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Mary Resing, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Active Cultures Theatre, Washington, DC
Discipline: theater
Lecturing/Research: Developing Long Range Strategies for Armenian Theater in the World Marketplace
Host Institution: Yerevan State Institute of Theater and Cinematography, Yerevan, Armenia
September 2005 – February 2006
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| Mount-Ararat |
As a theater producer and educator in the United States, I gained much valuable information in Armenia which I am anxious to share with my students and colleagues at home. I was, in fact, able to publish some of what I learned while still in Armenia. And because so few American producers ever come to the Caucasus, my Armenian students and colleagues constantly bombarded me with requests for information on American theater production and the performing arts culture. For most, I was their only window into the complex and vibrant world of the arts in America.
A key moment for me came late in my Fulbright Scholar grant. The marketing class I was teaching had been whittled down from an exuberant and unfocused 28 students to a highly focused six. My semester was officially over but because of the new availability of heating for the classrooms, most professors were still teaching. It was early December, the New Year’s festivities were looming and everyone was a little restless. I had just started the “hook” of my planned lecture when a student came dashing into class with a burning question. He wanted to produce a big event at the Opera House and was meeting with a potential donor but he didn’t know what to say or what to ask for.
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| Meeting of the South Caucasus, Central Asian Performing Arts Network
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The concept of giving money to support the arts is a new one in Armenia. Traditionally, the government has determined what is art and then funded it. The student’s dilemma was the kind I love so I threw out my lesson plan and seized the moment. The class as a whole took up his cause, and I was able to lead them step-by-step through easy, systematic and successful techniques for donor cultivation. At the end of the class period, the student dashed out of class and off to his meeting.
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| Armenian pop singers perform at HighFest |
This type of interaction was for me the payoff on an exciting and challenging five months teaching marketing and producing to young theater students at the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Film. For many, this was their introduction to the concept of sales-driven performing arts marketing. Armenian theaters are largely state-supported and the staff and artists are paid regardless of whether or not audiences come to fill the seats. For many Armenian theater producers, marketing and its twin sister fundraising are unwelcome, newfangled concepts. However, among artists there is a growing interest in independent production and non-governmental performing arts organizations.
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| My colleague Professor Artur Ghukasyan with me at the Institute |
As the above anecdote reveals, in addition to teaching marketing to a wide range of acting, criticism and directing students, I ended up mentoring and working extensively with a few students who would be entrepreneurs including the ambitious young man already mentioned who produced large events and spectacles for a variety of governmental agencies, a student who ran an independent dance theater troupe with her brother, and a burgeoning music producer who produced hip hop evenings at a night club and managed a teenaged female rap artist (the first in Armenia). I had a blast working with these young innovators who kept me on my toes.
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An outdoor performance by students from the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Film. |
I was also able to work with High Fest, Yerevan’s young international theater festival. My colleagues there became a great source of information about the local performing arts culture and kept me cheerful and grounded. In return, I helped them develop a Web site marketing Yerevan theater, a crucial element in computer-savvy Armenia.
My Fulbright Scholar experience was vitally important to both my colleagues in Yerevan and me. There are extremely few programs that support the work of Americans in the performing arts abroad. As far as I know, Fulbright is the only organization that does so in Eurasia and Central Asia, and I was the only U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the performing arts in the region in the past three years. And Armenians aren’t the only Central Asians curious about the arts in America.
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| My kids sing with their Armenian classmates in the school winter pageant |
Producers and performing artists from Alma Alta, Tbilisi and Tashkent whom I met in Yerevan also asked me to give seminars for their students and co-workers at their home institutions. Although I was unable to satisfy all their requests, my Fulbright Scholar grant gives me hope that the conversations I started with my Central Asian colleagues will be continued by others in the near future.
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"International education
exchange is the most significant current project
designed to continue the process of humanizing
mankind to the point, we would hope, that
nations can learn to live in peace"
--J. William Fulbright |
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