liberal arts vs. conservatory

fishbowlfreshman
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 11:21:01 +0000

Teriwtt,
That’s a great idea about the MFA. With your D’s stats, she can probably get a full ride to any number of state university honor’s programs where she could get a BA in Theatre, Dance, or Music and supplement the other two areas with electives or possibly even a minor. The trick will be to find the schools that have an active MT scene in the surrounding community since most universities will concentrate on straight plays in their mainstage seasons. It might also be preferable to look for schools that don’t have an MFA or where the MFA isn’t particularly strong since the MFAers tend to eat up most of the casting opportunities at a lot of places. An MFA need not be in MT, either, as long as she continues to work on her singing and dance skills in undergrad and gets her stage time in musicals. Actually, most MFA in Acting programs include MT as part of the curriculum though it’s not necessarily the main focus. It’s all-the-way-around cheaper, too! Many MFA schools not only offer the opportunity for teaching fellowships, but also grant tuition waivers to those who are accepted. Also, even if you have to pay, you’re looking at three years of tuition instead of four. Beyond that, a major advantage of an MFA is that it is considered a terminal degree which allows you to teach at the college level therefore potentially adding years to the back end of your life in the theatre - and providing and an opportunity to actually be able to live off it if you never hit it “big.” I actually came within a hair’s breadth of taking that path, myself. As it stands, I’ll probably get one in Directing when I’m older assuming I don’t become a famous “movie sta” or some such.

Sooz,
Since the OP is back and the subject has changed somewhat, I’ll spare everyone the line-by-line … However, I think I made the difference between a conservatory BFA and a university BFA very clear and it doesn’t involve the “stand alone” idea. For instance, CCM and CMU are both very much conservatories even though they are placed in a university setting. Another such program is Webster. You are right that I’m more familiar with the training at the acting than the MT programs, but the CMU and CCM MT conservatories and the Juilliard, CMU, NCSA, and Purchase acting conservatories do have higher bars to jump early on in the training than the university BFAs. Their having less rigorous academic requirements is by design to account for this due to the limited hours in the day students can spend outside of class working their assignments. Basically, the overall intensity at the conservatories and the college/university BFAs is roughly the same. Students at both types of schools are kept very busy. The difference is in the percentage of what they are busy with. It’s not like the conservatory students get any slack time in their schedules because of the lesser academic load. I also never said that all the students at the conservatories have arts h/s backgrounds or extensive professional resumes. I said a large number of them do and I think this will be confirmed if you ask the students you know who attend them … unless the kids I know have been exaggerating which I seriously doubt. One interesting point that you did bring up is that while the arts h/s kids may have concentrated on acting for several hours a day five and six days a week nine months a year, very few such programs have an MT concentration and many of them will have less of a music and dance background than kids like your D. This is a major difference in an MT vs. Acting program which could potentially dispel a bit of the boredom such students often suffer with the beginning acting classes at the college/university BFAs. As for the CAP21 actor training issue, on 2/14/04, Emilyp114 who I believe to be Alwaysamom’s D said …

I don’t know what the situation is at other schools, other than rumor, but certainly at NYU the straight drama kids are definitely not second-rate. In fact, we outnumber the MT kids by a huge margin. I think what you’ll find in most college drama programs are kids who although they may be great actors, like at the many straight drama studios at Tisch, there are also many talented singers and dancers. Many of us have taken voice and dance prior to arriving in college but our passion is for straight theatre. That doesn’t mean that many kids at Tisch aren’t as talented in MT as those in CAP21 (in fact, I can think of probably 5 in my studio who are more talented than any I’ve seen in CAP21), it’s just a personal preference that they want one of the other studios at Tisch. Many choose a straight drama program because they realize that they’ll get better acting training and that it will give them more options when they graduate. They realize that they have the innate vocal and/or dance talent but they want the strong acting training that the Tisch studios provide. Everyone has different reasons for their choices. Many of the CAP21 kids, as I’ve stated before, transfer to one of the acting studios after sophomore year to get that extra shot at the acting training. There are also some kids who transfer to CAP21 after sophomore year in order to enhance their vocal training.

It has also in been mentioned several other times, but the search function in the old format is scattershot enough that even I’m not bored enough to wade through all the extraneous hits. This just happened to be the first one I found.

How many points of credit does your D get for taking the voice lessons she’s counting as electives? At most schools, those count as one credit hour. The elective part of the gen ed requirements at Tisch call for twenty. I got thirteen courses by adding five four-point classes to the eight you’ve acknowledged to cover the electives.

Fish :)