MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College

This is the campus where I will be getting my MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. It is the old Fort Warden grounds, in Port Townsend, Washington, which Goddard College rents for their Intensive Residency programs.

I love this place. I attended a week-long Jazz Composition and Arranging workshop there as a junior in high school. They hired a U.S. Marines band to play our compositions.

I have twice before applied to MFA programs. In 1994, I was accepted into the University of Oregon's MFA in Printmaking program. In 2004, I was a finalist at Yale's MFA in Theatre Directing program and had completed the interview before I withdrew. In both cases, I decided not to go.

I think what stopped me, in the end, is that neither one felt like software; neither the students and teachers were software developers. I am a hybrid. I am both a traditional artist and a software creator, to a professional level; and it has been my life's work to figure out how to create a life with these in it.

If I am creating anything, I want to be creating it with software developers. This is true even if the thing I am creating is a choir, or a theatre troupe, or a symphony, or a company. It is just as true, however, that if I am creating art, I want to be creating it to absolutely the highest standards of that art.

GODDARD'S MFA PROGRAM

The best fit I have found so far is a meta-program, Goddard College's MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. This is a rigorously structured design-your-own-degree graduate program. It is perfect for someone who knows what they want, and wants to pursue it intensively.

Goddard was a traditional college for decades, before they decided to close their traditional programs and focus only on Intensive Residency programs. They had been the first to invent and pioneer the Intensive Residency model, with their legendary Creative Writing MFA. This spawned more than 40 similar programs in schools across the US and Europe. Thirty years later, Goddard decided to close their traditional programs and focus solely on Intensive Residency offerings. Their goal is to become the best Intensive Residency college in the world. "You are lucky you had such an immaculate record as a traditional college all those decades," said their accreditation board, "Or we would never let you do something like this."

This means I can stay in my house, in my life, working at my beloved DigiPen, and still get my degree. Every three weeks I submit a packet of work over the internet. Twice a year, all the faculty and students fly in for 8-day Intensive Residencies, during which we have showings, seminars, 1-on-1 meetings, semester reviews, and design the next semester's work. It is a two-and-a-half year program, three years with permission.

Goddard's focus and discipline is on whether you is following your own authentic artistic path. They do not care what medium you work in, or whether you move from one medium to another; they encourage your work to have a social component, as all art is connected to the world. They care strongly that you do the work; that you have intentional practices; that you do your work at a professional level; that you contextualize and articulate your work; that your work is authentic; and that you are establishing practices which will carry you as an artist for the rest of your life. Three years is not long in the life of an artist.

THE MFA IS A TERMINAL DEGREE

The MFA, Master of Fine Arts, is the terminal degree of the creative and performing arts. A PhD means you are an expert scholar of the field; an MFA means you are a virtuoso performer of the field. Concert pianists, painters, dancers, and writers get MFAs. In the academic world, scholars teach scholars, and performers teach performers. With a PhD in theatre, you teach theatre history. With an MFA in theatre, you teach acting or directing. An MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts is a good fit for the work I currently do, which is teaching game creators, in year-long project classes, how to make games.

I have noticed that people who truly long for an MFA or who truly long for a PhD, are always correct about their choice of degree. The PhD students profoundly love knowledge, research, scholarship. The MFA students profoundly love creating, in ever more skillful fashion. I don't think it matters which one you get, as long as you choose the one you love.

THE FOCUS OF MY MFA

This brings us to today, July 5, 2010. I have gotten the financial work done. I qualify for loans. I am half-way through my application. And I am walking around thinking deliciously about, "If I could do an MFA in anything, what would I do it in?"

I am definitely a creative artist. I have spent 40 years in these fields:
Music - 15 years
Dance/Choreography - 10 years + 8 years of sports
Art - 14 years
Writing - all my life
Theatre/Directing - 12 years formally, but grew up with it; wrote my first plays at age 8
Videogames/software - 30 years
High-performant ensemble creation - 13 years

I walk around thinking about this all the time:

What do I want from my MFA?
How shall I structure my MFA?
How can I involve DigiPen students in this?
What would be even better than that?

My MFA audition at Yale in 2004

In 2004, after living at the Odin for two months, I flew to Yale for my interview. I was a finalist for their MFA in Directing program.

At home, I had directed a lot of Chekhov, so of the scenes Yale offered, I chose one from "Three Sisters." I asked Eugenio for permission to borrow the three Odin apprentice actors to explore the scene. He agreed.

I will talk more about that another time.

One day, I got into the small car in back of the theatre in Holstebro and got driven to the airport. The next morning, in New Haven, I found a flower shop and bought a vase full of fat yellow tulips.

The audition allowed us to bring two props. I brought an ordinary Danish good-quality cream-colored cotton tablecloth edged in lace, and flowers.

Yale was beautiful. Stone, and heavy, and bright-washed with March sunlight.

The room for the audition was industrial. It had a white ceiling with giant air conditioning ducts suspended from it, also painted white. Some of the rooms had black rubber flooring; our room had hardwood, or linoleum; I forget.

What I remember is how busy and fast-moving everyone was -- the actors, the auditors, the students.

"We probably won't get to Chekhov today," I thought, as we set up the room. I find Chekhov emanates out of the actors, once they have become settled and pure. I did not think we would likely achieve this in 30 minutes.

The auditors sat at a table. Three men and a woman. I and the two student actors who had been provided worked in front of them, in a big empty space with a table and two chairs. The actors were a man and a woman who had memorized the lines, and had volunteered to do this rehearsal in addition to their already-busy schedules. They were eager to do well, and to impress their teachers; nervous that they would fail.

I sat them in a circle. I gave a short opening talk. It was not very good. I was nervous and had not prepared remarks. I gave up, stood us up, and started the familiar walking and statues work, to connect and ground ourselves. It helped, but was still happening at that frantic busy surface level. The actors faces were in grimaces, rictus smiles or fearful concentration. "Don't think," I kept saying in a soothing voice. "Don't think. Don't think. No one is thinking. This is all happening by itself."

Okzy. So, okay.

We start the backstory improvs. I want to create some time for them to experience their true life, their authentic memories of Moscow, from whose roots this play sprang -- the play within the play that no one will know but them. "We are going back in time, to when the family lived in Moscow. To the first time Vershinin came to visit, when Masha was a little girl, which she still remembers. This was an extremely unimportant event. Very trivial. Let us see this ordinary moment." I had had the actors set up a beautiful upper-class family living room. It had a cream-colored tablecloth from Denmark, and a vase of yellow tulips on the side table. Vershinin came to visit. They had their moment.

We went forward in time. We had another ordinary moment. They started to get more comfortable as the work took hold.

"And now, we go forward a bit more, to when the family is about to move away. They have been packing the house. They will be moving soon. Vershinin comes to visit again." Before we started, I had asked the actors to move all the furniture again, as if it were being prepared for packing. They folded the table, moved the items to the side.

"And in this visit, it happens that Vershinin and Masha have a private moment. Perhaps it is unimportant. It is a moment no one but Masha and Vershinin will ever know happened. Please go outside the room, and have this moment. Do not return until it has happened. Take your time."

The actors were nervous and excited. They glanced at their teachers, at me, and left.

We sat in silence.

It was the first peaceful moment I had felt at Yale.

I sat on the floor, 15 feet from the judges, my back to them, watching the door. The judges sat at their table, watching me and the door.

Minutes passed. No one moved.

The room was sunlit. The air was white. You could hear traffic, the rumbling of the pipes, voices, but the noise was muffled. Sunlight. Silence.

"Oh," I said, suddenly, turning to face the judges. Their eyes brightened, and got happy. "Did you notice how -- " and then the actors came back in. The judges' faces fell, bereft.

What I was going to say was, "Did you notice how much better the set was when the actors thought it didn't matter; when they were just getting the furniture ready for moving, and not trying to make it look good?" I never got to tell them; a Chekhovian moment.

The actors were better after their time alone. Still not fully grounded, but they had glimpsed the dream and were feeling its gravitational pull, starting to vanish.

I worked a bit more, but my time soon ended. We thanked the actors and they left.

The judges asked questions. I answered. It was like we were all puzzled by something; we couldn't find the comfortable vein of talking. Then one of them said, "Rachel, do you want to come to the Yale School of Drama? Don't think." "No," I blurted. "It would cost $100,000 and then how would I start my theatre?" We all rustled and relaxed. "I thought there was something off," said the woman who was the head of the program. "But I couldn't put my finger on it."

We were all relieved.

My "No" was correct. But the reason I gave was only partially correct; there was also something about This is not my home and This is not how I work and I don't want to leave my house in the woods and most fundamentally, This is not a fit.

We sat and talked companionably for the remaining 20 minutes.

"Good decision," said the head of the program. "You are on the rare slow road. Don't get off that. Here, we are on the fast road. We are training them for American theatre, which is like an aircraft carrier -- you have to get the plays UP and ON and LAUNCHED and you only have a few weeks to do it all."

At the end, they all gave me their business cards.

"I think we will be hearing a lot more from you," they said.

And then, matter-of-factly, cheerful at having had a tough decision make itself so cleanly, they walked refreshed back into their busy lives.

I folded the Danish tablecloth, picked up the vase of tulips, and walked outside, relieved to find myself in clean air, and free.

At one point during the questioning, I said something about the actors. They asked me what I thought of each actor. I answered. These were long and thoughtful answers, because I was searching for each answer as I was saying it; reflecting on the actors and who they were becoming; looking at them with Russian and Odin and bootcamp eyes. This was probably the most informative part of the entire audition. They knew the actors very well. They could absolutely calibrate my responses. It was in this answer, of everything I said or did, that they could most clearly see me. I also had the clear sense that some of what I said they agreed with or already knew, and some of what I said was new, unusual. There was that "hmmm" of interest.

Rest in peace, Torgeir Wethal

Torgeir Wethal, one of the founding actors of the Odin Teatret in Denmark, passed away this week. His funeral was Saturday, July 3.

The Odin made a video to honor Torgeir. It shows him from age 17 to 60. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/odinteatretarchives1

Here the pictures which feel most like Torgeir to me. Some of these are from the video, some are from the website. The final one is from my favorite Work Demonstration of his, "Dialogue Between Two Actors," a presentation with Roberta Carerri using an Ibsen text.

This is how I remember Torgeir.

I have three songs for Torgeir.

1. A lullabye, in case he gets scared. Slumber My Darling by Alison Krauss and Yo Yo Ma.

2. A beautiful hymn, sung by a beautiful girl, in a beautiful church. Amazing Grace by Leann Rimes.

3. A rocking girls-night-out celebration by an all-woman band. All The Single Ladies (Rehearsal) by Beyonce. I figure Torgeir will be so happy to get to heaven, and be young again, and healthy, and free -- that he would love to go check out the single ladies.

Two years passed

I dove into DigiPen, and vanished.