While it may seem like West Texas has little access to the international theatre community, the students at Texas Tech take part in many signature programs that connect them to artists and scholars worldwide.

A group of master’s and doctoral students has recently returned from the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival in Massachusetts where they spent 5 days watching theatre, listening to engaging lectures, and enjoying the walkable, seaside town.

Before the trip, students are prepared by their instructors to give them a more enriching experience. This preparation includes a class where they read plays and scholarship. Fine Arts doctoral student Josh Rapp, remarked, “We have class to prep us for those conversations so that when we get to the Williams Festival, we’re talking about what we’re seeing, but we’re also talking from a perspective of all this scholarship that’s been given to us, so we enter in the conversation with a bunch of literary experience.”

The theme for the festival this year was memory which guided the conversation about the productions. At the festival, students got to attend several performances such as The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly, Last Summer, Green Eyes, and Something Cloudy, Something Clear, all by Tennessee Williams, that explored and exploited the theme, sometimes seriously, often playfully, always imaginatively. 

E.B. Leighton, an MFA Performance & Pedagogy student reflected on a performance by the Die-Cast Ensemble that impressed her: “They took two pieces by Williams, Suddenly Last Summer and Green Eyes, and they reinvented them in a way that was truly breathtaking. There was a large sense of community within the pieces.”

While the Tennessee Williams Festival experience is only offered to graduate students, undergraduates are encouraged to participate in summer programs such as The Marfa Intensive or WildWind Performance Lab.

Located in the artsy desert city of Marfa, Texas, The Marfa Intensive asks students to take what they’ve learned in the classroom to a more professional setting, taking advantage of the environment. Over two weeks, they take on the challenge of mounting a devised theatre piece. This means they are not only training as performers, but also as creators as they develop their own scripts, designs, and choreography. The intensive is led by Dr. Chris Staley who describes the process as “putting into practice the tools to create something else.”

Taylor Snoga attended Marfa as a BFA Dance major which helped her to analyze the way performers take a concept from rehearsals to the stage: “As a dancer, our creative process looked a little different from the other people that were there, so it was really interesting and nice to see how other people create and the steps that they take.”

The work that Snoga and others did at Marfa has also influenced the 2024/2025 Mainstage season. The Ghost Project, under the direction of Dr. Chris Staley, will continue the work on the performances developed at Marfa for a performance in February.

The School of Theatre & Dance strives to connect students by bringing these artists to campus. WildWind Performance Lab is a three-week program in which participants take workshops from industry professionals and aid in the process of developing new works. In this space, the students work alongside the guest artists in a fast-paced and focused environment.

This summer, guest artists included The Pack Company, a collective that focuses on play development; Jim Wren, who led a self-tape workshop; Chris Bannow, who coached students through scene work with high tension; and Brian Quijada, who taught looping, a music technique, among many others. 

MFA Performance & Pedagogy student, Ayanna Taylor says, “We got to contribute to our ideas about new scripts and it was fascinating to have the … playwright in the room with us and watch them come in the next day with like thirty new pages.” 

Students are also encouraged to seek out their own opportunities for experiential learning so the school can support their individual goals. Over the summer, doctoral student, Rebecca Johnson, attended a 2-week intensive program with the Suzuki Company of Toga in Japan where she studied the Suzuki Method of Actor Training.

She found the program through Dr. Chris Staley while working as his teaching assistant. She advises, “I think it’s really important to find the faculty [who]… really invests in what you’re doing. Since Chris is a movement teacher, and that’s a lot of what I do, I always felt very supported by him as well as through the university to go.”

She said the SCOT program “directly correlates with my dissertation with trying to do more global practices for movement pedagogy.” Johnson reflects that she is “really trying to grow in terms of my understanding of what movement looks like on a global scale to help my students in the future.” She, along with four other students, also attended a mask workshop last fall in Ankara, Turkey, at our partner institution, Bilkent University, where they created their own masks and performed in an amphitheater in Ephesus. 

These experiences are essential to furthering student experience to better prepare them for the professional world upon graduation. Director of the School of Theatre & Dance, Dr. Mark Charney, explains, “All of it’s about connections, about giving all of our students a better opportunity by introducing them to professional companies and artists who also serve as their mentors, complementing the experience of the professors in our School.”  

For many students, these opportunities show them what is possible and even influence their future projects and goals. Taylor expressed that, at WildWind, “We learned looping in one of the workshops, and so I plan on using that in my thesis in some way. It was interesting to learn that.” 

As Texas Tech continues to make connections with artists from all over the world, new opportunities for students become realities. These experiences, guided by knowledgeable faculty, represent that the School of Theatre & Dance brings the world to Texas Tech, and students, in turn, to the world—better preparing them for their future work as well as broadening their perspectives.