Our second guest is, a university professor and playwright with 17 plays across North America. In this episode, we discuss the current education system and some of the challenges he has experienced as a teacher.
Summary
Current education system and some of the challenges experienced as a teacher.
Guests
Sheldon Rosen
University Professor and Playwright, Baby Boomer
Sheldon has been teaching and writing for the stage since 1972. He has had 17 plays produced throughout the United States and Canada. His play NED AND JACK was produced at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, in 1979 and 1980 and won the 1980 Canadian Author’s Association Award for Drama and was directed on Broadway in 1981 by Colleen Dewhurst. The play was also nominated for an Association of Canadian Television and Radio Award and was published by Samuel French in 1983. Mr. Rosen has been playwright- in-residence at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario (twice), the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the Lake, Toronto Free Theatre in Toronto and at San Jose State University. He has also received three Canada Council Arts Awards and several Ontario Arts Grants. He was Chairman of the Guild of Canadian Playwrights for 1979-80.
Mr. Rosen was selected to be a member of the New Dramatists in New York 1984. In 1990 he received the first annual Joe A. Callaway Award for playwriting at New Dramatists. Mr. Rosen has worked in a wide range of forms and media, including radio, television and film, improvisational comedy, mime, dance, symphony, opera, multi-media fashion shows and two years of producing and directing television and radio commercials. He was also the creator and director of the playwriting program at the National Theatre School of Canada for eight years. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Access Foundation from 1997-99. He is currently writing and teaching in Toronto and is Associate Chair and an Associate Professor of Creative Performance Studies at the Ryerson University Theatre School where he won the McConnell Curricular Innovation Award in his first year of full-time teaching. His play St. Dominatrix and the One Who Will come was presented as staged reading at World Stage in Toronto in 2002. His play 11places@once was presented in May in Vancouver as part of the Playwrights’ Theatre Centre’s Festival of New Work. He and Jonathan Aitken recently completed a 3 year SSHRC Research/ Creation Grant in Fine Arts to create a: ‘Typographical Play: The Application of Kinetic Typography to Live Performance”. He has since rewritten the proposal into a full-length theatre piece titled Hansel and Gretel. During this period he helped create a new LOI proposal for a multi-disciplinary MFA in Dramatic Writing. In August of 2011 was invited to participate in the Tapestry Opera Workshop where he completed three short opera pieces for presentation in April. He is currently in the early stages of creating an interactive digital textbook about the Creative Process.