I was happy to welcome Deb Toteda and Gerry Micera to the “Lights Up: High School Theater Podcast” last night for a conversation about giving feedback to student artists. I think you’ll find their perspectives thought-provoking, sensitive and full of intention. I know I did.
Toteda, who has choreographed at Harrison High School for 15 years, is currently staging the “Les Miserables,” which runs March 6-8. Micera, who has been at Putnam Valley High School since the school was founded in 2000, directs both the fall drama and the spring musical. This year, it’s “Into the Woods,” April 17-19.
We talked about using videotape to show students what directors and choreographers are seeing in rehearsal.
Toteda says the use of videotape really took off, of necessity, during the pandemic, when kids were missing due to illness. Videotaping kept them in the process until they could return, she says. But coming out of COVID, video really provided a useful shortcut, she says, one that’s baked into the process now.
“Dealing with 60 kids on stage — let’s say, that’s a typical cast size for Harrison — you don’t have time to go to each individual kid and give them specific feedback some times,” she says.
‘Taking the temperature down’
Toteda tells the cast she’s recording a particular number and then the company will look at the video on the screen in the auditorium, paying attention to posture, facial expressions and how they’re connecting with others around them. The camera will pan across the stage, so that everyone can glimpse themselves.
“That seems like a really safe way, because everybody’s in it together,” she says. Toteda says there’s value, too, in taking ownership of the work as a choreographer and showing a little vulnerability, acknowledging that she perhaps hadn’t communicated what she was looking for, or that the company hadn’t understood.
“It takes the temperature down a little bit,” she says. The students recognize that Toteda is looking at her work, too, and giving herself feedback on what she sees on video.
Feedback starts with the student
Micera says the videos are posted to a private YouTube account which the Putnam Valley kids can watch on their own. After it has been viewed, Micera says he starts the video review by asking the students what they saw in their performance, realizing that it’s only human nature for them to focus on themselves when they watch the tape.
“They watch it on their own, to allow whatever space they want to react as they need to,” he says. “When they come back, that’s when we might have that conversation.”
Micera says the videotape doesn’t lie and that the students will see what everyone else see, which makes starting with the students a back-door way into feedback.
“Self-identifying it softens it,” he says.
Toteda agrees, adding that making the feedback a group effort — not singling an individual out — is also vital.
“It’s a group,” she says. “You want theater to feel like an ensemble.”
Another takeaway: Feedback is part of making art, but it has to be grounded in trust.
Some great perspective in our 36-minute conversation, which you can watch here or where you listen to Apple podcasts or on Spotify.
(A correction: I misspoke in the podcast when I said that Micera had staged “You Can’t Take It With You” last fall. It was “Arsenic and Old Lace,” another show from my past. Apologies.)
Will write soon.
