Barrett's Blog

  Sitrep 5: Feb. 23, 2025: On Monday, I planned to write about Amiri Baraka’s quote in the Colbert article regarding revolution and the Black Arts Movement (“the holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening the consciousness”). It’s a good quote, and perhaps I’ll return to it at some point, but by Wednesday, our TikTok discussion was taking up other space in my brain. Full disclosure – I rarely use social media, and I’ve never used TikTok. That being said, I’m also taking an Arts Marketing course at present, which has me currently thinking about show branding and all aspects of promotion. Two things have stayed with me this week from Wednesday’s class. Thing #1: TikTok Dramaturg/Dramaturgy There is a lot to love about this concept. Ricardo’s phrasing was novel for me, and since it is undefined territory (in my mind at least), it is a concept that seems pregnant with interesting possibilities. The first possibility I see implied by the dramaturgy epithet is for th...

  Sitrep 4: Feb. 16, 2025 In our class discussion on Wednesday about the efficacy of shock, Craig asked how we might communicate the impact that a production such as Blasted had on its original audience when examining the play in a contemporary classroom. To paraphrase, how does one historicize ‘that-which-was-shocking’ in a contemporary theatre course? It’s an excellent pedagogical question because, when anthologized or mentioned in something like an Introduction to Theatre textbook, the event of any play is generally reduced to a very broad summary, instead of the experiential occasion it is meant to be. Even when read on a page, the reader is left with so many gaps. If we have a historical record of the play in production, then an analysis of the assorted reviews, any extant interviews with the players involved in the production, and other traditional kinds of scholarship can at least begin to paint a picture for the engaged student. The original reviewers of the play especia...

  Sitrep 3: Feb. 9, 2025 I’m continuing to think about Buselle, Kaplan, and Yates' “ethics of care” as applied to 21 st -century acting training, specifically as it relates to teaching acting students a process for creating emotion. Employing practices culled from intimacy direction and noting Magelssen’s call for the prioritization of actors’ well-being, I offer a few steps towards a pedagogy of care when it comes to teaching actors how to create and utilize emotion in realistic acting work and then subsequently how to help actors separate themselves from the mimetic experience and reground into reality when the work completes.                 Step One: The way the topic is introduced to students is crucial to contextualizing the work of emotions and giving students agency over the entire process. It is good to isolate emotion training as a specific unit within a broader course of study, so students are awar...

  Sitrep 2: Feb. 2, 2025: Oh, Method Acting… The detractors of Stanislavski based acting approaches have been passionately and thoroughly effective at evangelizing their distaste for the pedagogy, particularly the adversaries of Lee Strasburg’s brand of training that he immodestly called the Method. Some of this might be sour grapes, as former students of Strasburg and the many teachers who have tried to emulate him are legion, and the relationship between a developing thespian and their acting teacher is not only extremely personal, but fraught with opportunity for negative power transactions that can leave deep scars. However, many theatre students and film watchers of all stripes have an association with Method Acting that has formed without any lived experience or participation in a single acting exercise that comprises the technique. Their formed opinions primarily originate from two places.   First, media representation of the latest movie star cum extremist whose exp...