Month: October 2020

As universities everywhere partially open up their doors this autumn, they have to cope with many issues of the coming academic year, trying to reinvent the education process in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the consequent restrictions. Many creative hands-on courses are struggling to come up with safe ways to prepare their students, but departments and institutions teaching music, theatre and dances are probably hit the hardest.

In the era of social distancing, the performing arts industry itself is not going to function as before, given the health risks of live performances in indoor spaces with live audiences. Many venues are threatened with closure and the public may remain wary of attending live arts events even when restrictions are lifted. With coronavirus posing a threat to the future careers of today’s performing art students, drama schools, university arts programs and conservatoires are perceived as training people for jobs that are disappearing. This might be unnerving for university arts programmes and conservatoires, for a recent survey shows that as many as 40 percent of incoming freshmen are considering a possibility of passing on attending colleges this year, while 28 percent of returning students haven’t decided yet if they come back to the campus.

It is true that future performances and professional communities or performing arts rely on the talent pool coming out of higher education but the fact that supply is enormous cannot be ignored. “If there’s possibly no freshman class this year, that’s not going to impact, down the line, the number of dancers available to audition,” says Susan McGreevy-Nichols, executive director of the National Dance Education Organization. The same goes for music, according to Jesse Rosen, president of the League of American Orchestras.

Therefore, with this uncertain future pending, many of the age-old methods of training musicians, actors and dancers need to be drastically reshaped.

Like other arts institutions that offer dance, drama and music degrees, administrators of New York City’s Juilliard School, have spent the summer devising new classes and techniques and setting up safety protocols for rehearsal studios and theaters. For the first weeks of the fall term, the school is offering online classes, followed by a gradual progression of on-campus classes. Trying to pursue “the making-lemonade idea” President Damian Woetzel hopes to invite some big-name artists for guest lectures via video, which would be impossible under different circumstances, because normally all the stars would be touring the world.

Similarly, the Berklee College of Music in Boston, USA, which will be completely remote this autumn, is including virtual master classes with prominent artists who are stuck at home like most everyone else due to the coronavirus restrictions causing the closure of the venues. The college will be completely remote this autumn.

What makes distance learning especially challenging for performing-arts schools is a need for technology and tools that aren’t available outside of specialized classrooms. Training students to perform might be tricky as each art has technical demands, such as safe flooring, adequate unobstructed space, and the precise timing of music and sound — impossible over laptops with different bandwidths. For example, it is impossible to leap into a partner’s arms in online dance classes. However, instead, they can focus on nuances and overlooked details, such as how to use faces or how to position hands.

Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), whose alumni include Mel Gibson and Cate Blanchett, adapted their public performance schedule to take place in the digital space across a variety of platforms and are currently gradually reintroducing the students to the campus after developing a series of protocols that enable much of our training to continue.

In addition to ‘new normal’ practices like temperature checks at entrances, the wearing of masks in public areas and air-conditioning systems switched to ‘extraction’ mode, coronavirus-safety protocols in institutions training musicians and actors includes for example, banning on-stage kissing or teaching in small “bubbles” of players, which could slowly be integrated with other groups as restrictions on social distancing ease.

Apart from day-to-day operations, schools of the performing arts also to develop solutions to immediate practical problems around recruitment and assessment.

At the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, some applicants had not yet attended an interview or audition for autumn 2020 entry at the time of lockdown. To get around this, the institution created video instructions to for the applicants to record themselves performing their monologues and song choices. The interviews were held online and course-specific questions were answered by the staff during virtual open days.

Although the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC), UK, hopes to deliver the majority of the curriculum face to face by the second semester, it is possible for incoming students to do their first semester online. The administrators hope to “give them an in-person experience online”, holding over until later any elements of the course that required face-to-face interaction.

Assessment poses similar challenges. At RBC they decided on accepting all kinds of online offerings, instead of keeping final-year students in limbo until they were able to hold live examinations in a hall. According to the principal, Julian Lloyd Webber, some of the students had only an iPhone and no recording equipment but that didn’t stop them from creating things of “incredible standard and imagination”.  “The internet is so much a part of musicians’ future that it was very helpful for them to have to do this,” Lloyd Webber believes.

This is echoed by Jesse Rosen who is sure that digital proficiency that students will be gaining now will help them in their future careers. He claims that musicians that can create visual works for live-streaming or sharing online could be a major boon for orchestras and music ensembles that desperately want to increase their reach and audiences.

There is every reason to believe that performing arts will adapt to the current context and thrive again, and it will be today’s students, flexible and adaptive, capable of working across all platforms, with a blend of traditional skills and new techniques and understanding, that shape the future.

Last year, one of the world’s most prestigious art schools, The Royal College of Art in London, announced plans to expand its curriculum in order to transform the accepted paradigm of an art and design university, by injecting key scientific disciplines into the mix of creative courses traditionally on offer. RCA’s new ambitious five-year campaign programme, named GenerationRCA, sends a clear message that today’s designers must be trained to tackle larger interdisciplinary issues. The world is too complex and interconnected for designers to not be proficient in a variety of disciplines, from traditional craft-based skills to the science and technology that are an integral part of our daily lives.

As announced, the RCA will continue along its recent path of introducing exciting and provocative new programmes such as Environmental Architecture, a year-long masters that focuses on the city from a sustainability perspective, and Digital Direction, another year-long program that concentrates on digital storytelling in the creative economy. In the meantime, future programmes will center on nano and soft robotics, computer science and machine learning, materials science and the circular economy.

According to vice chancellor Paul Thompson, the launch of the GenerationRCA is the most significant development in its 182-year history. “Founded in response to the first Industrial Revolution, today the RCA stands as the vanguard of a new era in art and design, which promises breakthroughs in robotics, autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence,” he said. This watershed moment reveals that some art educators finally understand that science and technology need to be part of the curriculum in order for art schools to survive the digital age.

Historically, art and technology are separately boxed by our education system and ideological gap between the two is undeniable. However, such interdisciplinary programs are not completely absent from the academic world. There has been much discussion over last decades about how STEM education needs to expand to STEAM, incorporating art and creative thinking into more right-brained areas of innovation. Aware that art can spark an excitement about learning that goes beyond the artistic to embrace science, math, technology, and engineering, prominent tech and science schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and Carnegie Mellon have integrated design and arts education into their curricula. As is true in the best learning moments, a connection to art can ignite the drive for more learning across disciplines, more creativity and motivate students to continue seeking new solutions.

But so far, the science sector has been more open to welcoming art than the reverse. Although there are art and design schools that do digital arts education well, like UCLA’s Design Media Arts curriculum, which uses technology-powered art processes, very rarely a traditional school adopts science and technology as a core focus.

Despite the many possibilities that science and technology present, few art programmes embrace the new paradigm. It is noticed that art teachers are often reluctant to implement computer technology in art education, either because they don’t have the skills to use the technology or because they prefer the traditional approach and techniques. According to the 2019 State of Art Education Survey, 52.2 percent of art teachers want to learn more about teaching digital art effectively, but only 21.9 percent of art teachers feel comfortable actually teaching a digital arts curriculum. Some traditional creatives are not only unsure how to integrate technology into their teaching, but also hesitant to see coding and other technology-led processes as artistic practices.

Prof. Mick Grierson, a research leader at the newly opened Creative Computing Institute at the University of the Arts London, admits, “There are plenty of people who, for decades, have been in the art and design community but haven’t really been able to find a home for their technology-led creations and practice,” he says. “So of course, they naturally migrated to a STEM environment because it’s easier for them to talk about the materials they use and the approaches they take.” “It’s like the art school has handed the baton of creativity over to the computer scientists and programmers, who often make terrible art,” echoes digital artist Alan Warburton.

Back in 1990, Deborah Greh, St. John’s University educator, clarified that using technology as a tool to develop art works should not overshadow art principles, concepts and techniques. Too often artists are enchanted by the novelty of the tool itself, its formal and aesthetic possibilities, so they sacrifice substance in the process, neglecting the fact that art needs something to day. It doesn’t really matter, if a work of art is analog or digital – the qualities that make it meaningful remain the same, and that is something only art schools can teach.

Today, digital art still is not treated as seriously as analog art, and experts admit, universities will need to adopt an even broader shift in thinking to change that.

“The biggest problem that digital art forms have faced is that scarcity equals value, and being readily available means these works essentially are worthless,” says Grierson. This is echoed by digital artist and educator Vicki Fong, who believes that digital art is often perceived as being more about production. “People are using digital skills to speed up the process, so more art is being made at a much quicker rate, which doesn’t necessarily increase the quality,” she says. All this is the negative impact of the traditional creatives and art educators being slow to embrace computerized art and admit that it should belong to the realm of art rather than STEM environment.

Predictably, artists won’t just naturally begin incorporating technology into their work without schools teaching them how. As curator Julia Kaganskiy told Artnet, to succeed in technology-led art teaching schools should integrate both technological thinking and practice. “As software, algorithms, non-conscious cognitive agents and cybernetic thinking increasingly shape the world around us, artists need to have a strong grasp of the practical and philosophical implications of this transformation,” she says. “I’m not saying that every artist needs to learn to code, but they should probably read some media theory and software studies texts, maybe even some posthumanist philosophy.”

The process of integration of science and technology into the art school curriculum still has a long way to go. As technology infiltrates every element of our life, educators need to do more than just prep students with basic graphic software. One thing is clear: the artists and designers who embrace technology as part of their art training will no doubt be more in demand than those who do not.