Wednesday, September 26, 2012

What I Did Last Summer: Roger Held

Our VPA Faculty are always up to something great!  Find out what they did with their summer vacations in our What I Did Last Summer series.

 Roger Held, Department Chair and Professor of Theatre presented four hours of workshops for the Directors Lab Chicago. The Lab accepts applications from directors across the country and abroad. Those selected for attendance meet for a week during August.  Roger conducted workshops in self appraisal as it impacts script interpretation and working relationships. 

The twenty-seven members of the Lab worked their way through a selection of testing instruments designed to increase awareness of predispositions and learned values and attitudes which influence textual analysis. They were then asked to interpret a text and respond to a series of questions which allowed a discussion of the influences on their thinking.  The point of the exercise is to help stage directors become biased to how they see the play script and then develop a less biased perspective from which to develop a production concept.  

Roger also created a virtual office, reducing all the paper to half a file drawer and converted his old office into a seminar room.  He now works wirelessly from home, the conference room, and the theatre lobby.  In addition, Roger worked with Sue Hill on developing a Professional Website which should be open to the public by the end of September. 

He also got in some backpacking adventures.