[SML] Student workers (was: Aggregrate hours for majors?)

[Lawrence E. Stahl]

I want to push back against Mr. Niederberg's insinuation that students working on college productions constitute "slave labor" because they are not paid.   In my opinion it is incorrect both to say this is done primarily for practical reasons and also to declare it to be "philosophically suspect" (aka: “wrong”).   Money is not the only thing of value, at college or elsewhere.   Exposure to new ideas, experiences, techniques, and people is also of value, and providing that exposure is one of the things that colleges do well when things are working right, and ought to do more of whenever possible.   I work for a small liberal arts college, with all of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in that circumstance.   We don't try to make our students actively unemployable, but we are also not a professional training program.  There are many excellent conservatory-based pre-professional training programs that do what they do because that's what their faculty believes in, which is great, but just as we cannot do some of what they do, they can’t do some of what we do.   Both approaches are valid.  Both approaches have strengths and weaknesses.  Each student has to choose the approach that best suits her or his interests, attitudes, abilities, and goals.
Mr. Niederberg implies that since he has learned to deal with the many hidden expenses he enumerated in his post when producing a show, anyone who can't do what he does the way he thinks it should be done is somehow not employable.   Bull puckey.   I have heard variations on that for most of my career, along with the companion idea that college plays are really just subsidized vanity productions for hopelessly incompetent faculty who can’t get “real” producers to back their shows.   Also bull puckey.   Almost all of our productions are student-directed and designed.  Yes the infrastructure of the facility and the pre-existing props, costumes, and set pieces are provided for “free”--unless you count their ridiculously high tuition-- but our students are kept to a small and strictly enforced budget for production-specific expenditures.   The occasional faculty -directed or -designed show does in fact take place in part to allow faculty to keep skills sharp and to scratch their artistic itch, but they are also done to model the behavior the faculty expect of our students in how they prepare, how they work in the rehearsal room, and how they communicate with all members of the production.   The fact that each of the faculty members at my school has a different approach to directing and designing and to the rehearsal and performance process of a show is a strength and not a weakness of our program, in my opinion, and one that I openly discuss with our students.
Exposing students to as many aspects of and approaches to theatre as possible within the acknowledged limits of our particular faculty, our facility, and our imagination is an essential component of our pedagogy.   Insisting that they engage with the liberal arts ethos of our college by studying a broad range of academic disciplines other than theatre is another part.  We do not consider that to be wasted time that would have been better spent calculating the pro-rated cost of toilet paper.  We expend a considerable effort to convince our students that ultimately our job is to teach them how to teach themselves, though I am acutely aware that we do not always achieve that goal.   There is no way we can give each one of them an identical education or cover every conceivable part of the theatrical universe.   We do not even come close to that nor do we claim to, but we do insist that everyone go up to the plate and take a swing at as many pitches as they can while they are here.  That includes students interested primarily in design or tech auditioning for and taking on acting roles, just as much as it does having students mostly interested in acting helping at load-in's, work calls, and strikes, and designing as well.   As I said earlier, it doesn’t always work as well as we’d like to hope, but when it does it’s pretty amazing.
Um... well, I guess that pushed my buttons a little more that I realized when I started typing.   Sorry for the length of this post, and have a better day.
Larry Stahl
Technical Director
Gibson Center for the Arts
Washington College.
Chestertown, MD 21620


Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2015 17:01:10 -0800
From: Richard Niederberg <ladesigners at gmail.com<mailto:ladesigners at gmail.com>>
To: Stagecraft Mailing List <stagecraft at theatrical.net<mailto:stagecraft at theatrical.net>>
Subject: Re: [SML] Aggregate hours for majors?
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<CAJSxm-+_VOzfAug6w+-zYZhgCUrS9E0YgmkyyFEDx5GPunAL-w at mail.gmail.com<mailto:CAJSxm-+_VOzfAug6w+-zYZhgCUrS9E0YgmkyyFEDx5GPunAL-w at mail.gmail.com>>
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Dear John,
It sounds like your institution, among most others, relies upon 'Slave
Labor' to get the work done. This may be a practical approach, but it is
philosophically suspect. Meanwhile, I am finding freshly minted graduates
from most of these same institutions do not have the capacity to bid a job,
whether it is building a Costume, a piece of Scenery, a Prop, or a lighting
the stage for a production. They fail to consider overhead, such as FICA,
FUTA, SDI. Workman's Compensation, or other employment taxes and fees,
occupancy, and such incidentals as ordinary light bulbs, toilet paper,
light and water bills, blades, maintenance of equipment, or other costs of
doing business, We are in Show BUSINESS, NOT Show Talent. With a sound
business basis, Art will be supported and enhanced.
/s/ Richard
_________



Larry Stahl
Technical Director
Gibson Center for the Arts
Washington College
300 Washington Ave.
Chestertown, MD 21620
410-778-7859

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