Mary Elizabeth Anderson

A Survey of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theater: Implications for Preparation, Curriculum, and Professional Degree Programs

This study investigates teaching artists whose work is rooted in dance and theater. Although the term remains both ambiguous and debated, teaching artists provide a good deal of arts education delivery in P–12 and afterschool programs throughout the United States. Based on survey data from a range of teaching artists across the nation (N = 133), this study presents emergent trends including: (1) lack of preparation, (2) workplace issues and challenges, and (3) mixed attitudes regarding teaching artist professionalization and credentialing. We conclude with several recommendations for postsecondary curriculum development in dance and theater degree programs.

Moving, writing, failing: spatialities of ambivalence in Detroit's ruinscapes

In Detroit, the creative impulse to work in and around sites of ruin presents both aesthetic and ethical dilemmas. Creative practices that make use of ruined sites in the city are controversial to the extent that they present aesthetically attractive representations of real, unresolved social and environmental problems. This article examines the extent to which ‘ambivalent’ modes of moving, writing and thinking about creative practice in Detroits ruinscapes might contribute to an enriched understanding of the function of EcoART in traumatised environments. Exploring four types of ambivalence (down/up; inside/outside; here/there; back/forth), the author investigates the relationship between failure and transformation in EcoArt practices in Detroit.

“Art Life in Action”: Case Study of a Teaching Artist in Theatre

ABSTRACT How does a teaching artist in theatre describe critical educational events in her preparation and practice?

Oprah Feelin’: Technologies of Reception in the Commercial Flash Mob

This chapter examines the affective dimensions of the online reception of Oprah Feelin’, a commercial flash mob created for The Oprah Winfrey Show in September 2009. Flash mobs, or ‘flash mobilizations’, are examples of ‘rapid and exponential behavioral transmission’ in which text messages sent on mobile phones and other devices ‘can lead to thousands of people meeting on a square, within hours of the first message being sent’ (Riboli-Sasco et al., 2008, p. 267). While the earliest flash mobs relied on grassroots networks of communication in order to mobilize popular attendance at these events in a relatively short span of time, commercial flash mobs combine grassroots networks of communication with the resources and infrastructure of companies like TMobile, and significantly increase the time, planning, budget and attendance involved with the event. Scholars from across the disciplines have begun to explore the social and political dimensions of the flash mob and other ‘flash’ behaviours, with consistent attention on participants’ use of urban space in the earlier ‘do-it-yourself’ or ‘grassroots’ non-commercial flash mob events.1 Analyses of the flash mob from scholars in theatre, dance and performance studies are also emerging, with particular emphasis on the ways that flash mobs have impacted conventional understandings of audience and participation in public performance.2

The “Highly Satisfied” Teaching Artist in Dance: A Case Study

ABSTRACT What leads a teaching artist to find high levels of satisfaction in her life and work in dance?

The Credential Question: Attitudes of Teaching Artists in Dance and Theatre Arts.

ABSTRACT How do teaching artists perceive the need and usefulness of a credential program specifically designed for teaching artists in dance and theatre arts?

Laban for Student Actors: Probing Physical and Mental Limits

Address correspondence to Mary Elizabeth Anderson, PhD, MFA, Department of Theatre, Wayne State University, 4841 Cass Ave., Suite 3225, Detroit, MI 48202. E-mail: maryelizabeth@wayne.edu What moves a student of acting? Many undergraduate actors—and particularly those actors in their first or second year of study—experience movement in two distinct and problematically separate realms. The actor experiences the movement of his or her emotions as part of an inner, “feeling” life. And the actor experiences the movement of his or her body through space as part of an external, “performing” life. Whether actors are “feeling first and then moving” or “moving into feeling,” it is the task of the acting teacher to help students reconcile the perceived split between “internal” and “external” movement. This internal–external split, related to but distinct from the mind–body split, must be addressed repeatedly throughout training, lest the actor fall victim to the scenario described by Joseph Roach (1993), in which the performer’s body “resists his will . . . gestures die stillborn . . . his rhythms sputter and lurch like a new machine whose parts do not quite fit” (16). In this article, I discuss how I have employed Rudolf Laban’s principles of form and movement with students in a university theatre program. While Laban Effort/Shape is no stranger to acting classrooms in the United States, this work is generally located at the periphery of curriculum. In my work with intermediate actors in their sophomore year of university, I have placed Laban at the center of my teaching and have observed its unique ability to restore amicable relations between students’ internal “feeling” life and their external “performing” life. Although at first a challenge for them, Laban’s work ultimately helps students build a bridge across their perceived internal–external divide, and finally serves as a key that unlocks unacknowledged imaginative potential.