Rethinking the Role of the Performing Arts

Hull-House
presentation
of Moliere's
Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme.
See reference page

The trends that are reshaping the arts and humanities on campus are precisely what brought Shannon Jackson to Berkeley in 1998. An assistant professor of dramatic art and rhetoric, she was hired when the Department of Dramatic Art and Dance reorganized and launched a new doctoral program to reflect the more interdisciplinary and inclusive nature of contemporary theater studies.

"Her work combines the history, theory, and practice of theater," the department's chair, Mark Griffith, said when Jackson came to Cal. "She's an extraordinary symbol of what the department is all about."

Jackson is proving instrumental in bringing students in the dramatic arts together with students in a variety of humanities disciplines, which in turn helps close the gap that typically exists at universities between arts practice and theory. Her classes require students to write papers and prepare a performance. Through her teaching, writing, and performing, Jackson demonstrates that students who don't view themselves as performers or "theater types" can benefit greatly from performance.

For example, she says, students who major in literature can better understand an author's decisions about form and narrative technique by adapting a work of fiction into performance. Or, history students can use performance to learn about the role of interpretation in constructing perceptions of the past. "One way that I've taught primary historical materials is by performing the same excerpt of a letter or a diary two different ways," she says. "When students see how drastically different the same words can sound with an adjustment in tone and pace, then it brings home a more general point on how much interpretation can alter historical analysis."

Through her
teaching, writing, and performing, Jackson demonstrates that students who don't view themselves as performers or "theater types" can benefit greatly from performance.

Conversely, she says, performing artists benefit from studying the history and theory of drama. Such study is inherently interdisciplinary, engaging important questions and methods of several fields, such as American studies, literary studies, historiography, and gender theory. It strengthens the academic foundation of theater studies, she says, and is "a means of reconnecting arts-oriented practitioners and students to the goals of a liberal arts education. It foregrounds the connections between what art-making people do to larger social and historical issues and to other critical paradigms."

Outside the classroom, Jackson's research is helping to clarify the ambiguous role of theater arts at the university. Within higher education, she explains, a general tension has existed between pre-professional education and liberal arts education. "While most humanities disciplines positioned themselves as providers of the latter, theater ended up occupying a space somewhere in between, on the one hand speaking about itself as an artistic and humanistic field, while also devoting more and more of its curriculum to courses in audition techniques and résumé writing that prepared students for spots in commercials and sit-coms. Theater departments are still unclear about whether they are providing training in the arts and culture, or in professionalism and economics; nor are they clear about the difficulty and significance of combining both models."

Jackson is investigating those issues while writing a forthcoming book, Performance As Predicament, which Cambridge University Press commissioned for its new series in theater and performance theory. The book is an in-depth study of the concept of "performance" and six interrelated issues in which the questions of performance emerge: interdisciplinarity, institutionalization, cultural studies, theory/practice, multicultural theater, and historical method. Throughout her research, Jackson considers the structure and history of the American academic institution and argues that various institutional issues affect the course of intellectual development in ways that are often ignored.

"At a formative moment in the fields of theater and performance studies -- indeed, at a formative moment in the revision of the Dramatic Art and Dance Department at UC Berkeley -- this book investigates the institutional and disciplinary foundations of such blind spots in order to reconcile theoretical and professional debates," she writes.

Jackson's profound interest in the relationship between the dramatic arts and the humanities stems from her personal and professional background. Her work as an actor has been intertwined with her more scholarly pursuits ever since she balanced her aspirations in theater with her undergraduate studies at Stanford. "By day I studied modern thought and literature, and by night I went to rehearsals as an actress and director. I wanted to combine those worlds," she recalls.

She successfully combined them for her Ph.D. dissertation at Northwestern University, which was a history project about the Progressive Era that used performance to investigate the cultural life of the Hull-House Settlement of Chicago. Her resulting book, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, was published this year. She also wrote and performs a one-woman show, "White Noises," that uses humor and personal anecdotes to explore serious questions of race and gender.

Jackson sees great possibilities brought about by the reorganization of her department, and by the new Consortium for the Arts. She says she had been searching for a place "that sees in my field all the possibilities that I see -- a chance to engage in genuine interdisciplinary conversation; an approach to education that combines the critical and the pragmatic; a means of enabling interaction between the university and its community. If our redefined department and initiatives such as the Consortium for the Arts are given support, I have the sense that we could become the country's best program in my field and a leader in redefining the relationship between the arts and humanities more generally."

Next essay: Bringing History to Life Through Music

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Hull-House presentation of Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. See reference page	The trends that are reshaping the arts and humanities on campus are precisely what brought Shannon Jackson to Berkeley in 1998. An assistant professor of dramatic art and rhetoric, she was hired when the Department of Dramatic Art and Dance reorganized and launched a new doctoral program to reflect the more interdisciplinary and inclusive nature of contemporary theater studies. "Her work combines the history, theory, and practice of theater," the department's chair, Mark Griffith, said when Jackson came to Cal. "She's an extraordinary symbol of what the department is all about." Jackson is proving instrumental in bringing students in the dramatic arts together with students in a variety of humanities disciplines, which in turn helps close the gap that typically exists at universities between arts practice and theory. Her classes require students to write papers and prepare a performance. Through her teaching, writing, and performing, Jackson demonstrates that students who don't view themselves as performers or "theater types" can benefit greatly from performance. For example, she says, students who major in literature can better understand an author's decisions about form and narrative technique by adapting a work of fiction into performance. Or, history students can use performance to learn about the role of interpretation in constructing perceptions of the past. "One way that I've taught primary historical materials is by performing the same excerpt of a letter or a diary two different ways," she says. "When students see how drastically different the same words can sound with an adjustment in tone and pace, then it brings home a more general point on how much interpretation can alter historical analysis."
Through her teaching, writing, and performing, Jackson demonstrates that students who don't view themselves as performers or "theater types" can benefit greatly from performance.	Conversely, she says, performing artists benefit from studying the history and theory of drama. Such study is inherently interdisciplinary, engaging important questions and methods of several fields, such as American studies, literary studies, historiography, and gender theory. It strengthens the academic foundation of theater studies, she says, and is "a means of reconnecting arts-oriented practitioners and students to the goals of a liberal arts education. It foregrounds the connections between what art-making people do to larger social and historical issues and to other critical paradigms." Outside the classroom, Jackson's research is helping to clarify the ambiguous role of theater arts at the university. Within higher education, she explains, a general tension has existed between pre-professional education and liberal arts education. "While most humanities disciplines positioned themselves as providers of the latter, theater ended up occupying a space somewhere in between, on the one hand speaking about itself as an artistic and humanistic field, while also devoting more and more of its curriculum to courses in audition techniques and résumé writing that prepared students for spots in commercials and sit-coms. Theater departments are still unclear about whether they are providing training in the arts and culture, or in professionalism and economics; nor are they clear about the difficulty and significance of combining both models."

	Jackson is investigating those issues while writing a forthcoming book, Performance As Predicament, which Cambridge University Press commissioned for its new series in theater and performance theory. The book is an in-depth study of the concept of "performance" and six interrelated issues in which the questions of performance emerge: interdisciplinarity, institutionalization, cultural studies, theory/practice, multicultural theater, and historical method. Throughout her research, Jackson considers the structure and history of the American academic institution and argues that various institutional issues affect the course of intellectual development in ways that are often ignored. "At a formative moment in the fields of theater and performance studies -- indeed, at a formative moment in the revision of the Dramatic Art and Dance Department at UC Berkeley -- this book investigates the institutional and disciplinary foundations of such blind spots in order to reconcile theoretical and professional debates," she writes. Jackson's profound interest in the relationship between the dramatic arts and the humanities stems from her personal and professional background. Her work as an actor has been intertwined with her more scholarly pursuits ever since she balanced her aspirations in theater with her undergraduate studies at Stanford. "By day I studied modern thought and literature, and by night I went to rehearsals as an actress and director. I wanted to combine those worlds," she recalls. She successfully combined them for her Ph.D. dissertation at Northwestern University, which was a history project about the Progressive Era that used performance to investigate the cultural life of the Hull-House Settlement of Chicago. Her resulting book, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, was published this year. She also wrote and performs a one-woman show, "White Noises," that uses humor and personal anecdotes to explore serious questions of race and gender. Jackson sees great possibilities brought about by the reorganization of her department, and by the new Consortium for the Arts. She says she had been searching for a place "that sees in my field all the possibilities that I see -- a chance to engage in genuine interdisciplinary conversation; an approach to education that combines the critical and the pragmatic; a means of enabling interaction between the university and its community. If our redefined department and initiatives such as the Consortium for the Arts are given support, I have the sense that we could become the country's best program in my field and a leader in redefining the relationship between the arts and humanities more generally."