature” is changing even as I write these words. The ecosystem, war, famine, disease, technological advancement, political and financial alliances, and the emergence of third world countries present an ever shifting view from the mirror that we as artists hold up, so to speak.

In regard to the classroom, one of the by-products of this changing landscape is an increasingly diverse student body. Caucasian American, African American, Hispanic, Asian, Middle Eastern, East Indian, European, African, Gay, Straight, Transgender, disabled… When I turn a mirror on my classroom and those of other teachers of the theatre artists of tomorrow, this is what I am beginning to see.

And this is a good thing. However, when I turn the mirror around to view the classroom from the student side,the view (in my opinion) is all too frequently lacking. At a time when our student population often represents a wide variety of races, cultures, languages and lifestyles, it seems the makeup of those who are teaching in many of our theatre programs is distressingly lacking in diversity.

At the initial gathering of the National Alliance of Acting Teachers, I shared the following brief example: A few years ago, I began teaching in the master’s program at The New School of Drama in New York City. After a few weeks of getting adjusted to the workings of the school and getting to know my students, I was walking through the halls one day when I experienced a strange sense of déjà vu. As I looked around at numerous students and faculty heading to classes and chatting on the way, I was struck by how similar the the scene was to my early days as an underclassman studying acting at Boston University, in the early seventies. I saw NO other teachers of color, just as I saw none so many years ago.

After some further checking I discovered that there was one Hispanic woman and myself teaching in the entire School of Drama. How is this possible, in this day and age? And in New York City? After more investigation, I found this to be a pervasive problem in a large number of training programs, some of them quite prominent. When I explored the faculty makeup in other educational programs within the university, I found it to be quite diverse, reflecting the community and the larger world in which we live. So, why this imbalance in the theatre programs? If we are to “hold as twere the mirror up to nature”; if we are to, examine and question the human condition, as artists, we are only halfway there in regards to a true reflection of a diverse world in the training.

We are doing our students a disservice by not exposing them to a truly diverse group of teachers. Yes, Asian, African American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, African, East Indian, European, Disabled, Gay, Transgender… Qualified and diverse. Not every student responds to the same voice, even when teaching a set curriculum, so why not give them the best chance to succeed by exposing them to a wider variety of perspective, experience and approach? Who do you see in your mirror? And who do your students see?

I can offer opinions as to why this imbalance perseveres, but I’m more interested in solutions and I am proud to say that the view in the mirror is beginning to change at my current place of employment. Three new hires are highly qualified teachers of color and two more are on the way. Three women and two men. This is a result of a group dialogue and search, initiated and sustained by faculty and the head of the drama school. I have also requested and been given the go ahead to invite a very gifted actress who is looking toward a teaching career, to sit in with me and my students on an ongoing basis to observe as an aid in her development. She happens to be of Persian descent. Through these first steps and other initiatives, slowly but surely, an inequity is being acknowledged and addressed and I have to believe that our future theatre artists will be the beneficiaries. If the mirror where you teach presents a lopsided view, what will you do about it?.. Who do YOU see?

J. Michael Miller

Founder, The Actors Center

I have this recurring fantasy that one day every school of any kind will require its students to engage in a period of study in Empathy. Leading the core of that study should be an acting teacher, a very wise acting teacher, who treasures the light of specific truths as an expression of human nature.

Actors’ explorations are designed to reach across ethnic and racial divides and enlighten our little part of the world. As the future of the National Alliance of Acting Teachers evolves, I hope we can support teachers to share these ideals with the world, and lead our field to a more prominent place in our nation’s culture.

Kenneth Noel Mitchell

Professor and Director of Musical Theatre, University of Southern California

Gerald Glackin

New York, NY