Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

HAVING IT
ALL
The muddy, marvelous life of a teaching artist
VINCE RODRIGUEZ TEACHING AT SUMMER
SHAKESPEARE CONSERVATORY; PHOTO BY JAY YAMADA.
ELIZABETH CARTER TEACHING A CAL SHAKES
CLASSROOM RESIDENCY; PHOTO BY JAY YAMADA.
Learn more about Cal Shakes
Teaching Artists’ activities at
calshakes.org/blog.
BY DIRECTOR OF ARTISTIC LEARNING TRISH TILLMAN
AND PUBLICATIONS MANAGER STEFANIE KALEM
10 california shakespeare theater www.calshakes.org
People who teach music, dance, drama and art come into our lives in all kinds
of ways—the neighbor who teaches piano in her living room, the arts and crafts
counselor at summer camp, specialists who teach classes affi liated with a local
theater or perhaps in the school setting itself. We say “perhaps” in reference to
the crushing practice of cutting arts as standard classes in most K–12 settings in
California. However, right under most of our noses, we have brilliant professionals
working in arts education—teaching artists.
“A teaching artist is a professional theater artist who brings real world experience
in the arts to schoolchildren, exposing them to the performing arts in a way they
do not normally encounter in the public school classroom setting,” explains Clive
Worsley, a Cal Shakes associate artist and the popular moderator of our Student
Discovery Matinees. Teaching artists earn their way into this relatively new career
through years of study and experience in both art and teaching. While serving
as a teaching artist for the past decade—most recently teaching Henry VIII in
12 classrooms as part of a seventh-grade-wide Cal Shakes residency at Orinda
Intermediate School—Worsley has been working as a Bay Area actor and director,
and is, most notably, Artistic Director of Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette. “Not only
has being a teaching artist allowed me to make my living solely in the performing
arts by supplementing my income as an actor and director,” says Worsely, “but it
has also helped to deepen my relationship to my craft.” In addition, he continues,
“in seeing my students grow older, continuing to have encounters with them through
school and community events, I have no doubt that the work they did with me in
the classroom has improved their lives as students and as critical thinkers.”
Two other Cal Shakes teaching artists, Elizabeth Carter and Elena Wright, have
both been seen on Cal Shakes’ Main Stage—Carter as the nurse in our 1994
production of Romeo and Juliet, and Wright as the hilarious, drumming Thuria in
2011’s The Verona Project. Carter, whose parents were both educators, has been a
teaching artist for Cal Shakes ever since that summer, and is currently teaching our
brand-new cultural anthropology curriculum at EC Reems Academy of Technology
and Art in Oakland, via the work of Zora Neale Hurston (see pages 6-9). Wright has
been a teaching artist for three years, and is currently participating—on Cal Shakes’
behalf—at Leadership Public in Hayward, teaching Shakespeare and text study as
part of their school-wide, extracurricular-focused Week Without Walls program.
Teaching artists are passionate about fostering students’ abilities to create and