<p>Love it, Fishbowl.</p>
<p>I have lots of respect for many BFA and conservatory programs and didn’t intend to dis them, but in light of the OP article just wanted to share my experience of finding very few 50-year-olds regretting their degrees from Yale or similar programs.</p>
<p>Having attended a conservatory BFA acting program years ago (Boston University CFA, class of 1977), I had liberal-arts-lite. I think we had to take one non-acting course per semester to graduate. My mother would have preferred if I had gone to a more academic program, so I would have something to fall back on. I remember her telling me about Edgar Buchanan, of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres fame, who supported his acting career through dentistry.</p>
<p>I’ve been extremely fortunate, but there have been many times in the past thirty-five years that I’ve thought of giving up my acting career and doing something else. If I had been an English or Physics major, I probably would have left the business years ago. Instead, I stuck it out – partly because I didn’t have anything else to fall back on, and partly because there wasn’t anything that I loved to do as much.</p>
<p>After watching me ride the roller-coaster of an acting career her entire life, my daughter still wants to go into the biz. Although she could have gone to a conservatory, I stressed the importance to her of a liberal arts education – and she’s getting one at an institution that doesn’t grant a degree in theater. I guess I’ve become my mother.</p>
<p>Alas, Yale is not an option for the overwhelming majority of students. Most kids will have to decide among less prestigious schools, and hope that their choice proves to be the right one. In my son’s case, it boiled down to a BA at our very good, but enormous, state university, or a BFA from a smaller, urban school that offered him a significant enough talent scholarship to make it almost competitive in terms of price. I worried about his lack of motivation within the huge university community, although my husband and I felt that it was academically superior. My son seems to be thriving where he is.</p>
<p>I’m fascinated that there’s a college that doesn’t even have a BA in theatre - that is unusual! I’m sure with you as an inspiration, gibby, your daughter will do just fine.</p>
<p>My D ended up with only a somewhat broader group of choices than stagemum’s S, and if you factor in cost, she had and made the identical choice. So I guess they are pretty similar kids!</p>
<p>As for “craft” - I would say from listening to my D that her goal of having significant, kinesthetic, experiential learning is absolutely being met by her BFA curriculum, beyond what most of the BA programs available to her could have offered (not to say that it wasn’t available elsewhere). I think she would agree that she is learning theatre “from the inside.” </p>
<p>On the other hand, because she is in a more academically “available” school, she is spending time exploring other subjects as well, for better or for worse as far as her theatre training is concerned (apologies to Uta!). In fact, this week she told me she is planning to minor in Anthropology - as much because she loves it as because she thinks it would be a fascinating subject to combine with theatre. We’ll see if - unlike gibby - she does someday decide to follow these interests instead of, or along with, theatre. Anything could happen, as we middle-aged parents definitely know. I’m glad she doesn’t feel limited, or stifled, either within theatre or without, at the school she chose.</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM, that would take quite a marginally on-topic book! LOL Maybe read Hagen’s Respect for Acting along with Meisner’s On Acting to get it straight from the horses’ mouths although Miss Uta was indeed all about educating oneself as an artist experientially. Also check out writings by M. Chekhov, Lecoq and Meyerhold plus some books by voice teachers like Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater for some ideas as to how acting is primarily a psycho-physical endeavor that is learned kinesthetically. And yes you need to understand the play and its context, but that doesn’t require an Ivy League education if you’re anything approaching Ivy League material in the first place. And this idea that one needs to spend seven years in school to become a good actor smacks of balderdash in the face of the British “trade schools” consistently turning out better prepared actors than the American Ivory Towers do in three. </p>
<p>I actually spent a semester taking liberal arts classes at my home state’s flagship university after I left my first liberal arts oriented BFA where I had mainly taken academic classes anyway. Was it interesting to study Macroeconomics with an in-your-face socialist and take a course in World Cultures taught by a xenophobic neocon? Sort of. Did I generally enjoy the courses in Introductory Philosophy and East Asian Civilization? Yep. Was the Anthropology of Gender, Culture and Behavior absolutely fascinating? You betcha. Did any of them have anything to do with my growth as an actor? Doubtful. Those are just the ones I remember having taken off the top of my head, but did any of them impart enough information for me to do anything but hang myself in conversation with an expert on any one of those subjects? That’s about it. Would I have wanted to hang myself had I stayed at my first school or probably ended up in alcohol rehab had I majored in theatre at the second? Yuh huh. Will I find not having not spent four years studying liberal arts an inhibitor if I eventually decide to move onto something else for whatever reason? Doubtful. </p>
<p>But overall, I agree that you have to consider where the kid is at 17 in deciding which route is best. There is no one recipe, but I sometimes feel when I’m reading here that some of the parents are trying to force square pegs into round holes which is exactly what you do if you make a kid who’s wants a conservatory and is indeed suited for that kind of education go somewhere to study liberal arts. The only thing worse you could do is make her study something “practical” imho. This I know because it happened to me although it was really more my mom insisting that I take a full scholarship if I was going to study acting as anything else and the only full scholarships out there were for academics. It was like I was penalized for being an A student and a NMF. I’ve seen it happen to others, too, and it usually turns out messy.</p>
<p>Thanks, Fish. I guess your answer reinforces my impression that the only way to start to understand the training of an actor is either to do some training oneself, or to read very intensively from various sources such as those you have mentioned.</p>
<p>My son has tried explaining certain things to me, and I have felt some glimmmers of comprehension, but then when I try to share what I feel I know, I realize I don’t really understand it very well at all!</p>
<p>I am much, much better than I used to be at telling excellent acting from so-so acting, but I’m still pretty lousy at figuring out whether a play was well directed or just barely adequately directed!!</p>
<p>I agree with many of the posts already posted. And anyone who enters Yale as an undergrad for theater studies has to know it is not going to be the same sort of training as one gets in a BFA program. However, I will say that Yale has a ton of performance opportunities and students create lots of theater there. The complaint in the article about not enough teaching the students about the business or networking seems odd as that is a small part of a BFA education anyway. </p>
<p>In any case, graduates of Yale (and other BA schools of its kind) who major in theater can do well when entering the professional theater world. Off the top of my head, my D has friends who are recent grads of Yale in theater and I know one is a lead on a national tour of a musical and another is in a national tour of a well known musical too.</p>
<p>This summer I watched two very talented performers from our area return from their respective schools and IMHO the Yale grad left the grad of a tippy-top BFA program in the dust, though in the past I’d considered both equally talented and had assumed the BFA grad would have made better performance progress as a result of his focused training.</p>
<p>This is of course a meaningless sample size, but clearly demonstrated to me that different roads can lead to success.</p>
<p>^ The BFA student was probably in one of the middle bardos of the [four</a> phases of learning](<a href=“http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/phases-of-learning]four”>The Four Phases of Learning). A lot of the American conservatory-based programs take everything from students and rebuild their skillsets from the ground up sometimes leaving what appears to be a regression in skill the first year or two and it could well seem that someone who just got out and used what they had in public performance has made more progress. It’s also part of why some don’t present their students in public performance until third year. </p>
<p>One criticism of this conservatory approach is that the occasional student remains stuck in the middle of the process all the way through and never reaches “unconscious competence” for a variety of reasons. Another valid criticism is that some actors - especially the truly gifted - are occasionally ruined by this approach and it would have been much better for them to have been trained off the skillsets with which they presented with some adjustments made along the way. This is why you hear some actors like Viola Davis describe their experience at the old school Juilliard program as having been “somewhere between a blessing and a curse.” Also know that there are some really great actors and artists of all kinds whose dispositions leave them with little or no tolerance for any form of institutionalized learning and really are best left to their own devices with maybe a bit of mentorship from a respected elder although those people who actually have the needed tolerances to to be successful in the business are maybe a small handful in a generation. </p>
<p>This is third hand info since I wasn’t there, but I’ve talked to a BU BFA grad who did the junior year semester at LAMDA. She said that they started all the BA and BFA students off together but eventually had to separate most of the BA students from various schools off into a separate class after it became obvious that they didn’t have the basic skillsets to keep up. I have no idea as to whether that’s a yearly occurrence or not.</p>
<p>Then, some of the legendary British actors like Sirs Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen never did a “trade school” but instead did a lot of EC theatre while at Cambridge followed by a number of years apprenticing with the outlying UK repertory companies. Sir Ian spent ten years doing that before he made the move to the West End. He also ended up blowing out his voice because he’d never been taught how to properly use that amazing instrument and spent a lot of time and money rehabilitating and relearning under the tutelage of Patsy Rodenburg. “Wizard, you shall not pass!” wouldn’t have had the same effect were it not for her. There’s also a [really</a> funny video out wherein he describes his “method”](<a href=“http://www.wimp.com/goodactor/]really”>Wimp.com - Amazing Videos, Funny Clips. Watch amazing videos and funny clips. Updated daily.) although he glosses over how the considerable acting skills he applied were acquired. :)</p>
<p>Fishbowlfreshman, another interesting post. I’m worried (if that’s the right word) that my own son (17) is one of those people you refer to, someone for whom institutional learning is not a positive. I’m trying to figure out how best to advise him. He’s been fortunate to have been acting steadily for some years now and has learned a great deal along the way, particularly in the latest gig he did with a classical acting company. He is one of those people who learn a huge amount while doing and I’m very very worried about the predominant American method of 'breaking down and then rebuilding" as applied to him. I’m worried it would break him down and that would be that. We have been thinking more and more of non-American schools–but do you have any recommendations for excellent BFA American schools that <em>don’t</em> ‘break down’ first and/or are good with students with excellent natural instincts to start with, and who seek to build on these already? We are also not interested in any schools in which you have to audition midway or in which you are ‘evaluated’ midway. My daughter is absolutely loving Northwestern and in many ways it would also be great for my son (this particular BA would be great for him), but I don’t think he’s strong enough academically at this point. Thanks for any advice from anyone, actually!</p>
<p>Hi connections.</p>
<p>Your son sounds a lot like me. I too “learn by doing”, and wouldn’t respond well to someone trying to “break me down”. It took me a long time to find a place where I could go to college. I think it might be a good idea to look at non-American schools (I wish I had done that when I was younger).</p>
<p>But also think about whether your son really needs a degree, since he is already getting work with a classical acting company. Is he really going to be getting something from college that is worth the huge student loan? Many successful actors do not have college degrees. I don’t know the answer, you and your son will have to work that out yourself.</p>
<p>Also, college isn’t going anywhere, so he can always go back and do it some other time.</p>
<p>KEVP</p>
<p>fishbowlfreshman posted a link to a video, I just want to make sure that everyone realizes that the video is a scene from the Ricky Gervaise comedy series “Extras”. In this series Gervaise played a struggling actor, and he was able to get major succesful actors also to appear in the series playing comical parodies of themselves. So in this scene, the actor Ian McKellen is playing a comedy version of Sir Ian McKellen. He is not giving actual good acting advice. There are other videos of Ian McKellen where he does give real, sound acting advice. Most of you will probably figure that out on your own, but I realize there are some folks here who are new to the whole process and may not realize it is a joke. I wish fishbowlfreshman had made this clearer (I had no idea where the link would take me when I read his post, I thought I might end up at a video was giving real advice, then I said ‘ahh, it’s this very funny scene from Extras’)</p>
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<p>KEVP…Fishbowlfreshman is a woman.</p>
<p>KEVP, thanks for the feedback and advice. As far as college, I totally agree with you to a point, and definitely would never advise him to take out loans for a theatre degree, and I agree with questioning whether college is right for you–and certainly if you were going into acting via, say, commercials, and you were gorgeous, no one would care about your education. And I think people cared about the degree much less not too long ago. I just think it’s gotten a LOT more competitive, particularly in theatre. It seems to me. Certainly in classical theatre, which my S is interested in. It’s very very rare to be a working classical actor - as far as I can see from my obsessive perusal of bios - without having a BFA/BA in theatre at the very least, usually also an MFA or an internship at a company. I think the same thing is becoming true lately in professional MT–it’s just SO competitive. You can still go the semi-pro way and work yourself slowly up, but it seems in my opinion to take far too long and you just don’t have the same network or connections. </p>
<p>This is all ignoring the fact that my S could use more classical training. It’s more the way he learns that I’m worried about–the ‘break you down’ method. </p>
<p>A few folks have pm’d me with specific suggestions–thank you! I don’t know. First, I want to be rich so I don’t have to worry about paying for college for my kids! 
Can I wish for that? Second, when I held my little babies in my arms, NO WAY did I envision how hard it would be to help them into successful independent adulthood! My own kids are very different from each other so each time, I feel like I have to start from scratch. Ugh. There’s my rant.</p>
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<p>connections, I can relate to this! </p>
<p>KEVP, the link fishbowl posted was obviously satire.</p>
<p>^^Best rant ever, connections! Sometimes it all boils down to remembering those little critters we held in our arms…not really all that long ago. My three are all so different from each other, and I’ve learned so much from each of them. Thank you for the reminder. :)</p>
<p>Sorry if I confused anyone with the link. I figured the smiley would be enough to make that clear. Maybe a winky would have been more appropriate given that this thread has been linked to the top of the main CC forum which has typically been a scary thing … 
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<p>OTOH, Sir Ian may well have not been speaking entirely in jest. Wrap your head around an old Zen saying that has a great parallel to the growth and maturation of an actor …
Ties right into the four phases of learning, right? I can tell you from experience that the generally straightforward TV and film scripts I deal with these days really don’t require much aforethought. I can usually just read them over and know exactly what to do because the basic skillsets they require have become reflexive. In a sense, it really becomes like merely “pretending to be the person in the script” although years of sweat went into getting to that point. I’ll still go back and break things down and selectively apply various tools as a means of preparation if I’m dealing with nuanced writing, something highly stylized or if some aspect of the character feels like a reach and I’ll sometimes do it just to make sure I’m not getting sloppy. But it’s generally not necessary at this point having spent all that time wrestling with the great playwrights’ most difficult material in the fiery kiln of conservatory training. This stuff becomes child’s play when you’ve been used to playing Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg along with the Shakespearean weightlifting as long as you know how to streamline your process and not over complicate things like a lot of classically trained actors tend to do when they’re first starting out. And there’s no telling the level of difficulty someone on Sir Ian’s level of mastery could nail on an ice cold read just through instant recognition …</p>
<p>Of course, there are a lot of varying schools of thought on this and Laura Linney whom I consider to be one of the more accomplished American actresses in the business says she still goes back and breaks everything down Stanislavski style just like they taught her to do it at Juilliard back in the day. And Sandy Meisner to whom I referred in my first post said it takes twenty years to attain mastery and he may have been right. Don’t get any ideas about me saying I’m all the way there yet. Hell, I’m a just a few days shy of 26 and two-and-a-half years out of school … And needless to say I’d also tend to think a green actor saying such a thing is just basking in the delusion of phase 1. It’s amazing the number of “naturals” you’ll encounter in LA and there’s a whole industry of quick fixes and shortcuts being offered to feed their cluelessness. It’s so bad that I’ve gotten to the point that I avoid talking to “actors” about acting if it isn’t someone I already know or know of. Then there are all these carefully constructed celebrity media images feeding the general public’s notion that what we do requires no study …</p>
<p>Fishbowlfreshman, again interesting and cool. But aren’t the ‘naturals’ there largely because of their looks onscreen? My S did an audition for a TV show (didn’t get it) and we were sort of appalled/fascinated by the parade of stunningly gorgeous godlike people walking into and out of the audition room, in which they had to say two or three lines of little substance. Of course, you can also have the right ‘look’ by not being gorgeous, but by being something specific they want. Whatever, isn’t it far less about the acting in these cases and more about how appealing/perfect/appropriate you are onscreen?</p>
<p>If you have the right look, I think you can enter the business in a very different way then if you’re like a regular human. </p>
<p>But for regular humans and for others who don’t care to go the Hollywood route, it’s going to be about Chekhov etc. And back to what you were saying–some people have to break down the mountain to see the mountain; others will never see the mountain; others saw the mountain immediately but learned to doubt themselves and were never able to see it again; and still others saw the mountain at once and that was that. </p>
<p>The route varies for everyone, depending on individual goals, skills and learning styles–which is back to what I’d been asking about what school is appropriate for each of my children. Which <em>sort of</em> ties back to the original BA/BFA question!</p>
<p>Fishbowlfreshman - I always enjoy your perspective, but for those reading this thread keep in mind that a top BA does not turn out kids with “no training”. In fact, one of the reasons our D made NU’s BA program her top choice is that their Acting training enjoys a stronger reputation AND professional track record than most top BFA MT programs, which was a priority for her. And as I’ve said, my perspective is that of 50+ years so I’ve watched conservatory and BA trained friends (I attended a top Acting conservatory) move through lots of phases of life, including watching many with conservatory backgrounds struggle to go back and pay for a second degree (mine was in engineering). Plus after 10 years in the business, many people find they’ve learned more from their peers, audiences, life experiences and directors than they did in school, so I suspect the 1/100 of Yale grads who are still working in 10 years will have more than compensated for any training gaps they graduate with.</p>