Kevin B. Held – Personal Manifesto
My 5 Personal Guiding Principles for Theater-Making
1. Theater is about community and it is for everyone.
2. Theater is a vital force in the over-connected, fast paced, inhumane world in which we live.
3. In the theater, as in life, collaboration is vital.
4. In all theater, but especially educational theater, the process is more important than the product, but a successful process will lead to a polished product.
5. Don't be afraid to push beyond the boundaries of the box.
My Guiding Principles Explicated
Theater is about community and it is for everyone.
I have worked in secondary schools for my entire career. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community to nurture a successful theater program. Theater needs audience and interaction as well as students who want to be involved in all aspects of production. There is no theater without an audience.
One great example of the power of theater for me was Taipei American School's production of The Laramie Project, the Tectonic Theater Project's moving play about the death of gay college student Matthew Shepard. The Upper School principal decided that he wanted to address the silence surrounding homophobia in our school community head-on. He asked the theater program to use this production to open the new black box theater and the school invited Judy Shepard to come speak to the whole student body. This was a transformative experience not only for the 30 student actors and the 20 student technicians; it was a conduit to open a dialogue in the school community and encourage people to be more opening accepting of the LGBT community. This play inspired a group of students to found an organization to work alongside local groups working for LBGT rights and lifted the veil of silence on the issue of homophobia.
Theater is a vital force in the over-connected, fast paced, inhumane world in which we live.
It seems like the world continues to move more quickly, but, inside the walls of the theater, time slows down to a human pace. There is a real genuine connection between human performers and human audiences that cannot be replicated elsewhere. There is a paradox in the modern world – over-connected people with hundreds of "Facebook friends" can be (and often are) depressed, lonely, and actually disconnected. Theatre is a way to fully engage, and it has the power to make us more human.
In college, I served as the stage manager for an amateur production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. The year was 1991 and the conservative College of the Holy Cross allowed the production to happen on campus, but not in the theater. We were given an old cafeteria slated for demolition. We moved tray returns to become a make-shift backstage. That production moved the audience to tears and had an extended run because it addressed a problem in the campus community.
Recently, I was introduced to Punchdrunk Theater and their installation/event/ theater. I was impressed with Punchdrunk Theater's production of Sleep No More – their take on the classic Macbeth story. The performers were inches away from the audience who were in constant motion up and down on different floors of the performance venue. To enter the "McKitterick Hotel" you needed to give up your cell phone at the door. This kept people from taking photos, but it also kept people focused on the present moment. This real connectionmade this experience of theater more powerful, and also more human. Watching Lady Macbeth wash her hands or watching the rolling Christmas trees represent Birnam Woods was transformative for the audience.
In the theater, as in life, collaboration is vital.
No one does theater alone. Unlike visual art that can be produced by one artist, theater needs scenic designers, lighting designers, as much as it needs directors and actors. Everyone works together – I remember feeling like a major contributor to the artistry of a theatrical production when I was simply opening the main curtain at the correct speed when the stage manager cued me.
This extended quote about collaboration is from one of my favorite theater artists:
Collaboration is the biggest word in the theater.
It is the most important element in theatrical success.
Not just the collaboration between an author and composer,
but the total collaboration in every play, the convergence
and co-ordination of all the different talents, producing,
writing, directing, choreography, acting, scene designing,
costume designing, lighting, orchestration, theater management,
company management, public relations-
the mixture of all these ingredients is essential to every theatrical meal
that seeks to make itself palatable to the public...
The theater is a welding of many arts into one.
No one person can be efficient or talented in all these arts,
and if any man could write and produce and direct and act and
play the music, shift the scenery, design the costumes and, in short,
do everything that could be done on one stage
and come up with what was literally a one-man show,
he would still need one more thing, an audience.
You cannot get away from collaboration.
Oscar Hammerstein II
Some of the best success in theater for me developed from great collaborations. I have worked on dance productions where the vision of the choreographers was clear and I was excited to help realize their vision. I particularly enjoyed the TAS production Snow for its great visual imagery and retelling of the tale of Snow White. The two principal choreographers met early in the production process to discuss the lighting and the snowing effect and I was able to observe their rehearsals before the show got to the stage. Luckily, I had stage managed The Nutcracker for a ballet company so I was well aware of the needs of dancers who cannot be worried about slipping on the snow.
In all theater, but especially educational theater, the process is more important than the product, but a successful process will lead to a polished product.
Educational theater has a lot more to balance than professional theater. Students need to want to be involved; they need to be challenged, but within the developmentally appropriate levels. We must always remember that they are students first, with assignments and homework for other classes. I work on Lower, Middle, and Upper School shows here at Taipei American School and I approach them differently. The process must include enough time to bond as a team and enough rehearsal so that student performers and technicians are prepared for their audience. It is never acceptable to be under-prepared in academic theater. We have a responsibility to do our best for the students so they are given the chance to shine and grow.
Students need to be treated with respect at all times, but they also need to be pushed a little to grow. It is a delicate balance. I try to be sure that the crew never builds anything that the director chooses to cut later. It can be devastating to student technicians to have their work be in vain.
Faculty have a responsibility to direct and choreograph with their students in mind. At every school, there needs to be enough opportunity for students of all levels of experience to get involved in theater. That is the only way to build a healthy and sustainable program. At the secondary level, we are not trying to train professionals – we are trying to encourage life-long habits of theater attendance and support, as well as helping students on their journey of self-discovery.
Don't be afraid to push beyond the boundaries of the box.
Students need to be pushed to grow to their fullest potential; so do teachers or we will get complacent. I need to see more, learn more, and experience more to become a better teacher. The world continues to change and even theater needs to keep up with the times and advances in technology. However, not all great school theater occurs in the school auditorium or needs new tech. In Rhode Island in winter, we put on Greek and Roman myths by firelight in the courtyard adjoining the school chapel. The setting was perfect with no set at all. We served hot chocolate and told these stories the same way they were experienced in the ancient world.
Safe design is not always the best choice. When I designed Pippin at St. George's School, in the war song "Glory" with the trio dancing, we used images of soldiers and President Bush and Dick Chaney. The actors in armor from every age pierced through the screen with their swords and guns to come onstage to fight and die. This political statement was somewhat controversial, but it provoked discussion. Pippin is a great anti-war play and I was disappointed that the current Broadway version plays up the circus side and buries the potential for political message. It seems geared only toward the commercial market – what a missed opportunity!
For a production of Cabaret at St. George's, when the young boy began to sing " Tomorrow Belongs to Me" the crew released Nazi banners throughout the auditorium and the 40 students of the choir (who were not in the cast of the show) stood on cue in the middle of the audience spaced all around to make the whole room feel like a Nazi rally. On the final lines of the song, they raised their arms in a "Heil Hitler" salute. No one clapped at the end of the song, but it was excellent theater. We had two German exchange students who ran out the doors screaming and cursing – that was not my intent to hurt their feelings but I did want the audience to be uncomfortable. We used the mirror panel concept from the original production to further enhance the feeling of collective guilt over the Nazi rise to power. I think this production was easily my favorite one in Madeira Hall.
There are lots of "boxes" in theater – comparing the show to the original production can be a box that needs to be crushed. We will never have the same resources as Broadway in an academic setting, but we will usually have more bodies to work with. Audience expectations are another "box" that needs to be ripped up or at least re-wrapped. I love using the aisles and breaking the fourth wall to make the audience a little uncomfortable, but also fully engaged in the show.
My Personal Journey in the Arts
I have been heavily involved in theater since high school. I helped backstage on a production of Hello, Dolly! my freshman year, and I have never looked back. I can still remember working on St. Joseph's Prep Cape and Sword Productions of Godspell, Damn Yankees, Once Upon a Mattress and Merion Mercy's The Music Man. I went on to double major in Theater and Classics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. I worked in the scenery shop and stage managed the main stage shows. I really grew and developed as an artist with a production called RASA. This Bali-Indian opera challenged my notions of theater based mostly on musicals. It was told in a non-linear fashion and the cast included dancers, actors, and a rooster. In college, I also had the opportunity to design a realistic setting for Chekhov's The Three Sisters. I devoted more hours to that show than to all my other schoolwork that semester. In my senior year, I also got to design a working guillotine for a version of Danton's Death.
During the summers of college, I got involved in summer stock at the College Light Opera Company (CLOC) in Falmouth, MA. I worked on the sets and lights for 9 musicals in 10 weeks. I loved every crazy minute of it! I volunteered to be part of the running crew for each show. I loved operating the main curtain – slowly revealing the stage to the audience at exactly the right time. The first summer in Falmouth, the set and lighting designer I worked for was a member of IATSE. I learned something new and creative every time she unrolled her union-stamped plans. Budgets were tight - $1000 for each show. I feel very blessed to have been a part of summer stock before the advent of cell phones. For my summers in Falmouth, I was able to use the one phone under the staircase to make 2 calls – one to tell my mother I arrived in Falmouth and another to tell her I was leaving after the final strike. I have been back to visit recently and it is not the same community with internet – we had only each other for company and spend hours at the local piano bar with the cast belting showtunes. I know my sense of theatricality andmy personal aesthetics grow out of conversations/discusssions/debates at CLOC.
After college, I was hired by St. George's School as their technical director. (I was also hired to teach lower level Latin class, occasionally some Ancient Attic Greek, supervise a ninth grade boys' dorm, and plan the weekend activities, but those are for another completely different manifesto…) I felt like a kid in a candy store in their 7 million USD Drury-Grosvenor Center for the Arts. I was working in a new venue with 96 dimmers, 100 Source4s, 10 stage trap doors, a full scenery shop and a small costume shop. I was happy to serve SG for 12 years during which I took the summers to continue my involvement in summer stock, now at the Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan. I also attended Northwestern University and earned a Masters degree in theater (arts management and musical theater history were my areas of concentration), while working on their summer theater festival, supervising the running crews for all performances.
After leaving the idyllic hilltop campus of St. George's School, I moved to the bustling Asian capital Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. I was a big fish in a tiny pond at SG, and now I was a tiny guppy in an ocean of talented teachers and students at TAS. I went from a school of 350 students to a school of 2350 students. I was now a part of a well-established middle school program and a fledging lower school drama program. We do large productions in the 3 venues at Taipei American School. It is not easy to keep up with the pace! I continue to learn and be challenged with every production. In addition to the sets and lights, I have added costume design to my list of responsibilities here. In the fall of 2014, the Upper School did Les Miserables and a dance production of Romeo and Juliet. This spring, we will be doing a middle school musical Bugsy Malone and take our upper school shows to a festival in Singapore.
Living overseas is not like an extended vacation - it has its ups and downs like life back home. I have apartment leases and phone bills written in a language I cannot read. I need to make dental appointments with local dentists and, when I am sick, I need to see a local doctor. Luckily, these visits are covered by National Health Insurance. I needed a minor surgical procedure last year – I will never forget drifting off to sleep on the operating room table with all the doctors and nurses talking only in Mandarin. Here in Asia, I need to do all design work in metric units – a big change for someone who has always thought in feet and inches. I need to buy fabric and lumber in sizes and styles I have never seen back in the USA. I always need to be flexible. I cannot find every prop that I imagine – I need to make due with what is available locally. Everyday overseas can be an adventure, and I continue to grow and thrive here at Taipei American School.
My Other Journeys in Life
I am passionate about theater, but I am also fueled by another passion - a love for travel and exploration – experiencing cultures in situ, tasting local flavors, and seeing the most awe-inspiring sites crafted by human hands. I was first bitten by the travel bug in high school, around the same time I was getting my feet wet in the theater. I went on a three week trip to Italy – Rome, Capri, Sorrento – to study archeology and Roman topography with students from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. I was hooked and I continue to explore. Each place I go leads me in new directions and opens my eyes in new ways. Travel also influences my design work in ways that are not easily expressed or quantified.
While I worked at St. George's School in Rhode Island, the choir members asked me to give up some of my free time to chaperone a trip to Barcelona, Spain, and Carcassonne, Avignon, Nice, and Cannes, France. How could I say no??? The next year I chaperoned a choir trip to Barbados. I enjoyed traveling with students and I enjoyed traveling with colleagues. I went to the UK, France, and Morocco with a fellow teacher during spring break.
The Korean Parent Association of St. George's School offered an incredible trip of a lifetime – three weeks in Asia exploring Seoul, and Gyeongyu, South Korea, and Beijing, Xian, and Guilin, China, and finally 2 days in Hong Kong. I was chosen to participate and I ended up seeing lots of theater and traditional dance in those places. I loved Nanta – a Korean version of something like Blue Man Group. My student and I were called up onto the stage to participate – I should have known something like that would happen when we were seated in the front row and her parents were seated way back in the middle of the theater. I also saw Peking Opera in Beijing on this trip. I knew this would not be my last trip to Asia, but I never thought Asia would become my home.
St. George's School introduced a new curriculum of global engagement a few years later and needed teachers to volunteer to get involved. I was one of the first to step forward. It did not matter where we were going – I just wanted to see the world. I chaperoned a student trip for two weeks to Uganda, both the capital Kampala and "upcountry" to Murchison Falls. We went on safari in the game parks and took boats across the Nile, which begins in Uganda – a fact that I did not know before this adventure.
In the summers after I had completed my Masters degree, I took a job as "dean" for Oxbridge Academic Programs. I was stationed in Cambridge, England, for a month each summer, living at Jesus College, Cambridge University. In the afternoons, I could go punting on the Cam or attend Evensong at Kings' College Chapel. On all my days off, I usually took a train to London to see shows like Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray at Sadlers Wells Theatre, and I tried to see every musical running in the West End. In Cambridge each summer I also got to see three or four Shakespeare productions in the college gardens. The best part about working for Oxbridge was the free ticket to fly to the UK – I would explore the villages of the Cotswolds before reporting to work and then I would dash off to Europe after work before returning to the US. I saw Krakow, Budapest, Prague, Istanbul, and Paris.
After working at St. George's School, I decided I needed a change – with my passion for travel, why not teach abroad? This led me to Taipei, Taiwan. I would never have had the guts to sign a contract in Asia without the SG trip to Asia. Now that I am here, I have continued to explore. Recent trips have included school-sponsored visits to Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore, usually traveling with dancers, actors, and student technicians. I have also traveled to the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, climbing up to the beautiful Eagle's Nest Monastery. In Bhutan, I dined on yak cheese and dried chili peppers. I also ventured out to the see Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where I dined on fried tarantula – a sustainable and nutritious snack. I attended a performance in a garage in Mandalay, Myanmar – the Moustache Brothers were under house arrest for a performance at Aung Sang Suu Kyi's home so they can only perform in English inside their house. There was something magical sitting on plastic chairs in that smoke-filled garage; I hitched a ride home from the Moustache brothers' garage with some other audience members who are part of a Catalan separatist group. We rode through the dark streets of Mandalay in the back of a truck.
When I moved overseas, Oxbridge opened a new summer program in New York City and they wanted experienced people to come together to work there. I leapt at the chance to return to the US at Oxbridge's expense and spend the summer in an international city pulsing with theater. The musical theater class goes to see many shows and I have accompanied them often. They see some out of the way productions too – Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 was a fun evening of theater. I also had the chance to see the Punchdrunk Theater's Sleep No More which changed how I think about performance.
Last summer, I spent 2 weeks exploring Tehran, Isfahan, and Shiraz, Iran. I am currently planning trips to Luang Prabang, Laos, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, for Chinese New Year and a trip to Egypt and Jordan for Spring Break. The world is out there to explore and all that I see, smell, and taste informs me as an artist. These escapes from my day to day routine in the theater give me the energy I need to do the work that I love to do.
Not all of the places I have visited have been fun. I have also visited sites that move me to tears and make me question humanity. From Krakow, Poland, I took a day trip to see the Nazi Concentration camp at Auschwitz. There were no words to express what it feels like to see the hair of 140,000 people – one week of collection – on one side of a room, and Nazi uniforms, bolts of cloth, and socks on the other side. The center cabinet displays the paperwork from the Nuremberg Trials testify that the uniforms were made of human hair. While in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I visited Choeung Ek, commonly known in English as " the killing fields." When the Khmer Rouge murdered mothers and their children, they cut the women with crude tools and they smashed the infants' heads against a tree. That tree is still alive. Places like this haunt me, but they also help me grow as an artist.
There is still so much more to see, taste, and enjoy – I will never stop exploring and learning.