SETC 2006
I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Orlando, Florida after a rather exciting day of theatre workshops and seeing old friends (or should I say “friends from the old days” so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings?). I presented two workshops today, the first of which came as kind of a surprise since I found out I was doing it late yesterday afternoon. It was a panel discussion geared toward high school students making the transition from high school to a university theatre program. I sat on a panel with Jim Stacy from Louisiana State University Alexandria, Chet Longley from University of South Carolina Aiken and my collegue from Middle Tennessee State University, Kyle Zimmerman. The workshop was based around an article that Professor Stacy had written for an issue of Southern Theatre magazine that sought to help dispell some of the myths some high school students have about university theatre programs. It was a lively discussion and was well attended by high school students and faculty members as well as some current university students.
Next, came my workshop with our good buddy John Mauldin (see the bio links to the right) that was designed to help high school juniors and seniors prepare their university theatre program auditions. After a little screw up with our data projector not having been delivered on time to the conference room, we got our “lecture” portion of the workshop out of the way and opened the floor up to some of the students in attendance to showcase their audition pieces and hear our responses. My only regret is that we didn’t have more time to see more pieces. John and I are already talking about offering the same workshop again next year and requesting a longer time slot. The lecture is important–especially for students who might not be getting that information from their high school drama teachers. As we’ve discussed here before, some high school programs are nothing more than an English teacher’s chance to put on a show or two in the school’s “cafetorium”. Students who are serious about theatre coming from those programs might not get this information otherwise. In the past, there hasn’t been a great deal of workshops or information for high school students as part of the Conference, but thankfully that seems to be changing a bit.
For those of you who were in the “Auditioning for a University Theatre Program” workshop, I promised you that a version of our PowerPoint presentation would be available on this website. Be aware that you will need to have the Acrobat Reader loaded on your computer to access this file. It’s a free download. For more information about John and I, check out our bio pages in the list of links to the right. Welcome to the site! Feel free to look around and read some of the other postings. Oh yeah, check out the Green Room, too! So far, there hasn’t been a whole lot of action going on over there, but hopefully, you can help get things started!
Tomorrow, three of my collegues from MTSU and I are presenting a workshop entitled “Melodramatic Improvisation OR The Long and The Short of It”. The workshop is the brainchild of Professor Zimmerman. Perhaps I can get him on here to explain it a bit further. Still, it should prove to be a fun workshop. I probably won’t be posting about it immediately afterwards because I’ve got to catch my flight back to Nashville, but be on the lookout…