“It’s like we were all sitting around in these canoes and [Maridee] jumped in the water and started flipping them over. Now we are all learning how to swim. It’s fantastic!”
Trust your instincts.
Interrogate your assumptions.
Own your individuality.
These are the values I want most to instill in any young theatre artist, be they students of acting or directing. These are the powers I want to help my students discover within themselves. Teaching entails much more than a transaction where knowledge, or “facts,” are conveyed to students. Rather, teachers of the liberal arts are mentors on an intellectual journey that opens students to new thoughts and ideas while broadening the horizons of their minds.
The fundamental quest in any theatrical process is to tell a story. I implore directors and actors alike to categorically investigate the stories they are telling and in working to constantly be in service of those stories and their connection to those stories. I implore students to have an opinion, a point of view; and to express it through their work. It is my responsibility as a teacher to expose students to the gamut of methodologies and theories in my toolkit and allow them to try on these various systems in their examination of storytelling through performance.
I create classroom environments in which the students and I exist as an Ensemble of Artists that have come together to generate work in an incubator. The classroom is a gymnastic laboratory for exploration and innovation—questions are wildly encouraged, and failure wholly respected.
“[Maridee] causes me to critically think more than any other college class that I have taken.”
“[Maridee] rocked. Slater slays at theatre appreciation. She really made me think about things I never considered relevant in my life.”
“I loved the hands on social aspects of [the class], ie meditation in public and writing out our emotional responses, showing how that is a theatrical event.”