Teaching Introduction to Acting at Bronx Community College: From Shakespeare to SZA (original) (raw)

Training theatre students of colour in the United States

Theatre, Dance and Performance Training

are US theatre professors whose current research investigates underrepresented ways of training theatre students. Specifically, their work advocates for diverse training approaches to teaching acting. In this conversational essay, Dunn, Luckett, and Sicre illuminate many issues pertaining to US actor training programs in hopes that generative parallels and intersections with their work can be made with allies engaged in similar work abroad. First, they introduce themselves and their work, and then they move into the conversation. ÃÃÃ Kaja Dunn (KD): I'm an Assistant Theatre Professor at University of North Carolina Charlotte as well as an actor, director, and consultant on issues of race, equity and theatre for educational and professional organizations. Additionally, I am affiliate faculty for EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) with the organization Theatrical Intimacy Education and an executive board member of the Black Theatre Association. I identify as Black or African American, and Cape Verdean. Sharrell D. Luckett (SL): I'm the Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama and Playwriting and Associate Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Cincinnati. I'm also the founding director of the Black Acting Methods Studio (TM). 1 I conceived a field of study called 'black acting methods.' 'Black acting methods' are 'rituals, processes, and techniques where Black theory and Black modes of 1 Detailed information about the Black Acting Methods Studio TM can

Beyond acknowledgement of whiteness: Teaching white theatre teachers to examine their racial identity

Youth Theatre Journal, 2017

While some US public school theatre programs seek to move away from an annual token play of color, the white canon persists. This reflexive essay examines one professor’s pedagogical approaches in working with white pre-service theatre teachers as they direct short plays with high school students. The work interrogates intersections of identity, critical race theory, performance, representation and education theory and invites the field of theatre education to move beyond an acknowledgement of whiteness towards critical analysis of such racialization. The author examines her own practice as she seeks to embody culturally responsive theatre pedagogy (and invites her students to do the same), thus interrogating all identities rather than the common approach of viewing whiteness as given, non-diverse and normalized.

Examining the Intersections of Culturally-Relevant Pedagogies and Youth Literature in Theatre Performing Arts and Its Implications for a More Inclusive Learning Experience for BIPOC Students

Journal of education and culture studies, 2022

This work aims to examine the potential impact of theater guides based on the literary work of BIPOC authors and the culturally relevant pedagogical experiences rendered for students of color. We examine the ways that the exclusion of culturally relevant pedagogies in the creation of theater guides for BIPOC and non-BIPOC students hold the potential to further marginalize BIPOC narratives. We posit that standard approaches to the construction of theater guides of authors of color fails to center familial and cultural knowledge that centers the cultural authenticity of the literary work intended by the authors. This work acknowledges the historical exclusion of BIPOC voices in theatre performance and to that end, this work seeks to analyze how educational guides can work in tandem with Latina/o/x/e literature to center a more authentic experience of BIPOC communities. In this work we reimagine pedagogical practices that are 1) culturally competent and 2) bolster the intersectionality of the lived experiences of BIPOC communities in the educational guides of theatrical productions. This work will provide culturally competent two dramaturgical tenants for educators to consider.

“Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities

The Journal of American Drama and Theatre , 2021

A pathway to institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white institutions cannot be singlehandedly carved by Black faculty, nor can it be done without systemic shifts, and resources. As a scholar practitioner of manifestations of Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ L’agba in the diaspora, I use Ògún, the Òrìṣà of iron and energy of vision, adaptation, and expansion as a means of characterizing personal milestones in Black Theater pedagogy and production at William & Mary. Furthermore, this talk uses Ògún as a theoretical and philosophical concept for thinking through barriers to Black Theater pedagogy and production and charting humanizing and supportive structural pathways through systemic challenges in similar settings.

Theatre programs in community colleges: A policy for equity

Arts Education Policy Review, 2018

This piece presents a theoretical exploration of the potential for the creation of policy that would inform the inclusion of arts and particularly theater courses in all community colleges. In April 2017, Fong et al. released a comprehensive meta-analysis that explored the relationship between psychosocial factors of self-perception and motivation within 58 studies on student persistence and 186 studies on student achievement in U.S. community colleges. In the field of drama in and as education multiple studies have articulated a strong connection between positive self-perception, motivation, and involvement within drama-based experiences. My reflection emerges from four years service as the chair of the Arts and Humanities, and the sole theater professor at a leading campus within the largest community college in a Midwestern state. I share the ways in which the arts program, and particularly the theater program, were situated within the college's traditional vocational curriculum and theorize the ways in which a policy that secures the presence of the arts, drama, and theater in particular, within all community college curriculums may support positive self-perception and motivation and affect persistence and completion rates, particularly within terms of underrepresented and nontraditional communities.