‘Teaching hospital for the arts’ in the works
Creating “a teaching hospital for the arts” is the ambition behind an expanded partnership between Phoenix Theatre and Arizona State University’s School of Music.
Building on years of informal cross-pollination, a formal agreement was announced March 6 that will bring students from ASU’s Lyric Opera Theatre program to the downtown theater to work in professional productions, both onstage and behind the scenes.
This will give students more opportunities to build up performance credits toward both their academic degrees and membership in the Actors’ Equity professional union.
Phoenix Theatre staffers, including artistic director Michael Barnard, have taught musical theater classes on ASU’s Tempe campus, and the theater has used students as understudies in some productions. Now, the theater will host for-credit classes on its campus and benefit from other shared resources.
“It’s kind of in its embryonic state right now,” Barnard said. But the ultimate goal, he added, is to help nurture the next generation of theater talent in the Valley.
“It’s about trying to create a model for us here in the Southwest to encourage great students to come to this area. … We get to help cultivate talent here that will perform on our stage.”
The teaching-hospital model sounds very much like a proposed partnership with ASU’s School of Dance, Theatre and Film that Arizona Theatre Company has been pursuing.
Steven J. Tepper, dean of ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, said that those talks have been “paused” while Arizona Theatre is conducting a national search for a new artistic director to replace David Ira Goldstein, who plans to leave at the end of this season.
But Tepper said the agreement with Phoenix Theatre would not preclude future collaborations with other arts organizations.
“In our vision, there would be a version of a formal deep relationship with every significant nonprofit cultural institution in the Valley,” he said. “If we really believed in this teaching hospital model, every major institution would have appointments at the institute. …
“We would really design a new model for the entire city.”