<p>^^Oh, yeah, I think I did read about the DePaul change.</p>
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<p>Just to chime in: I have also seen kids rejected from less competitive programs and accepted to the most competitive ones. My daughter, too, was rejected by Emerson (no love lost there!) but accepted to what are considered more competitive programs. </p>
<p>And, we also know a young woman who went to UArts for a summer program, received extremely encouraging feedback, recommendations from UArts professors, and was encouraged to apply early. She did not even received a callback. She went to a more competitive program. </p>
<p>This is not to scare you, but to say: don’t be discouraged by whatever results you get. An early rejection could be discouraging to a certain kind of kid. Others might take an early rejection as fuel for an even stronger push during the prime audition season.</p>
<p>Susan – yes, my daughter has changed her approach from where we were before. While her maturity as an artist started earlier than some, she came to the conclusion that she was not ready as an adult to handle the lack of structure that would be associated with a 2 year non-college conservatory at a place like Stella Adler, Atlantic, Circle in the Square, etc. Thank you for your input in the past. I am aware that Tisch does not have guaranteed casting. She would rather be in a smaller conservatory setting and spend a bit less time in the classroom. However, I know her well enough to know that she’d be the kid at Tisch to not sit in the background. She’s make sure to take advantage of the opportunities available, which I think is the key to make Tisch work for you. There is no question in mind of the ability of most of the studios associated with Tisch to provide professional level training. I believe she will be able to hit a score on the SATs that is more consistent with a kid having a higher GPA. Her raw intelligence is high and she has a good math aptitude particular in comparison with theater kids. She’s just not a particularly motivated student. I’m really pushing her on the SAT prep as I think a high SAT score could make NYU a very good possibility should she not get into a preferred smaller conservatory. </p>
<p>KEVP --</p>
<p>Studio versus classroom has been used as a shorthand here for years to describe the acting/performance aspect of the program versus the academic portion. In short, movement, scene study, yoga, Shakespeare, voice and speech, etc. = studio… and literature classes, writing and any other gen ed class = classroom. Trust me, my daughter would not care if her Meisner class took place in a bathroom if it helped her develop as an artist. </p>
<p>You also misread my point on Stanislavski. I’m well aware that no one teaches exactly as Stanislavski. Nor am I aware of any college that makes the claim. My daughter has had a fair bit of exposure to Meisner as well as Stella Adler techniques and is comfortable with both. New and “funky” here referred to approaches rooted outside of that tradition not a comparison of Stanislavski techniques. (As to Meisner and Stella Adler, both reject “emotional memory” as a way to achieve “believable truth” which is the only aspect of the tradition that she finds problematic. I love this quote form Robert Lewis about using private emotions for performance, ''If crying were acting, my Aunt Rivka would be Duse [famous Italian actress known for tragic roles]” I had a bit of trouble finding this quote as this concept was quoted to her as Aunt Bessie rather than Aunt Rivka!) CalArts was a school she decided not to include because it seemed to us less grounded in these traditional approaches. </p>
<p>Finally, your guaranteed casting point makes no sense. First, the schools that tend to have guaranteed casting – Purchase, CMU, BU etc. – are not exactly awash in “not-so-serious” students so that is hardly a downside. Second, fostering a competitive environment among a small conservatory group does not strike me as in any way an advantage for the ability to land roles outside of college. BU can do guaranteed casting because it has small enough numbers of acting students for the shows it puts on. NYU can’t do guaranteed casting because it has too many acting students for the shows it puts on. One could certainly have valid reasons for choosing NYU over BU but I can’t possibly see how the lack of guaranteed casting at NYU could be perceived as a plus factor for picking NYU over BU.</p>
<p>ugadog99 – Thanks for the comments but I don’t deserve any particular credit over any of the mothers who devote so much energy to this process. As someone pointed out, there are other fathers who’ve been involved. Also, my wife handles just about everything else associated with my daughter so trust me when I say this is a small space where I contribute. Finally, there are some genetics at work here as well. We learned through non-identifying New York adoption information that both my birth parents had drama degrees. My birth father appears to have been from England and met my birth mother at a summer theater program and probably has no idea he gave birth to a child. Although the talent clearly skipped a generation, its not surprising that I’m predisposed to be interested in this. What’s actually been very cool for me about this is my daughter unlocked an artistic interest piece in me that I did not know even existed. </p>
<p>Abtsmom – thanks for the info on unifieds!</p>
<p>GH – She’s dealt with a lot of rejection as part of pursuing professional work so I think she can handle it. She’d sulk for a day or two at an early U of Arts rejection but it would ultimately spur her to focus even more on additional auditions.</p>
<p>^Regarding guaranteed casting at BU…Boston University School of Theatre actually has more students per class than a majority of other BFA performance programs, though certainly not as many as NYU.</p>
<p>The thing is, they have quite a high number of productions each quarter, compared to a lot of other programs. During the last few years, one of these has been an all-female Shakespeare production!</p>
<p>ActingDad - I always put Coastal Carolina out there in case people aren’t aware of what a gem of a program it is. The acting training is truly top notch. There is guaranteed casting for the BFAs. They cast through a generals audition at the beginning of the year. Cross casting can and does happen, so your D could be cast in a musical. And the Acting and PT majors can take voice, dance, etc. The BFA Acting and PT classes are very small. I believe the incoming acting class is 6 or 8. Both can take advantage of the study abroad at the Commedia dell’Arte in Italy. Definitely a conservatory style program housed in a university setting. They offer a showcase in NYC, and they bring in creative teams for developmental reading and staged workshops. This year Ben Vereen is coming in to work with the students in the spring before their production of Pippin. </p>
<p>They will be attendance in Chicago offering that as a prescreen for their on campus auditions. You can also do the video prescreen. They are a program that offers an early audition date in November. Their audition date is great - lots of feedback provided to those who audition. My D is a rising junior and couldn’t be happier with her choice of CCU. Again, not a school that is on a lot of people’s radar, but one I think is worth exploring based on what you say your D wants. </p>
<p>Best of luck!</p>
<p>^It’s so cool that Coastal Carolina students are able to study at the Accademia dell’Arte in Arezzo. For a whole academic year, I think I heard? The ADA is quite a place!</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM - The PT majors spend a full year there. The Acting majors spend a semester there. And I am so jealous lol!</p>
<p>Okay- I know this may seem to be a stupid question- but what is meant by Guaranteed Casting in a BFA program? Thanks for enlightening me!</p>
<p>Basically, every person in the program gets a role in every show. I’ll describe how it works at Purchase as that is the one I know best from the visit. Freshman are not cast in any shows. They work the upper class shows. This is pretty common. I suspect the general theory is you aren’t ready yet. Then, when you are a sophmore, you’ll be cast with your fellow sophmores in each show and so on going up. Some schools with guarnteed casting do not limit casts to a particular grade, i.e. a sophmore could get cast with a Junior. </p>
<p>The post that got me started thinking about the importance of the issue was a post from someone describing a student who had gone through Marymount with a BFA and had never been cast in a single show. I don’t mean to pick on Marymount. I know there is also favorable comments on here about the school. I am sure that being in NY, they are able to draw good faculty. But they take in a lot more kids than some of the smaller programs and thus there is no assurance that kids in the program will be cast in shows.</p>
<p>Thank you! I guess I can understand guaranteed casting. Both of my kids went to a performing arts high school and I would see kids who went from 9th - 12th grade and were never cast in a show. I always thought that was a shame because high school was the place to learn. I suppose it would be more difficult for college kids never to get cast because they are paying big bucks for their degree. However, the real world does not have guaranteed casting and if you’re going into this business, you have to be prepared for that.</p>
<p>Some of the studios at Tisch do have guaranteed casting, at least for some productions. For example, at NSB, the studio puts on several different musicals spring of second year and everyone gets cast in one (not sure what they will be doing in the Advanced Training) and at Meisner, each group puts on a show which everyone is in. These are just some examples. </p>
<p>Ferreting this information out can be difficult, though, so if she is accepted, she will need to ask the studio directly if the information is not available on the website.</p>
<p>Yeah, my son is in NSB. Everyone auditions for their studio shows and they all seemed to have gotten cast. My son was also in a Tisch Stage Works show. Every studio can audition for that and it is very competitive. They perform 4 shows each year. He’s a junior now, so we’ll see what happens this year in Advanced Training.</p>
<p>At BU, guaranteed casting draws from a casting pool of sophomores, juniors and seniors, with students mixed together in productions. You’re not just with your own classmates.</p>
<p>This past year was unusual because the program did two musicals, “The Last Five Years” and “Assassins.” (Some years they don’t do any.) I’m pretty sure that sophomores were cast as both of the leads in “The Last Five Years.” </p>
<p>Some of the juniors were jealous because the musicals were done during their abroad semester and they didn’t get to be in casting for them.</p>
<p>It was awesome! Very impressive - I assumed that the cast were all seniors, but I have since found out that some were soph. & juniors, too. Had never seen that show, really different! S loved it, too. Can’t beat seeing a production at a school you are interested in.</p>
<p>ActingDad - I only hope I can put in 1/10th of the energy you have put into helping your kid with this. I am just about going under with the planning, and we have only a few schools on our list so far.</p>
<p>That’s so cool that you saw “Assassins,” Marbleheader. If we lived nearby, I’d want to try to see all the BU shows, or at least most of them. As it is, I’ve only seen a handful.</p>
<p>Another thing they sometimes do at BU is let the students audition for certain selected Boston-area equity productions, through the school. My son was lucky enough to get cast in one such production, mostly because they were looking for people who could play musical instruments as well as act, and he was one of the ones who filled the bill.</p>
<p>ActingDad:</p>
<p>What you are calling “studio” I would call “hands-on”. I have discovered that I am entirely a hands-on learner, and so now when I consider an educational opportunity I know that it has to be “hands-on”. But I don’t think any of my “hands-on” theatre classes were ever called “studios”.</p>
<p>And by “Stanislavsky” what you really meant was “Meisner and Adler”. Well, I am a great advocate for people saying what they mean. It would help communication if when you meant “Meisner and Adler” you would simply SAY “Meisner and Adler”, so I would know that you meant “Meisner and Adler”.</p>
<p>And so apparently, everything that isn’t “Meisner and Adler” is what you consider “New and Funky”. And your slip of the tongue seems to indicate that at least subconsciously you consider Meisner and Adler to be “Stanislavsky” and everything else “not Stanislavsky”. Well, that’s exactly what the proponents of Meisner and Adler will want you to believe. They will insist that they are the ones doing “traditional Stanislavsky” while everyone else is “New and Funky”. You may be surprised to hear this, but all the other approaches insist they are the ones doing “traditional Stanislavsky” and it is Meisner and Adler who are “New and Funky”.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is worth dismissing all the other approaches to acting out of hand as “Funky”. Yes, the Adler and Meisner approaches to acting training have produced some great actors. But there have been many, many, many other great actors who trained using some OTHER approach to acting training. For this reason alone, it might be worth at least looking at these other approaches.</p>
<p>Anyone who is going to pursue a career as an actor, could conceivably work with all kinds of directors. Your daughter cannot expect to always get a director who is a Adlerian or Meisnerian. What if she worked with a director like me, whose formal training was in Chicago, not New York, and so was primarily based on the theories of Spolin (probably someone you consider “Funky”)?</p>
<p>I think young actors need to understand that there are many legitimate approaches to this art, and just because somebody is doing something different that is no reason to reject it as “new and funky”.</p>
<p>Any art form relies on originality and creativity, both of which basically mean “new”. Artists cannot be afraid of the new, because that will lead to us becoming nothing but museum pieces.</p>
<p>KEVP</p>
<p>actingdad, the other thing I thought of about unifieds–some people brought those small vaporizers that use a water bottle for their hotel rooms. This can be important if you are doing unifieds in Chicago or NY. Even without singing, voices can get strained from doing continuous auditions. (We didn’t have one and did 12 auditions in 4 days with singing and he was okay though)</p>
<p>How about too “edgy”. Is that better?</p>
<p>KEVP:</p>
<p>I believe you have said you work in the legal field. I try patent cases in my day job so I think I’m qualified to say that you seem to putting an unnecessary legal/lawyer spin on this. I’ve dived head first into trying to understand what my daughter is doing and where she’s going but you’ll have to forgive me that I don’t have the vocabulary to be particular precise on certain subjects. As I think I explained already, I used the term traditional Stanislavsky in a broad sense to refer to techniques that flowed from him. Reading books such as Bill Esper’s book, its clear that even among those teaching Meisner there is all type of variation. </p>
<p>When I used the term new and funky, I was lumping in a lot of things including techniques outside of these traditional methods as well as different art forms. I certainly wasn’t referring to debates between Adler and Meisner proponents or debates between their proponents and others within the Stanislavksy family which is far outside my knowledge (other than the emotional memory issue I mentioned). An example of the kinds of things I was thinking about is captured in this post by Milkshakespeare from back in July:</p>
<p>“The kind of theater that attracts some sort of audience (other than stand up comedy and remakes of Broadway musicals, of course) is very experimental and usually each company has it’s own ‘method’, which can combine physical theater, Tanztheater, native indian rituals, Meisner, Stanislavski, among others. It is really a big mix of everything. That’s the ‘kind’ of theater I want to make. Different, original, unusual.” </p>
<p>Apart from being impressed by how well Milkshakespeare could articulate what she wanted, I remember thinking that this is the complete opposite of where my daughter sits on the spectrum. We discussed this particular post and she agreed that this is not at all what she wants. Her passion is much simpler than that. Its simply to try to capture “believable truth” in a performance. </p>
<p>As to your point about my daughter dismissing every other technique, you seem to be creating a straw man. All else being equal, at her young age, it seems perfectly reasonable to want to pursue a BFA in a program that is grounded in a teaching style and approach that she is comfortable with. Having this as a criteria certainly doesn’t mean that she is going to reject all other ways of thinking about things. Nor did anything I say suggest otherwise. By the way, the only relevance to this criteria in the final analysis was to exclude CalArts among the schools on her list. It was the one school whose approach was just too “edgy” (to use a word another poster suggested) for her taste. </p>
<p>This may be one post too many on this subject and Im probably putting on my own legal hat on a bit too much here in response so I hope the rest of CC will forgive this as an occupational hazard.</p>
<p>ActingDad, I think you guys have a good list, and when she gets through the audition season she will surely have some good choices - and she will have learned a lot, no matter how it all goes.</p>
<p>One thing that strikes me here is that this is undergrad - I certainly have never felt like an expert in what I studied in college, and there was certainly always more I could learn. And my graduate/professional degree is the same way (it also requires continuing education forever). Let’s assume that good training programs, which all of the schools on her list are, have the potential to give her a solid foundation AND will have inevitable gaps, too. All of this will help her know what direction she wants to go with her career. </p>
<p>There are so many variables - profs who turn out to be nothing we expected or who suddenly go on sabbatical, facilities renovations, productions of the plays we want or didn’t want, the personalities of the other students, and general life issues that add to or detract from the learning experience - that we’re all just taking a giant gamble with this whole process. And what is “terribly wrong” one day (or week, or year) could turn out to be the most wonderful thing in the blink of an eye. </p>
<p>Dare I say this kind of variability is particularly intense with our … um … dramatic kids?</p>