Abstract
The interdisciplinary nature of theatre is perhaps obvious to those who work and teach within the discipline. However, amid budget cuts and an increasingly neoliberal socio-political context, it is becoming increasingly necessary to teach beyond the discipline and to model the ways that theatre skills connect to, support, and complicate other areas of knowledge. For over five years, I have collaborated with a colleague who teaches in the College of Business and who invited me to teach a theatre workshop for his business and entrepreneurship students. Specifically, I was asked to teach “the intangibles,” or elements of body language, acting, and improvisation. While these are “intangible,” instinctual elements of a business proposal or interaction, they are much more tangible aspects of a theatre professor’s pedagogy. Using my experience with these acting and improvisation workshops as a representative case study, this essay explores theatre’s unique ability to build a bridge between the arts and business/entrepreneurship. With Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future as a theoretical framework, this essay offers both a model and justification for similar interdisciplinary collaborations. Moreover, the essay argues for an increased incorporation of such acting and improvisation courses in existing business/entrepreneurship curricula—both as a vehicle to sustain arts departments and to highlight the overlapping skills between performance and business.
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Notes
- 1.
A special thanks to my colleague Greg Bier, director of the University of Missouri Entrepreneurship Alliance (EA), his administrative assistant Kelly Mattas, and the students of the EA for their willingness to engage in the arts and support this interdisciplinary collaboration so wholeheartedly.
- 2.
Gardner justifies these expansions and new directions in multiple intelligences in his 2006 publication , Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, with particular attention to his thought process and exploration into spiritual intelligence, which eventually gave way to “existential intelligence” due to the truly intangible nature of some aspects of spirituality.
- 3.
Best known for his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was influential in advocating for critical pedagogy, an educational approach that considers the acts of teaching and learning to be political endeavors and essential for oppressed groups’ agency and liberation. One of Freire’s key points was an educational model that countered the traditional “banking method” in which teachers deposited knowledge into students’ presumably empty heads.
- 4.
Anonymous written student response, July 2017.
- 5.
I have observed that the scenes from larger groups are less cohesive and coherent overall, with less investment in the project by all group members.
- 6.
Body leads can be described as the part of the body that breaks the forward plane of movement first, such as the forehead, the chin, the belly, or the hips. By exaggerating these leads, the students discover how their body position can impact their pace, mental state, and other aspects of performance. Similarly, Laban Movement Effort-Actions comes from the work of choreographer Rudolf Laban, who described human movement with four qualities: direction, weight, speed, and flow. While his system is larger than can be covered in a single exercise or workshop , introducing the eight Effort-Actions (wring, press, flick, dab, glide, float, punch, slash), each of which embodies a different combination of the four qualities, provides the students with vocabulary to differentiate types of movement.
- 7.
Anonymous student comment, July 2017.
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Rollie, E. (2018). Teaching the “Intangibles”: Building Pedagogical Bridges Between Business, Entrepreneurship, and Theatre. In: Fliotsos, A., Medford, G. (eds) New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89767-7_16
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