QUESTIONNAIRE - THEATER ARTS DEPARTMENT- FALL 2008
Reflecting on the past…
Best Experience: What is the best, or one of the best, times you have had as a lecturer with the UCSC Theater Arts Department – a time when you felt most alive, most involved, or most excited about your teaching, performing or public service. What made it an exciting experience? Who was involved? Please tell the story – take as much space as you need.
Tollefson: Though I have been involved in the department for the last 5 years as a staff employee as well as a grad student, my experience teaching in this department is based merely on one quarter of teaching during which my best experience was when I was grading the finals and found a student had taken to heart the message of the class and began to look at the tools, the constructed set, the hardware, and the physical theater metaphorically. (What I was teaching was some thing along the lines of : the medium of technical theater is its message.) This was not an easy concept to understand, and I was amazed and delighted that my student could synthesize theory and practice into an original thesis based on a dream she had about the fly system. She even referenced Freud, Zyzak and Bloom for support which, for an undergrad was phenomenal. Two other students began to uncover new ways of looking at theater that brought them to a deeper understanding of artistic communication. One was based on computer game design and the other was based on a theory of space. The rest of the class developed in other ways that I felt synthesized the material I presented- rather than merely memorizing a list of parts and restating them for the final they took a list of theater terms and constructed fictitious narratives that contextualized these terms, creating a better understanding of theater’s insider vocabulary. When the class saw value in what I was teaching, began to trust my instincts that theater education is by no means vocational education and it should be based on the discovery of meaning through a process of self-guided inquiry within the framework of contemporary social thought.
Considering the present…
Personal / Professional Values: Please describe what you value deeply about the nature of the work you do, about yourself, and about the Department.
Tollefson: These questions are always awkward for me because I feel they are vague . Upon what scales can I measure my own value without others who create the standards of weights and measures? And what standards for theater education exist that we truly understand on a philosophical level?
I value my commitment to my students as artists. I value my goal of helping my students develop a line of inquiry that will serve them throughout their artistic careers as a means of uncovering meaning in their lives and sharing that with others. I value my need to uphold professional standards in theater and in education based on the notions of diversity, collaboration and interdisciplinarity. I value my belief in theater as a tool for understanding social dynamics, not solely for the mirror it holds up to society but as a laboratory for modeling social interaction based on the audience performer dynamic. Specifically in the theater arts department at UCSC this notion is already alive in the courses on clowning , dance, gender/queer studies, and non-western traditions. My goal is to facilitate understanding and communication of these ideas of through design.
Core value(s): What do you experience as the core value(s) of the Department? Please give examples of how you experience those values.
Tollefson: From my limited perspective I believe the core value of the department is to prepare a future generation of theater practitioners that have an awareness of the complexity of contemporary social thought. This future generation should possess the capability to navigate a sociopolitical arena with sensitivity to race class and gender with a prime directive of communicating the need for social justice and inspiring action toward those ends. However diverse our department seems in its disparate goals as its participant’s interests run the gamut from the Aristotelian to modernism, to postmodernism and from ancient traditions to new media with in this variety one message stands out to me and that is the examination of the dynamics of power. Almost every play in the last 5 years that I have been here shows this to some degree or another. So it is from this observation that I’m extrapolation the core value of social justice.
Thinking about the future…
Three Wishes: If you could have anything you wished for, what three wishes would you make to heighten the vitality and health of the Theater Arts Department at UCSC?
Tollefson:
a. money
b. professional partnerships (beyond SSC!)
c. more visiting artists and master classes.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to these questions. Your experience and insights will be very helpful to me in designing a productive and engaging retreat. If you have any comments or questions you would like to convey in person I welcome your call at 459-4606. Again, thanks so much for your help! Laurie McCann.
