Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56805
All the World's a Stage At the Darden School, students can channel their inner actors in the class called "Leadership and Theatre: Ethics, Innovations, and Creativity." Even more important, participants in the 24-member class get a hands-on lesson that effective leadership is as necessary in acting as it is in business. "We spend a fair amount of time on standard acting exercises to get students in touch with their own emotions," says Freeman, who co- teaches the class with Randy Straw- derman, a professional director in Richmond, Virginia. "They often think that good acting is about loud voices and big emotions. We Darden students learn that good acting—and good leadership—means being authentic and learning how to display the right emotions. tell them that really good acting is about being authentic, trying to find the place where you can display the right emotion, the right behavior, at the right time. I happen to think that's good leadership, too." Students write an original play during the first four weeks of the class, then direct, produce, and per- form it during the last three weeks. There is also a condensed, one-week version of the course held during the school's January term. Students in that course have to create a six- minute play on their first day of class and perform it the next day. While Freeman admits the expe- rience is intense, he believes its benefits to students are enormous. "They've experienced something about trusting their own emo- tional intelligence. And they've learned what it means to work as a member of a high-performance team and be creative in a way that they've never been before. In the end, there's a kind of euphoria that they've pulled it off." During the course, students also perform ten-minute plays and partic- ipate in a number of improvisational scenes. As they do these exercises, they need to reach inside themselves to find ways to display real emotion, and that can be difficult. "Maybe a student is supposed to get angry in a particular part of the play and can't figure out how to do that," Freeman says. "The director will work with the student and ask, 'Can you think about a time when you were really angry? Can you find something in your experience that you can use to help you dis- play the kind of behavior you want to display?' If the acting is going to be good, it has to be real. After the exercise, I say to them, 'Okay, 44 March/April 2012 BizEd Professor Edward Freeman helps students get in touch with their emotions in the "Leadership and Theatre" class at the Darden School. how can you bring this to a real- life business setting?' We spend the bulk of the class discussing that." Students also practice giving feedback in such a way that people will hear it and respond to it in a positive manner. For example, stu- dents may have to provide feedback to fellow actors in the class to help others improve their technique. Or, if a student director is working with an actor whose native language is not English, he might have to figure out how to provide constructive feedback about pronunciation and accent so that the audience will be able to understand the perfor- mance. This kind of detailed exer- cise on giving and receiving feed- back is one of the most important parts of the class. By the end of the course, students understand that collaboration and team building are vital to their suc- cess. "With our theater company, there's no room for students to say, 'I'm going to do my part, and I don't care if you do your part,'" Freeman says. "They're all in it together. So there's a flat-out commitment to making everyone great." JACK LOONEY JACK LOONEY