The thinking I do on my own is important but it is simply not enough. It is like the plays I stage in my head: nice enough for an afternoon daydream but not ready for public. Shared thinking is the stage between me and the public, it is the space I rehearse and practice my ideas and their articulation. Through the experience of thinking with others, I have certainly learned to think better – more critically, with more openness, inventiveness and precision. We may all know how to learn (having learned language) and so can learn to think better if we are invited to create the space and the feedback loops.

The continued separation between “classical theatre training” and out-loud-shared thinking is just killing us at least 2 or 3 fronts –
1: it implies classical theatre requires no thinking about contemporary life. Which may go a ways to explain a lack of relevance.
2: There aren’t nearly enough “classical theatre” jobs for all the poor kids coming out thinking they’ll just audition and take scene study classes until they walk onto some big semi-thrust. Or onto a commercial set.
3: (controversial and provisional statement coming:) The current generation of theatre school students and grads are more conservative. This of course is not universally true, and maybe nothing new – maybe the exceptions have always been the bright lights – but I have felt more and more that the “next generation” is more interested in a kind of success that makes criticality and engagement very difficult. This is not just a theatre school problem, but it is a problem in theatre schools. An ever increasing instrumentalization (“I go to school to have a degree, I have a degree so I have a job, I read a thing so my mark is better, I get a higher mark to get into grad school, I go to grad school because there were no jobs”) kills a dynamic learning environment, not only because of over bureaucratic/capitalist Universities, but because of the will and desires of the students. Am I wrong, am I reading something backwards?

Also, chef schools I imagine do a good job of teaching and breaking down why flavors go together the way they do, on the pacing and pleasure of a meal, the health effects and nutritional values, on how food is grown and made. I imagine them also providing a great deal of space for experimentation and feedback surrounding these issues.

We spend a lot of time rehearsing a kind of activity, which is good – the more we do something with others, the better we will be. Perhaps there needs to be a space for the practicing of thinking also. Perhaps that could be both in school and out.

The point is, to blame an institution for not teaching you how to THINK seems like a big buck pass. We all know how to think. I think about my art all the time, and maybe that’s why I don’t have a work of my own up yet. I’m spending too much time thinking about it and not enough time writing it, working it, trying it out, DOing it. School gives us the tools to shape these raw thoughts in to actual pieces. It does its job by training us at our craft, but it’s our own creativity and artistic talent that makes new art. One doesn’t go to culinary school and then complain that they now only know the recipes the school taught them. Taking it further is in their hands. And it’s the same with us. Let’s take a little responsibility for our own art.