Theater companies nationwide are cutting back by mounting shows with smaller casts, leaving more actors looking for work, just as state governments are looking to close budget gaps by laying off teachers. For anyone hoping to make the transition from performing artist to performing arts teacher, it would appear that the prospects of success are doubly small.
"Certainly there's a nationwide perception that teaching is under siege, that performing arts programs are facing budget cuts," said Robert Colby, an associate professor and the director of teacher education in the performing arts department of Emerson College in Boston.
And the headlines seem to bear that out. For example, in early March, roughly 7,000 Los Angeles public school teachers got pink slips due to budget cuts. The month before, New York City announced that it would need to shed some 4,700 teachers to make ends meet.
Actors may be used to this kind of doom and gloom on the job front, but things might not be so hopeless for those who want to become schoolteachers. According to Colby, while public schools have seen significant cuts to music and visual arts programs, performing arts programs have mostly been spared "because they were so small to begin with." In New York, for instance, of those 4,700 proposed layoffs, none are slated to come from Manhattan's LaGuardia Arts high school (of "Fame" fame), according to city Department of Education figures. The Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a high school in Queens, would lose only one teacher.
Fall Back
Teaching has long been a way for actors to earn an income between gigs, and there are still plenty of education jobs to be had if you know where to look, say theater educators and actors. If not in public schools, there are opportunities in private and charter schools or in theater-education programs at museums, camps, and elsewhere. Schools are still hiring graduates of master's degree programs in theater education, but some are also drawing from the deeper pool of actors with a wealth of experience to share with students.
"As far as day jobs go, it's pretty damn satisfying," said Kevin Laibson, an actor and director who also teaches improvisation at the New York Film Academy. "Next to Starbucks, this is great."
Laibson, who also runs a production company called Magic Futurebox and is a theater curator at the Tank, an arts space in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, started teaching eight years ago in Philadelphia, where for economic reasons it was "absolutely a necessity" for him to become a teacher, he said. He didn't have a teaching degree, so "I had to throw myself into the literature" and "become a much better student than I ever was when I was a student."
It paid off, not just with a paycheck but also in helping to make him a better actor. "When you're first learning acting," Laibson explained, "you're wrapped up in your own process and journey. You never watch other people." But as a teacher, he said, doing an acting exercise over and over again with his students has helped him become far more disciplined about his own acting: "It's always refreshing to teach the work I have to do every week."
The New York Film Academy likes "actors with professional experience to come into the classroom," particularly for technique and on-camera classes, said Glenn Kalison, chair of the acting for film program. "Our teachers are still doing it."
Many NYFA instructors are not full-time faculty members, which gives them the flexibility to take acting gigs when they come up, Kalison said, while allowing the school to bring in the best-possible working actors to teach its students. Since the national economic woes began three years ago, Kalison has noticed more inquiries from working actors looking to get into NYFA's teaching rotation.
Back to School
There's also strong interest among actors in earning an education degree, which is required to teach in many public and private schools. "I'm happy to say that we had quite a large application pool this year," said Jennifer Katona, director of the graduate program in educational theater at the City College of New York. "We did not see a dip, which did surprise me. I thought we might."
Of the 85 students in the program, many have professional backgrounds in theater, from regional to Broadway, Katona said. They spend two years in one of five tracks, three of which lead to teacher certification in theater for pre-kindergarten through 12th grade and a master's degree in educational theater (one track provides just the certification and the other just the degree). Graduates go on to become theater teachers, arts administrators, and teaching artists and to work in afterschool programs, camps, and other places.
In addition, current and future teachers should think about adding dramatic elements to regular classroom instruction, said Rosalind Flynn, head of the master's program in theater education at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. At the university and as a teaching artist at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Flynn shows students and educators how to incorporate methods that actors use to prepare for a role. Reading a script, visualizing a scene, and deciding what's important in the text can all be used to help teach children to read, for example.
Having the flexibility to pick up any teaching job is important, though, because positions in the performing arts are fewer than in other disciplines and they rarely open up, according to Flynn. "Usually if you're the drama teacher, you are the only one in the school," she said. "And the people who get those jobs tend to stay in them a long time." Still, there are jobs to be had out there, added Flynn, who regularly sees positions cross her desk and passes them on to students.
In Boston and the surrounding region, said Colby, "there seems to continue to be employment," much of it at independent institutions such as private and charter schools. He said he has seen "as many applicants as ever" to Emerson's master's program in theater education, which emphasizes practical experience through internships or working at cultural organizations.
The degree prepares graduates for a variety of teaching roles, Colby said, and getting in front of an audience of students—whether pre-K children or budding thespians just out of college—can only help an actor develop beyond his or her own schooling. "Actors become better when they teach," said Kalison. "In some sense, actors are working on their craft when they teach."
This is part one of a two-part series. The next installment will focus on Southern California teachers.