ERIN HURLEY
What is the US job market looking for in new employees? The answer seems to be "everything": a scholar firmly grounded in theatre history (i.e., able to teach required courses for majors and non-majors) yet specialized or sub-specialized in identity studies, i.e., African/Asian/Latino-American studies, post-colonial studies, women's studies, and/or gay/lesbian/queer studies. Many programmes advertise for scholar-practitioners -- jobs for which a PhD and an MFA would be the ideal combination of degrees. Scholar-teachers with a demonstrable history of undergraduate teaching and many hours of service to the profession and the university are sought after for their ability to attract students (thereby increasing departmental credit-hours and often departmental budgets) and their commitment to volunteerism. What all of this basically boils down to is the multiple skill-sets of a flexible labour-pool, or, in academe, "interdisciplinarity."
A combination of a number of forces drives the movement toward interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, interdisciplinarity is one of the field's responses to new intellectual interests. Post-structuralist theory's category breakdowns, its deep questioning of borders and boundaries of all kinds, and its compelling analyses of "difference" have affected the humanities and notions of disciplinarity in profound ways. The institutionalization of inter-disciplines like Performance Studies and Cultural Studies have similarly prodded Theatre Studies to consider the politics of the cultural construction of its disciplinary formation.
On the other hand, interdisciplinarity is a necessary survival strategy in a period when the performing arts are under increasing attack as inefficient "extras," both in the university and in public culture. On the national level, the future of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities remains uncertain as the Right's clamour for family values and core-curricula continues unabated. Under this pressure of decreasing federal and state subsidies and increasing emphasis on producing good workers for the US' service economy in the global marketplace, university budgets and curricular considerations are increasingly driven by the budgetary need to augment credit-hours, and the political need to avoid controversy which would spotlight the institution in the ongoing culture wars. In this kind of climate, theatre programmes are not deemed a sound investment.
In Theatre Studies currently, the response to these forces is being posited as a solution. It seems that intellectual and market interests find common ground in interdisciplinarity, as both an intellectual project and a hiring/labour practice. It is offered as both an exciting, new wave of theatre scholarship, and as a bulwark against the permanent down-sizing of theatre programmes in the form of joint appointments. Indeed, in 1997, the two major US theatre conferences -- the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) -- both hosted panels in which the state of the profession, its intellectual agenda, and indeed its survival, were explicitly linked to interdisciplinary work. At ASTR, Stacy Wolf argued that the future of academic labour is the joint appointment.
If interdisciplinarity and joint appointments are the future of the field, what impact might that have on current graduate theatre training practices? I would offer the following recommendations.
First, it is essential that graduate students be trained in interdisciplinary work and that they be trained interdisciplinarily. I believe that interdisciplinarity can bring a great deal both to theatre/performance studies and the projects of other disciplines. Employing methodologies from a range of fields and theoretical positions allows theatre scholars to address a wider range of audiences, both academic and "lay." It encourages precision in our work and clarity in the definitions of theatre and performance that we employ. Moreover, crossing into other disciplines extends the reach of theatre studies and, frankly, in the current climate, a little proselytizing about why theatre studies is an interesting and worthwhile disciplinary base can't hurt.
That said, interdisciplinarity should be conceptualized not merely as a product (a joint appointment or a swell paper published in Public Culture, for instance) but as a process, a way of working and thinking and networking, emphasizing synthesis, border-crossing, and precise vocabularies. This kind of precision of vocabulary and analysis results from a firm grounding in Theatre Studies -- its methods, its materials, and its history as a discipline -- and an understanding of the history of each of the disciplines brought to the analytical table. To encourage this kind of process, required courses and the number of courses students must take within the Theatre and/or Drama department would need to be reduced. This would facilitate taking courses outside of the department and exploring other approaches and ways of thinking. Faculty mentors would need to encourage and support interdisciplinary work -- in paper assignments, class distribution, advising sessions, and the like.
Within the courses taught in the Theatre/Performance Studies department, the pedagogical focus might be on teaching a variety of critical languages as useful tools for student analyses of theatre and performance. A course along the general theme of "representation(s)," for example, would open up the possibility of teaching from a number of different disciplinary perspectives. A similar course might be offered on "performance" or "theatre and society."
Regarding exams: both preliminary and comprehensive exams would ideally be structured to evaluate the student in the skills the field and the market value. This is not to say that every student must be tested on, for example, critical race theory, just as it is not advisable to test every student on the Cid controversy. It strikes me that the skills most needed for quality work regardless of topic (disciplinary or interdisciplinary) are those of writing, critical analysis, and the ability to synthesize knowledge and information into coherent and persuasive text (oral or written). Comprehensive exams could evaluate these skills in the context of the students' demonstration of a good general knowledge of their chosen fields. The fields themselves might be built by students in consultation with their advisors and would, ideally, move across the period and national distinctions which often structure these exams and indeed our education.1
I am not advocating that all graduate students and their programmes bend their criteria and their interests to better intersect with the market, publishing interests, or the changes evident in other disciplines. Nonetheless, I think that theatre studies is well-positioned to take advantage of the changes apparent in academic culture. It is a discipline which already bridges theory and practice in its theatrical productions and its personnel, regularly produces scholar-teachers and scholar-practitioners, and emphasizes multiple skill-sets in its analysis of representational practices -- in performance, writing, designing, and teaching.
It is likewise well-positioned to engage in interdisciplinary work. To take but one example, at 1997's ATHE conference, Joseph Roach said that Theatre Studies' legacy is the inter-discipline of Performance Studies. As Roach's comment indicates, interdisciplinarity has long been at the heart of theatre and performance studies and we could develop this skill in more explicit ways.
NOTES
1 The CUNY PhD Programme in Theatre is moving toward
these kinds of structures.
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