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Performance, Theatre Training, and Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

John Russell Brown
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Abstract

John Russell Brown, who was a founder member and first Head of the University of Birmingham's Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and subsequently an Associate Director of the National Theatre in London, here responds to the article by NTQ co-editor Clive Barker in our May 1995 issue, ‘What Training – for What Theatre’, taking as further text an editorial by Richard Schechner in the Summer 1995 issue of TDR. Currently, as a Professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, John Russell Brown is teaching a production-based undergraduate acting course, and is also an advisor for Theatre Studies at the University of Singapore and a consultant to the School of Drama at Middlesex University. He draws upon this wide range of past and present experience to explore the issues raised by Barker and Schechner – and to suggest some possible ways forward.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 47 , August 1996 , pp. 207 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. TDR, XXXIX, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 7–10.

2. New Theatre Quarterly, XI, No. 42 (1995), p. 99–108.

3. He does not continue, as he might have done, to consider the common North American practice of teachers awarding grades to their own students without a second assessment by another colleague and without the department's grading being subject to regular scrutiny by an independent ‘external examiner’ as in British universities. It is this ‘self-validation’ which allows some teachers to award A's to almost all their acting students in an effort to boost confidence and the esteem given to their own teaching.

4. TDR, XXXIX, No. 4 (Fall 1995), p. 7–8.

5. Of these examples, only Trestle had its origin in an educational institution – Middlesex University, where their major course had been production-based.