From theoretical to practical: the importance of theatre and arts at SLU
From project management and collaboration to unity and improving mental health, theatre teaches people valuable life skills and can act as relief and support during tough times.
Nancy Bell, assistant professor of theatre at Saint Louis University, has been a theatre educator for 12 years after working for 20 years as a professional actress in New York City and Los Angeles. In her time as a theatre educator, Bell has witnessed firsthand how theatre impacts the lives of her students.
In an interview that has been edited for brevity and clarity, Bell talks about the importance of theatre in the SLU community in terms of the skills it teaches students and how these skills help students be successful in their time at SLU and elsewhere.
Why is theatre valuable and important for the students at SLU?
I think theatre is important for everyone because by its definition, it’s in person and in real time and you experience it as an audience member in the presence of other people. That is an experience that is becoming more and more and more rare. And the pandemic has accelerated that a lot. So public life, spaces and opportunities to come together in groups to experience things together, it’s becoming harder and harder to find meaningful ways to do that. And that just makes what we do even more important, that you can come to a theater and watch a play with a bunch of other people and something funny will happen and you will laugh and at the exact same moment there’s 30 other people laughing. It’s a recognition of your essential humanity on a physical level. We really need that as human beings. We can’t live in a virtual world.
What are some of the most important skills that theatre teaches?
I think it teaches people to be present. How to be present with other people and to tolerate the fundamental stress of that. It’s hard to be with other people, but we all need each other. And when you work on theatre and in the theater, you are collaborating on a really high level under a lot of stress. There’s a ton of stress, it’s natural to experience a lot of stress in performance. You’re coming together with other people under that stress to do a complicated thing. And there’s a lot of ego management skills that people learn from working in theatre. There’s a lot of tolerance you learn from doing that. I’ve had many students who have not experienced that others will be quiet, look at them and listen to them and care about what they’re saying and doing. It’s really simple, but everybody needs that. Everybody needs to know that they can speak and be heard and seen.
What are some examples of how SLU’s theatre department teaches these skills?
Producing plays is one of them. I mean, it’s great because we teach performance skills and how to do things backstage in our classes and in our coursework. And then we actually do productions where students take it from the theoretical into the real and practical application of doing a play. And that’s where they really cement those skills that we learned. That’s when they have some skin in the game and that’s when there’s risk and that’s when there’s a good kind of pressure and stress. That’s when those skills really get honed and embedded. And then, once you do that those skills are then transferable to so many other things. Being able to tolerate difference, being able to collaborate, being able to control your ego, being able to also express your ego as a performer, or a designer or someone with a vision. Being able to show up on time to things, you know, if you don’t show up then there is no show. All those things are transferable to every job you could possibly have.
That was actually my next question. How do these skills relate to other areas of life?
I will say this, there’s a lot of talk at the university and everywhere about the mental health crisis people are experiencing, especially people of your generation. We’ve had extreme, tragic examples of that on our campus. But we also have every day examples, like every day I encounter students who deal with things like depression, anxiety, are overwhelmed and burnout and all those things. And it’s really easy to see why students are experiencing that. And there is actually lots of hard evidence about how participating in theatre helps with that kind of mental wellness, like being accountable to other people and showing up and being part of a group and being accepted and also dealing head on with big problems and issues, which is what we’re doing in the first place. We’re grappling with them and looking at them or talking about them to each other. We’re inviting the audience to engage with us in those things. Those are the things that heal people from mental illness. That’s a huge thing that we offer, not just to the world as artists, but here on campus.
Another way to think about it too is that doing theatre is project management. That’s what it is. Producing theatre, being involved in a production, you understand what project management is and that is an aspect of just about every job. And in other classes you get a chance to be part of a managed project, but you don’t get a chance to manage a project. You don’t always get a chance to work with professors who are managing the project.
Tell me some success stories of students that you’ve had who have come out of SLU’s theatre department.
We have a lot of students who’ve gone on to major MFA programs at Columbia and Brown and Yale. So we have students who have gone to all those schools and studied stage management and acting and arts management. We also have students who are living in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago who are pursuing professional careers in the theatre. We have a lot of students who go on to law school. That’s a big thing a lot of people do from the theatre. We’ve had a lot of students that started their own business. We have students who have gone to grad school to study speech pathology. We have two students that actually have pretty successful long running podcasts. We have a student who is really building a nice career and doing virtual reality entertainment. That’s all I can think of right now.
