This past January four classmates and I took advantage of one of our MFA program’s best opportunities. We spent the final week of our winter break in London studying and seeing theatre, eating rashers and beans for breakfast, and generally trying to soak up the city. Visiting London while studying theatre is akin to traveling to Italy when studying sculpture, or to France when studying Champagne. Especially when you consider Shakespeare so obsessively -- as we do here at The Old Globe/USD -- England feels like the bedrock of our theatrical culture. The MFA London trip, then, is ostensibly an immersion trip geared toward as much exposure to that theatrical culture as possible. What I discover
This semester, the first-year MFA students are learning stage combat. Their focus is on fighting with Single Sword and Rapier and Dagger—two of the more common styles of swordplay on the classical stage. The end goal is to have good stage combat skills for work and careers in theatre and also to be certified as an Actor Combatant through the Society of American Fight Directors. Here, two students discuss their experiences. What is your experience with stage combat? Suzelle: Well, I did stage combat in my undergraduate program. My movement teacher at the University of Houston was Adam Noble, and he trained my class in Unarmed Combat, Single Sword, and Knife. I was able to test in all three wi
Photo by Daren Scott Chekhov can be intimidating for so many reasons. People always say that it is either terrible or phenomenal and not much in between. So the pressure begins, you feel you have to live up to the bar that has been set and the stigma that surrounds “these plays” or “those roles”. There is a voice in the back of your brain that might (did) become obsessed with getting it right, or doing it justice. But you have to start to accept the idea that the life of this play, like real life, is fluid and we move forward constantly adjusting how we get what we want. We don’t always listen to the people around us. We don’t push through life so why push through the play. An enormous part
