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Handbook Appendices Forms Theatre Scholarships For Theatre Majors, Minors, and Intendeds University Theatre Handbook Table of Contents Theatre Home

Seattle Pacific University
THEATRE STUDENT HANDBOOK
Toward a sense of Purpose, History, and Order

General Introduction

Gathered together here you will find an eclectic collection of information, policies, musings, and forms which will hopefully both answer your questions and help structure your experience as student and artist in the Department of Theatre.

Any theatre community is a highly complex entity due mostly to the very nature of the art: all those people pursuing their own creativity, working toward a seamless, integrated final product to present to another group of people, a group pursuing its own agenda of entertainment. Theatre is a highly social art. To this inherent complexity we add the merely difficult: education. This addition is not only an abstract version of education, but a rounded program seeking to invigorate viable theatre artists, providing them with a broad background in several areas of theatre practice. Additionally, we seek to infuse the process with the perspective of our Christianity. Thus, combining the social nature of the art and our educational desires, we strive toward a deliberate and active interplay of ideas and the varying skills of our entire community—students, faculty, audience—purposing thereby to create a dynamic social tension and a heightened creative curiosity which will both drive the artistic and educational process.

Therefore, we pursue a learning attitude which distinguishes the theatre program from most other disciplines represented on the Seattle Pacific University campus: ensemble. By ensemble is meant an attitude of purposeful exploring and learning by students and faculty as an unit, learning with each other and from each other. We are fellow scholars, yes, but as importantly, fellow creators and artists in our studios and as we prepare our productions together.

Ensemble can provide us with unusual educational and personal development.

Still, the goal is worth the risk. And because our life experiences are highly diverse, because our level of skill development in theatre is greatly disparate, and because our operations are calendar and facility driven, some guiding principles and rules have emerged to help coordinate our ensemble efforts. Let’s hope this handbook helps to clarify them.

Next Section: A.1.a Perspectives: The Impact of the Art

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