Greetings All! As I discussed in my last post, long-term, I’m hoping to collaborate with other faculty in creating a resource for faculty and students of Acting. This resource would include a directory of open dramatic text (scenes and monologues), acting exercises, readings and more. In my looking for open resources for what will be the “readings and more” section, I recently came across a great series produced by the American Theatre Wing entitled “Working in the Theater” — interviews with leading theater artists (directors, writers, etc). I could envision a faculty member linking a scene assignment of a play to one of these interviews (perhaps a useful piece of…

A few ideas from our meeting (our conversations and the video interview with Prof. Jhangiani) that stay with me: that open resources work well when they are REGENERATIVE (as in, as people use them, they contribute and expand to the resource); and, that the true spirit of open resources includes collaboration and sharing. What I love about both of these ideas is how they embody what (I believe) to be what is necessary for a community of people to succeed and thrive. In theater, we talk all the time about how there is no one dominant force, there is no one important figure; there is the play, and we are…

I’m thinking of creating a CUNY-wide resource for Theatre Arts faculty teaching acting courses. This resource would be organized into three collection areas. Section 1: A directory of scenes and monologues that are either open resources, or from electronic versions of plays found within the CUNY library system. CUNY faculty would be invited to contribute favorite useful (open) scenes and monologues to this collection. Section 2: CUNY faculty will also be invited to share useful exercises and theater games–tools that can be utilized to reinforce the concepts explored within the scene study and monologue units (a collection of sorts of best practices for exploratory exercises). Section 3: As in sections…