Julia Morgan Center for the Arts: A Lincoln Center Institute Affiliate
by Jean Schiffman

It is 9:30 a.m., and actor/clown Jeff Raz is hard at work. He has been here at Cabrillo Elementary School in San Francisco’s Richmond District since 8:30 a.m. with his lesson plan for the day carefully mapped out. He drove through Bay Bridge commuter traffic in time to watch a performance of the African-American Shakespeare Company’s modern, rap-infused version of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone on the stage in the cafeteria. Raz sat among a fairly rapt group of elementary school kids from various grades, all of whom were seeing Antigone for the second time this semester.

Yesterday Raz taught all day at the Clown Conservatory, auditioned for a national commercial and performed his solo show Father-Land at the Circus Center. This morning, despite fatigue, he is clearly “on,” leading a classroom of fifth graders in a far-reaching discussion of Antigone, plus exercises. The teacher, just as immersed in the Antigone story as the kids, is taking notes on the whiteboard.

“So—what surprised you about the play this time around?” Raz begins, squatting on the floor with the kids, who are sitting—and reclining and wiggling—in a circle.

“It was more emotional.”

“There was more yelling.”

“More crying.”

“Interesting!” cries Raz. “What else? Was it OK for Antigone to break the law to bury her brother? Is it ever OK to break the law? Was it OK for Martin Luther King to break the law? What if he’d killed someone?”

“Martin Luther King would never have killed someone,” points out an astute little girl.

Raz and eight other local performing arts professionals have been hired by the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts to participate in a unique, artist-centered education program created by the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) in New York in 1974. The model works so well that 32 other arts organizations around the country have signed on as LCI affiliates. This was the Julia Morgan Center’s first year as an affiliate; there is only one other in California (in Palm Desert). For the artists involved, most of whom will continue on next season, it’s been an inspiring experience that has taught them new ways of perceiving art and viewing themselves as artists and teachers.

Julia Morgan Center’s implementation of the LCI program works like this: Eleven schools (elementary and middle, plus one high school) sign on; in each school, five teachers commit to work one-on-one in partnership with the artists throughout the year. Each semester, teacher and artist devise a classroom curriculum to explore in depth one significant work of art. Exploration involves discussion, movement, acting, drawing, music, writing and other creative forms of expression. This year, in addition to Antigone, the schools saw the dance piece The Nature of Nature by Facing East Dance and Music. (According to policy, performers who appear in the productions may not participate as classroom artists.)
Schools pay 18 percent of the cost of the program; the rest is paid by the Julia Morgan Center, which has received funds for the project from the San Francisco Foundation, Koret, the Margaret and Dean Lesher Foundation, the Haas Fund and most especially the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Artists—who commit to 10 classroom hours per semester plus a 60-hour advance training session and a seven-day summer intensive with the teachers—are chosen for their professional expertise and their love of teaching; all have had some prior teaching experience. They are paid $65 per classroom hour plus a stipend for the two training sessions. (Next year’s positions are already filled.)

In the classroom many of the teachers get right down and do the exercises along with the kids. “Activities are age appropriate, meet classroom needs and relate to the work of art under discussion,” explains Sabrina Klein, executive director at the Julia Morgan Center. “Every classroom must be designed differently; this is not a preprogrammed, modular kind of thing.” For example, viewing Antigone has, for some of Raz’s classes, kicked off discussions of how we honor people who have died, and kids from different cultures reported on their culture’s unique traditions like Mexico’s Day of the Dead.

By the time students see the work of art for the second time, late in the semester, “they really own it,” says Klein. Not only have they explored peripheral issues suggested by the work of art, they have experienced what it’s like to think from an artist’s perspective. At the end of the semester, they display or perform their own works of art inspired by their classroom explorations.

For the artists, the work begins with their very first training session. To learn the LCI methodology, they themselves go through a miniature version of the process through which they and their partner-teachers will later lead the students. In the session they explore their own identity as teaching artists. This year the sessions began with watching a clip from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. For some, the process was initially difficult.

“I didn’t like the clip; I had actor complaints, writer complaints,” says Jeff Raz. “Then I was forced to find a question to ask this piece, along with my colleagues, and to develop exercises. I invented a little exercise that involved drawing, which is my weak suit. By this time I was totally engaged.”

Another trainee, David Maier, a fight choreographer and actor, had similar feelings. “I came up against my own ‘I’m not going to do that exercise, that’s ridiculous,’” he says. “But that’s where the rich discoveries are—the places that you don’t want to go.”

“It’s a process of digging deep and getting in touch with my most primal, creative instinct and ideas,” says Shotgun Players actress Beth Donohue, who also teaches drama to children through various other programs and tours with Berkeley Rep’s school tour program.

In the teacher-artist training session that followed the artists-only training session, there was similar resistance on the part of both teachers and artists.

“We artists can get pretty haughty about looking down on teachers,” admits Raz. “And a lot of these teachers had resistance to what we were doing. And I had a lot of resistance to the other artists—I love it when I’m running things, but if I don’t know what the next exercise is about, I get up on my high horse.”

Dancer/choreographer Roger Dillahunty (currently not performing due to a leg injury) was at first overwhelmed in the training session. “A lot of information was happening pretty fast,” he says. He has been teaching creative movement to children for 18 years and felt like he was an old dog trying to learn new tricks. “It’s intimidating; we’re working with teachers who teach different subjects. It’s intimidating to get up and think you have something you can show and teach them. We all felt insecure like that at the beginning.”

“When we first started with the teachers,” says Maier, “the performers took the lead, and the teachers were out of their element. But eventually we all got down to the common denominator. We all helped each other out—teachers, artists, administrators. The work of art was at the center of it all. It’s a great argument for how art builds community, and this is how: Let’s look at this work of art together.”

According to the LCI method, you don’t judge the art. Instead, you ask yourself questions about your own reactions to the art, both emotional and intellectual, and discover what it calls up for you. The ways of doing this are varied, but all have been tested and planned. Teachers and artists integrate these discussions and exercises with the proscribed academic curriculum. The ways that art can influence thinking processes and inspire self-expression are endless. The beauty of the method, for artists, is that even as they are teaching it to children, they themselves are being affected by it.

“My creative job,” explains Raz, “is to find questions to ask that piece of art that are going to be open-ended and take us through a lot of different creative modes, always keeping it enquiry based and experiential.” He compares the LCI task to his goal as a teacher in the Clown Conservatory; there, he must train people to be professional clowns by the end of the year. So, the goals of his two teaching jobs are vastly different. Yet he’s been able to incorporate LCI methods into his clown teaching: He has his clown students keep journals. “There’s a mantra where you ask not ‘Did you like it?’ but ‘What did you see, what did you hear?’” explains Raz. “Then you go to ‘What did you think, what did you feel?’ It’s a wonderful way to get past learned ways of rejecting art.” He relies on that mantra now in all his teaching work and tries to incorporate it into his own way of viewing art. “It doesn’t always work,” he confesses. “Teaching habits are as hard to change as performing habits. When you’re doing your job of performing, the stakes are high and you fall back on what you know. With teaching the stakes are high, too. It takes quite a while to change your bag of tricks.”

Maier says the LCI method is infiltrating the teaching he does at ACT’s Young Conservatory and elsewhere. “It’s in the way I’ve learned to isolate things, break them down to their simplest elements, appreciate them for what they are without saying this is good art, this is bad art. Whatever your experience is is absolutely right. The kids say, ‘I was bored,’ and I say, ‘Great, so was I during parts of it, let’s talk about that, what did resonate with you?’ If I just say, ‘What did you see?’ they say, ‘Antigone.’ But then if I can get to ‘I saw an African-American woman in modern clothes with a flag on her shirt yelling at a fat guy’—getting down to what did you really literally see and how does that resonate...” A viewing of Antigone, in which, in this translation, Polyneices is referred to as a terrorist, segued into a discussion in Maier’s first grade class about terrorism. Because this Antigone is modernized, he is teaching how to tell an ancient story in a modern way. “The discussion can go anywhere you want it to go,” he says. “You can talk technical, or about race, culture, generational issues. That’s what art does: You can go anywhere.”

Dillahunty had to teach a kindergarten class right after September 11. “There was so much emotion going around,” he says. “Children so young have all these feelings—they were frightened, worried.” So, he responded to the free-floating anxiety. “We put colors to emotions, we made dramatic faces, we did gestures and movements that represented emotions, we put sound and music to emotions. I’d play a piece of music and the children would say, ‘That’s sad’ or ‘That’s angry.’”

It goes without saying that this type of work is full of surprises and is not easy. “Even the good students can give you a run for your money,” concedes Dillahunty. “Sometimes I have to throw away some of the things I had planned and improvise so they get to a point where they’re having so much fun they don’t realize they’re learning.”

But the rewards far outweigh the difficulties. For these artists, the ramifications of teaching the LCI method stretch far into their life’s work as both artist and teacher.

Dillahunty says that once he got over his initial fears during the training sessions, the LCI method began to affect how he sees and hears everything, from ballet to a movie. The slow, careful methodology—from initial exercises, to seeing the performance, to more exercises and creative projects and discussions, to seeing the work for a second time—is like looking at stars: “The more you look, the more you see.” Now when he does classroom choreography, he’s not just teaching a step; he’s trying to get the students to experience what it feels like on the inside, how to connect with the movement kinesthetically, elastically. “How you lengthen and extend your leg—using visualization to have an eye inside your body.”

Maier feels he’s much more attuned now, as an artist, to the process. As a teacher he has learned to “scaffold”—to start with the most basic, simple thing and slowly build toward complexity. “So now, when a show I’m directing is frustrating me, I can go back and simplify: What do I want to achieve, and what are the steps I need to take to get there? For me personally, I’m always worried about where my next paycheck is coming from, so I have to live in a result-oriented world to an extent. I have to please people to get hired. To say to myself, maybe this isn’t brilliant yet is a very different way of thinking.” He says the LCI method has affected the way he approaches character work, even audition monologues. For example, in preparing Marcellus’s top-of-the-play monologue from Julius Caesar for an audition, he was able to reconnect with what he personally is passionate about and relate it to the character and circumstance.

For Donohue, who, like the others, loves teaching, the experience of using the LCI method reminds her of what it was like back in her conservatory days. She says she’ll always teach. “It’s been a dream of mine to be in a company that started from grassroots, where I could work in rep and act all the time and that had a conservatory where I could teach. Children are our future. My gift to give is a creative investment in them.”

The Julia Morgan Center’s LCI program is unique in that artists go directly into the classrooms in partnership with the teachers for a sustained period of time. And although Donohue, Raz, Dillahunty and Maier all insist they wouldn’t give up teaching even if they got steady acting work, they do have advice for other artists thinking of becoming teachers. Raz notes that performing and teaching operate on very different schedules (late nights and early mornings) and says that you might want to wait until a little later in your career to make this kind of commitment. He also suggests getting out of your head the insulting proverb, “Those who can’t do, teach.” “Teachers have a really hard job and are about as crucial as you can get,” he says.

“Be a good listener and willing to learn,” advises Maier. “I’m constantly getting new information and points of view from young people that I never got before.”

“You need a lot of patience. You need to stay in the moment and really listen to and value what the kids have to say,” seconded Donohue. “The only way to learn if you have what it takes is by observing teachers, interning, trying it out within a structured, supervised environment.”

Jeff Raz’s fifth grade class is drawing to a close. They’ve done physical warm-ups, discussed the fact that the actress playing Antigone had trouble getting a ring off her finger, wondered whether one actor’s expensive-looking watch was in fact a knockoff, chose a character and wrote down all that character’s heinous and heroic acts and what they’d have done in that character’s shoes. They’ve discussed their responses with a partner. They’ve thoughtfully considered all Raz’s questions, like, “When did you think someone was lying?” They seemed to understand that there are no right or wrong answers. Now Raz gets to do his thing: He juggles. They love it.

“Cool,” they murmur, goggle-eyed.

Jean Schiffman is an arts writer and a regular Theatre Bay Area contributor.