Rehearsal Spaces Research Articles

Constituencies of Care: Imagining Possibilities of Access in US Theatre Pedagogy and Production

Abstract: Conversations about accessibility and representation in US theatre have increased over the past decade, but few articles address how these topics might be incorporated into our classrooms and educational rehearsal spaces. Using as a case study the rehearsal and production processes devised for the Broadway musical How to Dance in Ohio , this Note considers how access initiatives implemented in the nonprofit and professional theatre spheres might be adapted and included in US theatre pedagogical practices for introducing students to comprehensive and holistic approaches to disability inclusion and accordant access initiatives.

Exploring cooperative learning as a tool in civic education

ABSTRACT Background Civic participation is a fundamental element of democracy; therefore, upholding and supporting civic participation, especially among the upcoming generation, is important. Political efficacy – an individual’s understanding of their capacity to participate in civic life – has been found to exert an important influence on the expected civic participation of adolescents. The study reported in this article considers how civic participation can be supported through educational efforts to promote students’ political efficacy. Purpose The study is based on a formative intervention project in the tradition of cultural−historical activity theory (CHAT). Cooperative learning techniques were used in a Norwegian social studies classroom with students aged 13 and 14 to explore how the experience was connected to the students’ political efficacy. Methods The data underlying the research were drawn from focus group interviews with 14-year-old Norwegian students, in which the students evaluated and elaborated on their experiences in the cooperative learning period. Findings Cooperative learning has the potential to enhance students’ political efficacy, mainly by providing students with opportunities to practice democratic skills and through peers functioning as political role models. However, the students’ responses point towards tensions within the student group and between the classroom as a unit of learning and the expectations of the classroom as a unit of individuality and evaluation. These key contradictions may hinder the realisation of cooperative learning classrooms and limit the rehearsal space that could be favourable for political efficacy. Conclusions The study illustrates how using cooperative learning in the social studies classroom can be a way to enhance students’ political efficacy. Simultaneously, the classroom context contains historically developed contradictions that shape the students’ understanding of their classroom experiences.

Building social connection and inclusion through rock music in the Western Balkans: Fostering the art of small changes

This article explores community-based rock music education as a site for strengthening social cohesion in a context of postwar, interethnic divisions. Focusing on small and incremental changes, it examines the practices of Music Connects, a project in the Western Balkans, and its goals of revitalizing rock culture in support of a more inclusive social life and greater freedom of movement in the region. The article explores the ways that an organizational and participant focus on aesthetic practices and artistic goals can still contribute to social goals. It highlights three key tasks connected to rock music education and revitalization, captured in the novel conceptual constructs of rehearsal space, the incubator, and the expansion of normal. Drawing upon qualitative data gathered in 2019 and 2021 from 40 participants, the article tells a story of small social changes through music-making that added up to significant developments in the region, musically and socially.

Listening to the structure: Mass-timber construction at the Groton Hill Music Center

Historically, Western music spaces were built with massive masonry-bearing walls. While these designs offer structural and acoustical benefits, today’s construction culture is conscious of more fluid forms and embodied carbon, which influences how consultants think about the design of spaces for music. The recently completed Groton Hill Music Center is unique for its use of mass timber’s sculptural capabilities to shape performance space acoustic volumes forthrightly, with little additional finish treatment. The center features studio classrooms for students of all ages, an orchestral rehearsal space, a 300-seat recital hall for soloists and small ensembles, and a grand 1000-seat concert hall that opens to view for a 500-seat lawn audience. Structure and architecture are largely unified, with one’s acoustic experience defined by the sculpted mass timber structure. The comparatively light-weight timber/concrete composite structure represents a significant and somewhat acoustically risky reduction in mass to provide an acoustically warm environment. This presentation will explore how the structure was optimized to provide stiffness and multi-scale diffusion, taking the ideals of classic concert hall design, and embracing contemporary construction technologies and acoustical analyses.

Co-Writing with Care: Ethics in/as Rehearsal

This article offers a vision of how scholars in community-engaged research can use peer co-writing to rehearse ethical engagement as an ongoing, contingent practice woven throughout the research process. The authors position ethics as both a process of constant rehearsal and the thing they are rehearsing for. As the co-authors cared for each other as scholars and people, through both honest critique and humble support, co-writing became a rehearsal space for translating theoretical ideas of ethics and community engagement into embodied practice. They found María Puig de la Bellacasa’s formulation of knowledge products as “matters of care” influential in shaping how they understand and practise ethics. Positioning the enactment of care as the ethical standard of collaboration does the work of making research more sustainable and generative by placing value on the interpersonal relationships that make research viable and not only on the research product. It also allows them to interrogate how individual knowledges are informed by larger communities and challenges them to acknowledge how all thinking is a collaborative process.

Extending Voice Work

“Extending Voice Work” documents a 2018 transdisciplinary research project (with an actor, director, musician, and philosopher), which explored the rehearsal space as feminist praxis and culminated in a production of the one-woman show Sabina’s Splendid Brain, by Canadian playwright Carol Sinclair. The rehearsal process included an extended or expanded voice workshop by Fides Krucker. The article traces a first-person, first-time experience of undergoing a voice workshop. It draws on a thick description of this experience to argue that voice work revolutionizes an understanding of key feminist philosophies of embodiment. In allowing a person to unearth and tangibly connect to preverbal bodily memories, voice work enables an experience of aspects of these feminist theories in practice. However, the article claims voice work also illuminates the limitations of these feminist concepts in their overall theorization of embodiment and the voice. An attentiveness to the practice of voice work demonstrates the inadequacy and undesirability of any one or any final theorization of embodiment. Instead, the article claims, voice work opens up a space for an ongoing rethinking of the intertwining of meaning and embodiment. It concludes that voice work can be a practice that allows us to connect with, write, resist, and rewrite the ever-emerging stories of our own, always embodied experience.

Even better musicians: Acoustic enhancement in the music classroom

Music educators are using electronic sound reproduction and acoustic enhancement in primary and secondary schools – and are producing better musicians as a result. The development of musical ability is inherently tied to room acoustics; a supportive variable acoustic environment accelerates the ear training and critical listening skills to proficiently play or sing in an ensemble. This presentation will review findings from the past 20 years spent with these technologies in music education. How might sound reproduction be optimized for learning clarinet? How can acoustic enhancement reduce the potential for hearing loss and other playing injuries? Is a low ceiling ever beneficial in a music rehearsal space? (Hint: no – but we’ll attempt to address that, too).

The Old Police House (TOPH): Treatise

ABSTRACT In the thick of austerity, small arts communities are tested to the brink. The Arts in the North of England had been hit with staggered funding cuts, almost halving resources available from arts funders, arts organisations and the councils. In 2013, the largest DIY space in Newcastle was forced to move, closing for 2 years whilst Morden Tower, a building rich in artistic heritage, fell in to such disrepair it was forced to close. A hole was left. The Old Police House, a small DIY rehearsal space for a DJ project in Gateshead, was just that. An old police house without heating or funding that, in response to community needs, became a make-shift venue and home to several young artists and projects. Seven years on with two venue moves, two changes of Prime Minister, the threat of a super-council looming over ‘Newcastle-Gateshead’ and competing programmers, what impact does DIY art have? How has the local artistic community changed? Do equity and equality still exist in a climate of prescriptive narratives from Arts Funders, tick-box feedback forms and tokenistic funding? This paper proposes to explore the challenges of running an urban experimental community arts venue within this cultural context, drawing on the authors’ personal experiences as an active participant.

Management of Christian Entertainment in Semarang

Christian Entertainment is a music group from Semarang that manages its management to maintain its existence and music quality. This is evidenced by the participation of Christian Entertainment in the entertainment industry and music performances, especially in wedding events, from 1999 until now. The purpose of this research was to understand and describe the performance management of Christian Entertainment and identify the factors that hinder and support the management activities carried out by the group. This research is a descriptive study with a qualitative approach. Data collection techniques employed in this study included observation, interviews, and documentation. Data validity was ensured through triangulation. Christian Entertainment, in terms of management functions, involve planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. The elements of Christian Entertainment's management include man, material, method, machine, market, and money. The management principles applied by Christian Entertainment are division of labor, delegation of rights and responsibilities, and unity of direction. The lack of a dedicated rehearsal space poses a challenge to the management activities conducted by Christian Entertainment Music Group.
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Rehearsing Upload

This article examines the process of developing a posthuman opera, Michel van der Aa’s Upload (2021), from the perspective of a rehearsal ethnography. Proposing a rehearsal-oriented ontology of opera, this article avoids discussions of the performance and even the music itself to focus on stages of rehearsing with a virtual body. As a participant-observer, I examine how the rehearsal space of Upload evolves into a laboratory that negotiates receptacles of digital data with congenital bodies. Dissecting the avatar as a compound of (non)human agents, I interrogate how rehearsing a virtual body reconfigures operatic production dynamics. The operatic rehearsal processes repetition and connection, and co-evolves together with the technologies of production. With the example of various agents’ interactions during the rehearsal, I illustrate how the figure of the avatar reproduces Upload out of canonical rehearsal practices by recalibrating the connections between opera’s agents. These elaborations lead to an understanding of van der Aa as a composer who recalibrates himself into the posthuman form of an opera production.

Vietas nozīme stāstījumos par dejošanu Pārdaugavā

It is important for people to structure the space around them and give it meaning, and this is evident in the stories of people involved in dance, not only talking about the process of dancing itself but also about the place and space where they dance. The project “Urban Experiences: Narratives, Memories and Place Heritage” (lzp-2020/1-0096), implemented by researchers from the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art at the University of Latvia and launched in 2021, includes a study in Rīga, Pārdaugava. It involved interviews with representatives of folk dance and stage folk dance groups working in Pārdaugava. In order to deepen the understanding of an important community of practitioners of Latvia’s intangible cultural heritage – dancers and dance teachers – the aim of this article is to find out where folk dance and stage folk dance perform today, which are the places they pay attention to and highlight as important, and how they shape their everyday dance life. Experiencing different places and spaces in the city shapes both the identity of dancers and dance teachers and the perception of a particular place. In other words, there is a two-way interaction: the person shapes the place, and the place shapes the person. Through semi-structured interviews with members of the dance community and subsequent analysis, the place where classes and concerts take place is crucial in sustaining their everyday practices. Rehearsal spaces create an atmosphere for everyday activities and are also important for socialising and maintaining a sense of community. Although most dancing takes place indoors, in recent years, there has been more dancing outdoors. And although this experience has not always been seen as a success, it has provided a different perspective on the space around us, and an opportunity for people who do not dance to be exposed to different dance practices. The article “The importance of place in narratives about dancing in Pārdaugava” analyses the contexts in which places appear in the narratives of people involved in dance, the meanings they attach to them and what they highlight as important characteristics of the dance environment, which in turn constitute this important part of the intangible cultural heritage.

Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach by Lisa Porter and Narda E. Alcorn

Reviewed by: Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach by Lisa Porter and Narda E. Alcorn Tom Humes He/Him Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice: Cultivating a Creative Approach. Lisa Porter and Narda E. Alcorn. New York: Routledge, 2020; pp. 133. Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice has been on my reading list since it became available for preorder in late 2019. I was drawn to it by recommendations from my colleagues and practitioner friends. This book stands apart from other textbooks due to the authors' focus on more subtle nuances of stage management, such as navigating systems of communication that may be culturally different than those to which the stage manager is accustomed. Other stage management textbooks scratch the surface when it comes to conflict, but they do not dig deep to discover the roots of why the conflict may arise, let alone explore a series of tools to resolve it. Porter and Alcorn divide the book into eight chapters that investigate factors that influence a stage manager's leadership: Theory, Practice, Environment, Communication, Orchestration, Culture, Ethics, and Purpose. These chapters focus on person-centered management, not only of the collaborators on the various teams with which the stage manager interacts but also of the stage manager themself. Person-centered management takes into account factors that may be influencing a person's viewpoint or process rather than focusing on a single metric such as productivity or output. Anecdotal examples of the authors' experience in various art forms ranging from Broadway to opera to circus provide the reader an understanding of situations in which they've triumphed or have learned the hard way to adapt. At the end of each chapter, Porter and Alcorn urge the reader to examine each factor from their own perspective with the sections "In Theory and Practice," which leads the reader through some guided exercises to implement strategies from the chapter, and "Think Like a Stage Manager," which provides thoughtful questions to reinforce continued critical thinking about and examination of the reader's current and future processes. Porter and Alcorn have done a great job of discussing these factors without getting too mired in the explanation of how to stage manage. Readers looking for more instructive or introductive texts might turn to Larry Fazio's Stage Manager: The Professional Experience or Thomas Kelly's The Back Stage Guide to Stage Management. In contrast, Stage Management Theory as a Guide to Practice can serve as a resource for an advanced stage management course for junior or senior undergraduate students or a graduate student course. This book will help stage managers who have plenty of experience with traditional theatre structures but find themselves working in shows/theatres/genres that are unfamiliar and may need to adapt to new ways of thinking. For example, in the "Ethics" chapter, there is a subsection about intimacy and ways that stage managers can and should advocate for safe practices within their rehearsal spaces. Intimacy coordination and direction are newer responses to some of the more harmful practices that have taken place in the rehearsal room, and if participants are informed about these methods, harm can be actively reduced. However, when the stage manager finds themself without a coordinator in a process that delves into physical or cultural intimacy, they can learn the basic building blocks of creating and advocating for a respectful space in Porter and Alcorn's book. The stage manager sets the tone for a respectful rehearsal space, and usually they are seen as the person who may need to step up and speak out when someone crosses a line. A moment within this book that resonates with me is Alcorn's firsthand account of a time within a process where a white collaborator spoke the "N-word," referencing a line within the play text. She writes: "I called a break and privately explained that his language was inappropriate. I expected an apology, but he told me he had used it in other productions where it had appeared in the script and no one had seemed upset" (101). I have wrestled with situations of a similar nature in some...

Subjective success of exterior glazing with both a light and heavy hand

The subjective success of the isolation of exterior noise depends greatly on the nature of the site noise, the use of the isolated space, and the client’s expectations. The architectural solution must respond to all of these factors, as well as budget and aesthetics. In recent years, Kirkegaard has completed several projects in which glazed walls separate a performance or rehearsal space from an urban or suburban exterior. Solutions have ranged from simple to “heavy-handed,” with a varying degree of subjective success. This paper offers a range of case studies, including situations where a significant retreat from “heavy-handed” solutions was subjectively successful and one situation where a modest retreat from “heavy-handed” solutions was not subjectively successful.

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

Two case studies in approach to the renovation of volumetrically challenged music rehearsal spaces

A music rehearsal room renovation can be acoustically challenging in that there is often limited room volume, lack of loudness control, and budget constraints. Two case studies detail these challenges. (1) The University of North Texas’ choral rehearsal room was due for renovation and with a volume of only 44,000 cubic feet, the room had to accommodate choral ensembles varying from 20–85 people for daily use, over 100 voices for an annual festival, and an added recital use. At an appropriate budget, the renovation used room shaping to simultaneously break up parallel surfaces and support voices while also adding adjustable acoustics to allow for tuning of the room for each rehearsal or performance. (2) The University of Texas at San Antonio’s large band, orchestra, and jazz rehearsal room lacked loudness control even with an approximate volume of 73,500 cubic feet to serve 30 – 70 + musicians. At a much more limited budget, the solution was to flip the orientation of the musician layout in the room to take advantage of the existing room geometry and to introduce variable absorption stored exposed to the room which increased the overall absorption while also giving the ensembles an opportunity to tune the room.

The Ethics of Care in Pedagogy and Performance: Intersections with Disability Justice, Intimacy Work, and Theatre of the Oppressed

This article argues that an applied ethics of care practice is central to the work of addressing the patriarchal and racist practices embedded within both professional and educational theatre spaces and their protocols and policies. Many theatre faculty in both the classroom and in rehearsal spaces encounter students' trauma(s), but often lack the tools to adequately guide students down from that trauma once it has been activated. In this article, Kate Busselle, Erin Kaplan, and Samuel Yates theorize what ethics of care in theatre and performances spaces might look like when creating systems and structures to protect students from future harm, address potential trauma in the moment, and mitigate the damage incurred from past experiences. Building from the foundations of feminist ethics of care theorists such as Virginia Held, Lisa Tessman, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, the authors share strategies for establishing ethical care processes to safeguard students in the classroom and in rehearsal spaces.

‘Theatre, Revolution and Love’: Moral–aesthetic education in Asja Lācis' proletarian children's theatre

Abstract This article explores the educational philosophy of Asja Lācis' proletarian children's theatre. Taking her post–First World War encounter with Russian street children as a starting point for my inquiry, I argue that Lācis regards the theatre as a rehearsal space for life. Here, children are to be absorbed into the craft of theatre, with the aim of honing their moral and aesthetic sense as a (self-guided) reorientation of their attention and desire towards (the possibilities of) the Good. Demarcating a porous educational theatre space that provides practical artistic opportunities for this education of attention, Lācis hopes to structure children's aesthetic, social, material and sensory engagement with their surroundings, whilst also ensuring their individual freedom as moral agents. Respecting children's ways of engaging in the world, Lācis posits theatrical improvisation as the key activity. Here, children create their own stories and metaphors about how life might be lived, thereby practising attention to, ‘testing’ and reflecting upon, the (possible) Good Life. The educator's pedagogical gesture is hereby that of observation: She pays attention to the social–artistic tensions that occur, as potential heralds of the child's unique way of embodying (and conceptualising) the Good Life. Theatre is here understood as a (negative) dialectical site of education, one that acknowledges the dark and uncertain relation between the child's commitment to the Good, and its (uncertain) coming into being in daily life. The student–teacher relationship can indeed become a pedagogical conduit for this search for (and embodiment of) wisdom, but cannot provide a blueprint as to how the journey might be conducted, or predict how the Good will manifest. It is in the ‘loving’ non-action of the educator, who honours the unpredictability of the arrival of virtue, and the unexpected form that it might take, that children's theatre is considered ‘truly revolutionary’: becoming a witness to Eros's (strange) presence in the child's unique gesture as a result.

Rehearsing Posthumanism

In this paper, I explore the rehearsal process of a new opera production about mind uploading by the composer, librettist, and director Michel van der Aa, called Upload. It was produced at the Dutch National Opera in Spring and premiered at the Bregenzer Festspiele in July 2021. As an ethnographer and writer for the Opera Forward Festival, I attended two months on site in the rehearsal spaces in Amsterdam and conducted twelve interviews with the production team. Drawing on Upload as the main case study for this presentation, my key intervention lies in proposing a methodology for examining operas that explore new, digital technology not only on stage but in processes of rehearsal. By focusing on an opera on posthumanism, I seek to shed light on how nonhuman and human materialities collide and learn to intertwine – beyond the dichotomy of vision and with a focus on the sonosphere of the rehearsal space – over the course of eight weeks. Due to Upload’s extensive use of new technology in the rehearsal space, this production challenges operatic production logics. It brings both wanted and parasitic sounds to the rehearsal. The posthuman, or after-human, setting disperses agential connections between humans and machines. By eliciting new modes of collaborating with machines within the operatic framework, this piece offers ways of reconsidering the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in 21st-century operas. Focusing on rehearsal ethnography, I extend the concept of the operatic work beyond the score and the performance. By theorizing present rehearsal practices in their moment of emergence, I explore what it means to rehearse with an avatar in a posthuman setting. To enter this debate, I explore ways of knowing through the audible space, drawing on Steven Feld’s concept of acoustemology, as well as Jane Bennett’s notion of ‘vibrant matter’ that argues for the agency of nonhuman materialities. Moreover, I investigate the figure of the avatar, one of the epitomes of posthumanism, through taking on a science and technology studies lens. By drawing on the notion of experimental systems introduced by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, I dissect how the avatar turns the operatic rehearsal from a production machinery with technical objects into an experimental system with unknown variables, called epistemic things. The opera deals with uploading your mind to a server, turning it into an avatar, and losing your physical body in the process. In the opera, the father turns into an avatar while his daughter remains in the world we know. Content-wise, this operatic work circles around the human in their entanglement with new media, specifically focusing on virtual realities. It sheds light on the friction arising when technology and human collide in novel ways, leading beyond binary discussions of non-human or human, virtual, or material. How does the artistic focus on a tech-driven chimera reconfigure the entire rehearsal process – even to the extent that I scribbled 'silent' as the very first fieldnote?

Acoustical criteria and design approaches for music education and rehearsal spaces

Case studies of three music education spaces will present acoustical measurement data with architectural features of the rooms compared to criteria from Sabine (1964), Pirn (1978), Gade (1988), Wenger (2008), and Tsaih (2011) among others to assess the sound qualities of the spaces. Among other qualities, reverberation time, room volume, hearing each other, and speech intelligibility are evaluated. Data are also compered to the Norwegian Standard NS 8178-2014. The case studies show how these criteria can be achieved given very different architectural systems employed in the rooms and describe the limits of where the qualities cannot be achieved due to the limits of program, budget, site, or space. Efforts are made to make each surface in the rooms acoustically productive in an optimized design to the extent practicable.

Sound isolation systems and HVAC noise control: The hidden acoustical systems in music practice and rehearsal spaces

An important part of the design and acoustical performance of music education spaces are the sound isolation systems employed to reduce sound bleed between and among different spaces and the designed control of noise and vibration from building mechanical systems. Three case studies present challenges addressed in actual projects. One is a multi-story fine arts building at a university where all of the major acoustical spaces are built as rooms within rooms and the HVAC is distributed from a large rooftop mechanical room. The second is a single storey building at a public high school where primary, secondary, and tertiary sound separations, and HVAC system zones are clearly defined and describe the basic architecture of the facility. The third describes the steps in design required to transform significant acoustical difficulties in sound transmission and HVAC system noise into an expressive architectural and acoustical space built on a very modest budget.