Pedagogy A-Go-Go
Welcome to Pedagogy A-Go-Go, a podcast about how we engage with learning and why. Hosted by Dr. Gina Turner, Executive Director of DEI and Professor of Psychology at Northampton Community College, and Kelly Allen, Director of Northampton Community College's East 40 Community Garden and former English professor.
Episode assignments and extras: https://linktr.ee/pedagogyagogo
Pedagogy A-Go-Go
How Big Can You Be? with Jessica López-Barkl and Darah Donaher
Hello! This month, Gina and Kelly sit down with Associate Professor of Theater and Communications Jessica López-Barkl and Assistant Professor of Theater Darah Donaher. In this episode, “How Big Can You Be?” Darah and Jess share with us the personal and professional growth students experience when they engage in theater driven pedagogies. Please be sure to subscribe to, rate, and review the podcast and follow us on Facebook and Instagram @pedagogyagogo.
00:00:00 Gina Turner
One, two, three, 4.
00:00:03 Gina Turner
Pedagogy a go go.
00:00:07 Gina Turner
Pedagogy go go go.
00:00:14 Gina Turner
Hello and welcome to Pedagogy a Go-Go, a podcast about how we engage with learning and why.
00:00:21 Gina Turner
This is season 6, episode 2, How Big Can You Be with Associate Professor Jessica Barkle and Assistant Professor Dara Donoher.
00:00:31 Gina Turner
And we are your hosts, Kelly Allen and Gina Turner.
00:00:36 Gina Turner
Hi, Kelly Allen.
00:00:37 Kelly Allen
Hey, I don't know if like people realize that like
00:00:44 Kelly Allen
every time that we start this, like while you're saying your intro, I'm just like holding back trying not to laugh.
00:00:51 Kelly Allen
Because we've just been like yucking it up like right before.
00:00:54 Kelly Allen
But anyways, how are you doing today?
00:00:57 Gina Turner
I'm doing much better, actually.
00:01:00 Gina Turner
I came in with a headache, but just the yucks always help to treat the headache, and so I'm feeling much better.
00:01:08 Kelly Allen
Oh, that's awesome.
00:01:10 Gina Turner
How are you doing today?
00:01:11 Kelly Allen
I'm doing well.
00:01:13 Kelly Allen
I took a mostly me day today.
00:01:17 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
00:01:19 Kelly Allen
I think I was sharing with one of you 2 earlier that I finally created
00:01:26 Kelly Allen
So I make pottery.
00:01:28 Kelly Allen
So you guys know that.
00:01:30 Kelly Allen
Oh yeah.
00:01:30 Kelly Allen
So, and I would like to start selling that pottery.
00:01:34 Kelly Allen
So I created an LTD and this ceramics partner of mine and I are gonna sell some pots.
00:01:45 Gina Turner
Cool.
00:01:45 Kelly Allen
So I was like, I need to make some pots.
00:01:47 Kelly Allen
So I took a me day.
00:01:49 Kelly Allen
And I made pots.
00:01:50 Gina Turner
What a great thing to do.
00:01:52 Kelly Allen
It was wonderful.
00:01:54 Gina Turner
Like that, because you're also doing something that's creative and doing something that's hands-on.
00:01:59 Gina Turner
So that's like, you know, when I take a me day, it's like, binge watch a television show.
00:02:08 Kelly Allen
No, that's nighttime.
00:02:10 Kelly Allen
Oh, speaking of which,
00:02:11 Kelly Allen
Have you watched The Lowdown yet?
00:02:13 Gina Turner
Yes, I love it.
00:02:14 Kelly Allen
Okay, I'm only on episode 4, I think it is.
00:02:19 Kelly Allen
But my goodness, gravy, is that show amazing.
00:02:23 Gina Turner
It's really fun.
00:02:25 Gina Turner
It's really fun.
00:02:26 Gina Turner
I'm only, I've only watched 3, so don't give away.
00:02:29 Kelly Allen
I won't, Oh my goodness, it's so good.
00:02:32 Kelly Allen
But okay, and I'm going to loop this in to what we're talking about here and like with the ceramics and what have you, like I
00:02:40 Kelly Allen
am driven by like beauty, not in kind of like, the classical, whatever sense it is, but just like the making of beautiful things that make its way into the world.
00:02:54 Kelly Allen
Like listening to the Beatles, like
00:02:58 Kelly Allen
if I listen to a lot of this stuff all at once, I get overwhelmed by that feeling.
00:03:03 Kelly Allen
It's like, it's like, wow, they did all of this in like less than 10 years.
00:03:07 Kelly Allen
Like all these, like these beautiful things.
00:03:09 Kelly Allen
But like when I go and I look at art and, like, so we're talking with theater folks today, like when I watch a play, like I'm just completely overwhelmed by
00:03:22 Kelly Allen
the beautiful things that we are able to create.
00:03:26 Kelly Allen
And I'm really driven by this desire to be a part of that.
00:03:33 Kelly Allen
Like I want to make beautiful things.
00:03:37 Kelly Allen
And I'm not saying that my pots are beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but for me, like the actual, like actually making them
00:03:47 Kelly Allen
feels beautiful.
00:03:48 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:03:48 Gina Turner
Well, the act is beautiful of creation, right?
00:03:51 Gina Turner
So, and I'm sure your pots are absolutely gorgeous, Kelly.
00:03:54 Kelly Allen
Some of them are good.
00:03:56 Gina Turner
There's a word that I can't think of that's kind of like awe, but it's a better word.
00:04:00 Gina Turner
But it is that kind of overwhelming awe and joy that you feel watching something that's so
00:04:08 Gina Turner
so precisely and with so much care being made.
00:04:14 Gina Turner
And I, so I know what you mean.
00:04:17 Gina Turner
It's a simple example, but I was driving in today and I heard Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips.
00:04:26 Gina Turner
And that is just a perfectly crafted song.
00:04:30 Gina Turner
Those pips, they're back there, like narrating the song to us as she's, heartfelt, pouring her heart out.
00:04:40 Gina Turner
And I kind of had that feeling just listening to that song, like, wow, this is so...
00:04:46 Kelly Allen
Amazing.
00:04:47 Gina Turner
Yes, So I'm really excited to get to talk to some art folk today in our podcast.
00:04:54 Gina Turner
We get to have Associate Professor of Theatre, Jessica Barkle, and Assistant Professor, Dara Donoher, of Theatre and Communication.
00:05:04 Gina Turner
I guess the department is Theatre and Communication.
00:05:07 Kelly Allen
I think Jess teaches communication in theatre, and Dara is, I think she's exclusively
00:05:15 Kelly Allen
theatre and then she does the shows and stuff.
00:05:17 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:05:18 Kelly Allen
We'll ask.
00:05:19 Kelly Allen
We'll get some clarification.
00:05:21 Gina Turner
We will get some clarification.
00:05:23 Gina Turner
Yes, we will.
00:05:24 Kelly Allen
Cool.
00:05:24 Kelly Allen
Looking forward to it.
00:05:25 Gina Turner
Me too.
00:05:26 Gina Turner
If you had just one word to describe yourself as a teacher, what would it be?
00:05:35 Gina Turner
Well, I guess maybe we get started.
00:05:39 Kelly Allen
This is generally how it happens, yeah.
00:05:42 Gina Turner
And Jessica, you were just talking about
00:05:45 Gina Turner
teaching the persuasive speech.
00:05:48 Gina Turner
So maybe you can talk about the classes that you're teaching.
00:05:52 Jessica López-Barkl
I teach 2 sections of in-person Comm 101, one asynchronous, fully online, Comm 101.
00:06:02 Jessica López-Barkl
I teach theater portfolio, acting 2, plays, classics to contemporary.
00:06:11 Gina Turner
Wow, that's.
00:06:14 Jessica López-Barkl
It's technically 7, but we shouldn't really count portfolio as a full class because it's more like independent study and I meet with them once a week.
00:06:24 Jessica López-Barkl
Toward the beginning it was a little heavy.
00:06:26 Jessica López-Barkl
There were longer conversations, but now they're, I'm like, did you do the thing?
00:06:31 Jessica López-Barkl
Did you turn the thing in?
00:06:32 Jessica López-Barkl
Okay, great.
00:06:34 Jessica López-Barkl
I'll see you later.
00:06:36 Gina Turner
I was just talking to actually to the president of our college about how you spend, 90% of your energy with 10% of students.
00:06:44 Gina Turner
So it's always so great to have the students where it's like, you did it?
00:06:48 Gina Turner
Excellent.
00:06:49 Gina Turner
See you later.
00:06:50 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:06:51 Jessica López-Barkl
I think they were a little weirded out about that, like about.
00:06:55 Jessica López-Barkl
five weeks in, now I talk to them for like 5, we're done.
00:06:58 Jessica López-Barkl
Like, yeah, we're done.
00:06:59 Jessica López-Barkl
Because you have nothing else to show me until you do the thing I told you to do.
00:07:03 Jessica López-Barkl
Which doesn't do till the end of the semester, but I need to know that you did those things.
00:07:07 Darah Donaher
Yeah.
00:07:10 Gina Turner
And how about you, Darah?
00:07:11 Darah Donaher
I teach the acting one class, one section of it.
00:07:15 Darah Donaher
Claire Freeman teaches the other section of it.
00:07:17 Darah Donaher
I teach a section of introduction to theater in person, and then I teach an introduction to theater section asynchronous online.
00:07:26 Darah Donaher
And then
00:07:28 Darah Donaher
part of my course load is also directing the shows.
00:07:31 Darah Donaher
So I directed She Kills Monsters in October.
00:07:35 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:07:36 Darah Donaher
And then I pick up with the Circle Mirror Transformation.
00:07:38 Darah Donaher
We have auditions tonight and tomorrow for Circle Mirror.
00:07:42 Darah Donaher
So that counts within, that'll be in January.
00:07:45 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:07:45 Darah Donaher
Yeah.
00:07:46 Darah Donaher
So when we're not,
00:07:48 Darah Donaher
directing, then we might get extra.
00:07:49 Darah Donaher
So we kind of fluctuate on that on that scale.
00:07:53 Gina Turner
Okay.
00:07:54 Gina Turner
And then you might pick up some communications classes as well.
00:07:58 Darah Donaher
I probably won't.
00:07:59 Darah Donaher
Jess will stay on that a little bit.
00:08:02 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah, I sort of sit in a liminal state of theater, calm and English because the
00:08:10 Jessica López-Barkl
plays classes cross-listed.
00:08:12 Gina Turner
Okay, gotcha.
00:08:14 Jessica López-Barkl
So I have a sociology student in there right now.
00:08:19 Jessica López-Barkl
It's like all of you listen to this part and then Lily, you can kind of listen.
00:08:27 Kelly Allen
So Derek, are any of your classes online?
00:08:30 Darah Donaher
I do one section of Intro to Theatre online, fully asynchronous.
00:08:34 Kelly Allen
So for performance people, how do you feel about teaching online?
00:08:41 Darah Donaher
I was in grad school at the time getting my MFA at Michigan State when the pandemic hit.
00:08:46 Darah Donaher
But at Michigan State, so the way that training program worked was that I taught a bunch of classes while I was also a student.
00:08:55 Darah Donaher
And a lot of our course loads each semester for every grad student was that we taught at least one online course a semester because they
00:09:03 Darah Donaher
It was a way for us to make money in the department and things like that, right?
00:09:07 Darah Donaher
So they offered a ton of online courses already.
00:09:09 Darah Donaher
They were very forward in online learning.
00:09:12 Darah Donaher
Not much of it was performance-based, but I felt like I had a handle on a lot of those kinds of things.
00:09:18 Darah Donaher
And then pandemic, we did all have to switch.
00:09:20 Darah Donaher
And I was teaching my own sections of acting classes as a grad student, and Jess was teaching acting, and we had to pivot online.
00:09:27 Darah Donaher
So we've done it.
00:09:30 Darah Donaher
It happens and happened, but that intro theater class is not necessarily a performance-based.
00:09:36 Darah Donaher
It's much more, what is theater?
00:09:39 Darah Donaher
Where do we find it?
00:09:40 Darah Donaher
Let's read about it.
00:09:42 Darah Donaher
Let's look at some history.
00:09:43 Darah Donaher
But performance online is a whole subject in itself.
00:09:49 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah, I mean, I taught musical theater.
00:09:51 Jessica López-Barkl
I taught movement.
00:09:52 Jessica López-Barkl
I taught voice for performance.
00:09:54 Jessica López-Barkl
I taught
00:09:56 Jessica López-Barkl
all of my performance classes during the pandemic for about two full years.
00:10:00 Jessica López-Barkl
And I think that cohort that came out of that, I would say the only thing that was bad was voice.
00:10:09 Jessica López-Barkl
You can't truly test, because they had microphones, what they were actually producing.
00:10:15 Jessica López-Barkl
And so when I started casting alumni into some of our seasoned shows,
00:10:22 Jessica López-Barkl
it was obvious that had lacked.
00:10:24 Jessica López-Barkl
So I think it is possible to teach those performance courses.
00:10:27 Jessica López-Barkl
And actually, the industry has pivoted to that.
00:10:31 Jessica López-Barkl
They make you have your auditions for dance are on reels now.
00:10:36 Jessica López-Barkl
You need to know how to record it.
00:10:37 Jessica López-Barkl
Your singing is all recorded now.
00:10:40 Jessica López-Barkl
Your auditions are typically recorded.
00:10:42 Jessica López-Barkl
Everybody left their offices that they were paying for in New York City and work out of their home now to save money.
00:10:48 Jessica López-Barkl
So you send in your auditions.
00:10:51 Jessica López-Barkl
And so
00:10:52 Jessica López-Barkl
even though I wasn't a fan, it's too late.
00:10:55 Jessica López-Barkl
Like the industry shifted after.
00:10:57 Jessica López-Barkl
So having to teach them how to perform, utilizing that two-dimensional space is important.
00:11:04 Jessica López-Barkl
But voice for performance, I wouldn't do that again online ever again.
00:11:08 Jessica López-Barkl
It didn't work.
00:11:09 Kelly Allen
So what has been the impact of this shift?
00:11:14 Kelly Allen
I guess like first on the industry, but then
00:11:17 Kelly Allen
also kind of like when you're teaching, like what kind of students are coming out of that environment?
00:11:27 Jessica López-Barkl
I mean, there's two answers to that.
00:11:29 Jessica López-Barkl
Like even at NCC right now, I know we have some students who actually stopped being theater majors during the pandemic and they're back.
00:11:38 Jessica López-Barkl
And they don't necessarily know the students who maybe started last year, but are now in Acting 2 because they took Acting 1 with
00:11:45 Jessica López-Barkl
Bill Munimer during the pandemic.
00:11:47 Jessica López-Barkl
And so you kind of get to see that generational shift of the traumatized one versus the one that's been fully in person, but maybe had high school slash middle school during the pandemic.
00:12:02 Jessica López-Barkl
You have that side.
00:12:03 Jessica López-Barkl
But the other thing is that because they have to,
00:12:09 Jessica López-Barkl
When we were re-looking at our program map, it was very important to me that they understood and maybe worked more heavily with Mario's program in media and have switched our voice class that we had because we had like a one credit movement in voice.
00:12:25 Jessica López-Barkl
that's not going to help them anymore.
00:12:27 Jessica López-Barkl
So we wanted to make sure that transferred.
00:12:29 Jessica López-Barkl
We looked at other schools and I noticed not even our transfer partners had anything regarding voiceover work currently like what we're doing for podcasting and that idea of learning how to do this technical aspect, which they are going to be forced to do on their own when they have to send in self tapes during audition season.
00:12:47 Jessica López-Barkl
So we added that to our program map and our curriculum for those classes because that's the way the industry has pivoted.
00:12:56 Gina Turner
That's so interesting because one of our colleagues has a daughter who is trying to work as a performer in New York.
00:13:05 Gina Turner
And one of her issues is that because it's all recorded and sent in, now it's not 100 people waiting in line for the audition.
00:13:14 Gina Turner
It's 1000 people sending in audition.
00:13:18 Darah Donaher
And I did the thing where I stood in line in mid-January when I first moved to New York.
00:13:23 Darah Donaher
And you sign up on a list, the non-official list doesn't even exist anymore.
00:13:29 Darah Donaher
So now like lining up and putting your name on this list and going home and coming back like isn't a thing.
00:13:34 Darah Donaher
Now you have to go.
00:13:35 Darah Donaher
So it has changed the landscape of even what we're preparing students to walk into, which is very different from when you've been in New York and when I've been to New York.
00:13:45 Darah Donaher
And
00:13:47 Darah Donaher
It just has shifted the entire career moving forward.
00:13:52 Darah Donaher
But it's nice to go to conferences and talk to other professors about like, how are you dealing with and talk to casting directors and for them to say, in-person auditions aren't going away.
00:14:04 Darah Donaher
We're guaranteeing they're not going away.
00:14:06 Darah Donaher
But first step might be to screen now.
00:14:10 Darah Donaher
And, but then the access does open up, right?
00:14:13 Darah Donaher
All of a sudden the accessibility is more.
00:14:17 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:14:17 Jessica López-Barkl
It's amazing.
00:14:18 Jessica López-Barkl
As a mother, it's impossible to try to continue being a professional actor or director if I'm always having to pound the pavement.
00:14:29 Jessica López-Barkl
You just leave the industry at some point because you can't.
00:14:32 Jessica López-Barkl
But now I can.
00:14:33 Jessica López-Barkl
And I've had a whole different career post-pandemic as an actor again that I didn't expect to do because I was just like, my life choice, this is more important to me and I cannot spend 5 hours to wait in line.
00:14:47 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm a union member, so I get to, I'm on the list, but that doesn't even guarantee me the amount of time that I have to drive down to New York City or to those places to get that spot that I have received and then wait my turn.
00:15:01 Jessica López-Barkl
It still takes time because there's other people on the list.
00:15:04 Jessica López-Barkl
This has opened up that equity and that inclusion in a way that is amazing.
00:15:09 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:15:09 Darah Donaher
And I think what, if we look back at teaching, I think something that I spend time on now, maybe more than I did before,
00:15:17 Darah Donaher
is just basic of you need to make eye contact with each other.
00:15:22 Darah Donaher
And how do we actually look at each other?
00:15:24 Darah Donaher
And playing games in person, right?
00:15:27 Darah Donaher
We lost, we were able to play some games.
00:15:29 Darah Donaher
People kept coming out with all these different like drama classroom, online Zoom games.
00:15:34 Darah Donaher
And so like you try all of them and you pass the ball and you, right?
00:15:37 Darah Donaher
But it's all online.
00:15:38 Darah Donaher
And we did the best we could.
00:15:41 Darah Donaher
but having them back in a room to actually play and be like, it's okay to look at this person and really engage in a scene.
00:15:50 Darah Donaher
And that has been, I think, things that have formed since.
00:15:54 Darah Donaher
And we're learning like that is a skill.
00:15:56 Darah Donaher
And even without Zoom, that students who are on their phones all the time, they're not used to the personal interaction.
00:16:03 Darah Donaher
is really, is something that I hit on more than I had in the past.
00:16:07 Gina Turner
That's so interesting.
00:16:09 Gina Turner
And it also makes me think about how much they're seeing performance on say, TikTok or Instagram or
00:16:18 Gina Turner
YouTube or that people are producing their own content.
00:16:22 Gina Turner
I have a couple of little accounts that I follow.
00:16:25 Gina Turner
I love a blogger.
00:16:26 Gina Turner
They're absolutely hilarious.
00:16:29 Gina Turner
So are they kind of, are the students coming in thinking, I want to be on the stage or I want to be on TikTok?
00:16:38 Gina Turner
Or are they, I mean, are they talking about that where they want to?
00:16:42 Jessica López-Barkl
You know, it's interesting.
00:16:43 Jessica López-Barkl
That's a conversation that happens in this.
00:16:46 Jessica López-Barkl
thing that developed during the pandemic for those of us who had to do tech theater and television tech and film tech, it's called Office Hours Global now.
00:16:56 Jessica López-Barkl
And we talk a lot about on the pedagogical days, we talk a lot about how TikTok is pivoting to maybe some having some streaming of their own and how, you know, and you start to hear that because they get to know that stuff first because they're the tech people.
00:17:08 Jessica López-Barkl
And I still listen to that at least twice a week.
00:17:11 Jessica López-Barkl
It's every day.
00:17:11 Jessica López-Barkl
But it's like,
00:17:13 Jessica López-Barkl
It's wild to me how the industry has shifted and what people could have aspirations to do, and that was another reason we really wanted to add one of Mario's classes in the media area and make sure that...
00:17:25 Jessica López-Barkl
The technical aspects are not something that they frown upon, but that becomes a part of the way it's scaffolded into the program in the flow so that they see that it's not just another thing.
00:17:36 Jessica López-Barkl
It's something they have to do and they have to have their hands on.
00:17:39 Jessica López-Barkl
Gone are the days where you can just be a stupid actor.
00:17:42 Jessica López-Barkl
Like you just can't get away with that anymore.
00:17:46 Jessica López-Barkl
And I think
00:17:48 Jessica López-Barkl
we would be idiots if we didn't pivot with it and try to make sure that even though we might have some thoughts about wanting to be a TikTok star, they're making more money than we are.
00:18:02 Darah Donaher
And we also sit in a different position than some four years do because getting into a four year for theater, especially if they want to do musical theater or especially if they want to pursue a BFA,
00:18:15 Darah Donaher
they have to pre-screen for the larger schools.
00:18:18 Darah Donaher
So we're not even just preparing them for the industry of filming themselves for self-tape, but also we're prepping them hopefully in that class of, oh my gosh, it's called portfolio, that we're also preparing them.
00:18:32 Darah Donaher
We put it now, we changed what semester it's in our program map
00:18:35 Darah Donaher
to be in their third semester because all the college auditions happen in the January time slot.
00:18:42 Darah Donaher
So we also want to prepare or right now.
00:18:45 Darah Donaher
Pre-screens are starting to be due November 1st.
00:18:48 Darah Donaher
So we want to also prepare them to be able to do pre-screen to get into their four-year, which four-year colleagues aren't necessarily preparing them for that.
00:18:56 Darah Donaher
They're preparing them for this.
00:18:58 Darah Donaher
So we're preparing not only for four years, but also hopefully afterwards.
00:19:01 Jessica López-Barkl
And a lot of programs do their theater portfolio in that last semester because they're leaving their four-year and they're going, but ours makes more sense if it is in that penultimate semester because we hope that they don't think that they are ready to go join the industry after only two semesters.
00:19:18 Jessica López-Barkl
for schooling, it's scaffolded to prepare them for that, but that's not gonna, there's no backup plan.
00:19:24 Jessica López-Barkl
So they really need to go get that four-year education.
00:19:27 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm a big believer as somebody who comes from generational poverty that we need to save their money on this end because when they leave their four-year, they have to do internships where they make absolutely nothing to build that resume.
00:19:39 Jessica López-Barkl
And people who come from generational poverty like me, you're not,
00:19:43 Jessica López-Barkl
you're not going to know that you can't afford to do that show to get it on your resume because you can't pay your rent and you can't eat.
00:19:50 Jessica López-Barkl
So the opportunities are less.
00:19:52 Jessica López-Barkl
And I want to make sure that when we're centering that community college experience, which is mostly in-person, hands-on, that they are getting the most amazing training and they will be the most amazing people that we send off to these four years.
00:20:09 Gina Turner
So it's striking me that we've never talked to someone in, when we've had people on the podcast who are in the arts.
00:20:17 Gina Turner
Like, right?
00:20:18 Gina Turner
I don't think we've ever interviewed someone who is literally in the arts.
00:20:22 Gina Turner
We've talked to English faculty and science faculty and math faculty.
00:20:28 Gina Turner
So it makes me think of you really are
00:20:31 Gina Turner
having to mentor them in a very different way.
00:20:34 Gina Turner
And I guess this is also leading me to the next question, which is if you can think of a word to define yourself as a teacher and how you engage with your students, because it is a different, it feels a little different to me and maybe I'm wrong about that.
00:20:52 Kelly Allen
No, it feels a lot different.
00:20:53 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:20:55 Kelly Allen
No, sorry, I digress.
00:20:58 Gina Turner
I appreciate the validation.
00:21:00 Kelly Allen
Oh, Lord.
00:21:01 Darah Donaher
I think the word that comes to mind when I was thinking about it is just like the idea of being dynamic in a classroom.
00:21:10 Darah Donaher
We go from teaching a lecture-based, like for me on a Tuesday, like I go from teaching A lecture-based course
00:21:16 Darah Donaher
that we're talking about all different aspects of theater.
00:21:18 Darah Donaher
And then a little while later, I end up going to teach my acting class where then I'm involved and I'm up on my feet and I'm jumping around and I'm, because they might come in with that energy that's here.
00:21:29 Darah Donaher
So I have to then, the energy has to go up.
00:21:32 Darah Donaher
And so how do I, what game do we play?
00:21:35 Darah Donaher
How do I engage in the room and engage with them?
00:21:37 Darah Donaher
And so
00:21:39 Darah Donaher
the word that came to me was dynamic, just because that energy has to shift.
00:21:42 Darah Donaher
And then also on the days where it might just not exist, and how do we deal with that?
00:21:47 Darah Donaher
And being able to shift in the room, I think in a theater classroom is really important, just because you're going to get all different things in a day.
00:21:55 Darah Donaher
So dynamic would be mine.
00:21:57 Darah Donaher
And also, my name is Dara Donoher, so it starts with a D, so I have to keep with the D thing.
00:22:04 Kelly Allen
Your parents also start with D's.
00:22:06 Darah Donaher
My entire family is DD and my middle name is also D, Dara D'Alimpio Donoher.
00:22:12 Darah Donaher
So I have to keep only in the D's.
00:22:14 Gina Turner
So I had to use a D adjective.
00:22:17 Gina Turner
I love that comedic.
00:22:19 Darah Donaher
That's a whole other conversation.
00:22:26 Jessica López-Barkl
I've always said I follow the three pillars of rigor, consistency, and passion.
00:22:31 Jessica López-Barkl
But if it would be like just one, it's passion.
00:22:33 Jessica López-Barkl
I think at the end of the day, again, I have already said this, but I come from very poor people.
00:22:39 Jessica López-Barkl
And it didn't matter to me that I was poor and my dad was very loving, you know, and my mom was very loving.
00:22:47 Jessica López-Barkl
And you didn't, the rest of it,
00:22:50 Jessica López-Barkl
didn't matter as long as there was something passionate going on.
00:22:53 Jessica López-Barkl
I wouldn't say it was happy or sad, but that there was feeling there.
00:22:58 Jessica López-Barkl
And so when I'm in the classroom, I think that I always talk a little bit about what a theater professional, Patsy Rodenberg, calls the second circle.
00:23:06 Jessica López-Barkl
First circle is kind of what we're all doing right now.
00:23:08 Jessica López-Barkl
We're kind of sitting and relaxing and making this very conversational and fun.
00:23:12 Jessica López-Barkl
Second circle is that presence, that dynamic energy that Dara was talking about.
00:23:17 Jessica López-Barkl
And the third circle is like where you're just like too loud and maybe a little agit part.
00:23:20 Jessica López-Barkl
and that's too much.
00:23:22 Jessica López-Barkl
So we try to talk about that in theater, we have to be second circle.
00:23:27 Jessica López-Barkl
Maybe in film, we're a little first circle, but because their audience is very small, whereas the canvas of the stage of theater is much bigger, we do need that second circle performance.
00:23:40 Jessica López-Barkl
And
00:23:41 Jessica López-Barkl
I don't know how not to do that anymore, to be honest.
00:23:44 Jessica López-Barkl
Like I've been teaching college as I was since 2008, and I just don't know how to not be on the tips of, on the balls of my feet and always forward.
00:23:53 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:23:54 Jessica López-Barkl
So passion.
00:23:55 Gina Turner
Well, I love that framing.
00:23:57 Gina Turner
I've never heard it before, that first, second, and 3rd circle, because it strikes me that we all have to negotiate those circles as instructors in the front of a classroom, right?
00:24:08 Gina Turner
And also kind of move
00:24:11 Gina Turner
definitely between 1:00 and 2:00.
00:24:13 Gina Turner
And sometimes when you're trying to get that energy going up in the other room.
00:24:18 Gina Turner
I know, now that I have a name for it, I know I've been in third circle and it's unfortunate.
00:24:25 Jessica López-Barkl
That is not good for anyone when I'm there either.
00:24:33 Gina Turner
That's great.
00:24:34 Jessica López-Barkl
And yet when I've taught prisoners, they're like, you know, Miss, when we're there,
00:24:38 Jessica López-Barkl
we still like you.
00:24:39 Jessica López-Barkl
It's when we get quiet, you should get scared.
00:24:41 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm always like, oh, yeah.
00:24:43 Jessica López-Barkl
Good to know.
00:24:44 Jessica López-Barkl
Heard.
00:24:45 Jessica López-Barkl
Wow.
00:24:47 Gina Turner
Can you say a little bit more about working with prison population?
00:24:50 Jessica López-Barkl
Sure.
00:24:51 Jessica López-Barkl
I always tell people it's the best thing I've ever done.
00:24:54 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:24:55 Jessica López-Barkl
And no one ever sees it.
00:24:57 Jessica López-Barkl
So, you know, because it's so specific.
00:24:58 Jessica López-Barkl
But I've done it.
00:25:01 Jessica López-Barkl
I started doing it when I was in AmeriCorps in New Mexico.
00:25:04 Jessica López-Barkl
I worked in both,
00:25:08 Jessica López-Barkl
so youth detention for both boys and girls.
00:25:11 Jessica López-Barkl
And then I started teaching college to, in medium custody and maximum custody with Walla Walla Community College at their Washington State Penitentiary through the Sunshine Lady Foundation.
00:25:24 Jessica López-Barkl
It was soft money, and I just thought it was no way to make money, so I'm just going to go.
00:25:29 Jessica López-Barkl
And it was amazing.
00:25:31 Jessica López-Barkl
And I accidentally was teaching Introduction to Theater, and they read that the reason people started to understand Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett was because it was shown at a prison, and the guys were like, yeah, it's about waiting.
00:25:45 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:25:46 Jessica López-Barkl
Which is what Beckett kept saying.
00:25:47 Jessica López-Barkl
It's about waiting.
00:25:48 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah.
00:25:49 Jessica López-Barkl
And they're like, yeah, we know waiting.
00:25:51 Jessica López-Barkl
There's like the guy who just showed up.
00:25:52 Jessica López-Barkl
And then there's like the guy who's been here for like 2 weeks and he like keep telling you when like calls are going to happen.
00:25:57 Jessica López-Barkl
And they were like, hey, miss, has anyone ever like have prisoners done Waiting for Godot?
00:26:01 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, I don't actually don't know.
00:26:02 Jessica López-Barkl
Can we?
00:26:03 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, I don't know.
00:26:07 Jessica López-Barkl
So I ended up producing it in Washington State Penitentiary in their barber shop.
00:26:12 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:26:14 Jessica López-Barkl
And then we did Iceman Cometh there, and then funding dropped.
00:26:19 Jessica López-Barkl
And then when I worked up in New York, I worked in maximum security and medium security.
00:26:25 Jessica López-Barkl
at Solomon Correctional Facility, which was Maximum, and Woodburn Correctional Facility.
00:26:30 Jessica López-Barkl
But then at Wordburn, I started working with rehabilitation through the arts, which recently got more famous because of the film Sing Sing.
00:26:37 Gina Turner
Yes.
00:26:38 Jessica López-Barkl
So anytime people are like, Jessica knows those guys.
00:26:41 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, I do, but like, don't be impressed.
00:26:44 Jessica López-Barkl
Like, they're way cooler than I will ever be.
00:26:47 Jessica López-Barkl
But yeah, I do see that
00:26:52 Jessica López-Barkl
There are many things we just don't talk about in the world, and it gets shut into the prison system pretty quickly.
00:26:57 Jessica López-Barkl
And so I remember when I first started teaching the prison system, Obama was elected, and people kept talking about a post-historical society.
00:27:04 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, interesting.
00:27:06 Jessica López-Barkl
I work in a state that's 85% white and 90% people of color in the prison system.
00:27:13 Jessica López-Barkl
That's not true.
00:27:14 Jessica López-Barkl
There's that pipeline.
00:27:17 Jessica López-Barkl
And I grew up, my brother was in, youth detention and easily, started was in that pipeline as well.
00:27:23 Jessica López-Barkl
I don't think it necessarily discriminates race, but it's there and it's in poverty.
00:27:28 Jessica López-Barkl
And that's, you don't see rich people behind bars.
00:27:33 Jessica López-Barkl
So it was amazing to have conversations about death of a salesman.
00:27:39 Jessica López-Barkl
with a bunch of men in there and seeing how what they thought was what their dad did was what they were gonna do, but that the world changed so you can't do that anymore.
00:27:50 Jessica López-Barkl
And I can't take away how much amazing conversations I've had.
00:27:54 Jessica López-Barkl
Or like Iceman Cometh, there were dudes who were just in that bar for 20 years.
00:27:58 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:27:59 Jessica López-Barkl
So there were guys were like, yeah, I've been in the same bar.
00:28:02 Jessica López-Barkl
for the past 25.
00:28:04 Jessica López-Barkl
and I can't do that research.
00:28:06 Jessica López-Barkl
I can only have those actors just sitting authentically in front of me and have that happen.
00:28:11 Jessica López-Barkl
So that's, I can't, I can only say those things or read their papers, which you can never read, because that would be exploiting them.
00:28:18 Jessica López-Barkl
But some of the best papers I've ever read were from some of the men and women I've taught.
00:28:23 Jessica López-Barkl
So yeah.
00:28:24 Gina Turner
Do you think that informed you generally in terms of teaching like our population of students?
00:28:29 Jessica López-Barkl
Hitting that authentic voice.
00:28:31 Jessica López-Barkl
I know how to get there now.
00:28:32 Jessica López-Barkl
I know what it sounds like and I know how to train it.
00:28:36 Jessica López-Barkl
And that took time.
00:28:37 Jessica López-Barkl
that's its own pedagogical thing that is time.
00:28:40 Jessica López-Barkl
That heuristic process of layering and getting there.
00:28:47 Gina Turner
I'm just, I'm getting chills thinking about, you know, a production of
00:28:53 Gina Turner
I just forgot the name of the play.
00:28:55 Jessica López-Barkl
Waiting for Godot.
00:28:56 Jessica López-Barkl
I thought Waiting for Godot.
00:28:57 Jessica López-Barkl
Ice Wing Cometh.
00:28:58 Gina Turner
No, the other one.
00:28:59 Gina Turner
Death of a Salesman.
00:29:00 Gina Turner
Death of a Salesman.
00:29:01 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:29:01 Gina Turner
And that trapped feeling of the.
00:29:04 Jessica López-Barkl
That paralyzation.
00:29:06 Jessica López-Barkl
Yep.
00:29:06 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:29:07 Kelly Allen
I don't know, you just said so many things.
00:29:09 Kelly Allen
And then, like, and I want to make sure that we can, like, pivot over to Derek, because I, you know, know that you have been, you have a lot of experience.
00:29:21 Kelly Allen
with theater with children.
00:29:25 Kelly Allen
So, and I'm not, I'm not drawing parallels at all.
00:29:29 Kelly Allen
It's your experiences, but like, but before we, before we do that, like Jess, I just, like, I'm just curious, like, what, like, if you had to give, I don't want to say like an elevator speech, but like, if you had to, you know, just explain to someone,
00:29:47 Kelly Allen
like what the value is for theater in the prison system.
00:29:52 Kelly Allen
And hopefully, like, explain in a way that it's, not only valuable for those who are incarcerated, but for those who are not.
00:30:02 Kelly Allen
Like, I don't know if you could unpack that.
00:30:04 Jessica López-Barkl
Well, I mean, the persuasive argument is follow the money.
00:30:08 Jessica López-Barkl
Because recidivism, if you think about our tax dollars, is $60,000 per prisoner.
00:30:16 Jessica López-Barkl
in that we pay on our tax dollars, right?
00:30:19 Jessica López-Barkl
And the only thing that has been proven to lower recidivism is education.
00:30:25 Jessica López-Barkl
The only thing that is proven at 90 percentile to reduce recidivism, because that's 65 is just education, 90% is arts education.
00:30:34 Jessica López-Barkl
So California's state penitentiary system knows this.
00:30:37 Jessica López-Barkl
So there are arts education throughout California's penitentiary system because they followed the money.
00:30:42 Jessica López-Barkl
It is intrinsically
00:30:45 Jessica López-Barkl
good, but that never, you can't sell that to somebody.
00:30:48 Jessica López-Barkl
You can't sell that to a correctional officer who thinks his tax dollars are paying for me to come teach men or women in the prison system who they feel like, well, why do these people get these classes?
00:30:59 Jessica López-Barkl
Why do they get college?
00:31:01 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm like, I don't want to get in an argument with right now, because you could actually make sure I'm not here.
00:31:05 Jessica López-Barkl
they can kick me out.
00:31:07 Jessica López-Barkl
They can make my life horrible.
00:31:08 Jessica López-Barkl
So I don't say anything.
00:31:09 Jessica López-Barkl
But their tax dollars weren't paying for any of it.
00:31:11 Jessica López-Barkl
was always soft money at every institution I've worked at.
00:31:14 Jessica López-Barkl
But actually, it's in their best interest that they did, because it's the only thing proven to take that down.
00:31:22 Jessica López-Barkl
But the value, the value beyond that
00:31:26 Jessica López-Barkl
is how do you get people to tell stories that will make people want to sit down and hear them that live at, I can't get somebody to play Vladimir or Estragon or Lucky or Pazo in Waiting for Godot like the men I had sitting in front of me who had experienced 25 years down.
00:31:49 Jessica López-Barkl
And I got to watch that.
00:31:50 Jessica López-Barkl
And my father got to watch that.
00:31:52 Jessica López-Barkl
You know, my dad who had an 8th grade education,
00:31:55 Jessica López-Barkl
He came and he said, when he left and he goes, they all look like Troy, which is my brother's name.
00:32:00 Jessica López-Barkl
And I said, oh.
00:32:02 Jessica López-Barkl
And that hit me because I realized that was a fear of my father's, that my brother who had gotten caught up in that was going to end up there.
00:32:09 Jessica López-Barkl
And he realized none of those men were scary.
00:32:11 Jessica López-Barkl
I think he was frightened that I was teaching there.
00:32:13 Jessica López-Barkl
And he got to meet all those men and he got to see that they were amazing and well-spoken and that they respected me.
00:32:19 Jessica López-Barkl
and that he also saw an amazing story.
00:32:22 Jessica López-Barkl
Would a man from South Dakota want to go see Waiting for Godot and watch for two hours, this repetitive absurdist play?
00:32:28 Jessica López-Barkl
Probably not.
00:32:28 Jessica López-Barkl
He loved every minute of them.
00:32:30 Jessica López-Barkl
And he hugged them, which is weird because my father was not a hugger.
00:32:34 Jessica López-Barkl
So for me, it's like you take this, you know, my father, who I look at a lot of things from my father's point of view, is this idea of anybody can go see a story be told.
00:32:44 Jessica López-Barkl
And if it's done in an authentic way, it's going to hit you.
00:32:48 Jessica López-Barkl
You can follow the money or you can follow the story.
00:32:52 Kelly Allen
Yeah, but what I'm kind of also hearing in that kind of thread is like when getting the opportunity to, witness one of these productions, so for the people on the outside looking in, like they, it's an opportunity to understand that,
00:33:16 Kelly Allen
that these people are not defined by their incarceration.
00:33:19 Kelly Allen
And then I would have to say that the same is true when you look at it from the other way, that these individuals can, it's like, I am not defined by what I'm experiencing right now, no matter how much kind of,
00:33:36 Kelly Allen
the outside world wants to kind of brand that label on me.
00:33:42 Jessica López-Barkl
I mean, the sense of penitentiary and penitence, like this idea of time served for the crime that you do.
00:33:50 Jessica López-Barkl
And I've never taught a man or a woman in the prison system who was proud of what they, you know, like, or felt like they were a product of what they came from.
00:33:59 Jessica López-Barkl
I actually got a man who just yelled at me one day.
00:34:01 Jessica López-Barkl
He was like, no, I had good parents.
00:34:03 Jessica López-Barkl
This was absolutely on me.
00:34:05 Jessica López-Barkl
He was like, don't try to think that I was a product of something.
00:34:08 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, he's like, I'm serving my time because I should serve my time.
00:34:13 Jessica López-Barkl
And in RTA, my boss is a man who served 28 years.
00:34:17 Jessica López-Barkl
and I've learned a lot from him.
00:34:20 Jessica López-Barkl
he was like, he consents off of some of the men we work with through RTA.
00:34:25 Jessica López-Barkl
He's like, that man hasn't really accepted what he's done to his victims.
00:34:30 Jessica López-Barkl
and then one day he was like, he knows now.
00:34:32 Jessica López-Barkl
And he could tell.
00:34:33 Jessica López-Barkl
He could tell after having some deep acting or being in a show.
00:34:37 Jessica López-Barkl
Because I did On the Waterfront with them and I was the actor in it.
00:34:41 Jessica López-Barkl
was different because I'd always been a director, but this was the first time I was like an actor and I got to hang out backstage with them and we got ready and we were all nervous together.
00:34:48 Jessica López-Barkl
It was really crazy.
00:34:50 Jessica López-Barkl
But my boss comes up to me and he goes, that guy.
00:34:54 Jessica López-Barkl
that guy he knows now.
00:34:55 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, oh, that's amazing.
00:34:56 Jessica López-Barkl
And I kind of looked and I could see that he was sitting over with something because the character had brought something out in him that you couldn't have taught him.
00:35:04 Jessica López-Barkl
unless he had been forced to sit with it.
00:35:07 Gina Turner
Well, I am making the link back to theater and children because it is such an empathy building, I mean, and self-awareness and emotional intelligence building exercise to the theater.
00:35:21 Gina Turner
I mean, it is, right?
00:35:23 Gina Turner
So I mean, I'm sure you can see transformations in children that you've worked with.
00:35:29 Darah Donaher
Yeah, I think something that Jess said that hit me was
00:35:34 Darah Donaher
So many, so I work at Pennsylvania Youth Theater, which is an after-school programming that kids come to PYT.
00:35:42 Darah Donaher
Through PYT, I also do outreach into our local schools.
00:35:45 Darah Donaher
So I even go into the elementary schools to do workshops, whether it be for a certain grade or if it's over the summer.
00:35:53 Darah Donaher
But I've spent a lot of time, and I also worked at Moravian Academy's Swain campus as their theater teacher.
00:35:58 Darah Donaher
So in all of these ways, like at Swain, they had to take my class.
00:36:02 Darah Donaher
It was one of their specials classes.
00:36:03 Darah Donaher
So they came to my class because they had to.
00:36:05 Darah Donaher
Now some of the kids loved it, right?
00:36:07 Darah Donaher
Theater was their thing.
00:36:09 Darah Donaher
They were so happy.
00:36:10 Darah Donaher
When I go into an after-school program, usually they have signed up for it, but it is something, hopefully, that is free to them, that those are the schools we go into, right?
00:36:18 Darah Donaher
So we're getting funding from somewhere, whether it be the school or United Way or something
00:36:23 Darah Donaher
we have gotten money to go into the school to do a programming.
00:36:26 Darah Donaher
And then at PYT, again, hopefully the students who are signing up want to be there.
00:36:32 Darah Donaher
So I've seen all the levels of it, but something that Jess said, which was when, especially I'm going into a school where they might not ever see theater again, or this is their first thing,
00:36:43 Darah Donaher
Sometimes the theater part is what keeps them there for the day.
00:36:47 Darah Donaher
It's what gets them to school in the morning.
00:36:49 Darah Donaher
It's what...
00:36:50 Darah Donaher
I'm the director at Liberty High School for their shows.
00:36:53 Darah Donaher
So many of my students...
00:36:55 Darah Donaher
come up to me and it's the best part of my day when I'm here, right?
00:36:59 Darah Donaher
Or I wasn't going to come to school today.
00:37:01 Darah Donaher
I wasn't feeling great, but I'm here because I wanted to go to rehearsal.
00:37:05 Darah Donaher
Now, if they're sick, they need to stay home.
00:37:07 Darah Donaher
However, if it's just like, I wasn't sure I was going to take a mental health day, but I wanted to be at rehearsal and they know they can't come to rehearsal unless they were in school, that's their part of the day.
00:37:16 Darah Donaher
It's the same with band.
00:37:18 Darah Donaher
It could be the same with their art class.
00:37:20 Darah Donaher
Like the arts, a lot of the times for a lot of our students, K through 12 is the thing
00:37:25 Darah Donaher
that gets them to school.
00:37:27 Darah Donaher
It's the thing that keeps them at school.
00:37:29 Darah Donaher
It's the thing that diverts them from, I was going to go hang out with this person, but actually maybe this person, right?
00:37:35 Darah Donaher
It gives them other opportunities.
00:37:37 Darah Donaher
And I think it is part of that is that it's what keeps them going.
00:37:43 Darah Donaher
So I see that part of it.
00:37:45 Darah Donaher
And then, yeah, I think confidence building, empathy, compassion, joy, they get all of it when they,
00:37:52 Darah Donaher
Either they see a show.
00:37:53 Darah Donaher
Sometimes it's just simply by coming at PYT for our school shows.
00:37:57 Darah Donaher
We bring in 250 students a day to see our school shows.
00:38:01 Darah Donaher
And for so many of those schools, that could be the only time that student sees theater or it's the first time they see theater.
00:38:08 Darah Donaher
And they're six years old in kindergarten.
00:38:10 Darah Donaher
And I remember sitting in an audience at six years old and being like, I've never seen anything like this in my life.
00:38:16 Darah Donaher
And how do I do it?
00:38:17 Darah Donaher
Right?
00:38:18 Darah Donaher
And so like that's the thing then that they get to go home and
00:38:22 Darah Donaher
I start most of my, with my littles, I start class by talking about how do you play dress-up at home.
00:38:29 Darah Donaher
And that's what we're going to do.
00:38:30 Darah Donaher
And playing with your imagination is freeing.
00:38:36 Darah Donaher
And it's exciting when I get to work with younger students because they don't have those inhibitions yet.
00:38:41 Darah Donaher
So when I say be a tiger, the amount of seven-year-old incredible tigers I've seen is outnumbered.
00:38:50 Darah Donaher
That's something that at the collegiate level, I struggle with sometimes.
00:38:54 Darah Donaher
But because they do, they have the wall.
00:38:57 Darah Donaher
They're too cool to be tigers.
00:39:00 Darah Donaher
They're not full-bodied.
00:39:02 Darah Donaher
But yes, I think it is so important for children to have the opportunity, whether it be theater, music, art,
00:39:12 Darah Donaher
It builds confidence.
00:39:13 Darah Donaher
It builds, it helps them stay at school, literally.
00:39:18 Darah Donaher
And it gives them skills to problem solve.
00:39:21 Darah Donaher
So much of theater is problem solving.
00:39:23 Darah Donaher
There's so much problem solving.
00:39:25 Darah Donaher
They have to work as a team.
00:39:27 Darah Donaher
It's not an individual sport.
00:39:29 Darah Donaher
So just even having to be in a group project or things like that, like they build these skills that they don't,
00:39:36 Darah Donaher
Literally at PYT, hanging up a costume after a show is your responsibility.
00:39:42 Darah Donaher
Putting it on a hanger and putting it up next to your number.
00:39:45 Darah Donaher
It's a skill.
00:39:46 Darah Donaher
It's a skill.
00:39:47 Darah Donaher
It's a skill that if you can learn that at 8 years old, it is your responsibility to pick it up off the floor, put it on the hanger and hang it back up.
00:39:53 Darah Donaher
That's something for at home then.
00:39:55 Darah Donaher
Right?
00:39:56 Darah Donaher
You're responsible for your clothes.
00:39:57 Darah Donaher
You're responsible for your property.
00:39:59 Kelly Allen
My daughter doesn't do that.
00:40:01 Kelly Allen
Her crap is all over the damn place.
00:40:03 Gina Turner
I bet she does it at the theater though, Kelly.
00:40:05 Kelly Allen
Yeah, so now I know.
00:40:07 Kelly Allen
And I'm going to say, I'm going to be like, babe.
00:40:09 Darah Donaher
I love the things we learn about our children and other people.
00:40:12 Kelly Allen
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
00:40:14 Darah Donaher
No, So I just think there's all different, even to be able to sit at a rehearsal and know it's not my turn to be on stage right now, but I have to sit here quietly and I'm going to watch and I'm going to observe and learn and not be on my phone because I'm not allowed to be.
00:40:27 Darah Donaher
And how do we use our time?
00:40:29 Gina Turner
Oh, gosh.
00:40:29 Darah Donaher
Right.
00:40:30 Darah Donaher
So it's just all, it's all different skills.
00:40:33 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:40:34 Gina Turner
I was really thinking about collaboration and back to what you were both saying about eye contact and just that the ability to be in space with another human being is priceless to have those experiences.
00:40:46 Darah Donaher
And there aren't as many spaces that we're doing it.
00:40:48 Gina Turner
Right, exactly.
00:40:50 Darah Donaher
So it gives an opportunity.
00:40:51 Gina Turner
What is an exercise that you do with our NCC students that you just love, that you really do feel like helps them to build
00:41:00 Gina Turner
authenticity, helps them to build that collaboration.
00:41:03 Darah Donaher
I just did, I just finished my, they do like a, in my intro to theater, I have a playwriting assignment for them where they come in, they've thought about dreams that they've had, that they remember if they do.
00:41:16 Darah Donaher
And they come in and they share these dreams and they have to create
00:41:20 Darah Donaher
A five-minute play.
00:41:22 Darah Donaher
Most of them it's longer because they get so excited.
00:41:25 Darah Donaher
A five-minute play, but they have to write it, they have to act in it, they direct it, they have to bring in props.
00:41:31 Darah Donaher
But the amount of fun that they had with being like, at first they're like, what?
00:41:34 Darah Donaher
Because it feels so daunting.
00:41:36 Darah Donaher
And then at the end they're like, are we writing another one?
00:41:38 Darah Donaher
But they love it.
00:41:40 Darah Donaher
It's their favorite thing of the whole semester.
00:41:42 Darah Donaher
I love it because they get to be so creative.
00:41:45 Darah Donaher
And there's parameters and things, but watching them go from, in a group of five, and then a few weeks later, they're performing this play.
00:41:55 Darah Donaher
It's just so joyful.
00:41:56 Darah Donaher
And they watching each other have so much joy, and it's like the loudest cheer you'll ever hear from the rest of the class that their classmates did it, because they also did it, and they're having rehearsal outside of class.
00:42:06 Darah Donaher
It's just,
00:42:07 Darah Donaher
It's so fun.
00:42:08 Gina Turner
And they're doing everything.
00:42:09 Gina Turner
They're writing, they're directing, they're doing all of the aspects of it.
00:42:14 Gina Turner
So again, there's that responsibility and collaboration going on.
00:42:18 Darah Donaher
Yeah, all that collaboration.
00:42:20 Gina Turner
That's so cool.
00:42:20 Gina Turner
How about you, Jess?
00:42:21 Jessica López-Barkl
You know, I'm just getting to know our NCC students, and I got them in acting too.
00:42:25 Jessica López-Barkl
And so it was a little bit of experimentation this semester to, you know, the first week I said, hey, you know what, come next week with a monologue and a scene.
00:42:35 Jessica López-Barkl
show off for me.
00:42:36 Jessica López-Barkl
I want to see what you got.
00:42:37 Jessica López-Barkl
And then we've been kind of building from there.
00:42:39 Jessica López-Barkl
I have a curriculum, obviously, that I follow, but that was kind of how we started.
00:42:42 Jessica López-Barkl
And we do, we have hesitancy and we were struggling with voice and we were supposed to be doing Greeks and Shakespeare, which is in the curriculum and in the
00:42:53 Jessica López-Barkl
course description and they're not ready for it, which is why we need to change the program map.
00:42:59 Jessica López-Barkl
But we worked with what we had.
00:43:00 Jessica López-Barkl
It was so funny.
00:43:01 Jessica López-Barkl
It was like the past two weeks were kind of golden.
00:43:04 Jessica López-Barkl
There's a lot of frustration, I think, with me.
00:43:06 Jessica López-Barkl
And I read their journals every week.
00:43:07 Jessica López-Barkl
They have a reflection journal that they have to write every week.
00:43:10 Jessica López-Barkl
in addition to some text analysis and actual learning and warming up and doing all the stuff.
00:43:15 Jessica López-Barkl
And each week I, or two weeks, I do different pedagogies as we go along.
00:43:19 Jessica López-Barkl
And we hit the global majority area of Vissav Lode-Meyer Hold, which is
00:43:24 Jessica López-Barkl
He was a artist who taught biomechanics in Russia and in fact died because Stalin killed him.
00:43:33 Jessica López-Barkl
And then I did Tadashi Suzuki work right after that, which is what we've been doing.
00:43:37 Jessica López-Barkl
And it's hilarious.
00:43:38 Jessica López-Barkl
The room has changed.
00:43:40 Jessica López-Barkl
Like they are, they noticed.
00:43:42 Jessica López-Barkl
They noticed.
00:43:42 Jessica López-Barkl
They're stomping.
00:43:43 Jessica López-Barkl
Well, because we had this day where you have to dance with Stick, which is this like Jacques Lecoq, the Savolode Meyer whole thing.
00:43:50 Jessica López-Barkl
And there was this other act, this thing where I went, come to Mama.
00:43:52 Jessica López-Barkl
And they have to run at me
00:43:54 Jessica López-Barkl
with their eyes closed and notice when they get scared.
00:43:57 Gina Turner
Wow.
00:43:58 Jessica López-Barkl
And notice their blocks and notice where they, and it was so funny.
00:44:02 Jessica López-Barkl
And it was so funny to watch none of the, even the playing field, nobody could dance with a stick.
00:44:06 Jessica López-Barkl
It was so funny when she saw me, what are you doing today?
00:44:08 Jessica López-Barkl
I was like, stick.
00:44:08 Jessica López-Barkl
And she goes, stick.
00:44:10 Jessica López-Barkl
And then the next week I was grabbing another thing of the bigger stick and she goes, what you doing today?
00:44:14 Jessica López-Barkl
I was like, Suzuki.
00:44:15 Jessica López-Barkl
And she goes, and I got up there.
00:44:18 Jessica López-Barkl
And then, you know what's so funny is they bought, after the dancing with stick and the Come to Mama, they were all at the same level and they were
00:44:24 Jessica López-Barkl
all crazy and having fun that when I came in with this really, really strict Noh theater, kabuki theater mixed with ballet, strangely, the Japanese drinking song where they're having to look over on the horizon at their enemy and hold 2 invisible sticks with buckets of water on it and like go down in a grande plier and sing this crazy Japanese drinking song, one thing down and one thing up, they all came up and they were like, second circle.
00:44:54 Jessica López-Barkl
That's great.
00:44:55 Jessica López-Barkl
And they were so much more fun with each other.
00:44:56 Jessica López-Barkl
And we were doing the absurdist scenes, because the curriculum and the course description asked for absurdism.
00:45:02 Jessica López-Barkl
So they're doing like Eugenio Nesco, Rhionnaceros, they were doing Wayne Never Godot, they were doing The Lesson, Beckett's play that's called play where there are three people and urns.
00:45:13 Jessica López-Barkl
Love it.
00:45:15 Jessica López-Barkl
was the best work they did.
00:45:16 Jessica López-Barkl
And so I would never have said, oh, that's the key.
00:45:20 Jessica López-Barkl
But now I feel like that was the key.
00:45:23 Jessica López-Barkl
We need more physical
00:45:24 Jessica López-Barkl
We need more global majority techniques and pedagogies in our classrooms to sort of open that up.
00:45:30 Gina Turner
I think I remember that song from when I was in undergrad.
00:45:37 Jessica López-Barkl
I didn't learn it in Japanese, but it says when evening comes to Tokyo.
00:45:44 Jessica López-Barkl
Let's fill the city.
00:45:46 Jessica López-Barkl
Lonely I sit and stare.
00:45:48 Jessica López-Barkl
My tears, my only friends.
00:45:50 Jessica López-Barkl
Yes, Oh my gosh.
00:45:53 Gina Turner
Yeah, so Suzuki technique is an acting technique that is really, you're really grounding your body physically and you do a lot of stomping around.
00:46:02 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah, they have this thing called the grammar of the feet.
00:46:05 Jessica López-Barkl
I have them walk across the floor like only on the outsides, but you have to roll and you have to hold and you're stepping on the ancestors and you cannot break their bones.
00:46:12 Jessica López-Barkl
and you have a spider on you and you do not want to drop the spider.
00:46:14 Jessica López-Barkl
They're all the students are like, yeah, They totally went for it.
00:46:17 Jessica López-Barkl
And if you had told me that our students at CCU would have fallen for that at the beginning of the semester, I would have said no.
00:46:23 Jessica López-Barkl
But even them, they were like, Ryan, that was the best thing that's ever happened to me.
00:46:26 Jessica López-Barkl
Dancing with stick.
00:46:27 Jessica López-Barkl
It made me cry, but I loved it.
00:46:28 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm like, all right, come to Mama.
00:46:31 Gina Turner
You know, and it's another thing that our students aren't embodied, right?
00:46:35 Gina Turner
We're so caught up in what we're supposed to look like and how we're supposed to be.
00:46:42 Gina Turner
in space.
00:46:42 Gina Turner
And as adults, we're also supposed to not use our bodies and be scared of our own bodies.
00:46:49 Gina Turner
How small can you be?
00:46:50 Gina Turner
How small can you be, exactly?
00:46:52 Darah Donaher
And yet in all my classes, I'm like, but how big can you be?
00:46:55 Jessica López-Barkl
Where's the chaos?
00:46:58 Jessica López-Barkl
Give me some controlled chaos.
00:46:59 Jessica López-Barkl
That creates second circle.
00:47:04 Gina Turner
Says Kelly.
00:47:05 Kelly Allen
Yeah, I don't know.
00:47:06 Kelly Allen
And just like that phrase, like, how small can I be?
00:47:09 Kelly Allen
Like, I
00:47:11 Kelly Allen
I'm thinking about how often that happens in my classes.
00:47:17 Kelly Allen
Like, totally subconsciously, they're just trying to figure out like how small can I be in this class and just get by or just not get noticed, not have to perform whatever.
00:47:31 Kelly Allen
But
00:47:33 Kelly Allen
That's terrifying.
00:47:34 Kelly Allen
Okay.
00:47:34 Jessica López-Barkl
And on the flip side, too, is like we tend to breed a lot of neurodivergent humans.
00:47:41 Jessica López-Barkl
And as somebody with autism, it's fascinating to think about my masking I did most of my life and how exhausting that is, but that I loved theater because theater allowed me to be all these other people.
00:47:52 Jessica López-Barkl
It didn't have to be me.
00:47:54 Jessica López-Barkl
And that was so, it's very strange to think I was the first day of acting class.
00:47:58 Jessica López-Barkl
I'm like, we are a tribe of people who hate themselves.
00:48:03 Jessica López-Barkl
The students always look at me and they're like, it's true.
00:48:06 Jessica López-Barkl
I mean, because we want to play other people.
00:48:09 Jessica López-Barkl
So there is a level of self-hatred that just sits in how small can I be because I want to hide me, but I can get big when I play someone else, when I don't have to sit in that level of self-hatred.
00:48:23 Jessica López-Barkl
And so it's freeing and that embodying is wonderful.
00:48:27 Jessica López-Barkl
Even though it seems that two things can be held to be true at the same time, I can hate myself and do a good job.
00:48:32 Gina Turner
Yeah, I just, I'm thinking now too, like, how do I embody my psychology students?
00:48:40 Gina Turner
I mean, I did, you know, my health psychology class, we would do a little bit of yoga, you know, toward the end of the semester in the spring.
00:48:46 Gina Turner
But how do you get people to
00:48:50 Gina Turner
be bigger, and it seems like we could take some pages out of the theater faculty book.
00:48:56 Darah Donaher
I don't think a game ever hurts.
00:48:57 Darah Donaher
Or a little dance it out.
00:49:00 Darah Donaher
Dance it out, play a game.
00:49:02 Darah Donaher
We did some stuff with like business majors at Michigan State and how you can bring improv into different areas and games are always good.
00:49:12 Darah Donaher
Games are always good and they always want to play a game and just to start class with it or end class with it.
00:49:18 Darah Donaher
we forget that play is in our nature and so games and play are anything.
00:49:25 Jessica López-Barkl
That interdisciplinary partnership of being able to integrate the arts into any and all areas was a class I used to teach in New York called Methods of Elementary Theater Education where you taught those games, but how does that apply to social studies?
00:49:41 Jessica López-Barkl
How does that apply to language arts?
00:49:42 Jessica López-Barkl
How does that apply to science?
00:49:44 Jessica López-Barkl
How does that, and there was a game for each and we hope to encourage
00:49:47 Jessica López-Barkl
I encourage that class to exist someday, but we have other things that we need to.
00:49:52 Darah Donaher
Even I taught about the Moravians that settled in Bethlehem to a third grade class through theater.
00:49:58 Darah Donaher
Wow.
00:49:58 Darah Donaher
And it was so much fun, right?
00:50:00 Darah Donaher
And we could still like play games and I was able to teach about the Moravians, but bring theater into it.
00:50:05 Darah Donaher
And then it's just awesome.
00:50:08 Gina Turner
Oh gosh.
00:50:09 Gina Turner
I want to be a theater major.
00:50:13 Darah Donaher
Hang out.
00:50:14 Darah Donaher
Well, when she tells me about the stuff she's doing, when Jess does stuff in her acting 2 class, when she was like, we're doing Suzuki, I was like, can I come up?
00:50:20 Darah Donaher
You could have.
00:50:21 Darah Donaher
I would not have stopped you.
00:50:23 Jessica López-Barkl
They would have, they would have like, after Dance with Stick, they're open to whatever now.
00:50:27 Jessica López-Barkl
Like, whatever you want, crazy lady, we will follow you.
00:50:30 Gina Turner
Well, I don't want to bring the room down, but we do like to ask if there are things that you would change about the profession or change about
00:50:42 Gina Turner
the way theater is taught or anything.
00:50:45 Gina Turner
I mean, you've already sort of highlighted, like you mentioned, this sort of global perspective on acting training.
00:50:52 Gina Turner
Other things that you would want to add or change.
00:50:55 Jessica López-Barkl
I think the industry is doing a lot of that.
00:50:57 Jessica López-Barkl
There's a lot of gate, there's a lot of gatekeeping.
00:50:59 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah, the gatekeeping of our industry is hard.
00:51:04 Jessica López-Barkl
getting over audience development and this mentality that we don't leave our homes anymore, we can get everything on a streaming service and having in-person experiences is, you better have food or alcohol attached to it or I'm not coming.
00:51:20 Jessica López-Barkl
Is it done at 9?
00:51:22 Jessica López-Barkl
So I mean, that's, I don't know, there's nothing we can change about that.
00:51:27 Jessica López-Barkl
I would, you know, I was thinking about that question last night.
00:51:29 Jessica López-Barkl
I thought,
00:51:30 Jessica López-Barkl
I would love for higher ed to not always think that the first thing when they're in a budget crunch is that we're going to cut the arts.
00:51:36 Jessica López-Barkl
And they always cut theater first.
00:51:38 Jessica López-Barkl
I've been the product of two theater programs in community college settings that have ended.
00:51:43 Jessica López-Barkl
So as a 47-year-old, this is the third time I'm starting at another community college.
00:51:48 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm so happy to be here.
00:51:49 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm so happy that they loved it enough to bring two of us because it's impossible to do alone.
00:51:54 Jessica López-Barkl
So excited to have a partner in this.
00:51:56 Jessica López-Barkl
But
00:51:57 Jessica López-Barkl
I would love for when we're at the table and thinking about budget cuts, can we stop thinking that theater is the first thing that should go?
00:52:04 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah.
00:52:05 Jessica López-Barkl
And if I was going to bring the room down, that's what I would say.
00:52:08 Darah Donaher
No, I think that's true.
00:52:09 Darah Donaher
And I'm a little bit newer to everything, especially to higher ed.
00:52:14 Darah Donaher
I did my grad school and I've adjuncted, but this first full-time gig for me.
00:52:19 Darah Donaher
And so I think I'm getting to learn it and know it.
00:52:22 Darah Donaher
But just in general,
00:52:24 Darah Donaher
accessibility, I think, is one of our weakest that I wish we could do more for.
00:52:33 Darah Donaher
I think the hardest part of like, yeah, we can offer online classes, but it's not the best online, or how do we make it better online so that we can offer more online, and then more people can take it, and more majors could take it then because they can't fit it into their class schedule, but they would love to take a theater class.
00:52:48 Darah Donaher
And so I think the accessibility of it is something that I sit with and I go,
00:52:55 Darah Donaher
wish it could change.
00:52:56 Darah Donaher
How do I change it?
00:52:57 Darah Donaher
Right?
00:52:57 Darah Donaher
It's that like, I'm sure I could do something and it's the finding the what?
00:53:02 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah.
00:53:03 Jessica López-Barkl
Six years ago, I was a little upset with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and how they were treating community college students.
00:53:11 Jessica López-Barkl
And my students in particular at the time felt like they would only choose the big four years and they were the one, the only ones who are winning.
00:53:17 Jessica López-Barkl
And I thought, okay, maybe like cheerleading, we should have one that's just like the double A and the triple A's and maybe the community colleges.
00:53:26 Jessica López-Barkl
And the students were like, no, because then that's dumbing it down.
00:53:28 Jessica López-Barkl
And I was like, oh, okay, I hadn't thought of that before.
00:53:30 Jessica López-Barkl
But
00:53:31 Jessica López-Barkl
I thought you can only change from within, so I joined their boards.
00:53:35 Jessica López-Barkl
And I joined what at the time was called Representation, Equity, and Diversity, but it's now called Building Opportunities through Leadership and Development.
00:53:43 Jessica López-Barkl
But for me, being a part of that executive committee in two regions now, and being able to really talk about access and bringing a sensory room or a Zen space
00:53:57 Jessica López-Barkl
for neurodivergent people, because there's a lot of us in theater, having that ability for somebody to go reground themselves because they need it after having a tough day, a tough round, and they're a place that they're not used to.
00:54:10 Jessica López-Barkl
You know, we sort of piloted that in our region one, and we're going to be bringing it to region 2.
00:54:15 Jessica López-Barkl
which is the region that Pennsylvania is in.
00:54:17 Jessica López-Barkl
And our students are going to be a part of that.
00:54:20 Jessica López-Barkl
And I think that we know that that's a problem in our industry.
00:54:23 Jessica López-Barkl
And so, and I can't just complain.
00:54:26 Jessica López-Barkl
I grew up in a blue collar world and I'm like, I can't just sit at a table and say, where's the solution?
00:54:32 Jessica López-Barkl
We can keep talking about problems till the cows come home.
00:54:35 Jessica López-Barkl
But you can go out and do something.
00:54:37 Jessica López-Barkl
And I'm not saying I'm the best for those environments because forward facing I'm a white woman.
00:54:42 Jessica López-Barkl
So, but I'm going to go and do that to create access for our students and for the people that maybe don't have voices yet in that way, so that they will do the same later.
00:54:53 Gina Turner
Yeah.
00:54:54 Jessica López-Barkl
And that's what we have to do for emerging thinkers, thought leaders.
00:54:59 Jessica López-Barkl
You know, that's our job as, you know, if they don't ever do the thing that they did when they were in their college education, that we should still hope that they are going to be thought leaders as citizens.
00:55:12 Gina Turner
I just want to sit here another hour and talk about all of this stuff and sing some more Suzuki songs.
00:55:20 Gina Turner
With Saki.
00:55:22 Gina Turner
Yes.
00:55:26 Gina Turner
But I guess I will direct us to our last question, sadly, which is the not guilty, guilty pleasure that maybe your colleagues don't know about you.
00:55:36 Kelly Allen
Yeah, and I was curious about this one, because just...
00:55:39 Kelly Allen
Based off of everything that you two have shared, I'm like, is it possible for a theater person to have a guilty pleasure?
00:55:44 Kelly Allen
Because they're just like, to hell with it, we're doing everything.
00:55:47 Kelly Allen
So, but yeah.
00:55:48 Darah Donaher
Do you have one?
00:55:50 Jessica López-Barkl
I mean, I had to ask my husband because I'm an oversharer.
00:55:53 Jessica López-Barkl
Darren knows this.
00:55:55 Jessica López-Barkl
So I'm like, what is there that people wouldn't know about me?
00:55:59 Jessica López-Barkl
My students used to get shocked that at one point in my life, I was a little obsessed with America's Next Top Model because I would watch it and just like feel better about myself.
00:56:07 Jessica López-Barkl
Like those are bad people.
00:56:09 Jessica López-Barkl
And I am a good person while I watch this.
00:56:13 Jessica López-Barkl
But then it got really trashy and I couldn't handle it anymore.
00:56:15 Jessica López-Barkl
I do love a good trash magazine.
00:56:17 Jessica López-Barkl
But I've kind of gotten away from, because for sustainability purposes, I don't want to have to recycle it.
00:56:23 Jessica López-Barkl
So I got away from that.
00:56:23 Jessica López-Barkl
But there's also a lot of Catholic in here.
00:56:29 Jessica López-Barkl
But now it's Traitors.
00:56:30 Jessica López-Barkl
Yeah.
00:56:31 Gina Turner
Oh, I've heard people love that show.
00:56:34 Jessica López-Barkl
I mean, I know nobody on that show.
00:56:35 Jessica López-Barkl
I don't watch any of those other reality televisions.
00:56:37 Jessica López-Barkl
And that's like an anathema to theater people were like, reality television, you watch that.
00:56:41 Jessica López-Barkl
But I'm like, Traitors is hilarious because there's a whole bunch of people from other reality television and they are dumb.
00:56:47 Jessica López-Barkl
And I feel good about myself for watching it.
00:56:50 Darah Donaher
I support that.
00:56:50 Jessica López-Barkl
I also love Alan *******.
00:56:53 Darah Donaher
He's just.
00:56:56 Jessica López-Barkl
Universal treasure.
00:56:57 Gina Turner
I seconded.
00:57:01 Darah Donaher
I don't know if it's a guilty pleasure, but I love to golf.
00:57:04 Darah Donaher
So that's like something I do on my off time when I like need something to do or have time to do something.
00:57:11 Darah Donaher
But my guiltiest of guilty pleasures is that I do love The Bachelor.
00:57:17 Darah Donaher
I do.
00:57:18 Darah Donaher
And Dancing with the Stars.
00:57:21 Darah Donaher
So that is my life.
00:57:25 Gina Turner
Did you watch The Golden Bachelor?
00:57:26 Gina Turner
I did.
00:57:28 Gina Turner
Oh, I was mesmerized.
00:57:31 Darah Donaher
And I hate saying it because I literally remember my undergrad acting teacher, when he asked if anyone watched real television, I thought more people would raise their hand
00:57:40 Darah Donaher
because I was friends with these people.
00:57:41 Darah Donaher
I was like, we've watched it.
00:57:42 Darah Donaher
And so I was like, and he was like, you're killing our industry.
00:57:46 Darah Donaher
And I was like, I, no, I didn't.
00:57:49 Darah Donaher
I didn't.
00:57:50 Darah Donaher
I watched it.
00:57:50 Darah Donaher
I didn't really watch it.
00:57:52 Darah Donaher
But he's like, they're stealing jobs.
00:57:53 Darah Donaher
And I was like, I, but
00:57:55 Darah Donaher
But that is when you ask, because we're doing a lot of things, that is the time I truly turn off my brain.
00:58:01 Darah Donaher
And I just, and it's an hour and I just chill.
00:58:04 Darah Donaher
But I do watch The Bachelor.
00:58:06 Jessica López-Barkl
We need it, we do, all of us theater, all of us college professors, we do a lot of thinking and a lot of writing and a lot of meetings.
00:58:14 Gina Turner
It's true.
00:58:14 Gina Turner
We go home, we should look at some bad people and judge quietly.
00:58:19 Gina Turner
But my good answer is that I golf.
00:58:23 Gina Turner
I love it.
00:58:23 Darah Donaher
But Dolphine is actually my guilty pleasure.
00:58:25 Darah Donaher
I don't want to.
00:58:26 Darah Donaher
We can cut around all the rest of that.
00:58:30 Gina Turner
But we can go down together because I confessed my golden bachelor and bachelorette watching.
00:58:36 Jessica López-Barkl
Fair enough.
00:58:37 Gina Turner
Fair enough.
00:58:37 Jessica López-Barkl
No judgment here.
00:58:39 Kelly Allen
Where am I?
00:58:39 Kelly Allen
love it.
00:58:41 Kelly Allen
All right.
00:58:42 Kelly Allen
Well, thank you both for being here and being a part of the show.
00:58:46 Kelly Allen
It was just an absolute trip to just to learn from you and just kind of just
00:58:52 Kelly Allen
I don't know, just bask in your bigness.
00:58:56 Kelly Allen
Thank you.
00:58:57 Jessica López-Barkl
Dynamic and passion.
00:58:58 Darah Donaher
Exactly.
00:58:59 Darah Donaher
Dynamic and passion.
00:58:59 Darah Donaher
Second circle.
00:59:00 Gina Turner
Second circle.
00:59:01 Kelly Allen
That was incredible.
00:59:02 Kelly Allen
Thank you so much.
00:59:03 Gina Turner
Thank you for having us.
00:59:04 Darah Donaher
Thank you for having us.
00:59:05 Darah Donaher
Thanks so much.
00:59:05 Gina Turner
Thank you so much.
00:59:06 Gina Turner
This was awesome.
00:59:08 Gina Turner
Pedagogy, go, go.
00:59:12 Gina Turner
Pedagogy, go, go, go.
00:59:22 Kelly Allen
That was awesome.
00:59:24 Kelly Allen
Like, I don't know.
00:59:27 Kelly Allen
Just totally hoping that someone's going to bust out in song and dance and then boom.
00:59:31 Kelly Allen
Wish granted.
00:59:33 Gina Turner
Three theater people.
00:59:34 Kelly Allen
That was wonderful.
00:59:35 Gina Turner
You can't hold us back.
00:59:38 Kelly Allen
So, and I think, yeah, did you mention somewhere in there that like this is the first time that we've talked with someone from the arts?
00:59:46 Kelly Allen
Is that true?
00:59:47 Gina Turner
As far as I can remember.
00:59:50 Kelly Allen
Okay, well past guests, if you are from the arts and we forgot you.
00:59:56 Kelly Allen
I mean, I'm so sorry.
00:59:58 Gina Turner
We talked to Abby and Abby's A poet.
01:00:01 Kelly Allen
She's a poet and she's the first person that I thought of, yes.
01:00:03 Gina Turner
So that is true.
01:00:05 Gina Turner
So, and I'm sure other people have creative endeavors that I am glossing over.
01:00:10 Kelly Allen
Sure, There's Andrew.
01:00:13 Gina Turner
Yeah, exactly.
01:00:14 Kelly Allen
And you know, and his DJing.
01:00:16 Kelly Allen
Exactly.
01:00:17 Gina Turner
Yeah.
01:00:18 Kelly Allen
But they teach this stuff.
01:00:20 Kelly Allen
They teach this stuff.
01:00:22 Kelly Allen
And I didn't know what to think about kind of like the teaching of theater as part of an associate's degree.
01:00:34 Kelly Allen
I just, I mean, I've got a child who is like deeply immersed in musical theater.
01:00:42 Kelly Allen
But even with that, I wasn't quite sure
01:00:45 Kelly Allen
like what it looked like on the collegiate level.
01:00:49 Kelly Allen
And my goodness, I feel like I wanted to say this kind of like half jokingly, but mostly seriously.
01:00:59 Kelly Allen
I was like, should it be required that all students take a theater class?
01:01:05 Gina Turner
I was thinking the same thing.
01:01:06 Kelly Allen
Like the thing, like the criminy Christmas.
01:01:11 Kelly Allen
I just said criminy Christmas.
01:01:12 Kelly Allen
What's wrong with me?
01:01:13 Gina Turner
I love it.
01:01:15 Kelly Allen
That's that most wonderful.
01:01:16 Kelly Allen
Okay.
01:01:18 Kelly Allen
No, the thing about like how students just like they try to get as small as they can be, but like what they teach them is to be as big as they can be.
01:01:30 Kelly Allen
Like, I don't know, like I think that is such a valuable kind of like attribute to have, not only as an academic, but like just as a person.
01:01:39 Gina Turner
Yeah.
01:01:41 Gina Turner
I mean, I'm so glad to hear you say that because I know I'm biased because I did have the background of managering in theater in undergrad and doing community theater.
01:01:51 Gina Turner
And so I personally, the value of it is just simply selfish because it's fun.
01:01:58 Gina Turner
I loved doing it because it was fun.
01:02:01 Gina Turner
So I think maybe I would take for granted a little bit the full on developmental
01:02:10 Gina Turner
benefits that doing theater does for people.
01:02:15 Gina Turner
And so it's their experiences, Jess's experience with the prison population, Dara's experience with children.
01:02:23 Gina Turner
I mean, this whole life cycle, basically, of what it does for people and how it highlights
01:02:31 Gina Turner
and Jess also made that point about masking.
01:02:35 Gina Turner
And she talked about herself as an autistic person, masking as a normal person.
01:02:41 Gina Turner
But we all mask as adults.
01:02:45 Gina Turner
we all are pretending to be adults.
01:02:48 Gina Turner
And how great it is.
01:02:50 Gina Turner
I'm sorry, I could talk about this for another 14 hours.
01:02:53 Kelly Allen
Yeah, no, I absolutely.
01:02:55 Kelly Allen
It's intoxicating.
01:02:57 Kelly Allen
It really is.
01:02:58 Kelly Allen
And
01:03:00 Kelly Allen
so you mentioned a word that I think needs to be used more often in higher ed and that's fun.
01:03:10 Kelly Allen
So I think, was it Dara who had mentioned that like it's their classes why like their students come to school for that day.
01:03:21 Kelly Allen
And like immediately I was reminded of my experiences in high school.
01:03:26 Kelly Allen
Like I hated high school.
01:03:29 Kelly Allen
But I went because I wanted to go to art.
01:03:34 Kelly Allen
So it's like, that was like, that was like the place where I could be me.
01:03:41 Kelly Allen
And it was just absolutely wonderful.
01:03:42 Kelly Allen
So like, I'm thinking and like, I'm dead serious here that maybe like if we want to talk about like retention levels, let's talk about like injecting more art into our curriculum.
01:03:54 Kelly Allen
You know, just give our students something
01:03:58 Kelly Allen
to look forward to.
01:03:59 Gina Turner
Yeah.
01:04:01 Gina Turner
Well, we keep talking about multimodal, methods of students preparing work, doing their final projects.
01:04:08 Gina Turner
And then, I mean, I got so excited when they were both talking about wanting to do a kind of, how do you use theater to teach all these other different disciplines?
01:04:17 Gina Turner
And I'm like, please do that, please do that.
01:04:19 Gina Turner
If nothing else, do that as a CTLT workshop or something, but I didn't want to give them work.
01:04:24 Gina Turner
But
01:04:26 Gina Turner
And also that, gosh, and the idea of creativity is so necessary for everything that we do in life.
01:04:36 Gina Turner
Like we need to be creative.
01:04:38 Gina Turner
We need to be able to be adaptable in life.
01:04:40 Gina Turner
So why wouldn't we want to inject that in all of the coursework that we're doing?
01:04:47 Gina Turner
And for me, when she mentioned band, that was what got me through high school was being in the marching band.
01:04:52 Kelly Allen
Yeah, same, same.
01:04:54 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
01:04:55 Kelly Allen
I almost forgot about the band.
01:04:57 Kelly Allen
Yeah.
01:04:58 Kelly Allen
But yeah, I don't know.
01:05:01 Kelly Allen
It's just, as you've said a couple of times, like, I could have just kept talking to them like just all night long.
01:05:09 Kelly Allen
Oh yeah.
01:05:10 Kelly Allen
So for our listeners, it's presently after 5 o'clock P.m.
01:05:14 Kelly Allen
So I don't know why I needed to add that detail, but there it is, because I'm having fun.
01:05:23 Kelly Allen
But no, I could have just kept going on and on.
01:05:29 Kelly Allen
And then the earlier part about, teaching theater, like this very physical thing online, like it.
01:05:40 Kelly Allen
That's something that I had several questions in my head and I was like, Kelly, keep your mouth shut because it would have put us like totally in the weeds.
01:05:49 Kelly Allen
We would have never learned about like their not guilty pleasures and what have you.
01:05:53 Kelly Allen
But I just think that's fascinating.
01:05:57 Kelly Allen
Like not only did they pivot, but it's like they're still embracing kind of the physical element, but they're using that pivot.
01:06:06 Kelly Allen
as a way to kind of, as a strength in their programming to help students for the reality of what is theater.
01:06:16 Kelly Allen
So I don't know.
01:06:17 Kelly Allen
I feel like we need to bring one of our ceramics faculty in.
01:06:21 Gina Turner
That would be great.
01:06:22 Kelly Allen
Because they're also teaching.
01:06:25 Kelly Allen
like hybrid.
01:06:26 Kelly Allen
Now someone, so as I've said, like I make pots and like I'm like, how do you teach that online?
01:06:32 Kelly Allen
Because when I've taught it before, like I get up there, it's like we're like holding hands.
01:06:37 Kelly Allen
Like I'm like, here, I'm going to hold your hands for you and I'm going to make this pot with you.
01:06:41 Kelly Allen
And like, how do you do that online?
01:06:43 Kelly Allen
But like the way that they just do it with such like grace and professionalism is just,
01:06:50 Kelly Allen
It's so inspiring.
01:06:52 Gina Turner
Dynamic and passion.
01:06:54 Gina Turner
I think they both, I mean, not to be glim, but seriously, that's what they absolutely exhibited in their ability to, in their desire, I think, to continue to want to give the full experience to their students, no matter what the circumstances.
01:07:13 Kelly Allen
Yeah, wow.
01:07:15 Kelly Allen
So that was awesome, Gina.
01:07:16 Kelly Allen
That was super awesome.
01:07:19 Kelly Allen
As always, it's a pleasure to hang out with you guys and.
01:07:22 Gina Turner
Utter delight, talk shop.
01:07:24 Gina Turner
So, till next time, till the next time, all right, bye.
01:07:46 Kelly Allen
Thank you for listening to Pedagogy A Go-Go, recorded in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
01:07:54 Kelly Allen
Our producer in all things technology is Jeff Armstrong.
01:07:57 Kelly Allen
If you've got any questions, please send them to pedagogyagogo@gmail.com and be sure to follow us on social media @pedagogyagogo and click into our bio for copies of podcast transcripts, guest assignments, and other useful tidbits.
01:08:13 Kelly Allen
Until next time, this is Gina and Kelly saying we hope your day is filled with wonderful learning experiences.
