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Mother of Invention
by Richard Warner, Professor, Head of Acting

How’s that old Plato quotation go?  “Necessity is the mother of invention.”…something like that?  Well, that time-tested Platonic musing came into play this past spring semester for 23 fourth-year Drama Wahoos. Seems to me that you Drama alums out there can conjure up some pretty specific memories of a number of shared classroom experiences. Do you remember what you accomplished in a course entitled Senior Sem?  For many years now, every Drama major has had to enroll in this class as their capstone, comprehensive academic exercise.

For the record, John Frick and I created the first Senior Seminar course around the year 1650 or so. You can check with John for the exact date (after all, he’s the historian). We were attempting to satisfy the clear need for a required, culminating core course that would allow each major to show the faculty what they had learned in their four years in the department and how they might apply that knowledge to their future theatrical practice.

The course has seen quite a few innovations from those early years when John and I were trading semesters with a curriculum that consisted of a series of lectures and student presentations designed to expand and explore the students’ idea of theater practice by studying 20th century masters. Some of you might recall a stroll down theater history’s lane that included Brecht, Artaud, Meyerhold, Grotowski… leading you to groups like The Open Theater, Wooster Group and a fella by the name of Robert Wilson.  The second half of the class offered each major an opportunity to strut their stuff by creating their own theoretical theater, soup to nuts. Each student had to develop a theater mission statement, design a playing space in a specific city, select a season, cast the productions and tell us what kind of audience was going to see what style of production.  John and I used to enthusiastically trade some of the wild and wonderful ideas that described what you wanted YOUR theater to be! He once told me that a thoughtful, opinionated and highly inventive student (I think her name was Tina Fey) once exclaimed in one of his class sessions, “Why didn’t you guys let us know about this stuff sooner?!” …a pretty interesting question…

In the years that followed these early efforts, Betsy Tucker has brought a lot of ideas to the course including trips to prisons and explorations of alternate performance theories such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. (Check out the article in this past summer’s newsletter about her prison workshops). John had several classes produce children’s plays that toured local schools and libraries.

Certainly all these capstone experiences were created to test the depth and breadth of the our fourth year majors’ understanding of theater but what seemed more expedient and necessary to Betsy, John and me was to seek ways to create theater together that connected our majors to the world around us…to reach out to a larger community, larger than the wonderful folk who came to the Culbreth to enjoy our productions. I guess what were we really asking the fourth years to explore was the idea that theater was not some frivolous, cultish event for the elite but rather a vital, necessary forum for a world that would greet them after they had taken that euphoric stroll in May down Mr. Jefferson’s lawn.

So this leads me back to where I began…necessity being the mother of invention. This past spring we were blessed with an exceptionally large group of fourth year majors…35 to be exact.  Due to the Culpeper prison’s space restrictions, Betsy could only invite 12 students to participate in her prison workshops…that meant one of us had to invent a comparable course for about twenty majors. Hmmm…

I thought to myself, “What do all these artists have in common?”  First they are all drama majors. This meant that they had a lot of identical and identifiable practical and academic experiences. Second they were all Wahoos, which meant that they all had shared experiences such as the first year dorms, O-Hill dining, the Corner, a Greek party, the downtown mall, etc. And, of course, they were all in their final year. I wanted to challenge them with a course that would test their theatrical knowledge, but also expand it. I wanted to invent an experiential structure that would allow them to assume full responsibility for their collaborative project. I wanted to find a way for all of them to share what was really important about the last four U.Va. years together. I wanted to make it personal…from the heart, as well as the mind. And I wanted to find a way to show the work to the department in a final presentation that would be a celebration of sorts, perhaps in a festival format.

The experience that these 23 artists gave me was truly one of the most satisfying and significant in my 23 years of Wahoo teaching. The course, Drama 491-section #2 – Multi-media, Community Outreach Project, used a docu-drama film presentation to explore current, relevant University community issues. The class was divided into four teams. Each team would write and produce (design, direct, perform, edit) a 20-minute film. The first ten minutes of the project would present the issue in a documentary fashion. This could include ideas from experts, as well as “average-Joe” opinions, supported by in-depth research. Then the video presentation would “cross-fade” into a ten-minute artistic response to the issue. In other words, the team wasn’t asked to offer solutions to a pressing community problem. They were to pose a problem and respond to that issue in some artistic way.

We began with literally nothing but the ideas I just outlined above and our shared past experiences and progressed through a series of lively, animated discussions that produced four group topics. Here’s what was on our majors’ minds:

Group #1 – Homelessness in Charlottesville
Group #2 – Charlottesville and U.Va. (town & gown relationships)
Group #3 – What Makes U.Va. Laugh?
Group #4 – Self Identity

We then proceeded to an information-saturation, research phase in order to create an outline for the script.  This was followed by a unit on story-boarding and collage creation to fill out these outlines with specific, moment-to-moment content.  All these ideas were then organized into a shooting schedule (no mean feat!!).  Jama Courtney and Bruce Johnson, two excellent experts from the Media lab, joined us in March, offering us film-editing workshops. Their advice and guidance was invaluable. And then the fun began. In April the teams began shooting footage with the assistance of graduate students: Andrew Cronacher and Alex Grubbs. There were a ton of thrills and spills as each team discovered just how difficult it is to make a 20-minute video! One team lost hours of editing work with an errant tap on a computer mouse!  Have you ever done this? I have…a special kind of pain-producer.  Another group was working together splendidly and then during the last week fractured into combative camps, “warring” over some important artistic decisions…but they were able to rise to the challenge of a final cut by pulling several all-nighters during the last week of class. Ever done that? I have…a mind-bender. I recall that I didn’t help matters much at this point when I decided to give a gung-ho, group pep-talk that began, “Look, we all know that making art is hard to do…”

Long story made short… every group found a way to stay together, to collaborate… and every team produced a shiny, new-minted DVD disc, full of visual, aural ingenuity.

And… on May 4… in the Helms Theater… close to 100 people participated in the inaugural Lemming Street Players’ SemFlick Festival.

Here’s some comments from the artists:

Something with which I’d previously begun struggling with within the Drama major was, “How can what I’m doing ever actually help anyone or make a difference?”  I found that the documentary is an outlet to do just that. It gave me the opportunity to interact with people and organizations I otherwise might not know about, which in turn gave my group and me the great responsibility of communicating their stories and opinions in an interesting, artistic, and hopefully meaningful way. Next year I will be helping with homeless outreach as part of my job. I might never have thought to pursue this without the experiences I has in this seminar.
…Casey Paul

Our senior seminar class reinforced for me the importance of having a good foundation in one’s creative efforts. I had worked closely with some of my group mates previously, while I had hardly exchanged two words with others. It was because we chose a project that we all believed in and knew we would enjoy working on that we circumvented any major clashes of personality or flagging commitment within the group, and in the need we had a creative product which we were proud to call our own.
…Harrison Gibbons                                                                                    

Working with film editing software definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone, yet gave me insight into so many other possibilities for my art. I learned so much by working with the new technology and had an invaluable experience throughout the process.
…Suzanne Casey

The entire class was a series of balancing acts: we balanced fantasy with reality, order with chaos, concept and statistic, truth and imagination. We were encouraged to research and report on things that mattered to us as students on the University.  The fact that we could pick an issue “so close to home” taught us that there is a function, opportunity and place for reflection on our culture.
…Ashley Romanias

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