Speaking as myself here for a sec...
I'm seeing a lot of "classes" in other departments here. If I were a theatre department head I would be somewhat skeptical about taking a conglomeration of classes in other specialties and calling it a stage management major. I see so many college SM programs that are simply an accumulation of classes designed for other people. It becomes a degree in General Theatre Tech, not a degree in Stage Management.
We have spoken about defining and standing up for stage management as its own field with its own skillset and unique demands. How can we promote this idea from the very beginning? Maybe with stage management degrees that focus on the things that are unique to stage managers. We have a chance here to develop a BFA for stage managers and we're wasting it creeping around stealing courses from other departments.
I know, we have done that for years. That's how it's always been. Everyone else gets classes for THEM, but we wind up cobbling together those classes and learning what we can from observation, like a combination of Cinderella and Dian Fossey. It's happened so much that now that we're given this great opportunity we're still sneaking around out of habit.
Theatre departments have been loath to create the classes that teach the soft skills that SMs need (like mediation, communication, hospitality) because they're a) hard to teach and b) we've never had the
cojones to ask for them. Here's the thing though - we're running off to spend our tuition money in interdepartmental coursework where we're not the main audience for the curriculum. And yet we've stated repeatedly that what we do is infinitely transferable to other industries. Other departments can kind of teach us what we need to know, but tailored courses for US will do so even better. And if we're finding courses over
there to be interesting from an observational point of view, one can only assume that they will find our interdisciplinary (but SM-focused) coursework to be attractive over
here. We need to demand it and we need to figure out how to teach it to the next generation.
It's a given that a solid curriculum for SMs will require a lot of "borrowing" from other disciplines. However, as many MBA programs have discovered, there's a difference between an education for specialists and an education for supervising executives. As much as it's nice to get the hands-on experience, what we really need is to be
conversant in the other disciplines' languages, not
fluent.
As an aside, I worry about in exposing hordes of stage managers to deep training in other theatre fields. It can cause ingrained methods and expectations that they won't deviate from for the rest of their lives. It's all too easy for us to say "this is how it must be done," and while many of us say that from experience there are times when we say it simply because of our ingrained habits. How easy would it be to expect the design process to always happen the same way as it did in that one time you were a designer back in school? Better to get a basic introduction to everything so that you can recognize the hallmarks of a particular issue, and then develop our own methods for handling those issues in the field.
Certain things do need to be hands-on once or twice - we need be able to sympathize with the process from the perspective of a director, an actor, a designer, a builder/draper, a playwright (!), and an administrator. I would suggest that these things need to be taught by actually doing shows, not through classes.
I think a BFA in stage management needs classes in
stage management, which should be modular and built with a theme that emphasizes guest lecturers from other fields. The modules can be in all of these things that have been discussed above, but they need to be taught from the viewpoint of the stage manager - the communicator. Not so much "how do you do these things" but "how do you communicate with the people who do these things and make their jobs easier?"
We also need to think about what would make these classes attractive to those in other departments. After all, we look at the English, Music, Business and Psychology departments and think "I'd like to take classes over there as it will help me in my job." How often do you see that happening from other disciplines looking at the theatre courses? They might take an acting course, they'd definitely take a public speaking course, they're ridiculed for taking dance classes. And let's be honest here, it's the high-demand interdepartmental classes that allow a department to survive in the world of academia.
"Communication with performing artists" - designed for stage managers but open to others would be attractive to other departments. I can see it drawing music majors, choreographers, playwrights, even restaurant managers.
"Understanding the design process" would bring them in from Comp Sci, Marketing, Advertising. A class in "project management for creatives" should be mandatory for anyone looking to manage for design-heavy companies, the fashion industry, the publishing industry.
Other 21st century topics that stage managers need which have not been addressed, and would be attractive to others if spun properly:
- "Effective use of scheduling technologies"
- "Conventions and industrial marketing: the business of presentational advertising"
- "Rootless: Addressing the needs of the modern creative freelancer"
- "The Celebs vs the Chorus: Dealing with status differences within an ensemble"
- "The art of substitution: Making the most out of a low budget business"
- "Talking Turkey: Maintaining morale and achieving success when the project is going South."
- "The Creative as Custodian: Maintaining a project after the creators depart"
- "Strange Bedfellows: Organized Labor and the Artistic Iconoclast"
If I were a theatre department head and saw that the stage managers were learning craft-specific skills such as these, I would be far more likely to say "Yes, this is a degree in Stage Management."
Let's think about some other topics that stage managers could be learning directly instead of learning by pseudo-anthropology.
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