4. The Actor's Goals

In this chapter, Hagen addresses one of the major lessons I learned after I graduated from undergrad: What do you want?

She of course is contrasting the actor with artistic goals against the actor with material ones, with any eye towards uniting artistically-driven actors to create a new paradigm for the American theater. Obviously this is not something I can (or should) do with my Intro students. Rather, I want to ask them about their goals for this class. I like the idea of the class belonging to them and, while I will have a prepared syllabus and my own goals, also taking their input as to what they want to explore and address in their own work. Perhaps they will journal about this and then we will have a discussion about it in the second or third class.

I'm becoming increasingly aware that most of my classroom ideas (so far) involve journaling and discussion rather than on-their-feet exercises. I have these in mind, too, but haven't figured out how they will interact with Hagen's content yet.