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The play enjoyed successful runs in 2004 at USF and at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Now retitled Trojan Barbie, the play is being performed this fall by Harvard University’s American Repertory Theatre (which credits USF’s performing arts program as its originator).
“Being in San Francisco, such a progressive city of clashing viewpoints, gave us endless opportunities to learn from our environment,” said Shoresh Alaudini ’07. His first professional acting job, a role his sophomore year in the independent film The Mission Movie, about gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District, was “deeply connected to issues of social justice, and so is my current role.” Alaudini plays a student in Berkeley Repertory Theater’s Yellowjackets, set at Berkeley High School in 1994 when racial tensions were running high, violence was common, and the issue of “tracking” students according to ability and potential was fiercely debated.
In 2003, students performed the courtroom drama Execution of Justice on the 25th anniversary of the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States. “This production really galvanized our whole department,” said Novak. The program held ancillary panel discussions with Mayor Willie Brown, State Senator John Burton, journalists who covered the slayings, and friends and relatives of Milk.
With its production of Angels in America two years ago, the department honored another solemn 25th anniversary—that of the discovery of AIDS. In conjunction with the play, which focuses on the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s, the department hosted a series of lectures on AIDS-related topics, including the Catholic Church’s response to HIV/AIDS over the years. Various faculty and staff also spoke about their own personal and artistic responses to the disease.
“Our works are almost always contextualized in greater detail than most other performing arts departments,” said Novak. “We try to create work that will bridge other academic disciplines throughout the university.”
The program’s dance side also incorporates social justice aspects. Assistant professor Amie Dowling, for example, leads an on-campus intergenerational dance company, the Dance Generators, for dancers ages 18 to 82. The troupe aims to celebrate diversity without false reverence for either youthful physicality or for aging. “Redefining audience expectations about who gets to be on stage is profound,” Dowling said. “There is something about showing a love duet between two 80-year-olds that in itself is radical and upends people’s thinking, gets those on and off stage to ask questions.”
Last fall’s Choreographing Change dance production touched on a number of personal, political, and social issues through movement. Part of a course in dance production, the performance sold out both evenings and, said Dowling, inspired students, faculty, and other audience members to discuss the issues it addressed, including concerns about water, its scarcity, depletion, contamination, and the inescapable need for it.
Dowling also teaches a class, “Performing Arts and Community Exchange,” that is a perennial favorite among performing arts and social justice students. Through the class, students teach movement, theater, creative writing, and improvisation to women prisoners in San Francisco’s county jail.
“Most of us had never interacted with inmates before, and we didn’t know what to expect,” said Courtney Stallings ’07, who is in her first year in the graduate acting program at The New School for Drama in New York. “My perception of our justice system and our society changed during the course.
I no longer looked at these inmates only as criminals, but as human beings who needed the human gift we brought: the chance to be heard. They taught me and my classmates much more than we could have ever taught them.”
Like Stallings, many graduates have gone on to the country’s finest performing arts master’s degree programs, and other alums are pursuing careers at the intersection of art and politics and social engagement.
That USF’s program can now have such an impact speaks to the changes it has undergone. Following budgetary crises in the 1970s, the university discontinued its performing arts department, ushering in decades in which all arts majors—painters, musicians, and dancers alike—studied the same unspecialized curriculum. In 1999, a group of professors spearheaded a movement to create a separate and independent performing arts department, one based on a curriculum “with a political and social consciousness, a belief that art and artists can change the world, one performance at a time,” said Varea.
“We are admittedly not for every student leaving high school with a newfound love of acting,” said Novak. “We are here for those who want to do something more meaningful with their craft. We want to expand our students’ notions of what performance really is.”
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