“I think of everything that our faculty does as research,” says School of Dramatic Arts Dean Emily Roxworthy, an artist-scholar with a long history of integrating scholarship, performance and education. “Our performance faculty, who are working actors — that’s creative research. They’re able to bring the cutting edge of our industry into the classroom. Our faculty and students are exploring the intersection of comedy and health care across the L.A. area — the incredibly accomplished scholars on our faculty are helping us understand the past to help us imagine the future of our creative fields.”
Dean Roxworthy’s research into theatrical and cinematic portrayals of academics has allowed her to look at academia from another angle. Her most recent book, The Theatrical Professoriate: Contemporary Higher Education and Its Academic Dramas (Routledge), was inspired by a little-known phenomenon that occurred at the 2015 Academy Awards ceremony: all four awards for best acting performance that year went to actors portraying university professors.
“Why is playing a professor considered this incredible acting feat? That was the a-ha moment for me,” Dean Roxworthy explains. In addition to examining portrayals of academics in film and on stage, her research explores different ways in which the dramatic arts can make a lasting change in society — a major focus of the research and pedagogy that permeates the School.
“First, the representation we put on stage and screen can really affect the way that people look at the world,” Dean Roxworthy says. “And what we do can be really helpful in solving problems that a range of industries face, especially higher education.”
Chair of Critical Studies & Dramatic Writing Rena M. Heinrich agrees. Professor Heinrich, whose book, Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama (Rutgers University Press) has been influential in the fields of Performance and Ethnic Studies, believes that learning from educators on the forefronts of research gives students a valuable educational experience. Heinrich acknowledges that theatre, film and other narrative arts serve an entertainment purpose in society, but she sees the dramatic arts as serving a deeper purpose as well.
“It exposes us to experiences we may not have had otherwise, and it illuminates something about our own history and our own time,” Heinrich explains. “Plays reveal realities about the world we’re living in. Even if they’re historically from a different period, they’re illuminating something about how this culture and this society work. They’re presenting that theory to you, even in a creative fashion.”
A fresh look at Stanislavksy
Professor Sharon Marie Carnicke is one of the most respected scholars on Chekhov and Stanislavsky in the world, and her latest work, Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis (Methuen Drama), sheds new light on one of the least known of the acting techniques developed by Stanislavsky in the last century, called Active Analysis. While many translations of Stanislavsky’s writings have presented him as rigid and inflexible, in accord with Soviet censorship, Carnicke’s uniquely structured book relies upon untranslated and uncensored sources. The first half brings him to life through transcripts of his classes and the second half demonstrates the use of Active Analysis in the context of her own acting workshop.
“Active Analysis starts with the notion that a play is a score for performance,” Professor Carnicke says. “We need to figure out, what are the facts in the text— like notes in a score of music — that are necessary for us to play accurately? Then we allow ourselves to step into those facts and create the life of the play with our own bodies and souls — to become a collaborator with the text — by improvising with those areas in the text which are open for interpretation.”
In Professor Carnicke’s “Acting Theory” class, students are given the opportunity to prepare performance pieces using various acting techniques, giving them a sense of the different ways actors have trained throughout history. This includes a chance to train in Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis under the supervision of a globally renowned expert. “Suddenly the whole thing becomes active and interesting and fun,” Professor Carnicke says of Active Analysis. “Over the years, it has also become my way into almost everything I teach. The play will change, the history will change, the facts will change. But my research has re-formed the way I can make plays of many eras so easily accessible to my students.”
Theatre on the edge
Perhaps no class taught at the School of Dramatic Arts exemplifies the nexus between research and education like Meiling Cheng’s popular “Theatre on the Edge.” Professor Cheng’s course originally stemmed from research for her influential book In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (University of California Press), which explored Cheng’s theory of multicentricity and examined performance art in Los Angeles. Although she had only intended to offer the class for a short time, she soon noticed that the waitlist for the course began to exceed its enrollment.
“I thought, okay — people are looking for classes like that. So I started offering it every semester,” Professor Cheng said.
Described with deceptive simplicity as “an exploration of the art of theatre at the edge of possibilities,” Professor Cheng’s course pushes students to experiment with new modes of expression in an effort to find their voices.
Professor Cheng’s more recent work, Beijing Xingwei: Contemporary Chinese Time-Based Art (Seagull Books), served as the inspiration for another class exploring performance art in China for non-majors. She sees the separation between art and research as a false dichotomy that needs to be broken down.
“A lot of times we think that critical work means analysis and detachment, creative work means spontaneousness and imagination. I don’t really believe that division is inherent,” Professor Cheng says. “If we feel something and perceive something, why can’t we just bring it into critical practice?”
The scholarship being done in the School is so rich and varied that it can be hard to keep track of all the avenues of research being conducted. Professor Sybil Wickersheimer’s recent work Scene Shift: U.S. Set Designers in Conversation (Focal Press), written together with SDA alumna Maureen Weiss (BFA ’96), set off a global conversation between primarily non-cisgender and nonmale set designers from different countries, allowing them to share their experiences, triumphs and challenges in a series of events that brought people together after a difficult few years for theatre caused by the pandemic. Professor Wayne Federman’s recent book The History of Stand-Up: From Mark Twain to Dave Chappelle has been praised as an important work chronicling the evolution of stand-up comedy from vaudeville to Netflix.
Scholarship and education support each other in ways that aren’t always obvious. A world-class research institution like the USC School of Dramatic Arts provides students the unique opportunity to train with both working artists and scholars leading the conversations in their fields. “That’s what makes a research university so special,” Dean Roxworthy says. “What you’re learning isn’t just what that professor has taught for the past twenty years. It’s constantly adapting to the latest discoveries in scholarship, to exactly what is happening out in the industry.”
This article appeared in the 2024-25 issue of Callboard magazine. Read more stories from the issue online.