The cut of at least $1 million mandated last year by the College of Arts and Sciences Dean for the Theatre, Film and Dance department has not just shrunk the department but fundamentally altered the structure and proportion of its diverse components.

Several faculty members said that, in the wake of the budget cuts, the balance of the department has shifted toward favoring academic or theoretical work rather than performance work, and it has shifted toward favoring the film component of the department over its theater and dance components.

Finding Balance Between Teaching and Doing in Performing Arts

This academic year, the number of shows in the Schwartz Center has dropped from six to four — and that number is expected to fall again next year.

“Everything will now be related to coursework or theory” and divorced from practice, said Prof. Bruce Levitt, theater, who emphasized his belief that participating in productions is central to the education of an actor and his disappointment with the department’s new trend.

Levitt said he did not know how the department would continue to put on shows in the wake of the cuts. From the 2008-09 school year to 2010-11, the department has lost six “professionals in the area of theater;” three and a third senior lecturer positions; a box office coordinator and marketing assistant; and at least one resident program teaching assistant position, according to Department Chair Prof. Amy Villarejo.

The department is “proposing that the production-side of the theater program become student-centered,” Prof. Don Fredericksen, film, said. “But, frankly, I don’t know what that means. It hasn’t been thought through yet.”

While admitting that next season is unlikely to be a “typical season,” Villarejo said that it’s not “reasonable to presume there won’t be work being performed in this building. We don’t know yet.”

“Events will still happen in a very robust way,” agreed Prof. Nick Salvato, theater. “What [students] do on stage might not look exactly what it looked like in the past, but [students] still will be on stage performing.”

One veteran theater staffer, who requested to remain anonymous out of fear of losing his job, said the department has been “long split in half” between an “academic side that teaches and a production side that puts on shows.”

Rockwell Shah ’10, one of the founders of SaveCornellArts.com, said that Villarejo and others in the department “want to turn [the department] into people reading books about acting — not people actually acting, performing and gaining stage experience.”

Shah alleged that Villarejo was saying she did not know what the production season would look like “as a tactic to delay public outrage … No one will honestly tell you there will be a production season next year. There just won’t be [one].”

Villarejo said she disagrees with the idea that performances will necessarily lose out to academics.

“[I] don’t see production and academics as in opposition,” she said. “The idea that there’s theater production and all else is a relic of the past ... [It is] an old way of thinking.”

Villarejo added that the department had little choice but to cut production staff, citing the “top-down” decision from University administrators to “retain professorial faculty.”

Over the summer, the administration tasked the department with generating models to find the $1 million in cuts. 

Several professors said the department could have met the administration’s mandated cuts without, in their view, so substantially altering the department to favor academic instruction.

“One option would have been to continue with our current regional theater model with modifications,” Prof. David Feldshuh, theater, stated in an e-mail. “That model was not chosen.”

Prof. Kent Goetz also expressed his belief that the model he drafted did more to save theater production while cutting the necessary amount.

“There were other ways to cut the budget that would’ve preserved other production,” Prof. Levitt said. Levitt cited the Ph.D. program and the Executive Manager position as two cuts that “alone probably would’ve been in the neighborhood of $200,000 to $225,000.”

The chosen budget cut model — cowritten by Profs. Sabine Haenni, Nick Salvato, Sara Warner and Beth Milles ’88 and eventually supported by others and Villarejo — recommended “cutting production as [an] entity distinct from curricular goals.”

In an e-mail, Arts and Sciences Senior Associate Dean Elizabeth Adkins-Regan explained that this model was chosen because, “of the various models that the faculty presented to us ... a majority of the faculty supported it ... It went beyond simply meeting the required budget cuts to propose forward-looking developments ... [and] produced the best match between the department’s mission and that of the College of Arts and Sciences.”

Still, not all members of the Theater, Film and Dance department felt included in the drafting of the models.  One senior staffer, upset that only tenured and tenured-track professors were allowed to participate in the drafting of models, called the process “shady, questionable decision-making ... despite the claim of being inclusive.”

Other faculty, including tenured faculty included in the budget making process, expressed similar concerns. 

Budget Cuts Will Favor Film, Profs. Say

Faculty and staff also said that the new department would emerge from the cuts more heavily proportioned to film studies.

Villarejo said that theater had previously received “extraordinary support” while film-making had dealt with “... extremely modest resources.”

She noted that the film-making division has one professor teaching film-making compared to three dance senior lecturers and nine theater professors, even though there are “more film majors than theater and dance combined.”

Prof. Don Fredericksen, film, rejected this characterization, saying that he does not “think we’re underprivileged” given the “enormous number of people who teach film ... all over the college [of Arts and Sciences].”

“Film is a hot major, but the number of people who participate in theater and dance — not just major — is quite large,” Levitt said. “You can’t just count majors in student interest in the program.”

The accepted model “urge[s] the addition of a position in Film Production.” It also suggests changing the name of the department to the “Department of Performance and Media,” offering majors in in either “Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies,” or “Cinema and Media Studies.”

Fredericksen said that his “sense” is that the new film department “will become somewhat more noticeable [and] have more of a presence.”