Kent Barrett, Theatre and Dance
Reworking of the Performance Design Curriculum
I attended the Valley and Ridge workshop in the summer of 2023 in order to integrate principles and practices of sustainability within a complete reworking of the performance design curriculum we offer through the department of theatre and dance at Dickinson College.
I am proposing to reimagine 3 courses beginning in the fall of 2024, interweaving sustainable practices and community engaged ways of making throughout all of them. The course titles (formed through V&R Workshop programming) are Sustainable Light Design, Scenic Construction and Painting Techniques, and Sustainably Sculpting with Light and Space. Within each course an emphasis is placed upon where “material” (in its myriad forms) comes from and where it goes, once our use for it has expired. The courses will also focus on community partnering, experiential learning, and collaboration as their core tenets.
Throughout the Valley and Ridge workshop, I was exposed to (and inspired by) a great deal of techniques, ideas, and conversations surrounding not just sustainable practices (and the incredible breadth and depth of all that this word encompasses), but pedagogical approaches such as “connect before content” and examining the mission vision and values of our class work and the community partners we hope to engage with. I also learned through the UNSDG’s that the ideas of sustainability can encompass values such as peace, equity, justice, collaboration, resiliency, health, and universal responsibility. All values and systems that we can interlace into future and current practices.
The formal and informal structure of this workshop led me to reimagine these three courses with sustainability as the core nucleus that everything else revolves around, but also helped me to reconceive how we approach many of our current courses and practices. As an example, this year in stage technology, rather than begin by building wooden objects that the student may or may not throw away, we are partnering with parks and rec and the college farm to build and install bird houses, bat houses, and bee structures that will help promote our hyper localized ecosystems.
This workshop was incredibly impactful; it sincerely transformed the way I think and work as an educator, artist, and person.