Research or Craft? Nine Theses on Educating Future Performing Artists

HEINER GOEBBELS is a German composer and director who has created numerous music theatre works, staged concerts, and compositions for ensembles and orchestras. His productions, several of which have been seen at Lincoln Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, include The Man in the Elevator, Black on White, Eislermaterial, Hashirigaki, Songs of Wars I Have Seen. His concert with the Hilliard Ensemble, I went to the house but did not enter, was recently seen in the White Light Festival at the Rose Theater. He is the artistic director for 2012–2014 of the International Festival of the Arts, Ruhr Triennale, where he staged John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2. Goebbels is a Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. From 2002–2011 he founded the Hessian Theatre Academy, the Hessian Film and Media Academy, tanzlabor_21 and Frankfurt LAB. He lectures frequently on the performing arts and education. He is the recipient of the 2012 International Ibsen Award.

EMMA LEW THOMAS, a Meisterschulerin of Mary Wigman, performed in her works in the 1950s and also studied with Harald Kreutzberg, Rosalia Chladak, Anna Sokolow, and Sigurd Leeder while dancing in Mannheim, Berlin, Paris, and Zurich. More than two decades ago she became the first guest professor of dance history appointed to a German university, at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Giessen. With a PhD in German literature from Indiana University, she has been teaching dance history at UCLA since 1971 (now as professor emerita) and continues to lecture, write, and explore her passion for translating movement sources into historical dance performance. Locally, she is president of the board of Lula Washington Dance Theater, Dance History Project of Southern California steering committee member.