Training Wheels

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

Last summer I had the privilege of attending a convening of conservatory leaders, service organizations, artists and funders examining the training of performing artists in the 21st century. The meeting embraced those training opera singers, ballet dancers, instrumentalists and others, in addition to representatives of the theatre field. 

The requirements of our respective fields are different in essential ways: The training of dancers and keyboard players, for example, must begin in early childhood (indeed, any young person who has not already experienced serious training by age 16 has little chance of a career at all in those fields); and yet premature training can be dangerous for the young vocalist or even the young actor. Certainly, the one thing I most envied about our peers in other fields was their attitude toward training, a pursuit they see as a lifelong (or at least career-long) commitment. So many of our own graduates view training as a discrete three- or four-year arc of study that ends with the awarding of the diploma. Many young actors are far more likely to spend major money on health club memberships and major hours pumping iron than they are to spend similar time and money on voice coaches, scene study and ongoing movement technique.

I found conservatory directors eager to learn more about how theatre professionals view their students—indeed, they were open and eager to learn more about professional viewpoints on virtually every front. But there were moments of real frustration in the dialogue, of good intentions blocked by essentially different points of view. I found myself wondering if it might be these basic differences in our respective cultures that made communication between the academy and the profession so difficult.

In conservatories, the basic organizing principle is the curriculum, with productions interspersed through the year as appropriate to serve training needs. Students are generally guided through a uniform set of programs and classes, regardless of individual skill levels or achievement, in a desire to produce a well-rounded performer with strengths in disparate areas—voice, movement, scene work, singing, dance, verse, etc. And teachers in conservatories often teach the same material repeatedly over years (the intro professor who must teach Oedipus or Hamlet, for example), coming to value most strongly the sustained, deep reflection that such study brings.

Working in the field, however, proceeds from the exact opposite end of the spectrum. The basic organizing principle in our field is the production, with training modules clustered around production needs: We call a voice coach for an actor with vocal trouble, teach fencing to an actor playing Laertes, and so on. Training in the context of a production is likely to be individually tailored and driven—not all actors take the fencing instruction that Laertes needs, nor are all necessarily scheduled into individual voice instruction. Indeed, it is the rare actor who will ever devote a career to the range of work and skills that conservatory training has sought to instill. And the theatre professional only rarely encounters the same text or role in production more than once; he or she must come to value the instinctive, strong “gut” take on material that comes from exploration within a framework of weeks or days.

No wonder we often find ourselves talking at cross-purposes!

And still, there was a general recognition at the training meeting that all of us can always learn from the larger world. In considering how to craft more responsive training for a new generation of artists, there may be value in thinking about executive training at progressive corporations, where business leaders are coached to relinquish areas of weakness in order to concentrate on strengths. If you’re weak in math, the argument goes, it may be because you hate math or you lack the natural abilities for it—and you probably will never like it or have it as a core strength. Rather than spending hours in remedial algebra, the executive is told to acquire only the basics to prevent mathematical awareness from being a liability, and then to spend the time freed up in pursuing areas in which the leader is already strong—in essence, to neutralize one’s weaknesses and soar with one’s strengths. Hiring staff then becomes less about choosing individuals who are uniformly strong than in selecting a team of people that collectively represents a set of disparate but maximally affective skills, a philosophy akin to casting.

What might this approach mean if applied to conservatory training? Might this result in truly, wonderfully idiosyncratic actors, for example, rather than the generic MFA actor decried by Jeanmarie Simpson in her commentary in our October issue?

The conversations become more fruitful when we see ourselves not as separate universes but as part of a larger arts continuum—a continuum that actually even reaches into the realms of pre­K-12 arts education, that embraces the “amateur” as well as the professional or pre-professional. Even the NBA realizes that there would be no great players for their teams (or great cheering crowds) were there not pick-up games in city parks and required gym classes around the nation. All of us, educators and practitioners, are dedicated to nurturing talent, promoting self-awareness and expression, developing audiences and contributing to the art form. Finding our roles in the continuum will lead to more productive conversations—and improvements—for us all. 

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