UpDate - Vol. 13, No. 35, Page 7
June 23, 1994
In the news
Recent comments about the University and its community are featured in
this regular column.
Change in education
The Project 30 Alliance advocates incorporating more liberal arts
courses into the teacher-preparation program. The idea is to insure
that teachers have a more thorough knowledge of the disciplines they
teach.
An $848,400 grant from the Carnegie Corp. of New York was used to
organize the group in 1988. Project 30 was started by Frank B. Murray,
dean of the College of Education at the University of Delaware, and
Daniel Fallon, a former dean at Texas A&M University who is now
provost at the University of Maryland at College Park. The group was
incorporated as a non-profit association in 1991.
"National Reform Movements in Teacher Education"
The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 9, 1994
Coaches stop fights
In order to preserve the image and the integrity of the great
game of college football, it was absolutely necessary that the NCAA
Football Rules Committee address the fighting issue that raised its
ugly head on several occasions this past year.
The public was appalled at the highly publicized series of fights
that took place, most of which were concentrated in one weekend of
college football....
I am gratified that [the] committee has now responded to the
mandate by passing rules that I am confident will reduce the instances
of fighting in the game. The football coaches made our job much easier
when Coach Tubby Raymond of the University of Delaware, who has long
been the chair of the American Football Coaches Association Rules
Advisory Committee, brought to our group a recommendation to pass
strict rules and penalties to address the issue. As a former coach, I
was both proud and gratified with the attitude of responsibility
exhibited by the football coaches profession....
The coaches wanted rules that would put the responsibility
squarely on their shoulders to control themselves and their student-
athletes. Our committee also received a strong recommendation from the
Collegiate Commissioners Association- supervisors of officials-to
address the issue of fighting with stricter penalties. This strong
endorsement by both the coaches and officials made our job on the
rules committee much easier....
No single individual has had as much impact on the rules of the
game as the late David M. Nelson, who served on the rules committee
for 34 years. The University of Delaware, where he served as coach and
athletics director, soon will be releasing the book he wrote before
his death, entitled The Anatomy of the Game.
I am confident this book will contain the principles Coach Nelson
believed governed all football rules changes: "They must be safe for
athletes, be applicable to all institutions, be coachable, be able to
be administered by officials, maintain a balance between offense and
defense, be interesting to spectators and not have a prohibitive
economic impact."
I believe Coach Nelson certainly would be proud of our new rules
recommendations. However, I'm confident he also would be pleased by
the action taken by the rules committee over the past three years that
implemented guidelines to "ensure good sportsmanship" in the game by
addressing the problems of "trash talking" and any other action that
would provoke ill will on the playing field.
"A Telling Blow to Stop the Fights"
By Vincent J. Dooley, director of athletics, University of
Georgia
The NCAA News
Feb. 2, 1994
A 'Jewel' in theatre
The 40-odd students in the Professional Theatre Training Program
at the University of Delaware are sprawled across the floor of what
was once a women's gym, waiting to begin the daily ritual of their
group warm-up. It's 9 a.m. on a chilly November morning, and among the
students who are stretching and chatting are many who look as if they
would rather be asleep. But when Jewel Walker, one of the program's
founding faculty members, steps onto a small, slightly elevated area
to begin the morning's exercises, the students--actors, stage managers
and technicians-move together in concentrated activity.
Walker's sweat pants and T-shirt don't fit his stentorian tones.
But as the warm-up continues, he comes down from his private stage and
circulates among the students, guiding their movements, never allowing
the possibility that any body-even the most out-of-shape or the least
coordinated-won't be able to keep up. By the end of the warm-up, he's
on the floor himself, no longer leading, but participating....
Walker has been training students in stage movement-or, more
accurately, serving as a teacher of movement for actors-since 1964,
when he was invited to join the faculty of Pittsburgh's Carnegie
Mellon (then Carnegie Tech). He stayed in Pittsburgh for 13 years,
directing and teaching acting as well as stage movement, then left in
1977 to help establish the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's
professional actor training program. In 1989, the members of that
faculty-including Walker and the program's director, Sanford
Robbins-relocated to Delaware, expanding the program on the East
Coast.
Today, Walker is widely respected as a pioneer in his field. "In
many departments at the time I started teaching," he explains, "there
wasn't anything called stage movement teaching. You would send the
actors to dance or eurythmics teachers for a couple of hours every
week and think that they would get graceful or something. My tendency
is to demonstrate things in more of a hands-on kind of way. You can
teach someone to dance, but that won't necessarily make them a good
stage mover....
"To actors, it looks as if their job is to make up a character,
and hope that the director can then shuffle them around so that a play
may get conjured somehow. That's to some degree their heritage,
whether they've ever been instructed in it or not. It's the way
everybody thinks. You can ask people who aren't even in the theatre:
What do they talk about? They talk about the characters."
For Walker, such a character-driven approach to text has, as he
puts it, had it's day. "We're going to be somehow mimicking a dead
past, and I don't see how the theatre can live on that," he goes on.
"The theatre is there to present the eternal, which is different from
being in the presence of somebody's past, or their particular
statement about themselves. I don't see any reason to be limited by
those kinds of things. In a way, that way of working takes away the
freedom of the audience to have their own creation. The work is
complete, so it leaves the audience with nothing to do but read their
programs, count the lights and look at their watches."
Delaware's professional training program aims to find and create
new legacies. The revolutionary Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki, for
instance, first brought his company to the U.S. through the Milwaukee
program, and Walker and his colleagues have adopted his
exercises-which demand total control and manipulation of the body-as
part of their own daily training routine.
The Delaware students go through the exercises with looks of
fierce concentration on their faces, their bodies straining to meet
the demands of this alien vocabulary of movement. "Our effort has
always been to get into training more in the water than on the shore,"
Walker says. "That's what I like about the Suzuki exercises-the
students get close to actually doing it. Some of them even get there."
[Asked if Walker] considers himself a trainer, a mentor or a
teacher, he laughs, "I'm just a worker. You can say any of those
things and I'm not offended by them, but all I've done really is come
to work. I just have a kind of vision, and a willingness to take on
any job."
"Jewel Walker: Body Talk"
American Theatre
January 1994