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  • Teaching Acting in the Face of COVID-19:Designing Instruction for Variable Acting Studios
  • Hillary Haft Bucs (bio), James Elliott (bio), David Kaye (bio), Matthew Mastromatteo (bio), Tom Pacio (bio), Valerie Clayman Pye (bio), Kim Shively (bio), and Gerritt VanderMeer (bio)

This article presents resources for instructors who are facing the challenges of teaching theatre performance during the COVID-19 era. The online video content links to four videos, which are organized by theme and accompanied by a timestamped guide for quick reference to specific topics. In these conversations, we consider strategies for: practice and accountability in the online acting studio; navigating shifting modalities for voice and movement training; virtual scene work and rehearsing online; and face-to-face teaching using masks and social distancing.

Context and Background

The work is the result of many weeks of ongoing conversations among a group of colleagues from eight different institutions, including public and private universities, working in environments ranging from small BA theatre programs to large BFA acting programs (fig. 1). We began meeting via Zoom in May 2020, just as the spring semester was winding down. Despite a lack of preparation, each one of us survived the shift to teaching online with, what we felt, were varying degrees of success. However, it was becoming increasingly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was far from over. With the immediate crisis behind us, we had a three-month opportunity to start developing thoughtful, longer-term strategies. We felt that our success and growth as teachers, the success of our students, and to an extent the future viability of our programs and institutions depended on our ability to adapt to a very uncertain future.

At first, we came together informally to share what we had learned during our crash-introduction to virtual teaching. Some of us were long-time friends, many of us had met at previous ATHE conferences, and some of us were new to one another. Our first discussion began with the questions: What learning objectives and practices do we most value in our acting classrooms and studios, and which will be most challenging to preserve in the face of shifting modalities and new constraints? Some areas of common concern began to emerge: How will we manage in-person acting classes in the fall given social distancing and mask requirements? How can we do so safely but effectively? Which learning outcomes could we preserve, and how would the transition to different modalities and safety practices impact our ability to grade and assess them? If given the choice, would it be better to teach voice and movement classes virtually or in-person? If the choice was not up to us, how could we teach effectively in either scenario? How can we create a sense of ensemble and collaboration skills in a virtual environment? How might we manage a virtual classroom in which the physical teaching space occupied by the instructor and the physical learning spaces occupied by the students are very different? In the virtual environment, what does it mean to be "present"? What does it mean to commit? How would factors beyond the instructor's control such as unequal access to the internet, appropriate learning spaces, privacy issues, and others impact our ability to hold students accountable? How will we instill discipline and teach students to build a practice in the face of a professional landscape that is in limbo? What might we be able to learn from the way [End Page E-7]


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Fig 1.

our fellow instructors in other practice-based disciplines, such as music, physical therapy, athletics, and so on are adapting to new constraints?

It quickly became apparent that it would take more than a single brainstorming session to begin to get a handle on these issues. Our initial conversation blossomed into a series of twicemonthly, focused discussions, which were led by two-person research teams assigned to preselected themes. We jokingly called our discussion group the "DIVAS" (for Designing Instruction for Variable Acting Studios), and the moniker stuck.1 These discussions became the genesis for the instructional videos below. An alternate name, "Developing Awesome Variable Instruction Design Heuristics, for ASynchronous...

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